He opened his mouth and she held up her hand to stop him. “I’m not finished. When I’m no longer needed here—“ She paused, and he knew she was thinking of Lucinda’s death, as he did. It was always there, looming in their future whether they could bring themselves to speak openly of it or not. “When it’s over, I’m going to set up my own stables, my own house. For the first time something will belong to me, and no one else will ever be able to take it away.”
Webb’s fists clenched. Her gaze was very clear, yet somehow distant, as if she looked back at all the things and people that had been taken from her when she’d been too young and helpless to have any control over her life: her parents, her home, the very center of her existence. Her self-esteem had been systematically stripped from her by Jessie, with Lucinda’s unknowing assistance. But she had had him as her bulwark until he, too, had turned from her, and since then Roanna had allowed herself to have no one, to care for nothing. She had in effect put herself in dormancy. While her life was on hold she had devoted herself to Lucinda, but that time was coming to an end.
When Lucinda died, Roanna planned to leave.
He glared down at her. Everyone else wanted Davencourt, and they weren’t entitled to it. Roanna was legitimately entitled to it, and she didn’t want it. She wanted to leave.
He was so pissed off that he decided he’d better go back to his room before he really lost his temper, something she wasn’t in any shape to endure and that he didn’t want to do anyway. He stalked to the door, but paused there for the last word. “We’ll work all that out later,” he said. “But you are not moving out of this house.”
CHAPTER 18
It was the day of Lucindas welcome-home party for him, and as Webb drove home he wondered how big of a disaster it would be. He didn’t care, but it would disturb Lucinda a great deal if things didn’t go exactly as she had planned. From what he’d experienced that afternoon, things weren’t looking good.
It hadn’t been much, not even a confrontation, but as a barometer of public sentiment it had been fairly accurate. He’d had lunch at the Painted Lady with the chairman of the agricultural commission, and the comments of the two women behind him had been easily overheard.
“He certainly has a lot of brass on his face,” one of the women had said. She hadn’t raised her voice, but neither had she lowered it enough to ensure she couldn’t be heard. “If he thinks ten years is long enough for us to forget what happened … Well, he has another think coming.”
“Lucinda Davenport never could see any fault in her favorites,” the other woman commented.
Webb had looked across at the commissioner’s face, which was turning dark red as the man studiously applied himself to his lunch and pretended he couldn’t hear a thing.
“You’d think even the Davenports would balk at trying to force a murderer down our throats,” the first woman said.
Webb’s eyes had narrowed, but he hadn’t turned around and confronted the women. Suspected murderer or not, he’d been raised to be a southern gentleman, and that meant he wouldn’t deliberately embarrass the ladies in public. If men had been saying the same things he would have reacted differently, but not only were the two verbal snipers female, they were rather elderly, from the sound of their voices. Let them talk; his hide was tough enough to take it.
But the social matriarchs wielded a lot of power, and if they all felt the same way, Lucinda’s party would be ruined. He didn’t care for himself; if people didn’t want to do business with him, fine, he’d find someone who did. But Lucinda would be both hurt and disappointed, and blame herself for not defending him ten years ago. For her sake, he hoped—
The windshield shattered, spraying Webb with tiny bits of glass. Something hot hummed by his ear, but he didn’t have time to worry about it. His reflexive dodge had jerked the steering wheel in his hand, and the right wheels of the car bumped violently as the car veered onto the shoulder of the road. Grimly he fought for control, trying to ease the car back onto the pavement before he hit a hole or a culvert that would send him careening into the ditch. He was effectively blinded by the shattered windshield, which had held together but turned white with a thick webbing of fractures. A rock, he thought, though the truck in front of him had been far enough away that he wouldn’t have expected the tires to throw a rock that far. Maybe a bird, but he would have seen something that big.
He got all four wheels back onto the pavement, and the car’s handling smoothed. Automatically he braked, looking out the relatively undamaged right side of the windshield in an effort to judge his distance to the shoulder of the road and whether or not he would have enough room to pull off. He was almost to the side road that led to Davencourt’s private road. If he could reach the turn off, there wouldn’t be as much traffic—
The windshield shattered again, this time farther to the right. Part of the broken glass sagged from the frame, little diamond bits held together by the safety film that prevented the glass from splintering. Rock, hell, he thought violently.
Someone was shooting at him.
Quickly he leaned forward and punched the safety film with his fist, tearing it down so he could see in front of him, then he pushed the gas pedal to the floor. The car rocketed forward, the force jerking him back in the seat. If he stopped and gave the shooter a stationary target, he’d be dead, but it was damn hard to make an accurate shot at someone going eighty-five miles an hour.
Remembering that hot humming he’d heard just beside his right ear after the first shot, he made a rough estimate of the trajectory of the first bullet and mentally placed the gunman on a high bank just past the cutoff for the side road. He was almost to the road now, and if he turned onto it, the gunman would have a broadside shot at him. Webb kept the gas pedal down and roared past the cutoff, then past the thickly wooded pasture road where Beshears thought the burglar had hidden his car—
Webb narrowed his eyes against the whistling wind and stood on the brakes, spinning the steering wheel as he threw the car into a state-trooper-turnaround, a maneuver he’d mastered when he’d been a wild-ass teenager running this same road, with its long, flat straightaway. Smoke boiled from his tires as they left rubber on the pavement. Another car blew past him, horn blaring. His car rocked and skidded, then straightened out with its hood pointing back in the direction from which he’d come. This was a four-lane divided highway, so that meant he was going the wrong way, against traffic. Two cars were headed straight toward him. He hit the gas again.
