Smoke in Mirrors

by Jayne Ann Krentz

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” Leonora said. “Your successor is going to find you a very hard act to follow.”

  Roberta glanced around the glowing rooms with a wistful air. “I’ll miss it, you know.”

  “Running Mirror House? Look on the bright side. Just think, no more dealing with crotchety professors. No more having to train new student assistants every quarter. No more soothing difficult alumni who threaten to cut off funds for the endowment if they don’t get their way.”

  “All true. Still, it’s going to seem strange to wake up in the morning next month and realize that I no longer have to come in to the office every day.”

  “I have a hunch that when you wake up that first morning on that beautiful cruise ship bound for all those exotic ports of call, you’ll forget about the office routine very quickly.”

  Roberta chuckled. “You’re right. And there’s another big plus. In my position as retired executive director of Mirror House, I’ll be able to attend the annual alumni reception next year without having to do any of the work ahead of time.”

  “That will be something to look forward to.”

  Roberta looked at Deke and Cassie, who stood a short distance away, talking to a small knot of people.

  “One good thing has come out of all the terrible events of the past few days,” she said. “Deke Walker appears to be a new man.”

  Leonora followed her gaze. Deke had his arm around Cassie’s waist in an intimate, casually possessive manner. Cassie’s magnificent figure was displayed to advantage in the black dress. Her face was alight with happiness.

  At that moment Deke laughed at something someone in the group had said. Leonora thought back to the first time she had met him, his face grim and haggard in the light thrown off by his computer screen. The transformation in him was even more breathtaking than the one that had occurred in Mirror House.

  “Yes,” she said. “He does look like a new man.”

  “It was getting rid of that dreadful beard that makes the difference,” Roberta said. “He should have done it long ago.”

  Leonora caught Cassie’s eye at that instant. She smiled. “I don’t think it was the beard.”

  Deke looked at Cassie standing in the doorway. She was silhouetted against the seductive glow of the lamp she had left burning in the living room. It occurred to him that he had never seen the inside of her house.

  “Thank you for a wonderful evening,” Cassie said.

  “This is the first time I can honestly say that I actually enjoyed one of those damn alumni receptions.” He hesitated. “We’ll, uh, have to do it again sometime.”

  “Next year,” she said a little too brightly. “Same time, same place. I’ll mark my calendar.”

  “I was thinking of maybe dinner this coming Saturday.”

  “Oh.”

  He waited but she did not say anything else.

  “Can I take that as an affirmative response?” he asked eventually.

  “Oh. Oh, yes. Yes, that would be great. I’ll look forward to it.”

  “Is there something wrong here?” Deke asked. “I’m getting mixed signals.”

  “No, really, I’d love to go out with you on Saturday night.”

  He reached up to stroke his beard in a gesture that had become a habit. When he touched bare skin he winced. He dropped his hand.

  “You’ve been very patient with me, Cassie. Very kind. I feel like I’ve been living in another world for a while. But I’m back.”

  “I’m so glad,” she whispered.

  “I’m okay,” he plowed on. “I don’t need any more acts of charity. Do you understand what I’m trying to say? I don’t want you to go out with me just because you feel sorry for me.”

  “I do want to have dinner with you, Deke, it’s just—” She trailed off.

  Panic hit him. He struggled, trying to figure out how to handle the situation. The problem was, he hadn’t had a lot of experience with this kind of thing. Too long out of the dating game, he thought. Not that he’d ever played the game that well in the first place.

  Inspiration struck. He looked at her, squinting a little against the glow of the light behind her. “Maybe I could come in for a while so that we can talk about this over coffee?”

  “Come in?”

  “Is that an invitation or a question?”

  She went very still. “Deke, there’s something I need to tell you.”

  Damn. It had all been charity. She wasn’t really interested in him as a man. She had just felt sorry for a client. He steeled himself. He could handle the truth, he thought. What he couldn’t take was false hope and kindness disguised as passion.

  “Say it,” he demanded. “Just say it and get it over with. I won’t shatter into a million pieces.”

  “I know that,” she said. “Only a very strong man could have weathered all of the rumors and gossip concerning the state of your mind these past few months. Only a strong man could have stuck to his guns when everyone was telling him that he was obsessive and crazy.”

  “Not everyone said I was obsessive and crazy. You and Thomas never said it. At least, not to my face.”

  “What I’m trying to get across here is that I didn’t go out with you tonight because I felt sorry for you, and I didn’t agree to go out on Saturday because I felt like doing you a favor. I want you to know the truth before you come in for coffee.”

  “What truth?”

  “Deke, you have been the target of a carefully calculated seduction.”

  Maybe he had flipped out, after all.

  “Huh?” he said.

  “Remember the dinner with Leonora and Thomas? The one I helped cook?”

  “Yes,” he said, cautious now.

  “That was part of the strategy. And tonight, this black dress?”

  “I really, really like the dress.”

  “More strategy. Leonora consulted her grandmother, who checked with Herb, who writes an advice column.”

  “I see.”

  “Herb chose the lasagna and the apple pie and this dress.”

