Dying For Revenge (The Lady Doc Murders Book 1)

by Barbara Golder

  She started to turn away, and I spoke rapidly, knowing it was now or never.

  “I know.” She jerked around, looking at me again, brows furrowed.

  “What did you say?”

  At least I had her attention. She leaned on the door, no longer threatening to close it, but made no offer to ask me in. I felt my own sweat trickle between my shoulder blades.

  “I said I’m sorry. I know I ruined your life. I meant to. It was wrong. I want to make it right.”

  There. I’d said it. Not as hard as I had thought.

  “Go on.”

  She was interested but still cautious, head cocked, eyes narrowed. And still not inviting me in. Fair enough.

  “I want to buy your house. For your asking price. My lawyer’s working on it.”

  Relief flooded her face, but she caught herself, evening out her features before she spoke again. “What’s in it for you?”

  I shrugged. “A house, I guess. And I’ll need someone to take care of it for me, so I thought you might want the job. I can’t just leave it empty, and I’m not coming back here.” I realized as I said it that it was true. This place was no longer my home, and it was no longer my prison, either. I was free to go, and go I would. “Look, I can’t really make up for all I put you through these past months. It’s just that…” I started to explain, then stopped when I realized it wasn’t important. Kiki wouldn’t understand, and wouldn’t care, and I didn’t need to be making excuses. An apology with excuses wasn’t much of an apology.

  Kiki was still struggling mentally to catch up with me. I guess it isn’t every day that your worst enemy rides in on a white horse to save the day.

  “You’re buying my house? And you want me to be the caretaker?”

  I sighed. “I do. I’ll buy your house at your asking price. Your first one.” I knew she’d had to cut the price several times; the market was slow. “That will give you all the equity you have in it and profit besides. I’ll hire you as caretaker for ten years. You live here as part of the deal. That will give you time to raise the boys right here; in ten years they’ll be in college. If something happens that makes you want to leave before then, you can, but you don’t have to. If things change and you want to buy the house back, I’ll sell it back for what I paid for it, and I’ll carry the note if you need me to. You don’t have to move. Stop packing.”

  “Is this a joke?”

  I didn’t blame her. In her shoes, I wouldn’t believe me, either. As a matter of fact, in my own shoes, I wasn’t entirely sure I believed me. But I was serious, and I told her so, handing her Rick Glass’s card.

  “Give my lawyer a call. He’s working on the papers. He’s expecting to hear from you.”

  Kiki looked as though she couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry. Crying won out. It usually does. I stood there in the heat, uncomfortable as much from the tears that rolled down her cheeks as from the damp silk shirt that clung to my back. I began to realize how helpless men feel at a woman’s tears. I made a mental note to apologize to Connor for the times I’d cried on his shoulder.

  Southern breeding will prevail, though, and Kiki composed herself enough to thank me through sniffles. She wiped her face with the hem of her shirt, cleared her throat, and invited me in.

  “The place is a mess, but I can get you a cold drink. A beer. Wine. Something.” She opened the door wider, and stood back.

  I’d been brave enough for one day, I decided. I shook my head.

  “I don’t think so, Kiki. Not today. I’d best not, but thanks. I’ve still got another errand to run, and I’m flying home tonight.”

  Home. It came out naturally. Home. I’d never thought of Telluride as home.

  She nodded, in understanding as much as in gratitude. I doubt she had any more desire to spend time with me than I did with her.

  *********

  My own home was only about a mile from Kiki’s waterfront mansion. I pulled into the drive, unprepared for the emotions that gripped me. Unprepared because I had spent so much time pushing memories away. Now I stood in the driveway looking up at the very embodiment of them. My tears trickled down, and I made no effort to wipe them away. Better to get them out, once and for all.

