The Widow's Secret (6 page)

She might as well have slammed a baseball bat against the side of Micah's head. “Mrs. Tremayne—Jocelyn. Whatever he said, whatever he wants, it's all right. Everything will be all right.”

“Don't try to coddle me as though I were an invalid.”

Despite his own shock, her reply made Micah want to smile. He resisted the urge; if his lips so much as twitched, she'd either shatter, or hand him his head on a silver plate.

If he were smart, he'd remove himself from this case—and from Jocelyn—before the sun set.

But he wasn't going to. He couldn't. Jocelyn Tremayne Bingham was in trouble, and for some reason God had seen fit to bring her back into Micah's life.

Or to bring Micah into hers.

Thanks, Lord. I think.
“There's a difference between coddling and caring, you know.” When she continued to stare
through him, he raised an eyebrow, then tried again. “Would you like me to read the letter?”

“No. You were born in New York, you attended university there. I just want to know what you remember about the Binghams. If you ever met the rest of their family, specifically Augustus Brock.”

She wouldn't want to know what he knew about the Brocks, or the Binghams, but the time was fast approaching when her lack of knowledge could cost her her life. “My family did not move in those circles,” he told her, choosing his words carefully. “I believe you know that my father was Rupert Bingham's head bookkeeper?” She nodded. “Yet it wasn't your father-in-law, but Augustus Brock who wrote you the letter inviting you to come to New York?”

“Yes.”

“Did he say why?”

After a protracted moment she nodded. “He said he regrets the way the family treated me. He wants to be…reconciled.”

Every muscle in Micah's body clenched in anticipation; his mind flatly rejected the prospect. “So you're wondering why, after they ignored you all these years?” Moving slowly so he wouldn't startle her, he sat forward on the edge of the seat. “Your own family died in a typhoid epidemic, you told me. But surely you have someone other than Katya to whom you could turn?”

That garnered a quick look and a jerky headshake. Choosing his words, Micah continued speaking in a calm voice that belied his own perturbation. “Your husband's family renounced you, so you renounced them by taking back your maiden name. You've lived here in Richmond for three years now, but I gather nobody here, including Katya, knows of your connection to the Bingham family, and you don't want anyone to know.”

“I'm the widow Tremayne,” she insisted, her hands twisting restlessly. “I don't confide personal details to others. Katya is loyal, but this is not a burden she deserves, unless I decide to—” the breath seemed to stall in her throat “—unless I decide to accept his offer. I didn't want to tell you, except you've been…kind. You even championed me, as it were, in front of Chief Hazen, which I know put you at risk. You already know who I am. What I…used to be, yet you went out of your way to protect me.” Her eyelids fluttered, and her tongue darted out to moisten her lips. In another woman the motion would have been provocative; Jocelyn Tremayne only looked fragile, and achingly alone.

Did he know her at all? Micah wondered. Would he ever?

Not likely she would ever offer him the privilege, when he was honor-bound to expose her father-in-law and possibly her uncle-in-law as murdering scoundrels. Arrogant criminals wearing dinner jackets and diamond stickpins, who had funneled millions of counterfeit currency into the economy so they and their families could live in mansions.

On the other hand, Micah felt equally honor-bound to do what he could to protect this vulnerable woman.
After Chadwick died, she must have stumbled onto something incriminating, and run for her life.

“I know who you married,” he corrected her. “And I know what has been happening in your life over this past month.” He couldn't help himself. He reached out his hand, lightly brushing his fingers over her mottled knuckles, and felt the tingle of response all the way to the marrow of his bones. “I know you're an independent woman, and a frightened woman. What I don't know, Mrs. Tremayne, is whether or not you really want me to advise you on your choices, or if you've already made up your mind on how you plan to respond to your uncle's letter.”

She was staring at her hand, her lips half-parted; when she looked up, a fiery blush consumed her face. “Why did you do that?”

Well, at least she hadn't slapped him. Micah smiled at her crookedly. “Because I couldn't help myself,” he admitted. When her hazel eyes darkened to jade, he added self-deprecatingly, “My mother would warn you that I'm not very polished around women. Since my wife died, I suppose I haven't invested a lot of time cultivating the proper deportment of a gentleman.”

“You were married?”

Sighing, he searched for composure while he shared pieces of his own broken past. “I met Alice a couple of years after your marriage to Chadwick. I'd just graduated from college, landed my first job. At the time, I was a civil engineer. We fell in love, married six months later.”

Jocelyn's head drooped, the rigid shoulders slumping. “Were you…happy?”

