SUSPICION'S GATE

  * * *

  Contents:

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

  Epilogue

  * * *

  * * *

  Chapter 1

  ^ »

  "At the gate which suspicion enters, love goes out."

  —Dr. Thomas Fuller

  Nicki had been hearing the whispers for several moments before the sounds began to coalesce into words in her weary brain.

  "Did you see him?"

  "I can't believe it! After all these years."

  "He always did have more gall than sense."

  "But to turn up here, now! Of all the nerve!"

  "He looks … different. Not just older—"

  "He looks like what he always was. A troublemaker."

  Her heart caught in her throat at the familiar appellation that brought back so many memories. Troublemaker. She lifted eyes still gritty and sore from a night of tears, searching the gathering.

  Only one person had ever inspired such universal disfavor in the small town of San Remo, and she knew all too well who it was. It took her only seconds to spot him; he stood at least two inches taller than nearly everyone gathered in the mist that was clinging rather grimly to the green expanse of the cemetery lawn.

  "Travis," she breathed, the name a mere whisper of sound that went unnoticed by the people clustered around her. As if he'd heard her, his head came up. His eyes, those incredible gray eyes that had always seemed to have the power to look clear through to her soul, fastened on her as if he'd known all along exactly where she was.

  For a split second the old joy leapt in her, an instinctive response she couldn't stop. She'd never been able to stop it, not when Travis Halloran turned that consuming gaze on her. And for an instant she saw the answering leap of emotion in his eyes, a softening in the cool gray.

  And then she remembered. She didn't think her expression changed, but she saw his eyes go icy, and the mouth that had gentled for a moment thinned as his jaw tightened. She looked hastily away, wondering why she had thought he wouldn't know exactly what she was thinking. He had always known. She only wished she knew why he was here.

  She tried to concentrate on the minister's words, but she didn't need to hear them; she had said her own private farewell in the dim, harsh light of dawn. But Reverend Porter's voice was having the same effect now that it had had on her as a child in church; it sent her mind flying anywhere to escape the droning buzz. Even to Travis Halloran.

  He'd changed. Not that he was any less compelling than he had been when she'd last seen him; more so, she thought rather breathlessly. He was still tall and lean, but he'd filled out to the adult male muscularity that had been promised in the breadth of his shoulders and the strength of his arms in youth. The dark hair was just as thick and still worn a bit long, but fell with the careless ease of a good haircut rather than the tousled shagginess that spoke of a wallet that didn't stretch to regular trips to the barber.

  His eyes were just as softly, thickly lashed, but they were harder now, as cold as the granite stones whose color they matched. His features were just as striking, high cheekbones, strong jaw, and that unexpectedly soft, mobile mouth. But where he had looked reckless and a little angry then, he looked only forbidding now.

  She wondered if he ever smiled anymore. Wondered if he ever let loose that devastating, lopsided grin to wreak havoc on the pulse rate of any female in the vicinity, that grin that had made even the "nice" girls in town watch with avid expressions as he walked by, and the younger ones giggle, blush and whisper from afar. Judging from the set, grim lines of his face, she thought it unlikely.

  "That son of a— Can you believe that?"

  Her brother's exclamation brought her out of her reverie. Richard, who was as usual a beat behind the rest of the world, had only now noticed the tall, lean figure standing apart from the throng. He took a step in that direction, but Nicki's slender hand on his arm stopped him short.

  "Hush," she whispered sharply. "Not now."

  Richard looked a little surprised, as if the shock of seeing the man who had once been his friend had driven all else from his mind, even the somber reality of the occasion. He turned his head away and she felt him go slack, sagging back into his usual slumping posture.

  Her palm stung, and Nicki realized that the recurrent, sharp pain was from the thorns of the single rose she held. She eased her tense grip, straightening the crushed florist's paper as she became aware of the silence.

  They were waiting, she thought, for her. Always for her, although Richard was the oldest, and the only surviving man of the family now. She smothered a sigh.

