Dearly Beloved

by Wendy Corsi Staub

His face clouds over. “Well, what I want to know is why she thinks she has to stay away in the first place.”

  “Come on, Keegan,” Laura says, even though she’s wondering the same thing. “You guys are broken up. Forget about her.”

  “I can’t,” he says, and she’s startled by the raw pain in his voice. “I keep trying, but . . . I don’t know, maybe if I could understand why . . .”

  Laura hesitates. She wants, more than anything, to tell Keegan what had happened to Jennie three years ago. In her opinion, her sister should have at least explained it to him—that because of her ordeal, she doesn’t want to love a cop. That she’s afraid of losing him to violent death. Just like she’d lost her father . . .

  And just like she’d lost Harry . . .

  But Laura clamps her mouth shut. It’s not up to her to tell Keegan why Jennie left him. She’d promised her sister that she wouldn’t . . .

  And besides, she realizes, glancing at her watch—there’s no time to get into it now.

  She wants to be there when Shawn walks off the plane, and Saturday traffic is always heavy around Logan.

  So she just shrugs and tells him, “Look, Keegan, I’m very sorry about you and Jen, but that’s really between the two of you. I don’t like to get involved in her personal life.”

  He gives her a look that says since when? But he simply nods and starts back toward the front door.

  He pauses, his hand on the knob, and turns back to Laura.

  “Just for the record,” he says quietly, “I really love her. And I’m not going to give up. Will you tell her that for me?”

  Laura nods.

  But even as the door closes behind him, she fights the urge to run after him, to tell him the truth about Jennie.

  And if she weren’t running so late, she would do it.

  But I will, she promises herself. Next time I get the opportunity, I’ll tell him, no matter what Jennie says. It’s for her own good.

  She tucks the napkin containing Shawn’s flight information into the back pocket of her jeans and thinks again about that sweepstakes ticket.

  Now that Keegan has planted the idea that the charity might have been a fraud, she finds herself going back over what happened that afternoon in the Stop and Shop parking lot.

  She remembers being frazzled as she rushed toward the double glass doors of the store. It was a blustery December day and she had lost her gloves, as usual—as well as the grocery list Jennie had jotted for her. She’d been trying to recall what her sister needed for the gingerbread cookies she wanted to bake when a voice had interrupted her thoughts.

  “Hey, miss . . . want to take a chance in a sweepstakes? You might win a free vacation, and it’s for a good cause.”

  She’d turned to see a man standing there with a roll of tickets. He was wearing a button that said New England Children’s Leukemia Society. Instantly, she’d thought of Melanie and had smiled and said sure.

  He’d waited patiently while she dug a dollar out of the bottom of her purse—she’d lost her wallet before Thanksgiving and hadn’t gotten around to replacing it yet.

  Frowning, Laura searches her memory and pictures the man. He’d been bundled up against the cold, with a bulky down coat, a ski hat, and a thick scarf wrapped around the lower half of his face. His voice had been muffled, and he hadn’t spoken much except to thank her after he’d handed her the ticket.

  But now, as she thinks back over the incident, she recalls vaguely thinking, at the time, that he sounded familiar. But she didn’t recognize him.

  No, she’d decided then that he was a stranger.

  And she’s still positive of that now.

  After all, scatterbrained as she sometimes is, Laura never forgets a face.

  Especially someone whose eyes are the same striking, light shade of blue as those colored contact lenses Shawn wears.

  Cornflower blue.

  Chapter 5

  Sandy wraps her robe more tightly around her wet body and hurries across the deserted second-floor hallway back to her room.

  She’d planned on taking a leisurely bubble bath to get into a romantic frame of mind for her date with Ethan. But after only a minute or so of running the water into the ancient clawfoot tub in the inn bathroom, it had gone from lukewarm to chilly. And even if it had been steaming, it was only a trickle when the faucet was on full blast, so it would have taken hours to fill the tub.

  Sandy had settled for taking a shower that was icy enough to set her teeth chattering and body shivering.

