Bed of Lies (7 page)

The phone rang shortly after she got home. Startled, she took a breath and picked it up. "Steve?"

"No," a deep, soothing, familiar voice said. "Zach."

"Oh. Hi. I... I didn't think you had my number."

"I didn't, but I called in a favor from a guy I met on the local police force while I was looking into the Tony Williams case. Told him I was worried about a friend and needed to get in touch with her."

"Oh," she said again.

"Guess I should have done that in the first place, huh?"

"It's not your fault." All he'd done was try to help her, time after time.

"You okay?"

"Yes," she said, then ruined it by starting to cry.

"He didn't hurt you?"

"No." But she was crying so hard, she had trouble making him believe her.

"Julie, I'm going to come over there, okay?"

"No." That was the last thing she needed. Okay, maybe she would like it. He'd hold her while she cried, and she wouldn't be so alone. He'd done that before, when things were really bad. She knew of no place that felt as safe as Zach's arms. She'd found that out as a little girl. But she couldn't allow herself that comfort tonight. "With my luck, Steve would find you here, and all hell would break loose."

"Okay. If you're sure. But promise me he didn't hurt you."

"I promise. He didn't. He wouldn't. He's not like that, Zach."

"Okay. Sorry I messed things up for you."

"You didn't. I did that all on my own."

"Julie, if you go home, Grace is there. She'll help you. Emma's there. My parents are there. I'm there every now and then, and all you ever have to do is call me, and I'll help you."

Which only made her cry harder.

"It doesn't have to be like this for you," he said. "You're better than this. Stronger. Tell the guy the truth, and if he can't handle it, to hell with him."

"He's the best thing that's ever happened to me."

"Surely not. Surely there's something better for you than this, somebody you have to lie to for him to accept you."

If there was, she feared she'd never find it, never make it work.

"Julie, please," Zach said. "What can I do?"

"Nothing. There's nothing anyone can do," she said as she hung up the phone.

Chapter 4

It was a tense week.

A problem cropped up with one of the stores in Birmingham. Steve went himself to fix it. Julie got a few curious looks around the office. Gossip had it that either she and Steve had fought, or the problem in Birmingham was more serious than he'd let on.

She kept her head down and the makeup heavier than usual, trying to hide the dark circles under her eyes. She had a knot in her stomach and a permanent ache in her head. She jumped practically every time the phone rang, thinking it might be Steve, finally ready to talk.

One afternoon, her assistant buzzed and said someone was on the line claiming to be an old friend. Julie braced herself, expecting Zach, or maybe her mother. If her mother did get arrested, she'd try to track Julie down to post bail.

But the voice on the phone was Grace's.

"Hi, stranger," she said. "I couldn't believe it when Zach told me he'd found you. I want to hear everything. Zach said you're engaged?"

"Yes. To my boss." It was such a cliché.
Picked up by the boss.

She told Grace all about Steve, all those things she always said about him. Solid. Dependable. Steady. The most even-tempered man on earth.

"But... you love him, right? You said everything but that."

"I do," she said with only the slightest hesitation. He was everything she needed in a man. "What about you? I meant to ask Zach, but we got sidetracked by other things—"

"About your parents," Grace said gently. "I'm so sorry about that."

Julie shrugged.
Dismiss. Deny. Go on.
She had the drill down pat. "Par for the course with them."

She supposed in a normal conversation the next question should be whether they'd been arrested, but she really didn't want to know. Plus she had other things to take care of.

"Grace, I'm so sorry about the way I left and for not ever calling or writing. I... It's no excuse, and God knows you deserved better. You were always so nice to me. I just didn't know what else to do. One day I decided I couldn't stay another minute, and I left. I should have at least said good-bye, but I knew you'd talk me out of running away if I gave you the chance."

"I missed you," Grace said. "I thought about you so many times, wondering what happened to you and hoping you were okay."

"I am," Julie claimed. "I'm just fine. But tell me about you."

Grace said she'd been a perennial student, earning a master's in fine art in the States and then studying for years in Europe. Painting, sculpture, architecture, they all interested her. She'd come back to Ohio a few months ago and decided she wanted to know more about her mother's work, stained glass.

"I'm glad you're so happy," Julie said. "And that things are going so well."

"I'm happy for you, too. And I'm afraid I have to go in just a minute. But I did want to ask one more thing. A favor."

"Anything," Julie said.

"Go see my big brother, okay?"

Julie took a breath, thinking,
Anything but that.
But how could she say no? Besides, there was something about the way Grace asked... "Something's wrong, isn't it?"

"I just haven't been able to get him to talk to me lately. I swear he calls when I he knows I'm not here and leaves messages about being busy and promising to get back to me later. And then he doesn't. None of us have been able to get him on the phone for a real conversation in weeks. I mean, he gets this way in trial sometimes, but... this is different."

"What's different?"

"The last six months have been tough. His... Well, our biological father got out of jail, and it's been..." Grace took a breath. "It's something I never really thought I'd have to deal with. I guess I should have known I would, at some point. But it kind of sneaked up on us all, and it's been hard on Zach."

