Misty was quick on her feet, and obviously thrilled with the tips. “Maybe I will take that winter vacation to Puerto Vallarta after all. My cousin’s got a place down there, ya know. Always asking me to come down, but the airfare’s out of my league. However, with a couple more days like this, I can see myself sitting on a beach and sipping a margarita from some hottie in a Speedo.”
Armando rolled his eyes and muttered something in Spanish under his breath. He and Denise had worked harder than ever getting the orders cooked and plated at a breakneck pace. Though Denise was handling the extra work effortlessly, Armando was at his rope’s end, griping that they were running out of staples and that too many of the orders came in with changes. Jessica, grateful for the fast pace, didn’t have time to think about the fact that she’d promised herself to go to the sheriff’s office the next morning.
But as the shift wound down and the last customers drifted out of the diner, her stomach once again knotted. Could she go through with it?
It was a little before eleven when Misty said, “You run on home. I’ll close.”
Jessica nodded. She was dead tired and told herself to get a decent night’s sleep, then face the music. When she drove out of the lot, she found the city streets nearly deserted, the town of Grizzly Falls seemingly folded in on itself and closed up for the cold winter’s night.
She told herself again that she wasn’t being followed, that the headlights she’d seen in her rearview mirror weren’t zeroed in on her. As she had before, she considered all of her options. She could wait for the bastard to find her, stand her ground, and try to blow him away herself, but then she’d end up in a trial and possibly prison or the mental hospital. Again.
No, thank you.
Fleeing or turning herself in to the police were her options.
If she ran again, she was only putting off the inevitable. Buying a little frantic time. Putting more people in danger. Again, she’d pass.
That left going to the police, telling them her story, and hoping they would believe her, trust her, go against all the evidence.
She turned onto the county road and the streetlights gave way to darkness. No car seemed to be following her and the more distance she put between herself and Grizzly Falls, the more she told herself to relax. She had only one more night on the run, then, come morning, her life would take another turn and change.
Forever.
“So be it,” she said, the beams from her headlights cutting through the deep night. A few snowflakes drifted lazily from the night sky to catch in the light. As she left the city behind she should have felt calm, but instead, she was still uneasy. Restless. She fiddled with the radio and heard an old Johnny Cash song on a country station that kept cutting out. She thought of her family and a bitter taste rose in her throat. Would they come to Montana? Would she be sent to Louisiana where she would face them again through iron bars or through thick glass where they could only speak through phones mounted in the walls? Or would they abandon her?
Did she even care? Those ties had been severed a while back, their frayed ends unable to be stitched back together.
She had, of course, not only betrayed and embarrassed them, she’d renounced them publicly, a sin for which she would never be forgiven. Her mother and father lived by a very stiff and archaic set of standards. A public life that was, to all who looked at it, picture-perfect. No cracks to be seen. But once the doors were closed, their private life was very different and very guarded.
She’d known the rules growing up.
She’d not only broken them, she’d done so in a very public way.
She remembered the day she’d first confronted her mother.
Outside on a lounge chair, her mother was reading a paperback. Wearing a sundress and dark glasses, she’d positioned herself on the porch in the shade of the overhanging oak tree, leaving only her legs exposed to the sunlight.
Though it was barely nine in the morning, the summer heat was sweltering, the day sultry, almost sticky, a haze in the blue Louisiana sky. An Olympic-sized pool, her father’s prized possession, abutted the veranda of her parents’ home outside New Orleans. It shimmered as it stretched far into the tended backyard.
“Mom?” Anne-Marie called, gathering her nerves.
Jeanette looked up and set her paperback onto her lap. A glass of sweet tea was sweating on the small table beside the lounge chair. A smaller glass of ice and a clear liquid, most likely gin, sat near a pack of long cigarettes by the ashtray and a lighter. Paddle fans, as always, were softly whirling overhead. Butterflies with orange and black wings flitted through the heavily blossomed bougainvillea flanking the yard.
