Wife On Demand Page 12

  “I thought we were selling off the art collection.”

  “It’s hardly a collection. We have sold the Picasso. Your half of that paid for the trial.”

  It had broken her heart to part with it. It was one of the first that her father had acquired, and she had always loved it. As a child she had stood in front of it for hours, just gazing. Once her father had found her standing on a desk with her ear pressed to the canvas. “I’m listening,” she had gravely explained. Hope could not remember the moment, but her father had never tired of telling the story.

  Without doubt it was the most valuable piece he owned, and she had allowed it to go—to a rich man who had only wanted “a Picasso” to hang on his wall.

  Jude nodded and stared at her from burning black eyes.

  “If Bill Bridges planted an employee on us, I need the proof,” he said. “And if that proof is in the office records, someone has got to go and search for them.”

  “Fine. Tell me what I should look for. I’ll do the search. It won’t take me half as long to find what you want as it would take one of your lawyer’s assistants.”

  He still looked at her. “Sell another painting,” he said flatly.

  She closed her eyes against the fury that arose in her and looked away. “I remind you that the majority of what Dad had was new artists whose work hasn’t appreciated much yet.” Her father had enjoyed risk in art as much as in the financial markets.

  “We don’t need—”

  “Jude,” she interrupted. “The woman who was injured in the explosion is suing. The city is considering whether to sue for the cleanup and policing costs after the accident. The widow of the night watchman is suing. It’s just barely possible we’re going to end up underinsured and be liable for some of the costs. If we sold every single thing Dad left it wouldn’t scratch the surface of a bill like that.”

  Jude gazed at her for a long, assessing moment, then gestured with the paper he held. “Why did you bring me this?”

  “Because it points to your innocence, Jude,” she said, with slow, angry emphasis.

  He dropped his eyes to the paper. “My word didn’t convince you, but this piece of paper did?”

  She did not reply, and his eyes lifted to hers again. “You never gave me your word and I never asked for it,” she said.

  Behind his eyes a thousand angry thoughts flashed. “And now, too late, you’ve got a guilty conscience.”

  “Call it what you like, Jude. So why don’t you tell me what you want to look at, and I’ll bring you those files?”

  As Hope boarded the train taking her away from Jude again she remembered the first time she had made this trip.

  If she had read it written in the sky she would not have believed that love could turn to hate like that, without making any diversion in her, as though at a certain point in its course a rushing river simply began to turn red. On the day that Jude had spurned her, Hope had climbed on the train in Kingston dissolved in tears, but she got off it in Toronto with a heart of stone.

  She had no explanation for what he had done. The manipulation she had been subjected to on the witness stand was so clear in her own mind, so obvious, that she could make no allowances for Jude’s not understanding it. Hope was a novice, the woman prosecutor who had faced her was an expert. Yet under the laws of the country, Hope had been forced to fence with her for a man’s freedom. It was as stupid a system as sending Christians against lions, and served about as much purpose in society, Hope thought bitterly.

  Jude had stood up against the same prosecutor, a voice whispered. Was it so unreasonable that he had expected her to be able to do likewise?

  But Jude had not had his entire inner certainty dismantled in the moments leading up to his testimony, she answered the voice angrily. Jude had not been faced with a woman of whose existence he had known nothing, claiming to be his almost fiancée. Jude had not had his fragile belief in himself as a person who was loved shattered...why could he not understand?

  She was sorry, desperately sorry that it had happened. She hated herself for the weakness that had let that woman get to her. But he had no right to hate her. He might have warned her about Corinne Lamont. He had chosen not to. Why?

  The only reason Hope could see was—that Corinne Lamont could not be explained away. In that case, his anger was understandable. He had manipulated Hope’s feelings just as Corinne suggested, and the gamble had not paid off. He blamed Hope, and he had never loved her anyway, so why should he go on pretending? Simple.

  The alternative was inexplicable. If he loved her, if Corinne Lamont had been lying...why had he not understood?

  But if Jude blamed Hope and only Hope for his conviction, he was wrong. People had been shocked by the verdict. A reporter had written an article describing the judge who had presided over the case as a “women’s judge,” notorious in legal circles for the ease with which he could be manipulated by breasts and sobs. He suggested that the judge had been too much swayed by Corinne Lamont’s “masterly portrayal of the injured woman” and outlined certain errors in his summing up to the jury...it was not all Hope’s fault.

  She had written Jude. She begged him not to judge her so harshly, tried to explain how her mind had simply refused to work under the pressure of being on the stand...but he never answered. She had no way of knowing if the letter even reached him, but she did not write again.

  Then she began to think of the day when she had asked him to say he loved her, and he had refused. Had she been a fool, then, to believe what he would not say? Why hadn’t he told her? Why hadn’t he given her that to cling to in those terrible days leading up to his trial? Her father dying, himself facing trial...why hadn’t he comforted her with his love, if he had felt any?

  He did not feel any, said the voice of hurt inside her. And little by little, the river turned redder and redder, until it ran with blood.