"Oh." As Zach had reminded her that first night in the restaurant, he hadn't had a perfect life. For so long it had just looked like he did. "I'm sorry. I didn't know."

"No way you would have, unless Zach told you, and I don't think he talks about it with anyone."

"He's always seems so together, so invincible," Julie said. "I forget sometimes that he's human like the rest of us."

"Me, too. We went to see him...
That man.
I'll never call him my father. He wanted to see us, and we didn't want to go. But after a while, we decided to just get it over with, all of us together, so he couldn't take us by surprise later. We made it clear that we didn't want any further contact with him."

"What happened?"

"Not much, at least not that I saw. But Zach was alone with him for a few minutes, and when he came out he was so upset. He claimed it was all over, that the man would never bother us again, but... he just hasn't been himself ever since. He's avoiding our calls, and he won't come home. I really need for someone who knows him to go see him and tell me he's okay."

"Sure."

"Thanks, Julie. So... I guess I'll see you soon? I mean, with what's going on with your parents and everything?"

"I... Well..." Out of excuses and ashamed of wanting to make them, she buzzed her assistant, two short beeps, the signal to interrupt her, to save her. Sure enough, Maggie buzzed her right back. "Grace, I'm sorry. That's my secretary, and I really have to go. But I'll let you know after I talk to Zach."

And with that, she escaped.

"Anything I can do?" her secretary asked through the intercom.

"No, thanks, Maggie. That's all I needed."

She sat still for a minute, thinking about Zach seeing a father who'd been in prison since Zach was just a little boy. How would that feel to him? She thought of what he might remember of the time he'd spent living in the same house with that man, what it would take to shake someone like the man Zach was today. She'd never seen him even break into a sweat.

Julie glanced at the clock on her desk. It was almost eleven. Not indecently early for lunch, and court had to break at some point, didn't it?

Five minutes at the courthouse, Julie told herself. Then she'd be done. Life could get back to normal. Steve would be back. She'd explain somehow. They'd get married, and Zach would leave town. Everything would be fine.

* * *

The courthouse was packed. She slipped into a seat in the back corner in time to catch the last ten minutes of Zach's closing argument.

He was calm, sincere, passionate and persuasive, painting a picture of a boy who'd never had a break in his whole life, one who'd been abused and neglected and tormented in ways that would make most people sick to even hear about them.

What would a child do under those circumstances? When he was pushed one step too far and seemed to have no hope of escape, no way out?

She looked at the defense table where, between Zach and another man, Tony Williams sat in a chair that seemed too big for him, wearing an ill fitting suit that swallowed his small frame, shoulders hunched forward, gaze glued to the surface of the polished table in front of him.

He looked like a little boy. A sad, angry and lost boy.

She hadn't expected to get so caught up in his dilemma, but she had tears in her eyes by the time Zach was done.

And she kept thinking, it could have been Zach sitting there. If he, Grace and Emma had never been taken away from their birth father, and one day the man had come after Grace or Emma... Zach would have done anything to protect them.

The judge announced a break for lunch. The crowd got to its feet and began to drift out. Julie waited in the back of the room until Zach and a man who must have been his co-counsel had finished speaking with their client, until finally she and Zach were the only ones in the room.

Zach sat back down, one arm folded across his chest, the other going up so that his hand covered half his face, as if he couldn't bear to see, and he looked oddly vulnerable sitting there. He was tired, too. She could see it in every line of his body, see the tension and what looked like pain.

Obviously Grace was right to be worried.

Julie slowly rose from her seat and walked toward the aisle. She bumped her knee on one of the last seats in the row, and at the noise Zach turned around, startled and obviously not happy to find that he wasn't alone.

"Hi," Julie said, standing where she was, about ten feet away from him.

He got to his feet but didn't come any closer. "What are you doing here?"

She shrugged and played dumb, thinking she'd slowly get around to what his sister had told her. "Bad day, huh?"

"Bad week. Did you hear any of the closing arguments?"

"About ten minutes of yours. You did well, had at least two of the jury members in tears."

"I'm afraid that won't be enough to win this thing. One or two people aren't going to be able to hold out against all the others," he said.

She tried to imagine Zach failing, and feeling the way she did sometimes, but she just couldn't do it. Then she tried to see him as a boy who grew up knowing his father was in prison, and now a man with that same father walking around on the streets free.

As Zach had talked about Tony Williams's life, she'd wondered if the emotion in his voice had come, not from listening to Tony talk about his childhood, but from Zach's memories of his own. No doubt, that's where the passion and the drive came from that made him so good at what he did.

"You look tired," she said. And strung tight as a piano wire.

"Like you said, bad day."

He probably had a lot of those. How could he not, doing a job like this? She wondered who took care of him when he wasn't sleeping or eating the way he should. Who did he talk to late at night, when the world seemed like a big bad place and he just wasn't sure if he could make it through another day?