Still Mr. & Mrs.

by Mary McBride

  “I really don't think so, ma'am. Thanks all the same.”

  “Well—” She looked at her watch. “Oh, my goodness. It's later than I imagined. We'll keep going until we reach Muriel's place up ahead, shall we? Then we can turn around for the trek back home.”

  “Fine with me.”

  The big white farmhouse up ahead sat well back from the road on the crest of what passed for a hill in this part of the state. It reminded Bobby of a wedding cake with fancy Victorian frosting decorating every overhang and eave. There were spindles and spools and more weird carpentry than he'd ever seen in one place.

  “That's quite a house,” he said.

  “Looks as if it should be the birthplace of a president, doesn't it? I'm sure Muriel wishes it were.”

  “Bootsie, right?”

  She nodded. “Yes, the infamous, often intolerable, always conspicuous, and obviously memorable Bootsie.”

  “The two of you have tangled for a long time, I'd guess.”

  “A very long time,” she said. “Ever since the daughter of the town tramp took the most eligible young man in town away from the Belle of Hassenfeld. Muriel's never forgiven me for it, either.”

  They were directly in front of the big Victorian house now. Mrs. Riordan came to a stop, turned, and lifted a hand to shade her eyes as she gazed at the length of road they'd just traveled. Sunlight glinted off the windshield of an approaching vehicle. Bobby hoped to hell it wasn't Doug in the SUV.

  “I'm ready to go back now,” Mrs. Riordan said.

  “Let's cross to the other side.”

  He took her elbow and ushered her across the road while he kept one eye on the oncoming traffic. It was close enough now for him to discern the color and make. Thank God it wasn't an agency SUV, but a black Mercedes sedan. Not too many of those around Hassenfeld. So it didn't surprise him all that much when the vehicle slowed as it approached them, or when Daisy Riordan exclaimed, “Oh, look. It's Gerald.”

  The Mercedes stopped and the window on the passenger side slid down, revealing the driver's beaming face. “Well, this is a pleasant surprise,” the professor said. “Out for your morning constitutional, are you, Margaret?”

  Bobby thought neither one of them sounded all that surprised as he stood there cooling his heels a discreet distance away from the car while the president's mother and Gerald Gerrard chatted through the open window. After a few minutes, she unzipped the collar of her jacket, as if she were warm, then untied a silk scarf from around her neck. No sooner did she have it off than the breeze snatched the silk square from her fingers and carried it into the ditch, where it caught on a clump of weeds.

  “Oh, my goodness. Would you be a dear and retrieve that for me, Robert? It's one of my favorite scarves, and I'd hate to lose it.”

  “Sure.”

  The damned thing had blown far enough into the ditch that Bobby had to maneuver carefully down its steeply angled side. Just as he bent to pluck the scarf from the bramble, he heard a car door open behind him. He whirled around just in time to see Daisy Riordan's right leg lift off the pavement to join the rest of her inside the car.

  Bobby was out of the ditch in a second, reaching for the door handle just as the president's mother pulled it closed and the professor stepped on the gas. The big Mercedes fishtailed violently, its heavy rear end hitting Bobby hard in the ribs and throwing him perilously off balance. It was all he could do to keep his feet out of the way of the spinning back tire just before the treads bit into the blacktop and the vehicle sped away.

  Bobby punched Bootsie Rand's doorbell, waited a couple seconds, then hit it again. The Mercedes had clipped him pretty good, and his side hurt enough to prevent him from sprinting the half mile back to the Riordan house to report the incident.

  Incident, his ass. The two of them, Crazy Daisy and the professor, had it all planned out. The flyaway scarf was a nice touch, he had to admit. And he'd fallen for it like a dumb ton of bricks. The same way he'd fallen for her insistence that no other agents accompany them on their walk. Goddammit.

  He hit the bell a third time, then pounded on the door with the heel of his hand, yelling, “Mrs. Rand, are you in there?” then muttering, “Come on, dammit. Come on.” If Bootsie didn't answer the door, he was going to have to decide whether to break in to access her phone or do a slow, side-aching jog back to Mrs. Riordan's house, losing a precious fifteen or twenty minutes in the process.

  Shit. Bobby was just about to reach into his pocket for a credit card to jig the lock when the door opened.

