Confessions Bundle

CHAPTER THREE

THEY’D JUST COME IN from a bike ride along the beach on Sunday, planning to have a quick lunch before Marcie had to leave for the airport, when the phone rang.

“I’ll get it!” Mary Jane ran off to the study.

“I’d hope it was one of her school friends calling except that she doesn’t have any,” Juliet mumbled.

“It’s probably Hank, forgetting what time my flight gets in. He offered to come pick me up so I didn’t have to pay to park my car.” With her long blond hair up on top of her head in a claw clip, her face clear of makeup and her slim leggy figure dressed in Juliet’s white terry-cloth sweat suit, Marcie looked beautiful, healthy and vibrant. She barely resembled the worn-looking woman who’d met Juliet and an exuberant Mary Jane at the San Diego airport two nights before.

“Oh come on,” Juliet teased her sister. “You kidding? A trip all the way to San Francisco? An adventure in the big city? He’s probably been up since dawn.”

Marcie chuckled and punched Juliet on the arm. “Hank’s not that bad. He’s taken me to dinner in San Francisco twice since Christmas!”

“Mom! It’s for you!” Mary Jane called.

The sisters, as identical in size and shape as they were opposite in coloring, shrugged and grinned.

“I’ll be right back.” Leaving her sister to start lunch, Juliet took the call.

“WHAT’S UP?”

Marcie’s question was immediate when Juliet, still wearing her black Lycra pants, sweatshirt and tennis shoes, returned to the kitchen five minutes later. The side trip to her room to breathe probably would have worked if she’d been facing anyone but the other two McNeil women.

“You’ve got that weird look on your face,” Mary Jane piped up, her mouth full of peanut butter and jelly as she watched her mother come into the kitchen and take her seat. “The one where something might be wrong but you’re going to pretend it isn’t.”

“Eat,” Marcie said.

“I am eating.”

With her short dark curls, Mary Jane might bear no resemblance to her blond aunt, but there was no doubting the adoration the two had for each other. When Mary Jane had found out her aunt was borrowing the white sweatsuit, she’d immediately run in and changed into her identical—if slightly more stained—one.

“Eat your chicken salad,” Marcie turned to Juliet, indicating the plate waiting in front of her. “The protein will do you good.”

It wasn’t a large portion, about as much as Marcie had given herself. Juliet stared out the bay window of the kitchen alcove, telling herself that she was nervous for nothing.

She’d made some very difficult choices in her life. And while she’d also adopted the very annoying habit of second-guessing herself about one or two of them, she knew, deep inside, that she’d done the best that she could. She’d seen him a few years ago and the encounter had run exactly as she’d have scripted it, had she known ahead of time it was going to happen: quick, impersonal and uneventful.

He’d been married. And thankful that he didn’t have children.

“You know that case I told you I was working on?”

Marcie watched her closely. “Eaton James.” She stabbed a piece of chicken with her fork. “He’s so big he’s your only client right now.”

Juliet nodded. Her sister always kept track.

“Blake Ramsden is going to be in court tomorrow, as a witness for the prosecution.”

Mary Jane took another bite of her sandwich, adding a potato chip to the wad in her mouth. She chewed and swung her feet while she watched her mother, and listened.

Fork midmouth, Marcie stared. “How do you feel about that?”

“Obviously uneasy.” Juliet focused on calm. Normalcy. She took a bite of chicken. “Surprise evidence is never welcome, particularly in a case as convoluted as this one is. True to form, Paul Schuster is attempting to confuse the jury with a paper trail that probably took years to accumulate, only half of which is really relevant.”

“Can’t you object?”

“She does.” Picking up her glass of milk, Mary Jane rolled her eyes. “The prosecution talks pseudo-logic, huh, Mom?”

“Yeah.” Juliet smiled. The milk mustache only slightly detracted from the maturity of her daughter’s contribution to the conversation.

