Eight Classic Nora Roberts Romantic Suspense Novels

by Nora Roberts

  “He was a beautiful boy, Mr. McAvoy.”

  “Yes, by Jesus he was.” He looked down at the guitar still in his hands. Because he wanted to fling it, he set it with exaggerated care on its stand. “What would you like to talk to me about?”

  “Just a few details I’d like to go over again. I know it’s repetitious.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I’d also like to talk to Emma again.”

  The easiness passed as quickly as it had come. “She can’t tell you anything.”

  “Maybe I haven’t asked the right questions yet.”

  Brian ran a hand through his hair. He’d had several inches cut off and was still surprised when his hand ran through it and into air. “Darren’s gone, and I can’t risk Emma’s state of mind. She’s delicate at the moment. She’s only six, and for the second time in her life, she’s been uprooted. I’m sure you’ve read that my wife and I are separated.”

  I’m sorry.

  “It’s hardest on Emma. I don’t want her upset again.”

  “I won’t push.” He tabled his idea of suggesting hypnosis.

  Enjoying her role as hostess, such as it was, Emma brought Michael over to her father. “Da, this is Michael.”

  “Hello, Michael.”

  “Hello.” Finding his tongue tied in knots, Michael could only grin foolishly.

  “Do you like music?”

  “Oh yeah. I’ve got lots of your records.” He wanted desperately to ask for an autograph, but was afraid he’d seem like a jerk. “It was great hearing you play, and all. Just about the greatest.”

  “Thanks.”

  Emma took a picture. “My da can send you a copy,” she said, admiring Michael’s chipped front tooth.

  When Lou left, leading his reluctant son out of the rehearsal hall, he had the beginnings of a headache and a nasty case of frustration. He’d kept his promise and hadn’t pushed Emma. He hadn’t been able to. The moment he had mentioned the night her brother had died her eyes had gone blank and her body had stiffened. Instinct told him she had seen or heard something, but her memory of that night was already blurred. It was peopled with monsters and snarling shadows.

  He didn’t care to admit that breaking the case depended on a terrified six-year-old whose memory of that night, according to the psychologists he’d interviewed, might never return.

  There was still the pizza man, Lou thought grimly. It had taken him two days to locate the right shop and the clerk who’d been working the graveyard shift. He’d remembered the order for fifty pizzas, and had considered it a joke. But he’d also remembered the name of the person who’d placed the order.

  Tom Fletcher, a session musician who played both alto and tenor sax, had had a yen for pizza that night. It had taken weeks to track him down, and weeks more to put through the paperwork to bring the musician back from his gig in Jamaica.

  Lou preferred pinning his hopes there. Whoever had been in Darren’s room hadn’t come back down the main stairs or climbed out of the window. That left the kitchen stairs where Tom Fletcher had been trying to convince the night clerk to deliver fifty pizzas with everything.

  “Hey, Dad, that was the best.” Michael dragged his feet on the sidewalk to give himself a few more moments. He pulled open the door of his father’s ’68 Chevelle, craning his neck to look at the upper windows of the building at his back. “The guys are going to go nuts when I tell them. It’s okay to tell them now, right? Everybody knows you’ve got the case.”

  “Yeah.” Lou pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. He wasn’t sure if the headache had been brought on by tension or the furious pulse of music. “Everybody knows.” He’d burrowed his way through a trio of press conferences.

  “How come they got all those security guards?” Michael wanted to know.

  “What guards?”

  “Those.” As his father settled into the driver’s seat, Michael pointed to the four dark-suited, broad-shouldered men near the entrance of the building.

  “How do you know they’re guards?”

  “Come on.” Michael rolled his eyes. “You can always tell cops. Even rent-a-cops.”

  Lou wasn’t sure if he should wince or laugh. He wondered how his captain would feel if he knew the average eleven-year-old could make an undercover cop. “To keep people from hassling them, maybe hurting them. And the little girl,” Lou added. “Someone might try to kidnap her.”