  She never knew how she coped with the loss, the loneliness, the huge burden of responsibility that fell on her...or the terrible, burning longing for Jude that, in spite of the flame of cold anger that now burned in her, tortured her night and day in those first weeks after his conviction.

  We shared a moment out of time

  But now it’s over...

  She had played her music, but it did not comfort her. It flailed her with remembering. Vividly did she remember that day when she had sat in his apartment waiting for him, listening to this song. She could remember every detail of how he looked when he had finally come in—the sweat streaks on his face and arms, the dust of construction...the bruising hardness of his body. How he had lifted her and taken her just where they were... “Jude,” she would cry softly, despairing, when she remembered. “Oh, Jude, was it all a lie?” Then, weakly, she would weep.

  She could hate him, but the physical yearning she could not suppress, and it was unbearable. She ached in every cell of her body. She bled from every vein, every artery, every part of her ripped open and unable to heal.

  It had been a long, terrible time. Her father’s body was kept alive by the life-support machine; the law did not allow it to be unplugged. Hope went and sat daily by his bed, knowing that her father was no longer there. He had been released from the bulk of flesh, even if the huge machine still forced it to take oxygen in and out, still cleaned the blood, still delivered nutrition. She told herself it was no different from visiting a grave—perhaps his spirit hovered there, perhaps he would find a way to send her comfort.

  But it was different. It was an added torture, because there was no finality, and no true grieving could happen till there was.

  Her day-to-day life, as well as her inner life, had changed out of recognition overnight. Her social life had died anyway when she had started with Jude; with him gone, and her father gone, she was alone. She had to let the housekeeper go, and she hated being alone in the big house, but although she thought of taking in a boarder, and the money would have helped, somehow she never did it. She took a computer training course and then g
ot work, and fortunately they demanded long hours.

  Everyone at Thompson Daniels had turned to her for the answers to unanswerable questions, and slowly she picked a path through unknown terrain to dismantle the firm that her father had spent a lifetime building up. She wrote references, she begged people she knew for jobs for exemployees... she did what she could, but she could not protect everyone.

  Old friends had rallied around, or tried to. Her father’s friends, in particular, tried to help in the first few months, but Hope was too wounded to be able to face their affectionate concern. Caring made her weep. The only way she could be strong was to stand alone.

  When her father’s body finally gave up, it had been a relief. That was perhaps the worst blow, that she should greet death as a friend. She thought, Well, at least now maybe I can grieve. But she was wrong. Her heart had been stone for too long. She stood and watched the coffin lowered into the cold, cold ground and her eyes felt scraped dry. She had lost the person who had meant most to her in the world, but mourning was denied her.

  She had written Jude to tell him, wondering if he would ask for day release to attend the funeral. He did not even answer. Maybe his love for her father, too, had been invented, dissembled for a purpose. She no longer cared.

  Her father’s will was simply one more blow of life’s sword against the stone of her heart. There was a spark, but it flickered once and was gone.

  After a while, she picked up her paints again. She made a studio for herself in the attic and hid away there for hours on end. Everything she painted was sterile, but what did it matter? She could forget sometimes, forget who she was, forget she had ever thought she loved.

  Now all that’s left is how to end

  How to begin.

  Finally, the yearning had stopped, too. But there had been no new beginning for Hope. There were only endings. Shutting up the office. Burying her father. And then, clearing out the things in his desk.

  When she returned to the prison visiting room a week later, her briefcase bulging with every working drawing Gig Young had executed, the office records that should pin down the exact time of his tenure and the area of his operations, as well as other random files Hope did not understand the significance of, the visiting room guard would not allow her to take them in to him.

  “Why not?” she demanded.

  “Because we can’t allow it,” said the woman flatly.

  Hope had never before met that voice of petty authority, but it was instantly recognizable. She stuffed the briefcase into a locker as instructed, and went in empty-handed.

  Jude swore when she told him what had happened, a string of profanity that shocked her. “Maybe I could come back on a day when that woman’s not on duty,” she offered quietly.

  “They don’t give us advance notice of the guards’ work schedule.” They sat staring at each other, Jude’s eyes burning into hers. “I have got to get out of here,” he said. His voice was all the more terrible for being quiet. The tension in him was electric.

  “Jude,” she cautioned softly, frightened.

  “There’s nothing they won’t do to stop me proving I’m innocent,” he said. “I’ll never get that information white I’m in here.”

  “But your parole hearing is coming up. There’s a good chance you’ll get parole, isn’t there?”

  “Do you think so?” Jude asked dryly. He sounded as if he were certain there was not.

  “Why shouldn’t there be? It’s based on behaviour, isn’t it?” She looked into his eyes and wondered whether his anger at the injustice of his conviction ever expressed itself in self-defeating violence.

  “It’s based on three things. Good behaviour, community support, and a proper display of remorse. One out of three is not an overwhelming score.”

  “What’s community support?”

  “It means a stable environment to return to. Something that might keep a man on the straight and narrow,” he told her, with a dry sarcasm in his voice that she did not understand the significance of.