“Very much. Until the birth of our son. Alice died. The doctor couldn't stop the bleeding. An hour later, I lost our son. My little boy…” Micah had been holding him. Even after all the years, memories could scorch the scar until the grief ripped open, oozing pain. “My son…”

He passed a hand over his eyes, and when he dropped it to press against the sofa's soft green velvet, Jocelyn's slender fingers brushed his knuckles in a tentative duplication of his earlier gesture. “Mr. MacKenzie—Micah, I'm so sorry…”

“I buried them together. He was so small.…I can still see his hands. They were perfect.” His breath shuddered out and he lost himself in the compassion shining from Jocelyn's face, the tears sparkling in her mink-brown eyelashes. “I'll never know the color of his eyes…hear the sound of his laughter. When the pain hurts too much, I imagine him and
my wife, up in heaven. Taking a walk with Jesus, all of them laughing—”

“Think it if you like, but it's a lie!” She stormed to her feet, an enraged and wounded soul lashing out blindly. “I don't want to hear about God, or Jesus, or how much we're loved. If God loved you, your wife and your son wouldn't be lying in a cold grave. I'm sorry for your loss, but at least you had someone you knew loved you. At least your wife had a child—” Her hands flew to her mouth. “I'm sorry. I—I—”

Whirling, she dashed from the parlor, the sound of her choked sobs echoing harshly in the air.

Stunned, reeling from the unexpected onslaught, Micah sat motionless. He couldn't have said which hurt more—the fiery lash of his own grief, or the frigid blast of Jocelyn's rejection.

S
he wept, soundlessly, her face buried in a pillow. Wept until her throat burned, and the spike lodged in her chest shrank enough to allow her to breathe. Until she was exhausted, and the outrage flattened into contrition.

What a selfish, mean-spirited harpy she was, to revile Micah MacKenzie's faith. If believing in a compassionate God, if concocting pretty mental pictures of his dead wife and infant son strolling among puffy white clouds with Jesus gave Micah MacKenzie peace…well, Jocelyn had no right to challenge them.

But she'd long ago given up believing.

After mopping her face with her sodden hankie, she dragged herself across to her mirrored washstand, and shredded the woman reflected there.
Look at yourself, Jocelyn. That dead-eyed, mean-spirited creature is what you've turned yourself into.

Perhaps she deserved her life. Perhaps, hidden within the hopeful young girl who had nobly rescued her family from homelessness and starvation lurked an evil twin. One whose secret longings required daily doses of divine castigation.

All she'd ever wanted was to re-create the happy home she had known as a child—with a devoted husband, children, the satisfaction of successfully managing her household. After Chadwick's death, the few years she'd spent as a student at the Isabella Chilton Academy had almost resurrected hope for that dream. Of course, Miss Isabella quoted scripture—endlessly—as the source of the school's credo, which was to train women to be competent wives, as well as wage earners if marriage was not God's plan for their lives.

I don't want any part of your noble credos, Miss Isabella.
They were naught but foolish fancies, like Mr. MacKenzie's.

With an inarticulate moan, Jocelyn whirled away from the mirror. Indifferent to appearances, much less propriety, she flew down the stairs, not pausing until she reached the parlor. Breathing hard, her gaze swept the room. Empty. He'd left then. She couldn't even redeem herself with an apology.

She wanted to sink to the floor and pound her fists until they bled, she wanted to scream, she wanted to—She didn't know what she wanted, only that she could not bear her present life.

“Mrs. Tremayne? Jocelyn?”

She whirled around. For a moment, every thought vanished, swept away in a cascade of relief and happiness. “I thought you'd left,” she managed, surprised by the hoarse croaking sound of her voice.

“I almost did.”

She looked down. “I wouldn't have blamed you. What I said was ugly. Unforgivable.”

“I wouldn't have put it quite that way. Painfully honest, perhaps. For both of us. But I burdened you with my life, un-solicited, so I—”

“It wasn't a burden,” she blurted, frantic to atone. “I'm sorry for everything I said. I had no right, especially when I
could see how much it hurt you to confide in me about your past. If I could only go back—” Hastily she strangled the sentence. “I—I wanted to know more about you.”

A little pool of silence descended.

“Why?”

Because the question was voiced so gently, because the gray eyes bathed her in kindness instead of recrimination, Jocelyn melted. She couldn't remember the last time she had been forgiven with such grace, as though her childish wish had been granted and the scene in the parlor had never occurred. If she never saw this man again after today, she would cherish the undeserved gift he had given her. In the desert of her life, she would cling to the one golden moment when someone cared enough to overlook her character flaws.

