Trust Me Once Read online

  Owen’s face became hard, but she glimpsed anguish behind the mask. He wasn’t saying a word, only listening to what was being said.

  When he sat down himself, Sarah knew. Her car. She had left her car on Warner’s property. She closed her eyes and prayed, knowing that it was too late.

  “Are you there now?”

  Owen’s question drew her gaze. In the dim light of the bedroom, she saw the tear that slipped down his cheek.

  Two thoughts struck her at once. She wanted to go to him, to console him. But at the same time, common sense told her that she should simply walk out of this apartment, clear out of his life. For all his efforts to help her, she had just brought him pain and suffering. Perhaps even worse to his friends. Perhaps he would be next.

  “Thank you for calling, Carol.”

  Sarah watched his hand shake as he hung up the phone. He sat in silence, lost in thought, one hand vacantly rubbing the day’s growth of beard along his jaw.

  She finally forced herself to her feet, moving to him. He didn’t even seem to see her when she sat down next to him and took his hand. One tear, and then another, coursed down his clenched cheek. He was working hard at accepting the news and controlling his pain.

  “Something has happened to him, hasn’t it? Someone has been hurt again… because of me.”

  “Don’t.” He whispered the word low and hard, turning to her as he said it and pulling her into his embrace. She held him, letting her own tears soak his shirt as he rested his face against her hair. “This is not your fault. Blaming yourself will not help anything.”

  “They killed him, didn’t they.” It was not a question. “They found my car…and then they killed him.”

  His voice was cold, his words clipped. “These are ruthless people. They kill in cold blood.”

  “Oh, my God. I should never have dragged you into the middle of this.”

  Sarah sobbed quietly, and they said nothing for a long moment. Owen broke the silence.

  “Long before you came into our lives, Andrew Warner was dying…one painful inch at a time. His suffering is over now. And this may sound warped, but I know he would have preferred to die any way other than the way he had ahead of him… suffocating in a hospital bed while his body shut down one piece at a time.” Owen stopped for a moment, gathering himself. “For a long time, I’ve insulated myself from life. I don’t know if it was fate or karma or luck that brought us together, but I’m glad it happened. Andrew is gone…he’s gone…and I feel…pain and hurt and loss. But I feel something else, too. Something I know he wanted for me. He wanted me here because he wanted me to remember what it is…to be human.”

  ~~~~

  Sarah didn’t know for how long they stayed wrapped in each other’s arms. He told her everything that the college dean had said. Tracy, surprisingly enough, was still alive, but she was in surgery. Her chance of pulling through was very slight. He told her what the police had told the dean about what had happened—about robbery being the most likely motive behind the killing—but Owen and Sarah knew the truth.

  “We need to go ahead just as we planned,” he told her finally. “Carol is at the hospital now. I’d like to stop by there and see her first. When I get back, we’ll go and check out the files at your office.”

  “I can go while you’re at the hospital.”

  “No,” he objected. “I want you right here, with the doors locked and with the curtains closed, until I get back. Please, Sarah. Do this for me.”

  She didn’t argue. She wasn’t about to call for a taxi again. The last time had been too close a call, and now everyone in Newport was looking for a sixteen-year-old who looked just like her.

  It was after one in the morning when Owen went back into the living room to make some calls. Sarah used the time to hide in the bathroom and change the color of her hair.

  Standing before the mirror, she tried to not think of what had happened. She tried not to blame herself for all these deaths. But it was impossible to ignore the fact that people around her were dying. It felt like a hot poker piercing her chest to think that it might happen again. That it might happen to Owen.

  Owen. Why was he at the edge of every thought?

  What was happening to her? She was not a woman to grow so attached, so quickly. She was not a woman to trust a man so instinctively or so completely. True, she trusted the judge, but that trust was based on years of working with the man, of seeing him with Avery.

  Sarah stared at her reflection in the mirror. The ability to trust was not her strong suit. It never had been. But that was only natural, she thought. She had been the product of a marriage that never should have happened. Her father, handsome and flirtatious, had come over from Ireland for a summer to visit with friends. In a corner store, not far from Boston’s South Station, he’d met a young and innocent clerk and swept her off her feet. Then she became pregnant by him. Trust me.

  Before the summer heat had given way to autumn’s breezes, the two were married, as John Rand faced his responsibility. He’d ended up taking a job and staying in America for as long as he could. But what Sarah remembered most of her parents’ marriage were the arguments and the hurt, the accusations and the mistrust. So many nights, before crying herself to sleep, she had wished, prayed…begged silently for them to get along. To love each other. To love her.

  But that had never happened. One day, John Rand had packed a suitcase and returned to his homeland, while Sarah had been left behind to fend for herself against a shattered woman’s bitterness and pain.

  The next time she saw her father had been on her high school graduation day. Sarah had been the valedictorian of her class, but he’d taken her aside after the ceremony to tell her that he was finally divorcing her mother. He was thinking of marrying again.

  She had seen him again when Sarah’s mother had died. He’d flown over to attend the funeral. It was the least he could do, he’d said. Sarah remembered thinking that truer words had never been spoken.

  The third time she had seen John Rand after he left had been two weeks ago at his own wake. She had stood there silently, staring down at the lifeless body, hardly knowing what to feel…or even how to feel. What do you do when a lifetime of hurt has been piling up on your heart, layer upon layer, until an almost impenetrable barrier of scar tissue has formed around it? Sarah knew very well what Owen had been talking about.

  Sarah checked her watch and jumped into the shower to wash off the hair dye.

  Years ago, when she’d broken up her engagement with Hal, he’d told her it wasn’t him who was unable to commit. He’d told her it was she who was incapable of maintaining a healthy relationship with anyone. He’d accused her of not trusting him or anyone else and, as a result, failing to invest any part of her emotional self in the relationship.

  She had not even tried to defend herself against his words. Life had taught her to trust a person only once…if at all. Hal had used up his chance.

  Stepping out of the shower, Sarah wiped the steam off the glass and looked again at her reflection in the mirror. The dark auburn hair was a shocking contrast against her pale skin, but other than that, she didn’t think she looked very different.

  Owen was waiting for her when she finally came out of the bathroom. He looked extremely tired, but she didn’t miss the once-over look of her face and hair and the bathrobe that she was wearing. His bathrobe.

  “You look great. But I like your natural hair color better.”

  “How do you know that I’m a natural blonde?”

  He raised one eyebrow. Sarah’s face colored as she remembered how he had put her in the shower and later dressed her for bed.

  “I called the hospital. Tracy is out of surgery and has been moved to the ICU. I think it’d be best if I go there now.”

  She nodded and glanced at the clock on his bureau; it was half past two in the morning. “Be careful.”

  He hesitated a moment, and then pulled her into his arms and just held her.

  She w
anted to ask him about Andrew Warner again—about his relationship with the man—but she couldn’t open up a wound that he was trying so hard to keep closed.

  “Get some sleep,” he said. “When I get back, we can go and check out those files in your office.”

