for Sallie. He didn’t have to look back to know the annoying woman was watching him out the front window of the grill.
Help her preserve the legacy of James Hayes? Now, that was a laugh. He didn’t want to preserve that legacy. He’d spent the past six years trying to destroy it.
CHAPTER THREE
Chattanooga, Tennessee
“THAT NOSY WOMAN’S going to ruin everything.”
George Conner stopped his frantic pacing to look for the cigarettes he’d carried for fifty of his seventy-three years, desperate for something to calm his nerves. The phone call from his stepson had rattled him. Kathryn Morgan. In Alabama. Asking questions. Heaven help them!
He patted his shirt pocket. Belatedly he realized he didn’t have any cigarettes. Marianne had forced him to give them up last year, along with everything else that made life worthwhile. Cigarettes. Booze. Red meat. She even regulated their lovemaking, if you could call what they did lovemaking.
He’d probably live longer, but what for? When a man gave up his pleasures, he might as well be dead. And if that Morgan woman uncovered his lies and he was headed for prison, he preferred to go with a cigarette in his mouth, his pants down and a shot of Jack Daniel’s in his glass.
He flipped open the wooden box on the bar, taking out one of the hand-rolled cigars he kept for friends whose wives weren’t as dictatorial as his own. He held the cigar under his nose and savored the smell. Marianne watched him without comment until he put it in his mouth, then said in that maddening voice she used when she wanted to scold but didn’t want to sound like she was scolding, “I know you’re not seriously considering lighting that.”
He hesitated, knowing he shouldn’t smoke cigars yet barely able to resist now that he’d gotten a taste for them. But then Marianne raised one eyebrow and that small gesture decided the issue. Mumbling a curse under his breath, George tossed the cigar on the bar, not as fearful of having another heart attack as being on the receiving end of Marianne’s wrath for the rest of the day.
He walked to the table where she sat, where she always sat, by the wall of windows that offered a spectacular view of the city far below. This room was her sanctuary in a dark monstrosity of stone, parapets and turrets that jutted obscenely above the trees at the top of Lookout Mountain and had earned the ire of the good citizens of Chattanooga. The Castle, most people called the house, although there’d been other less-flattering names over the years. The Dungeon. Hayes’s Folly.
Marianne hated it as much as everyone else. She had hated it every day of the nearly twenty years they had lived here, but no one other than George would ever know that. James had built the house for her as an expression of love. So she’d never move. That was an issue they had argued and settled a long time ago.
“Darling, sit down and I’ll have Agnes bring you some freshly squeezed juice,” she told him, taking a sip from her own glass. But he was too nervous to sit. He stood gazing out the window with his hands deep in the pockets of his polyester slacks, absentmindedly rattling his keys—and apparently Marianne’s patience—until she’d finally had enough.
“George, please,” she said shortly, drawing his attention. “He said he could handle her and he will. Now come sit down and relax.”
Relax? Not likely. She, on the other hand, looked as if she didn’t have a care. The undisputed favorite in her menagerie of animals had jumped into her lap, and she sat rubbing the old cat with unhurried strokes, pausing to scratch under its neck and feed it a treat from the bowl on the table. They were a matched pair, with their silver-white hair and startling blue eyes. They even had the same expression of cool disinterest.
“That woman is probably worming her way into your son’s house right now, and you’re entertaining the cat,” he told her.
Marianne put the animal on the floor and casually brushed the hairs from her lap. “What do you propose I do?”
“Go down there.”
“That’s unnecessary, I think. She’s probably already gone.”
“And if she’s not? If, in her snooping, she somehow uncovers what I did…”
“She won’t.”
“But he might tell her. Have you considered that?”
Anger flashed in her eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous. He’d never do anything to hurt his family.”
“Not consciously but—”
“Not ever! He’d never betray us, so stop this nonsense and get hold of yourself.”
George blew out a breath in exasperation. Arguing with her wouldn’t do any good. Marianne had always been blind when it came to the children. Bret’s jealousy of his brother was nothing more than sibling rivalry in her eyes. And James had been unhappy for months before Marianne could admit he’d become disenchanted with the success he had worked so hard to achieve.
Even Ellen, the child they shared, was perfect. Marianne refused to see that their daughter’s repeated relationships with men who abused her were a form of self-imposed punishment.
“Fine, M. You sit here with your head in the sand and wait for everything to fall apart,” he said, walking to the door and jerking it open, “but don’t ask me to.”
“Where are you going?”
“The country club.”
“But Agnes will have lunch ready in a few minutes.”
“I plan to drink my lunch.”
“George Conner, don’t you dare,” she called after him, but George had already decided he damn well did dare and kept walking, not bothering to respond.
WHEN THE ELECTRIC GATE at the end of the yard clanged shut and she could no longer hear her husband’s car winding down the narrow mountain road, Marianne allowed herself to give in to the fear she’d hidden from him.
She’d fought numerous threats from unscrupulous writers over the years, writers whose half-truths and lies about James has caused more pain than any family should have to endure. But this biographer, Kathryn Morgan, had a reputation for honesty and integrity, for uncovering the truth. And that made her more dangerous than all the others combined.
If this woman looked deeply into their finances, saw how they’d used the money from James’s estate and the several million in royalties his music continued to produce each year, she could become suspicious. But was she smart enough to figure out what they’d done? And why?
Unsure, Marianne went to her desk in the study, unlocked the bottom drawer and removed the thick file she’d commissioned more than a year ago on Kathryn Morgan. The folder’s front cover had a photograph attached, but she only glanced at it. What interested Marianne were the newspaper clippings, the stories the woman had written as an investigative reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times.
Reading everything took nearly an hour. Finishing the last article, she closed the file with a trembling hand and sat back in her chair to consider what she must do. She’d gotten them into this mess. The responsibility fell on her shoulders to get them out of it. But how?
She had hoped strongly worded letters from her attorney and the refusal of requests for interviews would discourage the biographer from writing this book, or at least from digging deep enough into their past to reveal their complicity.
But no, this woman was not so easily dissuaded. She had been a gifted child, and gifted children became gifted adults. By forgetting that, Marianne had committed a grievous error and put everyone in jeopardy.
A memory from long ago came to her: the old house on Tennessee Avenue and the secondhand piano with its yellowing keys that had occupied a corner of the den. In the memory, Jamie was only three or four and sat on the stool at the piano, his legs still too short to reach the pedals.
He