  “Well, look who's come down the road to see me,” Bootsie said, her turquoise-lidded eyes opening and closing with surprise while her neon pink lips. pursed as if to blow a kiss across the threshold. “What happened? Did Crazy Daisy toss you out?”

  “May I use your phone, ma'am?”

  “My phone? Why, of course you may, young man. Come in. Come in.”

  She stepped back to let him in, but not so far back that Bobby wasn't forced to graze her wiry little body as he passed. He swore he heard a muted sigh issue from her lips.

  “You look like you could benefit from a tall glass of iced tea, Bobby,” she said. “It is Bobby, isn't it?”

  “Yes, ma'am.”

  The former belle of Hassenfeld took a step toward him. “I'm so flattered that you finally came to call.”

  Shrugging helplessly, he took two steps back. Bootsie's hair seemed inhumanly orange and impossibly spiked with gel. She was eighty if she was a day, and he guessed she was trying to look twenty, but in her skinny yellow jumpsuit and gold sandals and with a circular dab of rouge on each of her cheeks, Bootsie Rand just looked like a cockatiel. A little shiver rippled between his shoulder blades when she winked at him.

  “The phone?” he reminded her.

  “Oh, the telephone. Of course. There's one right in there.” She gestured toward a room just off the hallway where they stood. “While you make your call, I'll go see to that nice cool glass of tea. Then we can chat. Or—” She giggled behind her hand. “Whatever.”

  Great.

  Bobby strode into what appeared to be a sunroom full of tall potted plants and oversize wicker furniture. A white rotary phone sat on a little white wicker desk. He picked up the receiver and dialed the number of the surveillance trailer.

  “I lost her,” he said when Doug answered.

  During the predictable explosion on the other end of the line, Bobby let his gaze wander over the objects on Bootsie's little desk. A white plastic tape dispenser with floral decals. A stack of magazines. A roll of stamps. A small porcelain vase filled with ballpoint pens, pencils, and a pair of scissors.

  He inspected a photograph in a small gilt frame out of which Senator Charles Riordan smiled back at him. He could have been wrong, but Bobby thought it was the same photograph that sat on the nightstand beside Mrs. Riordan's bed. The man who got away, he thought, recalling her story. Poor ol’ Bootsie.

  After Doug was through exploding, Bobby explained that, suspicious as he was of the professor, he didn't consider this an abduction. “More like a well-planned elopement,” he said disgustedly. “That old lady played me like a goddamned violin.”

  “That's just dandy,” Doug said, “and maybe they are just out for a little joy ride, but we still have to go on full alert, and I've gotta notify the local and the state police, not to mention the president, if we don't get her back in the next couple of hours.”

  Even as the special agent in charge spoke to Bobby, he was barking orders to whoever was in the trailer with him.

  “Stay on the line, Bobby,” he said. “I want you to give the make of that car and the license to Captain Severs in Springfield.”

  “Sure,” Bobby said. “You want to send somebody over here to pick me up, Doug?”

  “That's pretty much at the bottom of my to-do list at the moment, Agent Holland,” his supervisor growled.

  While he hung on the line, Bobby idly paged through a couple of the magazines stacked on the desktop. Boot
sie's major interests seemed to tend toward gardening and gourmet cooking and home décor, with a kinky minor in men's action rags like Soldier of Fortune and Mercenary. His eyes began to glaze over at articles entitled “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Time to Grow Them,” “Tomatoes Galore,” and “Survival: Twelve Days in the Desert on Two Days of K Rations.” He sighed, pulled another magazine from the stack, and flipped it open. All of a sudden his eyes weren't glazed anymore.

  The page he was staring at looked like a piece of Swiss cheese. It was full of holes. Square holes. Rectangular holes. Neat, clean holes where words should have been. He flipped the pages, only to find more empty spaces where somebody had meticulously cut out separate words.

  Then he checked a second magazine and discovered the same thing. Holes. Empty spaces. And a third, then a fourth and fifth, all of them virtual workbooks for a person sending a crank, anonymous letter.