  ~~~~

  She had dozed fitfully for a while, finally getting up and roaming around the apartment. The morning was still a long way off, and there was no sign of Owen returning.

  First News at 5 was just coming on the air when she switched on the television, and she sat up straight as images of her car flashed on the screen. Pictures of Andrew and Tracy appeared behind the newscaster, with an icon depicting the chalked outline of a murder victim superimposed. A picture of Hal. A picture of herself. A picture of the judge. A live report from the country home of the Warners’. Sarah stared at the news reporter standing outside the police-tape barrier with her car in the background.

  Suddenly feeling sick to her stomach, she hit the remote when they switched back to the newsroom. It was too much to bear watching.

  Sarah sat quietly, hardly breathing, her eyes squeezed shut. There was no sound except for the gently buffeting sound of the breeze off the ocean and the ticking of the clock. She got up and went to Owen’s desk, picking up the Braveheart letter opener lying beside the pile of prison letters. Taking a handful of the letters, she went back to the sofa and sat down.

  “Okay, Jake Gantley.” Maybe reading an account of someone else’s twisted life would take her mind off her own for a while.

  The letters were a proposition for Owen to use a memoir of Gantley’s own life, a record that the career criminal had been jotting down over the years. Jake’s life of crime had started at age eight with an arson charge, and it had gradually grown into more serious activities ever since. Of course, there were no specifics, each letter contained only tantalizing hints aimed at getting a potential buyer interested in the material that he was selling.

  Sarah read each one, following the sequence of the dates that they’d arrived at Owen’s address. All were pretty much the same, with a variety of attitudes expressed, from casual curiosity about Owen’s lack of interest to outright anger. But when she opened the last letter, a folded picture fell out onto her lap. Picking it up, Sarah unfolded it, for a moment staring uncomprehendingly at the photo.

  And then, a pain ripped through her with such power that it tore the very breath from her lungs.

  Chapter 17

  If it was true that rooms have a “personality,” Owen thought, then a hospital waiting room was a blank, a void—cold, impassive, unaffected by either time or human suffering. Afternoon faded to dusk, evening merged into night, dawn gave way to daylight, but the space defined by walls of beige or gray or muted greens remains unchanged. Furnished everywhere with vinyl seats of infinite color variations or fabrics designed to last an eon, the room’s indifferent reception extended without exception to all the vagrant sufferers who temporarily inhabit it. Some huddled together in a corner like refugees for warmth and support. Some sat alone.

  They came. They waited. They left. And time meant nothing.

  This waiting room was no different, Owen considered wondering whether the day outside these walls was about to break clear. The only windows to the room opened onto the nurses’ station. The only light came from the long fluorescent lights set into the textured white drop ceiling.

  The doctors had told him that there would be no change in Tracy’s condition tonight. Nor tomorrow, either. Perhaps not for a week, or two weeks…or more. It was incredible, they said, that she was still alive. But to what extent her injuries would affect her recovery and her future—that is, if she should ever regain consciousness—was something that still had to be determined.

  Owen had sent Carol Doyle home soon after arriving. Before she left, however, the dean told him that they had contacted Tracy’s older sister in Boston, and she was on her way.

