“And you, Carl, you’re a long way from being any saint! Before you were married you slept with—”
“Leave my wife out of this,” he warned tightly.
“I wasn’t going to mention Sara,” Katherine said with cool derision. “I was thinking about Ellen Richter and Lisa Bartlesman, when you were in your senior year of high school, and then there was Kaye Sommerfeld, when you were nineteen, and—”
Julie’s horrified, laughing plea caused them all to turn toward her. “Stop it! Please,” she said, caught somewhere between amusement and limp exhaustion, “just stop it. We’ve all ruined enough illusions about each other tonight.”
Ted turned to Katherine and raised his glass in a mocking toast. “As usual, Katherine, you’ve managed to criticize and embarrass the hell out of everyone else while leaving yourself above reproach.”
The antagonism seemed to drain from her. “Actually, I have the most to be ashamed of.”
“Because you stooped to sleeping with me, I presume?” he said with bored indifference.
“No,” she said quietly.
“Then why?” he demanded.
“You know the answer to that.”
“Surely not because our marriage failed?” he scoffed.
“No, because I made that marriage fail.”
His jaw clenched as he angrily rejected the softly spoken —and astonishing—admission. “Why the hell are you hanging around in Keaton anyway?” he snapped instead.
Katherine turned back to the tray of drinks and inserted a corkscrew into a second bottle of chardonnay. “Spencer says that I have a subconscious need to come back here before I marry him in order to confront all the local censure that I ran away from when our marriage went on the rocks. He says that’s the only way I’ll regain my self-respect.”
“Spencer,” Ted pronounced with a disdainful glance, “sounds like an asshole.”
To his amazement, his fiery ex-wife gave an infectious laugh as she turned and toasted him with her glass.
“What’s so funny?” he demanded.
“Spencer,” Katherine explained unsteadily, “has always reminded me of you . . .”
Julie put her untouched glass of wine aside and stood up. “You’ll have to argue without me here to referee. I’m going to bed. I have to get some sleep.”
46
PULLING ON A ROBE THAT Katherine had lent her, Julie walked quietly downstairs and found Katherine in the library, watching the 10 p.m. news.
“I didn’t expect to see you down here until morning,” Katherine said with a surprised smile as she stood up. “I made up a dinner tray for you though, just in case. I’ll get it.”
“Was there anything important on the news?” Julie asked, unable to keep the apprehension from her voice.
“Nothing about Zachary Benedict,” Katherine assured her. “You were a main topic of the state and national news, however—your return home from captivity, apparently safe and unharmed, I mean.”
When Julie dismissed that with a shrug, Katherine put her hands on her hips and teased, “Do you have any idea how famous you’ve become?”
“Notorious, you mean,” Julie joked, falling into their habitual friendly banter and feeling vastly better than she had in the last two days.
Nodding toward a stack of newspapers and magazines on the lamp table beside Julie’s chair, Katherine said, “I saved those for you in case you wanted them for a scrapbook or something. Look through them while I get your tray, or have you seen them already?”
“I haven’t seen a newspaper or a magazine in a week,” Julie said, reaching for the magazine on top and turning it over to the cover. “Oh good God!” she exploded, torn between anger and laughter as she gazed at her own face on the cover of Newsweek magazine beneath a lurid headline that read, “Julie Mathison—Partner or Pawn?” She tossed that aside and flipped through the rest of the stack, astonished to see pictures of herself plastered across the front pages of dozens of national magazines and newspapers.
Katherine came back in carrying a tray and put it on the table in front of her.
“The whole town has rallied around you,” Katherine said with a brief glance at the Newsweek cover. “Mayor Addelson wrote an editorial for the Keaton Crier reminding everyone that no matter what the big-city press says about you, we know you here, and we know you’d never ‘take up with’ a criminal like Zachary Benedict. I think those were his exact words.”
Julie’s smile wobbled a little and she laid the paper aside. “But you know better. As you heard me tell Carl and Ted, I did ‘take up’ with him.”
