Woman in Black by Eileen Goudge Read Free Book Online

teenaged son was asking questions she wasn’t remotely equipped to answer. Her friends stopped returning her calls, and she couldn’t walk from the front entrance of her building to her hired car without being swarmed by the press. It was Vaughn who acted as chief facilitator and bodyguard in those first crazed weeks, fielding the flood of phone calls, helping her dig through old records that might help Gordon’s case, fending off the media, calming the worst of her fears.
    â€œWhy is this happening? Why? ” she railed at one point, after a frightening incident in which she’d come close to being knocked over by a paparazzo as she was climbing out of her car (an action the man had occasion to regret when Vaughn caught up to him, pinning him against the side of the car and nearly wrenching his arm out of its socket). “I’m not a bad person, am I?”
    â€œNo, you’re not a bad person,” Vaughn soothed, putting his arms around her. They were in her apartment, behind closed doors, safeguarded from prying eyes and intrusive reporters, yet her brother seemed the only thing standing between her and the world. “It was just a shit-load of bad luck, that’s all. But you’ll get through this. I promise.” He drew back to look at her, his blue-eyed gaze like a fixed point on a compass in the rugged landscape of his deeply suntanned face. “We’re made of strong stuff, you and me. I’ve survived everything from armed rebels to snakebite, and you’ll survive this.”
    Since then he’d kept in daily contact, the only one besides her son whom she could rely on for total, unquestioning support. The rest of the family was of little help. She’d kept in only sporadic touch through the years with the various aunts, uncles, and cousins, and Gordon’s brothers were a dissolute pair who’d shown more interest in Gordon when he’d been in a position to lend them money. As for her and Gordon’s friends, all but a few had abandoned them. They hadn’t needed a judge or jury to tell them Gordon was guilty; as far as they were concerned, the facts had spoken for themselves. No doubt they questioned, too, how Lila could’ve been so blind to her husband’s misdoings.
    Lila didn’t know which was worse: being judged a fool or an accessory to a crime. The latter would have put her in jail along with Gordon, but at least she wouldn’t have appeared a clueless nincompoop. (Lady Macbeth, whatever else you could say about her, had been nobody’s fool.) In fact, her only crime had been in remaining loyal to her husband. Whatever anyone might think, Lila had been as roundly duped as the rest of the shareholders. Even now, a small part of her—the part that, as a child, had stubbornly clung to the myth of the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus long after she’d been old enough to know better—still believed in Gordon’s claim, in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary, that he was the innocent fall guy. The same man who was presently upstairs putting his affairs in order. Gordon couldn’t even venture as far as the basement, to help pack up the storage bin, without the device on his ankle emitting a silent alarm that would bring the cops running.
    Lila experienced a surge of anger. How could he have done this to her? To Neal? Not to mention all those poor, trusting shareholders, many of whom had lost their life’s savings. And to what end? So she and Gordon could dine in expensive restaurants three nights a week and vacation at four-star resorts? Fill their closets with designer labels and buy a new luxury car every other year? All of which had ended up costing them more than a fortune: It had cost Gordon his freedom and the respect of his peers, the future he should’ve had with her and Neal.
    Had he truly believed that money would buy them happiness? That she’d have loved him any less had he been