Confessions Bundle

“You don’t really have much choice in the matter. You owe me eight years and I’m not aware of any way you’ll ever be able to pay that back.”

She could feel the tears filling her eyes again and could do nothing to stop them. She didn’t blame him for his anger and wouldn’t blame him if he never spoke a civil word to her again.

“If you’re ever ready to listen, I’m here and will tell you anything you want to know.”

He tapped his leg for Freedom. Put the dog on his leash.

“Would you like me to drive you to your car?”

His eyes were hard as he glanced over at her. “I’ll walk,” he said. “I need the air.”

And being in the same car with her would be far too confining, she read between the lines.

He opened the back door and was halfway through it before she spoke.

“Blake?”

He turned.

“Do you want to find a new attorney?”

He frowned, gave a derisive sigh. “There’s hardly time, is there?”

Probably not. The paper trail was too extensive for anyone to have time to come in cold and get up to speed.

“I’ll do my best.”

He nodded. Walked out. And closed the door behind him with obvious finality.

OVER THE NEXT TWO WEEKS, Juliet saw Blake but spoke to him only briefly, to make arrangements for his visits with his daughter and to update him regarding his case. She tried a couple of times to speak with him about the past—and a future. Each time, he reminded her that he was her client and any kind of personal interaction between them would be unethical.

They both knew his words were more a slap in the face than a demonstration of concern over legal ethics. While they certainly couldn’t embark on a relationship while she was representing him, they’d already had some highly personal conversations.

Mary Jane was still claiming she didn’t want a father, but after her first dinner with Blake—a dinner she almost backed out of—she agreed to see him every time he asked. She didn’t say much to Juliet about what they did or where they went, or even what they talked about. For the first time, her daughter wasn’t sharing everything with her.

Juliet tried to talk with Mary Jane about her growing feelings for her father, whatever those feelings were, wanting her to know that she supported them, but Mary Jane wouldn’t discuss Blake with her. Nor did she seem to want to talk about Blake’s upcoming trial.

Until the day the trial began.

“You’re not wearing red,” Mary Jane said that morning, her voice almost accusing as Juliet came into the kitchen.

“It’s not my turn yet, you know that,” she said, pouring herself a second cup of coffee. She’d taken the first one into her bathroom with her while she got ready for a day she was dreading.

Marcie had come into the bathroom and talked with her while she put on her makeup and did her hair, but, not feeling well, she’d gone back to bed for another half hour rather than follow Juliet out to the kitchen.

“But this case is special. You should wear your power suit every day.”

If she’d had more than one red suit, she would have changed. “I can’t wear the same suit every day of the trial,” she told the little girl. “Besides, it loses effectiveness if you wear it all the time.”

Mary Jane dug into her bowl of cereal, spilling some of it over the side of the bowl onto the table. “You’ll wear it the first day it’s your turn, though, right?”

“Right.”

“And you’re going to win.”

“I’ll do my best.” She couldn’t give the girl the promise she wanted.

Eight years of love and trust had seen them through this crisis with Blake. Neither of them had ever mentioned Mary Jane’s mistaken assumption that Juliet had lied to her. But she couldn’t risk having Mary Jane accuse her of lying a second time.

JURY SELECTION TOOK ten days. The prosecution only took four to present enough evidence to put Blake away for life. Much of it was circumstantial. The bank account was not.

Juliet had a few tricks up her sleeve, but even with those, things didn’t look good for Blake.

“We’re up first thing in the morning,” she told him as they left the courtroom the second Wednesday in August. Dressed in a navy suit and sedate navy and cream tie, Blake walked beside her out of the building and toward her car.

It was the first time he hadn’t taken his leave of her at the first opportunity.

“For what it’s worth,” he said, hands in his pockets, “I have complete faith that you’ll do the best job that can be done. I won’t blame you if things don’t go well.”

He blamed her for robbing him of his daughter, but she got full marks for her legal ability.

Juliet wondered if that said something about her priorities. She hoped to God it didn’t, and was scared to death it did.

