The Way Back (15 page)

Gabby waited until she ordered the banana and strawberry concoction then stepped in front of her before she could leave. The woman had an easy smile and a graceful figure she covered with a tied-dyed cotton skirt and white cotton blouse.

“You are Cheryl Hillerman?”

“Can I help you?”

Not having thought of any convincing lie which might get the woman to talk about the past, Gabby’s only play was the truth. “My name is Gabby Haines and I work for McKay Publishing—”

And just like that the easy smile was gone and Cheryl was walking out the door. Gabby followed her out onto the street thankful she’d worn practical shoes since she practically had to jog to catch up to the woman.

“Please, Ms. Hillerman if I could have just five minutes—”

“Go away!”

“I’m here because Jamie sent me.”

That stopped her in her tracks. Slowly, Cheryl turned, her face a mask of skepticism.

“You know Jamie?”

“I do. I’m writing his biography.”

The woman laughed harshly. “Bull. No way Jamie ever tells anyone about his life. He’s too damn ashamed of it.”

“Well, it’s been a while and maybe he feels the world is ready to finally hear about what really happened that day.”

“What really happened?” Cheryl’s eyes narrowed, but at least Gabby had piqued her interest.

“I’m looking for the complete story. I want to hear what happened from you directly, in your words.”

Cheryl shook her head. “Nope. Don’t believe you for a second. Jamie will never talk about that day. Not with anyone. It would hurt Paula and he would cut off his arm before he did that again.”

“I’ve spent time with Jamie. I know him.”
I’m most likely in love with him, which really sucks if I’m wrong about the past.
“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know the story told by a single incriminating picture could have been misleading. I’m looking for the truth.”

Cheryl didn’t speak for a moment and Gabby wondered how close she was to considering Gabby’s proposal. Hope spiked, but then Cheryl shook her head, her decision obviously reached.

“Believe whatever you want. I’m not talking. If Jamie got on the phone and told me himself he okayed this farce of a biography, I still wouldn’t talk. I’ve spent the past eight years trying to make the people of this tiny community forget I was the nation’s
other woman.
I’m not going back there. Ever. You want to tell his story, then end it before that day ever happened. It would make everyone’s lives a little easier.”

The figurative walls in front of the woman were so thick, Gabby knew she wasn’t going to penetrate them. So much for being convincing. She held up her hands in surrender and took a step backward. “You win. I’ll leave. Can I ask one last question?”

“You can, but I won’t answer it.”

“Did you love him?” Gabby couldn’t say why she asked the question especially considering how hostile Cheryl was to her. But something in Gabby wanted to believe if it did happen, if Jamie had cheated on his wife and this woman engaged in adultery with him, then it was about more than sex.

She expected the woman to turn and walk away. Instead a small smile played about her lips as though she was remembering a joke someone told a long time ago.

“Did I love him?” she repeated. “No, I can honestly tell you I did not. For whatever that’s worth. Now leave me alone or I swear my next trip is to the police station. Surely there are laws about being harassed in the street.”

Gabby took another step back. “I understand. Thank you for speaking with me.”

“You’re not welcome.” Cheryl rushed her steps and a block away turned a corner so she was out of sight. Gabby thought about what she didn’t learn and probably should consider her efforts a waste of time.

Only she didn’t. If anything, she felt more strongly than ever the three people in this play were hiding something. Jamie wasn’t talking. Cheryl certainly wasn’t talking.

That left only one cast member.

It was time for Gabby to meet the ex-wife.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“M
RS
. H
UNTER
, I
can’t thank you enough for taking the time to talk with me.”

Paula Hunter had short dark hair she wore in a sleek bob around her face. Her smile was soft and elegant. Her clothes were Audrey Hepburn chic from her slimming dark capri pants to her crisp white collared shirt.

She was the picture of class and understated beauty. A modern day Jackie O. Gabby felt like an ungainly elephant in her presence. In her defense, she had to imagine most woman would feel the same.

She had been much easier to locate than Cheryl since her name and number were actually listed in the local phone directory. She was still Mrs. Paula Hunter after all these years. She lived in the same home she’d purchased for herself after the divorce. With a generous divorce settlement plus an inheritance from her mother, she lived comfortably in the upscale Connecticut neighborhood.

“I was surprised to receive your call. It’s been so long since anyone has asked me for ‘the story.’ There are days I can almost forget it ever happened.”

Gabby watched the woman’s delicate fingers form air quotes around the words and thought she even made that gesture look classy.

“Mrs. Hunter…may I call you Paula?”

“Of course.”

“I think you’ll find I’m not here to dig up dirt or create more scandal. I’m only trying to put all the pieces of the past together. Because, in looking back at what happened, I think the puzzle was incomplete. I believe in my heart there was more to the story than the people ever knew.”

“Why do you believe that?”

It was a fair question. Gabby wasn’t sure how Jamie’s ex-wife would respond to the answer. But she had taken Gabby’s call. She’d invited her into her home. It seemed only fair Gabby was as truthful to Paula as she wanted Paula to be with her.

“I know Jamie. Pretty well, I think. I’ve spent a lot of time with him. I’ve seen the man he is.”

