All That Glitters

by Mary Brady

  If she hadn’t been so fired up about clinging to the sight of Mr. Bad Guy’s taillights, she knew she would have been scared boneless. Now she held on to determination as a way of survival both mental and physical.

  The SUV ahead of her turned once again, this time onto an impossibly narrow road or a driveway she would not have seen if he hadn’t turned there.

  She slowed and followed with growing trepidation. He for sure knew she was tailing him, but he might also know she was a reporter. If his cell service worked, surely someone at the bar would have called him.

  A thought occurred to her that tried to be amusing, but wasn’t. He could be trying to lead her to some remote place where he could get rid of her and hide this minuscule car and no one would ever be the wiser.

  The folks of the town would be convinced she had gone away. Or because they would think she was trying to bring down one of their own, especially one who was so obviously a part of the community, they might help him cover up her disappearance.

  Was the story worth dying for?

  Was she crazy for thinking such things?

  Heck, yeah.

  But if she could wipe away the memory of the hopeless look on her sister’s face when she first told her story to Addy, it was worth every slick road, every gust of wind and even facing down a fleeing tycoon.

  But, she wasn’t going to die. He didn’t frighten her. The FBI agent she had interviewed had said scam artists rarely seriously hurt anyone. They were usually cowards, often helpless if they were forced into a face-to-face confrontation.

  After what she had seen of this guy, she had to admit he wouldn’t be terrified of her. Maybe he’d want to come clean, bare his soul to cleanse himself.

  Keep dreaming, she told herself.

  She squeezed the wheel and followed the lights. After a quarter mile or so of the steeper, rocky grade, and one particularly deep water-filled rut, she patted the steering wheel. “It’s okay, rental car, you can do this.”

  The road turned suddenly and a stand of trees gave her a small respite from the wind. Wherever they were going they had to be arriving any time. She breathed a long sigh. The sun would be setting soon and she wasn’t relishing the darkness.

  Where Hale was going and what she would do when they arrived hadn’t been very well planned in her head. Somehow, she had always seen herself confronting him in an office, a bar or a coffee shop, or even on the front steps outside his condo building in downtown Boston.

  “You’re leapin’, but you’re not lookin’,” her granddad always told her when she did thoughtless things as a child.

  Well, she was nothing if not adaptable. When she found out he had left town, she ran toward the place few people knew about. She would chase him into his mansion and follow him into his man cave, whatever it took. She didn’t care as long as he talked.

  She hit a jarring bump.

  “Whoa, baby.” She patted the dashboard with one hand.

  In the past year and a half, she had changed a lot. Zooming to the top and crashing and burning six months later did that to a person. Climbing out of the crater she had made on landing had been the most difficult part and she was not sure she had found the rim yet.

  Zachary Hale was going to help her regain her footing. Her old boss at the Boston Times was going to have to give her back her job when she brought this story to him.

  Once clear of the sheltering trees, the wind rocked the SUV’s taillights and then a few seconds later slammed into her car. The wheels fought for traction as the car shifted sideways. When she tried to correct, the wind lifted the rear end.

  The world seemed to shift as the car slid backward toward the edge of the road. Water coursed around both sides as terror grabbed hold of her and squeezed hard until she couldn’t breathe.

  With a snap, the rear end of the car dropped and she screamed. Braking and steering did nothing except perhaps hasten her descent.

  The nose of the car shifted suddenly upward toward the angry sky and the sound of her renewed screams bounced off the cheap vinyl and plastic around her.

  With a sudden jolt the car stopped, the headlamps pointing upward at a forty-five-degree slant and lighting up the torrent of raindrops. She had no idea how far she had gone. Ten feet? Twenty?

  Or how much farther she would drop.

  Gingerly she sat up in the seat trying to see outside the confines of the car. There was nothing but rain in the headlights. Darkness was falling.

  She tried for a calming breath.

  Was this all?

  Was she about to plunge off the edge of some bluff?

  She turned slowly in the seat to recon the area behind her. Just then, the wind rocked the car, shifting the tires, loosening their hold and the vehicle shifted downward even farther.

  Fear of having made yet another stupid mistake moved in for a tick, until she reminded herself there was a prize to be had if she could just buck up and get through this.

  The car shook again, but held fast.

  Okay.

  Now. Stay in the car or get out and run after the story of her the life? For her pride and her sister, she popped open the door.

  When she leaped out, the wind hit her like a hand grabbing her, hauling her upward.

  The strong hand hefted her up the few feet to the edge of the road and Zachary Hale tossed her onto solid ground. Through the sheets of driving rain she saw the black SUV.

  “Get in,” Hale yelled and she eagerly grabbed the door and did so.

  A couple minutes later the driver’s-side door popped open. Hale led with her duffel bag and backpack with her electronics as he jumped in and continued up the road.

  She closed her eyes for a moment of thanks for being alive and then she glanced at the driver.

  Brooding was kind of an understatement, as she observed him in the shed of he dashboard lights. The wind shook even the big SUV and the driver concentrated on the road.