SHE ASKED HIM to go for drinks, to talk over the questions she’d be asking him on the stand the next morning. He figured he already knew the drill. They’d been discussing the case for months. But for some reason, he agreed anyway.

Probably because Mary Jane was out with Marcie that evening and Blake didn’t want to go home to a house empty of her sweet voice. He’d had her for dinner almost every night since the day he’d met her. She wouldn’t let him get too close, wouldn’t discuss her feelings and interrupted him or pretended not to hear any time he tried to tell her how he felt. But she was friendly and generous with her thoughts on any number of topics. And she had hundreds of questions. Blake attempted to answer every one of them. He tried to be patient, although the days were passing far too quickly—days that might be his only chance to establish a relationship with the daughter he’d lost.

Juliet had been completely generous with the little girl’s time; he had to hand her that.

Or not. So she’d given him a couple dozen nights. She’d taken eight years.

He’d have preferred to meet Juliet downtown, some bar with a lot of people and enough noise to make conversation just difficult enough to keep the meeting short. They ended up at their usual bar out in Mission Beach, but only because Blake wanted to stop in and see Mary Jane before she went to bed.

As soon as Lucy had served them, commenting on their absence in the past weeks, Juliet got right to the point, outlining the questions she’d be asking—about his time abroad, his relationship with his father, certain business dealings that revealed him as a man to whom integrity came first. She didn’t acknowledge the possibility of losing, only of giving a win their best shot.

He’d been right to think he had it all down. There were no surprises here. He nodded. Sipped his whiskey. And nodded some more. Until her voice trailed off.

And then there they were, with half a drink apiece, and nothing left to say.

Had Lucy been close, he would’ve motioned for the check. She was across the room, her back to them as she waited on a group of guys in another booth.

“I was wrong.”

He considered pretending that he hadn’t heard Juliet speak. He looked at her through half-lowered lids, instead, saying nothing. But listening.

Not because he believed she had anything to say that he wanted to hear. Or because there was anything she could ever say that would make him okay with what she’d done.

Perhaps what he felt was morbid curiosity. Or maybe just the simple fact that anything was preferable to being alone the evening before he took the stand in his own defense.

She toyed with the stem of her wineglass, her eyes focused somewhere between it and the table.

“I didn’t figure it all out until just recently,” she said. He couldn’t tell if she was talking to him or just taking out loud to herself. Somehow that made him pay more attention. “I had this conversation with Marcie…”

She looked over at him. “She lied to me.”

“Must run in the family.” Blake regretted the words as soon as they were said. Not because she didn’t deserve them, but because they were beneath him. He’d never deliberately hurt another individual in his life.

“I told you my mother committed suicide,” she said, her eyes narrowed and tired-looking as she peered at him through the dim lighting. “What I didn’t mention was that I was the one who found her.”

Shit. She’d been what? Twenty-three? Four?

“I came home to help her get ready for a surprise birthday dinner in the city. I’d brought a new outfit for her to wear—a silk dress just like she’d worn when she was married to my father. I even had pumps to match…”

Blake swirled the whiskey in his glass. She didn’t have to tell him this. He didn’t need to hear.

“She was lying faceup in the tub. She’d only been in there a couple of hours, but already her skin was gray, her body bloated and wrinkled.”

He wanted to down the rest of his glass and order another. He couldn’t make himself lift it to his lips. Couldn’t be that present in the moment.

“I called 911, and then got obsessed with the idea that she’d be mortified if perfect strangers came in and saw her naked. She’d want to be seen in that new dress…”

He was still watching her. Couldn’t pull his gaze away from hers, even when her eyes filled with tears.

“So I hauled her out, dried her as quickly as I could, struggled with underwear. And panty hose…”

Juliet’s voice trailed off and Blake breathed a sigh of relief that she was done. Even though he knew she wasn’t. He waited.

“I had her completely dressed, shoes and all, by the time they got there.”

She shook her head and smiled, as though trying to pretend that she hadn’t just been talking about dressing her dead mother’s naked body.