The older woman nodded sagely. “Of course. Now you know him, you can’t imagine a man like him would do something as…crass…as cheat on his wife.”

“It doesn’t make sense. I’ve watched every piece of media coverage from that time and knowing him as I do, it looks to me like…like…”

Gabby struggled to confess what she’d seen because she knew it could put the woman she was talking to in an awkward position. The way he took all of the attention on himself, it was amazing to watch. The more he put himself out there, the more he confessed, the more questions he answered regarding his honor and his integrity, the more both Cheryl and Paula faded into the background. Eventually it was as though the two women had never been part of the story. Yes, he’d been the person in the spotlight to begin with, but the way he controlled the media after the story broke appeared to be planned or, at the very least, orchestrated.

“Like what? Say it.”

Gabby took a deep breath. “It was like he deliberately fell on some invisible sword. One he shoved deeper into his chest with every remark he made. The more he shoved, the more people ate it up.”

Paula didn’t speak immediately. She sipped the tea she had poured. She looked across the yard. It was a beautiful spring day in Connecticut and they sat together on a covered porch filled with comfortable lounge chairs for reading and couches for napping. All done in muted colors to accent the beautiful garden around the perimeter of the porch.

Gabby could practically see Paula out there among the flowers, planting and pruning. The image came complete with a wide-brimmed hat to protect her face from the sun and sturdy gloves to protect her perfectly manicured fingers from the dirt.

A woman of means and leisure. A woman who loved her quiet existence. Was she what she appeared to be? It was hard to say.

This was who Jamie had married. This was the woman he took to bed and made love to…except when he made love to someone else. No, something didn’t fit. Like an instrument out of tune. She couldn’t imagine him running his hands through this woman’s hair and tugging hard while he thrust deep inside her.

Gabby reached for her own cup of tea to hide her blush. How wrong was it to be thinking about incredible sex with Jamie while his ex-wife sat across from her?

Wrong, Gabby. Very, very wrong.

Oblivious to Gabby’s inner turmoil, Paula leaned back in her chair and sighed.

“An incomplete puzzle. That’s what you said. Yes, that’s an apt description. Ever since your call, I’ve considered whether or not I would speak to you about what happened. I thought about calling Jamie, but I know what he would say and frankly, I didn’t want to listen to him say it. It’s been eight years and many lies. When you called I thought…yes. Now is the time.”

Gabby found herself on the edge of her seat waiting for the words she knew would exonerate Jamie. The words that would make it okay for her to love him, or, more accurately, make it okay for him to believe she could love him.

“I was twenty-one when Jamie and I married. He was a very mature twenty-two. Recently graduated from the Air Force Academy he was being transferred overseas to Germany and it made sense for us to marry and that I should go with him. My father was an Air Force Officer and was teaching at the academy in Colorado. That’s how we met.”

No, Gabby thought. She didn’t want to hear this part. She didn’t want to know about their married life, and how happy they were, or why they didn’t have children or any of it. She only wanted the story of what happened in the motel. Why was Paula there? Why was Cheryl? What did it all mean?

“My parents were very old-fashioned. No living together in sin. No trying out the waters before marriage, so to speak. I was a virgin on my wedding night as any good girl should be, according to my parents. So it was a…surprise…for me when Jamie made love to me the first time. He was not a virgin.”

I’m going to have you naked and underneath me.

The earthy words came back with stunning clarity. Jamie was intensely sexual. He’d proven it to her by the way he’d taken her, as if she was the first, last and only woman on earth. Like he couldn’t get inside her fast enough or deep enough.

Imagining the twenty-two-year-old version of him on his wedding night was both sexy, because she could only imagine his virility, but also weird because she could see Paula in a prim white nightgown with her eyes closed waiting to be deflowered.

The two pictures didn’t jive.

“I was a failure as a wife. I thought I was a failure as a woman. I simply didn’t care for…it. I went to specialists. I saw therapists. I took medication…”

“Paula, you don’t have to—”

“No. This is, as you say, part of the puzzle. It’s important to understand who we were so you can understand how we got to the motel.”

But Gabby didn’t want to go where Paula was taking her. She didn’t want to discover that, at the end of the day, the woman was frigid so she had let Jamie have an affair. Maybe it made him less culpable if he wasn’t doing it behind her back, but it didn’t exonerate him. If his wife had issues in the bedroom, he needed to help her, not abandon her.

“I was a wreck and Jamie was as supportive as a man can be. Of course we spoke about divorce, but I knew my parents would not react well. I begged him not to consider it. I used his career as leverage. He was climbing the ranks and getting more and more opportunities. I convinced him a divorce would not look good to his superiors. The one thing Jamie and I did together very well was look good.”

“I think I understand,” Gabby said. “Your marriage was a sham.”

“It was. I held it together in a tightly closed fist. I did that for a very long time. Then everything changed the day I met Cheryl.”

Gabby waited for more, but Paula had paused deliberately as if she were waiting for something to click with Gabby.
The day I met Cheryl…
Not the day the picture was taken.

A rush of clarity hit Gabby. She thought about the almost amused expression on Cheryl’s face when Gabby asked her if she loved Jamie.

