Deborah Crombie - Duncan Kincaid & Gemma James 11 - Water Like A Stone

projects for friends.

Somehow, she had to get herself through the day. Confine her thoughts to minutiae, concentrate on the sequence of steps required to get her project back on course.

For a moment, her hatred of Piers Dutton squeezed her chest like a python, and she swallowed against the bile rising in her throat. It occurred to her that she’d never known true hatred before. If she’d thought about it at all, she’d imagined it as cleansing, a pure emotion unadulterated by the burden of fairness or compassion.

But it was corrosive, spilling over into every facet of her life, poisoning all her relationships. It kept her from forgiving Caspar his weakness; it kept her from telling her brother and Gemma that she understood they’d only done what they felt they must. And it was keeping her from reassuring her children that she loved them, especially Lally.

The thought pierced her heart. She’d sniffed, wiped her eyes, and gone back to the job site determined to do better, to keep focused on the things that really mattered.

But by midafternoon, when she’d picked Lally and the two younger boys up at the bookshop, her daughter’s sullen withdrawal only made her angry again.

She knew Lally had been hurt by her grandfather’s singling out Kit for this morning’s trip to Audlem—she’d felt a stab of jealousy herself that shamed her—but all her attempts at engaging the girl in some sort of ordinary conversation had failed so miserably that even the boys had become quiet, embarrassed.

When they reached the house, they’d found Kit and Hugh just back from their expedition, red cheeked and irritatingly cheerful. Hugh had lit the fire in the sitting room, and had dared the boys and Lally to take him on at Monopoly, but Lally had disappeared upstairs, refusing to join in. When Juliet called after her, she’d pretended not to hear.

Juliet sank down on the bottom step, desolation settling over her.

She tried to force her cold fingers to unlace her work boots, but stopped halfway through. Suddenly even the longed- for bath seemed more than she could manage. Perhaps she’d have a nip from the bottle of brandy her dad kept under the kitchen sink, just to get herself going, she thought, and she’d just pushed herself upright when the doorbell rang.

She knew, with the absolute certainty born of dread, who it was.

The dogs barked in chorus, and when her dad looked out of the sitting room, she waved him back and said, “It’s for me.”

Opening the door, Juliet stepped out onto the porch and faced her husband.

Her first thought was that he looked diminished, much less frightening than her imagination had painted him after his attack on her in the pub. His chest seemed to have sunk, his cheeks were unshaven, but his eyes glittered so feverishly that any hopes she had had that he’d come to apologize were quickly dashed.

The muscles in his jaw worked as he said, “They’ve taken him in.

Piers. To the police station. They say he cheated this woman who died, and others, too. Piers!” Outrage warred with disbelief in his voice.

“Caspar—” She reached out, moved by unexpected pity, but he jerked his arm away from her fingers as if stung.

“It’s your doing,” he spat at her. “You’d stoop to anything to get back at him for rejecting you, even ruining the business, ruining me.

And now the police suspect him of murder.”

Juliet let her hand fall to her side. So she had been right all along. The police wouldn’t have taken Piers in for questioning unless they’d found evidence to support her suspicions. Jubilation flared through her, but it faded in an instant and she felt merely tired and infinitely sad. There was no joy in vindication, not at this cost, but the oddest thing was that her fear had vanished.

Piers couldn’t hurt her now, and in defending him even in the face of reason, Caspar had lost his power over her.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you, Caspar,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? You bitch. You—”

She stopped his venom with a wave of her hand, and felt like Moses parting the Red Sea. Her head was suddenly clear. “I’ve started divorce proceedings. My solicitor will contact you. In the meantime, I want you out of the house. The children and I will be moving back in until things are settled. I’ll give you twenty-four hours to get your things. After that, if you come near us, except for arranged visitations with the children, I’ll take out restraining orders against you.”

He stared at her, uncomprehending. “You can’t—”

“I can.” She looked at her husband one last time, then stepped back into the house and closed the door.

It was only as she turned round that she saw Lally standing at the foot of the stairs.

“I got two of the big houses,” shrieked Toby, almost upsetting the game board in his excitement. “I win.”

“You can’t win yet, silly,” Sam told him. “Not until everyone runs out of money, and that can take days.”

Hugh, who had been coaching Toby on his moves, stepped in.

“It’s all right, Toby. You can buy lots more houses, and railroads, and you may beat us all yet.” He winked at Kit over the little boy’s head, and Kit grinned back.

Kit still felt a glow of pleasure from their morning, spent exploring the stair-step locks in the pretty town of Audlem, south of Nantwich.

Hugh—he still didn’t quite feel comfortable calling him

“grandfather”—had talked to him as if he were an adult, drawing him out about his opinions and interests, and had then taken him for lunch at a pub in the village of Wrenbury. Only thoughts of Annie

Lebow and the Horizon had marred Kit’s enjoyment, and he’d tried hard to keep them at bay.

Now, as Hugh urged Toby to roll the dice again, Kit made an effort to join in, but he kept thinking about the raised voices he’d heard a few minutes earlier, and the slamming of the front door. Hugh, too, kept glancing at the sitting-room door, and Kit sensed his enthusiasm for the game was at least partly an attempt at distracting them from whatever scene had taken place on the front porch.

And where, he wondered, was Lally?

“Sam,” he whispered, “take my turns for me, will you? I’ve got to go to the loo.” Then he was up and slipping from the room before anyone could protest, or Toby could follow.

The air in the front hall felt frigid compared to the warmth of the sitting room. No sound came from the kitchen, where the dogs were having a kip by the stove. Not wanting to disturb them, he climbed the stairs quietly, although he couldn’t have explained quite why he felt the need for stealth.

When he reached the upstairs hall, he saw that the bathroom door was closed, and as he moved closer he heard faint splashing, and smelled the scent of bubble bath wafting from under the door. He doubted it was Lally in the tub, although the fleeting image conjured up by that thought made his skin prickle with embarrassment.

Hugh’s study, then, where Lally and Juliet had been sleeping?

The door stood slightly ajar, but when he looked in, the sofa bed was tucked away, and only the clutter of Hugh’s books and papers hinted at its occupancy.

Perplexed, Kit wondered if Lally had been in the kitchen all along, but decided that while he was upstairs he’d grab a book he’d been reading that he’d promised to show Hugh.

He flung open the door to the room he shared with the other boys, with none of the care he’d taken in the study, and froze.

Lally, crouched on his bed with her hand plunged into the depths of a backpack, jumped as if she’d been shot.

“What are you doing in here?” she hissed at him.

“It’s my room,” he said, incensed. “What are you doing in here?”

“Trying to get away from my fucking mother, that’s what.” Lally eased her hand from the backpack, but stayed in her crouch, clutching the pack to her chest like body armor.

“Why?” asked Kit, still not following the plot.

“Because I hate her,” said Lally, vicious.