SUSPICION'S GATE Page 5

  "If you'll just sign these, then…"

  Travis raised an eyebrow at the carefully level tone, but walked over to the chair before the desk and sat down again. He scanned the papers, then lifted his gaze across the desk to the thin man.

  "What about the other arrangements we discussed?"

  Langley picked up a folder from beneath his left elbow. He held it out across the desk. "Right here. I think this will accomplish what you want."

  Travis took the folder and started to open it. Then he stopped. He lifted his head and looked at Langley. The man's expression was the same as always, carefully neutral, but something in his eyes gave Travis the clue. He closed the folder.

  "I see the San Remo grapevine is as effective as ever."

  Langley sat back in his chair. "If you mean have I heard the town's version of what happened fifteen years ago, then yes." He smiled rather wryly. "A great many people took great pains to make sure I heard all about it."

  Travis lifted a brow. "The town's version?"

  Langley propped his elbows on the arms of his chair and laced his fingers in front of him. "If I have learned anything in my limited time here, it is that anything involving the Lockwoods is news."

  Travis smiled, a little grimly. "Headline news."

  "Yes. And the Lockwood interpretation of events is what is usually accepted as fact."

  "Usually?" Travis met the man's steady gaze. "Meaning you're the … exception?"

  "I have," Langley said, "a very logical mind. I do not know the people involved, except superficially. I have no preconceived ideas, nor am I emotionally involved. I prepared Mrs. Lockwood's will, and listened to what little she said. There is only one conclusion I can draw."

  "Oh?"

  "Arthur Conan Doyle said, through Sherlock Holmes, 'When you have eliminated the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth.' I found it impossible to reconcile the given fact of Mrs. Lockwood's words and actions with what I was told about the events surrounding her husband's death. Therefore…"

  He shrugged, as if his conclusion was only an exercise in logic and not a flaunting of an entire town's beliefs. Travis sucked in a deep breath, then blinked, a little stunned by the strength of his own reaction. He didn't even know this man, why should it matter what he believed?

  Because he's the only person in this damned town who doesn't believe the Lockwood version, he told himself. And probably only because of that very thing: Langley didn't know him. If he did, if he'd grown up here, hearing all his life about Travis Halloran, perhaps his logic wouldn't have been quite so crystal clear.

  The why didn't matter, Travis realized suddenly. Only the fact that this man had done what no one else had; looked at the facts and reached a decision that wasn't based on the unsavory reputation of a wild, reckless boy, and the fact that he was the son of the town's drunken nuisance.

  "Thank you," he said quietly.

  Langley looked surprised. "For what? I merely reached the only possible, logical conclusion."

  Travis let out a mirthless chuckle. "For being the only one in this town capable of doing just that."

  And as he signed the papers Langley had drawn up, he tried not to think of the one person in tins town who should have been able to do it, who should have known him well enough to know that what they said was impossible. But she hadn't known it then, when she'd had all the faith of a young girl's heart in him, and she certainly didn't now, when there was nothing of that young girl left.

  It didn't matter that he knew, deep down, that he was asking too much. It didn't matter that he knew he was being unreasonable to want her to turn her back on her own family for him; with Nicole he'd always led with his heart, and his heart didn't want to listen to reason. Not fifteen years ago, and not now.

  Nicki tapped her pencil on the yellow legal pad on her lap, pondering the list she'd begun. With her chair turned away from her desk, she had her feet up on the credenza, staring out the rather grimy window into the yard.

  It was much worse than she'd feared. They were in trouble, much more trouble than she'd realized, until Travis's words had made her take a much closer look. She'd been aghast at what she'd found.

  It was going to take a minor miracle to get them out. She had to restrain herself from tracking down Richard and asking him what the hell he thought he'd been doing while their mother lay dying, but she knew if she confronted him now, she would say things she might regret later. She might be furious at him, he might be the biggest bonehead in the entire world when it came to business, but he was still her brother.

