A Woman Betrayed, page 23
“Nothing.”
“Were there other women?”
“No,” he said in an angry tone that quickly grew tentative again. “Is everyone okay?”
It was a minute before she said, begrudgingly, “As okay as they can be in the circumstances.”
“Hurt? Angry? Disillusioned?”
“All those things. The IRS came out pretty fast with its charges, and the Sun loves it.” She paused for the briefest minute before crying, “Why, Jeff? Why did you do it?”
Jeff didn’t want to go into explanations. That wasn’t why he had called. “How’s my mother doing?”
“You didn’t need the money. You were doing so well.”
“How’s my mother?”
There was another long pause, then a sigh. “She’s a trouper.”
“Has Christian been around?”
“Christian’s in Tahiti.”
“Does Scott hate me?”
“Scott is angry. He feels you let everyone down. Debra misses you, and Laura’s trying to carry on. Things are a mess for her, Jeff. She didn’t deserve this.”
But Jeff didn’t want to go into that either. “Has David taken my name off the door?”
“Not yet. When are you coming back?”
“I’m not.”
“You have to.”
“I can’t.”
“You have to. Until you do, nothing will be settled, and that would be the cruelest, cruelest thing to do to Laura and the kids.”
“I’m not coming back.”
“Then why did you call?”
He didn’t answer.
“Where are you, Jeff? At least tell me that. I won’t tell a soul, God knows I won’t.”
He trusted her. The problem was he didn’t trust himself. If he told her where he was and she came looking, he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t give in if she begged him to return. He had never been strong when it came to women, which was part of the problem. If he’d been able to stand up to Laura once in a while, he might have felt more like a man.
Well, he was a man now. He’d done his thing, and he was determined to stick with it. Let them call him a coward for leaving Northampton when the fire got hot. They were wrong. Leaving Northampton was the bravest thing he had ever done in his life.
“Jeff? Talk to me, Jeff. Are you still there? Jeff!”
Quietly, he replaced the receiver, returned to the truck, and headed back to the bluff.
16
LAURA CONTINUED TO STRIKE OUT on the loan scene. The banks in Hartford were as reluctant to give her money as those in Boston had been. David, who was still holding out for an affair, suggested she speak with her life insurance agent about borrowing against Jeff’s policy, but the government had reached him first and frozen those funds too. Privately—humbly—she talked with friends who had the resources to loan her money, but none came through. One claimed he’d had a bad year, another mentioned the big wedding his daughter was planning, still another vowed that what money he might have lent her was tied up in investments. A fourth suggested a business arrangement whereby he would buy into Cherries, but Laura wasn’t ready for that. She was sure that if her take remained stable, and if the court ruled in her favor, she could survive as an independent restaurateur, which was what she wanted. The business was all she had. Even aside from the pride involved, she couldn’t afford to siphon profits off to a silent partner.
On the second of January, Daphne petitioned the court to release to Laura that portion of Jeffrey’s assets which by rights were hers. The petition was accompanied by voluminous documents supporting the claim. Daphne had spent long hours compiling them, and Laura was impressed. She was also optimistic. For the first time since she’d learned of the freeze, something concrete and positive was in the works. Hope was in sight.
When Daphne reminded her not to expect a response to the motion for up to six months, which, she said, was typical of the backlog in the court system, Laura’s optimism wavered. “But this isn’t a typical case,” she argued.
“Not to you,” Daphne explained. “To the court it is. Everyone filing petitions feels his case is unique. I’ve argued for expedience, but I’m sure those others have too. How long it takes will depend on the judge, and I have no control over who’s given the case. What I’m saying is that you shouldn’t count on immediate relief.”
But the bills were still due. Having no other recourse, Laura finally took Daphne and Elise up on their offers, borrowing money from them to pay the most pressing of those bills. She felt bad doing it, but Lydia had no money to spare and Laura refused to ask Maddie, so she was over a barrel.
