Wakefield College 01 - Where It May Lead by Janice Kay Johnson Read Free Book Online Page A

long-ago murder.
    Damn it, had he really not known Mitchell King very well? For
some reason Troy kept thinking back to their conversation. He hadn’t felt
dissatisfaction then, but he suspected now that Dad had been holding back. It
would be like him to be reticent if, say, he hadn’t liked King. Troy’s easygoing
father never wanted to admit he didn’t like someone.
    Troy grabbed fast-food meals more often than he should, but
tonight he made the decision to stop at the grocery store—air-conditioned, thank
God—and then grill a steak and make a salad once he got home. He cleaned the
kitchen then called his mother, as he did a lot of nights when he wasn’t
stopping by the house to make sure she was all right.
    But he dreaded these phone calls.
    This conversation was typical.
    He asked how she was.
    “Fine.” She sounded vaguely surprised he’d asked. “Just
fine.”
    Of course she was fine. She’d never admit to anything else even
when he heard tears in her voice.
    Had she gone anywhere today? Why no, but she’d had to water all
the plants on the patio, you know, and that took forever.
    Oh, the time capsule was being opened this weekend? Goodness,
she’d forgotten all about it.
    She didn’t want to talk about it any more than she had the last
time he mentioned the weekend activities.
    Troy could never pin her down. There was a lot she didn’t want
to talk about, including how she felt or the fact that she scarcely left the
house. The weight she’d lost since Dad died wasn’t open to discussion. Sometimes
he wasn’t sure she’d notice if he quit calling altogether. For a while there,
he’d been doing her grocery shopping, but once she discovered one of the stores
delivered, she’d opted into the service. Mainly, Troy suspected, so he couldn’t
critique what—or how little—she ate.
    And, hell, maybe he wasn’t handling her grief well. Probably
because he was male, he’d always been closer to Dad than he was to her. Whether
Mom might have found it more acceptable to lean on a daughter than a son, he
didn’t know. What he did know was that he was all she had, whether she liked it
or not.
    There were days he wanted to give up, but he knew he’d never
let himself. He understood his mother’s devastation. She and Dad hadn’t spent a
night apart from their wedding day on. They’d had the kind of marriage he
wanted. The love between his parents had been so palpable, he’d sometimes been
embarrassed by it when he was a kid. Nobody else’s parents looked at each other
the way his mom and dad did. He’d never been able to imagine one of them without
the other. None of them had expected something so sudden and shocking. There
wasn’t even time to say goodbye.
    And yeah, there was a secret part of him that resented her
determination to make the grief exclusive to her. She didn’t want to hear that
he hurt, too.
    Troy had no trouble imagining her stare of complete
incomprehension if he tried to say, “I feel like I’ve lost my mother, too.”
    He gave brief thought to saying, I met a
woman who is special, but if that didn’t get a rise he didn’t want to
feel the disappointment. It was too soon anyway, he told himself. He hardly knew
Madison Laclaire.
    Although, damn, he did like what he knew.
    * * *
    A STEADY STREAM of alumni arrived
from early Friday morning on to pick up the schedule of events that included a
map of the wineries on this afternoon’s tour and directions to the golf course
that hadn’t existed when they were students here. Madison had had tables set up
beneath the trees outside Mem, one for check-in and the other holding a coffee
urn and pitchers of lemonade. The day’s heat was already making itself felt, but
the huge old trees and the velvet green lawn, still slightly damp from last
night’s sprinklers, at least gave an illusion of cool.
    Senator Haywood was an early arrival. Rather than tasting wine,
he would be speaking to an upper level political science class that