  Bonehead. That's what Travis had said. Bonehead decisions. Well, as much as she hated to admit it, he was right. But then, Travis had never been stupid, no matter what the general opinion of the gossips in town had been.

  She remembered one day when he'd arrived at the house, pulling up in his battered old Mustang and parking it in front of the door as if he had every right, just as he had all year. She'd seen him from her window, and despite being sick and feverish from a nasty early summer cold, she'd run down the stairs to greet him, skidding across the marble floor at the bottom.

  "Hey, slow down!" he'd said, stopping, his brows furrowing as he took in her pajamas and robe. "What's wrong, Nicole?"

  He was the only one, besides her mother, who used her real name. It made her blush, because every time he did she remembered what he'd said when she'd asked him why.

  "Because you're going to be a beautiful woman some day. Nicole will suit you then. Just like Nicki does now."

  She hoped her feverish face hid the rise of color in her cheeks; it must have, because he reached out one hand to touch her forehead.

  "I've got—" she had to break off for the sneeze that shook her.

  "A rotten cold," he finished. "And you're burning up. You should be in bed. And not," he added with a sternness that somehow didn't seem odd from the by then seventeen-year-old Travis to the fourteen-year-old Nicki, "running around with bare feet. Scoot back upstairs."

  "But I—"

  "Do as he says, Nicole," her mother directed from the door of the library. She sounded so odd, Nicki thought, and she was staring at Travis with such a strange look in her eyes… "Go on."

  "But I want to talk to Travis—"

  "Now."

  "Mom—"

  "Go on, Nicole. I have to … talk to your mother for a minute. But I'll come up and see you before I go." His eyes flicked to her mother. "If it's all right."

  Her mother nodded, and Nicki reluctantly started up the stairs. But when Travis followed her mother into the library, curiosity overcame her and she tiptoed back down and crept over to the door.

  "You wanted to see me?"

  Her mother's voice held that odd note of animation she recognized; she heard it whenever she'd done something her mother thought exceptionally clever. And she heard it almost every time her mother talked to Travis, she realized suddenly. Odd that she'd never noticed before; perhaps it was because she couldn't see but could only listen from her spot outside the door.

  "I thought … you might want to see this."

  There was a rustle of paper, and then a small exclamation from her mother.

  "A's and B's!"

  A report card, Nicki realized. And he'd done well, she thought with a rush of pride in him. He'd told her once he'd always done just enough to slide through with Cs, more often Ds. Or, at least, he had until her mother had gotten hold of him. Emily Lockwood had pushed and demanded, and Travis had responded first with anger, then disbelief, and finally, this year, with results.

  And sitting there, crouched outside the library doors, Nicki had remembered the first time Travis had ever talked to her about what her mother was doing. It had been six months after he'd started coming to the house regularly, and he was still in the disbelief stage.

  "I don't know what the he—" He'd broken off, giving her a sideways look.

  "Oh, please," Nicki had said scornfully, "Richard swears in front of me all the time.
"

  "Well, he shouldn't."

  "I'm not a child, you know," she'd said with all the superiority a fourteen-year-old could muster. "You don't know what?"

  It seemed to take him a moment to remember what he'd begun to say. When he did, much of the earlier heat was gone. "I don't know what your mother's up to."

  "What do you mean, 'up to'?"

  "Why she's spending all this time nagging me about school and reading and learning."

  "She thinks you're smart." Nicki had shrugged. "She does the same thing to me."

  "She doesn't nag Richie."

  Nicki had grinned; she knew her brother hated the nickname, but she couldn't help it. "Because he isn't smart. He doesn't have the brains, the drive, or the potential you do, that's what mother says."

  Travis had stared at her. "Why? Why does she care?"

  "Why not?"

  "I'm not— She doesn't— Hell," he'd spat out, his earlier words apparently forgotten, "my own father doesn't give a damn, why should she?"

  Nicki had bit her lip, his bitter words hurting her somewhere deep inside; she knew enough about his home life now to know what Travis had just said was quite probably true.