Her one best hope, she realized over the course of many long middle-of-the-night hours, was to maximize the profit she took from the business. To that extent, once the holidays were past, she pared down the restaurant’s staff to the exact number she and Jonah figured they could get by with. They had already lost one waitress, a part-time student who was transferring out of state to study full-time, and they didn’t replace her. Likewise, on the catering end, two of her staff were leaving to make a stab at their own service in upstate New York. Rather than having three separate catering crews on the payroll, Laura regrouped into two. Even with Scott and Debra pitching in at odd hours, that meant each of her employees had to work a little harder. She talked with them individually, making a personal plea. That, along with the loyalty she had already accrued, paid off.
So she dared be optimistic again. The business was more efficiently run than ever. Service was remaining at the high level she wanted. She felt she just might be able to make it.
She would have, had business been good in those early January days. But the cancellations Elise had received in December went unfilled, and fewer than normal new bookings came in. Time and again, Laura reminded everyone around her that January was the slowest month of the year. In the wee hours of the night, though, she worried.
Her worry increased when, one week into the new year, a grand jury returned indictments against Jeff. The media started in again with phone calls and visits. Duggan O’Neil carried the story as though it were the most important thing to happen in Hampshire County since Noah Webster published his dictionary in 1828. Gary Holmes wrote not one but two editorials in as many days, decrying modern morality, middle-class greed, and the challenge to law enforcement officials that the Frye case presented.
Laura was beside herself with frustration. The Sun’s attention did nothing to improve business, which seemed, to her terrified eye, to be slackening by the day. Both Elise and DeeAnn assured her that this wasn’t happening to any significant degree, but she suspected they were just trying to make her feel better. In her darkest, most private moments, she doubted anything could help. Her life had gone from perfect to perfectly horrid with terrifying speed. All its discouraging threads seemed to be spinning around on themselves, growing more tangled by the minute.
When Taylor Jones stopped in at the restaurant the day after the indictments came down, she wasn’t alarmed. Things were already so bad she was sure nothing he said or did could make them worse. And she was right, at first. He updated her on the leads the government was following in its search for Jeff and questioned her on whether she’d seen him, heard from him, or had the slightest contact with him, no matter how indirect. He told her he’d learned that the fraud went back eight years, that Jeff had apparently worked alone, and that Farro and Frye had been uninvolved in the scheme.
Then he told her what else he’d learned.
They were sitting in her office, with the door closed, when he announced that he had a witness placing Jeff on more than one occasion with a woman at the condo in Holyoke. Actually, “announced” was the wrong word, since he sounded almost apologetic, but the message hit Laura as though he had screamed it at the top of his lungs.
She instantly denied it. “That can’t be. Jeff wouldn’t have had an affair.” Of all the indignities she’d suffered in the last month, that one would be the worst. She couldn’t conceive of its being true.
But Tack was confident. “The witness consistently identified Jeff’s picture. She picked it out of a large group we gave her and then gave us his height and build, neither of which was apparent from the photo.”
Laura’s head began to buzz. Like pieces of an ugly puzzle, one element of Jeff’s treachery fit into another. Still, publicly, she had to maintain his innocence. There was loyalty involved, and self-defense.
“It couldn’t have been Jeff,” she insisted.
“The witness is certain.”
“She’s wrong. Jeff couldn’t have had an affair.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m his wife. I know.”
“The wife is usually the last to know when it comes to affairs.”
Her heart was pounding. “Jeff wouldn’t betray me that way.”
Taylor Jones’s voice dropped. “You didn’t believe he would willingly vanish, or commit tax fraud, but the evidence says he did both those things.”
“You haven’t proven either.”
“No, but the evidence is strong.”
A sharp rap came at the door, followed immediately by Daphne, who regarded Laura with concern. “DeeAnn let me know he was here.” Her gaze sharpened when it flipped to the agent. “As the Fryes’ attorney, I’d like to be notified before meetings like this.”
