by Dee Lloyd
“I thought music would wake us up gradually,” he said wryly. “But I guess it’s ‘up and at’em’ time.”
He swung his legs over the edge of the bed but stopped before he got to his feet.
“You do agree that we should trust Walt with those papers? Because once we’ve done that, there’s no turning back. The IRS will be calling the shots.”
“I don’t see what else we can do.”
“Just wanted to make sure you agreed,” he said and kissed her on the tip of the nose. He was learning.
Beginning with a jarring musical note set the tone for the day. Both Matt and Walt tried to convince Reenie that she should disappear, at least temporarily, into one of the safe houses of the Witness Protection program. She resolutely refused to consider it. There was no way she was going to sit quietly in some hideaway totally ignorant of what was going on.
While Matt went to the boathouse to get the photocopies of the contents of the manila envelope, she made buttermilk pancakes and bacon for the three of them. They ate quickly, then drank their coffee while Walt browsed through the photos and papers that Danny had gathered.
“What a damn fool!” he said, shaking his head at the first photo, the one of Jon with Lucy Spadafore. “No wonder Jon wants to get his hands on these,” he said. “Sal will have his head when he finds out Jon’s getting it on with his niece. He’s very protective of his family. And, can you imagine Gladys’ reaction to these action shots? Jon’s political chances are in the toilet if she ever gets a look at them.
“Don’t know this woman,” he said, turning over the second picture. “But this,” he held up the third, “is Norma Renton.”
Both Reenie and Matt looked at him curiously.
“Norma runs the Detroit office. She accompanied Jon on a GEL junket to the Far East a couple of years ago, but I thought their affair was over long ago. This explains a few things.”
He was silent for a while, staring at the photograph before turning it over. When he saw the next one, he gave a long low whistle.
“Bingo!” His voice was a harsh triumphant whisper. “Chang Lu. With Sal Gerardo. The boys are going to love this one. We’ve been trying to find a link between these two. And it’s our own tricky little Jonathan. Danny’s detective was certainly worth whatever he paid him.”
When the IRS man picked up the printout, Matt said, “I spent some time on that, Walt. And I can’t see that it’s a lot of use to us. All DiMarco wanted to show was exactly how much money Jon had cheated him of. This is only a chunk out of the middle of a file. Nothing here tells us about the banking transactions. Nor, of course, about the GEL connection.”
“According to your old boss, you’d have found the clue if there was one.” Walt turned to Reenie. “Where exactly had DiMarco hidden this stuff?”
“At the back of a file drawer in my kitchen office that was full of phony invoices I’d never seen before,” Reenie admitted. “I made it too easy for them. I thought it was simply old-fashioned business habits that made Danny insist on being in full control of every tiny detail of the lodge’s finances. I had no idea what was going on in my own kitchen.”
“Could you have missed a disk if he’d hidden one in there?”
“Reenie went through that filing cabinet again last night while the dogs had you pinned on the roof.”
“Any trouble with the beefed-up security?” Walt asked.
Matt told him about the man he’d left tied up.
Walt grinned his approval. “Wilson’s convinced Sal will find out what happened to Danny and make sure he’s the next one to end up in the lake. He hired a bodyguard and an extra man for the lodge. So what did you find?”
“There was no disk in the cabinet, but we did find something.” Reenie was getting a perverse kind of pleasure out of doling out the information at her own speed. It had been a while since she’d felt in control of anything. As she cleared away the breakfast dishes, she told Walt about the storage locker key they had found in the candy bar and their trip to the U Locket facility.
As she spoke, Matt picked up the cardboard box from the floor just inside the door where he’d placed it when they arrived at dawn. He placed it on the large round table beside Walt.
“Why don’t we see what we can learn from this little beauty?” Matt suggested, lifting the laptop carefully out of the box.
“You found it! This could be the break we needed!” Walt stood aside, giving Matt room to set up the equipment. He was almost dancing with excitement.
