Town Square, The (7 page)

His stomach dropped, and with it came the utter devastation of realizing Harriet had lied about everything from the day she had walked into his office. He cared about a woman who hated him for doing his job.

“So you and Harriet are here for what? Revenge?” he asked her.

Maybelline retrieved her license and set that and her purse down on the small side table by the mauve settee. Then she put her hands on her hip, ashes falling to the floor. “We came for the truth, for evidence that you exaggerated your findings on our father. But since the files are still in New York, I guess she decided to try something different last night. She didn’t tell me what she had in mind, or I would have stopped her.”

They weren’t in New York. He just hadn’t been able to tell Harriet there were more boxes of filing that day. She’d seemed so darn dejected. Now he knew why.

“By ruining herself in front of the whole town with me?” he scoffed.

“By showing Dare Valley you aren’t the Favorite Son everyone thinks you are.” Her words were as cutting as a chainsaw through a downed tree.

“This town knows
me.
They don’t know you. Trust me. When it comes down to it, they’ll believe me over you two.”

She crushed her cigarette out in the brown glass ashtray on the lamp stand, twisting it and twisting it until all smoke disappeared. “But you’ve been gone for five years, and in the big bad city, no less. People have been talking about how different you seem. Working long hours with an attractive woman like my sister, who’s working long hours too. Unusual that. And then there’s all your big ideas. You’ve set yourself up as a new leader in the community. That changes things. People think you’ve gotten pretty big for your britches already. Even
this
outsider has heard the talk.”

Well, he knew there had been talk, but he hadn’t considered how it could be used against him. If he’d thrown his integrity aside last night, it would have tarnished his reputation and his place in the community. Sure the woman always got the brunt of the censure, but he would have felt the heat too, particularly as he tried to launch his business.

“Tell Harriet that if she wants to see the files on your father, she can come to the office and ask me herself.”

“They’re here?” she whispered, her face suddenly losing all color.

“Yes.”

Part of him was sad they’d be hurt by the final knowledge that their father was guilty. His evidence was airtight.

“Our father was a good man, and you destroyed him.”

He walked to the door, the floor squeaking in spots, and heard her heels click on the hardwood as she trailed behind. When he shrugged into his coat, he turned to her.

“I expect your father was a good man and a good father, but he made an enormous mistake that killed seven infants.
That’s
what destroyed him, Ms. Wentworth. Not me. You and your sister would be wise to understand that.”

Her face fell.

And with that he let himself out into the cold day.

Chapter 7

H
arriet parked the car in the driveway as the sun was dipping below the mountains. Escaping down the highway for a while hadn’t helped. She was ashamed of what she’d almost done, and she felt a newfound, begrudging respect for Arthur. He’d kept his head when other men might not.

What
had
she been thinking? Had she become so blinded by anger that she’d been willing to throw away her first moments with a man like that? These were some of the serious questions she’d had to face on her car ride, and she hadn’t liked the answers. The one that had scared her the most was how much she’d enjoyed being kissed and held by Arthur, a man she’d sworn to destroy.

Even though part of her hated to admit defeat, she was ready to get the heck out of town and put this whole terrible episode behind them.

Maybelline met her at the door and told her about Arthur’s visit. A bucket of cold water to the face couldn’t have been more shocking.

“How could you have done something like that?” her sister raged at her. “I know you’re upset, but it
scares
me that you’d risk yourself that way, Harry.”

Her heart shattered, as much from the honesty as from Maybelline’s childhood nickname for her.

“It won’t happen again,” she pledged as she watched Maybelline storm out the parlor rather than acknowledging her promise.

She sat on the settee and folded her hands over her face. Shame blossomed inside, but rage quickly followed. Arthur Hale still had the gall to cling to the illusion that he’d been doing his job by destroying her father and their family. How dare he?

She
knew
he must have misrepresented something.

Her father was not guilty.

He couldn’t be.

Well, Arthur had said she could look at his files, and so she would. She drove to
The Western Independent
and walked into the place like she owned it. It was after five o’clock, but she knew he’d be working. His typewriter was clacking along as she strode down the hall to his office.

He spun around in his chair the instant she reached his door, almost like that sixth sense of his was working in overdrive.

“I knew you’d come for the files,” he said, his tone flat and unfriendly.

She was so used to kindness and warmth from him that it took her a moment to make her way into his office. His eyes didn’t remind her of an endless blue sky now, but rather the churning Atlantic Ocean in the middle of a storm.

“Where are they?” she asked.

He tossed something toward her. A rubber–banded stack of papers fell to the floor, and she had to go through the indignity of bending over to pick it up. All his courtliness was gone now.

The file was small compared to what she’d expected, but she had what she wanted, so she turned to walk out.

“Do you
really
think that’s all there is?” he asked her, stopping her at the door.

She turned and cocked a brow. So he wasn’t going to make this easy. Why hadn’t she expected that?

“I figured the size only proved what I already knew. That you didn’t research your series of articles on my father worth squat, which is why you got everything so wrong.”

His mouth thinned into a bitter smile. “And here I thought you would have realized how wrong
you
are after all the boxes you’ve filed.”

The swipe reminded her of an angry lion she’d seen at the circus. “Well, aren’t we a cute sight? After all this time together, both of us are showing our true colors.” Her throat tightened after she spoke the words, and she realized part of her was sick that they’d come to this.

“You lied to me from the beginning, and I was starting to care about you. Which you used to your advantage last night.” He rose and planted his hands on his hips. “Harriet, if all you wanted when you arrived was the goddamn files I had on your father’s case, I would have given them to you.”

Because she’d worked with him, because she knew him, she believed that. “Where are the rest of them? You told me the other day that there weren’t more boxes.”

