Dale chuckled. “She really went ballistic when I informed her that Mark Cherry and I are to be coexecutors of the trust you’ve established for the kids. Come to think of it, your parents weren’t best pleased, either.”
“You mean they were here?” Royce asked dryly.
Dale’s face went carefully blank. “Yeah, sure, till we knew you were going to be okay.”
“Meaning they didn’t stick around to be sure I came out of surgery all right,” Royce surmised correctly.
It was nothing more than he’d expected. He’d been at odds with his parents for as long as he could remember. Even as a kid he’d felt that he must’ve been switched at birth. He just didn’t seem to have anything in common with his socially prominent, appearance-driven parents. They’d never forgiven him for preferring to work with his hands rather than a calculator, and when his younger brother had eagerly embraced the family banking business, Royce’s fate as “the disappointment” had been sealed.
Dale, bless him, quickly changed the subject. “I want to ask for a postponement of the custody hearing. You’re in no shape to take on two kids by yourself now, anyway, and you know perfectly well that our position’s been iffy from the start.”
Royce nodded in reluctant agreement and rubbed his left hand over his face. His shoulder ached, his head felt heavy, and his leg throbbed above the knee. Shifting in a futile effort to find a more comfortable position on the narrow, lumpy mattress, he said what they both knew. “We’re no closer to proving she’s a threat to the children than we were when we started.”
“She’s crazy smart, that woman,” Dale said with a sigh. “She’s been real careful to make her threats in private to no one but you. The only thing we’ve ever had in our favor is the fact that she’s a proven adulteress.”
“Which means nothing when it comes to custody issues,” Royce said.
“Listen,” Dale said, shifting his chair closer to the bed, “if we could just get one of the kids to testify that Pamela has repeatedly lost her temper with them…”
Royce was shaking his head. Now he stated his position emphatically. “No. Absolutely not. I won’t have my children pressured to testify against their own mother.”
Dale sighed. “Well, Cory’s too young to be believable, and Tammy wouldn’t, anyway.”
“You don’t understand the pressure she lives under, Dale. No one can unless they’ve lived with Pamela. Everything that displeases her, no matter how slight, is a major betrayal to her. That means one emotional, irrational scene after another until your whole life becomes nothing more than a fruitless exercise in trying to please her, to stop the tirade. Eventually you realize that it’s impossible, but you can’t get out and you don’t dare give up. I know. I’m an adult, and after two years I’m still trying to fight my way free. Imagine what it must be like for a child. I tell you the truth, Dale, if Mark and I hadn’t walked in on her and Campo in the act, I’d still be married to that vampire.”
Dale knotted his hands into fists. “I still want to clobber that guy every time I think of him. You built his house, for pity’s sake, and not only does he try to cheat you out of your earnings, he sleeps with your wife—on the living room sofa, no less!”
“And I keep telling you,” Royce said, aware that he was beginning to slur his words, “it was the only way out for me. I can’t be anything but grateful to the creep.”
“Yeah, but if he hadn’t dumped Pamela,” Dale pointed out, “she’d have left the kids with you and beat a path with him to the Mediterranean.”
Royce closed his eyes, a smile quirking one corner of his mouth. “So Claude Campo is smarter than me. He sure wised up faster than I did. Can’t blame the fellow for that.”
“You were a senior in college when you married Pamela,” Dale argued. “You thought you’d nabbed a hot redhead to spend the rest of your life with. How were you to know she was a basket case that was slowly unraveling?”
Royce smiled. Trust Dale to defend him. “Anyway,” Royce said, getting the conversation back on track, “about Tammy. I don’t want anyone pressuring her, not about her mother and not about my fall. You got that?”
Dale nodded. “Sure, sure. Her animosity toward you is nothing more than an attempt to placate and please her mother. That’s what you’ve always said, and seems to me that her recent behavior reinforces it. I mean, she saved your life. If she hadn’t found you and called an ambulance, shock would have….”
“Finished what her mother started,” Royce muttered. To his chagrin, Dale pounced on that unwise statement.
“I knew it!” He came up out of his chair. “You’d never fall down your own deck stairs. She pushed you. The witch pushed you!” He punctuated the air with the jab of one forefinger, then dropped his hands to his waist. “We need a private investigator.”
“No.”
“We’ll punch holes in her alibi, sink her for good.”
Royce struggled up onto his left elbow to make himself understood. “No.”
“But you said—”
“You misunderstood.” Collapsing back onto his pillow, Royce massaged his temples with thumb and forefinger. “I only meant that Pam’s been punishing me for everything that has ever gone wrong in her life. No doubt she believes that if I died it would serve me right. That’s what she’s been teaching my kids ever since the divorce.”
Deflated, Dale turned the armless, molded plastic chair and straddled it. “And they’re too young to know that you divorced their mother because you caught her naked, humping a client in your own home.”
Royce cut his gaze sideways. “Succinctly put.”
Dale sighed and hunched forward, hanging his sharp chin on the edge of the chair back. “So that leaves us right where we’ve always been. Square one.”
“Not exactly,” Royce said, disciplining a yawn. Blinking, he fought off the drug-induced lethargy. “I want you to find a therapist for Tammy. She has to have been traumatized by all this.”
Dale fixed him with that no-nonsense, lawyer glare of his. “Royce, did Tammy see her mother push you? Is that what this is all about?”
“No. And even if she had, I wouldn’t let anyone badger her about it. She needs to talk to someone she can trust, someone neutral. I mean it, Dale, someone neutral. This isn’t part of the case. This isn’t discovery. This is my daughter. She needs help.”
Dale straightened and nodded. “Right. Sorry. I’ll get on it as soon as I leave here. You know, though, that Pamela’s going to fight us on it.”
Royce nodded wearily. “I’m going to ask my doctor and the kid’s pediatrician to recommend it.”
“That’ll help,” Dale said doubtfully.
The door swung open then, and Nurse Gage walked through bearing a green plastic tray. “Dinner.”
Despite his fatigue, Royce’s stomach rumbled and he smiled. “I think I’m hungry enough even for hospital food.”
“I didn’t know anyone got that hungry,” Dale quipped as the nurse slid the tray onto the bed table.
Apparently unamused, she pointed a finger at Dale and said bluntly, “You have been here long enough. He needs to eat, take his medicine and rest.”
Dale’s thin brows arched. With an amused glance at Royce he stood and threw his shoulders back, emphasizing his height. Executing a smart salute, he winked at the diminutive Nurse Gage. “Aye, aye, sarge.”
She barely spared him