Delores Fossen - New Year Heroes - The Sheriff's Secretary / Veiled Intentions / Juror No. 7

“You know Sawyer. He became an architect. Then there’s Jackson Burdeaux, who is a criminal defense attorney, Clay Jefferson, who became a psychiatrist and Beau Reveneau, who joined the army.”

“I’ve met all of them but Beau. Does he still live in Conja Creek?”

Lucas poured the egg concoction into the awaiting skillet before replying. “We don’t know where Beau is. His family moved from Conja Creek about eight years ago, and none of us have heard from him for several years.”

“So you were all close friends?”

“The best.” He took a sip of his coffee, his expression reflective. “We swore that we’d always have each other’s backs, that we’d support each other for the rest of our lives.” He shook his head ruefully. “We were very young and idealistic.”

“Must have been tough on you last month when you thought Sawyer had killed his wife,” Mariah replied. The crime had been shocking. Sawyer’s wife, Erica Bennett, had been stabbed and pushed off the dock and into the swamp water behind the Bennett home. Erica had been an unfaithful wife who at the time of her death had been pregnant. Sawyer had been the number-one suspect.

“The most difficult part was that I knew in my gut that Sawyer wasn’t responsible, but I was pressured by your boss to make the arrest.”

It had turned out that Erica had been murdered by her best friend and next-door neighbor, Lillian Cordell. And despite all the drama, Sawyer had found love with the nanny he’d hired to care for his daughter, Molly.

“I hear Sawyer and Amanda are getting married next month,” she said.

“Yeah. I got an invitation. It’s going to be a small wedding in Sawyer’s backyard. I’m glad he found somebody who makes him happy. He was unhappy with Erica for a very long time. And speaking of weddings and marriages, tell me about yours.”

As always, whenever she thought of Frank, her wrist ached as if to remind her of all the pain her marriage had brought to her. “There’s nothing much to tell. We got married, it didn’t work out and we got a divorce.”

“But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there?” He pushed the button to lower the bread in the toaster, then turned and looked at her expectantly.

“I’m surprised you’d find the minutia of a broken marriage of any interest,” she replied.

“I think there’s more than the usual minutia in your broken marriage. After all, it was you who told me Frank Landers might be responsible for all this.”

As he took the eggs from the skillet and ladled them onto two plates, she turned her attention to the window and stared out, knowing that she was going to have to tell him how bad things had been, how stupid she had been. The toast popped up and she turned her gaze back to him.

“I was twenty-one and Frank was forty when we married. We’d met in a bar, and I thought he was strong and smart. He seemed to adore me.”

She released a humorless laugh and wrapped her hands around her coffee cup. “I guess you could say I was a cliché. My father left us when I was ten and I never had a real relationship with him. My mother worked two jobs to support us and I rarely saw her. When I met Frank I was hungry for somebody to love me, and he fed that hunger. It wasn’t until after we were married that I realized his adoration was obsession and he was dictatorial and mean.”

Lucas carried the two plates to the table and joined her there. She was grateful that his eyes held no judgment, nor did they hold pity. He just looked at her curiously.

“I was smart, but I fell into the same trap that other abused women fall into,” she continued. “You’ve probably heard this story a million times before. At the beginning things were okay, although Frank had total control over what I did, where I went and who I saw. I wanted to please him so I played right into his game. By the time I got pregnant I’d been isolated from my friends and my mother. And while I knew things weren’t right, I wanted my baby to be raised in the kind of complete family that I hadn’t had.”

“When did the physical abuse start?”

She looked at him in surprise. She hadn’t mentioned anything about physical abuse. Unexpectedly, tears burned at her eyes as she thought of those years with Frank, years of fear and pain and broken dreams.

“About the time I got pregnant with Billy. Frank wasn’t happy about the pregnancy, although initially I thought he’d come to embrace the idea of a child. The first time he laid a hand on me it was just a push … a shove. I fell into the coffee table and got banged up. He was instantly sorry and we put the incident behind us … until the next time.”

“When did he hurt your wrist?”

She flushed and realized she’d been rubbing the ache since she’d begun talking about Frank. “The day I left him. By that time I’d been punched and kicked and slapped enough. I’d already begun to make plans to leave him, but that day he raised his hand to Billy. I stepped between them and he grabbed me by the wrist and twisted. I heard the snap when it broke. He drove me to the hospital, apologizing and telling me how much he loved me. But that snap of my wrist was a defining moment for me and I knew I wasn’t leaving the hospital with him.”

“You pressed charges?”

She nodded and once again wrapped her hands around her coffee cup, needing the warmth to infuse the chill that had taken up residence with the bad memories. “He spent a week in jail, then got out. Billy and I went into a shelter that night and we stayed at the shelter until the divorce was final. That day I packed up and Billy and I got into my car and left Shreveport and Frank Landers behind.”

Lucas picked up his fork and pointed to her plate. “You’d better eat before it gets cold.”

Although the hunger pangs that had gnawed at her had fled with the talk of Frank, she picked up her fork and took a bite. Instead of hunger, what gnawed at her now was a fire of simmering anger. She was angry with herself for falling into the trap of a battered woman, angry with Lucas for maintaining such control on his emotions, for fixing her eggs instead of finding her son.

She knew her emotions were irrational, that the anger she felt at the moment was misplaced, but she couldn’t get a handle on it, and as she attempted to take another bite of her breakfast, it flared out of control.

“You remind me of him,” she said.

He looked at her in surprise. “What are you talking about?”

“You remind me a lot of Frank.” Careless abandon filled her. Her pain rose up inside her, so enormous she wanted to strike out and Lucas was a convenient target. “You treat Jenny a lot like Frank used to treat me.”

He set his fork down and narrowed his dark eyes. “What does that mean? You’re somehow comparing my relationship with my sister to the abusive relationship you had with your husband?”

“Oh, I’m sure you’ve never laid a hand on Jenny, but emotionally you do to her exactly what Frank used to do to me.”

His narrowed eyes flickered with the heat of a burgeoning anger. “I think maybe your own emotional baggage is coloring the way you see things.”

“On the contrary, my emotional baggage makes me see things more clearly.” She wanted an explosion, needed to release not only the tension that balled so tight inside her, but also to diminish the physical attraction she felt for him.

What she wanted more than anything else was for him to reach out to her, to grab her and hold her tight in his arms as he had done the night before in the cemetery.

As crazy as it sounded, she wanted him to take her to bed, to fill her heart with anything other than the agonizing horror that was in there now. And that scared the hell out of her.