Shattered (6 page)

It didn't come. Instead he pushed the files and papers back inside the briefcase, clicked the lock shut, and stood up with it. If he'd noticed the file, he gave no sign.

Lisa let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. She didn't think he would actually fire her, but she wasn't positive. Getting caught taking a file from the prosecutor's office without permission was a good way to find out.

"I hate to hurry you up, but I need to be getting a move on."

He headed back toward his black Jeep, which was parked behind the Jaguar, as he spoke. Putting her briefcase in the backseat, he opened the passenger door for her before walking around and sliding behind the wheel.

"What are you doing out this way, anyway?" she asked as they got going. She'd forgotten, briefly, that he no longer lived in the farmhouse next door to Grayson Springs, where he'd grown up.

"My dad called about an hour ago." He didn't have to say anything else for her to instantly get the picture. The thing about embarrassing memories was that they went both ways. Most of his probably centered on his father, a raging alcoholic who'd thought nothing of beating his sons--Scott had an older brother, Ryan--when they were growing up, or firing off shotguns for no reason, or driving around drunk in their old pickup, screaming obscenities out the window. "He wasn't making a whole lot of sense, but I thought I'd better come check things out."

"Oh." The syllable acknowledged the fact that Bud Buchanan--
Mr. Buchanan
was how Lisa still thought of him--was probably out-of-his-mind drunk when he'd made the call. Given the way Mr. Buchanan had treated Scott--she could remember him sporting countless black eyes and fat lips, which gossip had laid at his father's door--she thought it said a lot for him that he was still taking his father's calls, much less driving all the way out to Woodford County after work to check on him.

"How's it going living at home again?" Scott asked. Clearly he had no wish to talk about his father or whatever problem he was having that might have precipitated the call, and she respected that.

"It's okay. A little claustrophobic, but I'm glad to have the time with my mother." Her mother's diagnosis was terminal. The only question was, how long did she have? Lisa hoped years, but she feared it might be much less. "Given the circumstances, there's nowhere else on earth I'd rather be."

"Yeah." Scott's answer, too, acknowledged a truth that they both knew. Martha Grant had been a wonderful, loving mother to her sometimes undeserving daughter, just as she had been a staunch friend to him.

Lisa remembered something. "So, did Gaylin confess?"

There was a pause as he shot her a quick surprised look. Then his mouth curved wryly. "For a second there, believe it or not, I had no earthly idea how you could have known that."

"Jungle drums." Her tone was light.

"No, I mean, I clean forgot you're an honest-to-God lawyer now. Who would have thunk it? I look at you, and I automatically think of that spoiled-as-hell teenager who followed me around for a couple of summers, practically begging me to do something illegal to her."

"I've grown up," she said shortly. "It'd be nice if we could move past our shared memories. I'll make you a deal: I'll forget them if you will."

His gaze flicked toward her, and then he smiled, a slow, lazy smile that had her narrowing her eyes at him.

"Nah, remembering's too much fun."

Lisa refused to lose her temper. "Did Gaylin confess or not?"

"Yeah, he confessed. Even told us where he hid the murder weapon. After we cut him a deal. No death penalty."

"He wouldn't have gotten it, anyway. Any good defense lawyer would have argued diminished capacity and then put half a dozen weeping relatives on the stand to testify about what a good boy he was really, and how Granny wouldn't have wanted to see her grandson executed."

"That's what I figured. Plus, he's nineteen. Eighteen when he committed the crime, which would have given the defense another angle. And he agreed to life."

"He'll be out in fifteen."

Scott shrugged. "The legal system's--"

He broke off as they reached the fork in the road where the lane joined the larger Mount Olympus Road. His face changed, and his hands tightened on the wheel. Glancing around to see what he was looking at, Lisa was able to see, down the way, the Buchanan farmhouse, which was at the top of the long drive leading down to Grayson Springs. A quartet of police cars was parked in the scrub-grass yard, strobe lights flashing. A uniformed cop could be seen hurrying up the steps to the house.