Pride and disillusionment floated away. All that mattered was her need to prolong the moment. “My marriage didn't turn out the way I expected. For a little while, I used to think about you. After a few years, I stopped.” She could no longer meet his gaze. “And I made myself forget. It's been ten years, yet you're still being kind, even though I don't deserve it. I no longer trust in God. I'm not sure I even believe He exists.” She stopped abruptly.

“It's all right,” he assured her, his eyes smiling. “I'm listening. I won't stomp out the door in high dudgeon, spouting scripture as I stomp.”

Jocelyn choked back a fresh bout of tears. “I've never known a man like you,” she managed, swallowing repeatedly to clear her throat. “I'm afraid….”

The smile died. “Afraid? Of me?”

“Of what you make me feel. Of what this—I think there's something wrong with me, something about my character I've never been able to subdue, inside.” Cheeks flaming, she forced the rest of it out. “From the very beginning, that day
when we were sitting together on the parlor sofa, and you held me? I—Nobody has held me like that in over te—I mean, in over f-five years. And it felt so good, so safe, I wanted more. I know what those feelings imply about my character, but you deserved to know.”

He was frowning now.
Why was he frowning?
She had spoken with too much candor, she had placed him in a socially awkward position, presumed upon his kindness and thus deserved nothing but his censure.

“What those feelings say about your character is that you're a human being, and a woman. A beautiful but lonely woman who for some reason shut herself off from life when her husband died.”

“I'm not beautiful on the inside. If you knew…” She choked back more words, her pulse leaping when instead of repudiation, Micah MacKenzie took her hand.

Holding her gaze, he stroked the backs of her knuckles with the pad of his thumb. Shocked speechless, Jocelyn clung to the strength of his warm fingers, her heart beating a suffocating tattoo against her rib cage.

“I know about your fear, and your loneliness,” he murmured as he cupped her trembling hand in both of his. “And your lost faith. No—don't pull away. It's all right, I'm not going to hurt you.”

“If I don't pull away now, I might not be able to at all.”

There. Her stark declaration finally jarred him, though despite the start of surprise he still refused to release her. Jocelyn quit tugging and closed her eyes, savoring the connection even as she steeled herself against the desolation that would follow.

“That's a dangerous admission,” he mused eventually. “Not one I would have expected, despite your widowhood.” Still watching her, he lifted her hand and pressed the palm
over his heart. Through her fingertips she could feel the beat, a hard rhythm in tune with her own runaway pulse. “Because, Jocelyn, I feel the same way about you. Someday we'll talk about it. But now is not the time.”

Somberly, he released her and gestured to the two wing-back chairs arranged to face the parlor's fireplace. “Right now, we need to talk about the letter from Augustus Brock, and what you're going to do.”

 

Her earlier temper had stung his skin, but Jocelyn's candor stripped Micah's heart bare. Alice had been reticent, both in her words and her personality; outside the criminal culture, most of the women Micah had encountered since her death abided by the social credo that precluded extreme emotion of any kind. And sensuality…well, the concept simply hadn't been part of their vocabulary.

Then Jocelyn Tremayne exploded back into his life. Did she have any idea what it did to a man, to deliver that loaded confession while staring up at him with wounded eyes the color of a sun-dappled pine forest?

A log from the fire he'd stirred to life earlier shot sparks, then settled into the flames. When a man started thinking in flowery metaphors, he was in as much trouble as that log, on its way to a fiery destruction. Weeks earlier, Micah had known he was in trouble. Without hesitation, he jumped feet-first into the fire. “Would you allow me to read the letter from your uncle-in-law?” he asked.

“Why do you want to? Unless…” Her eyes narrowed. “Is this interest personal or professional?”

“I don't know.” He answered her question, picking his way through how much to tell her. “I'm not trying to avoid an answer, Jocelyn.” As he hoped, his familiarity stiffened her drooping shoulders, though she didn't protest. “As Chief
Hazen explained the day you met him, for the past eight years the Secret Service has been conducting an investigation of a counterfeiting network based in New York City.”

“I remember. And you were the chief in charge, until he transferred you to Washington.”

“Well, I was in charge for only three of those years. What he didn't share with you is the reason for my transfer to headquarters. We believe this network has expanded their operation as far south as Charleston, and west to St. Louis. Remember Benny? He's the one who indicated a new source here, in Richmond. But he got away from me before I learned where he obtained the goods.”