Matt switched the computer on and looked at the two expectant faces. “The answers aren’t going to be obvious, you know,” he said with a laugh. “It’s going to take a while to see what’s on this hard disk. Once I know what I’m dealing with, I’ll need clearance to access some special data bases and their current passwords.”
“I’ll get right on that,” Walt said, heading for the phone.
Reenie said, “I might as well go over make sure Pete got something to eat this morning.”
“Good idea,” Walt agreed. “Keep as close to the usual routine as you can, but if Pete has any unexpected company, find an errand you have to do right away.”
Matt, who was apparently engrossed in the list of files on the little computer monitor, snagged her hand as she walked by him and pulled her down for a quick, hard kiss.
“Tell Pete what we’re doing.” He kissed her again, a more lingering, tender caress. “And keep a low profile, sweetheart.”
The next couple of days were blessedly uneventful. Walt hurried back to Lansing so he could field any Maura Fitzpatrick sightings that were too close. Before noon on Wednesday, he’d arranged for the clearances that Matt wanted.
Matt disappeared into his computer and did not surface except to eat the occasional meal and to sleep a few hours. The only exceptions were the hour he spent touring the facility with the security expert he’d called in to set up the alarm system and the two trips he made with Reenie out to a nearby abandoned gravel pit to teach her how to use the revolver they’d taken from the man at the lodge. She hated the idea but admitted that a situation could arise when she’d have to know how to fire the repulsive thing. She didn’t become an expert shot, but by the end of the second lesson, she was only a few inches off the center of the target.
Reenie spent the rest of her time with Pete. The more she saw of Matt’s father, the better she liked him. He took his role as her protector seriously, stationing his chair where he could observe any comings and goings through the main gate of the marina. He found chores for her upstairs or in the basement the moment a visitor or delivery person approached the house. Most of the time he told her long amusing anecdotes about the people in his town, in his life.
His relationship with Matt was the only topic that he seemed to find difficult to talk about. He talked freely about his daughter and grandson, even about his late son-in-law.
His name came up on Thursday afternoon when the strident shriek of the new motion sensor at the front gate announced Gus’ patrol car heading for the apartment.
“I suppose that early warning signal is a good thing, but, Lord, I’ll be glad when we don’t need it any more. Gus is probably here to work on the boat. He took over from Bronwyn’s husband as sheriff, you know. Phil Cooper was a good husband to Bronwyn. But the man thought he was immortal. Never believed the ice could collapse under the weight of his snowmobile. Somebody else’s maybe - not his. I think Gus would take over Phil’s family too, if Bronwyn gave him any encouragement. He’s real good with Tommy.”
Reenie’s attention was on the sheriff’s car parked in front of the marina shop. Gus had disappeared into the apartment. She wondered what he and Matt were talking about.
“Matt was overseas when Phil died,” Pete went on, finally getting to the one person she was hoping he’d talk about. “Made it home for the funeral but had to head right back. Hasn’t spent much time here since he joined up when he turned eighteen. I made a big mistake with Mattias. I didn’t want hi
m to take the scholarship he won. I was selfish. Told him I needed him here. So, he joined the army to spite me.”
Reenie wondered if there were any families where people didn’t try to bend their children to their wills.
“He’s here for you now.” Reenie couldn’t see Matt as spiteful.
“Don’t know that he’s all that keen to be here, though,” Pete muttered. His dark eyes had lost most of their sparkle. “Don’t know how long it’ll be before he heads out again.”
Silently, she wondered if he could be right. Then she realized that, no matter where he was, she would always love Matt Hanson. She didn’t know when that had happened, but she knew it was true.
“Matt tells me he intends to do his roaming in the off-season,” she said. “He cares about you, Pete.”
“Humph,” he replied. “There goes Gus’ car. He didn’t stay long. I wonder what Matt told him to get out of working on the boat this afternoon.”
Reenie hoped it wasn’t the truth about what he was doing.
