“It is good to see you again. Jane will be amazed. You are all grown up now.”
“I always was.”
He thought about that. “Yes, I guess you’re right about that. You look so different now, bella.”
“Amazing what changing one’s hair color will do.”
He leaned back and studied me. He could have mentioned my height, or my body, or any of the thousand things that were different. “Your eyes are so old now.”
I shrugged. “We have all changed in the past decade.”
“Why do you have that accent?” he asked.
“This year’s voice. Suits my purposes.” I stepped away from him and looked around the villa. “It must suck being really rich. You have homework all the time.”
“I love what I do.” He grinned. Of course he did. He always did. So long as everything worked out neatly. So long as no one caused any trouble.
Mistake number one: being the person who always caused trouble.
“Please, come, sit down,” he told me. He lightly grasped my arm and led me over to the sofa. I took one of the armchairs. I wasn’t getting any cozier than I needed to. “Can I get you anything? Espresso? An aperitif?”
“Is this how today’s going to be?” I slouched on the chair. “Do you think I don’t remember how you feel about people who drink alcohol this early in the morning? Or at all, ever, even on their own time? Is this how today’s going to be?”
He laughed. “I have had men working for me for fifteen years who can’t seem to remember that rule. You’re still sharper than any of them.”
“Doesn’t say much about your executives.”
“Says more about you, cara.” He settled on the sofa. “Perhaps you’d like something to eat then.”
His question reminded me I hadn’t eaten since sometime the previous afternoon. “I’m fine,” I said.
He nodded and tapped a button on one of his phones. “Tomás, dos cafezinhos, por favor. Y pasteles.” He leaned back on the sofa and draped his arm over the back. “You’re in some deeply serious shit, you know this, right?”
Oh, the time-honored technique of sweetness and lightness, viciously interspersed with direct tough talk. I laughed. “You’re the one who hired the lawyer, you tell me.”
“You are not this cold, this dispassionate about what happened.”
“Cold? Roberto, someone murdered my husband. They bashed in the back of his head. They went out of their way to make certain it looked like I did it. I don’t have time to be emotional about this. I have bigger problems to deal with. There will be plenty of time to be all torn up about it later.”
“I see some irony in our reconnecting over such a circumstance.”
“I don’t think you mean irony.” Then I slapped my leg with an exaggerated motion. “Oh, you mean because I used a cricket bat to—”
He held up a hand. “I don’t need or want the details.”
“Why am I here, Roberto? Why are we doing this?”
He leaned forward. “Because it is time you came home.”
I shook my head. “Stevie and I are doing fine, Roberto, thanks.”
He launched out of his seat and looked down at me. “You aren’t doing fine!” he yelled at me, and I flinched. Roberto had a disturbing voice when he yelled, intentionally designed to make recipients afraid. “You’re under suspicion of murder. You are living like a pauper, relying on other people’s handouts. You’re still the caretaker for your younger sister. You’re not doing well at all, Trudy.”
A series of knocks on the door interrupted his tirade. He muttered something and then yelled, “Come in.”
The door to the villa opened and a young man with curly black hair and wearing a blinding white chef’s coat entered. He held a silver tray that had two coffees, two glasses of water, a pitcher of water, and a tray of pastries on it.
Roberto leaned forward and cleared a space on the glass table in front of him. “Muchas gracias, Tomás,” he said. Then he waved his hand.
I tried to make eye contact with Tomás as he went about his business, and not only because he was very handsome indeed (although too smooth-faced for me). I wanted to see how well-trained he was. He never once so much as glanced in my direction. Tomás put the tray down, he bowed, and then he retreated, leaving as silently as he had come. I might as well have been a ratty throw on the armrest of the chair for all I existed. Tomás would not have heard whatever Roberto had been yelling. Wild horses would not get him to discuss anything said in his presence.
Roberto always had the best staff.
When the front door closed again, Roberto stood by the fireplace, leaning his head against the antique white wall and trying to collect himself. “Please. Enjoy.”
The pastries Tomás had brought in smelled heavenly. And I knew they would taste better than they smelled, because Roberto is a man who has always enjoyed the finer things in life for themselves. Even when he was a struggling young stockbroker in Barcelona, he decided he would rather eat once a day than eat inferior food. He was a lot thinner as a young man.
“Don’t mind if I do,” I said. My nonchalance would have been fabulously executed, had my stomach not taken that moment to grumble loudly. I picked up the coffee, which was thick and smelled heavenly and tasted twice as good. Then I tried one of the small spinach and walnut pastries and thought maybe going home to New York City might not be all that bad.
Except for one minor detail. Well, I suppose technically she wasn’t a minor; she was twenty-two years old.
After my second pastry (sweet potato and spices) I decided to give in and not pretend that I wasn’t hungry and this wasn’t heaven. I must have eaten five before I finally came up for air. The entire time, Roberto circled around the room, sipping his own coffee, watching me. He was not only nervous and upset about my presence, but he was a good host. He wanted me to enjoy myself.
When I finally came up for air, I said, “Why isn’t Mama here?”
“I didn’t want to get her hopes up.”
