LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

      Chapter Four

      “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.”

      “So you’d be looking into this on your own time?” She shook her head. “You don’t strike me as the type to operate on gut feelings either. What’s in this for you?”

      The woman she’d once been would have approached the question more obliquely, would have softened its bluntness with a social padding of courtesy. As she’d told him in the coffee shop, Julia reflected, she seemed to have lost that knack. She flushed slightly as his gaze met hers.

      “Does there have to be something in it for me?”

      The black Labrador on the braided rug in front of the sink heaved himself to his feet with difficulty and padded over to his master’s side. Max let his hand drop absently to the dog’s head before he continued.

      “I guess I can’t blame you for thinking that way.” He shrugged. “Let’s say I’m looking to clear my conscience, Julia. I screwed up and you paid for my mistake with two years of your life. I want to put things right again—not only for you, but for Willa.”

      His tone was steady, but she thought she could hear a trace of self-recrimination in his words. She searched his face.

      “You think she’s in danger, don’t you?” Under the table her fingers laced together tightly. “Dear God—you don’t think Barbara planted that bomb?”

      He frowned. “It’s a possibility. But it doesn’t really make sense when you look at the lifestyle your sister-in-law’s adopted since the tragedy.”

      “Her lifestyle?” Julia’s brows drew together in confusion. “Maybe she doesn’t take off to Europe at the drop of a hat or go to parties every night of the week, but she’s never thought anything of snapping up a Picasso lithograph without even asking the cost, because it happens to catch her eye. She keeps a floral designer on staff, for heaven’s sake, and the flower arrangements in her house are changed twice a week.”

      “That’s my point. These days she’s more likely to cram a handful of cornflowers and daisies into a jelly jar, and instead of Picassos, she’s got Willa’s drawings stuck up on the refrigerator. She’s handed control of Tenn-Chem over to her mother, and, as far as I know, she refuses to have anything to do with any of the other Tennant businesses.”

      He shook his head. “Like I said, it doesn’t fit. And she’d never let any harm come to Willa, Julia. She’s been a good mother to her.”

      He hadn’t meant his words as an accusation, she knew. But at them she felt as if a ball of ice had settled in her stomach. “My daughter has a mother, Max,” she said sharply. “Or she did, before you put me behind bars.”

      “I

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