In Self Defense (34 page)

Thirteen

It took almost three weeks before the reporters and the photographers and the so-called legal experts finally called it quits, before fresh stories with fresh villains cropped up to fill airtime and newspaper space, before the public’s attention waned, before Clare could blow her nose and feel confident that no one was lurking in the shadows, waiting to snap a picture of the indelicate act, or dig in her garbage for the discarded tissue.

The tutor was dismissed with gratitude, and the children returned to school.  No one hassled them.  Rather, their classmates seemed more to be in awe of them.

Henry Hartstone called.  “I don’t know what your plans are,” he said directly, after a moment or two of polite conversation.  “But some of us over here are thinking that this might be a good time for you to come on board.”

“Henry, I’m flattered,” she said, and meant it, “but I hardly think I’d be an asset to the company right now.”

“On the contrary,” the chief financial officer responded in his no-nonsense way.  “The stock actually got a nice little boost from the trial, and I think, as Gus’s heiress, and with Richard out of the picture, you should consider it.”

Clare gave a little chuckle.  “You know, I don’t think it would ever have entered my father’s head that I would one day actually work at Nicolaidis.”

“Don’t be too sure,” Hartstone told her.  “He might have put Richard in charge, but he wasn’t as old-fashioned as you think.  And he was nobody’s fool, either.  He always said, in the end, you’d realize that editing wasn’t your true calling in life.”

“Did he really say that?” she breathed.  Gus had started teaching her the business before she was even able to walk, but he had certainly never come close to suggesting anything like that.

“He did, on multiple occasions,” Hartstone assured her.

“In that case, let me get back to you after the holiday,” she said.  “Perhaps then, we can sit down and take a look at what the options are.”

***

Thanksgiving dawned clear and cold.

Doreen took her first day off since the beginning of the trial, and went to her sister’s in Yelm.  Clare and the girls went to Ravenna to eat turkey with Elaine and her family.  They sat down to dinner at two o’clock, and afterwards, Elaine and her husband had planned to take everyone to a special performance of Cirque du Soleil at the Tacoma Dome.

Clare begged off. “Take the children,” she said.  “Keep them overnight.  It’ll be good for them.”

“You should come,” Elaine insisted. “It’ll be good for you, too.  You need to start getting out.  This is a perfect opportunity.  It’ll be fun.”

“Too public, too soon,” Clare said.  “I’ll only spoil it for everyone else.  Let the children enjoy themselves for a change.  I’ll come get them tomorrow.”

Elaine tried, but couldn’t change her sister-in-law’s mind, and Clare drove home by herself.

It felt odd, but good.  Nobody followed her.  Nobody lay in wait for her.  She couldn’t recall the last time she had been truly alone, without anyone peering at her or hovering over her, without someone wanting something from her.  For a few precious hours, anyway, she could be herself, by herself, and the opportunity was irresistible.  It was heady stuff, this concept of being free, she decided.

She took a long hot bath, put on a pair of fleece pants and a long-sleeved fleece shirt, and went downstairs to raid the refrigerator.  Coming away with a tall glass of orange juice, she wandered into the library.  Doreen had laid a fire, and all Clare had to do was light it, making sure the kindling caught, and then wait for the flames to begin licking and curling along the logs.  She curled up in one of the deep leather chairs, pulled a throw over her knees, and raised her glass.

“To life,” she said to the ceiling, to the bookcases, to the fire.  In a matter of minutes, she was fast asleep.

The sound of the doorbell ringing woke her up.  Frowning, Clare padded into the foyer, glancing at the clock on her way.  It was a few minutes past nine.  She peered out the side window.  A delighted smile replaced the frown when she recognized the figure outside, and she quickly unlocked the door and pulled it open.

“What a nice surprise!” she cried.

“Hello,” James Lilly said shyly.  “I’ve been wanting to stop by, but I just didn’t know whether you’d feel like seeing anyone.”

“Come on in,” she invited.  “You know you could have come anytime.  A friendly face is always welcome.”  She led him into the library.  “What can I get you?”

“Oh, I don’t need anything,” he said.  “I’m fine.”

“Never mind,” she said.  “I know just the thing.”

She took her empty orange juice glass back into the kitchen, and exchanged it for a bottle of champagne that had been sitting in the refrigerator since the verdict.  “I’ve been waiting for someone to enjoy this with,” she said as she popped the cork and poured.  “I can’t think of a more appropriate way to mark the end of one life and the beginning of another, can you?”  She handed him a glass and raised her own.

“To life,” she said.  They both emptied their glasses in one long gulp, and Clare promptly refilled them.

“To life,” James echoed.

“How is it you’re not off in Texas, spending the holiday with family?” she asked.

He shrugged.  “All that’s left are a couple of cousins,” he told her.  “They invite me every year, of course, they’re very good about that, but this year, I don’t know, I guess I just didn’t feel like going all the way down there.”

“That’s odd,” she mused.  “In all the years I’ve known you, I think this is the first time you’ve ever mentioned anything about them.”

“I guess it just never came up.”

“I guess not.”  She took a sip of her champagne.  “Where are your parents?” she asked.

“My dad is dead,” he said.  “I never really knew him.  He’s been dead a long time.  He died in Vietnam.  I was four.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said sincerely.  “And your mother?”