“You should never have had to go through that.” He hadn’t meant to comment. “Especially not alone.”

With a half shrug, Juliet picked up her glass, swallowed the remainder of the contents.

“Yeah, well, the thing is, I thought I’d dealt with all of that. I went to counseling. I understood the phases of grief. I went through them and got on with my life.”

He wanted to hold her in his arms. Just for a second.

“I learned from the experience, used it to catapult me to success. My mother got pregnant just before she was due to start college. She gave it all up to get married and have Marce and me. I wasn’t going to do the same. I was going to make her sacrifice worthwhile by not repeating the same mistake.”

No. He wasn’t going to let her make sense. Wasn’t going to understand. Her choice had cost him too much.

“But you know what?” She looked as innocently lost as their daughter had that day he’d found her huddled behind a boulder on the beach.

“What?”

“I wasn’t over it at all. Instead of learning from my mother’s life, from her choices, I let her death rule me.”

Eyes narrowed, Blake sipped his drink, and motioned to Lucy for two more. “How so?”

“When I first found out about Mary Jane, when I first knew that I was pregnant, what I wanted more than anything was to tell you.”

He might have thought she was lying, but she didn’t seem to care whether he believed her or not. She was telling him what she knew without any apparent interest in his response. She was confessing, not convincing.

“I wanted to believe in the fairy tales and magic my mother had always talked about. The stuff she’d read from those storybooks from the time we were toddlers.”

She stopped as Lucy brought their drinks, and then, without touching hers, continued.

“I let my fear of being too much like her, my fear of making the same wrong decision, my fear of believing in love at first sight distract me from the truth.”

It made perfect sense. But so much had happened between then and now. So much had changed.

“There wouldn’t have been a way for you to contact me,” he heard himself saying. The pain of losing so many years of Mary Jane’s life had been easier to bear when he could blame it all on her. “When I first left, even my father didn’t know how to reach me.”

There was always later, though.

“Would you have come back if you’d known?”

And that was the million-dollar question. Blake would like to believe, unequivocally, that he would have.

He just wasn’t sure.

“And what about five years ago? You were married to an unhappy wife, disoriented yourself, thankful that you didn’t have children.”

Mary Jane would have been three. Still a toddler. Too young to remember that he hadn’t been around from the beginning.

“I would’ve taken responsibility.” He meant what he said.

But how could he have managed that? As she’d already said, he’d had an unhappy wife. He’d been filled with guilt and grief. Disoriented.

She nodded. Stood.

“See you tomorrow,” she said, and walked out, leaving him there with her untouched drink.

CHAPTER TWENTY

THE DEFENSE SPENT a week bringing in witnesses who testified to the character of the defendant. Employees, clients, even friends from Egypt. Juliet built a solid picture for the jury, a picture of a man incapable of defrauding anyone. A man who’d spent his time in the Cayman Islands living like the young married and financially modest man he was, not a man in possession of more than a million dollars. A man who was on the Islands only occasionally in between volunteering for weeks at a time in third world countries. Eaton James had sent money to help feed homeless children. Blake Ramsden taught them to feed themselves.

And still, the jury looked doubtful.

“It’s that damn bank account,” she told Duane late on the third Thursday in August. The trial had been going on for almost four weeks. If she didn’t win them over soon, Blake Ramsden was going to prison.

“What I know,” Duane said, lounging back in the chair across from her desk, “is that I’ve never seen you so emotionally involved in a case.”

She didn’t like his tone. “And your point is?”

“Nothing, Juliet.” He sat forward. “You’re like a daughter to me, you know that.”

She did, and acknowledged his statement with a nod. “But?”

“I just wonder if maybe your emotional involvement with this man is clouding your judgment.”

“You think he’s guilty.”

“I have no idea.” The older man ran a hand over his balding head. “What I do know is that you have a talent for finding the truth and for some reason, that talent isn’t helping you out on this one.”