  Back in her room, she locks the door and goes over to the window.

  Dusk falls early during New England winters. It’s only late afternoon, but already the stormy sky is rapidly darkening. The wind has picked up again, rattling the window-panes and moaning around the drafty old house, and raindrops splatter furiously against the glass.

  Sandy imagines how romantic it will be to snuggle before a roaring fire with Ethan Thoreau as the weather rages outside. Maybe, if this actually turns into a full-blown nor’easter as threatened, she’ll be stranded here on the island with him for a few days.

  And a lot can happen in a few days, Sandy tells herself, turning away from the window and flicking on the floor lamp near the bed.

  Who knows? Maybe I’ll go back home engaged. And it won’t be like it was with Joe. This time, I’ll definitely go through with the wedding.

  Dreamily, she closes her eyes and imagines what her wedding day will be like.

  A long, frilly white gown, definitely. Sandy has always dreamed of being an old-fashioned bride. She can just picture the dress . . .

  Of course, she has quite a few pounds to lose between now and the day she gets married.

  Her eyes snap open and she strips off the robe. Standing naked in front of the full-length mirror, she examines herself from head to toe.

  Hair . . . fine, once you’ve used some mousse and blown it dry.

  Face . . . not bad at all, once you get some makeup on.

  Boobs . . . well, they certainly are big. Too big—considering that your nipples sag to your bellybutton—although maybe Ethan Thoreau won’t think so. Maybe he likes women with giant breasts. Most men do, don’t they?

  Stomach . . . definitely flabby. Look at those rolls. Yuck.

  Hips . . . much too wide, and so is your butt.

  Thighs . . . well, at least the new skirt will hide your saddlebags.

  Legs . . . not bad—but uh-oh! They’re bleeding in a few spots from where you nicked them shaving over goosebumps in that freezing cold shower.

  Sandy grabs some Kleenex from the packet in her cosmetics bag and cleans the blood off her legs, making a face when she sees the red smears on the clean white tissues.

  She’s always been squeamish at the sight of blood.

  Liza restlessly tosses aside the manuscript page she’s been trying to read for the last five minutes and glances at her watch.

  It’s after four. Why hasn’t D.M. Yates called back?

  Is he trying to punish her for not being here earlier?

  Or . . .

  Liza stands and paces across the room, not wanting to even think that this whole thing might be an elaborate hoax.

  But how can she help but be suspicious? After all, it’s not as though she were born yesterday. It’s not as though she actually believes that famous, elusive writers routinely go around giving breaks to relatively unknown female editors.

  The more time she spends on Tide Island, stewing and waiting for D.M. Yates to show up, the more she wonders whether she’s been had. Only . . .

  Who would go to the trouble to play such a nasty trick on her?

  Albie.

  His name is the first to enter her mind. Only, would a high-powered man like Senator Albert Norwood actually have the time and energy to pull something like this off?

  He might, Liza realizes. He might, if he were angry enough at her.

  And there’s no question that he’s not exactly thrilled with her these days.

&n
bsp; After all, he hasn’t taken kindly to being blackmailed.

  But it’s his own fault, Liza tells herself. Married men who have a lot to lose politically shouldn’t go around sleeping with women like me.

  It certainly hadn’t been very hard to seduce Albie.

  She cringes slightly at the memory of his naked body—a white, quivering mass of Jello—hovering over hers and of his hot, garlicky breath in her face as he’d pounced on her, forcing himself into her with no foreplay other than roughly squeezing her bare breasts once or twice.

  It certainly hadn’t been difficult to hide the video camera in her bedroom, either. Albie was always so hot for her that he probably wouldn’t have noticed if a film crew had stood at the foot of the bed.

  Once Liza had the incriminating evidence on tape, all she’d had to do was send him a copy and threaten to give the original to Cathy, his wife of thirty-seven years. Albie had been furious, at first. Then he’d tried acting like the whole thing was just a big joke.

