AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“The brother? Jack, is it?”
“He’s extremely unhappy with his marriage,” she mused, frowning thoughtfully, “but Tate doesn’t figure into that. Although…”
“Although?”
“Jack’s rather pathetic, actually. You think of him as being competent, good-looking, charming, until you see him next to his younger brother. Tate’s the sun. Jack is the moon. He reflects Tate’s light but has none of his own. He works as hard as Eddy on the campaign, but if anything goes wrong, he usually gets blamed for it. I feel sorry for him.”
“Does he feel sorry for himself? Enough to commit fratricide?”
“I’m not sure. He keeps his distance. I’ve caught him watching me and sense a smoldering hostility there. On the surface, however, he seems indifferent.”
“What about his wife?”
“Dorothy Rae might be jealous enough to kill, but she would go after Carole before she would Tate.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I was browsing through family photo albums, trying to glean information. Dorothy came into the living room to get a bottle from the liquor cabinet. She was already drunk. I rarely see her, except at dinner, and then she hardly says anything. That’s why I was so surprised when, out of the blue, she began accusing me of trying to steal Jack. She said I wanted to pick up with him where I’d left off before the crash.”
“Carole was sleeping with her brother-in-law, too?” Irish asked incredulously.
“It seems that way. At least she was trying to.” The notion had distressed Avery very much. She had hoped it was only an alcohol-inspired delusion that Dorothy Rae had drummed up while sequestered in her room with her bottles of vodka. “It’s preposterous,” she said, thinking aloud. “Carole had Tate. What could she possibly have wanted with Jack?”
“There’s no accounting for taste.”
“I guess you’re right.” Avery was so lost in her own musings, she missed his wry inflection. “Anyway, I denied having any designs on Dorothy Rae’s husband. She called me a bitch, a whore, a home wrecker—things like that.”
Irish ran a hand over his burred head. “Carole must have really been something.”
“We don’t know for certain that she wanted either Jack or Eddy.”
“But she must have put out some mighty strong signals if that many people picked up on them.”
“Poor Tate.”
“What does ‘poor Tate’ think of his wife?”
Avery lapsed into deep introspection. “He thinks she aborted his baby. He knows she had other lovers. He knows she was a negligent parent and put emotional scars on his daughter. Hopefully, that can be reversed.”
“You’ve taken on that responsibility, too, haven’t you?”
His critical tone of voice brought her head erect. “What do you mean?”
Leaving her to stew for a moment, Irish disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a fresh drink. Feet spread and firmly planted, he stood before her. “Are you leveling with me about that midnight caller you had in the hospital?”
“How can you even doubt it?”
“I’ll tell you how I can doubt it. You came to me, what was it, almost two years ago, with your tail tucked between your legs, needing a job—any job. You’d just been fired from the network for committing one of the worst faux pas in journalism history.”
“I didn’t come here tonight to be reminded of that.”
“Well, maybe you should be reminded! Because I think that’s what’s behind this whole damned scheme of yours. You plunged in that time over your head, too. Before you got your facts straight, you reported that a junior congressman from Virginia had killed his wife before blowing his own brains out.”
She pressed her fists against her temples as that horrible sequence of events unfolded like a scroll in her memory.
“First reporter on the scene, Avery Daniels,” Irish announced with a flourish, showing her no mercy. “Always hot on the trail of a good story. You smelled fresh blood.”