“At the time, Addelson was rebutting that truck driver’s statement that you seemed to be collaborating willingly in Benedict’s escape—frolicking in the snow and all that Julie,” she said hesitantly, “do you want to talk to me about it—about him?”
Looking at her friend, Julie remembered the confidences they’d exchanged over the years. They were the same age and had become fast friends almost from the moment Ted introduced them to each other. When Ted and Katherine’s marriage fell apart, Katherine had gone back to college and then moved to Dallas. Until now, she’d adamantly refused to return to Keaton, but Julie had visited her often in Dallas at Katherine’s insistence. The special friendship that had sprung up instantaneously had somehow survived time and separation, and it was as vital and natural as it had always been. “I think I need to talk about him,” Julie admitted after a pause. “Maybe then I’ll get him out of my system and be able to start thinking of the future again.” Having said that much, she lifted her hands palm up and said helplessly, “I don’t even know how to begin.”
Katherine curled up on the sofa as if she had all the time in the world and suggested a starting point: “What’s Zachary Benedict like in real life?”
“What’s he like?” Julie mused, drawing a knitted afghan over her lap. For a moment she stared past Katherine’s shoulder, trying to think of how to describe Zack, then she said, “He’s hard, Katherine. Very hard. But he’s gentle, too. Sometimes, I actually ached inside from the sweetness of the things he did and said.” She trailed off and then tried again, with examples. “During the first two days I actually thought he might kill me if I defied him. On the third day, I managed to escape from him on a snowmobile I found in the garage . . .”
Three hours later, Julie finished, having told Katherine almost everything with the exception of intimate moments, which Julie didn’t attempt to hide, but didn’t describe in specifics either.
Katherine had listened in complete absorption, interrupting only for clarification, laughing at things that were funny like their snowball fight, gaping in disbelief at Zack’s jealousy of Patrick Swayze, frowning at other times— sometimes with sympathy, sometimes with disapproval. “What a story!” she said when Julie finished. “If it was anyone but you telling me this, I wouldn’t believe a word of it. Did I ever tell you I used to have a big crush on Zachary Benedict? Later I simply thought of him as a murderer. But now . . .” She broke off as if unable to put her thoughts into words, and then she finished, “No wonder you can’t stop thinking of him. I mean, the story doesn’t have an ending, it just sort of hangs there, unfinished. If he’s innocent, then the story is supposed to have a happy ending with the real murderer going to jail. The good guy isn’t supposed to spend the rest of his life living like a hunted animal.”
“Unfortunately,” Julie said grimly, “this is real life, not the movies, and that’s the way the story is going to end.”
“It’s still a lousy ending,” Katherine insisted. “And that’s all there is to it?” Repeating the last thing that Julie had told her, Katherine summarized, “Yesterday at dawn, you both got up, he walked you out to the car, and then you drove away? Just like that?”
“I wish it had been ‘just like that’!” Julie admitted unhappily. “That’s how Zack wanted it to be, and I knew it Unfortunately,” she added, trying to keep her voice steady, “I couldn’t seem to do it that way. Not only did I star
t to cry, I made everything even worse by telling him I loved him. I knew he didn’t want to hear it because I’d blurted it out the night before, and he pretended he didn’t hear me. Yesterday, it was worse. Not only did I humiliate myself by telling him I loved him, but he—he—” Julie trailed off in shame.
“What did he do?” Katherine asked gently.
Forcing herself to look at her friend and to keep her voice emotionless, she said, “He smiled like an adult does to a foolish child and informed me that I did not love him, that I only thought I did because I don’t know the difference between love and sex. Then he told me to go home where I belong and forget all about him. Which is exactly what I intend to do.”
Astonishment and bewilderment furrowed Katherine’s forehead into a frown. “What an odd, ugly way for him to behave,” she said sharply, “given the sort of man you portrayed him to be until then.”