  I looked around the yard. Monroe had always kept it up well, and his attention hadn’t slipped even without John’s watchful eye to keep him in line. The bougainvillea arbor over the brick entryway was clipped and flourishing. I smiled, remembering that it was that arbor that finally convinced John that his weekend gardening skills were not enough for this lush and formal yard. He’d done battle with the overgrown vine, cutting overgrown shoots and wrestling invading Virginia creeper in an effort to make it presentable for the housewarming party we had planned just after we moved in. As he cut one branch, a second snapped back, catching him in the face, narrowly missing his precious, beautiful surgeon’s eyes.

  I’d tidied the cut and confiscated the trimmers, and Monroe had come into our lives the very next week. He tended the yard with the love of a father for his children, and it flourished. And even though John wasn’t the one personally responsible, he prided himself in the perfect lawn, the neat hedges, the arbor, the rose garden, the gardenias under our bedroom window, the pond lilies in the water garden out back.

  I touched a fuchsia blossom as I put the key into the door and opened it. The entryway smelled of oil soap, the carved mahogany hall tree that had been a birthday gift from John empty of hats and coats and just-collected mail. A clue that no one lived here. My house had never been this neat. It had been strewn with the detritus of life: cat hairs and dog bones, schoolbooks and toys, stacks of books and magazines. The never-ending series of maids and houseguests for hire had not been able to keep up with it.

  Afternoon sun filtered through the living room drapes, mottling the oriental rug: a wedding gift from one of John’s aunts who was breaking up housekeeping and wanted to keep it in the family, and the mate to the one in my office in Telluride. The bookshelves that surrounded the fireplace were empty, and I could see the odd board that marked a repair John and Luke had made one summer afternoon, when my habit of stacking books two and three deep caused one of the shelves to collapse.

  I moved through the arched doorway into the dining room. I ran my hand over the table, remembering all the family dinners here. John and I had insisted that everyone be home for dinner, and we all sat around the big table together. John’s neurosurgical practice often kept him away, but I’d keep him a plate, and we’d sit together in the candlelight as he ate, exchanging stories of our days.

  “I miss you.” I said softly.

  And so it went. I walked through every room in the house, recalling the joys and sorrows of living there, the friends and the family who had shared our home and our lives together. The house was unbearably empty, sterile, holding only furniture in showcase perfect order with none of the little things that made it a home. No misplaced shoes. No childish drawings. No thrift-store treasures borne home by my children for birthdays or anniversaries or “just because I love you, Mommy and Daddy.” I used to get angry with John because he hoarded everything, adding to the inevitable clutter that comes from six kids, two parents, and assorted others sharing the same living space. Now I missed it all.

  “John, you’ve got to set a better example,” I’d chide him, especially when trying to make order out of the room Adam and Seth shared. It was a close call among the three of them who was the messiest.

  “Mom, I can find things if they’re on the floor. The only time I lose them is when you clean up,” Adam, in particular, would say.

  “It’s mostly Adam’s junk,” Seth would counter.

  And John would make it all worse with his own rationalization. “Tactile memory, Jane,” he’d say. “I can’t remember anything on my own. But if I have something to hold in my hand, it all comes back. This isn’t junk, it’s my peripheral brain.” And then he’d kiss me.

  I’d never understood until now. This house, the furniture in it, the
very walls reminded me of John, and I could feel his presence almost as close as it had been when he was alive and we shared this place together. I felt his arms around me, his breath on my neck, his hand in mine. Tactile memory. Not my peripheral brain. My peripheral heart.

  *********

  He looked at the clipping for the thousandth time, folded it carefully and put it, creased and smudged, back into the breast pocket of his starched, white shirt. He noticed that young men today did not wear such stiff shirts, but it was his habit from long ago, when starching a shirt kept it cleaner, more presentable, longer. Laundry was hard in those days, and he’d wanted to spare his new wife the trouble of so much washing, so much ironing. She had worked as hard as he did, and for so little. These days it was easy. She sent his shirts to the laundry in town, and they came back, stiff as a board. When he picked them up, the girl behind the counter invariably remarked.

