“Excuse me, Officer Stroup.” She leaned forward and spoke to the thickset shoulders in front of her. “Where is it exactly that we’re headed?”
He permitted himself a stare of incredulity before returning his stolid gaze to the fog-shrouded highway. “Come off it, Mrs. Winters. You know as well as I do where we’re going. To Winter’s Edge, your husband’s farm in Belltown, Pennsylvania. In Bucks County, where you’ve lived for the past seven years.”
She leaned back with a languor that came easily to her, a languor she didn’t like. She sat back up stiffly. “Do I know you?” she asked suddenly. She hadn’t registered any sense of familiarity when she’d been introduced to the sullen hulk of her husband’s errand boy, one of the local policemen, apparently.
“Your husband and I have been friends for years,” he said, but there was an undercurrent in his voice she couldn’t quite define. “We could have been friends too, if you know what I mean. If you weren’t so picky.”
She could guess what he meant, and she shuddered. “Why didn’t he come and get me?” She finally voiced the question that had been eating away inside her. There was no reason it should bother her—she didn’t remember the man, so why should he have the ability to hurt her? But he did. Perhaps it was no wonder that she hated him.
“I don’t imagine he wants to have any more to do with you than he can help,” Stroup shot back, his thick red neck mottled with irritation. “I owed him a favor or two, so I offered to take this little chore off his hands. Besides, I thought you might be feeling a little less uppity after getting involved in a murder.”
Her eyes met his in the rearview mirror, and there was no mistaking the meaning in them. Another shudder washed over her.
“I’m feeling as uppity as ever,” she said sharply, leaning back against the seat. Her head was throbbing again, and she longed for a room hidden away from everyone. Which was just what she’d get if they proved she bad anything to do with the mysterious George Andrews’s murder. “And you’re hardly acting like my husband’s friend,” she added belatedly.
He laughed, a fat, wheezy chuckle. “You should realize by now that your husband doesn’t give a damn what you do and who you do it with. You made sure of that a long time ago.”
She turned away, trying to shut out the sight of him in the front seat, trying to shut out the sound of his voice. Anything to still the pain in her head. Obviously Stroup believed her capable of adultery as well as murder. She wondered what she could have possibly done to alienate everyone so completely. Particularly her handsome husband.
She tried to picture him. Older, the nurse bad said. Very handsome. She summoned up the image of someone gentle, smiling down at her, with faded eyes and a fatherly manner. Gray hair, slightly stooped. But the comforting image shifted, almost immediately, and the man in front of her had midnight black hair, winter blue eyes, and a cool, mocking smile that held no warmth whatsoever.
Suddenly her hands were cold and sweating, her heart was pounding, beneath the silk suit, and the hairpins were digging into her scalp. Her eyes shot open, and she stared determinedly at the brown, blurred landscape. She wasn’t going to let them destroy her. She hadn’t before, and she wouldn’t this time.
The stray memory flitted through her brain like a wisp of fog, gone before she could snatch it back. Who had tried to destroy her? And why? The past remained stubbornly, painfully blank, with only the tantalizing memory to further claw at her nerves.
The sun was setting as they pulled into a small, old-worldly town somewhere over the Pennsylvania border. The gloom of the day had worked itself up to the tangible expression of pouring rain, and she watched the dead countryside fly by the windows with unabated gloom. Heaven only knew what sort of man she was about to meet. Her husband, they told her, but how did she know whether she could believe them or not? Maybe this was all some conspiracy—maybe they were trying to make her doubt who and what she was.
If only she could believe that. She felt bone tired, her head pounding. More than anything she wanted to sink into a soft, warm bed and sleep for hours and days until this nightmare had passed. But would she be sleeping alone, or with a hostile stranger who didn’t even care enough to pick her up at the hospital?
She felt the sudden sting of tears in her eyes, and she opened her expensive leather handbag, searching for a tissue. The lining of the purse still smelled of the cigarettes she’d tossed, and there was no doubt she’d once been a smoker. The smell of it made her ill.
Tucked inside were two handkerchiefs, linen and expensive. The first was very plain and masculine, and the initials, embroidered so carefully on the scrap of material, were R.A.W.. There were pale orange streaks across the white linen, too pale to be the blood she had first suspected.
Panic filled her, swift and unreasoning, and she shoved the scraps of cloth back into the purse, no longer eager to open the Pandora’s box in her lap. M.A.W. the other handkerchief had read. If Winters was her last name, then her first must be Mary or Magdalene or something of that sort. Though why the image of Mary Magdalene, the great whore, would have come to mind when she was looking for an identity was something she didn’t want to think about. She only knew she wasn’t going to let strangers convince her she was something that she wasn’t.
The weather didn’t choose to improve. She shivered slightly as the car pulled away through the deep troughs of water, out across the rain-swept highway, then leaned back, eyes shut, heart pounding. She didn’t want to watch where he was taking her. She simply wanted to arrive, and face up to it when she had to.
It was far too easy to drift into a strangely altered state. She had no idea whether it was the result of her head injury, or whatever drugs they’d given her, or just stress and exhaustion. But as she closed her eyes she could see him, through a mist of anger and desire. His eyes, winter blue, staring at her with frustration and contempt. His mouth, wide, sexual, set in a thin line of anger.
She wanted to lift her hand, to touch him. To brush a strand of inky black hair away from his face, to soothe away the fierceness as he looked at her. If she could just explain...
But it was too late for that, she knew it. Too late for second chances, too late for the truth. She let herself sink back, into the darkness, into the forgetfulness that was a mixed blessing.
The sudden bumpiness of the road jarred her into reluctant alertness, and she sat up straight, guessing by the unevenness that they must be crossing a wooden bridge. She looked out the streaming windows at the long low building as they drove by. An old stone farmhouse loomed beside it, wet and forbidding in the glare of the headlights through the pelting rain. Stroup brought the sedan to an abrupt halt, the jolt flinging her body against the back of the seat.
“Shoulda worn your seat belt, Mrs. Winters,” he said with a malicious chuckle. “Or did you forget that it was the law nowadays?”
Her nerves had reached fever pitch. “So arrest me,” she snapped back.
“Don’t I wish I could,” he replied, and she had no doubt be meant it. “Maybe I’ll get my chance later on. In the meantime, we’re here. Home sweet home, Mrs. Winters.” He leaned over the back seat. “It looks pretty deserted. You want I should see you inside?” The leer was back in his thick face.
She controlled the shiver of disgust. “I don’t think so, thank you. Do I have any luggage?”
“You know that as well as I do,” he answered shortly, leaning back against the seat. He smelled like state cigarettes and yesterday’s beer. “You were found in the clothes you’re wearing and no sign of where you’d come from. I’m sure your husband will have plenty of other stuff waiting for you. Both of you can afford it.”
She stared back at his pugnacious face, struggling to think of something suitably devastating, something that would make him flinch as he’d made her flinch. Her tired mind remained a blank. She could be cruel and cutting, she knew it with a perverse pride. At least she wasn’t totally defenseless. But right now she was too exhausted and tense to find the words.
“Thank you,” she murmured inanely, reaching out and opening the door into the torrent of rain.
