Whirling around in surprise, Julie looked for the source of the ominous voice and walked around to the front of the chairs. There she had her second jolt because the woman who was rising to her feet, leaning on a silver-handled ebony cane, was not the diminutive old woman who Julie had rather expected to resemble the butler in stature and demeanor. Instead, she was taller than Julie by several inches, and once she gained her feet, her posture was as rigidly erect as the expression on her unlined face was stony and forbidding. “Miss Mathison!” the woman snapped, “Either sit down or remain standing, but start talking. Why have you come here?”
“I’m very sorry,” Julie said hastily, backing quickly into the high-backed chair opposite Zack’s grandmother’s. She sat down so the woman wouldn’t feel obliged to remain on her feet. “Mrs. Stanhope, I’m a friend of—”
“I know who you are, I’ve seen you on television,” the woman interrupted coldly as she sat down. “He took you hostage and then converted you to his media spokesperson.”
“Not exactly,” Julie said, noting that the woman refrained from even using Zack’s name. As always, when Julie was prepared in advance to face a difficult confrontation, she was able to maintain an outward serenity that she didn’t always feel, but this situation was even more tense and awkward than she’d expected.
“I asked you why you’ve come here!”
Instead of letting the older woman rile or intimidate her with her tone, Julie smiled and said quietly, “I’m here, Mrs. Stanhope, because when I was with your grandson in Colorado—”
“I have only one grandson,” the other woman bit out, “and he lives here in Ridgemont.”
“Mrs. Stanhope,” Julie said calmly, “you’ve only allotted me five minutes. Please don’t make me waste them caviling over technicalities because I’m afraid I’ll end up leaving here without having explained what I came here to tell you—and I think you’re going to want to hear it.” The woman’s white brows snapped together at Julie’s tone, and her mouth thinned, but Julie forged bravely ahead. “I’m aware that you do not acknowledge Zack as your grandson, just as I’m aware that you also had another grandson who died tragically. I’m also aware that the breach between you and Zack has remained during all these years because of his stubbornness.”
Her face twisted with derision. “He told you that?”
Julie nodded, trying to ignore the older woman’s unexpected sarcasm. “He told me a lot of things in Colorado, Mrs. Stanhope, things he’s never told anyone before.” She waited, hoping for some sign of curiosity, but when Mrs. Stanhope continued to regard her stonily, Julie had no choice except to continue without encouragement. “Among other things, he told me that if he had his life to live over again, he would have reconciled with you long ago. He admired you very much and he loved you—”
“Get out!”
Julie stood up automatically, but her temper was rapidly igniting and she fought it down with all her strength. “Zack admitted you and he were very much alike, and when it comes to stubbornness, he was clearly telling the truth. I am trying to tell you that your grandson regrets the breach between the two of you and that he loves you.”
“I said get out! You should never have come here!”
“Apparently not,” Julie agreed tautly, reaching for the purse she’d left beside the chair. “I had no idea a grown woman, facing the end of her life, could still harbor some absurd grudge against her own flesh and blood for something he did when he was still a boy. How bad could it possibly have been that you can’t forgive him?”
Mrs. Stanhope’s laugh was bitter. “You poor fool! He duped you, too, didn’t he?”
“What?”
“Did he actually ask you to come here?” she demanded. “He didn’t, did he? He would never have dared!”
Sensing that a negative reply would somehow play right into the woman’s hands and harden her even further against Zack, Julie threw all her pride away and gambled everything on this last chance to reach the woman’s heart. “He did not ask me to come here and tell you how he felt about you, Mrs. Stanhope. He did something that is even more revealing about the respect and love he still has for you.” Drawing a fortifying breath, Julie ignored the woman’s freezing expression and said, “I hadn’t heard from him until I received his letter a week and a half ago. He wrote to me because he was afraid I was pregnant, and in his letter, he implored me not to have an abortion if I was. He asked me instead to bring his baby to you to raise, because he said you had never shirked a responsibility in your life, and you wouldn’t shirk that one. He said he would write you a letter first to explain—”
“If you are pregnant by him and you have any comprehension of genetics,” his grandmother interrupted furiously, “you’ll have an abortion! Regardless of what you do, I wouldn’t have his misbegotten brat in my house.”