  When she looked up, she met an assortment of stares that both comforted and puzzled her. The ones of honest, pure sympathy she understood; it was the touch of anticipation in others that puzzled her. That is, until she saw one of those glances slip sideways to Travis, then back to her.

  What were they expecting? she wondered with a spurt of sudden bitter anger. An explosion? Something to liven up a bleak occasion? Well, she wasn't about to oblige them. The child she had been would have; the woman she'd become had left that kind of thing far behind.

  She stepped forward, to the edge of the gaping hole in the lush carpet of grass. Without meeting any of the staring eyes, yet feeling the gaze of one particular pair as if it were a physical thing, she tossed the rose down onto her mother's casket.

  He hadn't wanted to come. He'd never wanted to set foot in this town again, and if it hadn't been for that attorney's dogged insistence, he wouldn't have. He'd shed the dust of this place fifteen years ago when they had cast him out, and he had never looked back.

  Well, almost never. But Travis Halloran tried not to think about the times when one image battered its way into his resistant consciousness, when the one bright, shining picture from those dreary days pounded on the door of his mind and refused to go away until he'd let it in to be looked at, to be remembered in all its vivid clarity, to be savored in all its sweetness. The only sweetness he'd ever known in that long ago, bitter time.

  It had stunned him to find that the image he'd carried around for so long was so wrong. Gone was the coltish, gawky girl; in her place was a lovely, poised woman, long-legged and femininely curved. A woman who caused a lightning-fast response of tension and heat in him. Nicki Lockwood had grown up, and he couldn't help feeling that somehow she'd passed him in the process, never mind that he was nearly three years her senior.

  But for the briefest second, a frozen moment in time, that young, innocent girl had looked out of those wide blue eyes, the girl he'd known before the world had crashed in on him, wiping that look of near-worship out of her eyes forever.

  It was no more than he'd expected. Why should she be any different than everyone else in this town? Just because, for a while, she seemed to see past the defenses of an angry, rebellious spirit to the frightened boy inside?

  No, she was no different. The look of distaste that had narrowed those huge eyes mirrored the look of everyone else in this place, and any tiny hope he had ever harbored that she, of them all, might not believe, might not hate him, went down to a quick, lonely death. And with it, some lingering, soft part of his heart quivered and gave up the fight against the encroaching stone.

  Still, it tore at him when she stepped forward, a slender lonely figure, nearly as isolated as he was as she tossed the solitary rose into the grave. Where the hell was Rich, why wasn't he with her, supporting her—?

  Because when it came to the crunch, Richard Lockwood had as much backbone as a jellyfish, he thought sourly. And who knows it better than you, Halloran? Why the hell are you here, anyway? That damned lawyer…

  "It's imperative that you be present, Mr. Halloran," the lawyer had told him.

 
; "Imperative?"

  Travis had said it idly, unimpressed by the urgency implied by the word. He'd been too busy speculating that this man, this lawyer, who had come to San Remo long after his own inauspicious departure, was probably the only man in the small town who would ever call him "Mr. Halloran." To everyone else he'd always been just "that Halloran boy," "that drunkard's son" or, more simply, "that troublemaker."

  "Yes," the man had said, oblivious to his gaffe by San Remo standards. "Not for the funeral, necessarily, but for the reading of the will."

  Curiosity, he thought now as he drove the familiar yet changed roads to the big, sprawling house on the hill, was going to be the death of him yet. The attorney had refused to divulge any further details, and he'd been forced to satisfy his inquisitiveness in the only way possible; he'd come back to the town he'd been born in and had sworn never to come back to in his life.

  And, he muttered grimly to himself as he pulled in beside a long, white Cadillac convertible, if you think your reception at the cemetery was cool, wait until you walk into that damned house.

  He got out, noting with a vague interest that the plate on the long, spotless car read LOCKWD1. Richard, he thought immediately. The senior Lockwoods had never gone for that kind of personal advertisement, and Nicki would find it … ostentatious in the extreme.