Her friend and partner had never asked her why Blake, her client, had been at her house that day. He’d never asked why the little girl had run away. But she knew he was hurt that she wasn’t telling him.

If she had any idea what to say, she would.

But she didn’t.

ON THE SEVENTH DAY of testimony, when the defense was due to rest, Mary Jane insisted on attending court.

“He’s my dad, Mom,” she’d said over breakfast that morning. “He needs me there.”

Juliet might have replied if she hadn’t been choked up with tears that she couldn’t let fall. It was the first time the child had acknowledged that she had a dad. Until then, Blake had been a father in the biological sense. And, maybe more recently, a friend. Blake seemed to be capturing his daughter’s heart as surely as he’d captured Juliet’s. When Juliet said nothing, Marcie jumped in, offering to bring the little girl to the afternoon session.

Had there been any chance the jury would deliberate and deliver their verdict that day, Juliet would never have allowed Mary Jane to be there. As it was, she couldn’t justify keeping her away.

Blake had already lost eight years of sharing life with Mary Jane. And she was right. He did need her there.

All morning in court he was restless, and growing more tense as the minutes ticked past. Like her, he could probably see the writing on the wall.

And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it except sit there and wait to be hanged.

She offered to take him to lunch, or to have sandwiches brought in to her office. He opted to drive out to the beach instead. She hated to picture him there, all alone, but couldn’t very well stop him from going.

She went to her office alone, instead. And spent the hour and a half poring over numbers and reports and statements that she’d already committed to memory frontward and backward.

BLAKE TOOK HIS SEAT for the afternoon session of court with more peace in his heart than he would have expected. He’d rather die than spend time in prison, but somehow, over the past weeks, he’d come to understand that there was one thing that mattered more than time, or prison, or even life or death. It had finally hit him an hour before, at the beach.

It was the obligation to be true to oneself.

He’d been true to himself when he’d stayed away three years longer than he’d planned—and when he’d come home, despite the difficulty his wife had had adjusting to life in one place.

The obligation to be true to oneself was why Juliet had had to have her baby on her own terms, by herself.

After weeks, months, years of searching, it had taken one walk on the beach with his back completely against the wall to show him what he’d known all along.

Real honesty meant following the dictates of one’s own heart.

He was already seated in court by the time Juliet arrived. She’d been planning to wait outside to walk Marcie and Mary Jane in. He didn’t turn around to see if she had.

But he did try to catch her eye as she slid into her seat beside him. She didn’t give him a chance. Something had happened.

Tight-lipped, she shifted in her seat as they waited for the call to rise. She shot up the second Judge Lockhard asked if she had any further witnesses. He knew that she had not. She’d already presented every piece of evidence she’d disclosed.

“May I approach the bench, Your Honor?”

Eyebrows raised, Lockhard glanced toward Paul Schuster, motioning both attorneys to come forward. There followed a rather lengthy consultation, during which Blake found it hard to keep his hold on the peace he’d brought in with him. One way or the other, he was ready for this to be over.

He could feel Mary Jane back there somewhere behind him. He suffered warring emotions knowing she was there. Her presence gave him a strength he didn’t know it was possible to have—a need to survive, just so she’d be okay. But it hurt him, knowing that his little girl was watching him like this, accused and on trial.

Finally, following something the judge said, both attorneys turned. Schuster, with eyes serious and mouth unsmiling, sat. Juliet nodded to someone behind him.

“The defense calls Private Detective Richard Green to the stand.”

Blake frowned, turned, watched a man he’d never seen before step forward.

To his defense?

The man took the stand. Agreed to tell the truth.

Coming back to the table, Juliet pulled a sheet of what looked to be mug-shot photos out of her satchel.

“Detective Green, can you explain what I’m holding here?”

“Yes, ma’am, that’s a printed copy of parts of a videotape taken at the National Bank in the Cayman Islands.”

The bank where Blake’s supposed account was housed.

“And can you tell me what’s significant about these particular photos?”

“That is the portion of film taken the day and time when Blake Ramsden opened his account.”

