Blue Heaven (Blue Lake) (22 page)

Jane answered the door wearing tight workout shorts and a crop top. Her hair was piled on top of her head but she clearly had not broken a sweat. She’d been waiting for him. What he had hardly wanted to believe was suddenly clear. All the signs were there in her crazy eyes. This had happened, but not on such a grand scale, before.

“I’ve been waiting for you.” Jane held her door open until Daniel went into her house. He got the chills just being in the same room with her. She must have stopped taking her meds a while ago if she’d gone this far.

Before Daniel could process a word, Jane grabbed him and kissed him hard on the lips. Disgusted, he pulled away. She hadn’t tried anything like that in over a year. He’d been sure she was finally over him, over her delusions that they’d get back together again. When they were younger, that was the pattern, but not for years now.

Daniel remembered how she’d had him in thrall after his folks died. She’d convince him to skip school, bring over porn, weed, and apple wine. They’d have sex for entire afternoons while Bob was in school, only leaving the bed to grab some food. He hadn’t always been the perfect parent, but eventually, the sharp shock of his parents’ deaths dulled, and he pulled himself together. He got rid of Jane. Or so he thought.

He noticed the champagne chilled and waiting in crystal glasses. She’d obviously had done some sipping before he’d arrived, but it was like she knew he’d be coming. After he broke off the kiss, she twirled away like a little girl in a party dress, grabbed the champagne, handed him a glass.

“We did it!” She held her glass high in the air before clicking it with his. Daniel, stunned by the kiss and everything Bob had told him, stunned that this was a woman who had committed a major crime, a federal offense, and she wanted to celebrate with him. He set the glass of champagne on a side table without touching a sip.

“I had nothing to do with whatever you did, Jane. How could you steal Eva’s money?”

“You can’t prove I did that. Nobody can.”

Daniel thought about Port Huron. His friend who’d taped the video the afternoon of the open house had been with the group. He’d told Daniel there was some strange footage of Jane. “He got you on tape. At the open house. When you used Eva’s computer? He filmed it.”

That shut her up. For a second.

“But I did it for you.” Jane drank off her glass of champagne and threw the empty glass onto her brick hearth. It shattered. She went over to the glass and deliberately chose a piece, quickly slashing across her wrist with the sharp end. Blood started flowing. Daniel knew then she was out of her mind. She was high or drunk or having another breakdown; it was hard to tell.

“Now we have the resort.” She started coming at him with the bloody piece of sharp glass.

“Jane drop the glass. Give me your arm. You’re hurt. We have to stop the bleeding.”

Jane did exactly as he asked.

He speed-dialed Jane’s father and put his phone on speaker so Augustine could hear what was happening while Daniel tried to wrap the wound.

“Call 911,” Daniel said as soon as Paul said hello. And then to Jane, “Why did you cut yourself? You’re bleeding. Let me wrap your arm up. We need to get you to the doctor
.
” He wanted Paul to hear that.

Jane seemed dazed as Daniel pulled her into the kitchen and used snowy white towels to staunch the blood on her arm, and to buy time.

“Your dad is calling an ambulance.” Daniel only hoped it was true. “And you’ve got to return the money you stole from Eva’s account.” Jane seemed impervious to the pain those wounds would certainly cause.

“Honey, we can give her back the funds after we foreclose,” Jane said, bleeding and drunk but still making deals. ‘We’ll pick up the property at a good price, I can negotiate the hell out of that one. She’s got to see, with you and me and my dad, who’s going to believe her against the three of us? Not to mention, she has like zero money for a lawyer.”

Daniel hoped old man Augustine had called 911. And that he was still listening.

“But what you did was illegal, Jane.”

“Nobody has to know.”

Daniel had never wished himself somewhere else as hard as he did right now. Somewhere nice with Eva, walking on the beach, sitting in her bungalow on a rainy night. He had taken Eva for granted. He realized now how much he loved her and needed her in his life. Meanwhile, Jane had calmed. She seemed to like him holding the towel around her arm and talking things over.

Jane’s father came. It seemed like hours later, but it was probably only ten minutes. By then the bleeding had stopped and Daniel knew she hadn’t done any serious damage to a vein or artery. He explained what she’d done to Paul, and left him to take care of his daughter.