Julie stepped back from the evil of those remarks. “What kind of monster are you anyway?”
“He is the monster, Miss Mathison, and you are his dupe. Two people who loved him have already died violent deaths at his hand. You’re lucky you weren’t the third!”
“He did not kill his wife, and I don’t know what you’re talking about when you say two people—”
“I’m talking about his brother! As surely as Cain killed Abel, that demented monster killed Justin. He shot him in the head after a quarrel!”
Confronted with such vicious lies, Julie lost her control. Shaking with fury and shock, she said, “You’re lying! I know exactly how Justin died and why! If you’re saying these things about Zack because you’re trying to justify turning away his baby, you’re wasting your breath! I’m not pregnant, and if I was, I wouldn’t leave you alone in the same house with my baby! No wonder your own husband couldn’t keep loving you and took up with other women. Oh, yes, I know all about that!” she burst out when shock momentarily cracked Mrs. Stanhope’s contemptuous glower. “Zack told me everything. He told me that his grandfather said you were the only woman in the world he’d ever loved, even though everyone thought he’d married you for your money. Your husband told Zack he just couldn’t meet your high standards, and he finally quit trying to do it soon after you were married. What I can’t understand,” Julie finished with contempt, “is why your husband loved you or why Zack admired you! You don’t have standards—what you have is ice instead of a heart! No wonder poor Justin couldn’t tell you he was gay! Zack isn’t the monster, you are!”
“And you,” Mrs. Stanhope countered, “are the monster’s pawn!” As if Julie’s loss of control was contagious, the rigidity drained from the older woman’s face and her autocratic voice was suddenly edged with weariness. “Sit down, Miss Mathison!”
“No, I’m leaving.”
“If you do,” she challenged, “then you’re afraid of the truth. I agreed to see you because I watched you plead for him on television, and I wanted to hear what could possibly have brought you here. I thought you must be some sort of opportunist, desperate to remain in the limelight and that you’d come here to dredge up something that might do that for you. Now, it is obvious to me that you are a young woman of considerable courage and strong convictions and that it is your misguided sense of justice that sent you here. I respect courage, Miss Mathison, especially in my own sex. I respect yours enough to discuss things with you that are still intensely painful to me. For your own sake, I suggest you listen to me.”
Stunned by the drastic change in the tone of conversation, Julie hesitated beside her chair but remained stubbornly standing.
“I gather from your expression that you’ve decided not to take my word for anything,” Mrs. Stanhope said, watching her. “Very well. Were I as deluded and loyal as you clearly are, I wouldn’t listen to me either.” She picked up the bell on the table beside her chair and rang it, and a moment later the butler appeared in the doorway. “Come in here, Foster,” she ordered, and when he complied, she turned to Julie and said, “How do you think Justin died?”
“I know how he died,?
?? Julie corrected fiercely.
“What do you think you know?” Mrs. Stanhope retorted, brows raised.
Julie opened her mouth to tell her, and then hesitated, belatedly remembering that this was an old woman and that Julie actually had no right to destroy her memories of Justin merely so that she’d cease to hate Zack. On the other hand, Justin was already dead, but Zack was still alive. “Look, Mrs. Stanhope, I don’t want to hurt you any more than I probably have, and the truth is going to do that.”
“The truth can’t hurt me,” she scoffed.
That mocking tone of Mrs. Stanhope’s scraped against Julie’s raw nerves and broke her slender thread of control. “Justin killed himself,” she said flatly. “He shot himself in the head because he was a homosexual and he couldn’t face that. He admitted it to Zack an hour before he killed himself.”
