Hannah gasped. “Patricia?”
The habitually morose motel guest shot her a glare of such intense hatred that Hannah instinctively recoiled. What had she done to this woman except try to be a gracious host? Sitting beside her on the couch, her mom gripped her hand in support.
“Caught her running through the woods,” Aaron said. Hannah wondered if he’d gotten the scratch on his cheek from a low-hanging tree branch or if Patricia had fought him. “She denies throwing the rock, but it’s pretty obvious, considering.”
“No one touched the rock, right?” Andrew asked, nodding toward where it still lay.
“No,” Steven said, looking pleased with himself for seeing to that.
“Then I think we can prove quite definitively whether she threw the rock. Note that she’s not wearing gloves.”
Patricia seemed to struggle for a moment between continuing her denials and defiantly claiming her action. She settled on the latter, almost spitting at Hannah, “I wish it had hit you. If you hadn’t moved when you did, it would have.”
On her feet now, Hannah stared at the other woman in
bafflement. “Why? What on earth did I do to you?”
“You took him from me!” she shrieked. “You all did. And I hate you all. I wish that rock had been a bottle full of burning gasoline.”
Hannah looked at her mother, her sister, her cousins, trying to see if anyone understood what this woman was ranting about. “Took who from you?”
“Wade! You took Wade!” Patricia was weeping openly now.
Hannah felt her knees give way. She sank to the couch again in shock, realizing she’d been very slow in catching on. “You were one of Wade’s women,” she said dully.
That, of course, only set Patricia off more. She babbled almost incoherently about how she’d been the only woman Wade had truly loved, how he was now so bitter and unhappy that he wouldn’t answer her letters or accept her calls or visits to him in prison, how the stress of his arrest had caused her to have a miscarriage of his child.
“It isn’t fair that you have everything now and I have nothing,” she concluded, sobbing as she sagged between Andrew and Aaron’s rather helpless support. “You’re pretty and you live in a great place. Your family spoils you rotten. Now you’ve got a good-looking new man who’s obviously crazy about you and you’re going to have his baby—the very man who helped you send Wade away. You have everything, and you left me with nothing.”
Steven looked out the broken window during the silence that followed Patricia’s outburst while everyone struggled to understand her twisted reasoning. “A police car is turning into the drive. Someone should go out to greet them.”
Patricia wailed even louder.
“Maybe we shouldn’t press charges,” Hannah said, looking at Andrew. “She certainly isn’t the only woman who was taken in by Wade’s lies. Heaven only knows what he told her.”
Several in the room objected to Hannah’s attempt at leniency, but Andrew spoke clearly over them. “We’ll tell the police exactly what happened,” he said implacably. “She slashed your tires, sabotaged your porch and barely missed hitting you with that rock. The latter is the only one we can prove, but it’s an assault and she’ll be charged for her crime.”
“Seriously, Hannah, you’d let her go so she can come back and attack you again?” Maggie demanded. “You heard her, next time she’ll throw a Molotov cocktail.”
“I never want to see this place or any of you again,” Patricia fervently assured them, her plain, tear-streaked face set in a hard expression.
C.J. escorted two uniformed officers into the room. Her heart heavy, Hannah fell mostly quiet then, except to give brief responses to the questions that were asked of her. Watching her family trying to clean up the damage to their home, and her grandmother sipping tea in an attempt to settle her nerves, she wondered just how much more distress her past mistakes would end up costing the ones she loved.
* * *
“That woman was truly delusional,” Sarah said when Patricia Gibson had been taken away. “To think that she blamed Hannah—blamed all of us—for Wade going to jail, when it was his own greed and dishonesty that sent him there.”
Andrew wasn’t particularly surprised. In the course of his investigations, he’d heard too many women make too many excuses for badly behaving men.
He blamed himself for not even considering one of Wade’s cast-off women as Hannah’s stalker. He’d found evidence of the affairs, but his investigation had focused on finances, so he hadn’t bothered to follow up on specific names. Especially because Wade hadn’t trusted any of those women enough to partner with him in his crimes. Andrew doubted that Wade had considered his probably brief affair with Patricia to be the great romance she’d envisioned it.
Hannah, he noted, had become very quiet since Patricia was escorted away. He imagined she was tired, stressed. A little sad, perhaps, that another woman had been taken in by her ex. She was very carefully not meeting his eyes—not meeting anyone’s eyes really, but she seemed to be avoiding him in particular. He wished he knew what she was thinking.
“That girl is just flat-out crazy as a Bessie bug,” Pop pronounced flatly. “Believing all those lies Wade told. Saying Andrew is the father of Hannah’s baby.”
Andrew sensed that Maggie, Shelby and Aaron all shifted their weight or cleared their throats uncomfortably, probably wondering how Hannah would respond to that. Truth be told, he was curious about that himself.
With all eyes upon her, Hannah drew a deep breath and stood, one hand resting lightly at her middle. She was a bit pale, making the fresh scratches stand out against her skin, but her chin was high and her voice steady when she said, “No, Pop. Whatever other delusions Patricia suffers from, she wasn’t wrong about that. Andrew is my daughter’s father.”