by Nancy Martin
“Maybe I am,” I admitted. “But I accept him as the man he wants to be. He’s done some things he’s not proud of, but now he’s trying to do the right thing.”
“Huh,” she said.
“Maybe you’ve been sent for a reason,” I said. “To be a part of his new life, too.”
She stuck her hands into her pockets again. “I’m not asking to be a part of anything. I just wanted to meet him. Tell him a few things.”
My heart ached for this solitary young woman who was disappointed to discover that her dream dad wasn’t the man she’d hoped for. I said, “I know he’ll want to hear what you have to say. He’s a good listener.”
She shrugged, unwilling to confide in me.
We stood quietly for a moment as the night sounds whispered around us. The river murmured a few hundred yards to the east in the darkness. From inside the church, we could hear the baritone cadence of a solitary voice—Father Tom speaking to his late-night flock. Only three other cars were parked in the lot. On the nearby road, a pickup truck with a whining engine drove past and kept going. The truck’s radio played a thumping rock song.
“My mom raised me right,” Carrie said when the music faded into the distance. She sounded argumentative. “She worked hard, helped me with school. I’m going to college as soon as I get done with my hitch.”
“That’s wonderful. She was very proud of you, I’m sure.” I heard the stupid guidance counselor tone of my words and felt foolish for being patronizing to this capable young woman.
Carrie rolled her eyes, but they were suddenly glassy with tears. “Listen, my mom was great. She wasn’t some welfare crack whore. She was a teacher, and plenty of kids loved her. She made a big difference. She wouldn’t like me being here, meeting him. She didn’t ever want me to know him, and she probably had her reasons—good reasons. I should have honored her wishes. I shouldn’t have come.”
She turned away from me, full of remorse, but I reached out to seize her hand. “Don’t go, Carrie.”
She pulled free of my touch. “I shouldn’t have done this.”
“Come home with us,” I urged. “We can make omelets and talk.”
Carrie didn’t stick around to listen to more. She put her back to me and walked away. I wanted to run after her, but it wasn’t my place to chase her. She hadn’t come to meet me. I was an added complication, that’s all. A moment later, Carrie climbed into a low, dark car and drove away.
Michael came out of the church a little while later. “What happened?”
“I’m sorry.” I stopped pacing the parking lot. “I’m really sorry. She left.”
“What did you say to her?” There was a note of accusation in his voice.
“I said at least twelve more sentences than you did,” I shot back. “You ran like a frightened rabbit, Michael!”
He blanched and ran one hand through his hair. “Sorry. You’re right. I was scared to death. Which way did she go?”
“We’re not following her,” I said firmly. “She’s already prepared to be afraid of Don Corleone. Let’s not push that button, all right?”
“She wasn’t afraid. Did you see the way she looked at me? Like I was a worm or something.”
Softening, I touched his shoulder. “You’re not a worm. Her mother had a lot of years to tell her side of the story. You’ll have your chance soon. She’ll call again.”
“You think so?”
“Give her time.”
Michael swore under his breath, perplexed as I’d ever seen him.
We had been standing in the middle of the parking lot, but suddenly a set of headlights raked over us. It was a police cruiser.
The car pulled close and the driver’s side window went down. “Mick,” said the cop. “You headed home now?”
Michael didn’t answer.
“Come on.” I took his arm and felt the tension in his body. He was on the edge of an outburst, but I steadied him. “Let’s get you home before you turn into a pumpkin.”
While the state trooper watched, we got into Michael’s car.
When he’d started the engine and pulled out onto the highway, he said, “What about Emma? Should we swing by the police station? See if she’s been turned loose?”
“No, I don’t want both of you spending the night in jail. Let’s get you home before some kind of ankle alarm goes off. Anyway, I have to regroup before I can cope with Emma’s situation.”
The cop followed us the whole way home. At Blackbird Farm, Michael paused at the end of the driveway and exchanged monosyllables with his crew, who were gathered in a tight knot and blowing agitated puffs of cigar smoke into the air. One had a baseball bat in hand. I could see something had them worked up.
