Perfect (Second Opportunities 2)

"What do you think you know?" Mrs. Stanhope retorted, brows raised.

Julie opened her mouth to tell her, and then hesitated, belatedly remembering that this was an old woman and that Julie actually had no right to destroy her memories of Justin merely so that she'd cease to hate Zack. On the other hand, Justin was already dead, but Zack was still alive. "Look, Mrs. Stanhope, I don't want to hurt you any more than I probably have, and the truth is going to do that."

"The truth can't hurt me," she scoffed.

That mocking tone of Mrs. Stanhope's scraped against Julie's raw nerves and broke her slender thread of control. "Justin killed himself," she said flatly. "He shot himself in the head because he was a homosexual and he couldn't face that. He admitted it to Zack an hour before he killed himself."

The other woman's cold gray eyes never flinched; she simply stared at Julie with a mixture of pity and disdain, then she reached for a framed photograph on the table beside her and held it out. "Look at this," she said. Left with no choice, Julie took the photograph and looked at the fair-haired, smiling youth who was standing at the helm of a sailboat. "That is Justin," Mrs. Stanhope said in a carefully expressionless voice. "Does he look like a homosexual to you?"

"That's a ridiculous question to ask. What a male looks like is no indication of his sexual orientation—"

Julie broke off as Mrs. Stanhope turned on her heel and walked over to a large antique cabinet on the far wall of the room. With one hand on her cane, she bent and opened the door, revealing shelves containing crystal glasses, then she pulled hard on the top shelf and the whole panel swung out in an arc. Behind it, Julie saw the door of a concealed safe, and she watched in a state of inexplicable uneasiness as Mrs. Stanhope turned the dial, opened the safe, and extracted a large brown expandable file tied with an elastic cord. Her face wiped clean of expression, Mrs. Stanhope untied the elastic cord and dropped the file onto the sofa in front of Julie. "Since you won't take my word about what happened, there is the record of the coroner's inquiry into Justin's death and the newspaper reports."

Unwillingly, Julie's eyes dropped toward the papers that had spilled partially out of the folder, and her gaze riveted on the front-page newspaper clipping with a picture of an eighteen-year-old Zack, another of Justin, and a headline that read:

ZACHARY STANHOPE ADMITS SHOOTING BROTHER, JUSTIN

Her hand beginning to tremble uncontrollably, Julie reached down and picked up those clippings that had slid from the folder. According to the newspaper story, Zack had supposedly been in Justin's bedroom, talking to his brother, while examining a gun from Justin's collection, a Remington automatic handgun that Zack thought was unloaded. During the conversation, the gun had fired accidentally, striking Justin in the head and killing him instantly. Julie registered the words she read, but her heart rejected them. Tearing her gaze from the clippings, she glared at Mrs. Stanhope and said, "I don't believe any of this! Newspapers print things that aren't true all the time."

Mrs. Stanhope stared at her, her face coldly impassive as she reached down and extracted a bound transcript from the folder on the sofa and thrust it at Julie. "Then read the truth in his own words."

Julie tore her gaze from the woman's expressionless face and looked at the manuscript cover, but she didn't touch it. She was afraid to. "What is that?"

"The file from the coroner's inquest." Unwillingly, Julie stretched her hands out, took it, and opened the cover. It was all there: Zack's verbatim explanation of the event, taken down and transcribed by a stenographer at the inquest. Zack had said exactly what the newspaper clipping had indicated. When her knees threatened to give out, Julie sank down on the sofa and continued to read; she read until she'd finished the report, then she read newspaper clippings, looking for something, anything, that would explain away the discrepancy between what Zack had told her and what he'd told everyone else.

When she finally dragged her eyes from the file in her lap to Mrs. Stanhope's face, she understood that Zack had either lied to her about the event … or else he'd lied to everyone else under oath. Even so, she struggled to find a way to avoid condemning him for it. Dragging her voice through the knot of emotions in her chest, she said with as much force as she could muster, "I don't know why Zack told me Justin shot himself, but either way it wasn't Zack's fault. According to this file, it was an accident. An accident! He said so—"

"It was no accident!" Mrs. Stanhope bit out, her knuckles turning white as she leaned harder on her cane. "You can't ignore the truth when it's staring you in the face: He lied to you and he lied to everyone else during the inquest!"

"Stop it!" Julie lurched to her feet and threw the file onto the sofa as if it were contaminated. "There's an explanation for it. I know there is. Zack didn't lie to me in Colorado, I'd have known if he was lying, I tell you!" She thought desperately for explanations and came up with a logical one. "Justin did kill himself," she said shakily. "He was gay and he—he admitted it to Zack just before he shot himself, then Zack—Zack took the blame for some reason—maybe so that no one would start looking for motives—"

"You idiot!" Mrs. Stanhope said, but her voice was filled with as much pity as anger. "Justin and Zack had quarreled just before that gun went off. His brother Alex heard the quarrel and so did Foster." Twisting her head toward the butler, she said shortly, "Tell this poor deluded young woman what they were quarreling about."

"They were quarreling over a girl, Miss Mathison!" Foster said unhesitatingly. "Justin had asked Miss Amy Price to the Christmas dance at the country club and Zack had wanted to take her himself. Justin wanted to withdraw the invitation for Zack's sake, but Zack wouldn't have it. He was furious."

Bile rose up in Julie's stomach and she reached for her purse, but she still tried to defend Zack. "I don't believe either of you."

"You prefer to believe a man who you know for a fact either lied to you or to the coroner and the newspapers, is that it?"

"Yes!" Julie snapped, desperate to get out of there. "Good-bye, Mrs. Stanhope." She was walking so quickly that Foster had to trot ahead of her to get to the front door ahead of her to open it.

Her heels clicking sharply on the slate floor of the foyer, Julie was almost to the door, when Mrs. Stanhope's voice called her name. She halted in dread and turned, trying to keep her face blank as she looked at Zack's grandmother, who seemed to have aged two decades in the minute it took to follow her in to the foyer.