Chapter 18
Chapter 18
“I’m Sergeant MacIntosh. Mind if I ask you some questions?”
“I don’t even know what just happened,” Emma replied, dazed and exasperated. “Why did you arrest my husband?”
“Because he’s wanted for a wrongful death in Saskatchewan,” the officer explained. “He’ll be transferred back there to face charges.” He watched her carefully while she processed this information.
“Wrongful death? Are you telling me ... he might have killed someone?”
“He never spoke to you about this?”
“No.”
Matthew woke and began to fuss, so Emma bent over the pram, found his soother in the folds of the blanket, and used it to settle him.
The officer’s expression softened. “Is this your baby? With Mr. Baxter?”
“Yes.”
In that moment, Ruth drove up in her car, pulled over at the curb, and got out. She slammed the door shut behind her and ran to Emma. “I came as fast as I could.”
“Did you know about this?”
“Yes,” Ruth replied. “They came to the school this morning looking for Logan, so I told them he was staying with me. I had no way to find you.” She stared at Emma in dismay. “I’m so sorry.”
Emma was floating on waves of shock and denial. “I don’t understand what’s happening. I don’t know what he did.”
“I’m going to need a full statement from you,” Sergeant MacIntosh said. “You’ll have to come to the station for that.”
“Should she have a lawyer?” Ruth asked.
“That’s up to Mrs. Baxter.”
Emma didn’t know what to say. She had no experience with this sort of thing, the machinations of the real world. “I had nothing to do with whatever happened in Saskatchewan. I’ve never even been there, and he never told me anything about anyone’s death.”
“No? Well, I’ll be the one to tell you, then. Your husband is facing a murder charge.”
Emma’s heart began to beat raggedly in her chest. “No. That can’t be right.”
It had to be a mistake. Logan wasn’t perfect, but Emma could never accept that he would kill someone. Intentionally.
“I need to talk to him,” she said. “When can I see him?”
“I’m not sure about that,” Sergeant MacIntosh replied. “First, we’ll need a full statement from you. Can you come to the station now?”
Confused and rattled, Emma couldn’t form words. Her brain wasn’t working properly.
Ruth laid a hand on her shoulder. “I’ll look after Matthew. You go and do what you need to do.”
“All right.” Emma bent over the pram and kissed Matthew on the forehead. Still half-dazed, she followed the policeman to his car.
The next twenty minutes in the back seat of the paddy wagon was like walking slowly out of a thick fog. It gave Emma the time she needed to comprehend the situation: Logan coming to Sable Island and wanting to stay there forever, hidden from the world; Logan growing depressed and irritable when he knew he had to return to the mainland; Logan impatient to return to the seclusion of Sable.
Like a thunderbolt, Emma realized that for most of the past year, she’d been living in a romantic fantasy with a man who’d come to her home with an agenda. But now a treacherous wave was washing her onto the shores of reality.
She’d wanted so badly to be loved. How could she not have seen or felt that Logan was hiding something momentous from her?
Two days later, Emma walked into the city jail. She was taken through a heavy door and down a gray-painted corridor to a cell where Logan was incarcerated.
As soon as he saw her, he stood up from the cot, approached the bars, and fell to his knees, where he rested his forehead on the cement floor and wept inconsolably.
The policeman uneasily backed away and left Emma to look down at her husband, who reached through the cell bars and wrapped his hands around her ankles.
Emma had always been a compassionate soul, but after two days of speculating about what he had done—and what else he might have kept from her—strangely, she felt nothing. Her body was completely numb. Her emotions were dead and flat. All she could do was stand there, waiting for him to gather his composure.
At last, he stopped crying and slowly got to his feet, but with the look of a broken man.
That was the moment Emma was hauled out of the pit of emptiness and felt the first stirrings of heartbreak. And pity. How in the world had Logan come to this? Why hadn’t he trusted her enough to tell her?
“I didn’t think you’d come,” he said, clutching the bars, his nose running, his face wet with tears.
“They wouldn’t let me come until now,” she explained, “and they told me you’re leaving tomorrow.”