Though he had risen at her entrance, he appeared otherwise undaunted. “Mrs. Frye isn’t being charged with anything.”
“She has the right to representation.” To Laura, Daphne said, “Is everything all right?”
Laura fought hysteria. “Not really. He says Jeff was having an affair.”
Daphne froze for an instant; then, in the next instant, boiled. Her anger was a visible thing. Knowing that she had an impassioned defender in Daphne was vague solace for the devastation Laura was feeling.
Swinging the door shut with more force than was necessary, Daphne said slowly and with barely contained fury, “I thought you were going to hold off telling her about this.”
It was a minute before the implication registered, and then Laura was appalled. “You knew?”
“I knew,” Daphne admitted. “He told me last week.”
“But you didn’t say anything to me!” Laura cried, feeling betrayed. She knew it was irrational, given all Daphne was doing for her, and it was probable that the betrayal she felt was really related to Jeff. But Daphne was the one who was there.
Daphne defended her inaction. “It was right after the holidays, which had been hard enough on you. I didn’t see the point in making things worse.”
“But this affects me.”
“It’s an unsubstantiated claim.”
“He has a witness, Daphne.”
“But no warm body. If Jeff was having an affair, he had to have it with someone. Agent Jones doesn’t have any idea who that was.”
“Yes, I do,” Tack said. Both pairs of eyes flew his way.
“Who?” Laura asked, but the agent was looking at Daphne.
“When I first told you about this, I had no leads on the woman, and as long as that was so, I agreed with you that there was no need to further upset Mrs. Frye.”
“What’s a little more?” Laura cried, but Tack didn’t take his eyes off Daphne.
“My witness is certain that the woman in question is the hostess here at the restaurant.” At Laura’s gasp, he turned to her. “We had to identify the woman in case your husband was in contact with her. We figured she may have been someone local, so we took our witness around to the places your husband frequented. One look at DeeAnn Kirkham, and she made a positive identification.”
“DeeAnn,” Laura breathed and clutched at the pain cutting through her chest. “DeeAnn.” Tears came to her eyes. She adored DeeAnn. She depended on DeeAnn. It was bad enough to think Jeff had had an affair; it was much worse to think he’d had one with DeeAnn. “It can’t be.”
Still standing, Tack said, “We didn’t leave it there. We took the witness all over town, but she kept coming back to your hostess. She said that the hair was the thing, that sandy color, the thickness, and the length. The woman she saw with your husband had great hair. She said that over and over again: great hair.”
“Lots of woman in this town have great hair,” Laura argued. She was desperate to discredit the witness’s claim. Jeff couldn’t have had an affair. “Lots of woman in this town have sandy hair. Look at Daphne. Hers is that color, but I wouldn’t accuse her of having an affair with Jeff. DeeAnn isn’t only my hostess, she’s my friend.”
“She’s very attractive,” Tack remarked.
Daphne bristled. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Attractive women attract men,” he answered, then asked Laura, “What do you know about her personal life?”
Laura could barely think. The accusation—even the idea—that Jeff had gone looking for sex was devastating. Putting her fingers to her temples, she tried to slow the wild whirl inside. “I—uh, I know she dates.”
“Lots of men, or is there someone special?”
She wanted to say there was someone special with whom DeeAnn was head over heels in love, but there wasn’t. Dee dated a lot. Her taste ran toward men who were mature enough to appreciate the fine points of feminine allure and wealthy enough to reward those points accordingly. Laura wouldn’t have put Jeff into either of those categories.
“Laura?” Daphne prompted. “Was there anyone special?”
“Uh, no. No one special.”
“Does she pick up men here?” Tack asked.
“No!” Laura cried, because the implication of that turned her stomach. “This isn’t a singles bar.”
He reworded the question. “Does she meet men here?”
Laura wanted to answer as definitively as before, but she couldn’t. “I suppose she might. Men are in and out all the time.” And DeeAnn was an inveterate flirt, which, irony of ironies, was one of the things Laura had always loved about her. She did things Laura might have wanted to do but couldn’t. Watching her was great fun. Or had been. The idea was fast turning sour. Laura took a shallow breath. “What do I do, Daph?”