Chapter Sixteen
“I told Gus the last coat of varnish needed to dry at least another day before we could do any more sanding on the hull,” Matt told her later that evening when she dragged him away from the computer long enough to eat the dinner she’d brought home for him. “That made sense to him. He was curious about why I’d had the new security measures installed, though.”
“What did you tell him?” Reenie asked quickly.
“That I didn’t want to wait to do it until after we had a major breakin. Gus is always preaching crime prevention, so he congratulated me on my good sense,” he said with a guilty grimace.
Matt’s eyes looked tired from his long hours at the computer, and she could see he hated being less than straightforward with his old sailing buddy.
“I don’t want Gus to see me now that my face is pretty much back to normal. Will he be at Tommy’s party tomorrow afternoon?”
“Nope. Barring a crisis at the office, he’ll be at his brother’s hunting camp for the weekend,” he assured her. “While we had a cup of coffee, I pumped him a little about the DiMarco murder investigation. Gus is cooperating with Will Franks, the local sheriff and giving thanks it didn’t happen in his county.”
“I know Will Franks,” Reenie said. “He’s part of the group that Jon plays poker with twice a month. I don’t know if he’d believe that I saw what I say I did. All the pictures really prove is that Jon’s a sleaze.”
“We’ll make sure the charges against Jon will hold before you talk to anyone. Too many powerful people have got their shirts in a knot about this.”
Matt bit into a juicy pecan tart. “Mmmm,” he said, with an appreciative grin as he licked a bit of flaky pastry off his lower lip. “These are terrific.”
The man was sinfully attractive.
“I made them for Tommy’s party tomorrow afternoon,” she said, wishing she could forget everything else, climb onto his lap and share the sweetness of the tart with him. It would be a good place to start.
The grave look he gave her drew her back to the harsh realities of the present.
“Gus didn’t have any good news for us. He made a point of telling me the police are desperate to locate Maura Fitzpatrick. They aren’t sure whether you were involved with Danny’s death or if you really are in danger from the killers, but they know you disappeared around the same time as Danny was killed and might be able to clear up some the confusion about the time of death.
“They checked Jon Casen’s whereabouts as a matter of course because he was DiMarco’s partner. They found two witnesses who claimed they’d seen him at the Driftwood Sunday night; however, Casen has an alibi from some woman who says they were working on GEL business in Lansing all evening, and your grandmother insists he spent the night in his own room at her home. Now, the witnesses say they must have been mistaken.”
“I wonder if we’d recognize the woman who gave him the alibi from Danny’s photo collection,” Reenie said dryly.
“Your grandmother also insists you didn’t name the people you were frightened of.”
“She probably wiped that part of the conversation from her mind as too bizarre to consider. She’s stubbornly clinging to the image she’s created of Jon.” Reenie knew Gran was not rational on the subject, but the rejection by her only relative hurt.
Pete Hanson, the following afternoon, was a distinct contrast. Like a typical grandparent, he was snapping pictures as if he’d never seen seven-year-olds in action before.
Fortunately, the unseasonably warm weather was still holding. From the moment they erupted into the yard, Tommy and the four boys and two girls he’d invited to his party filled the air with enthusiastic shrieks and yells. The excitement started the moment the children spotted the banner proclaiming The Thomas Cooper Mini-Olympics which Jeff and Matt had hung between two tall spruce trees. Jeff had painted white lines on the lawn behind the house to create a makeshift running track for the events.
Reenie had noticed Matt’s fondness for his nephew from the first minute she saw them together, but she’d never seen him with a group of children before. With his quiet smile and his low voice, he drew them like the Pied Piper. Tommy rode proudly on his shoulders over to the picnic table where she’d set out a snack of Tommy’s favorite fruit punch with a tray of cherry and pecan tarts. Matt swung Tommy down to join his friends and sauntered over.
“That should stave off starvation while they tear around for an hour or so,” he said, drawing her close against his side. “Looks wonderful, sweetheart.”