  "Maybe because Richard doesn't have the brains, the drive, or the potential," she'd said with the sometimes devastating acumen of the young.

  "Well, if she thinks she's going to reform me or something, she's crazy." His voice had taken on that stubborn tone she'd come to know.

  "Oh, quit," she'd said, hating it when he got like that. "Besides, why would she want to reform you if she thinks you're so great the way you are?"

  He'd stared at her, as if still startled by the way this irrepressible girl with the upturned nose faced him down without a qualm. Then he'd grinned.

  "You always manage to turn it around on me, don't you?"

  She'd smiled at him. "You know it's just an act. You try to sound tough, and act like you don't care, but I know better."

  "You," he'd said, reaching out to tap her nose, "know too darned much."

  But he was smiling when he'd said it, and she'd seen that warmth in his eyes that she somehow knew shone only for her. And maybe, like now, when he showed her the results of her efforts, for her mother.

  "I told you that you could do it," her mother said in a triumphant tone that had startled Nicki out of her daydream. "And in only a year!"

  "I know." Travis sounded strange, as if his throat was tight, so that it hurt him to speak. "I… No one ever believed in me like that before…"

  "Ah, Travis, don't ever let anyone tell you you can't do anything you want to. You have it all. Everything I wish Richard—"

  She stopped abruptly, and Nicki knew why. She herself had suffered from that feeling of disloyalty when comparing Richard to Travis and finding her brother so wanting.

  And she knew now why Richard wasn't home yet; she doubted that his report card would measure up to Travis's. But then she had found herself scrambling away and up the stairs to avoid being caught eavesdropping.

  And two months later, her father was dead because of Travis.

  Nicki's mind, recoiling from that painful memory, sent her careening back to the present. A truck was rumbling past the window, vibrating the glass. She glanced out, seeing the full mixer pull out of sight around the corner of the building.

  And then, suddenly, she became aware of something else, a disquieting, shivery feeling of being watched. Only then did she remember that, somewhere near the end of her reverie, she had vaguely registered her office door opening.

  She glanced over her shoulder toward that door, and smothered a small sound of dismay when she saw Carl Weller standing there, an expression that could only be described as lurid on his unshaven face.

  In the privacy of her closed office, preferring the comfort of having her feet up, she hadn't been particularly cautious about her position; Weller's avid gaze on the long, bared length of her legs made her wish she'd worn something other than a dress. It was hardly practical for a cement plant anyway, a dirty, dusty place at best, but she'd had a meeting this morning and hadn't had time to change.

  Then anger spurted through her; she'd be damned if anyone was going to control what she wore or how she sat in her own office. Carefully, giving no evidence at all of haste, she lowered her feet to the floor. She stood up slowly, glaring at the man across the desk. He was about her own height, thin except for a noticeable beer belly, and his eyes were a dull, cold brown that had always bothered her.

  "Have you ever heard of knocking, Mr. Weller?"

  "Hey, I did!" the man cried defensively. "You didn't answer!"

  "Do you know what a closed door means? Did it ever occur to you that there might have been a reason I didn't answer? That perhaps I didn't want to be interrupted?"

  "Hell, you weren't doing anything but staring out the window!"

  Nicki slapped down the legal pad she'd been holding, her anger ballooning. "If I spent half my day like that, I'd still accomplish more than you," she snapped.

  Weller smirked. "Well, I guess it's a good thing I work for your brother instead of you, honey."

  Nicki's blue eyes went icy. "Mr. Weller," she said sweetly, "you call me that again and there won't be enough of you left to be fired."

  Sensing he'd pushed too far, the man backpedaled hastily. "All right, take it easy. I only came to tell you that your brother wants to see you."

  "Fine. He knows the way." She sat down and tugged the keyboard of the P.C. on her desk toward her.

  Weller ran a hand over his thinning, mouse brown hair. "He meant in his office."

  "I don't have time." She tapped a few keys. "If it's not important enough for him to come here, it's not important enough to bother me with."