“Doesn’t it present a conflict of interest having him as a witness for the other side?”

“No.” Juliet shook her head. “I certainly have no personal relationship with him!”

“Still…”

“I’ll explain to Eaton James that I met Blake Ramsden in a bar years ago, but that there’s been nothing between us since. He’s not going to care.”

“So what’s Ramsden got to do with the Terracotta Foundation?”

“I have no idea. Schuster’s faxing me a copy of the evidence he plans to present. I know that Ramsden’s father donated a substantial sum of money to Terracotta several years ago to be put in some land investment that didn’t pay off. Terracotta, and those particular investors, lost everything they put into the project. But no one has ever suggested any evidence of fraud. Eaton James was up front with everyone about the risk involved.”

“Mr. Ramsden died when I was a little kid,” Mary Jane reminded them all. “And Blake was still gone then, right, Mom?”

Juliet nodded.

“But he’s been back a long time,” Mary Jane added.

Marcie looked from one to the other of them, pushed the chicken salad around on her plate with a fork and took a small bite. Then she put down her fork.

“Okay,” she said, crossing her arms. “Nice try, but we both know the court case isn’t what I was asking about. Are you going to tell me how you feel about seeing him again?”

“You don’t care, do you, Mom?”

Juliet looked at her sister. “You have a plane to catch.”

“We don’t have to leave for another half hour. At least.”

If not for the somewhat questioning look in her daughter’s eyes, Juliet might still not have answered. Truth was, she didn’t have an answer.

“I guess I’m a little uneasy,” she said. “I mean, I did know him briefly. It could be kind of awkward.”

“Know him briefly? He’s the father of your child!”

“Biological, only.” Mary Jane was chewing again. She’d finished one-half of her sandwich, leaving the crusts, and had started on the other.

“A child whom, I might add, he knows nothing about.”

Pulling her hair down out of its ponytail, Juliet shook her head. “That’s a decision I made a long time ago.”

“I know. And I understand why. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be changed.”

“I don’t want it changed!” There was nothing childlike in the small body at the opposite end of the small table from her mother. “It’s always just been the two of us and I like it that way. Besides, it’s not like he wanted to marry my mom.”

With a quick frown in Juliet’s direction, Marcie leaned toward Mary Jane. “I know he didn’t, honey, and I know you like it with just you and your mom, but maybe you only feel that way because you don’t know what you’re missing.”

“Missing?” The look the girl gave her aunt was similar to one that Mrs. Cummings had bestowed on Mary Jane in her office the previous month. “You think I want to be like Tommy Benson at school? Or Sarah Carmichael? Or Tanya Buddinsky?”

“Buddinsky?” Marcie asked Juliet.

“Her last name is Buehla.” Juliet lowered her head a notch as she looked at Mary Jane. Her daughter knew better than to demean herself with name-calling. She couldn’t quite keep the twitch of a grin from her lips, however. Tanya had had a field day with Mary Jane’s possible expulsion from school the month before. She had spread some fairly inventive stories about Juliet and their little cottage on the beach as well.

Picking up her silverware, Marcie reached for Juliet’s plate and put it on top of her own. “So why don’t you want to be like these other kids?”

“They’re splits!”

“Splits?”

“Their parents are divorced,” Juliet translated.

“Yeah and they have to go part of the time to one house and part of the time to the other and their stuff is always getting left in the wrong place. And there’s the holidays.” Mary Jane’s forceful tone made it sound as though those would explain themselves.

“The holidays?”

“One at one house and one at another and everyone’s constantly fighting about it.”

“Oh, honey, it’s not always that way,” Marcie said.

“Mostly it is, and anyway, how would you like to open your Christmas presents and then have to leave them right away and go someplace else?”

“To get more presents? That might be cool.”

“Who needs more presents if you don’t get to play with them?”

With one raised eyebrow, Juliet asked her sister if she’d had enough.

