The Courage Tree - Diane Chamberlain [135]
Marti did not answer, and all Zoe could hear was the sound of Sophie’s breathing through the bedroom door. She looked down at her daughter.
“Did you?” she repeated.
Marti was holding onto the back of the chair. She looked up at her mother with those beautiful, dark-lashed eyes.
“Yes,” she said
As carefully as she could, Zoe stepped off the chair and sat down on its edge. She felt as if she were choking, and it took her a moment to find her breath.
“Why?” She tried to keep her voice even and gentle. “What compelled you to do that? I thought you didn’t even know her, Marti.”
“I didn’t.” Marti sat down on the sofa, avoiding Zoe’s gaze. “I told the jury the truth when I said I didn’t know her. I met her ten, maybe twenty minutes before I…before it happened.”
“I—I don’t understand this,” Zoe said.
Marti’s eyes filled with surprising tears. Zoe had rarely seen her daughter cry, not even during the trial. “Mom…I don’t want to tell you why I did it. I didn’t want you to ever know.”
“Tell me,” Zoe said.
“She called me.” Marti glanced out the window toward the forest. “Tara Ashton. She called me a couple of weeks after Daddy died.”
“Why would she call you?”
“She said she needed to see me. That it was extremely important. I didn’t have a clue what she wanted, but I went over there anyhow. She sounded so insistent.”
Marti had been to Tara Ashton’s house, after all. Zoe thought back to the witnesses who had said they’d seen Marti’s car there, seen her exit the building. Zoe had thought they were mistaken, at best. Liars, at worst. She’d been wrong.
“She let me in,” Marti said. “She was all smiles and…oh, you know what she looked like. Just beautiful and…so damn sure of herself.” Marti looked teary-eyed again, and Zoe felt confused.
“Were you jealous of her?” she asked. “Was that it?”
“Jealous of that bitch?” Marti laughed. “No way.”
“Well, then…what happened?”
Marti looked uncomfortable. She shifted her weight on the sofa, raising her feet to the sheet-covered cushions, then lowering them to the floor again. “We sat in her living room,” she said finally. “She gave me a glass of ginger ale. Ginger ale. I thought that was weird.” Marti wrinkled her nose at her mother. “Who drinks ginger ale? And then she told me that—” Marti looked up at the ceiling and let out her breath. “Oh, Mom,” she said. “I just don’t want to tell you.”
“Tell me what, Marti?” Zoe was bracing herself. She had no idea where Marti’s admission was headed, but she knew it was going to sting.
“She told me that she was pregnant, and that Dad was the baby’s father.”
Zoe caught her breath, then let it out in a laugh. “Well, that’s ridiculous,” she said.
“I thought it was, too,” Marti said hurriedly. “But then she told me that Dad had helped her get the part that you were supposed to get in that movie. She said he got them to write it for a younger woman so she could have it.”
Zoe could barely breathe. She remembered Max coming home from his office one day, telling her that he’d argued with the writer. He’d described how he’d pleaded with the man to keep the character in the script just the way she was—perfect for Zoe—but the writer had wanted to rewrite the part for Tara Ashton. Max had looked genuinely pained over the turn of events. Suddenly, Zoe wondered exactly whose idea it had been to rewrite that role.
“I still don’t believe it,” she said.
“Mom, I do.” Marti leaned forward. “She was going to get DNA testing done on the baby. She had a lock of Dad’s hair…she actually showed it to me.”
Zoe laughed again, less heartily this time. “He hardly had any hair,” she said.
“I know that. But she had this piece of it, and it looked like his, you know, a little curly, the way his hair was in the back, and she said she was going to use it to get DNA testing done, and that it would be all over the papers and all, unless…”
“Unless what?”
“Unless she got some of Dad’s inheritance.”
“Dad’s inheritance?” Zoe shook her head. “Honey, I just don’t believe…”
“Mom, you never believe anything, you know that?