“Now what?” I asked when Michael rolled up his window with an exasperated sigh.
He drove around the back of the house in the dark. “Something’s making a weird noise out in your pasture.”
“One of the ponies?”
“Nope. Whatever it is, it’s making scary yowling noises. They decided it’s Bigfoot.”
“Bigfoot! Oh, for the love of—! It was probably a cat, that’s all.”
“Bruno went to check it out, but he hasn’t come back. So they’re spooked.”
I had observed that most of Michael’s posse were the inner-city kind of mob enforcers. They didn’t like getting their shoeshines muddied up. Country life alarmed them more than the hint of gangland war. I knew one of them had quit when he was handed his Green Acres assignment.
As the headlights swept the paddock fence near the barn, we could see eight inquisitive pony faces poking through the rails. Their ears were pitched toward the pasture, listening alertly.
Toby dashed partway out into the pasture and back, barking. Ralphie ran back and forth after him, squealing with anxiety.
“Now what?” Michael asked, exasperated.
We climbed out of his car, and I saw immediately what had Toby and Ralphie going crazy.
Emma marched out of the darkness, hitching up her pants. Behind her, Bruno followed, daintily hopping over piles of manure and cursing. He held one hand to his swollen eye socket.
I ran across the grass. “Em! What are you doing here?”
She was cussing a blue streak. “What the hell does it look like I’m doing? I had to pee, but the house is locked. So I went out behind the trees. Next thing I know, this asshole is whacking the bushes like I’m an alien intruder. Who locked the damn door?”
Michael was right behind me, trying to smother his laughter. “Sorry, Emma. That was me. I gotta say, you have the smallest bladder of anyone I’ve ever known.”
“The size of my bladder is not the problem, you smart-ass bastard.” She punched him in the chest and blew past us.
Michael planted his hand on his chest and turned to me. “What’d I say?”
“You’re a man,” I explained rationally. “She’s taking out her frustrations on the nearest representative of your sex.”
“I didn’t get her pregnant.”
“I hate all men!” she bellowed over her shoulder.
Michael called after her, “Wasn’t it me who called my lawyer to get you out of jail?”
She spun around, enraged. “I’m sick of men, all men, every man on the planet.” She pointed a shaking finger at Bruno. “That one had to come scampering into the woods! Scared the hell out of me.”
Bruno kept his hand clamped over his eye. “We heard a noise. I went to check. She jumped out of some bushes and hit me.”
“I had my pants down around my ankles and he sneaked up on me! With a baseball bat!”
He said, “It was a tree branch.”
“He tried to clobber me with it!”
“It was mistaken identity. I thought—that is—when she . . . er . . .”
“It’s okay, Bruno,” Michael said. “Go get some ice.”
Emma whirled around and marched for the house. As she walked, she ripped the neon orange POLICE CUSTODY wristband from her arm.
I soothed
the dog and the pig and Emma, too, as I used my key to let us into the kitchen. Toby ran past me, and Emma shoved through right behind him, taking time to deposit her wristband around Ralphie’s ear. I barely prevented Ralphie from shouldering his way inside, too. As fetching as he looked with his ear ribbon, I didn’t want a pig in my house. Once inside, I flipped on the light. Emma’s face was red. She turned the faucet on to wash her hands.
“Take a deep breath and calm down,” I said. “Getting this worked up can’t be good for the baby.”
“Cut the mother hen routine.”
I tossed Aunt Madeleine’s book on the kitchen table. “Are you hungry?”
“Starving. The cops gave me a candy bar an hour ago. You owe me big, Sis. I haven’t been arrested since I was picked up for shoplifting a six-pack back in school. It’s your fault I got nabbed tonight.”
“I’m sincerely sorry.”
“I hope it’s worth it. Did you find anything in Quintain?”
“That can wait. How on earth did you get home? Where’s your truck? It’s not parked outside.”
“The police towed it.” She dried her hands on the kitchen towel. “I have to go back tomorrow. I hitchhiked here, then sneaked through the woods so Mick’s goons wouldn’t see me. The last thing I wanted to do was explain myself to a bunch of grinning wiseguys.”