Emma had lain awake in bed half the night remembering their summer together—meeting at dawn to gallop on the beaches, the excitement and anticipation of every encounter, and the sharing of ideas, knowledge, and theories about the horses. Most importantly, her first sexual experience with a man. Physically, at least.
“But you can’t leave without telling me what happened,” she said. “Not just in Saskatchewan, but between us. Was any of it real?”
“Of course it was. What do you want to know?” he asked. “I’ll tell you everything.”
It was not an easy question to answer. Of course she wanted to know his side of the story about the death of a dairy farmer, and other sordid details she’d been told, but she needed to know something else first.
“Did you actually love me? Or was it all just a way to escape this?”
“Of course I loved you,” he replied, sounding almost indignant. “And I still love you now. Maybe I was a fool, but after I met you, I thought I had a chance to be happy, that I could start a new life and be a new person. I wanted that more than anything.”
“But that’s not possible for anyone,” she countered. “You can’t escape who you are.”
Logan dropped his gaze to the cement floor. “Obviously not. I see that now. But I couldn’t help wanting it.” After a moment, he shook his head. “How did they ever find me?”
It was a rhetorical question, but Emma provided the answer regardless. “There were wanted posters in the police station, and one of the clerks thought he recognized you at a pub on Argyle Street. You were followed back to Ruth’s house, and the next morning, she was questioned at the school.”
He nodded, accepting the information. Then his bloodshot eyes lifted. His brow was creased with worry. “They’re not accusing you of anything, are they? For harboring a fugitive?”
“No,” she replied. “Ruth explained how you and I met on Sable Island, and I confirmed that with the police. They understand that I was duped.”
He bent his head to rest on the cell bar. “You weren’t duped, Emma. I swear to God, I fell in love with you.”
For a moment, she felt the tug of seduction—the desire to believe that love and passion could conquer all, and that she could find her way back to the bliss of those early days in his arms, in the warm, sandy hollows of Sable. She had trusted him then, but he was different now. And so was she.
“What happened between you and that man?” she asked. “And please tell me the truth. I can’t handle any more lies. Lies would kill this even more dead than it is already.”
Logan bowed his head. “Please don’t say that.”
“Then tell me the truth.”
“All right.” He moved to the cot against the wall and sank onto the thin mattress. “But I hope you’ll give me some credit for honesty if you’re going to hate me forever.”
“Don’t jump to false conclusions,” she said. “Just tell me.”
He took a deep breath, as if to summon courage. “Fine. Here’s the truth. Before I left Saskatchewan, I had an affair with a married woman. It went on for about six months.”
The words hit Emma like gun pellets to the chest. Despite everything—how his behavior over the past month had challenged her patience, and how the discovery of his lies now made her doubt their entire relationship—she still loved him. It wasn’t that long ago that they were passionate and euphoric on their wedding night. Hearing of another woman felt like a terrible betrayal.
“Did you love her?” Emma asked, hearing a tremor of hurt in her voice.
“I suppose I did.” His gaze fell to the floor. “I’m sorry, Emma. You wanted honesty.”
“I did,” she replied.
But the truth, spoken from his own lips, made her sick to her stomach. Her heart clenched, and she writhed with jealousy, but she was angry too.
She steeled her emotions and pushed on. “Tell me the rest. All of it.”
He paused, then spoke in a low monotone, as if he needed to tamp down his shame. “She was the wife of a farmer whose herd I looked after. I guess he figured out what was going on, because he called me one night, late, to come look at one of his cows. He was waiting for me in the barn, and I knew as soon as I saw him that he was fit to be tied. We got into a scuffle, but I managed to pin him down and ... I ... I killed him. I didn’t mean to. I swear to you. I just ... I snapped.”
With a strange absence of feeling, she simply stared at him. “What do you mean, you snapped?”
“I went into a rage ... trying to defend myself ... because I knew he was going to kill me.”
Emma swallowed uneasily. “How did you kill him?”
The police had already told her, but she needed to hear it from him honestly and directly.
Logan kept his gaze fixed on the floor. “I strangled him.”
As she imagined her husband choking the life out of someone, she fought a rising nausea. “So, you’re saying it was self-defense.”