“So…you haven’t told her you’ve found me.”
“I had no idea what I was going to find. I cannot let you break her heart again.”
“Break her heart?” I screamed. “Do you know what she did? I begged her for help and she hung up on me.”
“She didn’t know what you had done.”
“She knew I needed help. What else did she need to know?”
Eleven years ago, my mother had rejected me when I needed her most. She had been a difficult mother in some impossible situations, and I had been a terrible child. I had hurt her in some dreadful ways. But when I called her, blood spattered all over my clothing, she hung up.
Roberto sat across from me again. In his hands he had a photo album, the old-fashioned kind with printed out photos affixed to page after physical page. Such a casual maneuver. Not a casual man.
I opened the photo album, and my breath stopped.
It was a picture of my mother, Jane. She still looked marvelous, with her blonde hair and big blue eyes that I always wanted. I desperately wanted to look like her. I began asking to get my hair colored when I was ten so I could be blonde like her. She was eighteen when I was born, which meant she was only forty-five now. In this picture, she could have easily passed for early thirties, with almost no crow’s feet or wrinkles. All natural. I knew she wouldn’t have had plastic surgery.
She looked the same. What was different was that the picture showed her with her arms around two children: a girl and a younger boy who looked so much alike they were clearly siblings. They were darker than my mother and resembled Roberto quite a lot.
“Consuelo is six and Alejandro is four. Connie and Alex. I am very proud of them.”
Stevie had kept up with gossip about my family. I knew they existed. But much like she had with me and my brother, Mama kept her new kids out of the tabloids.
Roberto didn’t have any other children. His first marriage, to a woman named Zarita, had lasted for twenty years. She die
d a few years before he met me. After she died, he moved into the expansive co-op apartment directly beneath our three-floor penthouse monstrosity on the Upper East Side. I was nine and my mother was already married to stepfather number one, Jimmy. Roberto talked to me as though I were an adult—well, maybe not an adult, but he didn’t talk to me like I was a baby, the way Jimmy did. Roberto treated a whiny nine-year-old with kindness and respect. And Jimmy was a son of a bitch who liked to pinch me to make me cry or hit me where the bruises wouldn’t show.
Roberto gave me espresso. He thought ten years old was a perfectly fine age to drink coffee. It turned out I liked hot chocolate better. He took me to Washington Square Park and let me play chess. I was terrible but I had a great time. When I was twelve, he started letting me hang around his office downtown, running errands for the workers there, like buying sandwiches or photocopying articles.
One day, my mother stopped Roberto in the lobby of our co-op and asked him, viciously, why on earth a forty-three-year-old man was showing so much interest in a twelve-year-old girl. He said, “Madame, why don’t you ask your daughter why she prefers to spend time working for me instead of home with you?”
My mother had immediately marched into my room and said, “Tell me what Mr. Montesinos meant,” and I showed her the left side of my rib cage. Jimmy was gone less than an hour later, screaming about lawyers and million-dollar settlements. My mother, who had been insanely wealthy all her life and knew better than he did how to play this game, shook her head. He didn’t get a penny.
However, a year later she married Patrick. The less said about him, the better. Jane always had to be with a man, which is how she ended up with so many terrible ones. I sincerely hoped Roberto had been a better husband than the first three had been. The best that can be said about them is that they taught me to be self-reliant.
I counted backwards from a thousand to get a grip on myself. “Family reunion time is over. What is it you want, Roberto?”
“As always, you are very efficient. All right then. You have quite a mess here in Los Angeles. We need the police to find whoever did this.”
“And find the actual culprit?”
“Exactly. Then, you need to come home to New York City. You have been a very busy girl for the last eleven years.”
I wondered if he knew how busy.
“My investigators have managed to trace you backward to Lucrezia Forni. Care to give me the names you had before that?”
Lucrezia was my name when we lived in Firenze. That had been about five years ago.
He knew how busy I’d been.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
He raised an eyebrow. “That doesn’t matter.”
“Oh, it matters quite a lot. I vanished off the face of the earth eleven years ago and suddenly you know where I am.”
“Perhaps it wasn’t suddenly.”
“Given some of the situations I’ve been in over the past few years, you would have shown up a long time ago if that were true. For example, Lucrezia got into a scrape or two.”
“Yes, she did. You know, if you needed money, you could have asked us for it. Instead of robbing our villa.”
“Yes, but robbing the villa in Venice was more satisfying. Not to mention fun.” Actually, it hadn’t been either satisfying or fun. I’d done it as a way out of a bad situation I’d been in. But he didn’t need to know that.
Roberto clapped his hands. “All right. Here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to move here, to the Peninsula, so we can keep an eye on you—”
“No,” I said.
“What?”
“We have a place to stay,” I lied. “I’d rather stay there.”
“That is not acceptable.”
My turn to shrug.
He smiled tightly. “After this murder investigation is dealt with, you will come home to New York. Yes, things will be a madhouse for a while.”
“Madhouse? Roberto, are you aware that my father wants me dead?”
He narrowed his eyebrows, as though he hadn’t the slightest idea what I might be referring to. Then he shook his head. “Stop being dramatic.”
