He stared, shook his head slowly. “Kyle’s dead.”
“How do you know? Because the reports say he got drunk and fell off a boat? And what if he didn’t, Nathan? He had the photographs, the negatives, the journal.”
“But he did drown. He was drunk, stumbling drunk, depressed, moody, according to the people who were with him on the yacht. They didn’t realize he was missing until well into the next morning. All of his clothes, his gear were still on the boat.”
When she said nothing, he spun around her and began to pace. “I have to accept what my father did, what he was. Now you want me to believe my brother’s alive, that he’s capable of all this. Of stalking you, pushing you until you collapse. Of following you here and . . .” As the rest slammed into him, he turned back. “Of killing Susan Peters.”
“My mother was strangled, wasn’t she, Nathan?”
“Yes. Christ.”
She had to stay cold, Jo warned herself, and go to the next step. “Susan Peters was raped.”
Understanding the question she was asking, Nathan closed his eyes. “Yes.”
“If it wasn’t her husband—”
“The police haven’t found any evidence to hold the husband. I checked before I came back. Jo Ellen.” It scraped his heart to tell her. “They’re going to be looking more closely into Ginny’s disappearance now.”
“Ginny?” With understanding came horror. The cold that had shielded her melted away in it. “Oh, no. Ginny.”
He couldn’t touch her, could offer her nothing. He left her alone, stepped out onto the porch. He put his hands on the rail and leaned out, desperate for air. When the screen door squeaked, he made himself straighten.
“What was your father’s purpose, Nathan? What were the photographs to accomplish if he would never be able to show them to anyone?”
“Perfection. Control. Not simply to observe, and preserve, but to be a part of the image. To create it. The perfect woman, the perfect crime, the perfect image. He thought she was beautiful, intelligent, gracious. She was worthy.”
He watched fireflies light up the dark in quick, flirtatious winks. “I should have told you, all of you, as soon as I came here. I told myself I wanted—needed—time to try to understand it. I justified keeping it to myself because you had all accepted a lie, and the truth was worse. Then I kept it to myself because I wanted you. It got easier to rationalize it. You’d been hurt, you were wounded. It could wait until you trusted me. It could wait until you were in love with me.”
His fingers flexed and released on the railing as she stood silent behind him. “Rationalizations are usually self-serving. Mine were. After Susan Peters, I couldn’t ignore the truth anymore, or your right to know it. There’s nothing I can do to change it, to atone for what he did. Nothing I can say can heal the damage he did to you and your family.”
“No, there’s nothing you can do, nothing you can say. He took my mother, and left us all to think she had abandoned us. That single selfish act damaged all of our lives, left a rift in our family we’ve never been able to heal. He must have hurt her.” Jo’s voice quavered so she bit down hard on her lip until she could steady it. “She must have been so frightened, so confused. She’d done nothing to deserve it, nothing but be who she was.”
She drew a long breath, tasted the sea, and released it. “I wanted to blame you for it, Nathan, because you’re here. Because you had your mother all your life. Because you touched me and made me feel what I’d never felt before. I needed to blame you for it. So I did.”
“I expected you to.”
“You never had to tell me. You could have buried it, forgotten it. I never would have known.”
“I’d have known, and every day I’d have had with you would have been a betrayal.” He turned to her. “I wish I could have lived with that, spared you this and saved myself. But I couldn’t.”
“And what now?” Lifting her face to the sky, she searched her heart. “Am I to make you pay what can’t be paid, punish you for something that was done to both of us when we were children?”
“Why shouldn’t you?” Bitterness clogged his throat as he looked out into the trees, where the river flowed in secret silence. “How could you look at me and not see him, and what he did? And hate me for it.”
It was exactly what she had done, Jo thought. She had looked at him, seen his father, and hated. He had taken it, the verbal and physical blows, without a word in his own defense.
Courageous, Kirby had called him. And she’d been right.
How badly he’d been damaged, she realized. She wondered why it had taken her even this long to realize that however much harm had been done to her, an equal share had been done to him. “You don’t give me much credit for intelligence or compassion. Obviously you have a very low opinion of me.”
He hadn’t known he had the strength left to be surprised. He stared at her in disbelief. “I don’t understand you.”
“No, you certainly don’t if you think that after I’d had time to accept it, to grieve, I would blame you, or hold you accountable.”
“He was my father.”
“And if he was alive, I’d kill him myself for what he did to her, to all of us. To you. I’ll hate him for the rest of my life. There will never be forgiveness in me for him. Can you make room to live with that, Nathan, or are you just going to walk away? I’ll tell you what I’m going to do.” She rushed on before he could speak, her words fast and hot. “I’m not going to let myself be cheated. I’m not going to let the chance of real happiness be stolen from me. But if you walk away, I’ll learn to hate you. I can do it if I have to. And no one will ever hate you more than I will.”