“I thought it was, too,” Julie said miserably, “particularly when I was almost certain that he cared about me. Sometimes, there was a look in his eyes, as if he—” She broke off in disgust at her gullibility and said angrily, “If I could go back to yesterday morning and do it over again, I’d pretend I was perfectly happy to be going. I’d thank him for a great adventure, then I’d drive away and leave him standing there! That’s what I should have—” She trailed off, imagining the scene in her mind, then very slowly she shook her head, negating the whole idea, struck by a realization that made her feel much better. “That would have been an incredibly stupid, wrong thing to do,” she said aloud.
“Why? You’d have your pride,” Katherine pointed out.
“Yes, but I would have spent the rest of my life thinking he might have loved me, too, and that if we’d admitted how we really felt about each other, then maybe I could have talked him into taking me with him and, later, searching for the real killer. In the end,” Julie concluded quietly, “I’d have hated myself for not telling him again that I loved him, for never trying to change the way our story ended. Knowing that Zack didn’t love me even a little is hard, and it hurts, but the other way would have hurt much more and for much, much longer.”
Katherine stared at her, dumbstruck. “Julie, you amaze me. You’re right about everything you just said, but if I were in your place, it would take me years to be as objective as you are now. I mean, consider what the man did—he kidnapped you, seduced you after you saved his life, took your virginity, then when you told him you loved him, he gave you a cavalier, flippant answer and sent you home to face the FBI and the world media on your own. Of all the heartless, rude—”
“Please don’t go into all that,” Julie said with a half-laugh as she held up her hand, “or I’ll get angry all over again and forget how ‘objective’ I am. Besides,” she added, “he didn’t seduce me.”
“From the story you just told, it’s obvious to me he seduced you with twenty-four-karat charm.”
Julie shifted her gaze to the empty fireplace and shook her head, “I wanted to be seduced. I wanted him so much.”
After a moment, Katherine said, “If he had told you that he loved you, would you truly have turned your back on your family and your job and everything you believe in and gone into hiding with him if he’d asked you to do that?”
In answer, Julie lifted her gaze to Katherine’s. “Yes.”
“But you’d become an accessory, or whatever it is they call someone who joins in with a criminal.”
“I don’t think a wife can be prosecuted for standing by her husband.”
“My God!” Katherine gasped, “you’re completely serious! You’d have married him!”
“You of all people shouldn’t find that so difficult to believe,” Julie said pointedly.
“What do you mean?”
Julie watched her with a sad, knowing smile. “You know what I mean, Katherine. Now it’s your turn to confess.”
“About what?”
“About Ted,” Julie clarified. “You’ve been telling me for a year that you want to make Ted listen to you because you have things you need to make him understand. Yet tonight, you meekly accepted every nasty, unjust remark he made to you without a word of argument. Why?”
47
KATHERINE SHIFTED UNEASILY BENEATH JULIE’S steady gaze, then she reached nervously for the teapot on the tray in front of her and poured tepid tea into her cup. When she lifted the teacup to her lips, there was a slight tremor in her hand and Julie saw it. “I accepted the way he treated me because it’s no more than I deserve after the way I behaved while we were married.”
“That’s not the way you felt three years ago, when you filed for divorce,” Julie reminded her. “You told me then that you were divorcing him because he was selfish, heartless, demanding, overbearing, and a whole lot of other things.”
“Three years ago,” Katherine stated sadly, “I was a spoiled brat married to a man whose only real crime was that he expected me to be a wife, not an unreasonable child. Everyone in Keaton, except you, knew that I was a ridiculous excuse for a real wife. You were too loyal to your best friend to see what was before your eyes, and I didn’t have the maturity or courage to face the truth. Ted knew the truth, but he was too gallant to destroy your friendship and faith in me by telling you what I was really like as a wife. In fact, one of the few things we ever agreed on was that you shouldn’t know we were having problems.”
“Katherine,” Julie interrupted softly, “you’re still in love with him, aren’t you?”