  “I’ll have to remember to thank Herb. Can I ask why I was targeted for this strategy of seduction?”

  “Why? You have to ask me why? Isn’t it obvious? You were targeted because I’m in love with you.” She flung her arms wide. “I have been for the past six months. But you never noticed and I was afraid you never would, and your beard was getting longer and longer and it all looked hopeless. That’s why.”

  The damp night air was suddenly as effervescent as champagne. Deke laughed.

  “I think,” he said, “that this may be the happiest night of my life.”

  She blinked once or twice. “You’re sure?”

  “I love you,” he said. “I think I must have fallen in love with you somewhere in the middle of that first yoga lesson.”

  “Really?”

  “Why do you think I signed up for a full year in advance?”

  “Oh.” Her expression softened. Her full mouth curved into a welcoming smile.

  “Are you going to invite me in for coffee now?” he asked.

  She stood back and held the door open for him.

  A long time later, he settled beside her in the warm, shadowed bed, replete and content beyond measure. He reached for Cassie. She came to him, damp and happy, folded her arms on his chest.

  “That was incredible,” she said.

  “It was, wasn’t it?” He stroked the full curve of her hip. “Always knew those damn yoga lessons would be good for something someday.”

  Leonora kicked off her high heels the moment she walked into Thomas’s house. Wrench brought her a mangled leather bone, which she admired while Thomas hung up their coats and got the fire going.

  When he had a blaze crackling he went around the end of the counter, poured two brandies and took them into the living room.

  She savored the sight of him as he lowered himself onto the sofa beside her. He had removed the jacket of his suit. The collar of the white dress sh
irt was open, the sleeves rolled up on his muscular forearms. His tie hung loose around his neck. He propped his feet, clad in black dress socks, next to her nylon-sheathed toes on the coffee table.

  They sipped brandy in a comfortable silence.

  “What do you think?” Leonora said eventually. “Are they in bed together yet?”

  Thomas checked his watch. “It’s been nearly forty minutes since we left them both at her place. I’d say, unequivocally and without a doubt, yes. They’re in bed.”

  “Unequivocally?”

  “It’s a fancy word meaning, for sure.”

  “I know what it means, I just wondered how you could be so certain that Deke and Cassie are in bed.”

  “Something about the way they were looking at each other during that last dance, I think.”

  “Mesmerized by each other.”

  “Yeah.” He sipped brandy and lowered the glass. “Mesmerized.”

  She rested her head against the high cushion behind her and looked at his feet stacked one on top of the other on the low table. They looked very large next to her own. She felt a little mesmerized herself, she thought. She closed her eyes.

  “I owe you,” Thomas said after a while. “For a lot of things. For coming here to Wing Cove. For working with Deke and me to get the answers we all needed. For helping Cassie seduce Deke. For—”

  “Don’t say it.” She did not open her eyes.

  “Don’t say what?” he asked.

  “Don’t say that you owe me for sleeping with you or I will never, ever forgive you.”

  “I wasn’t going to say that.”

  She opened her eyes and saw that he was gazing thoughtfully at her toes.

  “What were you going to say?” she asked.

  “I believe that I was about to thank you for agreeing to stay on here in Wing Cove for a while.”

  “Oh, that.”

  “Yeah, that.” He took another swallow of brandy. “I need to ask you something.”

  “Ummm?”

  “What you said earlier tonight. About me being a good father. You really think so?”

  “Yes.” She waited. When he said nothing more, she risked a quick glance at his hard profile. “Why?”

  “Just wondered what made you say it.”

  “You know how to make a commitment and stick with it. That’s the most important element of fatherhood, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “You don’t think maybe I’m a little old for fatherhood?”

  “No.”

  He took the brandy glass out of her hand and set it beside his own on the table. He eased her down onto the sofa and lowered himself gently along the length of her. He was warm and heavy and unmistakably aroused.

  She caught the trailing ends of his tie in her hands. “I love you, Thomas.”

  “I fell in love with you the first time I saw you.”

  “Impossible.” She wrinkled her nose. “You thought I was a liar and a thief.”

  “Didn’t change the situation.” He framed her face between his hands. “Just made me worry about things for a while.”

  He kissed her, long and deep.

  They were sitting in her living room looking out into the gardens. She had poured a shot of the fancy orange-flavored liqueur Leonora had given her on Mother’s Day for both of them. The television was still on but she had turned down the sound an hour ago.

  She and Herb had both seen the late-night movie when it first aired forty years earlier. It was a romantic comedy. They knew how it ended. Neither of them had lived lives that had even remotely resembled the Hollywood version, but that was okay.

  The older you got, Gloria figured, the more you understood that reality and fiction didn’t have to match up. They were mirror images, not exact duplicates. They each had a place. Both were important. But they were not the same. A smart person didn’t try to make one into the other. That way lay disaster.

  She checked her ankles and was pleased. They were hardly swollen at all tonight. In fact, they looked pretty good, if she did say so herself.

  She glanced at Herb. He looked pretty good tonight, too. Relaxed. A little younger, maybe. More energetic, at any rate. She was feeling rather lively herself.