By the time Bronwyn arrived with the prizes a few minutes later, the children had demolished the snack and were hopping around the track and shrieking with laughter at the bizarre feats they were expected to perform. There wasn’t any real competition involved. All a child had to do to win a ribbon was complete one of the events that Matt and Pete had devised to dissipate some energy before the party moved indoors. The prizes they won depended on the number of ribbons they collected.
Matt was stationed at the starting line, Jeff monitored the middle and Pete beamed and called encouragement from the finish line where he’d stationed himself to take photographs of their antics. It was impossible to remain uninvolved. Reenie found herself drawn wholeheartedly into the laughter and the cheering.
Reenie was charmed when Tommy stopped to help dust off the smaller of his two female guests who had tripped over her shoelace and fallen. The child seemed upset about the dark grass stains on her white denim pants. At first glance, Tommy didn’t resemble his uncle at all, but the concerned frown on his little forehead was an exact copy of the one on Matt’s face as he hurried over to check on the child. Reenie’s heart filled at the sight.
“Tommy mentioned he had a girlfriend the other day,” Reenie commented. “Is Susy the one?”
“Both she and Ruthie are,” Bronwyn told her. “He always has at least two girlfriends. He’s a generous lover.” She followed Reenie’s gaze and paused as if debating whether or not to go on. “Matt isn’t, you know. Sandra Field is annoyed about that. She called me a few days ago to pump me about you. She said she wondered about your buying brown contacts.”
Reenie had been hoping against hope that Bronwyn had been too distracted by the crises in her own life when she met her to notice her change of eye color. She held her breath.
“She even suggested that from some angles, you…” Bronwyn sighed, then looked at her with a candid gaze. “She said you looked quite a bit like Maura Fitzpatrick.”
Reenie went still. “And what did you say to that?”
Bronwyn’s black eyes were steady on hers. “My brother cares about you. I told her not to be ridiculous. That the Hansons and the Kellys had been friends for years.”
“Thank you,” Reenie said quietly. “I’m sorry about the lies. But I’m afraid. If my .. old boyfriend finds me, he will kill me.”
“Why would he do that?” Bronwyn asked, her black eyes were filled with skepticism. Of course, she was
a big fan of Jon’s.
A pink-cheeked, fortyish woman whose fair hair was attempting to escape from a fat French braid scooted up to join them on the sidelines.
“Only three more events. I’m exhausted just from watching.” She extended a capable-looking hand to Reenie. “I’m Donna Franklin. Jeff’s wife. You must be Reenie. Matt sent me over to warn you the kids will be ready for food in about half an hour.”
“The pizzas!” Reenie exclaimed. “They went right out of my mind.”
“Why don’t you and Matt drop by to see me after I put the birthday boy to bed tonight?” Bronwyn said pointedly. “That should be about eight o’clock. I’m dying to hear the rest of the story.”
“We’ll be there,” Reenie said, making her escape to the kitchen.
The rest of the party went by in a blur of laughter, present opening and flashing light bulbs. Pete’s present was a camera much like his own and, from that point on, “Pete and Re-Pete”, as Matt dubbed them, were merciless chroniclers of the party.
“Uncle Matt calls us that because my middle name is Peter,” Tommy confided to Reenie. “Gramps says its because we both burp a lot if we drink our sodas too fast.”
The moment they were alone, Reenie told Matt about his sister’s defense of her to Sandra Field and her demand that they come to her house at eight o’clock and explain why Reenie was hiding from Jon.
“So Sandra’s the one who called the hot line,” Matt muttered. “Too many people know or suspect you’re here. We have to take Walt up on his offer of a safe house.”
“No. I can count on you and Pete. I want to trust Bronwyn. Nobody else,” Reenie stated simply. “I’m staying with you.”
“And I want you here.” Matt cupped her determined little chin in his hands. “I don’t know if I could stand the uncertainty if you were out of my sight.”
The brief kiss they shared spoke of something more abiding than the passion that flared every time they touched. The emptiness he carried deep inside him stirred as if it anticipated relief. That he could even imagine filling it with Reenie’s warmth startled him. He’d never pictured himself needing anyone.