“Don’t you?” Accusation singed his words.
“No…I can’t imagine….” She was so taken aback by his supposition of an accomplice for Mitch that she hadn’t noticed the suspicion in his eyes, the way his arms crossed over his chest, the grim hard angle of his jaw. But now, after the shock of his statement had dissipated, she knew what he was thinking.
“You’re not…you couldn’t be,” she was stammering, but she couldn’t control herself. Slowly she stood up and watched the play of emotions that rampaged over his face. “I don’t believe that you would think I could somehow be involved. You wouldn’t be suggesting anything like that…would you?” Before the anger took hold of her, disbelief and agony tortured her eyes.
“Why don’t you explain…”
“No!” She stamped a bare foot on the thin floor of the gazebo. “I don’t have to explain anything to you….” Tears burned in her eyes, but she tilted her head defiantly in spite of them. As they began to flow slowly down her face, they caught the moonlight in tiny rivers of outrage. “Are you accusing me of embezzlement?” Her voice was as chilling as the wind that rustled the leaves overhead.
“Erin,” he said in a calm voice devoid of emotion. “I just want to know the reason for certain facts….”
“Facts? You mean evidence? I don’t believe it. You don’t have any evidence—you couldn’t, just an overactive and suspicious imagination!”
He tried to interrupt, but she wouldn’t let him. “I wondered, from the beginning, why all the questions about Mitch, why all the vague insinuations and especially why you would look at me the way you did. But I must have been a fool, a damned idiot, not to have put two and two together.” She took a gasp of cold autumn air, only to find that her entire body was quivering with rage and betrayal. “How can you stand there and accuse me, after all that we’ve shared together? Oh, Kane—why?”
“If you could just be reasonable.”
“Reasonable?” she shrieked, and then laughed from the tension that was capturing her in its angry claws. “Reasonable? How can you expect me to be ‘reasonable’ after you ask me to marry you and accuse me of a crime I didn’t commit?”
“Erin, don’t make this any harder than it already is,” he pleaded, and leaned against a beam that supported the roof. “I can’t ignore the facts, as much as I’d like to. I know that you need money—the employee loan application states as much—”
A protesting sound gurgled in her throat, but he ignored it.
“And your ex-husband, Lee Sinclair—” the name came out in a snarl of disapproval “—you loaned him money once, and he’s back in town.”
“How?”
“It doesn’t matter.” He shook his head, and continued in a
flat, dry voice. “And there was the securities key discrepancy. You were one of the people who had access to the bearer bonds that were taken, and suddenly, somehow, you find the money to paint the apartment house and fix it up for the winter. An odd set of circumstances, wouldn’t you say?”
“Exactly that, circumstances,” she commented indignantly.
“That first morning in the bank I found you alone in your office. You had the perfect opportunity….”
“Enough!” she stammered, and started down the two weathered steps of the gazebo. “I’ve heard enough.” She paused for a minute, her hands supporting her weight on the railing. “What I don’t understand is why, if you suspected me from the start, you didn’t tell me—or ask me? Didn’t you have the decency to respect my innocence and ask me about all those ‘facts’?”
“It doesn’t matter, not now,” he said with a rush of enthusiasm. “We can get married, and I’ll find a way to replace the money.” He strode over to her and captured her wrist. “Don’t you see, no more money will be taken, and all the cash that’s missing since Mitch left the bank will be replaced.”
“Just like that?” she asked incredulously. Her eyes narrowed and she surveyed the hand on her wrist suspiciously. “You really think that I was a part of this, don’t you?”
“Erin,” he sighed disconsolately as he tilted her face with his thumb. “I know that you met Mitch on the day of his arraignment. I also know that the money was taken on that day….”
“You bastard!” Before she could think, her free hand arched upward and slapped Kane’s cheek. The loud smack echoed in the night, and Kane’s eyes grew black with suppressed fury. His jaw clenched, and for a moment Erin wondered if he was going to retaliate and hit her.
His voice, suddenly soft, reached out to her. “Erin…”
“Don’t! I don’t want to hear anything more! Not ever again. I’ll…I’ll hand in my resignation tomorrow…and I think it would be best for all of us if you would move out of the apartment as soon as possible. You…you can…have two weeks….” The sobs that she was quietly withholding began to rack her body, and she felt as if she were about to be torn in half by his betrayal. At the pressure from Kane’s hand on her shoulder, she drew away as if wounded and started stumbling toward the house.
“Erin, wait!” Kane ordered, but she ignored his plea. “You can’t resign. If you’re innocent, you can’t resign. It will appear more incriminating!”
Whirling to face him, nearly tripping on the exposed root from a nearby fir tree, she replied bitingly, “I’m quitting. I…I don’t want anything more to do with you…or your bank!”
“Erin, don’t!” He was beside her in a minute, and his features had softened. “Don’t you understand? I need you, I want you…I love you!”
“Love? You don’t have any idea what the word means. And, as for needing and wanting, I think you’re getting them confused with using. Because that’s what you did to me, wasn’t it? You used me—tried to get close to me so that you could ‘look into my darker, private side.’ Isn’t that how you phrased it? I didn’t know what you meant, not at the time, but I know now, don’t I? You wanted to get inside my head and find a way to incriminate me for a crime that I had no part of….”
“Please try and understand….”