The other woman’s cold gray eyes never flinched; she simply stared at Julie with a mixture of pity and disdain, then she reached for a framed photograph on the table beside her and held it out. “Look at this,” she said. Left with no choice, Julie took the photograph and looked at the fair-haired, smiling youth who was standing at the helm of a sailboat. “That is Justin,” Mrs. Stanhope said in a carefully expressionless voice. “Does he look like a homosexual to you?”
“That’s a ridiculous question to ask. What a male looks like is no indication of his sexual orientation—”
Julie broke off as Mrs. Stanhope turned on her heel and walked over to a large antique cabinet on the far wall of the room. With one hand on her cane, she bent and opened the door, revealing shelves containing crystal glasses, then she pulled hard on the top shelf and the whole panel swung out in an arc. Behind it, Julie saw the door of a concealed safe, and she watched in a state of inexplicable uneasiness as Mrs. Stanhope turned the dial, opened the safe, and extracted a large brown expandable file tied with an elastic cord. Her face wiped clean of expression, Mrs. Stanhope untied the elastic cord and dropped the file onto the sofa in front of Julie. “Since you won’t take my word about what happened, there is the record of the coroner’s inquiry into Justin’s death and the newspaper reports.”
Unwillingly, Julie’s eyes dropped toward the papers that had spilled partially out of the folder, and her gaze riveted on the front-page newspaper clipping with a picture of an eighteen-year-old Zack, another of Justin, and a headline that read:
ZACHARY STANHOPE ADMITS SHOOTING BROTHER, JUSTIN
Her hand beginning to tremble uncontrollably, Julie reached down and picked up those clippings that had slid from the folder. According to the newspaper story, Zack had supposedly been in Justin’s bedroom, talking to his brother, while examining a gun from Justin’s collection, a Remington automatic handgun that Zack thought was unloaded. During the conversation, the gun had fired accidentally, striking Justin in the head and killing him instantly. Julie registered the words she read, but her heart rejected them. Tearing her gaze from the clippings, she glared at Mrs. Stanhope and said, “I don’t believe any of this! Newspapers print things that aren’t true all the time.”
Mrs. Stanhope stared at her, her face coldly impassive as she reached down and extracted a bound transcript from the folder on the sofa and thrust it at Julie. “Then read the truth in his own words.”
Julie tore her gaze from the woman’s expressionless face and looked at the manuscript cover, but she didn’t touch it. She was afraid to. “What is that?”
“The file from the coroner’s inquest.” Unwillingly, Julie stretched her hands out, took it, and opened the cover. It was all there: Zack’s verbatim explanation of the event, taken down and transcribed by a stenographer at the inquest. Zack had said exactly what the newspaper clipping had indicated. When her knees threatened to give out, Julie sank down on the sofa and continued to read; she read until she’d finished the report, then she read newspaper clippings, looking for something, anything, that would explain away the discrepancy between what Zack had told her and what he’d told everyone else.
When she finally dragged her eyes from the file in her lap to Mrs. Stanhope’s face, she understood that Zack had either lied to her about the event . . . or else he’d lied to everyone else under oath. Even so, she struggled to find a way to avoid condemning him for it. Dragging her voice through the knot of emotions in her chest, she said with as much force as she could muster, “I don’t know why Zack told me Justin shot himself, but either way it wasn’t Zack’s fault. According to this file, it was an accident. An accident! He said so—”
“It was no accident!” Mrs. Stanhope bit out, her knuckles turning white as she leaned harder on her cane. “You can’t ignore the truth when it’s staring you in the face: He lied to you and he lied to everyone else during the inquest!”
“Stop it!” Julie lurched to her feet and threw the file onto the sofa as if it were contaminated. “There’s an explanation for it. I know there is. Zack didn’t lie to me in Colorado, I’d have known if he was lying, I tell you!” She thought desperately for explanations and came up with a logical one. “Justin did kill himself,” she said shakily. “He was gay and he—he admitted it to Zack just before he shot himself, then Zack—Zack took the blame for some reason—maybe so that no one would start looking for motives—”
“You idiot!” Mrs. Stanhope said, but her voice was filled with as much pity as anger. “Justin and Zack had quarreled just before that gun went off. His brother Alex heard the quarrel and so did Foster.” Twisting her head toward the butler, she said shortly, “Tell this poor deluded young woman what they were quarreling about.”