“This is a surprise.” Jeanette smiled, but Anne-Marie knew it was false. Jeanette Favier had never been a warm person.
“I have something to tell you.”
“Oh.” Nothing more. Just the hint of disappointment from dealing with a daughter who had continually disappointed and bothered her.
“It’s about . . . him.”
“Again?” Her mother sighed, her smile falling away. “Why you have such a problem with your husband, I’ll never understand. Marriage isn’t easy, and given your . . . condition, you’re lucky he wanted you.”
“My condition. You mean because I was a little wild?” Anne-Marie challenged.
Her mother sighed through her nose. “Your brothers were ‘a little wild,’ but you pushed the boundaries, got yourself in that accident and—” She stopped. “Oh, well.”
“Go ahead. Say it. I’ve never been the same since. Isn’t that what you were going to tell me? You blame me for falling off a damn horse and hitting my head and think that’s the cause of every bad thing that’s happened to me since.”
“You were in a coma for days, but of course, you don’t remember that. When you finally woke up”—Jeanette shook slightly—“you were . . . different.”
“With a condition.”
“You went from bad to worse. I’d thought . . . no, I’d hoped . . . when you finally decided to get married that you would settle down, make a decent life for yourself. But that’s not the way it ever is with you.”
“He’s not the man I thought he was.”
“No one is. We all have girlhood dreams of white knights and thunderous steeds and chivalrous men who pledge their lives to us, but in the end, they are all just men.” Jeanette let out a long breath and shook her head. “Have you forgotten the ‘for better or worse’ part of your vows?”
“He hit me, Mom.”
Jeanette looked up sharply. “Oh, Anne-Marie,” she said as if she didn’t believe her, as if Anne-Marie were spinning another lie.
“I’m serious, Mom,” she insisted and witnessed the cords in her mother’s neck tightening, the way they always did when Jeanette was forced to deal with her wayward, rule-breaking daughter’s problems.
“Okay. So he shoved you,” she finally said, finding a way to make the statement more palatable. “Why don’t you just, you know, keep quiet about it?” Jeanette Favier’s type of motherly advice. “That’s what we do, you know.” She reached for her cigarettes, then her fingers scrabbled over the glass top of the table, nearly knocking over her iced tea before she clenched the soft pack.
Anne-Marie stood her ground. “He beat me!” she repeated, her fists clenching at her sides. “That’s assault, Mom.”
“Hush!” Her mother sat up quickly, then glanced furtively over her shoulder toward the inside of the huge plantation-style home. “For the love of God, Anne-Marie, keep your voice down. The cleaning people are here and your father’s in his study.” She pointed overhead to the area in the general direction of Talbert Favier’s private office.
“You don’t care that he hit me?”
“Of course I care.” Jeanette tried to shake a cigarette out of the crumpled pack.
“You should, because he hit me over and over again. I thought . . . I thought he would crack my ribs.”
“But he didn’t, did he?” Jeanette managed to
shake out a cigarette and light up despite the fact that it was slightly bent. Her hands were trembling.
Anne-Marie stared down at her mother. “Not yet. But he will.”
“No, no. You don’t know that.”
“He’s going to really hurt me.”
“Now, look, Anne-Marie,” Jeanette said, sighing in a cloud of smoke. “This is not good. But you knew he had a temper before you married him.”
“Not like this. I didn’t know he was violent.”
Lifting up her sunglasses, Jeanette squinted at her daughter through a thin tendril of smoke. “So what do you want to do?”
“Go to the police.”
“What? Oh, Lord!” She shook her head at the thought, then set her cigarette in the ashtray. “No way. You have to leave the police out of it.”
“He beat me, Mother. What part of that don’t you get?” To prove her point, Anne-Marie took off her own shades to display the red in her eye, the bruise surrounding her eye socket.
“Oh . . . oh, dear.” Jeanette winced.
Not stopping with the damage to her face, Anne-Marie lifted her T-shirt to show the black, blue, and sickly green discoloration across her abdomen.
