Until Proven Guilty - J. A. Jance [69]
I lay my finger across her lips and silenced her. “Then as we walked, or rather, as we ran home, I remembered that I did have a ring buried among my treasures.” I pulled the box from my pocket and opened it. The tiny chip of diamond caught the light and sparkled gamely. “My mother was never married,” I explained; “she was always engaged. And now, from one of the longest engagements in history, this ring is going to be part of one of the shortest.”
Anne took the ring from the box and held it up to the light. “This was your mother’s?”
“Yes.”
She gave the ring back to me and held out her hand so I could place it on her finger. It slipped on as easily as if it had been made for her. “Thank you,” she said. “You couldn’t have given me anything I would have liked more.”
We sat on the couch for a long time without speaking or moving. It was enough to be together, my arm around her shoulder, her hand touching mine. That night there was no need in the touching, no desire. We sat side by side, together and content.
“Happy?” I asked.
“Ummmhm,” was the answer.
“Let’s go to bed,” I said, “before we both fall asleep on the couch.”
“But it’s early,” she objected. It was a mild protest, easily overruled.
We undressed quickly but without urgency. Our bodies met beneath the sheets, her skin cool against my greater warmth. I eased her onto her side so her body nestled like a stacked saucer in my own, my hand resting comfortably on the curve of her breast. “Just let me hold you,” I murmured into her hair.
It couldn’t have been more than eight o’clock, but the previous days of frenetic activity had worn us, fatigued us. Within minutes we both slept. For all the ease of it, we might have been sleeping together like that for years.
Chapter 19
Maybe I should start reading the newspapers first thing in the morning. That way I wouldn’t get caught flat-footed quite so often. Peters brought me a copy and I read it at my desk with him watching from a few feet away. Maxwell Cole’s column pronounced Anne Corley to be a dilettante copper heiress from Arizona.
Max had done some homework. He had dug up a good deal of information. Had Anne Corley not been linked to J. P. Beaumont, I think she would have been pictured sympathetically. Colored by his antipathy for me, however, she became something quite different. Rich, and consequently suspect, Anne Corley was depicted as a character out of a macabre, second-rate movie.
Cole reported as fact that for eleven years, between the ages of eight and nineteen, Anne Corley had been a patient in a mental institution in Arizona. She had been released, only to marry one of the staff psychiatrists, Dr. Milton Corley, a few weeks later. The marriage had caused a storm of controversy and had resulted in Corley’s losing his job, in his being virtually discredited. He had committed suicide three years later, leaving a fortune in life insurance to his twenty-two-year-old widow.
Corley’s money, combined with that already held in trust for Anne as a result of being her parents’ only surviving child, created a formidable wealth. Cole touched on her book, but focused mainly on her wandering the country dropping roses on the caskets of murdered children. It could have been touching. In Cole’s hands, Anne became a morbid eccentric, one whose continued sanity was very much in question.
Trembling with rage, I set the newspaper aside. Anne Corley was not a public figure. What Max had written seemed clearly an invasion of privacy, libelous journalism at its worst. My first thought was for Anne. What if she had purchased a paper and was even now reading it alone? How would she feel, seeing her painful past dragged out to be viewed and discussed by a scandal-hungry audience? That was what Cole was pandering to. He was selling newspapers with lurid entertainment rather than information, and he was doing it at Anne’s expense.
“How much of it is true?” Peters asked.
It took a couple of seconds to comprehend the implications behind Peters’ question. “How the hell should I know?” Angrily I shoved my chair