  He felt a tug of nostalgia as the word ostentatious floated up to him from the depths of memory. How many times had she said it, with all the self-assured wisdom of a fourteen-year-old who looked upon her own comfortable world with the disdain of one who'd never known any other?

  He'd said that to her the first time she'd used the word to describe a different car, also shiny, new and expensive, that had sat unused in one bay of the huge garage behind the house.

  "It is ostentatious. Richard can't even drive yet, he's such a klutz, but there it sits, rusting away." She'd wrinkled her nose in that way that always made him uncomfortable, although he couldn't have said exactly why. "Ostentatious and blatant."

  "Blatant? I can understand ostentatious," he'd said, reaching out to tweak her sassy, upturned nose; somehow it made him feel better. "I think you just like the word. But why blatant?"

  Instead of answering right away, she had looked at the big house that was her home. "I'm not sorry we have money," she said honestly, "but that doesn't mean I like to flash it around like that. It would have been better, would have made Richard better, made him appreciate it more, if he'd had to work for that car."

  She hadn't said "like you did," but the implication had been there, along with the subtle compliment. She did that often, and it made him feel awkward even as it warmed him. He was sixteen years old, with the practiced, cool remoteness affected by so many boys his age. Only in his case it was all too real, brought on by too many confrontations with the limitations and grim reality of his life. He'd learned to live with that; the problem came when he tried to reconcile the cavalier, impudent image he felt compelled to uphold with the boy who was flattered, even moved by the honest admiration of a fourteen-year-old girl.

  He'd tried to brush it off, act like it meant nothing to him. He'd teased her mercilessly, yet she had always seemed to see beyond his defenses. And he had never realized how much it had come to mean to him until he'd lost it forever. He shook his head sharply, clearing out the mist of memory as he walked past the conspicuous car.

  He'd underestimated, he thought as the heads swiveled toward him as he came through the front door. You could freeze Hawaii with the looks he was getting. And this was just the company staff and friends of the family. He was obviously going to be severely testing the thickness of the shell he'd built over the years. That is, if he didn't cut and run right now.

  Not, he thought, a half-bad idea. But then the thin, almost emaciated frame of John Langley, the attorney who had come to him with this ludicrous request, appeared in the doorway of the library.

  "Damn," he muttered when it became obvious that the man had spotted him.

  "Ah, yes, Mr. Halloran, thank you for coming. We can begin now that you're here."

  It was almost worth the chill when he saw the stunned expressions around him. He wondered if it was because he was being invited into the inner sanctum, or because of the almost deferential air granted by the lawyer to someone they remembered only as barely—if at all—deserving civility. The thought braced him, and he slipped back into the mental armor that had been his weapon ever since he'd walked out of this house fifteen years ago, with the acid of betrayal eating at his gut.

  "We're waiting in the library. Right this way—"

  "I know where it is."

  The man looked startled. Travis couldn't help a wry smile. "You're new in town, aren't you, Mr. Langley?"

  He didn't wait for an answer, just walked past the man toward the heavy, carved doors of the library. He couldn't help the shiver that rippled through him as he remembered the last time he'd been here, the night that had ravaged his life. The night when a woman he'd trusted had turned on him, and an adoring young girl had looked at him with stunned, tragic eyes. He'd put on the old armor, he thought ruefully, but he hadn't checked it for chinks. He shrugged, shoring up the weak spot.

  He heard a gasp as he stepped into the paneled room he remembered so well. He didn't know who it had come from; his gaze had shot immediately to the slim figure still clad in the simple black dress she'd worn at the cemetery.

  She was sitting in the chair she'd always favored, a big, overstuffed twin of her father's recliner, the chair he'd sat in so often himself. Her long, silken legs were curled up under her, and she looked small and fragile. And bruised somehow, not with physical marks but in the darkness shadowing her eyes. His stomach knotted at the sight of her.