“Oh, my goodness.” The air seemed to leave her lungs and she felt a little light-headed. “All this time and you never told anyone.”

“No. Jamie wouldn’t hear of it. He knew it would permanently separate me from my parents and, despite their strong beliefs, we were close so it would have devastated me to not see them. But they would not have tolerated their daughter being a lesbian. So we all stayed silent.” She paused for a moment, once again staring out over her garden. Then she sighed. “They have both since passed—my father just this past year. It seems silly now to have lied to them all that time. They thought I was distraught over what Jamie did to me, which is why I never married again. It was a convenient lie to let them believe.”

Fury like nothing Gabby had ever known filled her body actually lifting her to her feet. “How could you? You let him take the fall. You let him become America’s whipping boy. You were the cheater that day. You were there with Cheryl and he caught you two together.”

“He was, to say the least, upset. However, after some time and a lot of talking, we both realized my sexual preferences explained a great deal about why our marriage didn’t work.”

“I’ll say! A man like Jamie... A man like him and he was married to
you.
You should have told him. You shouldn’t have tried to hide it from him all those years. It wasn’t fair, to either of you.”

Paula held her hands up. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know until I met Cheryl and had these feelings for the first time. I didn’t understand what sexual attraction even was until I was with her. You have to believe me, I never would have committed myself to a man had I had any inkling. But growing up, sex was not something one talked about openly in my home. I didn’t date, I didn’t flirt or tease. My whole world was about meeting a nice boy from the Academy and marrying him. That was my goal. Sex didn’t enter into it.”

“You know what the press did to him. They vilified him. They made the American people believe that he was less than what he was. He was a hero and you took that from him. You took it from everyone.”

A sad smiled played across Paula’s lips. “Yes, he was a hero. Is a hero. And so it shouldn’t be any surprise to you he decided to rescue me no matter the cost to him.”

“You should have stopped him.”

“I thought you said you knew Jamie.”

Gabby’s fury evaporated rapidly, leaving her feeling wobbly. She fell back down into the chair as she considered what Paula’s story meant to her own past and her future.

“I was so disheartened. You ruined my greatest crush.”

“As I did for many women. But all you knew about Jamie was the public image he presented. You didn’t know him. We made the decision together to tell the story most assumed was true and, in a way, it freed us both. I was able to divorce him with my parents’ support. He was able to go live his life with whomever he chose.”

“Only he didn’t,” Gabby snapped. “Instead he took himself off to an isolated island. He’s been there ever since and he’s never once let another woman get as close because he never thought any of them would believe in him again.”

Paula smiled. “But you did.”

“Yes! I did. I believed in him and he sent me away.” Gabby considered his actions. “Why did he do that? Why did he do that if he knew the truth? Maybe he didn’t believe me. Maybe his ability to trust is so shattered— All this time…you took his life away.”

“I think Jamie would disagree. We weren’t the greatest lovers, but we were good friends. We accomplished a lot together. I was the one who pushed him to apply for the astronaut program. I was there each time he blasted off into space, never knowing if it was the last time I would see him. I was the reason he was a hero the day he saved those men and women on the space station. I gave Jamie his life. I gave you, your crush. Then I gave him his freedom.”

Gabby wanted to argue, but really, what was left to say? The truth was out and there was only one thing she cared about doing.

“Thank you,” Gabby said as she stood again, this time to leave. “For telling me. I needed to know.”

“And what are you going to do with this information? Are you going to tell the world in a book?”

“Is that what you want?”

The woman tilted her head and waited a beat before answering. “I wouldn’t mind it, no. I feel like I freed Jamie the day I divorced him. I told myself even while the press was attacking him I was doing a noble thing. But I haven’t been free these past eight years. Instead, I’ve clung to a lie. With my parents gone, there’s no reason to stay hidden in this life anymore. It’s time for me to move on, too.”

Gabby swallowed. She wouldn’t feel any pity for this woman. “Good luck. I’ll let you know what happens.”

“Thank you. And when you see Jamie again tell him…I’m sorry. For so many things.”

Oh, Gabby would tell him. Right after she socked him in the nose for lying to her all this time.

* * *

J
AMIE
ENDED
THE
CALL
and put his cell back in his pocket. It was done. Paula had finally given someone the truth and, of all people, it had to be Gabby. The implications of what that meant were staggering.

Most importantly, she would be coming back to the island and to him. That he knew. But what was he going to tell her?

“What’s wrong?”

Jamie looked up at Zhanna, whose arms were filled with plates of food. None of it for him. “Go deliver your orders and then we’ll talk.”

“Uh-oh. You have serious-talk face. I don’t want to do serious today. I have hot date with Tom in a little bit. He’s coming here to get me.”

Jamie cringed. In a way he was glad she was dating. In a totally different way he didn’t want to hear about it.

“Oh, no,” Zhanna said. “I can see in your face this is not good. Give me one minute.”

He watched her serve the plates with speed and grace. She moved quickly and efficiently throughout the tiny diner and made sure everyone got a smile along the way. She was a natural and he couldn’t help but feel a burst of pride in his chest. She was an amazing woman and he was glad to call her a friend.