“How about needing more love?” Marcie asked softly, sending a stab to Juliet’s stomach.

“You guys love me.” Mary Jane didn’t miss a beat. “More than most kids in my class are loved, I’ll bet, even those with two parents married. Some houses are good with dads. This one is good without one.”

“You sure about that, honey?” Juliet didn’t know where the question came from. She’d been very open with Mary Jane from the beginning, telling the child that she would contact her father anytime she wanted her to.

Getting up, Mary Jane dropped her plate on top of her aunt’s. “Positive.” She picked up all three plates and carried them over to the sink. “Now, would you two just go on talking about Mom and quit worrying about me?”

Juliet loved her daughter, but how in the hell she’d ever produced such a precocious and outspoken one was beyond her.

With her chin on her hand and her elbow on the table, Marcie looked at her. “So?”

“So what?” Juliet fingered the edge of her tweed place mat.

“How does Mom feel about seeing Blake Ramsden again?”

Shrugging, she looked at her daughter getting water all over the counter and floor as she sprayed the three plates and put them in the open dishwasher beside her.

“He never contacted me after that one time together. Never followed up on the event to find out if there’d been any consequences. You know, hurt feelings, disease, and—even though we’d started out taking precautions—a baby…”

“I know.”

“He should have.”

“I agree.”

Marcie always had. Juliet would never be able to repay her sister for all the support she’d offered, then and now. She remembered the nights Marcie had sat on the bathroom floor with her, helping her study for her bar exam. Juliet had fought an almost constant battle between mind and body in those days. She’d often thought she could have made it into the Guinness Book of World Records for the length of time she’d suffered from a morning sickness that had never been limited to mornings.

“Besides, he was out of reach,” she added, sitting back to give Mary Jane access to the table she was attempting to wipe down with a sopping-wet cloth. The place mats would soak up the extra moisture when the child put them back. “For years. He’d mentioned that he was leaving for one, but it was closer to four.”

“I know.”

Of course Marcie knew. Her sister’s patience was unending when she was listening to Juliet agonize over a decision made so many years before. Would she ever be completely free from guilt?

“I might’ve been able to reach him through his father,” she continued, watching the little girl whose face was so serious as she folded the dishcloth and hung it on the rack inside the cupboard door. Mary Jane had a lot of energy, yet she concentrated fiercely on even the smallest tasks. “But he’d been so adamant about the fact that he had to have that time away from his father. I respected that.”

“And you didn’t want him to know you were pregnant,” Marcie added.

With a quick kiss to her mother’s cheek, Mary Jane ran off toward the bedrooms in the back of the house.

“I didn’t want the entanglement of a relationship with him,” Juliet agreed, only slightly defensive. “Do you think I was wrong?”

“No.” That opinion had never changed.

“I just couldn’t do it.” The words were torn from her as she remembered back, felt the crushing weight that had been a constant burden during those months of tormenting herself with a decision she hadn’t been prepared to make. “The only thing I knew about life back then was that I couldn’t, at any cost, repeat Mom’s mistakes. Because, really, who did she help, Marce? Us? Dad? Herself? Dad never wanted us. We’d have been better off not knowing that. He never wanted her, either. She lost every dream she’d ever had. And we paid for that, too. I couldn’t do that. Not to me, or to my baby.”

Marcie’s hand, as it covered Juliet’s, was warm and soft. Grounding. “It’s okay, Jules, you don’t have to tell me. I get it. We both saw what Mom went through marrying Daddy just because she was pregnant with us, everything she gave up. And Lord knows, we learned from everything that came after that. Why do you think I’m thirty-four years old and still living alone?”

“Because Hank hasn’t asked you to marry him.”

“Well,” Marcie looked away—and then back. “There is that.”

“Move to San Diego, Marce. You’ve said so many times that you want to. Mary Jane and I have room here.”