James blinked behind his glasses.  “My mother was never around a lot, either,” he said. “She was very young, and I guess being a widow with a kid wasn’t exactly her idea of having fun.  She’s been dead a long time, too.  I think the story goes that there were two guys outside some bar down in Laredo who squared off over who was going to have her for the night.  No one was exactly sober, and she got caught in the crossfire.  I was nine.  Her parents raised me for a while, and then, after they got killed in a car accident, my cousins took me in.  I was twelve.”

It was a terrible story.  “Now I’m really sorry,” Clare said.  “No one should have to lose their family like that.”

He looked around suddenly.  “Speaking of family, where are the kids?” he asked.  “Where is your housekeeper?”

“The kids are having some well-deserved fun for a change with their aunt and uncle and cousins,” Clare replied with a smile.  “They’ll be back tomorrow.  Doreen is at her sister’s.  She’ll be back tomorrow, too.  And I’ve been enjoying a little time by myself.”

“Oh well then, maybe I should be leaving,” he said, the color in his face deepening just a bit.  “I really just stopped by to see how you were holding up.”

“All things considered,” she declared, “I think I’m holding up pretty darn well -- thanks in no small part to you.”

“Oh, I didn’t do that much,” he said with a diffident shrug.

“Don’t be modest, James,” she told him.  “I wasn’t kidding before when I made that toast.  You gave me back my life.”

He considered that.  “Well, the way things were going, somebody had to, I guess,” he said.  “But you did most of it.  I only helped.”

“The police wouldn’t have believed me if I’d gone to them -- you were right about that,” she said.  “I had no evidence.  They would have just patted me on the head and sent me on my way, and sooner or later, Richard would have succeeded.”

“Forgive me for saying so, since he was your husband and all, but the man was a pig,” James and the champagne declared.  “I watched him rutting around women for almost four years -- using the position you gave him to get away with it.  Frankly, I don’t know why you wanted to hold onto him.”

Clare sighed.  “I loved him,” she said simply.  “I really did.  In spite of everything.”

“Well, maybe, but he didn’t deserve you, you know that,” James said.

“That’s very sweet, but not to worry,” she told him.  “All the wonderful things I felt for him all those years vanished as soon as I realized what he meant to do to me.”

They were sitting side by side in front of the fire, watching the flames flicker and snap.  “I do feel bad about duping the police, though,” she admitted finally.

“Really?”

“Detective Hall came by, to apologize.  I think she really meant it.  I think she was really sorry.”

“I don’t know why she should be,” James said.  “There wasn’t anything the police could have done differently.  Or should have done differently, now that I think of it.  They had everything covered -- except, of course, what they couldn’t have anticipated.”

“I almost told her,” Clare confessed.

James blinked.  “You did?” he said cautiously.  “Now why would you have done a thing like that?”

“As I said, I felt bad for her.”

“But what would that have accomplished, after the fact and everything?”

“I don’t know,” Clare conceded.  “Maybe nothing.  But maybe they’d have been able to put their obsession with the stalker to rest, once and for all.”

“I guess,” he said with a dry chuckle.

“You were very good, you know, very convincing,” she told him.  “You should have been an actor.  Some of those phone calls would have scared me out of my wits, if I hadn’t known.  In fact, there were times when I have to admit I wasn’t even all that sure.”

“Well, that was the whole idea, wasn’t it?” James suggested.

“Yes,” she said, “but you didn’t have to be quite so good at it, did you?  You even managed to hide your adorable Texas twang.”

“Of course I did -- the police were listening,” he reminded her.  “Besides, you were just as good as I was."

“You have a point,” she conceded.

He chuckled again.  “Actually, it was kind of fun, you know, once I got the hang of it -- of playing the part of a stalker, I mean,” he told her.  “It was pretty heady stuff.  I could see where someone could get carried away with it.”

“I don’t know how you ever came up with the idea.”

“Oh, it wasn’t that hard, really,” James explained.  “One day, while I was trying to teach you how to walk on crutches, I remembered those two cases the detectives later told you about -- the singer and the waitress -- and I knew the police had never caught anyone.  It seemed like the perfect way to get them involved, so they’d protect you.  Even if they did end up doing a pretty lousy job of it.”

“Well, we can’t really blame them for what happened on Mercer Island,” Clare said in defense of Erin and Dusty.  “Even we didn’t figure on that.”

“True,” he agreed, and wagged his head.  “You’ve got more lives than a cat, you know.”

“Lucky for me,” she said.

“Until it almost backfired.  Who knew Richard was going to leave that message for Stephanie Burdick, and that you’d end up having to stand trial for his murder?”

“When it should have been him standing trial for trying to kill me,” Clare agreed.

“And having some crackerjack attorney get him off?” James suggested.

“Now that would have been my death sentence,” Clare gasped.  The alcohol was taking effect on her now, too.  “You know, there were times during the last year when I really thought this was all just a horrible joke, and that Richard was going to rise up from under some rock, at the most inopportune moment, and expose us.”

“Not much chance of that happening,” James said, glancing at her with an odd little expression on his face.  “I’m afraid the man is as dead as dead can be.”

“I know,” she said with a nod.  “It’s just that sometimes, I don’t know, none of it seems quite real.”

They sat there, side by side on the soft leather sofa, not saying anything for a while, she contemplating the fire, he contemplating her.

“Do you think the real stalker is still out there?” she wondered finally.  “Do you think he’s still in Seattle?”

“Hard to tell,” he said.

“What if he is, and he’s been following this story all along -- do you think he might be offended because he was being blamed for something he didn’t do?”