J. Jance: Trial By Fury

She drew her chin up and squared her shoulders. "Don't be," she answered. "I'm glad I found them and read them. It makes it easier to go on. I didn't lose anything. It never existed."

A nurse poked her head in the door. She saw me sitting on the edge of the bed and frowned in disapproval. "You'll have to leave now. We're bringing the babies to nurse."

I started to my feet. Joanna caught my hand. "Don't go," she said.

The nurse glared at me. "Are you the baby's father? Fathers can stay."

"He's a father," Joanna said evasively. "I want him to stay."

The nurse clicked her tongue and shook her head, but eventually she gave in, led Joanna back to bed, helped her get ready for the baby, and then brought a tiny bundle into the room. I sat self-consciously on the chair by the window, unsure what to do or say.

I couldn't help remembering those first few tentative times when Karen had nursed Scott when neither of them had known what they were doing. That wasn't the case here.

When I glanced up at Joanna, she was leaning back against the bed looking down contentedly at the bundle nestled in her arms. "I've decided to name him Peter," she told me.

Without her having to explain, I knew why and was touched. It was a nice gesture toward Peters, one I hoped he'd appreciate someday.

"It's a good name," I said.

It was quiet in the room after that. The only sounds came from the lustily sucking infant. This part of parenthood made sense to me. It seemed straightforward and uncomplicated. Joanna Ridley made it look deceptively easy.

But still there was an undercurrent beneath her placid, motherly surface. I sensed there was more to the story, more she hadn't told me. I didn't know if now was a good time to ask her about it. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

"What was in the letters?" My question broke the long silence between us.

Joanna answered my question with one of her own. "Do you remember when Detective Peters asked me if Darwin had a separate checking account or credit cards?"

I nodded. "You told us no."

"I was wrong. There was a lot I didn't know, including an account at the credit union, a joint account with her, with Candace Wynn. I never saw the money. It was deducted from his paycheck before it ever came home, and he had all the statements sent to him at school. Between them they must have had quite a sum of money. Part of it came from Darwin, and part came from her. According to the letters, she had been systematically gutting her parents' estate for years. They used the money to buy a boat."

"A boat?"

"A sailboat. It was supposedly a partnership made up of several people. In actual fact, there were only two partners, Candace and Darwin. They planned to run away together until I found out something was going on. Then, even after she knew I was expecting a baby, she still kept talking about it in her letters, that eventually it would be just the two of them together."

Joanna paused and took a deep breath before she continued. "From the letters, it sounded like she understood about me, about the baby, but when she found out about the cheerleader, that Bambi whatever-her-name-was, she snapped."

The quote came unbidden to my mind. I repeated it aloud. "‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.' Isn't that what they say?"

Joanna didn't answer me. I watched as she took the baby from one breast, held the child, patted his back until he burped, then gently moved him to the other breast. Once more I was struck by her beauty, by the sudden contrasts of black and white, skin and gown, sheet and blanket, mother and child. Sitting there in a splash of morning sunlight, Joanna Ridley was the epitome of every Madonna I had ever seen.

Beautiful and serene, yet she, too, had been scorned, betrayed. Where was her anger, her fury?

"What about you, Joanna?"

She looked up at me and gave me a wry grin. "I wasn't scorned, honey," she drawled with a thick, southern accent I had never heard her use before. "I was suckered. There's a big difference."

The next few weeks were a blur. I camped out in Kirkland with the kids and Mrs. Edwards until school got out.

I took a leave of absence so I could look after the kids and run back and forth to the hospital. The girls kept wanting to go see their dad, but he was far too sick for visitors. Peters' health remained precarious, and the doctors told us it would be months before he was entirely out of the woods.

Before Ames returned to Phoenix, we spent hours trying to second-guess what the long-term implications were, but other than sorting out the custody arrangement, we decided to hide and watch and not make any other plans until we had some clear direction from the doctors. Mostly, they weren't very informative, but they did hint that the fact that Peters had been unconscious at the time of the wreck was probably the only thing that kept him from being killed. The doctors vacillated between saying he'd never be able to live on his own again and voicing cautious hope that he might recover.

There were occasional times when Peters was fairly lucid. During one of those periods, I asked him if he remembered anything about his time with Candace Wynn. He said no. The doctors tell me that it's not unusual for a person who has suffered a traumatic injury to totally forget the events surrounding the injury.

Considering what I discovered, his amnesia was probably a good thing. Joanna let me read Candace Wynn's letters. In the last one, one written the Thursday before Darwin Ridley died, she raged about Bambi Barker. She had somehow gotten hold of Molly Blackburn's negative. Alternately threatening Darwin and pleading with him to run away with her, she ended the letter with the impassioned statement that if she couldn't have him, nobody would.

She must have gone over the edge then. From what the homicide detectives were able to piece together, she somehow convinced Darwin Ridley to come home with her, slipped him some of her mother's morphine, put a noose around his neck, and pushed him off the second-floor landing over her truck. All she had to do then was cut him down, hose him off, cover him up, and haul him away. The crime lab found bits of trace evidence in the truck that indicated she had used it to transport Ridley back to the dumpster where he was found. No one ever figured out for sure why she went to the trouble of stripping him, unless she used his clothes in a futile attempt to frame Joanna.

Eventually, Maxwell Cole came forward with the envelope and his copy of the Ridley / Bambi photo. The typeface on his envelope matched that on Joanna Ridley's envelope. It was also the same typeface on Candace Wynn's love letters to Darwin Ridley. The remains of the typewriter were found crushed in the wreckage of the van, along with a suitcase of small bills and Molly Blackburn's missing negatives. Peters'.38 was there, too.

Candace must have sent the pictures to the Barkers, Joanna, and the press, just as she had planted the evidence in Joanna Ridley's trunk in hopes of throwing us off the track.

She and Peters hit it off like a couple of star-struck kids. Maybe she was on the rebound. Maybe she liked playing with fire. Somehow, while he was at her apartment, Peters must have discovered something that alerted him, something that told him Candace was behind Ridley's death. Since she went to the trouble of painting the rail, he may have discovered the chafed place on the upright where the noose was tied off.

Whatever it was, when she overheard him trying to call me, she stopped him. That explained the cryptic message on my machine.

Ned Browning resigned on the first of April under a cloud of Chief Marilyn Sykes' making. His case won't come up for several months, but when it does, I doubt he'll be involved in the educational system anymore.