In trying to keep up with him, Ellie was getting out of breath, and when she tripped over a rock, she caught herself with his arm.
Jessie steadied her, then gave a bit of a frown. “I think you should go back to the summerhouse. In fact, I think maybe this isn’t a good time for a visit.”
Ellie acted as though she hadn’t heard him. “What were you told on the phone?” she asked.
For a moment Jessie blinked at her. “Is this writer curiosity or real interest?”
Talk about not pulling punches, she thought, but didn’t say that. “I liked him,” she said, with her mouth set in a firm line. She wasn’t going to give up.
“All right,” Jessie said with a sigh. “His wife, Sharon, found him this morning. She says that last night they had a big fight. She’s been wanting to leave the ranch for months now. She wants to move back east so she can have a career. But Lew refused to leave, so last night she asked him for a divorce. It looks like Lew shot himself in despair.”
For a moment Ellie held on to Jessie’s arm and looked up into his dark eyes. But she wasn’t seeing him. Instead, she was seeing that nice man who’d met her at the airport. “Lew wasn’t that much in love with his wife because he was flirting with me,” Ellie said softly. “And, anyway, he was proud of her having a career. It was in the way he grinned when he told me that his wife had decorated the summerhouse.”
Jessie frowned. “Just because a man flirts with one woman—” he began, then cut himself off. For a moment he was silent as a couple of men rode past them. From the looks on their faces, they’d learned about Lew.
When they were alone again, Jessie bent down closer to her and lowered his voice. “I know quite a bit more about this than others do. Truthfully, it’s not coming as a great shock to me. Sharon’s been confiding in me for a long time. There were two men inside Lew. He was good at his job, but in a personal way, he wasn’t an easy man to live with. Sharon gave up a lot for him.”
That overused phrase of “pushing your buttons” came into play. “Suicide,” “depression,” “gave up a lot,” and, above all else, “for me” were phrases that pushed so many buttons in Ellie’s head that she was close to exploding.
“Let me guess,” Ellie said through her teeth. “His wife says that she gave up a lucrative career to move out here to the middle of nowhere to be with him. She lives her life for him.”
Jessie had dropped her arm and was looking at her as though she were about to lose her mind, but Ellie couldn’t seem to stop.
“Tell me,” Ellie said, venom in her voice. “Did the woman act as though she were reluctant to tell you about how miserable her life was? Did she say that all she wanted was a husband, but Lew was more interested in money than he was in her? Did she hint that Lew might be . . . well, insane?”
Jessie stared at her in shock, and his horrified look made Ellie come back to herself.
“Sorry,” she said, starting to back away from him. “I’m sure this isn’t the
truth. I’m sure she’s a nice woman and I’m just talking from my own personal experience, but—”
Jessie was still looking at her as though she had escaped from the local loony bin. Ellie glanced at her watch. “I have to go. I have to . . . change clothes,” she said, searching for some reason to leave instead of just turning tail and running. “I think Valerie wants me for . . . for something,” she said, continuing to back away from him. He seemed frozen in place as he stared at her.
“I’m sorry about what I said,” Ellie said, desperately wanting him to stop thinking she was crazy. The divorce court had required that she prove that she was sane, but she couldn’t do it then and she couldn’t do it now. “It’s just that I liked Lew, liked him a lot.” She was still backing up as she spoke, putting more and more distance between them. “But I didn’t feel any depression coming from him, and I think that after what I’ve been through these last three years, I’d know when a person is depressed. Madison is depressed, but Lew wasn’t.”
“Who is Madison?” Jessie snapped, the first words he’d said in minutes.
Ellie waved her hand in dismissal. “Just a friend of mine.”
Jessie was glaring at her, his eyebrows drawn into a deep frown. “What’s he to you?”
It took Ellie a moment to know what Jessie was talking about, as her mind was on Lew. “She. Madison is a she,” she said, then took a deep breath. “If you’re asking me about men in my life, I have a husband who is probably at this moment having lunch with someone and telling him or her what a jerk I am because I ran off for the weekend, heaven only knows where, with heaven only knows who. But the difference is that this time it’s true. And I’m sure that this weekend is going to cost me even more than he did cost me.” She knew this didn’t make sense, but how could she explain a future that hadn’t happened yet but that she knew? “I really do have to go,” she said lamely.
He was still standing there looking at her, so she glared at him, willing him to leave. He wasn’t for her. This thing with Lew had reminded her that she was still married and she still had to go through a vicious divorce. And her lovely weekend had turned into a fiasco. There was Valerie hauling her around to show her off, and Jessie had already admitted that he was using lines on her that he used on all women when he was trying to get them into bed with him. So much for her fantasies about love and a future, et cetera. And now this . . . This death of a man she’d liked very much.
“I think you’re right,” she said softly. “I think that another time would be better for a visit. I think . . . Tell Valerie . . .” Ellie couldn’t think of any more to say, so she did just what she’d been trying not to do: She turned tail and ran back into the guesthouse and shut the door firmly behind her.
Twenty-three
When Ellie made up her mind to do something, it didn’t take her long to start moving. “My strongest point and my weakest,” she’d told Daria. If the decision was good, then great, but if the decision was to leave behind a possible career in art and follow a man . . .
Anyway, an hour and a half later, she was packed, had made her apologies to Valerie, and was sitting on a bench on the front porch of the summerhouse waiting for a driver to pick up her and her luggage and take her back to L.A. Valerie had said that Woody was sending a plane to fetch some of Lew’s relatives at the airport, so she wouldn’t be causing anyone to make an extra trip. Valerie had been so upset at the news of Lew’s death that she hadn’t paid much attention to what else was going on around her.
So now Ellie was sitting and waiting. Her daring little escapade had turned into horror—and now she was going back to her own personal nightmare.
For three years she’d thought about what she’d like to do to that man if she could do it all over again. She’d loved imagining hiring a private eye to stalk her ex. She’d thought long and hard about how she’d hire someone to get close to him and find out where he’d hidden the money he’d stolen from her. She’d spent months, even years, imagining all the things she wanted to do to him.
But now she was sitting on a cushioned bench, the California mountains were in front of her, and she dreaded having to do any of it. She just plain dreaded it. Years ago when she’d been complaining about her husband to someone, the person had said, “If you don’t like him, why don’t you divorce him?” “Too much trouble,” Ellie had answered instantly.