  “What do you think?” she said. “Are they in bed yet?”

  Herb checked his watch. “Damn well better be. If they aren’t, you can’t hold me responsible. An advice columnist can only do so much. After that, it’s up to the advisees to take action.”

  She thought about the humming excitement she had heard in Leonora’s voice that afternoon when they had discussed what her friends would wear to the reception.

  “I think she’s in love, Herb. For real this time. Not trying to fake it the way she did with Kyle Delling just because it looks right on the surface.”

  Herb raised his glass in a small salute. “To love.”

  They both drank to that.

  Herb checked his watch again. “Speaking of getting to bed, we’d better get a move on. I took that little blue pill forty minutes ago. The effects don’t last forever you know.”

  “Nothing lasts forever, Herb. That’s why you’ve got to reach out and grab life when it comes along.”

  “I know. What do you say we go grab us a little right now?”

  She smiled. “You’re a real smooth talker, Herb.”

  She put down her glass and pushed herself up out of the chair.

  She didn’t use the walker. Herb took her arm to steady her.

  Together they walked into the shadowed bedroom.

  “About our deal,” Herb said sometime later.

  She chuckled. “Relax, you’ve finally managed to sleep your way to the top, Herb. Your name and photo go on the column tomorrow.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  The phone in the librarian’s office warbled at a quarter past three on Monday afternoon. It was the first time it had rung all day. Leonora started at the unexpected sound. She did not like the unpleasant jolt of adrenaline.

  She had told herself that the strange, nervy sensation was a direct result of the stress she had been under in the past few days and the fact that she’d had the mirror dream again last night. But now she wondered if it had something to do with the eerie gloom that had descended on Mirror House this afternoon.

  She and Roberta were the only ones here. In the wake of the activity that had prevailed downstairs for the past few days, the brooding silence that welled up from the first floor had a hollow quality as if it came from a distant place that was not of this world.

  The phone rang a second time. Leonora closed the little treatise on the use of mirrors as symbols in art that she had been examining and got to her feet. She went into the small office and scooped up the receiver.

  “Hello?”

  “Awfully quiet around here today, isn’t it?” Roberta said.

  Leonora relaxed a little. “Downright spooky.”

  “It’s always this way the Monday after alumni weekend. I just made some coffee. Thought I’d take a short break. Care to join me?”

  The thought of drinking Roberta’s coffee made her cringe, but she needed something to help her shake off this edgy feeling.

  “Thanks. I’ll be right down.”

  She hung up the phone and walked quickly out into the shadows of the hall. When she started down the main staircase, the somber gloom from the ground floor seemed to rise up to meet her in a relentless tide. Mirror House was a different world today. The glitz and glamour that had prevailed on Saturday night had vanished. The time-warped quality was back.

  The sensation of impending dread grew stronger as she made her way down the stairs. She was conscious of having to push herself to go down the last few steps.

  This was crazy. What was wrong with her? Maybe she was coming down with something.

  She needed that cup of coffee, she thought. She craved the company of another human being even more than the stimulant.

  The glow of the computer screen glinted off the lenses of Deke’s
glasses. His fingers moved over the keys with the virtuosity of a wizard crafting sorcery.

  “Okay, I’m in,” he muttered. He did not look up from the screen. “I’ve got Kern’s banking records. Now what?”

  Thomas turned away from the window and walked back to the desk. He looked over Deke’s shoulder.

  “Now we search for some kind of pattern,” he said. “Whatever Elissa Kern found that made her think her father was making blackmail payments to Rhodes.”

  “I still don’t get the point of this search. Stovall told us that Kern was being blackmailed by Rhodes. It’s old news. Kern and Rhodes are both dead.”

  “I’m just trying to tie up some loose ends.”

  “What loose ends?” Deke sounded exasperated. “It’s finished.”

  “Did I give you a hard time when you were acting like an obsessive nutcase because you wanted answers about Bethany?”

  “Yes, you did, as a matter of fact. I seem to recall a lot of lectures on the subject of letting go of the past and getting on with my life. And then there were all those hints that I should talk to a shrink.”

  “So now I’m the obsessive nutcase. Humor me, okay?”

  “Whatever you say.” Deke went back to work on the keyboard. “But I gotta tell you, I had planned to spend today in bed working on my yoga exercises.”

  Roberta was standing behind her desk, stacking framed photographs in one of the three cartons arrayed in front of her. When she saw Leonora in the doorway she looked up with a relieved smile.

  I’m not the only one who has a case of the creeps today, Leonora thought. The oppressive atmosphere had affected Roberta, too.

  “Oh, good, you’re here,” Roberta said. “Please sit down.” She put aside the photograph she had been about to stuff into the carton with evident relief, and crossed the room to the table that held the coffee things. She picked up the pot. “Thanks for joining me.”

  “I’m glad you called me downstairs. I wasn’t getting much done, anyway. This place feels even stranger than usual today.”

  “I agree. And I’m used to Mirror House.” Roberta poured the coffee into two cups. “Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to come in and pack up my office today. So many years and so many memories. But it has to be done. I just wanted to get it over with, I suppose.”