Page 78 of Megan's Mate
“I don’t see you out buying any orange blossoms for yourself, girl.”
“Marriage isn’t the answer for everyone. It wasn’t for you.”
“No, I’m too smart to fall into that trap. Maybe you’re like me. Men come and go. Maybe the right one goes with the rest, but we get by, don’t we? Because we know what they’re like, deep down.” Colleen eased closer, her dark eyes fixed on Megan’s face. “We’ve known the worst of them. The selfishness, the cruelty, the lack of honor and ethics. Maybe one steps into our lives for a moment, one who seems different. But we’re too wise, too careful, to take that shaky step. If we live our lives alone, at least we know no man will ever have the power to hurt us.”
“I’m not alone,” Megan said in an unsteady voice.
“No, you have a son. One day he’ll be grown, and if you’ve done a good job, he’ll leave your nest and fly off to make his own.”
Colleen shook her head, and for one moment she looked so unbearably sad that Megan reached out. But the old woman held herself stiff, her head high.
“You’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you escaped the trap of marriage, just as I did. Do you think no one ever asked me? There was one,” Colleen went on, before Megan could speak. “One who nearly lulled me in before I remembered, before I turned him away, before I risked the hell my mother had known.”
Colleen’s mouth thinned at the memory. “He tried to break her in every way, with his rules, his money, his need to own. In the end, he killed her, then he slowly, slowly, went mad. But not with guilt. What ate at him, I think, was the loss of something he’d never been able to fully own. That was why he rid the house of every piece of her and locked himself in his own private purgatory.”
“I’m sorry,” Megan murmured. “I’m so sorry.”
“For me? I’m old, and long past the time to grieve. I learned from my experience, as you learned from yours. Not to trust, never to risk. Let Coco have her orange blossoms; we have our freedom.”
She walked away stiffly, leaving Megan to flounder in a sea of emotion.
Colleen was wrong, she told herself and began to fuss with napkins again. She wasn’t cold and aloof and blocked off from love. Just days ago she’d declared her love. She wasn’t letting Baxter’s shadow darken what she had with Nathaniel.
Oh, but she was. Wearily she leaned against the doorjamb. She was, and she wasn’t sure she could change it. Love and lovemaking didn’t equal commitment. No one knew that better than she. She had loved Baxter fully, vitally. And that was the shadow. Even knowing that what she felt for Nathaniel was fuller, richer, and much, much truer, she couldn’t dispel that doubt.
She would have to think it through, calmly, as soon as she had time. The answer was always there, she assured herself, if you looked for it long enough, carefully enough. All she had to do was process the data.
She tossed down her neatly counted napkins in disgust. What kind of woman was she? she wondered. She was trying to turn emotions into equations, as if they were some sort of code she had to decipher before she could know her own heart.
That was going to stop. She was going to stop. If she couldn’t look into her own heart, it was time to...
Her thoughts trailed off, circled back, swooping down on one errant idea like a hawk on a rabbit.
Oh, God, a code. Leaving the linens in disarray, she flew down the hall to her own bedroom.
Fergus’s book was where she’d left it, lying neatly on the corner of her desk. She snatched it up and began flipping frantically through pages.
It didn’t have to be stock quotes or account numbers, she realized. It didn’t have to be anything as logical as that. The numbers were listed in the back of the book, after dozens of blank sheets—after the final entry Fergus had written. On the day before Bianca died.
Why hadn’t she seen it before? There were no journal entries, no careful checks and balances after that date. Only sheet after blank sheet. Then the numbers, formed in a careful hand.
A message, Megan wondered, something he’d been compelled to write down but hadn’t wanted prying eyes to read. A confession of guilt, perhaps? Or a plea for understanding?
She sat and took several clearing breaths. They were numbers, after all, she reminded herself. There was nothing she couldn’t do with numbers.
An hour passed, then two. As she worked, the desk became littered with discarded slips of paper. Each time she stopped to rest her eyes or her tired brain, she wondered whether she had tumbled into lunacy even thinking she’d found some mysterious code in the back of an old book.
But the idea hooked her, kept her chained to the desk. She heard the blast of a horn as a tour boat passed. The shadows lengthened from afternoon toward evening.
She grew only more determined as each of her efforts failed. She would find the key. However long it took, she would find it.
Something clicked, causing her to stop, sit back and study anew. As if tumblers had fallen into place, she had it. Slowly, painstakingly, she transcribed numbers into letters and let the cryptogram take shape.
The first word to form wasBianca.
“Oh, God,” Megan pressed her hand to her lips. “It’s real.”
Step-by-step she continued, crossing out, changing, advancing letter by letter, word by word. When the excitement began to build in her, she pushed it back. This was an answer she would find only with her mind. Emotions would hurry her, cause mistakes. So she thought of nothing but the logic of the code.
