Page 86 of Pieces of Her (Andrea Oliver 1)

The front door opened and closed. She felt the sound reverberate like a knife to her heart. She had to part her lips again to take in breath. She was torn between relief to have him gone and fear that she would never see him again.

“I’m sorry Nick is such an ass,” Jasper told Barlow. “But he does have a point. We can’t keep doing this. The answers are not going to change.”

Barlow said, “This is an active investigation. The people who orchestrated the Oslo assassination still have Dr. Maplecroft.”

“Which is a tragedy,” Jasper said. “However, there’s nothing my family can do about it.”

Barlow said, “The ransom note for Dr. Maplecroft asked for an admission of guilt from your father’s company. They blame him for Robert Juneau’s murderous spree.”

“It’s the family’s company.” Jasper had been sensitive about this since taking over last year. “The kidnappers also asked for one million dollars, which is preposterous. We can’t take responsibility for the actions of a madman. Do you know how many homes Queller Healthcare runs? Just in the Bay Area?”

“Fifteen,” Andrew answered, but only Jane heard him.

Barlow said, “The kidnappers are calling themselves the Army of the Changing World. You’ve never heard of them?”

Both Jane and Andrew shook their heads.

Across the room, Danberry closed the fallboard on the piano.

Jane felt her heart lurch. The ivory would yellow without sunlight.

Jasper picked up on her distress. He asked her, “Shouldn’t that be up?”

She shook her head. Nick would tell her to let the keys yellow. To skip practice. To stop pushing herself so hard. Martin could not punish her from the grave.

“Major Queller?” Barlow was waiting. “Have you heard of the Army of the—”

“Of course not.” Jasper edged close to losing his cool, but brought himself back quickly. “I don’t have to tell you how damaging those lies are to the company. We were meant to go public this week. We’ve got some very powerful investors who are getting very antsy about this mess. The charges the kidnappers made are ludicrous. We don’t torture sick people, for Chrissakes. This isn’t Soviet Russia.”

Danberry tried, “Major Queller—”

“My father was a good man,” Jasper insisted. “He made some controversial statements, I’ll admit, but he always had the good of the family, the good of the country, in his mind. He was a patriot. His mission in life was to serve others, and that’s what got him killed.”

“No one here is disagreeing with that.”

“Look.” Jasper moderated his tone. “Laura Juneau obviously had a screw loose. We may never know why she—”

“The why is pretty clear.” Andrew spoke quietly, but they were all listening. “Robert Juneau was kicked out of half a dozen Queller group homes. He should’ve been hospitalized, but there was no hospital to go to. You can say the system failed him, but we’re the system, Jasper. Queller is the system. Ergo—”

“Ergo, shut the hell up, Andy.” He glared at Andrew, fire in his eyes. “The company could be ruined by this idiotic bullshit. The investors could pull out completely. Do you understand that?”

“I need some air.” Jane stood up. Andrew and Barlow did the same. She felt dizzy. Her stomach flipped. She had to look down at the floor as she walked away. Her boots might as well have been crossing a spinning wheel. She wanted to go to the bathroom and throw up or cry or just sit there, alone, and try to figure out what was happening.

Where had Nick gone?

Was he mad at Jane? Had she made a mistake? Had she been silent when Nick wanted her to defend him? Would he be angry? Would he shut her out again?

Jane couldn’t be shut out again. She couldn’t take it. Not now.

Not when she was carrying his child.

Instead of going into the bathroom or stopping in the kitchen to leave a desperate message on Nick’s answering machine, she walked to the back of the house and went outside.

She stood on the patio with her eyes closed and tried to breathe. The fresh air made her feel like the band around her chest was loosening. She looked up at the cloudy sky. She could see a tiny sliver of sun behind the Golden Gate Bridge. Morning fog still laced the Marin Headlands. There was a chill in the air, but Jane didn’t want to go back inside for her sweater.

She saw signs on the wrought iron table that her mother had been here: Annette’s lipstick-stained teacup, a full ashtray, the newspaper held down by a cut glass paperweight.

Jane’s eyes scanned the front page of the Chronicle, though she knew the ransom letter by heart. Nick had bragged about its cleverness, even as Jane worried that it made them sound like evil super villains in a cartoon—