  "What the hell?" Richard had come to his feet behind the big, mahogany desk that dominated the room. Despite the man's obvious anger, all Travis could think was that he looked like a boy playing at his father's desk.

  "Hi, Rich," he said casually, as if he'd seen him only yesterday.

  "Isn't it enough that you … you desecrated my mother's funeral?"

  "Desecrate?" One dark brow rose sardonically. "I didn't think I was that important, Richie."

  Richard fumed, reddening, but he made no move to come out from behind the big desk as he sputtered, "What the hell do you think you're doing here?"

  "I've been asking myself the same question," Travis answered dryly.

  "He is here at my request," Langley put in quickly, looking more than a little wary at the intensity of the undercurrents he clearly didn't understand.

  "You asked him here?"

  Travis watched as Richard whirled on the man. Perhaps it was just the contrast with the spare attorney, but Richard looked almost fat. Soft, at least, pudgy, as if he'd regained the baby fat lost in adolescence. Or maybe he'd never lost it at all. Travis couldn't remember. He couldn't remember much of Richard at all; he'd spent too many long, solitary hours blocking out those memories. His images of Nicki were so much clearer, had always been so much more vivid—

  "Where do you get off inviting him here? Do you know who he is, what he did—"

  "Do you?" Travis said it quietly, almost gently, and watched as Richard's eyes widened in shock. My God, he thought. He's even got himself believing the Lockwood version of the truth. "Never mind, Richie. You're safe now."

  "Don't call me that," Richard snapped. "Get out. Just get out."

  "I asked him here," Langley cut in with a sudden firmness that surprised Travis. "On Mrs. Lockwood's behalf."

  "My mother?" Richard looked stunned. His eyes flicked from the lawyer to Travis.

  "Relax, Rich," Travis drawled acidly. "She probably just left me a ticket straight to hell, with her blessing and her loving family to deliver it."

  It still stung, he realized in carefully masked amazement. After all this time it still stung that this woman he'd respected, admired, and yes, even loved, had turned on him at the worst time of his life, and delivered the final blow that de
stroyed what little there had been left of youth and trust in him. It had taken him years to convince himself he didn't care. And more years to stop thinking himself a fool for believing in Mrs. Lockwood in the first place.

  "If you will sit down, please, Mr. Halloran?"

  "I'd rather stand, thanks." Travis sliced a sideways look at Richard. "Wouldn't want anyone to think I planned on staying."

  Richard, still red-faced, glared at the attorney, then shifted his gaze to his sister as if searching for support. She'd said nothing at all from where she sat with her eyes fixed unwaveringly on her lap.

  No, Travis thought, on her hands. Slender hands, with long, graceful fingers that were now laced together so tightly the knuckles were starkly white.

  "Let's get this over with," Travis said suddenly, in a tone of command. Whatever last blow Emily Lockwood wanted to rain down on him from beyond the grave, he didn't want to drag it out. And he told himself firmly it was for his own sake, not Nicki's.

  It seemed interminable. There were bequests to various relatives and to several long-time employees of Lockwood, Incorporated. Then came the house, and Travis barely restrained himself from pacing as the endless list of items went on and on.

  No one, he thought, should have so damn much stuff that it took three days to bestow it when you finally had to admit you couldn't take it with you. Or you shouldn't be so picky about where it all went. One line would do it. House and contents. Three little words, and it could have been over. It was all going to go to Nicki and Richard anyway. Of course, that wouldn't explain why he was here. But then, he wasn't sure he wanted to know why he was here.

  He felt suddenly uneasy, afraid that somehow Emily Lockwood was going to reach out and smash him to bits all over again. Langley read on.

  The will, he thought, was exactly like Emily Lockwood had been: carefully worded, precise and detailed. He'd admired that then, the contrast with his own rather slovenly household, he supposed. And he'd been properly struck with grateful reverence when she had taken an unexpected interest in him.