“Wouldn't he have obtained them from this new…source, you called it?”

He could share at least that much without fear of compromising the case, or himself. “Both the bill and the coin were manufactured elsewhere. Benny could have snitched them from their origins, in New York, or he could have gotten them from a new shover—the person who passes counterfeit goods—here in Richmond.”

She thought about that for a bit. Then, “Surely you don't think Mr. Hepplewhite was part of this network!”

“It's highly unlikely, but a thorough investigation is required nonetheless, because Benny Foggarty is still at large, and Mr. Hepplewhite was murdered.” She flinched a little, but her gaze upon him was steady. “Remember I told you how murder is not the normal modus operandi of counterfeiters?”

“I remember.”

“Mmm. Most of the members of this class of criminals hold down ordinary jobs, along with their illegitimate pursuits. Manufacturing bogus goods takes time—and money. So they're also bricklayers, carpenters, factory workers. But some member of this motley group crossed a line when he
committed cold-blooded murder. Thus far, Mr. Hepplewhite makes the third victim that we know of.”

He leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees. The firelight danced across Jocelyn's face in an evocative play of light and shadow; Micah tried not to compare the flames to her hair, which she had stuffed into an untidy knot on top of her head. Several strands had slipped free to spill unnoticed down her back. Short snippets dangled about the neat shells of her ears….

Clearing his throat, he clasped his hands and rested his chin on them. “For the past ten days I've been pursuing another lead. Took me all the way to St. Louis. I returned to Richmond as soon as I could, not merely because I needed to follow up on Benny Foggarty and Mr. Hepplewhite, but because…” He hesitated, then added quietly, “I needed to see you.”

“I'm under investigation. I received bogus goods, and my former in-laws live in New York City.” Her voice was dull. “It's never been Mr. Hepplewhite. It's me. You think I'm part of this counterfeiting network because my husband was from New York City.”

Lord, she's going to turn every one of my hairs gray
…. “No. I do not think you're a counterfeiter. I believe you're innocent, Jocelyn. Don't shake your head. Look at me, and trust me.” He waited until he knew he'd gained her complete attention. “Right now, my faith in your innocence has placed me in an awkward position, but I am not going to abandon you. That's a promise, and I don't make those lightly.”

“There's no need to make promises you might have to break. I understand. You don't need to explain.”

“There's every need. I want to explain—because you
don't
understand.”

Head tipped sideways, Jocelyn contemplated him for a long moment. “What don't I understand?”

What she didn't understand would fill the
Farmer's Almanac
. Micah sucked in a deep breath, then prayed an urgent prayer for guidance. “As I explained, counterfeiting is peopled with men whose daily lives are the antithesis of polite society. Networks are formed, and broken, much like schools of fish in the ocean. Loosely bound, easily separated, occasionally caught in a net. However, we believe the murders that have been committed have been ordered by one, perhaps two, individuals who are
not
part of what we call a criminal subculture.”

Reluctant to proceed, he picked up a miniature bronze statue of a cat posed on the table where the missing glass paperweights used to be, stroking the ears with absentminded fingers.

“Well,” Jocelyn prodded impatiently, “do you know who they are?”

Carefully he set the statue of the cat aside. “If I share anything else, I'm not sure if either of us will care for the consequences.”

A scant smile curved her mouth. “I'm not much afraid of consequences these days.”

After this, you will be.
“The parties under suspicion are influential, upstanding members of society. New York society, to be specific.”

Jocelyn's eyes widened. “Oh! I see now.
That's
why you want to read the letter! I could go to New York, using my uncle's invitation as the excuse. You're asking me to, ah, replace Benny Foggarty as your inside source?”

“Not only melodramatic, but possessed of a fertile imagination.”

The brief smile returned, then vanished as the shadows in her eyes deepened. “I suppose. I thought I'd outgrown the bad habit. Likely it's because I'm a freckled redhead.”

“You don't think very highly of yourself, do you?”

“Life is a harsher schoolmaster than you, Mr. MacKenzie.”

“Call me Micah, if you don't mind. We've known each other more or less for a decade.” When she opened her mouth, he interjected swiftly, “Why don't you fetch me the letter. I need a moment to sort a few things through my mind, then we'll see if we can hitch both of our imaginations to the same buggy.”

She returned moments later with the letter, and the announcement that Katya would be along with a tray. During her brief absence she had rearranged her hair, scrubbed all traces of tears from her face and now more closely resembled the poised woman he remembered. He wondered how long that poise would remain intact.