Katherine’s whole body tensed at the words, then she looked down at the huge pear-shaped diamond sparkling on her left hand and twisted it in her fingers, keeping her gaze averted. With a choked laugh, she said, “A week ago, before your disappearance forced Ted to start talking to me, I would have answered no to that question.”
“How would you answer it now?”
Katherine drew a long breath and looked up at her. “As you so eloquently phrased it about Zachary Benedict tonight,” she said, “I would sleep with your brother for the rest of my life—if he’d only ask me to again.”
“If you feel that way,” Julie asked quietly, her gaze searching Katherine’s face, “how can you justify the fact that you’re still wearing another man’s engagement ring?”
“Actually, the ring is now on loan to me.”
“What?”
“I broke our engagement yesterday, but Spencer asked me not to make it official for a few weeks. He thinks I’m simply overreacting to old, sentimental memories that came back when I saw Ted again.”
Restraining the urge to cheer at the news of the broken engagement, Julie smiled and said, “How do you intend to get Ted back?” Her smile faded a little as she added, “It’s not going to be easy. He’s changed since the divorce, he’s still devoted to his family, but he rarely laughs, and he’s become distant . . . as if there’s a wall around him and he won’t let anyone past it, not even Carl or me. The only thing he really seems to care about now is passing his bar exams and opening up his own practice.” She paused trying to think of a kind way to phrase it and then opted for the simple truth: “He doesn’t like you, Katherine. Sometimes, it’s almost as if he actually hates you.”
“Did you notice that, too?” Katherine tried to joke, but her voice shook a little. Sobering, she said, “He has good reason to hate me.”
“I don’t believe that Sometimes two wonderful people simply can’t make a go of being married, and it’s no one’s fault It happens all the time.”
“Don’t whitewash me when I’m finally getting up the courage to tell you the ugly truth,” she said shakily. “The truth is that the divorce was entirely my fault I loved Ted when I married him, but I was so spoiled and so immature that I couldn’t understand that loving someone means you make some sacrifices for him. It sounds bizarre, but I actually thought I was entitled to bind Ted to me with matrimony and then to spend the next couple of years being independent and carefree—until I was ready to settle down with him. To give you an example,” she persevere
d, her voice ringing with self-disgust, “one month after our wedding, I realized that all my friends were going back to college for the fall semester, and I wasn’t. Suddenly, I felt martyred because I was only twenty, and I was already tied down and missing out on college life. Ted had saved enough money by working as a deputy sheriff to go to school and pay my tuition, and he came up with the perfect suggestion: We could schedule our classes on the same days and drive to Dallas together. But that wasn’t good enough for me. You see, I wanted to go back East and live in my sorority house like a coed, then spend summers and holidays with my husband.”
Julie struggled to keep her face from betraying her surprise at such a hopelessly unfair marital arrangement, but Katherine was so busy condemning herself that she wouldn’t have noticed anything. “Ted pointed out the obvious impracticality of such a marriage and added that even if he were willing to live like that, he couldn’t possibly afford to send me to Brookline. So I went running home to Daddy to ask for the money, even though Ted had made it plain to me that if I married him, he would never take a penny of Daddy’s money. Daddy, of course, told Ted that he would be happy to pay for all my expenses at Brookline, but Ted refused, which made me furious. I retaliated from that day forward by refusing to lift a finger at home. I didn’t cook another meal for him or do his laundry. So he did the cooking and grocery shopping, and he took our laundry over to Kealing’s Cleaners, all of which made everybody in town start talking about what a lousy wife I was. Despite that,” Katherine said, “he never gave up hope that I’d grow up soon and behave like a woman instead of a brat. He felt guilty, you see,” Katherine added, looking directly at Julie, “for marrying me when I was so young and hadn’t had a chance to really live. Anyway, the only wifely duty I performed during the rest of our first year of marriage was lovemaking, which,” she added with a soft smile, “was definitely not an awful chore with your brother.”