“I’m half-owner of…a salon that—”

“Can be sold,” Juliet interrupted. She turned her hand over, grabbing her sister’s. “That place has been running for fifty years and just like you bought it when Miss Molly had her stroke, so will someone else when you leave. If you loved it, that would be one thing, but you talk about it like it’s a lead ball around your neck.”

“Maybe…”

“We hated what the divorce did to Mom, having no money, no way to support us. We hated that town, the way life just stopped there. The way Mom slowly gave up. And sometimes it seems like, instead of doing the opposite of what she did, you’re letting the lure of security snag you, too. It scares me to death when I think of you there in Maple Grove, living in a trailer—albeit much nicer than Mom’s—watching television every night. I can’t bear the thought of seeing the same thing that happened to her happen to you…”

Marcie met her gaze head-on, eyes moist with emotion. “That’s not going to happen, Jules. I’m not Mom.”

She’d love to be convinced. But what if Marcie was just too close to the situation to see the similarities? Their mother certainly hadn’t seemed to be aware that she’d needed help.

“You’re more of an artist than a hairdresser, Marce. You’ve already had an offer from a Hollywood studio at that hair show, who knows what else could turn up if you looked. And you’d probably make three times the money you’re making.”

“Maybe.”

For the first time, as she watched the thoughts play across her sister’s face, Juliet allowed herself to hope. “Will you at least think about it?”

“Yeah.” A couple of tears slid down Marcie’s face. And then she smiled. “Yeah, I’ll think about it.”

“Okay.”

Standing, Juliet felt better, a little bit in control of her life again.

“And you, sis—” Marcie stood as well, eye to eye with Juliet “—you going to tell Blake Ramsden he has a child?”

She opened her mouth to say no. Adamantly.

“How many more schools you going to go through before you realize you have to do something different?” Marcie pressed, her face close enough for Juliet to see the white flecks in her twin’s blue eyes.

“Different doesn’t have to mean telling Ramsden he fathered a kid nine years ago. Telling him won’t make any difference at all if he doesn’t want her. Mom pretended Dad wanted us and look how horrible it was when we found out the truth. I’m not going to risk putting Mary Jane through that.”

“But you’re considering telling him.”

As they’d been doing since they were babies sharing the same crib, Juliet and her sister locked gazes, speaking on a level more intense than words. A conversation that permitted nothing but the deepest truth.

“I don’t know.”

SHE WASN’T DOING anything more than sitting with her back to him behind a table at the front of the room, but Blake could still feel the energy pulsing around Juliet McNeil as he walked into the courtroom Monday morning. It had been that way in the bar on the beach all those years ago, too.

He didn’t know what it was about her, but the woman did not allow herself to be ignored.

Taking a seat in the last row of the courtroom, he leaned back, making his six-foot-two-inch body as inconspicuous as possible. Schuster had thought he’d be calling Blake to the stand about an hour into the one o’clock session. He’d waited until one-fifty to show up, hoping to be in and out in half an hour, forty-five minutes tops.

Having left for New York so unexpectedly, without an opportunity to prepare anyone to stand in for him, he still had catching up to do.

Two-thirty rolled around and still Blake sat. Schuster was better in person than the papers had ever painted him. Intelligent. Methodical. Bringing out every intricate detail that the jurors might otherwise have missed.

Details that meant nothing to Blake. The paper trail of mock companies, false invoices and nonexistent vendors that Schuster was laying was far too convoluted to follow without having started at the beginning.

That fact left Blake with far too much time and too little diversion to avoid the thoughts that continued to plague him in spite of his ordering himself to stop.

If he’d been here in San Diego five years ago, could he have prevented the events that followed? The deaths of his parents? If he’d come home when he’d originally said he would, could he have saved the life of the very beautiful and very lost free spirit he’d seen buried just two days before?

“I object! A personal land purchase made before my client was appointed director of the Terracotta Foundation is irrelevant to this case.”