  But when he’d realized that Liza meant business, his demeanor had changed and he’d become desperate to do whatever she asked. “Just don’t show Cathy the tape,” he kept begging.

  And Liza hadn’t . . .

  Yet.

  At first, she’d used it to get Albie to write his autobiography for Xavier House. Every publisher in New York had been after him for years, trying to make a deal, thanks to his famous, scandal-ridden background.

  His father was Tyson Norwood, the oldest son in a family that had been America’s premier political force before the Kennedys arrived on the scene. And his mother was Lexie Jones, who had been one of the most famous Hollywood starlets of the thirties. Albie was their only child—the lone heir to the Norwood legacy since Ty’s brother Miles was unable to have children and his brother Wendell had been killed in the D-Day invasion without ever marrying.

  Ty, a charismatic congressman, was a notorious ladies’ man who was rumored, at one point, to be sleeping with the First Lady right under the President’s nose. As a result of his philandering, Lexie had killed herself when Albie was a teenager, jumping off the Empire State Building at high noon on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Ty had promptly made headlines by turning around and marrying a beautiful, recently divorced English duchess only a few months later. During the mid-sixties, the two of them were gunned down on the sidewalk in front of their Manhattan brownstone by someone who had never been caught. There were rumors that the murder was connected to Ty’s gambling debts or that he had been caught sleeping with a famous Brooklyn mobster’s wife, but no one was ever arrested for the crime.

  Despite his family’s high-profile activities, Albie had managed to lead a fairly quiet life. But that didn’t stop the press from hounding him everywhere he went, or from speculating about his family’s colorful past.

  Now, thanks to Liza, the world was going to learn the darkest secrets of the Norwood family, via Albie’s soon-to-be-published autobiography.

  And thanks to that book, Liza had earned a fat bonus at work, not to mention a promotion and that write-up in Publishers Weekly.

  The last time she had seen Albie, for dinner a few weeks ago, he had seemed resigned to the fact that she had a degree of power over him. He hadn’t seemed bent on revenge . . .

  But then, if his idea of revenge is sending Liza on this wild-goose chase to a rattletrap inn on an out-of-the-way island in the dead of winter; she should probably be relieved.

  After all, she isn’t exactly a stranger to using men to get what she wants.

  In fact, it’s a wonder no one has tried to get even with her before now.

  If this D.M. Yates thing turns out to be a hoax, she’ll be pissed as hell. But, she supposes, there are worse things someone could do to her . . .

  The rain beating on the roof above the attic drowns out the sound of the classical music coming from the small portable CD player, so he shuts it off.

  It’s almost time to go, anyway.

  He notes a tremor of anticipation in the pit of his stomach and wonders if Sandy’s feeling the same way. Is she jittery with excitement over the prospect of a date with Ethan Thoreau? Is she primping for him, right this very moment, behind the door to her room two floors below?

  He pictures her round face and thinks about how different she looked back when he first met her.

  Of course, she’d been much younger then.

  She wasn’t quite thirteen, her body already curvy and womanly, but not yet overweight.

  And he, at fifteen, had been a poor little rich kid: acne-ridden, clumsy, painfully shy—and that wasn’t all. He had a hideous, horribly ugly face. His features were elongated and thrust forward, as though a giant suction cup had forced them out. The doctors had told his parents that something must have happened to his face as he passed through the birth canal, and that it would probably look better as he grew older. But it hadn’t.

  Once, when he was about seven, he’d overheard his mother telling one of her friends that it was as though God had played a horrible trick on her and his father. After all, they were both beautiful people.

  He closes his eyes and thinks back to that long-ago, hot June day. After spending the morning aimlessly wandering along the water behind his parents’ summer home on the Connecticut shore, he’d walked in the back door, and there she was. Sandy Cavelli. Sitting at the kitchen table, looking bored, while a fat, dark-haired woman spoke with his mother.