  He looked at the scissors in the porcelain cup that sat beside the photo of the senator. Still holding the phone, he reached down his right hand to pull the drawer out a few inches and saw a little bottle of glue, some sheets of plain typewriter paper, and a stack of plain white envelopes. Generic, all of it. He saw a pair of thin latex gloves. And strewn like confetti all over the interior of the drawer, he saw words.

  Go. And. The. Harm. I. You. Hurt.

  His heart suddenly felt like a fist, and his blood started pounding in his ears.

  Kill. Crazy. Daisy. Daisy. Daisy.

  Jesus H. Christ.

  “Doug,” Bobby said quietly into the phone. “You need to get a technician over here right now.”

  16

  After Bobby left to take Mrs. Riordan for her walk, Angela sat for a long time beside her suitcase and let the tears just roll down her cheeks, drip from her chin, and plop on the hands she kept folded in her lap. She was so tired of crying. It seemed that was all she'd been doing lately. Crying. It felt like her damned day job.

  Maybe this time, she thought, if she didn't try to stifle her sobs or attempt to stem the flood in any way, if she literally cried her eyes out, then maybe she'd be done with the stupid tears. Forever. So she sat and cried and cried until she was practically dehydrated. Then she picked up the phone, intending to take another stab at locating Rod in Mexico, but wound up calling her parents instead.

  It wasn't until her father asked, “How's my little G-man?” that Angela realized how truly unhappy she was. She didn't want to go to Mexico. She didn't even want to return to L.A.

  “Daddy, can I come home?”

  His reply was immediate, although he had to speak around an obvious lump in his throat. “The sooner, the better, honey.” Then he called out, “Rose! Rose! Angela's coming home.”

  In the distance, she heard her mother ask, “Is Bobby coming, too?”

  But before her father could relay the question, Angela quickly said, “No. Just me, Daddy. I'll call you from the airport when I get in. I have to go now. See you later.”

  After she hung up, Angela sighed and zipped her suitcase. There was time to prepare a last lunch for the president's mother, and maybe even fix up a plate for her dinner. It wouldn't take long to sauté a chicken breast with a side of pasta and a salad. Poor woman. No sense letting her starve just because the help couldn't get their marital act together.

  She was headed toward the kitchen when the cell phone she'd put in her pocket started beeping. For a moment, she was sorely tempted to ignore it, convinced that it was Rose Callifano, the Grand Inquisitor, calling back to give her the third degree about Bobby, literally refusing to let her daughter off the hook. Angela muttered a few well-chosen oaths, then finally answered on the seventh ring.

  When she hung up a few minutes later, she was sincerely wishing it had been her mother on the other end of the line instead of Doug, informing her that just about all hell had broken loose in Hassenfeld in the past half hour. Mrs. Riordan was missing. Bobby was at Bootsie Rand's, injured somehow, quite possibly in the head, to quote Doug, because Bobby was apparently convinced that the ancient, orange-haired woman was their prime suspect.

  “Drive on up there, Angela, and see what's going on,” Doug had ordered her.

  Good God.

  She grabbed the station wagon keys from their hook in the kitchen, then went flying out the back door. The president's mother had mentioned that her friend Muriel lived about half a mile away, but Angela couldn't recall if she'd said east or west. Since she hadn't pointed the place out on their drives east toward town, Angela guessed the Rand house was west as she turned out of the driveway onto the blacktop and stepped on the gas.

  The big Victorian farmhouse didn't quite strike her as Bootsie's style, but it sat at the half-mile point, so she pulled in and trotted up to the front door. Worst case, she'd get directions to the correct address. While she stood on the porch and waited for somebody to answer the door, Angela realized how fast her heart was racing, and that the only thing on her mind was Bobby.

  The fact that Mrs. Riordan had disappeared barely fazed her at the moment. Bobby was hurt, Doug had said, but it wasn't serious. Hurt but not too serious. What was that? A sprain, a strained muscle, bruises, cuts and abrasions? His injury could have been much worse, she knew, because this was Bobby Holland they were talking about, after all. Super Agent. Iron Man. The man who would undoubtedly say he was fine even if he had multiple fractures of multiple limbs.

  Oh, God. And the very last words she had spoken to him were about wanting him to cry. What if he was? she thought all of a sudden. Crying. In horrible, horrible pain.