Daphne deferred to Tack. “What do you suggest?”
“Let me talk with her,” he said. “I don’t think she had anything to do with the tax fraud scheme, but if she’s heard from him and hasn’t come forward, she’ll be considered an accessory after the fact. She ought to know that.”
“What do I do, Daph?” Laura asked. She was feeling battered again, as though she’d taken another hit and was on her knees, needing help to get up but not sure what to do once she got there. “Do I assume it’s true and confront her? Do I scream and yell? Do I fire her on the spot?”
Daphne pulled up a chair and sat close. “What do you want to do?”
“I want to beg her to tell me it isn’t true. I like DeeAnn. I’ve always liked DeeAnn. If it turns out she was having an affair with Jeff, I’ll be crushed.”
“I doubt she’ll confess to it. Unless she does, you won’t know for sure.”
There was so much lately that Laura didn’t know for sure that she wanted to scream. But screaming wouldn’t accomplish a thing. Nor, she realized, would shooting questions at Daphne. In the end, the decision was hers. She had to regain control. “Let’s call her in. I need to hear what she has to say.” Clinging to the idea of control, she left Daphne with Taylor Jones while she went into the heart of the restaurant.
DeeAnn’s eye was easily caught. The smallest movement of Laura’s head brought her over. As she approached, Laura watched her face for signs of a guilty conscience. All she saw was concern.
“You’re not upset that I called Daphne, are you? That guy may be big and gorgeous, but he’s trouble with a capital T. Is everything okay?”
“I’m not sure,” Laura said. She was quivering inside, trying not to let it show. “Do me a favor? Get Kammie to cover and come talk with us for a minute.”
“Sure, hon,” DeeAnn said and set off to find the waitress.
Laura had always known DeeAnn was a knockout, but that fact took on added significance as she watched her walk off. The features were right—the casually styled hair, the bright clothing, the slender legs, slightly flared hips, full breasts. But there was something else, something sensual in her walk, in the way she cocked her head, the set of her eyes, her smile. Laura had never before had cause to compare herself to DeeAnn. Now she did. And she came up short. Next to DeeAnn, she was efficient and bland. If, somewhere beneath that placid exterior of his in a place Laura hadn’t known existed, Jeff had wanted a temptress, Laura wouldn’t have been it. DeeAnn might have.
Shrinking back into the shadows of the hall, Laura waited with her arms crossed hard over her breasts until DeeAnn appeared. Without a word, she led the way back to her office.
Inside, DeeAnn looked from one face to the next. “Uh-oh,” she said in a singsong voice that in other circumstances might have been amusing. “Something’s up.”
Laura stood back against the wall and focused expectantly on Tack, who took her cue and, in a straightforward, no-nonsense way, filled DeeAnn in on what they’d been discussing. By the time he was done, Laura was feeling more raw than ever and DeeAnn was looking stunned. Her eyes flew to Daphne and, after a minute, to Laura, but she didn’t say a word.
“Is it true?” Laura forced herself to ask.
DeeAnn gave a quick, jerky shake of her head—too quick and too jerky for Laura, who had had optimism thrown in her face once too often. This time she was being smart. She was believing the worst.
Tack seemed skeptical of DeeAnn’s denial too, because he said, “As far as the law goes, whether you were his mistress or not doesn’t matter. All I want to know is whether you’ve been in contact with him since he disappeared.”
Eyes wide, DeeAnn shook her head.
Turning sideways to the wall, Laura huddled into herself. Behind her, the conversation went on. She was aware of its hum, but none of the words registered over the clamor of her thoughts. Jeff had had an affair. He’d slept with another woman. She tried to grasp the idea, but it was too repulsive to hold. In the next breath there were other ideas to repulse her. Where were you? Why didn’t you see? How could you not have known?