“They were quarreling over a girl, Miss Mathison!” Foster said unhesitatingly. “Justin had asked Miss Amy Price to the Christmas dance at the country club and Zack had wanted to take her himself. Justin wanted to withdraw the invitation for Zack’s sake, but Zack wouldn’t have it. He was furious.”
Bile rose up in Julie’s stomach and she reached for her purse, but she still tried to defend Zack. “I don’t believe either of you.”
“You prefer to believe a man who you know for a fact either lied to you or to the coroner and the newspapers, is that it?”
“Yes!” Julie snapped, desperate to get out of there. “Good-bye, Mrs. Stanhope.” She was walking so quickly that Foster had to trot ahead of her to get to the front door ahead of her to open it.
Her heels clicking sharply on the slate floor of the foyer, Julie was almost to the door, when Mrs. Stanhope’s voice called her name. She halted in dread and turned, trying to keep her face blank as she looked at Zack’s grandmother, who seemed to have aged two decades in the minute it took to follow her in to the foyer.
“If you know where Zachary is,” Mrs. Stanhope said, “and if you have any conscience at all, you will notify the police at once. Despite what you may think, it was loyalty to Zachary that prompted me to conceal the facts about his quarrel with Justin from the authorities, instead of repeating it as I should have done.”
Julie put her chin up, but her voice was shaking. “Why should you have done that?”
“Because they would have arrested him, and then he would have gotten psychiatric help! Zachary killed his own brother, and he killed his wife. If he had gotten psychiatric help, then perhaps Rachel Evans would not be lying in her grave. The guilt for her death is on my shoulders, and I cannot tell you how crushing a burden it is. If it had not been obvious from the beginning that Zachary was going to be convicted of killing her, I would have had no choice but to come forward with the truth about Justin’s death.” She stopped, her face twisting as she visibly tried to get control. “For your own sake, turn him in. Otherwise, there will be another victim someday, and you will live the rest of your life carrying the same burden of guilt that I must bear.”
“He is not a murderer!” Julie cried.
“Isn’t he?”
“No!”
“But you can’t deny he’s a liar,” Mrs. Stanhope put in irrefutably. “Either he lied to you or he lied to the authorities about Justin’s
death, didn’t he?”
Julie refused to answer. She refused because she couldn’t bear to admit it aloud.
“He is a liar,” Mrs. Stanhope stated emphatically. “And he is such a good liar that he found the perfect career for himself—acting.” She started to turn away, then she stopped and looked over her shoulder. “Perhaps,” she added in a weary, defeated tone that was somehow more alarming and more effective than her earlier wrath had been, “Zachary truly believes his own lies and that is why he is so convincing. Perhaps he believed he was those men he played in movies, and that is why he was such a ‘gifted’ actor. In his movies, he played men who murdered needlessly and then escaped the consequences because they were ‘heroes.’ Perhaps he thought he could murder his wife and also escape the consequences because he was a film ‘hero.’ Perhaps,” she finished emphatical’y, “he can no longer separate reality from fantasy.”
Fighting her reeling senses, Julie clutched her purse to her chest so tightly that it collapsed in her grip. “Are you suggesting he’s insane?” she demanded.
Mrs. Stanhope’s shoulders drooped and her voice sunk to a whisper, as if the act of speaking suddenly took a supreme effort. “Yes, Miss Mathison. That is exactly what I am suggesting. Zachary is insane.”
Julie didn’t know whether the older woman lingered in the foyer or not. Without a word, she turned and left, walking swiftly out to the car, suppressing the urge to run, to flee from the evil of this house and its secrets and the seed of terrifying doubt it had planted in her heart. She’d intended to stay overnight in a motel and explore Zack’s birthplace, instead she drove straight to the airport, returned the rental car, and took the first commuter flight leaving Ridgemont’s tiny airport.