  “Jeez. You mean they’ve got to have guards all the time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bummer,” Michael murmured sincerely, no longer sure he wanted to pursue the idea of becoming a rock star. “I’d hate to have people watching me all the time. I mean, how could you have any secrets?”

  “It’s tough.”

  As his father pulled away from the curb, Michael cast one last look over his shoulder. “Can we go to McDonald’s?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “I guess she doesn’t get to do that much.”

  “What?”

  “The little kid. Emma. I guess she doesn’t get to go to McDonald’s.”

  “No.” Lou ruffled his boy’s hair. “I guess not.”

  It took only a few minutes to get Michael settled in with a cheeseburger, fries, and a shake. Lou left his son in the booth to call in. From the phone outside the window he could see Michael dousing more ketchup on the burger. “Kesselring,” he said. “I’ll be in the station in an hour.”

  “I got some bad news for you, Lou.”

  “What else is new?”

  “It’s Fletcher, your pizza man.”

  “Didn’t he make it into L.A.?”

  “Yeah, he made it in. Sent a couple of uniforms to pick him up this morning for questioning. Seems they were about six hours too late. He’d been dead that long.”

  “Shit.”

  “Looks like a standard OD. He had the works and some top-grade heroin. We’re waiting on the coroner’s report.”

  “That’s great. That’s fucking great.” He slammed a hand against the wall of the booth, hard enough to make a mother hurry her three children by. “Have the lab boys been over his hotel room?”

  “Top to bottom.”

  “Give me the address.” He fumbled for his notebook. “I have to drop my kid at home, after that I’ll have a look.”

  Lou noted it down, swore again, and banged the receiver. He opened the door, then to give himself a moment, leaned against it. Through the window he could see his son cheerfully plowing through the cheeseburger.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Saint Catherine’s Academy, 1977

  Two more weeks, Emma thought. Two more long, boring, rotten weeks, and she’d be out for the summer. She’d be able to see her father, and Johnno and the rest. She’d be able to breathe without being told she was breathing for God. She’d be able to think without being warned about impure thoughts.

  As far as she could see, the nuns must be full of impure thoughts or else they wouldn’t be so sure everyone else had them.

  She would be going back to the real world for a few precious weeks. New York. Emma closed her eyes a moment, trying to bring its noise, its smells, its life into her quiet room. With a sigh, she propped her elbows on her desk, slouching in a way that would have made Sister Mary Alice crack her ruler. She didn’t bend over the French verbs she was supposed to conjugate, but looked out over the green lawns to the high stone walls that closed the school off from the sinful world.

  Not all the sinful world, she thought. She was full of sin, and was grateful her roommate, Marianne Carter, was equally blighted. Her days at Saint Catherine’s would have been torture without Marianne.

  She grinned as she thought of her funny, freckled, redheaded roomie and best friend. Marianne was sinful, all right, and was even now doing penance for her latest transgression. The caricature Marianne had sketched of Mother Superior was worth a couple of hours scrubbing bathrooms.

  If it hadn’t been for Marianne, she might have
run away. Though where she would have run, she hadn’t a clue.

  There was really only one place she wanted to go, and that was to her father. And he would have shipped her right back.

  It wasn’t fair. She was nearly thirteen, nearly a real teenager, and she was stuck in this antiquated school conjugating verbs, reciting catechism, and dissecting frogs. Gross.

  It wasn’t that she hated the nuns. Well, she admitted, perhaps she did hate Sister Immaculata. The Warden. But who wouldn’t hate someone with a pruny mouth, a wart on her nose, and a fondness for giving young girls extra chores for the teeniest infractions?

  But Da had only been amused when she’d told him about Sister Immaculata.

  She missed him; she missed all of them.

  She wanted to go home. But she wasn’t sure where home would be. Often she thought about the house in London, the castle where she had been so happy for such a short time. She thought about Bev and hated it that her father never spoke of her. Even though they had never divorced, Emma thought. Some of the girls at school had parents that were divorced, but you weren’t supposed to talk about it.