  “Jude, if there’s anything I can do—there must be something.” She supposed she owed him that much, however he had hurt her. If she could undo some of the damage she had done, by helping him get early parole, of course she must. She did not love him anymore, but that did not blind her to justice.

  He leaned across the table and grasped her wrist. “You can help me,” he whispered.

  “What do you want me to do?” The message of his touch, carried by blood and nerves, travelled to all the usual destinations within her, but she fought down her response.

  “If I—” The intensity in him was catching. Her own heart was suddenly beating in hard heavy thumps. “For what I’m planning I need a safe house. If I turn up on the doorstep, will you let me in, and not ask any questions? I won’t stay.”

  She gasped, a hollow, hoarse noise like a death rattle. “Jude!” she whispered. “What are you talking about?”

  “Never mind what I’m talking about. I won’t stay long. I’ll need a change of clothing and some money, as much as you can spare. Will you do it?”

  “Jude, but then you’d have the police after you! How can you prove anything if you’re on the run? Wouldn’t it be better to—”

  “Never mind your advice. I want out of here, and I’m going to do whatever it takes, with you or without you. If I’m free I can prove my innocence, and then it won’t matter how I got out. Now, give me your answer.”

  She thought of what Corinne Lamont had said on the witness stand. Had he used her? Was he using her now? Who was he? She really did not know him, had never known him. Even less now than before. What was in his heart?

  “Jude...”

  “Hope, I’m innocent. It’s wrong that I’m here. It’s a mistake. If I get out, I’ll find the proof.”

  She was stirred by unnameable emotions. “Exactly what would you want me to do?”

  “I told you, money and clothes. You would have to start making small withdrawals now. If they see that you’ve made a big cash withdrawal, they’ll suspect you immediately. Can you get me some clothes?”

  “Your stuff’s all in Dad’s bedroom.”

  He frowned in anger. “What? What’s it doing there?”

  “When you gave up your apartment we put the furniture into storage, but there was no knowing when you might need...well, anyway, that’s where it is.”

  “Who did you arrange this with?” he demanded furiously. “Not Nick Harvey?”

  “His secretary was given the job of seeing to your place. She...asked for my help.”

  He swore.

  She fired up suddenly. “Jude, it’s half your house! She had the right to ask and I did not have the right to refuse! You have no other home now—if you do make parole, where are you going to go?”

  “Into a halfway house, of course. What did you imagine—that they would let a dangerous criminal like me straight out onto the street?”

  This deflated her anger. “Oh. Well, I didn’t know that.”

  “Now you do,” he said dismissively, and returned to the main point. “I’ll also need those files you’ve collected, and keys to the office. That’s all I need. That, and you keeping your mouth shut when they come to ask you questions.”

  His eyes fixed her, dark, intent, full of more messages than she could ever hope to disentangle. She swallowed convulsively, torn beyond imagining, opened her mouth and closed it.

  “Come on, Hope, make up your mind.”

  Again she dropped her eyes. “Jude, it’s wrong. I’m so sure that this is the wrong way to go about it. Why don’t you—I mean, if your parole date is next month, why don’t you just concentrate on that? You’ve put up with it this long, you can wait another month, can’t you?”

  A muscle in his jaw tightened. “I could wait a month if I thought I’d get it. But I won’t get it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I told you. I’ll be showing no remorse for the crime.”

  “But you’re innocent.” />
  “And if I tell them I’m innocent, that my conviction was justice set on its ear, to the parole board that’s lack of remorse.”

  Her head still bent, she looked up at him. “Can’t you fake the remorse, Jude? For the sake of your freedom?”

  “I am not going to lie to those bastards about having killed a man.” He spoke with calm, cold fury and she knew he was unshakeable.

  “Well, Jude, a lot of people are saying now—you didn’t do it. Somebody was writing in the paper about unsafe convictions just the other day and used you as a prime example. The parole board must know that. Are you sure they won’t listen if you tell them you’re innocent?”

  He looked at her.

  “Jude, this is not Czechoslovakia under a repressive regime. This is not the Stalin show trials. This is Canada.”

  “People are the same all over the world. Why do you think that woman wouldn’t let you bring in those papers today?”

  She looked at him levelly. “Because she is a petty official with petty power over others and she likes to exercise it. If you’re thinking she had instructions from above, all I can say is, I doubt it very much. The other guard would have let me bring them in. I could see that in his eyes.”

  He looked at her as if unsure whether to believe her.

  “Now, what do you mean about not having community support? You have friends.”

  “But I don’t have the love of a good woman, Hope,” he said dryly.

  “I can’t believe that’s the only thing they look for.”

  “No, but it’s the most convincing. They figure that’s what’ll keep a man on the straight and narrow. How little they know, eh?”

  She ignored that. “What would we have to do to convince them that you—” she swallowed “—had the love of a good woman?”

  His dark intent gaze was fully arrested as he stared at her. “The most certain thing would be marriage,” he said with slow precision; and then, as if he knew her answer, he drawled, “So, Hope, which would you rather do to put right what you put wrong—many me, or just give me some money and turn a blind eye?”