The Stranger's Sin by Darlene Gardner Page A

attracted to him.
    Who was she trying to fool? One of the reasons she’dasked him to team up with her had been that she was already attracted to him. Far too much.
    “I only said what I did to get Ms. Heffinger to help us,” she explained. “She wouldn’t have helped if I told her Mandy owed me money.”
    He stuck his hands in the pockets of his shorts, not looking at her as they weaved through the burgeoning crowd. Most of the women they passed, and quite a few of the men, gave him second looks. She thought it was mostly because they could tell from his carriage he was a man of substance.
    Fear that he’d discover her true motives wasn’t paramount in her mind, she realized. She was afraid of him thinking poorly of her. It was a hell of a thing, but there it was.
    “It made more sense to tell her why you were looking for Mandy,” Kelly continued. “Your story’s more sympathetic.”
    He said nothing. The easy camaraderie of the morning had vanished as completely as the smoke from a barbecue grill.
    A half dozen food vendors had set up around a flat, grassy area populated with portable tables and chairs. “I need to get to work as soon as we get back so how about an early lunch?” Chase said as they approached the area. “I’ll buy.”
    “That’s not necessary,” Kelly said.
    “I thought you were short on cash.” The inflection in his voice hinted he no longer believed that was the case, doubt she’d brought on herself. He was both right and wrong. Mandy hadn’t been the one to clean her out hersavings account, but the money Kelly had withdrawn was disappearing fast.
    “I am a little short,” she said.
    “Then I’ll treat.”
    After they ordered, she followed him to a table where he set down their tray of food. The silence between them was so pronounced, the popping of their soda tops sounded like gunfire. He bit into his cheeseburger, but she ignored her chicken sandwich, still chewing on her lie.
    The lie that had slipped from her as easily as air from her lungs. The lie that met with his disapproval. But couldn’t he see that all lies weren’t the same, that there were times when lying was necessary? At one period in her life, she’d viewed them as survival tools.
    “Lying isn’t always wrong, you know,” she said.
    He set down his burger on his paper plate and looked her full in the face for the first time since they’d left Helene Heffinger. “How so?”
    She fidgeted, picked up her soda can, put it down without taking a drink. How could she make him understand? “What would you say if a woman asked if her jeans made her look fat?”
    He folded his hands over his chest, the line of his mouth as uncompromising as his posture. “If she’s asking, she already knows they make her look fat.”
    She sighed. “Then what about a lie to protect the innocent?”
    He gave a quick shake of his head. “I’m not following.”
    Like him, she didn’t touch her food. She was too busy concentrating on a way to sway Chase from his rigid view of the world. She slowly came up with a scenarioto illustrate her point. “What if your dad was arrested for murder?”
    “Never happen,” he said quickly. “My dad’s not capable of hurting anyone.”
    “You’re sure of that?”
    His eyes narrowed. “Positive.”
    “Then what if it was a case of mistaken identity? Your dad tells the cops he’s innocent, but they insist they have the right guy.” She kept on, even though the situation was uncomfortably close to her personal catastrophe, hoping to get Chase to see things in a different light. “If you say your dad was with you at the time of the murder, he goes free and nobody knows you lied.”
    “I’d know.”
    She felt her jaw drop. “You’d let your dad go to prison?”
    “I’d tell the truth and then try like hell to dig up proof that he was innocent.”
    Chase had far too much faith in the truth. The facts hadn’t kept Kelly out of jail. “In my world, everything isn’t so clear cut.