  She still thought of Darren, her sweet little brother. Sometimes she could barely remember how he had looked, how he had sounded. But when she dreamed of him, his face, his voice, were as clear as life.

  She remembered almost nothing about the night he had died. Nuns tended to drum such pagan nonsense as monsters out of young girls’ heads. But again, if she dreamed of that night, as she did when she was ill or upset, she remembered the terror of walking down the dark hall, the sounds all around, the dark monsters holding Darren as he cried and struggled. She remembered falling.

  And when she awoke, she would remember nothing at all.

  Marianne came through the door in an exaggerated stagger. She held out her hands. “Ruined.” She dropped backward onto her bed. “What French count would want to kiss them now?”

  “Rough going?” Emma asked, struggling not to grin.

  “Five bathrooms. Dis-gus-ting. Ugh. When I get out of this joint, I’m going to have a housekeeper for my housekeeper.” She rolled over on her stomach, crossing her ankles in the air. Emma only smiled, enjoying the sound of Marianne’s brisk American voice. “I heard Mary Jane Witherspoon talking to Teresa O’Malley. She’s going to do it with her boyfriend when she goes home this summer.”

  “Who?”

  “I dunno. His name’s Chuck or Huck or something.”

  “No, I mean Mary Jane or Teresa?”

  “Mary Jane, you dork. She’s sixteen and built.”

  Emma frowned down at her own flat chest. She wondered if she’d have boobs to speak of when she hit sixteen. And if she’d have a boyfriend to do it with.

  “What if she gets pregnant like Susan did last spring?”

  “Oh, Mary Jane’s folks would fix it up. They’ve got piles of money. Anyway, she’s got something. A diaphragm.”

  “Everyone has a diaphragm.”

  “Not that kind, dummy. It’s birth control.”

  “Oh.” As always, Emma was ready to defer to Marianne’s greater knowledge.

  “You put it in, you know, inside the sacred vault, with jelly and it kills off the sperm. You can’t get knocked up with dead sperm.” Marianne rolled over to yawn at the ceiling. “I wonder if Sister Immaculata ever did it.”

  The thought was enough to bring Emma completely out of the dumps. “I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure she bathes in her habit.”

  “Holy hell, I nearly forgot.” Marianne rolled again, and digging into the pocket of her rumpled uniform, pulled out i half-pack of Marlboros. “I struck gold in the second-floor John.” She scrambled up to search through her underwear drawer for a pack of matches. “Somebody had them taped to the back of the tank.”

  “And you took them.”

  “The Lord helps those who help themselves. I helped myself. Lock the door, Emma.”

  They shared one, blowing little puffs of smoke out the open window. Neither enjoyed the taste particularly, but gamely dragged on. It was adult and sinful, two things both of them craved.

  “Two more weeks,” Emma said dreamily.

  “You’re going to New York. They’re sending me to camp again.”

  “It won’t be so bad. Sister Immaculata won’t be there.”

  “That’s something.” Marianne tried to adopt a sophisticated pose with the cigarette. “I’m going to try to talk them into letting me stay with my grandmother for a couple of weeks. She’s pretty cool.”

  “I’ll take lots of pictures.”

  Marianne nodded, thinking further ahead. “When we get out of this place, we’re going to get an apartment, like in Greenwich Village or L.A. Someplace cool. I’ll be an artist and you’ll be a photojournalist.”

  “We’ll have parties.”

  “The biggest. And we’ll wear all kinds of gorgeous clothes.” She held out the hem of her uniform. “No plaids.”

  “I’d rather die.”

  “It’s only four more years.”

  Emma turned to gaze out the window. It was hard to think in terms of years when she wasn’t sure how to get through the next two weeks.

  A continent away, Michael Kesselring studied himself in cap and gown. He couldn’t believe it. It was finally over. High school was behind him and life was just around the next bend. There was college, of course, but that was a summer away.