  “Isn’t that uncomfortable?” she’d ask. “There is so much starch. It's almost like wood.”

  No, not uncomfortable. Familiar. Reassuring. A nice thing in one’s old age, like a warm blanket on a cold night. And this was a nice place to live, not like Hungary had been in his youth under the Communists. He had learned quickly to lie, to hide, to submit his actions to the authorities. Guile and deceit and selfishness were a way of life, but he’d managed to keep his heart true. True to his country, his faith, his wife. Not easy when everything around him was trying to rip it away. Not easy when it took almost total devotion to selfish needs just to get by, day by day. It took a strong man to survive.

  Or woman. His wife was as strong as they came, deceptive because she was so small. So delicate when he’d married her, not any bigger than a minute, frail as a breath, and beautiful as the dawn. A cloud of blond hair, huge brown eyes. The hair was gone white now, thin and flat, but the eyes were the same and every time he looked into them, he saw his loving, young bride, on the clear summer day in Szombathely, in front of the Franciscan church. How had she changed so much? How had he not noticed? Had she changed, or had she just grown more like herself in spite of his love for her? Harder and more determined.

  She had always been better than he was at playing the Communist game, at getting what she wanted from those who ruled their lives with their power and position. She was good at using her charm and her wits to feed and house them when he had not been able to work himself. She had moved them as far up in a closed society as she could until she could move them no farther. It was she who had planned the escape, figured the route, marked the time, arranged the distraction that kept the border guards away long enough for them to ski into Austria and freedom in the middle of a blizzard. She had been the one to find her uncle, Lazlo, in far away America, had bullied him into sponsoring them to come to the country where their only child, their son, was born. Free. American.

  They had made a good life here in this place. Not like home at the foot of the mountains and the beginning of the plains, this was more rugged, more isolated. The ranch had been hard work, re-learning ancestral ways, wresting a living out of the high meadows and the stupid, stupid sheep. But they had done it. Raised their son, the only one, to her great dismay, for she had wanted a legion of children.

  They had endured and prospered. They had sent the son to college, to marry, to return with a wife who loved him enough to come live in this solitary place, make a living and have a child of their own. A granddaughter who would eventually take over the ranch. The granddaughter who nearly broke their hearts with her wild ways, with no thought of home or family. A granddaughter who left the mountains for the city, never wrote, never called, never responded, never cared.

  Until her own parents died one winter when their car skidded off the road and into the icy river. Then she’d sobered up, come home with some gray in her hair and some pain in her heart. She was the one who’d figured out the only way to save the ranch was to expand it; it was she who’d cajoled her grieving grandmother into selling her knitting, had found an entire squadron of talented artisans to copy her designs and make beautiful things from the wool and the mohair and the cashmere; who’d connected with all those rich and famous people she’d met in the wild days, had made a name for the ranch and the store, and brought life back to the dying land and to her loving grandmother. She had even met a man and was pregnant with an unexpected baby when she had died.

  It had been her death that pushed his wife over, back into the self he thought she had left behind in Hungary. She had seen too much death. Friends who opposed the invaders and were shot to death in the streets. Friends who disappeared in the night, never to return. Aging parents who died for lack of food and care. Her son and his wife, whom God flicked from the side of the road for no reason one harsh winter night.

  And then her granddaughter, her brilliant, beautiful hard-working granddaughter, dead because some spoiled and drunk young man crossed the center line and sent Bella into eternity while the drunk walked away unscathed. It was too much. Unable for so many years to push back, she had finally taken out a lifetime of frustration, anger, disappointment and hurt in a few well-placed bullets. It pained him that she turned her anger outward and never once came to him.

  But then, she wouldn't. It wasn’t in her. There were simply things that she never spoke about, subjects that she never raised, even to him. He wondered whether it was because she wanted to protect him or because talking would cause her too much pain. He didn’t know. He just knew it was part of her character to know things, but not to know them, never to acknowledge them, never to let them out into the light of day. Never to share them, always to be solitary and a little broken. Perhaps it was the result of being the Hungarian daughter of a Bulgarian father, even her name a little different, not quite right. But he had loved her then and he loved her now.