  No. She wasn't even going to imagine that. If that were the case, somebody surely would have called for emergency medical help. But there were no sirens wailing in the distance. The only sounds Angela heard were crows cawing in a nearby cornfield, a dog barking somewhere in back of the house, and then—finally!—through the closed front door, the sound of clacking heels as they approached.

  Bootsie Rand opened the inside door and glared at Angela through the screen as if she were greeting a vacuum cleaner salesman.

  “Yes?” she inquired icily.

  “It's Angela Holland, Mrs. Rand. Remember me? I'm Mrs. Riordan's housekeeper and cook. I'm looking for my husband, Bobby. Is he here by any chance?” While she spoke, Angela lifted on tiptoe and was straining to see over the wild orange spikes on the little woman's head.

  Still looking decidedly annoyed, the elderly woman said, “No, he's not here. Why don't you—”

  From somewhere inside the house, Angela heard Bobby's voice call out, “Is that my wife?”

  Bootsie's scowl immediately tipped up into a smile, and all the wrinkles on her face reversed, as did her mood. “Oh, that Angela!” she exclaimed. “Bobby's wife! Of course. How silly of me. I should have recognized you, dearie. Do come in.” Suddenly the soul of hospitality, the bizarre little woman pushed open the screen door so quickly that Angela had to jump back. “Come in. Come in. May I offer you some iced tea?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Once inside, Angela gazed rather frantically around the vestibule, half expecting to discover a trail of blood across the polished oak floor.

  “Your Bobby is in there.” Bootsie gestured toward a doorway. “In the sunroom. We were just sipping tea and chatting. Such a pleasant young man.” She closed one turquoise-lidded eye in the approximation of a wink. “What is it you young people say? Such a hunk!”

  “Ange?” Bobby suddenly appeared in the doorway where Bootsie had pointed. Angela's immediate impression was that he was intact. No blood. No apparent broken bones. No bruises that she could see. Thank God. She lofted a little sigh of gratitude heavenward.

  He motioned her to come closer just as Bootsie chirped, “I'll be back with more tea in two shakes of a lamb's tail,” then clacked off in her gold sandals.

  Now that her heart was no longer racing, Angela's relief turned to irritation. She'd just about had a coronary, worrying about her husband, and here he was, the hunk, blithely sipping iced tea wi
th an eighty-year-old punk rocker. “What the hell is going on?” she asked, approaching him. “What happened with Mrs. Riordan and the professor? Doug said—”

  “Ssh.” He put a finger to his lips. “Come here. I want to show you something.”

  Bobby reached out to take her hand and lead her across the sunlit room. His grasp was so warm and strong. She didn't want him to ever let go. What the hell had possessed her, wanting to see his tears? God. She didn't want his tears. All she wanted were his so-hard-to-come-by smiles. When he let go of her hand to open a drawer, she felt lost for a second.

  “Take a look in there,” he said, barely above a whisper.

  Angela looked—at the plain paper and envelopes and glue and latex gloves and the little snippets of words strewn all over the drawer. She made a tiny gulping sound. “Bootsie?” she asked. “You've got to be kidding. Bootsie's the one who's been sending the threats?”

  “Ssh,” he cautioned her. “It makes sense. Mrs. Riordan stole the senator out from under Bootsie's nose half a century ago, and the woman has harbored a grudge ever since. Don't forget that the last letter was postmarked right here in Hassenfeld.”

  “I don't know, Bobby.” Angela shook her head, still staring at the bizarre contents of the drawer. “She doesn't strike me as that underhanded. You know? Devious, maybe, but confrontational. I could more easily imagine her starting a catfight with Mrs. Riordan than going to all this trouble to—”

  Footsteps sounded in the hallway, and Bobby closed the drawer, then moved Angela away from the desk.

  “Don't say anything,” he told her. “Just drink your tea, fast, and then let's get out of here.”

  “Are you all right? Doug said you'd been hurt.”

  “I'm fine. Ssh.”

  He wasn't fine. Bobby gritted his teeth as he angled himself behind the wheel of the Taurus, wishing that instead of drinking his iced tea, he had applied the cold glass to his ribs. His side was screaming. He reached down gingerly for the lever to move the seat back from Angela's jockeylike position, which put his nose right up against the windshield, then slowly eased out his legs.