“I destroyed a billion-dollar deal. The man can hold a grudge. He sent one killer after us already.”
“When?”
I snorted. “Eleven years ago?”
“What happened?”
“I didn’t kill him, if that’s what you’re asking.”
I did, however, let the man die. All I’m going to say is, it was him or me, and I’m extremely fond of me.
“Just the one?”
“Thank Hades I had proper training in how to hide. We’ve stayed hidden for eleven years to avoid him.”
“You will be safe. We can protect you.”
I nodded, as though everything he were saying made sense. I had a somewhat different take on it. “So where would Stevie and I go when we’re in New York?”
And Roberto did the worst thing a negotiator can do: he hesitated.
How on earth could he not have had an answer for that question ready? I was reminded immediately of some of the best advice I’d ever heard on the subject of discussing difficult subjects, and what do you know? It came from none other than Roberto Montesinos. Always tell the truth if you can, he told me. If you can’t tell the whole truth, tell as much of it as you can. If you can’t tell the truth at all, say what you’d like to do. And if you can’t say that much, keep your mouth closed.
Roberto had his mouth firmly closed.
“Oh my God,” I said, trying not to laugh. “Mama still calls her ‘the bastard,’ doesn’t she?”
“Bella, I don’t pretend to understand your mother’s attitude toward Stevie—”
“I understand it. It’s looney tunes. She still blames a baby for breaking up her first marriage. Stevie had nothing to do with being born. She wasn’t responsible for my father fucking around with a ski instructor. Or with half of the women on the Eastern seaboard. Or every seaboard.”
“Everything that happened as a result of your father’s—”
“Let’s go with ‘evil’,” I said.
“His more unfortunate influences on your family…Jane regrets it.”
“Well, if she hadn’t met him, she certainly wouldn’t have ever met me, would she? How many problems would that have solved right there?”
He slammed his hand on the armrest of the sofa and stood up. “Your mother loves you. Why can’t you believe that?”
Did he want an actual list of reasons? “Look on the bright side.” I picked up my glass of water and leaned over the back of my armchair. “If Stevie had never been born, you might not be married to my mother right now. Ever thought about that?”
“Every day,” he said. That surprised me. “Every day I wonder what my life would be like if I didn’t have Jane and Connie and Alex.”
Nothing like that had ever come out of the mouths of Husbands One through Three. I would bet money on that, and I’m not the betting kind. Son of a bitch. Well, good for Mama. “I’m not going home to New York unless Stevie comes with me.”
“Your sister will be taken care of, Trudy. Sorry, Drusilla. For God’s sake, she needs help, not to continue living as you have been. You know this.”
“So. She needs a better living situation…just not with me.”
This time he didn’t hesitate. “No, not with you.”
“And I don’t get to know where she is until…”
“You show you can act like a responsible adult.”
“And in a few years I won’t need your say-so, will I?”
On my thirtieth birthday, I would become one of the richest people in the world. And I wouldn’t need Roberto or anyone to run interference for me. Visions of my thirtieth birthday had gotten me through a lot of sleepless nights.
He smiled, much more sadly this time. “There is no money unless your mother and I say there is money.”
It took me a few seconds to understand what he was saying. He was telling me
that the trusts I’d been waiting on no longer existed. One of his hands tapped on the armrest of the sofa and the other one picked at the lint on his trousers, and I knew I was screwed.
Years ago, I figured out Roberto Montesino’s tell. I probably could have made several more fortunes than I already had telling competitors about it, but at the time I was ecstatic that I could use it to beat him at the penny poker games we played. He was such an expressive man that if his hands were moving, he was telling the truth, and when he could sit quietly without so much as doing finger flexes, he was lying.
His hands were still in motion. There was no money. He’d done something to screw me and my inheritance over.
“You stole my money.”
“Everything is right where it should be. We have no idea if you even have the ability to act in anyone’s best interest, including your own. You will need our help. You aren’t prepared. Your dyslexia was and mostly likely still is catastrophic. And if, as you say, your father still wants revenge, you need protection. Until you are ready, until you are prepared, there is no money waiting for you.”
The shock of what he was telling me started washing over me, in hot, acidic waves. I felt like I was going to throw up, fall over, burst into a mad rage. I clenched my hands shut instead. “I’m not going to abandon my sister.”
In that moment, I wasn’t entirely sure I believed what I was saying. Roberto could be forgiven for thinking he’d won.
He stabbed his finger in the air toward me. “You don’t have much choice in the matter. We’re going to get you squared away here in Los Angeles, and then you come home to New York.”
“Whether I want to or not.”
“Yes, even if you don’t want to.”
After eleven years of hiding away and making sure Stevie was safe, it was all over. And no one was going to look out for my little sister the way I had. Which meant if I were physically separated from her and her location could be found, it was going to be open season on her, as a way to take revenge on me.
I probably shouldn’t have murdered that guy when I was sixteen, but trust me, I had a very good reason at the time.
CHAPTER EIGHT
You Know Who I Am (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries Book 2) Page 8