****

Daniel drove home. He didn’t need to call Eva. Her car was on the curb in front of his house. He came into the living room. She sat there with Bob. Eva’s eyes were closed, her head thrown back against the sofa.

She opened them when he said her name.

He told her everything that had happened at Jane’s.

“This is crazy,” she said, not moving a muscle. Just looking at him with a hot intensity. He knew she had to be fatigued. Probably hadn’t slept. He wished he could take care of her, but first, they had to get through this horrible thing. Because it still wasn’t over.

Eva told him what the deputy had said after formally taking her complaint down and he’d gotten that phone call. He hadn’t said anything else. “My office is a crime scene!”

Daniel didn’t know the end of the story yet, either. When he’d left, he assumed Paul had taken Jane to the hospital. But there had been some pieces he had been able to put together again. Eva’s pieces.

“Before I left, Paul, that’s Augustine’s name. Jane’s father, assured me that the funds will be back in your account before Monday.” Daniel pulled Eva into his arms and held her. She didn’t resist, simply put her head on his shoulder. “He’s going to revise the fine print on your loan, get you a better interest rate and a less cutthroat foreclosure stipulation. Plus you won’t have to pay on the loan until September. It is the least he can do for you.”

Eva slumped against Daniel with relief. “It’s still a mess, but I can work with it. What’s going to happen to Jane? Isn’t bank fraud a federal offense?”

Daniel held her close. She felt so good. He never wanted to let her go. He didn’t want to spend another minute without her. He couldn’t imagine them spending the winter apart. “This all happened less than an hour ago, so I’m not sure.”

“My God, you poor man,” Eva said. Typical of her, even now, she wasn’t thinking of herself, but of him. Of course, he was sure she was relieved that her financial situation had been resolved, or was fast on the way to resolution.

“So what was the proof you had? That you told Jane about?”

“This.” Daniel clicked on the uncut video footage that his buddy had given him in Port Huron. Certain sections had not appeared on the internet, but they were juicy if you knew the background. He fast-forwarded and zoomed into Jane at Eva’s desk, with the time stamp clear. Just before the bank transfer had taken place. Within minutes.

“You can’t see what she’s doing.”

“She didn’t know that. And there’s enough proof there for any court of law.”

“So during the party she went into my files,” Eva said. Daniel’s heart ached for her. She just didn’t know how crazy Jane could get when she went off her meds and started drinking. And really, he hadn’t, either. She’d pulled crap before that her father had explained away, but nothing this bad. Jane must have sensed how much he truly loved Eva. “I knew it was stupid to keep all my passwords in my top drawer.” Eva rested her head on his shoulder.

“Didn’t Jane help you with the art on your website?”

“Yeah, we were at that computer together plenty of times. She knew the way to my site, knew how my bookings are set up. It would be easy for her to locate the contact info of my guests. I feel like an idiot for ever trusting her.”

“Try being me. I dated that woman for years.”

“I guess you have a point.”

Then the bell rang. Through the glass insert on the door, they could make out the faces of Paul and Jane Augustine standing on the porch.

Chapter Thirty

A sheriff’s car was outside, parked in front of the house. Daniel pulled out a copy of the video He’d sent a copy via email to the sheriff the minute he’d seen the thing his buddy had alerted him to on the video. At the time, they’d been drinking and neither of them had any idea what it meant.

“I swear I didn’t ask them to come,” Daniel said.

“No. I know. But I want to see her,” Eva said.

Daniel let them in. Eva had never met Paul Augustine, but now he looked to her like a beaten old man. His face sagged with sorrow and his jowls vibrated with emotion.

Eva had never seen Jane so messed up. Her hair was snarled, her wrist was bandaged, she stumbled when she walked. Maybe the doctor had given her a pain pill. She didn’t seem like the same person Eva thought she knew.

Daniel sat back down next to Eva on the sofa and Jane plopped gracelessly into a chair opposite them. Paul Augustine stood behind Jane, one hand on her shoulder.

Jane’s eyes were shot with red as if every blood vessel in her whites had popped. She looked like she had a major case of pink eye. And her nose was red as well. She looked more defeated than crazy, as if her acts of lunacy in the past few days were a grand experiment that had failed.