  After a few minutes more of driving, he stopped and backed into a short driveway and up to a three-car garage. One garage door raised and he parked the vehicle safely inside.

  Addy hadn’t gotten but a glance of the mansion through the downpour. Large and brooding, old, not what she had expected.

  Once inside the garage, she did not give herself a second to sag in relief. She grabbed her bags and scrambled out of the vehicle. For a reporter it was probably more apt than for most people to ask for forgiveness for trespassing rather than ask for permission. If she was out of the vehicle, he could see she planned to stay.

  As she stood next to the SUV and dripped, the garage door lowered. In the dimness of the light, she could see that a very early model car and a buggy of some sort filled the other two garage spaces. He must be a collector of some kind.

  Then a disgusting thought occurred to her. Maybe he bought these with OPM...other people’s money.

  Move, she told herself. The moment would never get better than this, and if she invited herself to stay...

  She let herself into a breezeway between the house and the garage. The enclosed space ran the length of the garage and was undoubtedly a twentieth-century addition designed as shelter only. Stark and serviceable, the room had hooks on the far wall holding coats for all seasons with men’s boots and shoes lined up on mats below the coats.

  Off to the left there was a large box of wood and a set of flip-up doors to a cellar. The doors would have been outside before the breezeway had been built. Outside and close to the entry to the kitchen so the food stored down there could be easily accessed. It was a very old house.

  When Hale didn’t follow her, she moved to where she could see him through the window in the door to the garage. If he picked up an ax or a chain saw, she could run out a door on either end of the breezeway.

  She put a hand to her wet hair and
shoved a large clump out of her eyes. Maybe if she could see more clearly, she wouldn’t think such dire thoughts.

  He rounded the SUV making a beeline for where she stood in the doorway. Coming to murder her? “Con men don’t usually turn to murder, unless it’s a last resort” were the FBI agent’s exact words. The woman had seemed confident in herself, but Addy wondered if she was pushing this guy toward said last resort. She had once thought of herself as a good judge of character, but now she’d just have to rely on being extra careful.

  She stepped away as he swung open the door. Inside the breezeway, Hale seemed to be racing to remove the rain suit, hanging each piece on hooks on the wall. Then he ripped off his overshirt and damp baggy work pants, tossing each item onto the top of a nearby washing machine. When he turned in her direction, a sweep of raw appreciation for the masculine body made her face flush. She had no idea what had been living under those business suits.

  With his dark T-shirt and dark athletic shorts clinging to his body, there was little she could not intimately imagine about this rat. Too bad.

  He took a step toward where she had made a large water spot on the floor, and she stood up taller. Getting timid would not get her the scoop every journalist wanted and only she was brave or crazy enough to go after.

  “Zachary Hale, I’m Adriana Bonacorda. I’d like to get your side of the story.”

  He looked at her for a long moment. Drops of rain fell from his water-darkened hair still tipped with summer’s blond, and splatted onto the smooth, clean concrete garage floor.

  “I’d like to throw you out in the rain.” There was only candor, not malice, in his deep voice, a voice to fit the body.

  He turned and strode away. When he went through the door to the house and didn’t close it behind him, she tore off her coat and hung it on the hook beside his. Ripped off her wet clothing and hung it there also.

  Then, in her girl shorts and tank top, she grabbed her bags and scrambled inside after him.

  When she flipped a light switch, she found herself alone in a large old-fashioned kitchen with a cold wood-burning stove and a wooden icebox with shining brass hardware. Antique pots and bowls hung from hooks and the fireplace with a stone mantel had to have been built with the house, perhaps two hundred years ago.

  She put her bags down on the old-style braided rug, and shivering, dug in her duffel for the fleece pants and hoodie she brought because she knew Maine was colder than Massachusetts. Darn cold, she thought as she shoved a leg into the pants.

  “Close and latch the shutters in there. Cross-tape every window without a shutter.” Hale had disappeared into the interior of the house but his barked commands filtered back to her through the sound of the pounding rain. A roll of wide masking tape sat on the wooden counter next to the icebox.

  The first window, long and tall, was flanked by sheer curtains with tulips fancifully stitched across the bottom.

  She surveyed for a moment.

  Open the window, reach out in the pounding rain and pull the shutter closed.

  Easy peasy.

  She struggled to push up the first heavy window and when it wouldn’t stay by itself, propped it open with her shoulder while she reached out and pulled the shutters closed. The shutter’s latch fell easily into place, but she struggled to lower the heavy wood and glass window without letting it drop and shatter into a million shards.

  After she was finished, a large puddle of rainwater stood on the linoleum around her feet and she was wet again.

  When she heard shutters slam in the next room, she closed the next two sets, grabbed the tape and a flashlight from the old wooden kitchen table, just in case, and hurried past Hale into the parlor to do the same in there.

  The light she had turned on blinked out, as did the ones in the rooms she had left behind. She flipped on her flashlight.

