“Would you sit down, Brian?” she murmured.
“Hmm.” She’d interrupted his daydream about wandering over to Kirby’s shortly and waking her up in a very specific and interesting manner. “Sure.”
He settled into a chair and decided he’d never been more relaxed or content in his life. He even gave Lexy a quick wink when she sat on the arm beside him.
“I don’t know how to begin, how to tell you.” Jo took a bracing breath. “I wish I could take the chance and let sleeping dogs lie.” She caught Brian’s eye, saw the flicker of confusion in his. “But I can’t. Whether it’s the best thing or not, I have to believe it’s the right thing. Daddy.” She walked over, sat on the coffee table so that her eyes were on a level with Sam’s. “It’s about Mama.”
She saw his mouth harden and, though he didn’t move, felt him pull back from her. “There’s no point in stirring up old waters, Jo Ellen. Your mother’s been gone long enough for you to deal with her going.”
“She’s dead, Daddy. She’s been dead for twenty years.” As if to anchor them both, she closed a hand over his. “She didn’t leave you, or us. She didn’t walk away from Sanctuary. She was murdered.”
“How can you say such a thing?” Lexy surged to her feet. “How can you say that, Jo?”
“Alexa.” Sam kept his eyes on Jo’s. “Hush.” He had to give himself a moment to stand up to the blow she’d delivered. He wanted to dismiss it, slide over or around it. But there was no evading that steady and sorrowful look in her eyes. “You’ve got a reason for saying that. For believing it.”
“Yes.”
She told him calmly, clearly, about the photograph that had been sent to her. The shock of recognition, the undeniable certainty that it was Annabelle.
“I worked it out a hundred different ways in my head,” she continued. “That it had been taken years later, that it was just a trick of the camera, just a horrible joke. That I’d imagined it altogether. But none of those were true, Daddy. It was Mama, and it was taken right here on the island on the night we thought she left.”
“Where’s the picture?” he demanded. “Where is it?”
“It’s gone. Whoever sent it came back and took it while I was in the hospital. But it was there, I swear it. It was Mama.”
“How do you know? How can you be sure of that?”
She opened her mouth, but Nathan stepped forward. “Because I’ve seen the photograph. Because my father took it, after he killed her.”
With a storm raging in his head, Sam got slowly to his feet. “You’re going to stand there and tell me your father killed Belle. Killed a woman who’d done him no harm, and then took pictures of it. He took pictures of her when he’d done with her, and showed them to you.”
“Nathan didn’t know, Daddy.” Jo clung to Sam’s arm. “He was just a boy. He didn’t know.”
“I’m not looking at a boy now.”
“I found the photographs and a journal after my father died. Everything Jo told is true. My father killed your wife. He wrote it all down, locked the journal and the prints, the negatives in a safe-deposit box. I found them after he and my mother died.”
When the words trailed away there was no sound but the whisk of the blades from the ceiling fan, Lexy’s weeping, and the harsh breaths Sam pushed in and out of his lungs.
He could see her now, shimmering at the front of his mind, the wife he’d loved, the woman he’d cursed. All the lights and shadows of her shifted together to form rage. To form grief.
“Twenty years he kept it to himself.” Sam clenched his fists, but there was nothing to strike. “You find out and you come back here and put your hands on my daughter. And you let him.” He burned Jo with a look. “You know, and you let him.”
“I felt the same way when he told me. Just the same. But when I had time to think it through, to understand ... Nathan wasn’t responsible.”
“His blood was.”
“You’re right.” Nathan moved so that Jo no longer stood between him and Sam. “I came back here to try to find a way through it, or around it, or to just bury it. And I fell in love where I had no right to.”
Brian set Lexy aside so that she could weep into her hands instead of on his shoulder. “Why?” His voice was as raw as his soul. “Why did he do it?”
“There’s no reason that can justify it,” Nathan said wearily. “Nothing she’d done. He ... selected her. It was a project to him, a study. He didn’t act out of anger, or even out of passion. I can’t explain it to myself.”
“It’s best if you go now, Nathan.” Kate spoke quietly as she rose. “Leave us alone with this for a while.”
“I can’t, until it’s all said.”
“I don’t want you in my house.” Sam’s voice was dangerously low. “I don’t want you on my land.”
