The Night In Question. Harper Allen

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СКАЧАТЬ she opened her eyes to the unfamiliar room around her.

      The next moment she was sitting up abruptly, her heart crashing against her ribs as full consciousness returned.

      She wasn’t in prison anymore. She was free. She was free!

      Swiftly flipping back the thin blanket that had been covering her, she swung her legs over the side of the bed, her bare feet impervious to the chill of the linoleum floor. Joy so pure it felt like a physical element tore through her. No matter that she was in the cheapest room of the cheapest flophouse she’d been able to find last night—she was free, she thought, trembling with excitement. There had been times that she’d thought this moment would never come.

      Free meant she could start looking for Willa. She could hardly believe it was true, she thought faintly. No wonder she was shaking like a leaf. She let her breath out in a ragged exhalation.

      “You got out,” she whispered. Across the room her reflection wavered at her from a smeared dresser mirror, and she met her own gaze.

      “There were times in there you weren’t sure you were going to make it, but you did,” she told the woman staring back at her. “They said you were too pampered, that you’d never survive. They were wrong. They didn’t know how much you had to live for.”

      Slowly she got to her feet. Drawing closer to the mirror, she stared at her reflection in it, her palms flat on the dresser’s surface, her arms braced.

      She’d slept in the cotton bra and the utilitarian briefs that were all the underwear she owned. Against the pallor of her skin the bra straps looked dingy from too many washings, and she felt a brief flicker of humiliation.

      She’d gone into that place wearing a teal-blue designer suit, handmade Italian heels, satin and lace lingerie. She’d come out almost two years later in a shapeless polyester smock, her own clothes somehow having been mislaid, she’d been told. In the smock she’d felt as conspicuous as if she’d had her inmate number stencilled across her back, and the first thing she’d done when she’d gotten out yesterday was to spend a few of her precious dollars in a secondhand clothing store.

      She’d left the hated smock balled up on the floor of a change room, and for an hour or so she’d just walked aimlessly down one street after another, not noticing the April chill but finding herself trembling instead with nervous exhilaration. Around her streetlamps and neon signs and car headlights had begun to come on, piercing the blue Boston dusk, and gradually she’d started to feel at ease among the stream of humanity flowing around her on the sidewalks.

      Then a tall figure had detached himself from the passers-by and had stepped in front of her, blocking her path.

      As easily as that, Max Ross had ripped away any delusions she might have had of putting her past behind her. At the sight of him she’d felt immediately exposed, as if everyone around them knew what she was and where she’d spent the last twenty-three months.

      He’d meant her to feel that way.

      But he’d made one vital miscalculation, she thought with a spark of cold anger. He’d thought he’d been dealing with Julia Tennant—the Julia Tennant he’d seen two years ago, the Julia Tennant he’d helped put behind bars. That woman might have accepted his warning.

      That woman didn’t exist any longer.

      She raked her hair straight back from her forehead, and narrowed her gaze at her reflection in the mirror. “You tipped your hand, Ross. That wasn’t smart,” she said softly. “You shouldn’t have let me know how much you hated me, because now I’ll be watching out for you.”

      Despite her words, a sudden tremor ran through her as she recalled their briefly antagonistic meeting the night before and saw again the hostile implacability in his expression.

      He would do anything he could to stop her. Sick fear washed through her. In the mirror, her reflection swayed slightly, and she squeezed her eyes shut.

      Sometimes the dream went on, the rest of the memories, less vivid but still unforgettable, tumbling through her mind like a collection of spilled photographs. The faces of the jury members as they’d filed back that final time into the courtroom, the electric excitement from the press section as the verdict had been delivered, the blank expressions of the court officers as they’d moved toward her after she’d been found guilty. Her own confused hesitation as to what was expected of her until she’d seen the handcuffs one of them was unfastening from his belt.

      And just as she was escorted out, the flash of pity, instantly erased, that had crossed Max Ross’s features while he’d watched from a few feet away.

      Abruptly she straightened, blocking out the images in her mind. She’d imagined that, she told herself. Pity wasn’t in Ross’s repertoire. If the man had any humanity at all, he certainly didn’t intend to waste it on the woman he thought of as a black widow spider.

      As she’d learned over the past few weeks, he wasn’t alone in that attitude.

      “Your sister-in-law only testified against you after the authorities guaranteed her safety,” Lynn Erikson had told her in prison. “Do I think you’ve got a good chance of having your conviction overturned with what we’ve found out about the search of your summer home? Absolutely.”

      Lynn had shrugged, and in the small gesture it had been possible to see a ghost of the arrogant and high-powered attorney she’d once been before a cocaine addiction had raged out of control, destroying her life and robbing her of her freedom.

      “They didn’t need a search warrant for the house that had been your husband’s, but the summer place on Cape Ann had always been in your name only. The wiring and the chemicals they found there should never have been allowed into evidence, and without them, all the state has is Barbara’s testimony of seeing you hand the package over to Kenneth just before his flight. That’s not enough to prove you knew what was in it.”

      She’d shaken her head wearily, as if to forestall Julia’s hopes. “But it doesn’t change the deal Barbara got, or the fact that permanent custody of Willa was given to her when you got sent here. Oh, maybe after a lengthy court battle you might win your daughter back, but I doubt it. Even if your sister-in-law didn’t have the Tennant fortune backing her, she’d still have the sympathy of any judge. Her own husband was on that private jet—who’s going to take a child from the arms of a victimized widow and find in favor of the woman who got away with killing both her husband and her brother-in-law?” Lynn’s husky voice had softened. “You say Barbara always adored Willa. At least you know your little girl’s being raised by someone who loves her, Julia. A lot of the women in here don’t even have that to hold on to.”

      She owed her freedom to Lynn, Julia thought, turning from the dresser mirror and staring unseeingly out of the grimy window. Maybe the sensible course of action would be to take the disbarred but still brilliant attorney’s advice and accept that Willa was lost to her forever.

      But she didn’t accept that. Because if she ever did, there would be no reason to go on living.

      The teal-blue suit she’d worn that last morning when she’d said goodbye to Willa hadn’t been found when she’d signed for her belongings upon leaving prison. Her heart had been in her mouth as she’d waited for the rest of her possessions. When the clerk had brusquely told her that her leather handbag had also gone missing, and would be forwarded on to her if and when it was found, she’d feared the worst.

      “There was a pair СКАЧАТЬ