  In the beam of light she could see furniture and fixtures she might have seen in her grandmother’s home or at one of her old aunts’ houses when she was a kid. Her flashlight paused on a round table with three tiers that would serve no purpose in today’s world and then a pair of bulldogs that might be banks. Hale was trying to protect the place as if it was a museum. Wait. It was a museum, of sorts.

  When Hale strode past her, she got busy and finished the parlor. A library across the hall and then a maid’s quarters at the back of the house needed her attention next. When she heard Hale run up the stairs, she finished two more rooms and followed. The first bedroom she worked on had a dark four-poster bed complete with a wooden canopy—if that’s what they called the wood ones—and velvet curtains. On a stand sat a pitcher and bowl that had once been used for washing up in the morning. A small primitive bathroom sat tucked between this and the next bedroom and she closed the shutters on all of them and taped a window in the hallway.

  She could hear Hale on the third floor or attic or whatever was up there slamming shutters and then his footsteps hurrying.

  By the time she finished a fourth bedroom and third sitting room, Hale stood, a shadow in the doorway. She resisted the urge to shine the beam in his direction and the ambient light was too dim to see the expression on his face. A spark of fear sent a prickle of pain along the nerves just under her skin, but there would be no “flight” today.

  “Thank you,” he said and vanished. This time, he didn’t call back to her.

  The lights flickered on and she wandered out of the bedroom to look in the other rooms down the hallway. Every bedroom had an antique bed or two, some older than others. One was even a rope bed used by the early settlers in lieu of a mattress. The house seemed to be a collection of antiquities spanning the ages.

  Addy was not an expert, but she had seen enough around Boston to know colonial American through early-twentieth-century furnishings when she saw them. None of the rooms looked as if they had been lived in for a very long time, with the exception of the four-poster bedroom. It had a space heater sitting near the fireplace. He could entrench himself in this room and make her sleep on the stiff and formal settee in the parlor.

  She loped down the stairs doubting Zachary Hale was going out into the storm again, but he wasn’t in the kitchen or the rest of the house. When she heard sounds in the garage again she went out to see him unloading groceries and water from the SUV.

  He now wore a navy pull-on shirt with a button V and jeans, and she assumed dry underwear. She’d give a few bucks herself for some of those right now. She had some in her duffel bag, but since she might be tossed out into the storm at any moment...

  Throwing her out was exactly what she expected a guy like Zachary Hale to do. He wouldn’t steal from old ladies and then open his home to a reporter, unless he had other plans for the reporter.

  She swallowed against the tightness in her throat, let herself out into the garage and grabbed four of the gallon bottles of water from the SUV and followed Hale up a set of stairs at the back wall of the garage. Wherever he was going, there must be a place to make food.

  If anyone understood why people went into an ax murderer’s dark basement without back up, it was an investigative journalist, especially one with no options in the outside world short of minimum-wage jobs—if she could even get one of those.

  Only her sister would miss her, and that was a maybe, because her sister was busy with two children, living in a tiny apartment and had only called her because she was in dire straights.

  Addy shook her head. Their lives were such a mess.

  She shouldered open the door at the top of the stairs at the rear of the garage and stopped short. The door opened into a large loft where vaulted ceilings spread out over a comfy living space. This explained where in the unused house he stayed. He didn’t.

  A kitchen sat to the left, small, open with a freestanding work island. Two bar stools sat tucked under the lip of its butcher-block counter. To the right of the k
itchen area was a more formal dining space with a table—all wood and with six chairs. In the middle of the back wall sat a fireplace flanked by a couch and cushioned chairs.

  On the right of the room was a large bed covered with a duvet of large burgundy and forest-green squares. The whole place looked woodsy, spare and masculine with the exception of a few touches that said a woman had been here on more than one occasion.

  She put the water on the counter and started to go down for more.

  “I’ll get the rest.”

  She began to protest, but he held up a hand and continued. “In the bedroom with the four-poster bed, there are dry towels and a space heater.”

  She took the dismissal for what it was. He had no idea what to do with the enemy, but apparently even a rat couldn’t throw an intruder, no matter how unwanted, out into a hurricane to fend for herself.

  Not getting any dryer, she hurried down the stairs, through the garage and breezeway and to the kitchen. She plucked her duffel and backpack from the braided rug and headed for the bedroom with the four-poster bed...and a space heater.

  What she was going to do when the electricity went out, and it surely would, she had no idea.

  Worse than the cold, sitting in the cold dark she wasn’t going to get the story from Hale. She needed a plan to put herself in his space where she could glean knowledge from his reactions.

  As she carried her bags up the stairs, she wondered if somewhere in the clattering din of the storm would eventually be the hum of a generator to keep the space heater functioning.

  In the four-poster bedroom, she flipped a light switch. When the dim bulb came on, it was barely better than nothing.

  Part of her wanted to sit down in the semi-dark and write up what she had already learned about Zachary Hale and the other part, the overachiever survival part of her wanted to rush back over to the loft. She would demand Hale tell her all there was to know about his company, Hale and Blankenstock Investments, LLC, and about the partner on which his attorney tried to blame the scandal.