  He’d quickly realized that the woman, Angie, was interviewing for a part-time maid’s position. The house already had a staff of four—a full-time housekeeper, a cook, a gardener, and a handyman who doubled as a chauffeur. But lately, his mother had been complaining that the housekeeper, Tess, couldn’t keep up with all the entertaining they did on weekends. His father, barely looking up from his New York Times, had told her to go ahead and hire part-time help then.

  “And what about your daughter?” his mother had asked Angie, casting a glance of displeasure in Sandy’s direction.

  “She’ll have to come with me when I work,” Mrs. Cavelli had said. “Her father and brothers are busy working on weekends. My husband’s a plumbing and heating contractor, and my sons are all involved in the business.”

  He still remembers the look of pride on the woman’s face as she said it, and the look of disdain on his mother’s.

  “Well, if you have to bring her, she’ll have to help,” she’d said in her clipped tone.

  “That’s fine. Sandy’s always a big help.”

  And she was. She regularly dusted and vacuumed and made up the guest rooms, which were always occupied on weekends by his parents’ friends from the city. And she often helped the cook in the kitchen, making wonderful canapes for his parents’ Friday and Saturday night cocktail parties.

  It took him several days to work up the courage to say hello to Sandy. Until he did, he spent a lot of time watching her—peeking through the doorways of guest rooms as she bent over to make up the beds or watching her through the kitchen window as she worked over the stove, pausing every now and then to wipe trickles of sweat off her neck before it could drip down between her breasts.

  As far as he knew, she never realized he was there.

  When he’d finally been brave enough to talk to her, she’d responded with a broad, cheerful grin and a bright, “Hi! It must be great living in a house like this, huh?”

  How could he tell her that most of the time, it was a nightmare? That his father was never there emotionally, even on the rare times that he was there physically. And that his mother . . . well, he couldn’t tell anyone about his mother. About what she did to him. About what she made him do.

  He’d never told another soul about that.

  So, in response to Sandy’s question, he’d smiled and shrugged and said, “Sure, it’s great.”

  And from that day on, they’d been friends.

  Though to him, it was always more than that. He’d thought it was more to her, too. He’d been wrong.

  But
how was I to know? he wonders fiercely, clenching his grown-up fists in his attic room. She acted like she cared about me . . . like she loved me. She was the first person who ever treated me as though my looks didn’t matter.

  But obviously, they had mattered.

  Because in the end, she’d abandoned him.

  Just like the others would, in years to come.

  With a sigh, he opens his eyes and his gaze falls on the portable stereo.

  Oh, yes. He mustn’t forget to bring the music.

  He hurries over to remove the round silver CD he’d been playing, presses it into the plastic case, and puts it away in alphabetical order.

  Then he reaches for a cassette tape from the stack on the table. It took him several days of combing record stores to find all the right songs to record on this tape.

  He checks the neat lettering on the inside sleeve of the plastic cassette case to make sure he has the right one.

  Yes, this is it.

  The one that begins with “One Hand, One Heart” and ends with Mendelssohn’s wedding march.

  “I’m telling you, it isn’t right,” Tony Cavelli repeats, this time thumping the table with his fist so hard that the ladle topples out of the bowl of sauce, sending tomato-colored splatters all over the plastic tablecloth.

  Danny and his wife Cheryl, who is seated to his right, exchange a glance.

  Cheryl raises her eyebrows slightly, as if to say, Aren’t you going to stick up for your sister?

  Danny sighs inwardly. Cheryl’s right. But he hates to get into this whole thing about Sandy and some weekend trip she’s apparently taken.

  He and his father don’t get along very well as it is. Never have. Pop doesn’t understand why he’d insisted on going to college or why he hadn’t gone into the family business. Or why he’d married a girl who wasn’t Italian when he could have settled down with Donna Aglieri, his high school sweetheart.

  It isn’t that Tony Cavelli doesn’t like Cheryl. Who can help but like her? She’s sweet and kind and pretty with dark blond hair and big blue eyes and the kind of smile that lights up her whole face.