Her mother sucked in a swift breath. “I’m so, so sorry.” In an act so foreign to her mother that Anne-Marie was stunned, Jeanette grabbed a towel draped over a nearby chair and dipped one corner into the pool. “Sit,” she said, indicating the end of the chaise and then, smelling of smoke and her signature perfume, she gently dabbed at her daughter’s injuries.
Anne-Marie sucked in her breath as her mother touched her face, pressing the cold towel against her cheek.
“I think you’ll live,” Jeanette pronounced.
“This time.”
“It’s not that bad.” She took her time folding the towel.
“He attacked me, Mother. Beat me. Then raped me.” Anne-Marie was trembling inside, the memory of the vicious attack fresh and brutal. She needed her mother to understand, to be her champion.
“Oh, darling,” her mother said softly.
For an instant, Anne-Marie believed Jeanette’s hard exterior had cracked with empathy and love for her only daughter, but that hopeful impression was short-lived as the older woman asked gently, “Whatever did you do to provoke him so?”
“What? Didn’t you hear me? He assaulted me, gave me these.” Once more, Anne-Marie lifted her T-shirt to display her bruises. She hurt inside, was as emotionally beat-up as she was physically. But it was at the hands of her own damn mother, the woman whom she’d hoped would believe her and protect her.
“Oh, I heard you, sweetheart,” Jeanette said as she leaned over the table and took a final puff of her cigarette before putting it out in a series of nervous taps until the filter tip was mashed in the ashtray. Then she turned to grab her daughter by the shoulders. “I know you’re sore. It’s obvious, but . . . but your husband’s a good man, maybe a little rough around the edges in private, but you just have to try to please him.”
“How can you say that?” Anne-Marie nearly screamed. “These aren’t the Dark Ages, for God’s sake! Mother, listen to yourself. Do you really think I should stay with a man who does this to me?” She held her T-shirt higher, where bite marks were visible on her breasts over the top of her bra.
“Honey.” Her mother picked up the towel again, and, looking as if she really had no idea what to do, tried to dab at the contusion on Anne-Marie’s cheek again.
Anne-Marie dropped the hem of her T-shirt and grabbed her mother’s wrist, stopping her. “He’s an animal,” she hissed. So angry she was nearly spitting, she shoved her face close to her mother’s so that their noses nearly touched. She saw the tiny imperfections in the older woman’s face, the pores that were a little larger on her nostrils and the telltale web of red lines running across her nose to her cheeks. Minuscule threads lurking beneath the surface, they were evidence of far too many gin and tonics by the pool that were stubbornly resisting an ever-thickening layer of makeup.
Anne-Marie said, “I will not be used as a human punching bag.”
Jeanette backed up. “You married the man.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Listen to me, Anne-Marie. There is no divorce in our family. You might see that as archaic, but that’s the way it is. Your father is an elder in the church, a respected businessman. And your grandfather’s a preacher. Do you hear me? My father preached from the Good Book. Your brothers have problems with their wives and kids and they’re working it out. You haven’t been easy, my dear. Not at all. Not with the craziness you spew. But,” she said and then repeated, “but . . . we are proud, genteel people, expected to set an example for the community.”
“You would sacrifice me? For the sake of... what? Some ridiculous and antiquated notion of what a marriage is? Your precious reputation?”
Slap!
Her mother’s palm struck fast and hard, leaving a red mark over Anne-Marie’s already bruised cheek. “Sacrifice is a part of life, a path to heaven. And marriage is sacred. Don’t you ever forget it. And as for divorce? In this family, it’s out of the question.” She yanked her arm back.
Anne-Marie let it go. “You can’t tell me what to do. I’m a grown woman.”
“Then act like one.” Disgusted, Jeanette added tautly, “Do your duty, Anne-Marie.”
“Are you kidding?”
“You’re a wife. His wife. Your choice. And, let’s face it, you haven’t been a very good one, have you?”