He reached the pasture road just before he would have collided head-on with one of those cars, and took the turn on two wheels. He braked immediately and threw the transmission into park. He jumped out of the car before it stopped rocking, dodging into the thick cover to the side and leaving the car to block the exit from the pasture road, just in case this was where the shooter had left his car. Was it the same man who had broken into the house, or coincidence? Anyone who used this highway on a regular basis, which was thousands of people, could have noticed the pasture road. It looked like it was a hunting road leading up into the woods, but the trees and bushes cleared out after about a quarter of a mile and opened up onto a wide field that butted up against Davencourt land.
“Fuck coincidence,” he whispered to himself as he weaved his way silently through the trees, taking advantage of the natural cover to keep anyone from getting a clear shot at him.
He didn’t know what he’d do if he came face-to-face with someone carrying a hunting rifle while he himself was barehanded, but he didn’t intend for that to happen. His had been a fairly typical rural upbringing in spite of, or perhaps because of, the advantage of living at Davencourt. Lucinda and Yvonne had made certain he fit in with his classmates, and the people he’d be dealing with the rest of his life. He’d hunted squirrel and deer and possum, learning early how to slip through thick woods without making a sound, how to stalk game that had eyes and ears a lot better than his. The rustlers who had taken his cattle and hightailed it into Mexico ha
d found out how good he was at tracking and at not being seen if he didn’t want to be. If the gunman was in here, he’d find him, and the man wouldn’t know he was anywhere around until it was too late.
There was no other vehicle parked on the pasture road. Once he’d established that, Webb hunkered down and listened to the sounds around him. Five minutes later, he knew that he was stalking the wind. No one was there. If he’d figured the trajectory correctly, then the shooter had taken another route off that high bank.
He stood up and walked back to his car. He looked at the demolished windshield, with those two small holes punched in it, and got seriously pissed off. Those had been good shots; either one or both of them could have killed him if the angle of fire had been corrected just a hair. He opened the door and leaned in, examining the seats. There was a ragged hole in the back of the driver’s headrest, just about an inch from where his right ear had been. The bullet had had enough power, even after going through the windshield, to completely pierce the seat and make an exit hole in the back windshield. The second bullet had torn a hole in the back seat where it entered.
He picked up the cellular phone, flipped it open, and called Carl Beshears.
Carl drove out without lights or sirens, at Webb’s request. He didn’t even bring a deputy with him. “Keep it quiet,” Webb had said. “The fewer people who know about this, the better.”
Now Carl walked around the car, looking at every detail. “Damn, Webb,” he finally said. “Someone’s got a real hardon for you.”
“Tough. I’m not in the mood to get fucked.”
Carl cast a quick look at Webb. There was a cold, dangerous look on his face, an expression that boded ill for anyone who crossed him. Everyone knew Webb Tallant had a temper, but this wasn’t temper: this was something else, something deliberate and ruthless.
“Got any ideas?” he asked. “You’ve been back in town—what, a week and a half? You’re making enemies real fast, serious ones.”
“I think it’s the same man who broke into the house,” Webb said.
“Interesting theory.” Carl thought about it, stroking his jaw. “So you don’t think it was just a burglar?”
“Not now, I don’t. Nothing has happened at Davencourt for the past ten years, until I came home.”
Carl grunted, and stroked his jaw some more as he studied Webb. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
“I didn’t kill Jessie,” Webb growled. “That means some one else did, someone who was in our rooms. Normally, I would have been there. I never did go in for the late-night bar scene, and I didn’t fool around with other women. Maybe Jessie surprised him, the way Roanna did. Roanna met up with him in the front hall; mine and Jessie’s rooms were on the front left side, remember? Corliss has the rooms now, I sleep in a bedroom on the back. But the so-called burglar wouldn’t have known that, would he?”
Carl whistled softly between his teeth. “That would make you the intended victim all along, which means this is the third attempt to kill you. I tend to believe you, son, mainly because there wasn’t a reason for you to kill Miss Jessie. That’s what had us so buffaloed ten years ago. Whoever did it must have thought it was real funny, you being blamed for killing her. That would be better than killing you himself. Now, who hated you enough to try to kill you ten years ago, and stay mad this long?”
“Damn if I know,” Webb said softly. For years he’d thought Jessie’s secret lover must have killed her, but with these new developments that didn’t make sense. It would have made sense for the murderer to try to kill him, but not for him to kill Jessie. It would even have been reasonable, if he wanted to think of murder as reasonable, for the two of them to plot to kill him. That would get him out of the way, and Jessie would have inherited more of the Davenport fortune. If she had simply divorced him, her inheritance wouldn’t have been as much, because despite Jessie’s threats she had to have known that Lucinda wouldn’t have disinherited him just because they’d divorced. To her credit, he didn’t think Jessie had been involved in a plot to murder him. Like Roanna, she had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but for Jessie the bad timing had been fatal.
