Chaz went white.
Walter came running up and tried to take her by the elbow. “Samantha, for the love of God!”
She shoved her husband’s hand away and looked at him, her stare fierce, her tears stopping as quickly as they’d come. “This man murdered our Kelly, I know he did. And he has to be brought to justice. He has to!”
As Samantha verged on the edge of hysterics, Mark realized just how unsteady, even volatile her emotions were.
While everyone nearby remained too shocked to move, her husband managed to slip an arm around her shoulders, whisper into her ear, and begin to walk her to the exit.
Suddenly Braden Senior was at his son’s side.
“Unfortunate dear,” he said loud enough for all to hear. “Overwrought, understandably.” Once Walter McShane had led his wife out of earshot, Charles turned to the rest of the group, and added, “It’s tragic, but the woman’s sadly unstable. Of course she’s distraught, but has always been far too emotionally charged and changeable. Bad for Kelly, bad for the marriage. Sorry for the disruption, but I’m sure I can count on your understanding.”
The sheer unflappability of the man took Mark’s breath away, until he noticed Braden’s right fist was clenched so tightly that the knuckles were white.
Chaz eyed the remnants of his drink and placed it untouched back on the bar. The color still hadn’t returned to his face. But when he saw Mark looking at him, he responded with an angry glare.
The embarrassed silence slowly dissolved as people resumed their conversations in small groups.
Mark turned to resume his own conversation with Earl and Janet, but saw them headed for the door.
On impulse he followed at a discreet distance, not at all sure what he would do.
“So tell me about Kelly,” Janet said, settling back in her chair.
Earl paused with his fork halfway to his mouth.
He and Janet sat across from each other at a table by one of the big windows in the main dining room of the Plaza Hotel. It offered a view of Central Park across Fifty-ninth Street, but he’d barely noticed. He also found the food tasteless – most of his dinner remained on his plate – and Janet was uncharacteristically quiet. Despite sensing his act about Kelly grow rapidly transparent, like a con artist hooked on his own lie, he continued the sham. “What everybody said about her gave a pretty good picture.” His breezy tone sounded false to his own ear.
Janet’s glacial blue eyes held steady on him. Finally, she reached across the table, touched his hand, and interlaced her fingers with his. “It’s time you told me what’s up here.”
He felt sheepish. “It’s ridiculous. I don’t know why I didn’t tell you right out – didn’t want to worry you was the main reason. I’d hoped the story would go away. The NYPD obviously weren’t interested, and after a few days of holding my breath, nobody from Hampton Junction came knocking on my door either. But now, by keeping quiet, I’ve made such a big thing out of something that happened so long ago-”
She raised the fingers of her free hand to his lips and silenced him. “Earl, what’s the deal? Were you two lovers?”
He sat there, feeling caught, his quiet serving as an admission of… of what? Not guilt. He felt more regret and sadness than shame. “How did you know?”
She shook her head, obviously incredulous that he had to ask. “I could understand it being a shock – all these years you believed she’d escaped, and now you find out she had been murdered. But your needing me to be with you at the funeral, your being in a daze for the last week, then your letting slip about Kelly’s cloud game-”
“I’m sorry-”
A waiter arrived to clear away their plates, and Earl welcomed the hiatus in his apology, then had no idea what to add when he left.
“She was married,” Janet said after a few seconds, almost to herself.
“I know, but as I told you before, there were problems, big ones.”
She shook her head and gave him a smile as if he were an errant medical student. “And you got involved with a woman old enough to know better. What’d she say? ‘Mister, my husband doesn’t understand me’?”
“It wasn’t like that. In fact she hardly ever talked about her husband’s problems.”
“Then how was it? My God, Earl, I mean I knew I wasn’t the first in your life, and you weren’t my first, but I sure never messed with married men. Considered them tainted meat.”
Earl winced at Janet’s characteristic candor. Yet she didn’t seem to be upset so much as pensive. “What can I say, Janet? Over the first few years of med school Kelly and I spent a lot of time talking together. She told me the trouble she was in, and I was young and stupid. I guess I got caught up in rescue fantasies.”
“You guess?”
Nothing, not even a lifetime of medical experience, had ever enabled Earl to unravel the mysterious power Janet possessed to make him explain himself. He knew only that once she got him started, he found it hard to stop.
“Okay, so I was an idiot. But I don’t regret trying to help her. As Chaz became increasingly abusive and controlling. I honestly thought she and I were good for each other, that we’d get her out of her mess, then see about us. Besides, you weren’t anywhere in sight to ‘save me from myself,’ as you so often put it, for about another fifteen years.”
“Hey!” she said softly. “Of course you tried to help her. You’re a compassionate, caring man. It’s one of the many things I love in you.”
“I mean, it’s not like I’ve been nursing a flame for her all these years.”
“I know.”
“Hell, I haven’t even thought about her in two decades.”
She sat back again. “And that confuses you – how it still can hurt, as if you lost her all over again?”
Like a surgeon probing for physical signs, she’d put her finger exactly on his pain. “Yeah,” he admitted. “Since I read about her body being found, I’m all tangled up in feelings from when I was twenty-four. Even though I’m not that young guy anymore, I can’t cut myself loose. Weird, eh?”
“Not so weird.”
“No? It is for me.”
She grabbed his hand again and gave it a squeeze. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“It wouldn’t help any. What to do now is the important question.”
“How do you mean?”
“The newspaper article I showed you? I’m the mystery man in the cab.”
As did most surgeons, Janet had nerves of steel, and even the nastiest surprises couldn’t catch her off guard. Yet her pupils pulsed wide. “That was you?”
“Yeah, and maybe the cops haven’t taken up the chase just yet, but that Dr. Mark Roper will be trying to pin a face on him.”
“Oh, my God.”
“So do I go to him or the NYPD and make a clean breast of things before they get to me? As nice as Roper was, he made me nervous.”
Though they’d been talking barely above a murmur, she leaned forward close enough to whisper. “And confess you were having an affair with her? That’s nuts!”
“It’ll be worse if I say nothing and Roper or his sheriff find me out on their own. At the very least they could charge me with obstruction of justice, now that it’s officially a murder case.”
“And how the hell will you explain not coming forward for twenty-seven years?”
“I had a lot of reasons, some pretty complicated, but I could make them understand.”
“Try me first. I’m a lot more sympathetic.”
“Okay. For starters, from the very beginning she made me promise never to reveal our affair.”
“Jesus, Earl, give me a break!”
“Hear me out. At first I thought she wanted to avoid a scandal. Adultery is no small thing, and back then it was a very big deal. But, no, that wasn’t it. She told me later that she really didn’t give a damn what people thought, that she worried about Chaz and how he’d react if he ever found out. The possibility of losing her obsessed him, which fueled the abuse, to the point she figured not only did she have to make a clean break – disappear, change her name, and start over – but he must never know about our affair because it might enrage him even more.”