"Uh-oh," she said.

"Shit." Scott turned toward home and sped up.

4

"Do me a favor,
would you? Drive yourself the rest of the way home, and I'll come by and collect my car later."

Mouth tight, Scott glanced at Lisa as he braked, then slid the transmission into park at the top of the paved drive that led down to her home. To his right, three police officers were now dragging his struggling, handcuffed father, clad in a wife-beater and baggy black pants and cursing at the top of his lungs, out of the run-down white farmhouse where Scott had grown up.

Lisa barely had time to say "Sure" before he got out of the car, leaving the door open for her, presumably, to take his spot behind the wheel.

"Settle down, Dad," he called sharply, striding toward the scene of the fracas as she got out, too.

"You no-good piece of shit, where the hell have you been?" The cops were force-marching Mr. Buchanan down the steps as he turned his vitriol on Scott. Lisa, trying not to hear, walked around the front of the car. "Think you're too important now to come over here and help me out when I call you? If it'd been you who'd come through that door, I'd have taken a shot at you, too. And I would have been pissed as hell that I missed."

Lisa winced.

"Shut up, Dad."

Scott's voice was hard, his body tense, his hands curled into near fists at his sides. If he remembered her existence as he crossed the yard toward where the little group had stopped to wait for him at the foot of the steps, he gave no sign of it. She understood. With herself and the cops as witnesses, this was embarrassment on a far higher order than any she had ever experienced, and she had little doubt that there was pain connected to his father's nonstop boozing mixed in there somewhere, too. This was trouble, but it was Scott's trouble to deal with, an ongoing burden he'd been carrying for his entire life.

"What's up, guys?"

This question Scott addressed to the cops, who were clearly doing their best to control their belligerent prisoner without resorting to violence. Beth didn't wait to hear the reply. Instead of lingering to add to Scott's problems, she got into the Jeep and drove away. But not before she saw the whole group talking at once as Scott reached them.

He was the Lexington-Fayette County DA, but this was Woodford County. He had influence but no authority here. As she drove on down the lane, she wondered if he would be able to convince the cops to let Mr. Buchanan go. Then she wondered what the mean old man had done to get the cops called on him. With no kids left at home to beat up and his wife long dead, there wasn't a lot he could do to attract police attention at home. He'd said something about shooting at Scott. Since that hadn't happened, he'd probably taken a shot at somebody else.

Whatever, she had little doubt that Scott would deal with it, just as he'd dealt with all kinds of problems having to do with his father over the years. In the meantime, she had problems of her own, first and foremost of which was a broken-down Jaguar. Fishing her cell phone out of her purse, she called Triple A and arranged to have it towed back to the dealership that was supposed to have fixed it. For tomorrow, she supposed she could take the farm truck. Or, well, she'd work something out. The key was not to be late for a second day in a row. At the idea of facing Scott again under those circumstances, she grimaced.

