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Before she opened the door, Lara peered through the blinds to see who had rung the bell, then hastily undid the locks. “Janellen! I’m so glad to see you. Come in.” She stood aside and ushered her unexpected guest into the waiting room.
“I hope I’m not disturbing you. I always seem to drop in without calling first. I acted on impulse again.”
“Even if you’d called, you wouldn’t have been able to get through. I took my phone off the hook. Some reporters don’t take ‘no’ for an answer.”
“They’ve been calling Key, too.”
Hearing his name was like getting an arrow through her heart. Trying to ignore the pain, she removed a box of books from the seat of a chair. “Sit down, please. Would you like something to drink? I’m not sure what’s in the house—”
“I don’t care for anything, thank you.” Janellen glanced around at the disarray. “What’s all this?”
“This is a mess,” Lara said with a wry smile as she sat down on a crate. Wearily, she pushed back a loose strand of hair. Since her return, even involuntary motions seemed to require a tremendous amount of energy. “I’m packing.”
“What for?”
“I’m leaving Eden Pass.”
Janellen was possibly the only person in town who didn’t welcome the news. Her expression was a mix of dismay and despair. “Why?”
“That should be obvious.” There was a bitterness in Lara’s voice that she couldn’t mask. “Things didn’t work out here as I had hoped. Clark was wrong to deed me this place. I was wrong to accept it.”
She was touched to see tears in Janellen’s eyes. “The people in this town can be so stupid! You’re the best doctor we’ve ever had.”
“Their opinion of me had nothing to do with my qualifications as a physician. They bowed to pressure.” It was unnecessary to cite Jody Tackett as the party responsible for the shunning.
Janellen already knew, and felt guilty by association. “I’m sorry.”
“I know you are. Thank you.” The two women smiled at each other. If circumstances had been different, they could have become very good friends. “How is your mother doing? Has the medication been effective?”
Janellen told her about Jody’s marked improvement. Lara didn’t want to dampen her optimism, but felt it was her professional duty to interject some realism. “I’m glad to hear that she’s feeling better, but stay vigilant. She must continue taking the medication until her doctor instructs otherwise. I recommend frequent, periodic checkups. And before you completely reject the idea of angioplasty to dilate the carotid, I recommend another round of extensive testing.”
“I don’t think Mama would agree to it, but if I notice signs of stress or—heaven forbid—another seizure, I’ll insist.”
They chatted for a few minutes more, then Janellen rose to leave. At the door she said, “I saw your husband on The Today Show this morning. They had videotape of him being greeted by the president.”
“Yes, I saw it, too.”
“The interviewer asked why you weren’t with him. He said you were so overwrought from your experiences in Montesangre that you were unable to accompany him to Washington.”
It rankled that Randall was serving as her mouthpiece and giving out false information. She had made her position unequivocally clear to him when they were in Houston and had remained locked in her bedroom of the suite until she was certain he had left the hotel for the airport to catch his Washington flight. They hadn’t said goodbye.
His excuses for her absence in Washington were self-serving, but, other than confronting him about it, there was nothing she could do to stop him. The issue wasn’t worth having another private encounter. Their next one would be in a divorce court, and then she would have an attorney speaking for her.
“It must have been…” Janellen hesitated, then plunged ahead. “Well I can’t even imagine how you felt when you discovered that he had been alive all this time.”
“No, I’m sure you can’t imagine.”
Introspectively, Lara again saw Randall lying in the bathtub. She heard her screams echoing off the gaudy tile walls, heard the crunch of breaking wood as Key kicked his way through the door, felt his arms closing around her. She had buried her face against his chest. At first they had thought Randall was dead.
But he’d come back to life.
Key hadn’t touched her since, not even casually.
There were no words to describe the enormity of the shock caused by Randall’s resurrection, so she simply said, “I was astounded to see him alive.”
“I’m sure you were, but you don’t appear overwrought. Why didn’t you go to Washington with him?” On the heels of her blunt question, Janellen quickly withdrew it. “I’m sorry. That was unforgivably rude.”
“No need to apologize. You asked a legitimate question. The answer is simply that I chose not to go. Politics is Randall’s arena, not mine. What he does with his recent celebrity is up to him. I want to ignore mine, and I wish that everyone else would.”
