The snow was falling now in big, paper cutouts that lay on his jacket for a mere twinkling before melting into oblivion. Quinn held up a sleeve and marveled at the sheer magic that was coming and going there. Whether it was the carollers or the children, the deer or the snowflakes—for an instant Quinn was a kid again, in harmony with the universe around him. God, how he'd missed New England.
He felt a tug on his jacket and, still smiling, turned to see a small boy looking up at him.
"Mister? Did your daddy really kill a girl in school?"
Quinn gazed down at the kid. He was six, maybe seven. What kind of parents talked about stuff like that in front of a six-year-old? Jesus.
"My dad didn't hurt anyone, sport," he said as gently as he knew how. "That was just a rumor."
"What's a roomer?"
"It's when someone tells stories that might not be—"
"Andrew!" a woman said shrilly behind the child. "Get over here right now. Right now!"
She rushed up to the boy and hauled him off with a brutal yank on his parka. For the first time since he'd stepped into the Currier and Ives scene, Quinn felt some of his resolve falter. If every citizen in Keepsake was going to treat him like a leper...
"Quinn, dear! Quinn! Yoo-hoo!"
Surprised at the enthusiasm in the voice, he turned in time to behold a petite, elderly woman angling a four-legged walker before her as she made her way by lamplight across the snow-covered grass. She wore a black wool coat and was muffled under several circuits of a fluffy red scarf; her red knit hat covered all but a few white curls. Only her eyes showed, and that was all he needed to see.
"Mrs. Dewsbury!"
It was his old English teacher, the first and only mentor he'd ever had. He'd had her for homeroom once and for English twice. Quinn had always known he was a natural athlete, but it was Mrs. Dewsbury who had convinced him that he could compete in the classroom as well.
She had to be eighty by now. He didn't like seeing her using a walker; but he liked the fact that she was still out and about.
"Mrs. Dewsbury, it really is you," he said, grinning as he approached her.
She lifted a welcoming arm for his embrace. He hugged her gently and kissed her cheek and said, "You look great. No kidding; you look great."
"Oh, tish! I'm old and decrepit and I've got two new knees that I don't trust a damn. And speaking of bones, I have one to pick with you, young man. Where have you been hiding for the last seventeen years? You might have let me know."
"Right. I'm sorry about that. We, uh, took up residence in California."
She cocked her head thoughtfully and said, "You know, I'm not surprised. They hired your father, no questions asked out there, am I right?"
"Californians tend to do that," he agreed. "They get lots of practice with illegals."
"Hmph. Well, Frank Leary was a wonderful gardener, and the Bennett estate hasn't looked as good since. Just last fall—early fall, mind you!—their latest gardener went and flat-topped every rhododendron he could reach. The things looked grotesque, and after the inevitable winterkill, they looked even worse. Well, never mind. How have you been, dear? How have you been?" she demanded, squeezing his forearm through his thin jacket. "Oh, my," she added after she did it. "Do you still play?"
"Football? No, I left that all behind me."
"I always watch for you during the Superbowl."
He laughed and said, "I have a masonry business. I do a lot of stonework. I guess that's what's kept me in shape."
She pulled her scarf away from her face and snugged it under her chin. "And your father I just heard has passed on?"
Quinn nodded. "Last month," he said quietly. "Of a stroke. He didn't linger long ... two and a half weeks."
"I'm sorry, dear. I know how close you must have been to him."
Somehow Quinn didn't want to talk about it, despite—maybe because of—the sympathy he heard in her voice. He said, "Can I get you something? Hot chocolate?"
"Actually, I've brought my own refreshment." She reached into the leather handbag that was hooked on her walker and came up with a silver hip flask. "Blackberry brandy is what warms me these long, cold nights."
She tipped it in Quinn's direction. Startled, he shook his head. "Thanks, but I'm driving," he said, wondering about her own ability to operate a walker while under the influence. His old teacher and mentor had always been a free spirit. Obviously that hadn't changed. "How did you get here?" he asked. He wouldn't have been surprised if she'd told him on a Harley.
