LITMIR.BIZ

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words: “I sell insurance. A childless woman whose husband is young, healthy and employed does not need half a million in life insurance.”

      In Easy’s mind, all those excepts added up to murder.

      He had hoped, because of their former relationship, Catherine would cooperate. Through her he might obtain a confession of murder, or discover some basis for John to proceed with a wrongful-death suit against his former brother-in-law.

      At the moment he considered himself lucky she didn’t shoot him on sight. Stunned by how much her revelation about the baby hurt, he mounted his motorcycle and rode away.

      

      CATHERINE RESTED with her back against the wall until the motorcycle noise faded in the distance. She breathed deeply through her mouth, her chest aching.

      On wooden legs, she walked downstairs to her bedroom. From the bedside table she picked up a polished silver frame. It contained a photograph of a little girl with dark hair, dark eyes and a gap-toothed smile. Catherine had clipped the photograph from a magazine and did not know the girl’s name. Over the years, she’d changed the anonymous photographs from baby pictures to this present child.

      Not for the first time, she wondered if her insistence on pretending to have a photograph of Elizabeth was a sign of insanity. A means of punishing herself for a guilt she couldn’t shake.

      She accepted her action. She knew she’d done the right thing for Elizabeth. At the time, she’d been sixteen years old, little more than a baby herself. She had no right to destroy Elizabeth’s life. Still, the hurt, guilt and shame lingered.

      Catherine traced the smiling child’s jawline with a fingertip. Seeing Easy again hurt most of all. The pain of learning he’d joined the army remained burned into her memory. He’d left without so much as a goodbye. He’d left her alone to deal with her pregnancy and her parents and the shame.

      Closing her eyes, she remembered vividly the feel of Easy’s skin. He’d been a breathtakingly beautiful boy. She’d filled notebooks with sketches of his face and hands and the alluring musculature of his arms. Tall, slender and graceful, he’d always been ready with a joke and a laugh. A smart aleck, the class clown and captain of the football team—she’d loved him desperately.

      A scratching noise startled her. The greyhounds waited at the French doors leading to the lower patio. Oscar lifted a paw and patted gently at the glass.

      With a trembling hand, she opened the door for the dogs. “I can’t believe I yelled at him,” she told them. “I never yell.”

      She trudged upstairs to the studio. With the shock of seeing Easy fading, she was appalled at how she’d reacted. The rage had erupted within her like a volcano lain dormant for all these years.

      She glanced at the telephone. She wanted to call Jeffrey, but what could she say? She’d never told him about her high school love affair or the child she’d given up for adoption. Now that Grandma had passed away, she never talked about it at all.

      As much as she longed to put the past behind her, it affected every aspect of her life. Her relationship with her parents remained strained. Although they lived in the house where she’d grown up, she saw them less than once a month. Visiting them remained a chore. She supposed she waited for them to say they were sorry for the way they had treated her.

      She remained terrified of pregnancy, terrified of losing yet another child. She didn’t trust birth control devices or drugs. She couldn’t trust fate. No sex until marriage, she’d vowed, and stuck to it all these years.

      She couldn’t marry anyone, or even fall in love, unless she trusted him enough to tell him about the baby. How was she supposed to tell anyone when she could not bear to speak of it?

      At a worktable, she frowned at a painting for a beginning reader’s book about spiders. In painstaking detail she’d depicted hatchlings bursting from an egg sac. Babies. It occurred to her that the projects that excited her the most dealt with babies in one form or another.

      She kept seeing the look of astonishment on Easy’s face. All these years she’d assuaged some of her guilt by blaming him for deserting her. She was rotten, but she always had the comfort of knowing he was more rotten.

       He hadn’t known.

      How could he have known? She slumped on a stool and rested her chin on her fist. The day after she told her parents about the pregnancy, they’d shipped her off to Arizona. She’d been too humiliated to tell anyone at school. No one had known.

      For the first time in twelve years, she faced the hard truth that Easy wasn’t to blame for Elizabeth’s loss. She believed he’d written letters and called; she didn’t put it past her parents to “protect” her. She also believed him impulsive enough to join the army on a romantic whim. Maybe they should talk. Maybe they—

      “No!” The dogs lifted their heads to see if she was speaking to them. “I refuse. The past is over. I don’t want to see him or talk to him. I won’t.”

      As much as she wanted to drop the matter, pass it off as an unpleasant blip in an otherwise placid life, Easy wore on her mind. He lurked like a shadow while she finished the painting.

      The velvet ring box perched atop the fireplace mantel kept drawing her attention. Easy was the long-ago past; Jeffrey represented the future. She called Jeffrey and reached his voice mail. At the tone, Catherine left the message that she needed to see him.

      After she hung up, she marched resolutely to the fireplace and opened the ring box. The sapphire seemed to wink at her.

      She had a career and a neatly ordered life. She always imagined she didn’t need anything else. Easy’s startling reemergence made her see the lie. She did want a husband and children, but she was afraid, simple as that. Afraid to love, afraid to lose again, afraid of a broken heart.

      Bearing an illegitimate child didn’t brand her as a fallen woman. She’d been sixteen, a child who made a mistake. She rubbed her flat belly, dismayed by the emptiness she felt inside.

      She slid the ring onto her finger. It was weighty, flashy, alien.

      Certainly Jeffrey would understand. What’s more, she felt, he would still love her.

      

      INSIDE THE PEAK CAFÉ, Easy looked toward the booth where he and Trish usually sat. The small café off Academy Boulevard sat halfway between his office and hers, so they often met here for lunch. Trish waggled her fingers at him. He joined her.

      “I ordered you a Peak burger,” she said.

      “Thanks.” He wondered if he’d be able to eat it.

      She searched his face. “Oh God, Catherine doesn’t believe you about Jeffrey Livman.”

      A waitress arrived with two iced teas. She smiled at Easy. He tried to smile back at her, but failed. His gut ached as if he’d been kicked.

      “We never talked about Livman.”

      Trish’s face twisted in a puzzled frown. She dumped Sweet’n Low into her iced tea. “She wasn’t home?”

      “She was there all right.” He huffed a long breath, staring at the iced tea, repulsed. He’d been a confirmed soda drinker until Catherine introduced him to the pleasure of a glass of icy cold sun-brewed tea.

      “What happened, Easy? Was Livman there? He’s not supposed to see you. You’ll spook him.” She launched into a diatribe about how Easy was supposed to operate. John had tried to convince the police to investigate Roberta’s death, but they’d found no evidence of foul play and there had been no witnesses. Romoco Insurance, which had carried the life insurance policy, had worked with John, but despite the large benefit, they had turned up nothing to suggest Roberta’s death was anything other than an accident. When the coroner declared the death accidental and closed the file, the insurance company had been forced to pay out, and John’s hope for a police in-■ vestigation had died. They needed a confession. The

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