Perfect Partners

one side and thereby lessen the impact of the teak board Copeland wielded.
    “Someone left some old horse blankets behind,” Letty said, looking past Joel into the stall.
    Joel glanced down at the blankets where he had been lying with Diana that night. Nothing had changed. Even the damned blankets were still here. A surge of uneasiness rose like bile in his gut.
    He should never have come back here today. Not with Letty.
    “We’ve seen enough.” Joel grabbed Letty’s wrist, intending to start back to the Jeep.
    “Wait, Joel. I want to look around some more.”
    “I don’t.”
    Letty glanced at him, eyes widening with surprise at his tone. “Joel? What’s wrong?”
    “Nothing, damn it.” Joel tried to school his roiling emotions. He could hardly explain that this was where he had brought Diana the night Victor Copeland discovered them. Nor did he want to talk about the peculiar way his stomach was twisting as the memories cascaded through his mind. He should never have come back here, Joel thought again.
    Letty was watching him with anxious sympathy. “Maybe it’s time you told me what you meant about Copeland killing your father.”
    “Yeah, maybe it’s time I did.” Joel looked down at her. “You’re probably going to think I’m nuts. I’ve got no proof. No witnesses. Nothing to go on except my own instincts.”
    Letty put her fingers gently on his arm. “Tell me everything. Right from the beginning.”
    “You know most of it. I was seeing Diana Copeland. Her father didn’t know about us. She said she wanted to wait to tell him. We both knew he wasn’t going to like the idea of his daughter marrying me. I was getting impatient, though. I told her if she wouldn’t do it, I’d tell him myself. She got really upset.”
    Letty frowned. “Upset?”
    “She started crying. Made me promise not to say anything to Copeland until after she’d gone back to college in the fall. I don’t know what the delay was supposed to accomplish. It was just a stalling tactic as far as I was concerned. Hell, I was trying to get her out from under his thumb. She was always telling me how domineering he was.”
    “Sounds as if she was simply afraid to tell him about you and was biding her time.”
    Joel lifted one shoulder in a negligent shrug. “Maybe. More likely she didn’t really want to marry me. She just liked the thrill of fooling around with a guy she knew her father would never tolerate. In the end our luck ran out. Copeland caught us together.”
    “Copeland told me that much. He said he was furious.”
    “He was. When Victor Copeland loses his temper, he goes kind of crazy. He’s a wild man.” Joel decided there was no point in going into the details. “He fired me, of course. Told me to get out of town.”
    “Did you agree to go?”
    Joel exhaled slowly. “I was more than happy to leave. I asked Diana one more time to go with me, and she had hysterics. Said she couldn’t possibly go with me. Wanted me to understand that this wasn’t what she had planned.”
    “She was scared. Panicked by a choice she was not prepared to make. She was just a young woman at the time.”
    “Don’t kid yourself. She knew what she was doing.” Joel realized he was clenching his jaw. His dentist had told him six months ago he had to stop doing that. He forced himself to relax the muscles of his neck and shoulders. “To make a long story short, I went home and went to bed. It was two o’clock in the morning, so I didn’t wake Dad to tell him what had happened. I figured the next day would be soon enough to give him the bad news.”
    “What happened the next day?”
    “Dad left for work early that morning, before I got up. I spent the day packing my stuff. When he came home after work, he was very, very angry. I’d never seen him like that. Said Copeland had just fired him. He said that he had lost his job, that he was too old to find another one, and that his life was ruined.”
    Letty looked at him with an aching sympathy in her eyes. “Copeland fired your father? Because of what you’d done?”
    “Right. Or as Dad put it, because I didn’t have enough sense to keep my pants zipped around Diana Copeland.” Joel ran his fingers through his damp hair. The old tight feeling deep inside was getting bad. He could feel himself growing tense and twisted like a spring. Usually it got like this only late at night. Usually he could run it off.
    But today there did not seem to be anyplace to run.
    “Joel,