Harper Allen - The Night In Question

“If you’ll tell me how much I owe you for the doctor, I’ll be on my way.”

Her posture was ramrod straight and the shoulder-length blond hair was pulled tightly back from her face in a low ponytail. The graze on her temple had been cleaned by the doctor, but pinpricks of blood had welled up on it again.

She looked about as vulnerable as an electric fence. She was looking at him the way she always had—as if breathing the same damned air as he did was an ordeal. Max felt a muscle in his jaw twitch.

“Don’t worry about it.” His tone was deliberately dismissive, and with a flicker of satisfaction he saw her stiffen. “It was my decision to call him in. He gave you a fairly clean bill of health, by the way.”

“So barring any more encounters with the Boston transit system, I should live to a ripe old age. That’s good to hear.”

If he hadn’t been watching her closely he would have missed the total despair that flashed over her features. She bent her head, holding out her hand to Boomer as the dog sniffed her leg with canine formality. After a moment the heavy black tail gave a slow wag of acceptance.

“You stepped out in front of that bus deliberately, didn’t you?” He hadn’t intended to ask her the question, but as soon as the words were out he knew he needed to hear her answer. Julia’s head remained bowed.

“I don’t know, Max,” she said finally. “I honestly don’t know. Anyway, what happens with me isn’t your problem now, so don’t worry about it.” She gave Boomer one last pat and straightened, meeting his gaze directly. “I want to thank you for opening my eyes. You were right—Willa’s better off without me. I won’t be looking for her anymore.”

The smile that lifted her lips was brittle, as if she was one small muscle movement away from cracking. The least impulsive of men, with difficulty Max curbed the impulse to reach out to her. There was nothing he could say, he told himself harshly. He’d accomplished what he’d set out to do.

All that was left was to let her walk away. In silence he preceded her down the short hallway. He unlatched the front door and opened it, seeing with obscure relief that at least the rain had stopped.

The woman before him was a stone-cold killer, he reminded himself sharply. Forty days and forty nights of rain wouldn’t wash away the enormity of her crime.

“There’s a bus stop at the corner.” He didn’t meet her eyes. “There should be one coming by in a few minutes.”

“I’ll wait for it on the curb this time.” There was a touch of wryness in her tone. “Goodbye, Max.”

He saw the slight movement as she began to extend her hand to him. Before she could complete the action, he bent down to grasp Boomer’s collar. Her expression went very still.

“I’ll hold him while you leave,” he said shortly. “Sometimes the old boy forgets he’s not a pup anymore, and tries to make a dash for freedom.”

“Tell him it’s not worth it.” Julia’s words were clipped. She put her hand on the aluminum handle of the outer door and then paused, looking down at the two of them. “The answer to your question is yes, Max. Some part of me couldn’t bear the thought of going on without her. But even while I was lying there on the pavement a second later, I thanked God that I’d been prevented from doing it—because one day, maybe years from now or decades from now, my daughter might want to meet the mother she can’t remember. And even if that meeting only lasts long enough for her to satisfy her curiosity, it’ll be something to hold on to for the rest of my life.”

She turned back to the door, averting her face from him, but not before he saw the terrible bleakness that shadowed her features, the raw glaze of desolation in her eyes. Before he could speak she went on, her voice a whisper and her words no longer directed at him.

“In kindergarten already. Oh, precious—I wish I’d been there to hear about your first day.”

For a heartbeat she rested her forehead against the glass of the door, her eyes tightly closed and her teeth catching at her bottom lip. Then she raised her head and took a deep breath.

The next moment she’d pushed open the door and was gone, so quietly and quickly that by the time Max released his hold on Boomer’s collar he could just make out her slim figure swiftly walking down the sidewalk, her shoulders hunched against the night air, her hands jammed into the front pockets of her jeans.

It seemed that Julia Tennant was always slipping away from him, he thought with illogical frustration. She’d walked out on him at the coffee shop, she’d walked out on him this afternoon at Dobbs’s place and now she was gone for good—from his life, and her daughter’s.

And something about that just didn’t make sense.

Still standing at the door, he felt a chill spread through him. Julia had reached the corner, and the harsh street lighting gave her face and her hair an even paler hue. A block or two past her he could see the bus approaching.

She loved her child. The anguish he’d just heard in her voice had been wrenchingly real. She loved her daughter more than life itself, and that love was so total she was willing to give Willa up rather than bring any harm to her.

When he sat in on a trial, Max had a habit of focusing on one jury member out of the twelve, using his or her reactions as a gauge for the others. At Julia’s trial, he’d chosen a middle-aged woman as his barometer, and he’d been able to pinpoint the exact moment when Julia’s fate had been sealed. The prosecutor had brought out the fact that Willa had been supposed to be on the flight with her father the night he was killed. The little girl had actually boarded the private jet with him and the others, and only the fact that she had promptly gotten sick as soon as she’d been buckled into her seat had saved her life. Kenneth had apparently insisted on having her taken off the plane, rather than cope with her nausea.

Max had seen the middle-aged juror, probably a mother herself, turn appalled eyes on Julia as the implication had set in—that the woman they called The Porcelain Doll had been willing to kill not only her husband, but her child as well. The rest of the trial had been merely a formality.

The worn parquet flooring beneath his feet seemed suddenly insubstantial, as if it was about to buckle and splinter. Max clutched at the door frame as everything he’d thought was real was swept away.

“She didn’t do it,” he breathed, his frozen gaze fixed on the lonely figure standing under the streetlight. He saw the bus slow as it approached her, saw her waiting for it to stop so she could get on. “If she’d known there was a bomb in that package she would have gotten on that plane herself before she’d ever put Willa in danger. She didn’t do it, dammit!”

He pushed open the door, sprinting toward her and calling out her name in a hoarse shout as he saw her step up onto the platform of the waiting bus. He had to stop her, he thought desperately.

Because if Julia Tennant was an innocent woman, then someone else had gotten away with murder.

“When did you last eat?” Before Julia could reply, Max pulled two flat packages from the freezer compartment of his refrigerator. “It looks like you’ve got a choice of He-Man Beef or He-Man Chicken. Both have some kind of apple crisp dessert and mashed potatoes.”

“I’m not hungry.” Julia saw that her hands were trembling slightly on the tabletop. She slipped them onto her lap out of sight. “How are you going to persuade the Agency to reopen the case? Would they do that on your say-so alone?”

“No.” Carefully he folded back a square of foil from the corner of each aluminum rectangle before sliding the dinners into the oven. He set a timer on the counter and took his place at the table across from her. “The Agency doesn’t operate on gut feelings and instinct. As far as they’re concerned, they got the right person, whether you were released from prison or not. Your file’s officially closed.”