"The senior citizens' van," she said with a sigh of disgust. "I flunked my driver's test last year. Macular degeneration in my left eye. And the right one's fading fast," she added. "I can barely read large-print books with a magnifying glass anymore, but I keep trying." Lifting the flask, she glanced around, then took a single prim sip, screwed the cap back on, and tucked the silver container snugly in her purse. "Well, my dear! How long will you be staying?"
He wished he knew. He had a business to run back in California. "That's up in the air. I've just paid a visit to an uncle in Old Saybrook. He's my father's brother and is ailing himself. While I was in your neck of the woods, I thought I'd drop in just to ... to ..."
"To see who got rich, who got fat, and who got out?"
"All those things," he said, smiling. She was making it so easy for him to lie. "And I wanted Keepsake to know that at least one chapter in their history had ended."
"And a sorry chapter it was, condemning your father without a trial! I hope you don't think we were all so foolish," she said, straightening her tiny frame behind the walker.
His response to that was drowned out by the amplified thumps on a microphone being tested for sound. Mrs. Dewsbury explained that the thumper was Keepsake's current mayor, Mike Macoun. Quinn had a vague memory of the man, a restaurateur who was undoubtedly well connected both then and now.
After a pretty little speech in favor of Christmas, the portly mayor took one cord and plugged it into another cord, and the twenty-five-foot balsam fir lit up to happy oohs and ahs from the crowd. It was a tree for kids, not grown-ups, all buried in red bows and gaudy colored lights and topped with a giant, lopsided star. There was nothing chic or understated about it, which pleased Quinn. He was tired of the white lights his upscale clients favored.
Someone shot off a cannon and the mayor declared that Keepsake's holiday season had officially begun. Almost immediately, the crowd began thinning. The snow was beginning to pile up, and people were anxious to get on with their chores.
"Where are you staying, Quinn?" the elderly woman asked.
"Let me think, it's newish ... the Acorn Motel."
"Heavens, don't be silly. You're not staying at any motel. You'll take me home and stay at my house while you're in Keepsake."
He protested, but she wouldn't hear of it, and soon it was settled. He would stay in her overly large and virtually unoccupied Victorian home for the duration, whatever it ended up being. Quinn liked the idea of having daily access to someone who could fill him in on seventeen years of comings and goings in Keepsake. He tried to insist on paying for his stay, but Mrs. Dewsbury wouldn't hear of that, either. They ended with a compromise: he would do a few odd jobs around the house, and they would call it even.
After giving the driver of the senior citizens' van a heads-up, they left Town Hill together to scandalized looks and some sly greetings, although no one approached them to chat. Caught up in conversation with Mrs. Dewsbury, Quinn had little opportunity to look around him, but the one time he did, he saw a man whose face he could hardly forget: his father's employer and the richest man for miles around, Owen Randall Bennett. The textile mill owner was deep in conversation with two other men and didn't notice—or pretended not to notice—Quinn, who instinctively altered course away from him. He wasn't ready to deal with the town's patriarch yet, not by a long shot.
"That way's closer to the car," he said to Mrs. Dewsbury, pointing off in another direction. As they shifted course, h
e found himself wondering where the rest of the Bennetts were. Owen was around. Was his wife? What about their two kids? Had Princess Olivia married and moved on? And her brother, the Prince? Knowing Rand as well as he did, Quinn guessed that he'd been given an empty title and a corner office by his father.
But it was Rand's twin sister Olivia who came more vividly to mind. Skinny, brainy, infuriatingly competitive—Quinn and the Princess had butted heads over every academic award the school had offered. He half expected her to tap him on his shoulder and challenge him then and there to a spelling bee.
Olivia Bennett. He'd never forgotten her. How could he, when they'd grown up side by side on the same estate, she in the big house, he in the gardener's cottage?
He drove Mrs. Dewsbury home with extra caution—the last thing he needed was to smash up a kindly old widow who'd taken pity on him—and then he hovered solicitously as she plowed in her fur-topped galoshes behind the walker through several inches of unshoveled snow on the walk.
