“Somehow I don’t think she would see you as an inconvenience,” Rachel murmured, remembering the way Emily had looked at her brother.
Lucas stared at his mug. “How long are you going to be in town?”
“It will probably take another week for me to get Grandmother’s affairs in order.”
“Sir? Ma’am? Your table is ready.”
In response to the hostess’s summons, Rachel and Lucas stood and followed her into the dining room, to a nicely secluded table for two. They glanced at the menu, placed their orders, then studied each other until their meals arrived.
“You haven’t mentioned what you and your grandmother are doing for the holiday,” Lucas said.
“After dinner—which I’m going to cook for us—my grandmother wants me to take her to her church for a candlelight service. She hasn’t missed one in almost fifty years. She’s very aware that this will be the last one she’ll attend here.”
“You won’t be seeing your mother for Christmas?”
“Mother won’t come back to Honoria. We decided to postpone our holiday dinner until New Year’s day. She’s spending this evening with a couple of single friends from her widow’s support group.”
Lucas didn’t say anything, but Rachel felt a need to explain, anyway. “Mother tells everyone her husband died twenty-four years ago. As far as she’s concerned, of course, he did.”
Lucas frowned down at his plate. “No one has heard from your father since he ran off with my stepmother? He’s never made any contact with anyone?”
She shook her head. “He never even tried to claim the money he left in savings accounts and other investments. If he ever knew his son had died, he made no effort to contact us. For all I know, he may be dead. Mother has every right to claim widowhood, if that makes her more comfortable.”
“Yes, she does. Er... your brother had a theory of his own about why your father disappeared.”
Rachel didn’t know what Lucas was talking about. “What do you mean?”
“He decided that my father killed Al and Nadine and hid the bodies, then told everyone they’d run off together.”
7
RACHEL REALIZED that her jaw had dropped.
She closed her mouth, then shook her head. “That’s insane. What makes you think Roger believed such a thing?”
“He told me. The night he ordered me to stop seeing you. He said he wouldn’t allow his sister to be involved with the stepson of a whore and the son of a murderer. When I asked what the hell he was talking about, he told me his crazy theory. And then he pulled out what he claimed was proof that he was right.”
She could hardly believe what she was hearing. “What kind of proof?”
“A gold bracelet. It was covered in dirt and dried mud, but I recognized it. It had belonged to Nadine. She never took it off.”
“Where did Roger find Nadine’s bracelet?”
“He said he’d been walking in the woods behind the rock house—which is where he claimed your father and my stepmother used to secretly meet. He claimed his dog dug up the bracelet. From that evidence, he concluded that Nadine and Al were buried somewhere in those woods.”
“This is crazy,” Rachel murmured, shaking her head in dazed disbelief. “I know Roger had a hard time accepting our father’s disappearance, but how could he have come up with this ridiculous theory?”
“He refused to accept that Al would abandon his children for Nadine. It was easier for him to believe that your father was dead than to admit Al cared so little about the two of you that he would simply disappear from your lives forever.”
“I didn’t like admitting it, either,” Rachel replied. “And I doubt that Emily likes knowing that her mother ran off when she was just a baby. But this...”
Lucas nodded grimly. “That’s pretty much the way I reacted when Roger threw this tale at me. I thought he’d lost his mind. I told him my father was a bastard, but he wasn’t a murderer. My father never cared enough about anyone to be driven to that point.”
“Nadine must have dropped the bracelet by accident. Finding it in those woods is no proof of anything.”
“That’s what I told Roger.”
“And what did he say?”