  He was eighteen, old enough to drink, to vote, and thanks to President Carter, had no military draft to interrupt his plans.

  Whatever they were, he thought.

  He hadn’t a clue what he wanted to do with the life that was ahead of him. His part-time job at Buzzard’s Tee Shirt Shop was mainly for gas and date money. He had no intention of spending his life screen-printing T-shirts. But just what he would do was still a cloudy mystery.

  It was a little scary taking off the cap and gown. Like shedding his youth. He held them both in his hands as he scanned his room. It was cluttered with clothes, mementos, record albums, and since his mother had long since given up on cleaning it herself, his cache of Playboys. There were the letters he’d earned in track and baseball. The letters, he remembered, that had convinced Rose Anne Markowitz to climb into the backseat of his secondhand Pinto and do it to the tune of Joe Cocker’s Feeling Alright.

  He’d been blessed with a tough athletic body, long legs, and quick reflexes. Like his father, his mother was fond of saying. He supposed in some way he took after the old man, though their relationship had had its share of battles. Over hair length, wardrobe, politics, curfews. Captain Kesselring was a stickler.

  Came from being a cop, Michael supposed. He remembered being careless enough once to bring a single joint into the house. He’d been grounded for a month. And a few lousy speeding tickets had cost him just as dearly.

  The law was the law, old Lou was fond of saying, Michael thought now. Thank God he himself had no intention of being a cop.

  He took the tassel from the cap before tossing it and the gown onto his unmade bed. Maybe it was sentimental to keep it, but nobody had to know. He routed through his dresser drawers for the old cigar box that held some of his most valued possessions. The love letter Lori Spiker had written him in his junior year—before she’d dumped him for a biker with a Harley and tattoos. The ticket stub from the Rolling Stones’ concert he had, after a lot of blood and sweat, convinced his parents to let him attend. The pop top from his first illegal beer. He grinned and, pushing it aside, found the snapshot of himself and Brian McAvoy.

  The little girl had kept her word, Michael thought. The picture had arrived in the mail only two weeks after the incredible day his dad had taken him to meet Devastation. The new album had come with it, the hot-off-the-presses copy. He had been the envy of his contemporaries for weeks.

  Michael thought back to that day, the almost unendurable excitement he’d felt, the sweaty armpits. He hadn’t thought about that day in a long time. Now, perhaps because of his newly acquired adult status,
it occurred to him that it had been a terrific thing for his father to do. And uncharacteristic. Not that the old man couldn’t come up with terrific things, but he had gone to the rehearsal hall on police business. Captain Lou Kesselring never mixed police business and personal pleasures.

  But he had that day, Michael thought.

  It was strange, but now that he was remembering it all, he could picture his father dragging home files, night after night. As far as Michael could recollect, his father had never brought home work that way before, or since.

  The little boy, Brian McAvoy’s little boy, had been murdered. It had been in all the papers, and still cropped up from time to time, perhaps because the police had never solved the case.

  His father’s case, Michael recalled.

  That had been the year Michael had been named MVP on his Little League team. And his father had missed most of the games. And a lot of dinners.

  It had been a long time ago, Michael mused, but he wondered if his father ever thought about Brian McAvoy and his dead son. Or the little girl who had taken the picture. Some people said that she’d seen what had happened to her brother and had gone crazy. But she hadn’t looked crazy when Michael had met her. He remembered her only vaguely as a slight girl with pale hair and big sad eyes. And a soft, prettily accented voice, he recalled now. A voice a lot like her father’s.

  Poor kid, he thought as he placed the tassel over the snapshot. He wondered what had ever happened to her.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Emma couldn’t believe her time was almost up. In less than a week she would head back to New York and Saint Catherine’s. True, she missed Marianne. It would take weeks for them to talk through all the things that had happened over the summer. The best summer of her life, even though they’d only spent two weeks of it in New York.