His eyes lifted. “Yes, that’s what I’m going to tell the court.”
“But is it the truth?”
He stared at her with resolve. “Of course it is. I didn’t want to kill him. I didn’t plan it.”
“But his wife says that you did,” she argued. “She says you wanted her to leave her husband and run away with you.”
Logan covered his face with both hands. “I’m not going to lie. I did suggest it once, but I didn’t mean it for real. It was just romantic babble when we were caught up in ... you know ...”
“Caught up in what?” Emma demanded to know. “Go ahead and say it.”
He sighed dejectedly. “The excitement of the affair.” He lowered his hands to his lap. “But that doesn’t mean I actually plotted to murder her husband. He’s the one who called me that night.”
“Why would she say it, then?”
Logan shrugged and spoke helplessly. “I don’t know. She’s probably mad because I took off that night and left her. That was a mistake. I should have told her what happened and called the police.”
Emma rubbed the back of her neck.
“Do you believe me?” Logan asked.
“I don’t know.” Her nausea was still on the rise. “You’ve been lying to me since we met, so it’s not easy to trust you.”
He stood and slowly approached the bars. Emma took a full step back. She didn’t want him to think he could simply reach out, touch her, and have her love and trust return.
“Please don’t give up on me,” he said. “I swear I wanted to tell you, and I figured I would, eventually, but I was so afraid you’d cut me off. And I’m sorry for being so surly lately, but I was afraid of leaving Sable and getting caught—because I knew if that happened, I’d lose you. If it weren’t for the baby, everything would have been fine. We wouldn’t be here right now.”
She shook her head in disbelief. “Are you suggesting that our son spoiled everything? Or that my need to go to a hospital was what caused all this trouble?”
He bowed his head and shook it. “No, I’m sorry. That came out wrong.”
“It’s not my fault you’re in jail,” she said. “I’m not the one who killed a man.”
Thankfully, Logan had the sense not to argue. But he reached through the bars, held out his hands, and urged her to take hold. “Please, Emma ... all I ask is that you stand by me. You could come to Saskatchewan and stay with my sister. Or at least wait for me, because I’d come back to you, I swear.”
She looked down at his outstretched hands—at the familiar lines on his palms that she’d often traced with her fingertips and thought she could read. But in that moment, she felt numb. Her heart was cold and empty, as if it had been gouged out by disappointment after disappointment, and there was nothing left inside. No love, no sorrow, not even any compassion. What had happened to the person she once was?
Oh, she knew exactly what had happened—she’d wanted so badly to feel passion and desire, to love and be loved in return, that she’d let herself fall into a fantasy. Logan wasn’t the man she’d believed he was or wanted him to be. He’d been keeping secrets from the beginning. And if he could hide something as horrendous as manslaughter or murder, what else had he hidden from her? What had she not seen?
This man before her, locked up in jail and holding his hands out to her, was a stranger. She’d been utterly blind.
“Emma?” he asked.
Wrenched from her thoughts, she froze. She did not take hold of his hands.
“I don’t know what my feelings are,” she explained. “Except for confusion and uncertainty. I can’t promise I’ll wait for you. I can’t promise anything. But I’m not going to Saskatchewan. That much I know.”
He slowly withdrew his hands back inside the cell and let his arms fall to his sides.
“I have to go now,” she said.
Logan darted forward. “No, please don’t go ...”
She started walking.
“Can I write to you?” he asked.
She stopped and turned. “Of course. You’re Matthew’s father. You can write to me on Sable Island, because that’s where I’ll be. Because I’ll be taking the next ship home.”
In the end, she walked out of the jail, where a cold rain fell hard and pounded the asphalt in the street. Cars swished through puddles, their windshield wipers whipping back and forth. Emma raised her umbrella and hurried to where Ruth was waiting in the car with Matthew.
As she walked briskly, she tried to imagine what her future might entail. Logan could go to jail for life, or he might be acquitted—but either way, Emma could never regret their relationship, even though it was built on lies. Nor could she hate him. Because how could she possibly hate the man who had given her Matthew?