Her all-white Queen Anne house was enormous; he was surprised she still lived in it by herself. But her grandparents had built it, and four successive generations had lived in it. It wasn't easy to abandon so much history. The trouble was, her son was settled in a lucrative career as a financial planner in Boston, and her divorced and childless daughter lived out west. Mrs. Dewsbury had dreams—but no real hopes—that after she was gone, one of them would somehow return to live in the family homestead.
"In the meantime," she said, handing Quinn her walker and brushing snow from the banister as she ascended the ambling, wraparound porch, "my daughter wants me to move to a retirement community nearer to where she lives. But I'd be miserable living somewhere else. I wouldn't know a soul and the food would taste different. No, the only way I'm leaving this house is feet first."
She pointed to an exterior light fixture hanging by its tattered fabric cord from the porch ceiling. "One thing you might do for me, dear, is tuck that thing back into its hole sometime. I got on a stepladder the other day, but I was still too short."
Aghast at the thought of her teetering on a ladder in her new knees and poking at a frayed cord, Quinn assured her that the job was as good as done.
They went inside to a house that was cavernous and yet cozy in a varnished, dark-wood way. The ceilings were easily ten feet high, but the arched doorways somehow whittled the rooms back down to size. God knew, there were enough of them: twin parlors, a breakfast room, a music room, a cozy area, a game room, a reading room, a writing room—Quinn got lost just looking for the phone.
But he found it at last, an old black one being used to weigh down a slew of papers and magazines on a cluttered desk in a book-filled nook that smelled of fireplace ashes and potpourri. If rooms had personalities, then this one was smart, interesting, and heedless of other people's opinions. Quinn liked it as much as he liked its owner.
He looked up the number of the Acorn Motel and canceled his reservation there, then meandered back to the kitchen to reminisce with his old teacher over a pot of spiked tea. The second pot was steeping when they heard a sudden, sickening sound of shattering glass from in front of the house.
An accident, was Quinn's first thought; the street was still unplowed. He ran to the front door and flipped on the porch light, which, not surprisingly, didn't work. The wide street was dark, but he could see no cars embraced in a fender bender on it. All he saw was his rented brown pickup, parked the way he'd left it in front of the house.
Actually, not quite the way he'd left it. The front windshield had been smashed to smithereens.
More surprised than angry, Quinn ran out to the now-deserted street. Hard to believe, but someone must have followed him to Mrs. Dewsbury's house. He peered inside the truck. The front seat was buried under a blanket of broken glass. His camera and duffel bag were where he'd left them, but the caller had left a welcoming bouquet: red carnations, strewn all over the broken glass.
Somehow they didn't look right. Quinn reached inside and picked up a couple of them.
What the hell? He fingered the blooms. Wet. He looked at his hand. Red.
A clutch of carnations, dipped in blood.
Chapter 2
"Any sign of them?" Mrs. Dewsbury called out.
Quinn turned to see his elderly hostess standing in the doorway, her small frame silhouetted in the soft glow of the parlor lamps. "Nah," he said. "They're gone."
He tossed the flowers back on the seat and wiped his fingers on a floor mat, then took a closer look around. He could see evidence in the snow where someone had jumped out of a car, scrambled over to the rental, done the deed, and escaped. The depressions were already filling in with newly fallen snow; no clues there. He scanned the other homes on the street. All were large with lots of windows, but all were dark. No doubt everyone was off doing Christmas errands. Shit.
He went back to the house, brushing the snow from his sweater before he rejoined Mrs. Dewsbury in the more formal of her two parlors. He expected to find a frightened, agitated little old lady. He was wrong. Old and little she might have been, but the lady was clearly pissed.
"I have lived in this house for eighty-one years and I have never—never—seen such a thing," she said in a shaking voice. "What will you do? How will you drive?"
Quinn shrugged reassuringly and said, "It's no big deal. I'll have the car towed and rent another if I have to."
"Too bad I sold the Buick to my nephew last year. Really, it's just too bad!" Her hands were trembling as she moved from armchair to drum table to davenport to the walker that she'd left in the archway between the two parlors. With white-knuckled fury she reclaimed the walker and began marching out ahead of him.