“Thank you for seeing us, Eva.” Paul Augustine stood behind Jane’s chair with his hand on her shoulder. “Jane has something she’d like to say to you.”

Jane pulled in a shaky breath. She had not so far met Eva’s eyes. She was instead looking down at her bare legs, tanned and toned, below her workout shorts. The irrelevant thought that spooled through Eva’s head was that it was too early in the season to be tan. Jane probably went to a spa in Port Huron to spray tan herself. Why hadn’t she noticed Jane’s self-absorption before? Her vanity? Her insanity?

Eva didn’t know why she was focusing on such silly details. It could be that her heart hurt, still. She’d really believed that in Jane she’d found a friend for life. But it had all been a lie.

Jane looked up, looked Eva right in the eye.

“I did like you, you know,” she said.

It wasn’t exactly an apology. When Daniel had told her what really happened, she’d felt things slot back into perfect place. But no. There was one piece missing here, one thing that would never be right again. Her friendship with Jane. Which had been a lie from the minute Jane had introduced herself in the bar. Paul Augustine’s hand squeezed his daughter’s shoulder with a bit more pressure.

“I can’t, Daddy. I just can’t say I’m sorry for trying to win him back.”

“You don’t have to say that, honey. What you need to apologize for is trying to ruin Ms. Delacroix’s business. You need to apologize for accessing her personal accounts and creating havoc in her life.”

“I do apologize for that,” Jane said, woodenly, but again looking down and not at Eva. “I don’t want to go to jail,” she said.

Eva felt torn. Nobody should be offered a get out of jail free card just because they were rich.

“That’s not up to me.”

Paul Augustine nodded. Jane stared blankly at her manicure. Man-eating red, Eva noticed. To match her eyes. Which was when Eva realized something. Jane might be rich. She might be privileged. But she suffered too. She might even have legitimate mental problems, Eva didn’t know about that, but she did know about suffering, and about wanting something, or someone, so bad that you’d do almost anything to make it happen. Hadn’t she done that with Blue Heaven? Of course, she’d used legal means. But still. This entire incident would be a minor blip on the screen of her life—if she could believe that Jane would never do anything like this again. She never wanted to see Jane again. She didn’t want to live in the same town as her.

“I don’t want to live here, seeing the two of them all the time, holding hands. It would make me sick.” Jane found a hangnail and tore it off so violently that her finger beaded with blood. She wiped it on her bare leg. Mr. Augustine pretended not to notice.

“There are places for people like my daughter,” Paul said to Daniel and Eva, “secure facilities where she will get the help she needs.”

Eva realized he was talking about a mental hospital. Probably a really nice one where Jane would be comfortable and sheltered, but also get the help she so obviously needed.

Jane seemed to have no sense of what she’d done wrong. There was no remorse. Maybe she was drugged, or maybe she was a sociopath. Eva didn’t know.

“It’s not up to us. Jane’s fate is out of our hands,” Daniel said.

“See,” Jane said, looking up again into Eva’s eyes. She stuck her bloody finger where the wound had beaded up in her mouth and sucked. Then she took it out, inspected it, smiled, maybe pleased that it was clean. “He still worries about me. He cares about me, and there’s not a thing you can do about that. He only loves you because you have the prime Bryman property…”

Jane would have gone on, but her father said “Jane!” in the sternest tone he’d used yet. “Enough!” Paul yanked Jane’s arm and she stood. “I think we’ve said enough for today.”

Deputy Montcalm was on the porch. Paul walked Jane to the sheriff’s vehicle. He kissed her and then let the deputy drive her away.

“She’ll be out on bail by morning.” Eva was so tired. She just wanted life to go back to normal.

“They may realize she’s a flight risk and deny bail.” Daniel hugged her tight and she let him.

****

For the rest of the day that started so badly and ended so well, Daniel took care of Eva. He drove her home to check on the cats. The police tape was gone, so was her laptop. Daniel made her dinner at his place. He gave her a cup of tea and a stack of shelter magazines he’d bought at the bookstore in Port Huron. Then he sat with his laptop, figuring out, he said, the logistics of her second, overbooked week. She just couldn’t handle one more detail, so she’d been happy to let him have a go at solving the overbooking problem. She had no idea what he’d say to her customers or how he’d work it out, but he vowed everyone would be satisfied.