Grayson Springs was maybe half a mile in distance but light-years in every other respect away from the five-room, two-story farmhouse with the saggy front porch and leaky tin roof where Scott had grown up. Her own home, she thought, as it came into view at the bottom of the oak-canopied lane, was the very picture of an antebellum southern mansion. Surrounded by undulating acres of grassy fields crisscrossed with miles of four-board white fences, Grayson Springs was a white-painted stone house with front double porticos supported by soaring Grecian columns that stretched up more than forty feet to the slate roof. It looked like something that belonged in
Gone With the Wind
. The original part of the structure, the main house, had been built before the Civil War and was three stories tall. The two-story wings, one on either side, had been added later. There were more than twenty rooms, not counting bathrooms and pantries and connecting hallways as large as rooms and the odd little nooks and crannies common to old houses. Most of them were unused now. The size of the place meant that the utility bills were outrageous, as Lisa knew only too well because she now paid them. Another half-mile or so behind the house were the barns, four of them, once the heart of the operation that had made the name Grayson Springs revered in horse-racing circles and now empty of Grayson Springs-owned horses except for her mother's twenty-eight-year-old mare, Firefly. A host of factors, from the crashing economy in general to the savage downturn in the Thoroughbred industry in particular and including the long decline in its owner's health, had led to the present sorry state of affairs. Its horses sold off, mortgaged to the hilt, its glory days no more than a memory, Grayson Springs teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. Lisa had little hope of saving it beyond her mother's lifetime. But as long as Martha Grant breathed, Lisa would do everything in her power to keep them all in the house, the bank at bay, and the property unsold. Lisa was determined that her mother's last days, however many she had left, would be spent in the home she loved, unclouded by the knowledge that the trust funds set up to secure their futures were all but gone, casualties of bad management and the tsunami known as the Great Recession that had so recently rocked the financial world. She was fairly confident that when the farm was eventually sold, as it would have to be, it would bring enough to pay off the mortgage that had most ill-advisedly been taken out when the income had started to drop, and the other debts as well, but there would be precious little, if anything, left over. What she was going to have once her mother was gone was what she could earn for herself, and no more, which wasn't the greatest news she had ever heard but was something she could deal with. Most likely she would move back to Boston, where a lot of her law school classmates had settled and where she could reasonably hope to find work as a full-fledged attorney again rather than being stuck earning a less than adequate living as a research assistant due to the lack of jobs. In any case, until that happened she meant to do what she could to keep things going here until there was no longer any need to pretend that life was the same as it had always been. She had leased the barns and fields to a nearby Thoroughbred operation so that, from her windows, her mother saw as many horses about the place as she always had. She did her best to keep up the gardens, with their winding brick paths, where Robin Baker, the family's longtime employee, pushed Martha every pretty day in her wheelchair, and the yard and the house. If they no longer entertained lavishly, well, as far as anyone knew, that was because of her mother's health and Lisa's own disinclination. If the full-time staff had dwindled to two, they were the two Martha most counted on. Robin and her brother, their erstwhile farm manager Andy Frye, who, at sixty-six, stayed on with them as kind of a groundskeeper cum jack-of-all-trades because he had worked for Grayson Springs for most of his adult life and was, as he said, too old now to make a change, had over the years become almost family. Keeping Martha's world intact until she no longer needed it was, Lisa felt, the least she could do for the mother who had adored her all her life, and whom she adored in turn.

I'll be sad when all this is gone
.
When Mother's gone . . .

Even the thought made her throat tighten, and resolutely she pushed it away. She wasn't going to think about that. Not now. Not until she had to.

As she pulled the Jeep up under the porte cochere and got out, a glance at the asphalt parking area just a little farther on told her that the workers were still there, repairing the damage from the tree that had come crashing into the roof of the north wing during a violent thunderstorm the previous month. They'd finished fixing the roof last week and had moved on to repairing and painting the ceiling of the bedroom the tree had lodged in. It wasn't too far from her own room, so she supposed she ought to consider herself lucky that it hadn't been hers that had been hit. The thing was, though, their homeowner's policy had a big deductible, and she was going to have to figure out some way to come up with the funds to pay that part of the bill.

Chalk up one more headache.

"Whose car you got there?"

Andy's voice had her head turning to find him. Tall and spare, his military-cut hair a reminder of a youthful stint in the army, his face deeply lined from years spent working in the sun, he was on the back porch, which was connected to the porte cochere by a set of steps and ran the full length of the back of the house. His arms were full of flowers. The vibrant oranges and whites and purples of the mixed lilies and hydrangeas and butterfly bush blossoms were one of the signs of summer she loved the most. As determined to keep Martha from finding out the truth about the farm's precarious state as Lisa was herself, Andy had been working in the garden, she knew, and was bringing the flowers in for her mother. Like everyone else, Andy had benefited from Martha's kindness over the years. He was another of those who loved her dearly.

"Scott Buchanan's. The Jag broke down again, and he gave me a ride home."

Andy glanced past her, toward the car, then lifted his eyebrows at her questioningly as, heading for the kitchen door, she joined him on the porch.