The judge, an older, slightly overweight man who looked to be in his mid-fifties, looked atop his reading glasses toward Paul Schuster. “Counsel?”

“If it pleases the court, Your Honor, I am attempting to establish a pattern of business dealings that has followed the defendant through most of his adult life—a pattern that is directly related to the case at hand.”

Blake wasn’t sure that Schuster had said anything relevant at all, but figured he had when the judge nodded. “You may continue.”

Those were pretty much the same words Blake’s father had said to him the first time he’d called home—a year to the date from when he’d left—to tell his father he wasn’t through with traveling. The old man had taught Blake well and he’d presented his case so logically that there was no room for argument. He could feel his father’s displeasure from halfway around the world, and knew that the elder Ramsden’s acquiescence had been offered in a way meant to manipulate Blake right back to the fold.

He’d taken it at face value instead, thus successfully meeting one of the challenges he knew his time away had been meant to help him to master—standing up for what was right, even in the face of conflict.

Growing up under the thumb of Walter Ramsden had taught him to avoid conflict at any cost. It had taken Blake a long time to break the hold his father had over him. And more, to see that it wasn’t himself who was so lacking.

The time away, while much longer than originally intended, had been fraught with painful introspection, introspection that had taken him many places, taught him what mattered and what did not.

“Ms. McNeil, do you have any questions?”

Schuster had finished with his second witness of the afternoon.

Juliet stood, her long body as gorgeous as he remembered, even in the sedate brownish skirt and matching jacket. Her arms were long and slender and she moved with such conviction.

“Not at this time, Your Honor.”

Juliet sat, leaned over to whisper something to a suited man on her right. A member of her team?

Eaton James, the man Blake considered an accomplice with himself in his father’s death, was seated on her left.

The judge turned to the elderly man on the stand. “You may step down.” He asked Schuster to call his next witness.

Blake sat up, ready to go.

He leaned back with a deliberately deep inhalation as a name other than his was called. Lifting the sleeve of his jacket where it rested against his leg, he had to stifle the groan of frustration. It was three o’clock. If he didn’t get out of here soon, he wasn’t going to make it to the McGaffey site before work shut down for the day. The site check had been scheduled for the previous Friday.

He wondered what Juliet McNeil was thinking as she sat there watching the proceedings. What she’d whispered to her colleague. While Blake didn’t know her well, he’d bet a year’s income that her relaxed, almost bored, stance disguised a mind that was racing as fast as Schuster’s.

Amunet had had a mind that was unable to slow down. Always thinking, planning, wondering, she’d had a hard time staying in one place for long without growing bored. With a trust fund left by her long-deceased French father, and a wanderlust in her soul to match his, she’d quickly become travel companion to him, playmate, and then wife.

That tug at his stomach was back. It happened every time he thought of the irrevocable step he’d taken, so sure, in his youth and arrogance, that he was absolutely doing the right thing. He’d been honest with her; he was a man who was looking for meaning in the sometimes meaningless acts he saw, trying to understand violence, starving children, death. And love. A man looking for answers with no way to predict where they might lead…. So why did he feel guilty about being led back home?

This time when the judge asked Juliet if she had any questions, she shook her head. Then she began gathering up her papers, sliding them into a leather briefcase.

“Then this court is adjourned until tomorrow morning, 8:30 sharp.” The gavel came down hard, resounding around the courtroom, as if to emphasize the fact that Blake had just wasted an entire afternoon he couldn’t afford to waste.

As people rose around him and shuffled out, Blake felt impatient to be with them. Juliet McNeil was busy speaking with the men at her table. Blake looked for Paul Schuster.

“I’ll need you here first thing in the morning,” the man said after coming down the side of the courtroom and joining Blake.

Blake nodded.

“You’re next,” Schuster added, “so it should go fairly fast.”

With one last glance at the woman to whom he did not want to speak, Blake nodded again and, as a reporter approached Schuster, quietly left.