He fished out his keys, came around the desk, and walked out, leaving her to trail behind him. “My brother helped me move the boxes in here. But we didn’t finish before he took off to do some field work, so I got lazy and left them at my house.”

“You lied to me.” Why would he do that?

He looked over his shoulder. “Well, you looked so tired and worn down that day that I decided not to tell you. I was planning to hire someone to help you once my brother, George, got back, and we brought the rest of the boxes over.”

He’d been planning to hire someone to help her? She looked down at her feet, feeling more shame.

“You’ll have to follow me. Frankly, I don’t want to give you a ride back into town, and after your crap last night, I don’t plan on feeding the gossip.”

The hard tone of his voice made her clench her teeth. “Fine.”

He strode out of the office ahead of her, not bothering to open the door for her, and headed toward his car without a backward glance. Tension radiated through her body, and she realized her shoulders were knotted too.

This side of him intimidated her, and part of her missed the easy going man she’d come to know.

He slammed the door to his Thunderbird and waited until she was in her car, ready to follow him. Then he drove down Main Street.

She’d heard he’d bought an old house on a hill overlooking the valley rather than moving in with his parents. It was a good fifteen minutes out of town, and if her mind hadn’t been spinning like her stomach, she would have stopped to appreciate the towering pines rising up the mountain on her left while the valley flowed out below her like a large salad bowl.

His house was a white A–frame and had a porch boasting a gorgeous view of the mountains and the valley. She pulled in behind his car. He didn’t wait for her to reach him, his legs eating up the distance to the front door. Part of her wanted to hurry after him, but she held herself back. Remained in control.

Though she was used to him holding doors open for her, he didn’t this time, and she had to open the front door herself. Because of her upbringing, she rubbed her feet on the rug before setting foot on his gleaming hardwood floor.

She wandered into the living room. It could use some furniture, she thought, but it held a lot of promise with its fifteen–foot high white plaster walls and white crown molding with fleur de lis in the corners.

She heard his steps off to the right and followed the sound. He was hefting boxes onto an old partner’s desk when she found him. The room had three big windows, one with lead glass panels in the shape of a peacock’s tail, and was filled with boxes.

“You can start here,” he said.

The lone overhead light didn’t provide sufficient light without a table lamp. “Where?” she asked.

He gestured to the two boxes he’d hauled over and spun them around. The name Wentworth was written in black marker in his handwriting, and somehow the starkness of seeing her family name like that made her tummy spasm. Her father’s work had boiled down to these papers sorted into a box, nothing to identify them but the careless scrawl of letters.

It hurt, seeing that.

“You can start with these two boxes, and if you get through them in the next two hours and want more, you can start on the next ones.”

“Which ones?”

He pointed to the back of the room, and as she looked deeper into the room, she saw her family’s name scrawled across at least seven more boxes that were facing front.

Her throat clenched at the sheer volume of it all, and she couldn’t speak.

He crossed his hands on his chest, his mouth tight. “You didn’t think I’d give the parents of those babies false hope, did you, by throwing out an unconfirmed cause? Or that I’d ruin a respected scientist without doing my research?”

Unable to meet his gaze, she looked down at the rug. It was an uninspired Aubusson with a blue background and faded yellow flowers. “I don’t know what to say.”

“The file in your hand is a summary of everything in the boxes by number.”

“How many boxes are there?”

“Twenty–five,” he said, walking toward her. “Do I need to take your purse?”

Clutching it was an automatic response. “Why ever would you say that?”

Those blue eyes held a hint of danger. “I don’t want you taking out a matchbook and burning the evidence. It won’t change what happened.
The New York Times
has copies of the key documents.”

He thought she was capable of arson?

A tick in his jaw made her realize he was angry, and who could blame him?

“After last night, I’m assuming there’s pretty much nothing you wouldn’t do.”

Right. Even she had discovered there were things she didn’t know or like about herself. “You don’t have to worry about that.”

“Good,” he replied. “I like this house. Wasn’t glad Mrs. Pokens passed, but was glad I could have a place of my own like this one. Be a shame if it burned down before I got the chance to move in properly. There’ll be coffee in the kitchen if you get thirsty.”

And then he headed toward the door.

“Arthur?”

He paused, the muscles of his back shifting when he placed his arm on the doorframe, not turning around.

“I’m sorry,” she said, clutching her purse to her side. “For last night. I went too far.”

His head lowered, but she couldn’t see his face. “Yes, you goddamn did.”

He left her alone then, in the room filled with the twenty–five boxes organized by number and marked with her family name.

Chapter 8

W
atching her go through his files about her father was like being a spectator at a funeral. She came and went from his house for the next two days, stubbornly sifting through the papers in the boxes after telling him that she needed more time to go through all of them.

All of them.

She wasn’t going down without a fight. Her face might look ashen, but the chip on her shoulder could take down a small army.

The story he spread around town was that they were working at his place, with her sister acting as chaperone, while a water leak was fixed at the office. He hired Herman to fix the imaginary leak and swore him to secrecy, saying they were working on a big case that required total privacy.

While he was protecting both their reputations, he realized he was lying for her again and wondered what that said about him.

Maybelline was out for a walk when he walked past his home office. Harriet sat on the floor in a pink sweater set and black skirt with one knee bent at the leg. Her hand was pressed against her forehead, and she was clutching some papers to her stomach. Boxes surrounded her like a maze.

He would have walked by, but he heard a sniff and then the unmistakable sound of a woman crying softly.

Cripes
, he thought, and ran his hand through his hair. Why wouldn’t she give up? Then he realized she couldn’t. It was her father, and because he loved his family too, he could understand.

“Harriet?” he called out softly.