The Whispering Room

She still didn’t know whether to believe that story. But one thing was certain. Lena Saunders had led her to the truth about Johnny.

Her eyes burned with fatigue and unshed tears, but she wouldn’t give in to her emotions. She’d never been the type to wallow in despair, not even in the aftermath of Johnny’s shooting. She had J.D. to think of. She was all he had left.

Down the block, a car door opened and closed, and Evangeline watched as a man crossed the street and started up the sidewalk toward her house. Her gun was on the porch beside her, and she put her hand over the weapon and kept it there until he’d turned up her sidewalk and she recognized who he was.

Nash paused as their gazes met in the twilight.

Then he slowly closed the distance to the porch and climbed the steps.

She turned her head up to him. “How long have you been sitting out there?”

“A while. I wanted to make sure you’d gotten home all right.”

“Don’t your agents give you a report?”

“I guess I wanted to see for myself.” He hesitated. “I’ll leave if you want.”

“Suit yourself. I don’t care one way or the other.”

He still hesitated before finally lowering himself to the step beside her. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“What’s there to talk about? My husband was on the take and I never suspected a thing. All I want to know now is how I could have been so blind.”

“Don’t beat yourself up. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Good thing stupidity’s not a crime.”

He planted his forearms on his thighs and gazed out into the gathering darkness. “For what it’s worth, I understand a little of how you must be feeling. I know what it’s like to be disillusioned about the person you trusted most in the world.”

“You don’t know how I feel right now.”

“I know about betrayal. I was married to a woman for fifteen years,” he said. “I thought we had the perfect marriage. Then one day, out of the blue, she told me she wanted a divorce. She said she hadn’t been happy for a really long time, and she needed to find herself while she still had her youth. That’s actually what she said to me.”

Evangeline turned to stare at him.

He gave her a little sideways smile. “That’s not the worst part. I thought with a little time, a little space, we’d be able to work things out. A few weeks after she left, I found out she was already living with her boss. They’d been having an affair for nearly a year. He was married, too, and he and his wife went through a nasty divorce because of Deb. Both families got dragged through the mud before it was all said and done. The fallout nearly ruined my career. The bureau tends to frown on a messy personal life.”

“How did you get over it?”

“It took a long time and I made a lot of stupid mistakes along the way. But the worst part is what all that did to our daughter. She’s still paying the price for what we put her through.”

“How old is she?”

He turned back to the darkness. “She just turned twenty a couple of months ago. We celebrated her birthday at the Louisiana Correctional Institute in Saint Gabriel.”

Evangeline turned in surprise. “She’s an inmate?”

“For her eighteenth birthday, she and her friends went out partying. They were all well over the legal limit, but Jamie was the one driving that night. She veered into the wrong lane and hit a car head-on. The other driver was killed instantly. Two of the girls in the car with Jamie were critically injured. Jamie suffered a concussion and a broken leg. She was still on crutches when she was convicted of vehicular manslaughter and sentenced to ten years in prison. She’ll be eligible for parole in another two.”

Evangeline had no idea what to say to that. “My brother’s an ex-con. He served nearly seven years in Angola for robbing a convenience store. My parents were devastated. I don’t think they ever got over it.”

“I don’t think I ever will, either,” he said quietly.

They fell silent for the longest time as night settled over the neighborhood. Heat lightning shimmered in the distance as the breeze off the river kicked up. It was the kind of night that always made Evangeline feel lonely and lost.

“I should go,” Nash said beside her. It was almost a question.

She nodded.

“Are you going to be all right?”

She tried to smile. “I guess that’s the upside to having someone knock on your door and tell you your husband is dead. I’ve already survived the worst night of my life. I’ll get through this, too.”

He fished a card from his pocket and laid it on the porch beside her. “This is my number. If you need anything…”

“I won’t. But thanks.”

He rose and walked down the porch steps. When he got to the bottom, she said his name and he turned to glance up at her.

“Why did you really come here tonight?”

He hesitated, glanced out over the yard and then his gaze came back to her. “Because I wanted to see you.”

And then he turned and walked off into the darkness while Evangeline sat hugging her knees, an odd little catch in her chest.