Anne-Marie didn’t answer.
“I didn’t think so.” With a frown, Jeanette said, “Look into a mirror. Think about what you’ve done. You’re not the victim here.”
“He hit me.”
“Then deal with it. But, please, don’t come running to me!” She started for the inside of the house.
“I’m divorcing the son of a bitch.”
Her mother hesitated at the French doors leading to the kitchen. With one hand on the doorknob, she glanced over her shoulder. “Then you’re divorcing all of us, Anne-Marie. You won’t be welcome here again.”
Anne-Marie’s stomach tightened and she’d fought the urge to run to her mother and beg her forgiveness, but she stood firm.
“I trust you can show yourself out,” were the last words her mother said to her.
Chapter 21
Jessica shoved thoughts of her family aside as she drove through the night. They would not be any help. Never had been. Even her grandmother on her mother’s side, Marcella, who had adored her only granddaughter, wouldn’t come to her aid.
Not any longer.
That, of course, was her own fault. The effect of stealing from someone who loved and trusted her.
Would the police be able to protect her?
She doubted it. She had too many strikes against her—a mental patient as well as a thief and a known liar. No, she didn’t really believe the cops would help her, at least not the cops in New Orleans. She’d pinned her hopes on Dan Grayson. But even if he’d still been alive, chances were he wouldn’t have come to her rescue, either.
“Face it,” she said to the disguised woman in the mirror, “you’re on your own.”
Then again, hadn’t she always been?
The snow began to fall a little more heavily, collecting on the windshield, and she remembered the storm that had been predicted, a blizzard moving south from Canada, the biggest of the winter. Great, she thought sarcastically. Just what she needed. She flipped on the wipers and from the corner of her eye, caught a flash of headlights shining through the night, a vehicle somewhere behind her.
You’re not the only one who lives out here, she reminded herself.
“But almost,” she said, her gloved hands tightening over the steering wheel. Again, she looked back. Again she saw lights.
She swallowed hard and wondered where the hell all of her bravado had gone. It was as if her courage had dissolved in the time, over a year, since that conversation with her mother.
It’s nothi
ng. Don’t be paranoid. Get a damn grip.
Her heart was pounding like crazy. Despite the cold, her fingers began to sweat in her gloves as she clenched the wheel.
Another look in the mirror.
The lights had disappeared.
Probably turned off at that last junction. She let out her breath.
It was nothing. See? For God’s sake pull yourself together. You have to keep a level head.
She saw the lane leading to her cabin and started to turn in when two eyes caught in the headlights. “Oh, God!” She slammed on the brakes and the SUV skidded, back end fishtailing as the deer leaped nimbly into the surrounding trees.
She sat for a second, waiting for her rollicking heart to return to normal as snow drifted down, falling steadily, piling on the ground.
It was a damn deer. Nothing more.
She pressed on the gas pedal. Wheels spinning, she whispered, “Come on, come on,” as the back end slid some more. Finally, the front wheels caught, the Tahoe lurched forward, and she drove along the ruts to the cabin, a tiny dark abode in the middle of nowhere.
She’d been foolish to come to Grizzly Falls, she realized, propelled by fear and confusion and, yes, paranoia. But, come the daylight, she would make things right.
The rest of the drive down the winding length of the lane was uneventful. She parked, hurried into the cabin, then went through her usual routine of replacing firewood, then stoking the flames, and double-checking all the locks on the doors and latches on the windows before making certain that every curtain or shade was pulled tight.
After twisting on the shower to get the warm water running, she took off the pieces of her disguise. She hung her wig and padding on a hook behind the bathroom door then secured her dental appliance in a ziplock plastic bag that she left on the counter. Cold to the bone, she showered quickly, then dried off, tossing her towel over a hook near the window. She cracked the window just enough to clear the room of what little steam had collected. Shivering, she pulled on her sweats, grabbed her uniform and underclothes, then hurried back to the living room where the fire was burning more brightly, some heat emanating from the grate.