"We'll just see what Chief Vickers has to say about this," she huffed. "Use the phone in the kitchen to call him. It's a speakerphone."
Oh, perfect. "Y'know, Mrs. Dewsbury," Quinn suggested, "Chief Vickers may not be the most sympathetic man in Keepsake."
"Sympathy has nothing to do with this! Someone just broke the law, and it's his job to uphold the law."
Law, shmaw. Quinn was a lot more worried about staying on in the woman's house and putting her at risk. "Okay, look. I'll call and report this, but under the circumstances I think the best thing would be for me to—"
"Don't even think it!" she said in her best schoolmarm's voice. "You're staying here, as we agreed. This mess has gone on seventeen years too long as it is. I blame your father for running away, and I blame this town for hounding him into it. But Frank Leary is dead and gone now. There's no reason why the sins of the father have to be visited on the son."
"There was no sin, Mrs. Dewsbury. My father didn't murder Alison." Quinn had to force himself even to say the words; they caught in his throat like barbed wire. "He did not murder Alison."
In her anger the old woman was candid, and in her candor she was brutal. "Some people in Keepsake will never believe he didn't hang her at the quarry, Quinn. Or that he wasn't the one who got her pregnant. I'm sure you know that."
Wincing at the all-too-familiar vision of his classmate twisting from a rope, and unnerved by the ease with which his old teacher alluded to his father as a suspected murderer, Quinn said fiercely, "He was innocent, goddammit!"
Immediately Mrs. Dewsbury's expression softened, and she became everyone's favorite grandmother again. "For what it's worth, I don't believe—I never believed—that your father did it, Quinn. He was far too kind, much too gentle. But he kept to himself, and you know how everyone always thinks that still water runs deep. It was much easier to accuse him than to search for some vagrant—or look closer to home."
Quinn gave her a sharp look. Closer to home. So he wasn't the only one who had glanced in that direction.
She lifted the cordless phone from its base and held it out to him. "Now call."
****
Olivia Bennett was in her shop, Miracourt, turning a bolt of satin in mistletoe green, when the bells above the door jangled in another cheerful br-r-ring. Two s
nowy children came charging inside, shepherded by Olivia's twin brother and his wife Eileen. The kids should've been droopy after their long day in New York, but they'd reached the stage of unfocused energy that comes from being overtired. Besides, Christmas was coming. Who had time to droop?
"Hey, look who's here," Olivia said cheerfully to her niece and nephew. "Two melting snowmen."
"We're not snowmen," said the very literal five-year-old. "We're just all covered with snow." The child stomped her boots on the floor, then began brushing the snow from the sleeves of her red woolen coat.
Her mother stopped her. "Careful, honey, you don't want to ruin Aunt Livvy's fabrics. That's a gorgeous color, Liv," she added, pointing to the satin. "It'd look fabulous on you. You should make something for yourself out of it."
Olivia laughed out loud at the notion, then tucked a dark curl behind her ear and began feeding the fabric through her Measuregraph. "Who has time to sew anymore, much less to design?"
Owen Randall Bennett, Jr., her handsome twin brother who was as fair as she was dark, grinned and said, "Oh, come on, Livvy, we all know you could design a dress in your sleep, weave the fabric before lunch, and sew it together by cocktails."
"Wow. Am I really that talented?" she said, giving him a mild look.
Still smiling, Rand said, ''Nn-o; but you are an annoying workaholic."
"Oh, dear. I keep forgetting that I have an affliction. How was The Nutcracker, Zack?" she asked her nephew.
Zack, who at nine had reached the age of feeling obliged to seem bored about life in general and Nutcrackers in particular, said, "Fine."
His little sister had been turning an endearingly awkward pirouette. Suddenly she stopped and exclaimed, "The Nutcracker was big. He was huge!"
Zack stuck his ungloved hands in his pockets and shrugged. "Not that huge."
"Yes he was!"
"Wasn't."
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