He fell silent again, his features troubled and brooding.
Reel noted this and said, “She wasn’t Laura anymore; you realize that, right? She wasn’t your…Juliet anymore.”
“Maybe she never was.”
“Like you said, people can rationalize anything.”
“But I keep thinking that none of this would have happened if I had just walked into the house that night and taken her with me out of Cantrell. But I just drove off to a new life and left her behind. I abandoned her. Or at least she saw it that way. And maybe she was right.”
Reel considered this for a few moments. “You can’t put that burden on your shoulders, Robie. You can’t live someone else’s life for them. Hell, it’s hard enough living your own.”
“I guess,” he said, not sounding convinced.
Reel looked down at her hands. “But what happened to her, well, it was terrible.”
He looked at her in surprise. “So now you’re defending her?”
“No. I would never do that. But I guess I can understand how all this happened. We’re not all created the same. Some are more fragile than others. And you never know which one you’re going to get. Or which among us is going to crack.”
The door opened and Taggert poked her head in.
“You guys ready?”
“Ready?” said Robie. “For what?”
“To go see your dad.”
Chapter
79
THEY WERE DRIVEN over in a transport vehicle to accommodate Reel’s wheelchair. As soon as they entered the foyer of the Willows, Robie received a shock nearly equal to that of seeing his father standing under the moonlight holding the gun he’d just used to shoot his wife.
Blue Man was emerging from the front room with Dan Robie.
As always, Blue Man was dressed in a suit and tie, but apparently in deference to his current location, and taking in the heat and humidity, he was wearing, of all things, seersucker.
“What are you doing here?” asked Robie.
Reel just looked on in amazement from her wheelchair.
“Briefing your father and getting debriefed in return. Enlightening. Quite enlightening. I think I’ll leave you to it. I’ll be at the airport. You two are riding back with me. Until then, I have one more person to visit.”
“Who?” demanded Reel.
“Little Bill Faulconer, I believe he’s called. We can always use talented hackers. Even more so now that the NSA’s actions have been uncovered. One agency’s loss is another agency’s gain.”
And then Blue Man was gone as quickly as he had appeared.
Robie looked at his father. Dan Robie looked like he had aged ten years. The posture wasn’t as straight, the shoulders sagged, the hair seemed less thick, the man’s energy level was not as robust.
And who could blame him?
“How are you two doing?” Dan said quietly.
Reel said, “I’ll be doing better when I can ditch the wheels.”
Dan looked at his son. “And you?”
“I’m okay.”
“Let’s go in here.”
Dan led them back into the front room. Robie rolled Reel into the room and then sat in a chair next to her and across from his father.
“Your colleague filled me in on some things,” said Dan.
“That is stunning. And possibly illegal,” noted Robie.
“Nothin’ classified, he assured me,” said Dan. “But enough to let me know what you’ve been up to generally, Will.” He looked at Reel. “Both of you.”
Robie could only gape at his father while Reel looked just as surprised but found her voice. “Were you surprised at what your son is doing?”
“I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t be sure. It’s why I threatened him. Things looked so fishy. And her story made no sense. She was drinkin’ with him? Why? But I never thought that she killed the man.”
“She planted the evidence against you at the crime scene. She wanted you to be arrested and convicted of the murder.”
“I know that now,” said Dan. “It’s just hard to process that the woman I had a child with…”
“But the Range Rover was seen near where Clancy was killed,” Robie pointed out. “They thought it was you driving but it was actually Victoria.”
“At first I thought the witnesses had to be mistaken. Or else they had seen Clancy’s Rover and not mine. I must’ve been asleep when she came back and took the truck. But I never put that together, principally because I did not know the woman I had married was…what she turned out to be.”