Mariah Stewart - Coming Home

“Pleasing Hal is the right reason.” She shook her head. “It’s the only reason why I’d sit down with her right now.”

“Well, then, I guess that’s going to have to do. For now.” He took her hand and walked to the end of the pier.

Even from a distance, they could hear Hal berating his old sailing buddy, who still hadn’t gotten his boat into the slip.

Listening to Hal, Vanessa started to laugh. “He’s such a paper tiger. He’ll rail away on Carter, and Carter will rail away on Hal, and in an hour, they’ll be buying each other a beer at Walt’s. Hal just loves to bluster sometimes.”

They stood and listened to the harangue-fest for a few more minutes before Hal leapt from the dock to the deck of the Whaler and helped navigate the craft into position. Within minutes, the boat was tied up and both men were stepping up onto the dock. They chatted a few minutes-Hal introducing Maggie to Carter-before apparently forgetting all about the Shady Lady as the three headed directly to Walt’s.

“She’s up to no good.” Vanessa’s eyes narrowed. “Her last husband died recently so she’s on the loose. She’s come to St. Dennis and she’s realized that Hal is pretty well off and she’s setting her sights on him again.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Oh, yes I do. I know that look.”

“Look, I’m sure after all these years, they have things to say to each other. They were in love once, they had a child together…”

“Which she never even bothered to tell him about until she couldn’t handle him. Let’s not forget about Beck and the way she told Hal that he had a son.”

When Grady didn’t comment, Vanessa stopped walking. “What?” she asked.

“I think you need to leave that part to them to work out.”

“How would you feel if Melissa-that was her name, right?” she asked, and when he nodded, she continued. He had a feeling he knew where this was going. “How would you feel if she disappeared from your life and came back years later with a child she said was yours?”

“She did disappear from my life,” he said softly, “and if she showed up today with a child of mine, I’d be very happy to have that child. I would have loved to have had a child. But since she’s dead, that’s not a possibility.”

“Oh, God, I am such an idiot. I am so sorry.” Vanessa’s face flushed as scarlet as the sun dropping into the Bay. “I can’t believe I said that.”

“It’s all right, Ness…”

“What a boneheaded thing to say.” She was wide-eyed. “Boneheaded and thoughtless and insensitive and-”

“Enough.” He put a hand over her mouth. “I understand the analogy you were trying to make. It’s all right. We can talk about Melissa, Ness. Just as we can talk about Gene.”

“That’s very different.” Her face grew very serious. “Gene and I got divorced because I knew that sooner or later, he was going to kill me. That’s why we’re not together. You and Melissa-you’d probably still be together if she hadn’t died, right?”

It was a question he hadn’t anticipated, and once asked, one he found himself hesitating a little too long to answer.

“I don’t know,” he said finally.

“You don’t have to say that just because you’re here with me. I can take honesty.”

“That’s an honest answer.” He sat on the edge of a stone bench that looked out over the water. “There were some things that… that didn’t set right with me.”

“Oh, hey, everyone has things about their significant other that drives them crazy.” She waved a hand as if to dismiss what she perceived must be inconsequential.

“This isn’t like, she always left her shoes in the middle of the floor, or that sort of thing. This was bigger. Much bigger.”

“You mean like maybe she was having an affair?”

“No, it was more like she lied to me about the half million dollars she’d hidden in the bookcase.”

THE silence was overwhelming. For a moment, Vanessa could not speak. When she finally did, her words came almost as a squeak.

“A half a mil… half a mil…” She cleared her throat and tried again. “A half a million dollars in the bookcase?”

“Inside a bunch of those fake books, you know, the hollow ones? I found them when I started packing things to do some remodeling. The whole house needed repainting… you can probably imagine what the place looked like and smelled like. Before I could do any real work, I had to clean it out, so I started easy, packing up the small stuff.”

“What did you do next? After you realized what was in the fake books?”

“I sat on the floor and counted it. And I did exaggerate a little,” he confessed. “It was more like four hundred and seventy thousand.”

“Close enough to half a mil in my book,” she said. “Melissa never told you she had all this money?”

“After she moved, she told me that someone had paid her to quit the Bureau, but that she didn’t know who it was, and while she said it was a lot of money, she never told me how much. I later found out that she hadn’t quite told the truth.”

Vanessa digested this for a moment. “Why would someone pay her to leave her job?”

“I suppose sooner or later, I need to tell you about Brendan.” His arm rested along the back of the bench, his fingers absently toying with the ends of her hair, which lay loose around her shoulders and partway down her back. He appeared to be deep in thought.

“You don’t have to feel that you have to tell me. If it bothers you to talk about it, you don’t have to.”

“Remember earlier, I said if you can’t share something about yourself with the person you sleep with, that maybe you shouldn’t be sleeping with them?”

Vanessa nodded.

“Well, I guess it’s my turn to walk the walk.” He turned to her slightly. “I guess the easiest place to start is the night my cousin Dylan-Connor’s brother-was killed. The short version is there was a sting operation in the works, a couple of drug dealers. Connor was supposed to be undercover to meet these guys and make the deal. At the last minute, Connor got pulled off the op and Dylan was sent in his place.” Grady paused and took a deep breath. It was obvious that it still bothered him deeply.

“The official version was that Dylan was killed by one of the drug dealers being set up that night. But the truth was the shots were fired before the targets were even out of their cars. Melissa was part of the backup team; she was there. She saw someone slipping out of the building where the shots had come from carrying a high-powered rifle. Later, she realized this person was not on the roster for the operation. She didn’t realize at the time that he wasn’t supposed to be there because she’d yet to see the final list of agents who were assigned that night.”

“Who had she seen coming out of the building?”

“My brother Brendan.”

“No one else saw him?”

“Apparently not. Anyway, a week or so after that, out of the blue, Melissa told me she was quitting the Bureau-that she was burned out-and she was going to move to Montana. She and I had been dating for quite a while, and we started talking about me putting in for a transfer out west. She said she’d wait for me there, that she couldn’t wait to get away. I’ve known other agents who just got fried from the stress, so it didn’t strike me as particularly odd. But that wasn’t the real reason why she was quitting.”

“What was the reason?”

“The threat against her and her family, and the money she was offered to walk away and forget what she saw that night, came from Brendan.”

“She told you this?”

“No. She never discussed this with me. If she had, Brendan would be in prison right now, instead of in hell, where he belongs. I was able to put it all together after Brendan died.”