Confessing to the Cowboy - By Carla Cassidy Page 0,45
use another scoop or something. Hell, I might just as well stay home and make my own damn nasty coffee if yours isn’t going to get any better than this.”
Mary nodded to Cameron and smiled at George. “I’ll try to remember to add an extra scoop when I make the next pot,” she replied. She left the old man and gestured for Ginger, one of the other waitresses working, to take her place.
As she approached Cameron, her gaze shot to the manila folder he carried and the smile that had curved her lips slowly faded.
“Can we talk privately?” he asked.
He saw her inhale a deep inward breath as if for courage and then she nodded and motioned him toward her back quarters. Thankfully Cameron knew Matt would have already left for school and they would be alone for this discussion.
Everything he had learned from the internet and by talking to the authorities in California the day before had created numerous questions that needed answers. Somehow he had to sort out the confusing mess she’d handed to him when she’d confessed to her husband’s murder.
When they reached her living room she turned to look at him, her blue eyes widened with obvious fear. “Mary, don’t look at me that way,” he said softly. “I’m not here to arrest you. I’m here to tell you that you didn’t kill your husband, that according to everything I’ve learned, Jason McKnight is still very much alive and well.”
Mary gasped in astonishment, her heart pounding a thousand beats a minute as she stared at Cameron in disbelief. She shook her head and back away from him. “I was there, Cameron. I saw him lying on the floor, I know how hard I hit him. Again and again I hit him with that fire poker.”
“But did you check his pulse before you ran? Did you see if he was still breathing? Or did you just assume he was dead and take off?” Cameron motioned her to the small kitchen table in the corner of the room.
She stared at him for a long moment and then moved to the table and sank down into a chair. After shrugging out of his jacket and hanging it on the back of the chair, he sat next to her. She was acutely aware of his familiar woody-scented cologne and the body heat that radiated from him.
It was a single sensory sensation to cling to while the entire world whirled and shifted beneath her feet. Jason alive? Was it possible?
Had he still been alive when she’d packed the clothes for herself and her son? Had he still been breathing when she’d grabbed his wallet from his pants pocket and taken what money was there? Had he been conscious when she’d slammed out of the front door, running for her life and for her son’s life?
“I spent all day yesterday and most of last night on the internet and on the phone, trying to learn all that I could about the murder of Jason McKnight,” Cameron said as he placed the manila folder of papers in the center of the table. “And what I discovered is that there was no body, there was no investigation and there was no murder.”
She stared at his lips, as if afraid if she didn’t see them forming the words she wouldn’t understand what he was saying. “I...I don’t understand.”
Cameron opened the folder and pulled out what was obviously a printout from a news page from the San Francisco Examiner newspaper.
He shoved it toward her and she picked it up to see that it was dated on the day after she’d fled their home believing that she’d beaten Jason to death. Financial Wizard and Philanthropist Attacked in Park, the headline read.
The story indicated that Jason McKnight had been beaten and robbed in a neighborhood park near their home by an unidentified masked man. He’d sustained substantial injuries but was listed by the hospital in serious but stable condition.
Mary looked up from the article to Cameron. “But it’s a lie. He didn’t get those injuries from a robbery. I gave them to him. Why would he lie about the attack?” A million thoughts raced through her mind but the one that kept surfacing to the forefront was the utter joy in the realization that she hadn’t killed him, that she wasn’t a murderer after all.
She wasn’t going to go to jail. She wasn’t going to lose Matt. She’d be here with him to see him grow into the