  Weller looked taken aback, then his lip curled nastily. "I'll tell him you said that, Your Highness."

  Nicki didn't even look up. "You do that."

  Weller turned on his heel and headed for the door. Then his footsteps came to an abrupt halt, and Nicki heard him grunt as if he'd run into something solid. She looked up, and saw Travis blocking the doorway of her office, Weller glaring up at him.

  "Move it, con man."

  Travis lifted an eyebrow as he looked at the grubbily clad man. "Interesting choice of words," he said mildly. "Been listening to Richie?"

  With a snarled grunt, Weller tried to shove his way past Travis. It was like trying to move one of the trucks parked outside; he never budged. Then, with an elaborate bow, he stood aside and let the man pass. Straightening, he propped one shoulder against the doorjamb and crossed his arms casually.

  Slowly, Nicki stood up, barely realizing she was doing so. "What are you doing here?"

  "I heard you and your friend as I was passing by. I thought I'd stop and see if you needed any … pest control."

  So he'd been listening, she thought, wondering how much he'd heard. Or seen. Then she saw his gaze flick from her dress to the credenza she'd had her legs propped on, and she knew he'd seen and heard more than enough. Her chin came up.

  "I don't need any help from you."

  "I can see that. You handled him fine. What I don't see is why the jerk still works here."

  "He's a friend of Richard's. He's been here for years."

  "Oh?" He straightened up and walked into her office. "Richard managed to keep a friend for years?"

  "Yes," she said stiffly. "Something you wouldn't know about."

  His expression never wavered. "You're right. I don't know anything about the kind of friendship that lets you be an ass—a jerk to a friend's sister. Not to mention one of your bosses."

  He sat on the edge of her desk, one foot braced on the floor, the other casually swinging free. Nicki opened her mouth to retort sharply that she knew exactly what kind of friendship he knew about, the kind that let him try to blame a friend for his own deadly mistake. But the words wouldn't come, and she wound up just standing there, glaring at him as she resisted the urge to back away.

  Strangely, he look
ed at her as if he knew exactly what she was thinking, exactly what she wanted to say. As if he still had that instinct that, years ago, had allowed him to coax her deepest thoughts and dreams out into the open. But he only said, "Is he always like that?"

  Nicki sighed. "Yes. A jerk." The words came easily now, as if she'd never suffered that temporary muteness. She sat back down, some of her anger at Weller returning. "I'd fire him in a minute," she admitted, "if it was up to me."

  Travis ran a finger along the edge of the calendar on her desk, riffling the edges of the pages. "I get the feeling it wouldn't be for just his … attitude."

  "No. He's lazy, incompetent and a pig."

  He lifted his head. "But you keep him. Because he's Richard's friend."

  "Yes."

  He studied her for a moment, an odd expression in his eyes, then let out a short, compressed breath. "Loyalty," he said softly. And Nicki knew he wasn't talking about Weller. Or Richard.

  "And I suppose," she said, her voice icy as anger rose in her again, "you feel you deserved loyalty, even after what you did?"

  That odd expression in the gray eyes vanished. "Me? Of course not." He stood up abruptly. "You made it quite clear that I didn't deserve even the loyalty you give to … lazy, incompetent, piggish jerks."

  Despite herself, Nicki winced. She hated the fact that she could still hurt for him, and instinctively struck back. "At least Carl never killed anyone."

  His jaw tightened. Nicki could almost see him fight down the denial that rose to his lips. It surprised her. Was he, at last, going to stop denying it, going to start taking responsibility for the tragedy he'd caused?

  If only he would, she thought suddenly. If he had, in the beginning, it would have made so much difference. He'd been a kid then, a little wild and reckless. It had been an accident, that night his reckless driving had shattered her world. But she could have, she'd realized, forgiven him. In time. But he'd tried to dodge it, to sidestep the blame in the worst possible way, by passing the buck to a friend, and for that she could never forgive him. Especially since that friend had been—

  "Damn it, Nicki, I said I needed to see you now!"