Carl took a length of string from his pocket and tied one end of it around a pen. “Come hold this windshield up as straight as you can,” he said, and Webb complied. Carl passed the free end of the string through the first bullet hole, threading it through until the pen caught on the outside and held. Then he tied the other end around another pen, this time securing the string under the pen’s clip, and passed that pen through the holes in the back of the headrest.
He looked at the trajectory and whistled softly again. “At the distance he was shooting from, if he’d adjusted his sights just a teeny bit to the right, that bullet would have caught you smack between the eyes.”
“I noticed it was a fine shot,” Webb said sarcastically.
Carl grinned. “Thought you might be a man who appreciated good marksmanship. How about the second bullet?”
“It went on through the trunk.”
“Well, any good deer rifle would shoot a bullet with that much power over that distance. No way of tracing it, even if we could have found one of the slugs.” He eyed Webb. “You took a chance, stopping here like this.”
“I was mad.”
“Yeah, well, if there’s a next time, cool off before you decide to go after someone who’s armed. I’ll have the car towed in, and my boys will go over it, but I don’t think we’ll find anything that will help us.”
“In that case, I’d just as soon no one else knows about this. I’ll take care of the car.”
“Mind telling me why you want to keep it quiet?”
“Number one, I don’t want him on guard. If he’s relaxed, maybe he’ll make a mistake. Number two, you can’t do a whole hell of a lot anyway. You can’t give me an escort everywhere I go, and you can’t keep a twenty-four-hour watch on Davencourt. Number three, if Lucinda finds out, it just might kill her.”
Carl grunted. “Webb, your folks need to know to be careful.”
“They do. The so-called burglar spooked them. We have new deadbolt locks now, more secure windows, and we’re wired to an alarm that, if it goes off, will set every dog inside a thirty-mile radius to howling. It’s not any secret in Tuscumbia that we’ve done this, either.”
“So you think he knows, and isn’t likely to try getting into the house again?”
“He’s gotten in twice before without any trouble. Instead of trying it again, this time he tried to shoot me off the road. Sounds as if he heard the news.”
Carl crossed his arms and stared at him. “Miss Lucinda’s big party is tonight.”
“You think he could be among the guests,” Webb said. He’d already thought of that himself.
“I’d say there’s a good chance. You might want to take a look at the guest list and see if you recognize the name of someone you didn’t get along with, somebody who came out on the short end of some business deal. Hell, he wouldn’t even have to be invited; from what I hear, so many people will be there that he could waltz right in and no one would notice.”
“You were invited, Carl. Are you coming?”
“Couldn’t keep me away. Booley will be there, too. Is it okay if I run all of this by him? That old dog is still pretty sly, and if he knows to be watching, he might see something.”
“Sure, tell Booley. But no one else, you hear?”
“All right, all right,” Carl grumbled. He looked at Webb’s car again. “You want me to give you a ride up to the house?”
“No, everyone would ask questions. Take me back to town. I have to get something else to drive anyway, and I’ll arrange to have this one taken care of. As far as anyone is concerned, I had car trouble.” He looked at his watch. “I’ll be pushing it to get home in time for the party.”
The guests were due to arrive in only half an hour, and Webb was nowhere around. All of the family was already there, including his mother and Aunt Sandra. Yvon
ne was beginning to pace, because it wasn’t like Webb to be late to anything, and Lucinda was growing increasingly fretful.
Roanna sat very still, holding her own worry inside. She didn’t let herself think about car accidents, because she couldn’t bear it. Her own parents had died that way, and since then she shrank from the very idea of an automobile accident. If she passed one on the highway, she never rubbernecked but carefully kept her gaze averted and got past the accident site as soon as she could. Webb couldn’t have been in an accident, he simply couldn’t
Then they heard the front door open, and Yvonne rushed to the door. “Where have you been?” Roanna heard her demand with a mother’s asperity.
“I had car trouble,” Webb replied as he took the stairs two at a time. He was back downstairs in fifteen minutes, freshly shaved and wearing the black-tie apparel on which Lucinda had insisted.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said to everyone as he crossed to the liquor cabinet and opened the doors. He poured himself a shot of tequila and tossed it back, then set the glass down and gave them a reckless grin. “Let the games begin.”
Roanna couldn’t take her eyes off him. He looked like a buccaneer despite the fineness of his clothes. His thick dark hair was still black with dampness and brushed into a severe style. He moved with the lithe grace of a man accustomed to formal clothes, without a trace of self-consciousness. The jacket sat perfectly on his broad shoulders, and the trousers were just snug enough to look trim without being binding. Webb had always worn his clothes well, no matter what they were. She had thought no one could look better than he did in jeans and boots and chambray work shirt, and now she thought no one looked better in black tie. Jet studs marched down the front of his snow white shirt, which had rows of tiny tucks, and matching jet cuff links gleamed darkly at his thick wrists.