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“As far as I was concerned, yes.” Tina’s chin inched upward and she adjusted her sunglasses, her hand trembling a bit. “He . . . he and I saw our ‘relationship,’ if that’s what you could call it, differently.”
“How so?” he asked.
“He didn’t think it was exclusive.”
“And you did?”
A tic developed near her temple. “Yes . . . and I didn’t like the way he . . .” She cleared her throat. “I suspected he was . . . involved, that’s the delicate way of saying it. I thought he might be involved with my daughter.”
“Your daughter?” Ian repeated.
“Not Lucille, of course, she was . . . a child. But he couldn’t keep his eyes or his hands off Marilyn.” She said it bitterly, as if the betrayal still stung, as if Ray’s interest in her teenaged daughter was less about Marilyn’s innocence, youth, and vulnerability than about her own damaged pride. “That was . . . over the line. My daughter?” Her lips flattened. “Off-limits. If Marilyn’s father had ever found out, he would have killed Ray.”
Marilyn Armstrong’s father, Sean, had once been a stuntman with a penchant for Jack Daniel’s whose trigger-sharp temper had gotten him thrown off more than one movie set.
“But he didn’t?”
“Not that I know of. Unless Marilyn told him, which, I suppose she could have. Sean and I never talk. Never. Only through lawyers. Like I said, ‘greed.’ Sean, he was expensive. Good-looking. Oooh. So handsome, but he knew it. Aspired to be a leading man, but it never happened. He was jealous of my success. Anyway, the upshot is that we don’t speak, so the subject of Marilyn’s dalliance with Ray never came up.”
“Dalliance?” Ian repeated.
“She flirted with him, outrageously. It was embarrassing. Worse, of course, is that Ray was attracted to any pretty young thing. Including my daughter.”
“They had an affair?”
“Close enough. I don’t know the details. Don’t want to know.”
But Ian suspected she did. He said, “Lucy is scared of Ray.”
“I know, and I understand, but it’s been years,” Tina said, shoving her sunglasses upward to nest in her red hair. “Years.”
“Still. She’s had nightmares for as long as I’ve known her. About that night.”
“I know, I know. She’s been to psychologists and counselors, psychiatrists, you name it.” Tina looked off into the middle distance, to a place only she could see, and for a second a flicker of sadness appeared in her eyes, but it quickly vanished as Tina’s chin inched upward, almost defiantly. “I’ve done what I can for her, but the only one who can fix Lucy is Lucy. She’s irrational. I mean, I understand that she was traumatized. Good Lord, we all were, and she was so young, but we’re not the people we were then. None of us.” Tina frowned, her eyebrows knitting, and he spied a few unwanted wrinkles appear on her near-flawless skin. “Why would Ray come after her now?”
“Because he’s finally out and he promised he would.”
“She’s the only one who claims that. Something about her reading his lips in the courtroom. As if a child her age could do that, especially that one with her overactive imagination!” After dropping her sunglasses back down again, she reached for her coffee cup, took a sip, and scowled. “Cold.” Then she sighed. “Anyway, Ray’s been behind bars forever. I would think he would want to experience freedom and let the past go. Start over. Find a new life.”
“Sometimes people feed on their need for revenge.”
Sculpted eyebrows rose behind the rims of her dark glasses. “I hear he’s found God. Why on earth would a person who is at peace and supposedly at one with his maker go out of his way looking for revenge?”
“Maybe he’s an eye-for-an-eye kind of guy.”
“And maybe, just maybe, Lucy has blown this all out of proportion. It wouldn’t be the first time, now, would it?”
Salzburg, Austria
Then
“Hurry along, Lucille,” Sister Anna encouraged, the skirt of her habit rustling, her rosary dangling from the rope at her waist, her shoes clicking as they reached the staircase that wound upward, stained-glass windows allowing in filtered light that cast colorful shadows on the stone steps. “It’s not a good idea to keep Sister Maria waiting.”
Lucy had trouble keeping up. She wasn’t supposed to run, but Sister Anna’s strides were long and she mounted the stairs quickly, holding up her skirts, making short work of the two flights to the headmistress’s quarters.
She’d been pulled off the playground, where she and the other girls had been playing tag, chasing each other on the manicured lawns that surrounded the castlelike structure that was St. Cecilia’s School for Girls.
The ceilings on the third floor were vaulted and dark, and Sister Maria’s office was on the end of a long corridor.