  He would have loved her through it, held her, coaxed her through it if he’d only known. If he’d only recognized. He hadn’t, and now it was too late for her and for him. Such a waste. It was what he hated most about the Communists and the Nazis before them, those predators of their precious Hungary. They wasted human life, they had poisoned her, and now she did the same.

  He’d known she had never really ceased mourning Bella, but he hadn’t known how deep her mourning was. Not until he read the article in the paper about the lady doctor who was investigating the deaths. It spelled out a story in such detail that he could not ignore it, especially when he read about the rifle. The one with the inlaid deer. The white stag.

  He had always been proud of her prowess with the rifle — she was better than he was — and they both had competed for their country in biathlon in hopes of winning a few more favors, a bit better treatment from the overlords. Never did he dream that she would turn her skill, undimmed even after all these years, to such terrible use. His face flushed with shame at the thought at the same time that his heart ached for the woman he had lost to such darkness.

  He took the long, polished, oak case from the closet and opened it. A single rifle lay in there cradled by the velvet lining, an empty space where the mate had been for so many years. He closed it, and took it outside, putting it in the bed of the red pickup, wedging it against the toolbox that spanned from side to side, so that it wouldn't rattle, and he covered it with one of the rough blankets in the bed so she wouldn't see. A tuft of airy, white wool spotted the dark surface, and he pulled it off absently, then called to his wife.

  “Ivanka! Hurry! I am ready.”

  It was time to go into town.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  JUNE 25

  I slept late the next morning, exhausted in mind and body from my trip back East, though the private jet made it easier. I blushed at the expense, but the fact of the matter was, I could afford it, and it meant I was able to do what I had resolved to do before I lost my nerve. Now it was done, the pages turned, and when I woke, my mood was lighter than it had been for many months. And my two cats were sitting on my chest, purring and licking my face, something they had never done be
fore. Perhaps they sensed the change.

  I bathed and dressed quickly, still annoyed that I was forbidden showers until the stitches came out, probably tomorrow. Caroline had not accompanied me to Florida but had waited anxiously at home for my return. I had sent her away last night, arguing reasonably that if the plane ride hadn’t done me any harm, I was well enough to manage on my own. And I was. Still tired, still a little sore, but up and taking nourishment. All good.

  The thought of nourishment reminded me that I was hungry. I’d had one of the elegant little sandwich and cheese plates that the plane stocked, but that was a long time ago, and it was all I had eaten yesterday. I wandered into the kitchen to find Pilar at the stove, the children in a noisy assembly about the table, chattering in a mixture of Spanish and English.

  “Buenos dias, Señora Doctora.” No matter how hard I tried, the women insisted on using my honorific. Both of them. I tried again.

  “Jane, por favor, Pilar. Que es para desayunar?”

  She was removing a cast iron skillet from the stove, turning the burner off as she shifted the massive pan with ease to a cold burner. It smelled of onions. Wonderful. My stomach growled.

  “Tortilla de papas,” she replied as she bent to remove something from the oven. “Ignacio! Sientate!”

  Her special potato omelet. I took my place at the table, patting the chair beside me for Ignacio to join me. He had a way of testing Pilar’s limits that reminded me of Adam. I smiled conspiratorially at him.

  “Be good, and you’ll get a bigger piece,” I whispered.

  “No fair!” shrieked Mariela. “I’m bigger.”

  “I’m hungrier,” Pablo weighed in.

  “I’m the mom,” I countered. “I win.”

  I tickled Mariela and she giggled. Pablo crowded in for his share of attention, clambering onto my lap and putting his arms around my neck.

  “Not the mom,” Ignacio said in a solemn, authoritative voice. “Tia Abuelita.”