Love by Association

His girlfriend. She sat there, nonplussed. How had she expected Colin would react?

“You’re forcing him to take action,” Julie said, and Chantel couldn’t tell what his sister thought of that. “You’re doing this to help him, too. And that’s why you don’t want him to know what’s going on. Not just because you know there’s no way he’d ever agree to it, but because you want him to have the chance—in his own eyes—to make this right. You know he won’t refuse to go after David to the fullest extent of the law.”

Maybe Johnson could have had the thought a time or two if she’d let herself bring Colin into the mix.

So was Julie going to refuse to help her, after all? Because she’d seen something Chantel hadn’t been willing to look at? The fact that she was playing God, manipulating Colin into coming to terms with the past so the he could be free to embrace the future.

Or at least trust himself a little more. And not be so damned obsessive about protecting the world all by his testosterone-driven self.

“You don’t have to help me,” she reminded Julie, who’d picked up her fork and begun eating again.

Knowing that it would be a sin to let such great food go to waste, Chantel joined her.

“I want to help you more now than ever,” Julie said over her second bite. “I’d give just about anything to be able to undo the choice Colin and I made ten years ago. Sometimes I think signing away our rights has hurt us more than the rape did.”

It was going to work. She was going to be able to make this work!

“Obviously, I can be in charge of the lights going out,” Julie said. “If David doesn’t leave the first time, I turn them out again. The new breaker box is on the wall just outside the windows in the main room. It’s not like anyone would think it strange if odd little agoraphobic Julie slips away...”

“No one calls you that.”

“Not to my face.” She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, anyway. What matters is finding someone to call everyone down for the announcement. And to keep them there long enough for David to do his worst.”

That’s where Leslie came in. If...

“That’s why you asked me about Leslie last night, isn’t it? Because you needed a third and she and I are close?”

“Yes.” No beating around the bush.

“And you wanted to know if we could trust her to help us without saying anything to anyone.”

Well, yes, but... “I was thinking, if she’s been...hurt...too, then she’d be more able to go all the way with this.”

“She wasn’t raped, if that’s what you mean.”

Chantel hadn’t thought she was. “But she’s been physically abused.”

“Yes.”

And there it was.

“By who?” She asked the case-solving question. All that would be left would be getting someone to testify to the truth.

“I don’t know,” Julie told her.

“Have you asked?”

“Yes.”

“And she won’t tell you.”

“She says it’s best for me if I don’t know.”

She couldn’t believe that Julie, as she now knew her, would have accepted that answer.

“You buy that? That it’s best for you to not know?”

“What I think is that it wouldn’t matter if I did. What I am certain of is that nothing would be done about it. That’s what Leslie said, too.”

“And you believe her?”

“I did until this morning.”

“You think you can convince her to believe differently, too?”

“I know she’ll agree to help us. What have we got to lose? The worst that can happen is that David Smyth doesn’t take our bait, your mystery is solved—just make sure Colin isn’t the one who did it, please—and we all go home with no one the wiser.”

“Exactly. Colin can’t be the one. I have to make sure I’ve got him well and truly occupied someplace else the entire time this is going on.”

She couldn’t deny his effect on her.

“I’m thinking that instead of having him in the main hall hearing the announcement with everyone else, I’ll stick him in the room with the old safe in it—guarding the family riches. Guests will be able to find him there to ask him questions and he’ll have preset answers to give them. Answers that will lead them to the real killer—if they pay attention, if they find a letter that will be hidden in another part of the house. And a knife that’s going to be planted in a bedroom where one of the dead bodies is found.”

“Who’s going to be playing the original two dead bodies?”