Juliet turned to the judge. “I’d like this admitted as evidence, Your Honor.”

Judge Lockhard glanced toward Schuster. “No objection, Your Honor.”

The judge nodded.

That was when Juliet turned, looked straight at Blake and smiled.

“Mr. Green, do you recognize the man in those photos?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Would you tell the jury if that man is in this courtroom today?”

Blake held his breath.

“That would be impossible, ma’am. The man in these photos is dead.”

Blake’s head swam.

Eaton James had opened the account himself, forging Blake’s name. Just as he’d forged Walter Ramsden’s name on the post-office box, and forged various other documents and investment agreements, as well as the names of principal signers of companies that did not exist.

Blake had figured all along that Eaton had opened that account. He’d had no idea of some of the other things the man had done.

And didn’t particularly care at the moment.

He listened, trying to focus on facts being revealed by Green, who’d just flown in from the Cayman Islands. It seemed James had taken the secrecy of the Cayman Islands a little too seriously. First, he’d thought he could hide his ill-gotten gains there in an account that could not be verified by anything other than a bank statement, which he’d manipulated to point the finger at someone else. And second, he’d thought he could shoot off his mouth there, too. Once Green had found James’s watering hole, just the night before, the truth had come pouring out, validated and verified by witnesses over and over again. It had taken him hours—and probably money—to get his hands on the tape.

James hadn’t lost money on Eaton Estates, he’d banked it. He’d purchased the land for less than a tenth of what he’d shown in the investment agreement, for less than a tenth of what he’d charged his investors. True, the original investment had gone sour, but Eaton had that extra money no one knew about. And when Walter Ramsden had started to ask questions, James had offered to prove his integrity by paying the man back every cent he’d invested, to keep Ramsden from nosing around.

That explained those checks James had written to Blake’s father. Payoff, not blackmail. James must’ve had a great laugh at Ramsden for turning around and sending every dime of that money to Honduras to feed those hungry children—who were the first and only children to have benefited from the Eaton Estates deal.

Blake tried to pay attention to the rest, to focus on the answers that had nearly driven him insane with their elusiveness. But they just didn’t seem to matter anymore.

He wished Juliet would finish up with her witness and come sit beside him.

She did, and the moment her gaze met his, when that old connection flared between them, was as sweet as any he’d known.

Until, two minutes later, when he heard the words, “Case dismissed.”

He felt like jumping up, whooping and hollering like a kid, but he couldn’t seem to move. Afraid he might do something really stupid, like cry, he sat there, his arms heavy against the arms of his chair, and blinked a couple of times.

It was all the time it took for Mary Jane to come hurtling forward and fling herself on top of him.

“We did it!” she cried, hugging him.

It was the first time he’d ever felt those tiny arms around him.

Tears slowly dripped down his face.

JULIET STOOD and watched while the courtroom quickly cleared out, reporters following Paul Schuster through the back door. She tried not to watch her daughter in Blake’s arms. Tried not to be jealous. Tried not to need to be there, too.

Marcie, who’d come forward behind Juliet, nudged her. “I guess this is as good a time as any to tell you I’m getting married.”

Juliet had suspected as much, and was scared to death of what Marcie’s future would bring her.

She pulled her twin into her arms and held on. “Be happy, Marce.”

Marcie hugged back, tightly, and then leaned back to look Juliet square in the eye. “I am, Jules. For the first time since Mom died, I feel genuinely happy.”

“Did you tell her?” Mary Jane piped up from her father’s arms. Blake had risen and held the little girl high on his suited hip, as though she were little more than a toddler. The sight took Juliet’s breath away. Her daughter had a dad. And seemed to be perfectly happy about it. Mary Jane might be tough, but Blake was tougher. Her mother could have told her that.

“Yes,” Marcie said, the smile on her face going on and on. She rubbed her stomach and though she wasn’t really showing yet, Juliet felt another twinge of envy. Marcie was going to have it all. Mary Jane was going to have it all. Blake was going to have it all.