  Sitting alone, Owen ran through the situation over and over again. He knew Tracy Warner would be mad as hell to know that the only person keeping vigil for her was Owen Dean. But he didn’t give a damn what she might think. He was tired of this game that the three of them had played for most of his life. Andrew was dead. The war was over. The dead and the casualties were all that were left.

  Now he just wanted her healthy again, before he walked away forever.

  Owen got up, stretched and moved to the entrance to the waiting room, staring down at the gleaming tiles of the corridor, hurting inside. Behind the nurses’ station, he could see the ICU, with its beds and portable screens, its monitors and life-sustaining machines. There were two other patients besides Tracy, and for a moment he watched a nurse in blue scrubs navigating about the unit.

  He’d come to Newport to say goodbye to Andrew. But he’d never thought how much it would hurt when the time finally came. Andrew had gone in a way neither of them could ever have expected. The violence of it sickened Owen. And he’d never even had a chance to say the things he wanted to say. He’d never even had the chance to say goodbye.

  He took his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed his home number again. Just as when he’d called the last time, a half hour ago, his own answering message was followed by a beep. “It’s me…could you please pick up?”

  He waited, hoping for Sarah to hear him—to answer the phone. But there was no response. She could be sleeping, just as he’d suggested. God knows, she must be exhausted. Owen tried to comfort himself with the thought. Hell, she could be in the shower again. She liked long showers, he could tell that already.

  But none of this made him feel any easier about leaving Sarah alone in his apartment. He glanced at his watch again. Five-forty-two.

  If they hadn’t already, the police would surely find Sarah’s car on the Warner property. Owen considered whether Andrew would have said anything to his killers about seeing Sarah and Owen together. He turned back to the room, staring at nothing. No, he was certain that Andrew would never have said a word, no matter what.

  No matter what…

  He heard the ping of the elevator and the click of the high heels coming down the hall. Turning, Owen recognized the older woman as he watched her stop and speak briefly to a nurse on duty behind the counter. With a nod, the woman went to the large, plate-glass window of the ICU and looked for a long time at Tracy and the equipment set up around her.

  The last time he’d met Joanne, Tracy’s sister, he’d just finished high school. Andrew had forced him to come to some family picnic that Owen had known he wasn’t welcome at. He’d only stayed for half an hour. Other than Andrew, Joanne had been the only person who’d been hospitable, never mind civil. No, she’d been downright friendly, and he’d never forgotten her smile.

  He guessed the older woman was pushing eighty now, but despite the tragedy, she still had the same welcoming smile when she turned and saw him watching her.

  “Owen.” That’s all she could say, before the tears started. “Thank you for being here.”

  He went to her, offering what comfort he could, and led her back to the waiting area.

  But even as he sat with Joanne, his mind focused again on Sarah. Anxiety was beginning to eat at him, and he began to imagine the worst, all the while cursing himself for leaving her alone.

  ~~~~

  The first pinks of dawn were beginning to streak the eastern sky when the Porsche pulled into the parking lot of the Port of Entry Motel. Weaving around two potholes the size of Delaware, the driver made her way around to the back, parking next to a stinking green Dumpster. Glancing up at the line of second-floor rooms, she stared for a moment at the light coming through a tear high in the drape in 213.

  She flipped on the overhead light above the driver’s mirror and put on fresh lipstick. The sky was growing lighter with tick of her Rolex. She switched off the light and glanced impatiently up at 213 again.

  Shit, she thought, it was gonna be hot today. She could feel the frigging humidity already.

  A n
ewspaper delivery truck pulled up at the corner of the back lot and stopped, leaving the engine running. In a second, a heavyset man stepped out of the door and dumped a bundled stack of newspapers by the corner of the building.

  She didn’t spare the guy a second look, but after he had roared out of the parking lot, she considered getting out and taking one of the papers. Who knew how long she’d be waiting here?

  But when she saw the door to room 213 open, her mind was made up. She shut off the engine, grabbed her cell phone and purse and got out.

  “This babe was real good.” Her client chucked her good-humoredly on the chin as he reached the bottom of the stairs. “In fact, I wouldn’t mind if you were to bring this one around again tomorrow night. Yeah, as a matter of fact, I want you to bring her. I’ll bring a new buddy of mine. We’ll have a little party.”

  “I haven’t seen her yet.” Her eyes flickered away. “But I’ll probably have to take her shopping. Which means I’ll have to charge you the same as for a new one.”

  She tried not to show anything as a flash of temper hardened the younger man’s face. “Bullshit, Cherie.”

  “She’s going to cost me…”

  Before she could defend herself, the man’s fingers were gripping her windpipe. With her feet barely touching the ground, she found herself driven backward until her back banged against the railing of the stairs.

  “You’ll bring her around for free, you greedy bitch. After all the money I throw your way.” His face was an inch from hers. The smell of scotch was potent. She couldn’t breathe. “After all the fucking damage you did to my other car this week, this is how you show your appreciation?”

  She reached up with both hands and tugged at his grip until it loosened a little.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Okay, I get it. I’ll have her here and ready for you. Just…just leave me a message what time you want her.”