I decided against telling her she’d been mistaken for Bigfoot. She had punched Bruno for less of an insult.
She threw the towel onto the counter. “Do you know how hard it is for a pregnant hitchhiker to get picked up? I spent twenty minutes with my thumb hanging out before Floreen Donaldson stopped for me.”
“Floreen, who used to clean for Mama?”
“Yes. She took one look at me and started on the story of Bathsheba. Why is it Bathsheba’s fault if King David grabbed her off a rooftop, anyway? She got the bad rap, but he was the one who coveted his neighbor’s wife in the first place. It’s always the woman’s fault.”
While she talked, I grabbed a loaf of whole wheat bread and the jar of peanut butter. Sugar and carbs—always an antidote for female rage. With luck, I had a few chocolate chips in the pantry. I could add them to her sandwich.
Michael poked his head through the back door, using his knee to keep Ralphie from barging inside. “Is it safe to come in?”
“Sure. I could use a punching bag.” She was rubbing her belly as if to soothe the child within. Or maybe herself.
“Just so you know, there’s somebody coming up the driveway,” Michael said.
“Who? Libby?”
“Nope. A guy in a BMW.”
Emma exploded with more swearing.
Michael ducked back outside. I made Emma a peanut butter sandwich and let her fume. When Michael returned, he was followed by a man I couldn’t have been more surprised to see on Blackbird Farm.
“Hart,” I said, hardly able to conceal my astonishment. “What a pleasure to see you.”
He stepped into the kitchen, looking bewildered. “There’s a pig on your porch. I think it’s wearing a hair ribbon.”
“Really?” I asked with false cheer. “I wonder how that happened.”
Hart Jones, a successful stockbroker and Emma’s summer paramour, wore a two-thousand-dollar suit and a pale silk tie, as if he’d just been called away from the symphony. He gave me a head-to-toe glance that absorbed the mud-spattered condition of my clothes. If his first impulse was to recoil in horror, he mastered it with the kind of social skill men of his socioeconomic class probably learned from the cradle. “Hello, Nora. Did you have some kind of accident?”
“Heavens, no,” I said breezily. “Just doing a little late-night gardening.” The stress of the evening was finally starting to get to me, I realized, and it took an effort to fight down the bubble of hysteria that threatened to burst out. “Hart, this is my—this is Michael Abruzzo. Michael, this is Emma’s—this is Hart Jones.”
They shook hands politely, but I could see both men already knew plenty about the other’s background. Last summer, Michael had listened to all of our sisterly discussions about Hart, and Hart had no doubt read all the newspaper coverage of the infamous heir to New Jersey’s mob rackets. I wasn’t sure which of them was more influenced by the other’s advance publicity. Impressed or filled with instant loathing, I couldn’t tell.
“What are you doing here?” Emma demanded, still flushed with embarrassment. But she was clearly determined to bluster through. She kept the table between herself and Hart.
“You called me.” Hart sounded just as testy. “From jail. Remember?”
“That was before my lawyer showed up,” she snapped. “I told you, you didn’t have to come.”
“You said you’d been arrested,” he replied. “You think I could stay away after a call like that? I left Penny in her family’s box at the opera. You think that was easy to explain?”
Hart Jones was a Philadelphia financial wunderkind who’d hooked up with Emma a few months back when he was trying to decide whether to settle down for better or for worse with Penny Haffenpepper, a Main Line heiress. I’m sure he intended his fling with my hot-blooded sister to be a one-night stand in a hotel suite, but it turned into a monthlong, torrid affair that resulted in Emma’s current predicament. At the end of summer, though, Hart had disappeared from her life. I assumed Emma had broken things off with him and he’d gone back to his well-behaved fiancée.
From the way the two of them glared at each other now, it didn’t look as if the embers of romance were going to rekindle anytime soon. And yet . . . a dangerous static crackled in the air.
Emma said, “Well, you shouldn’t have made the trip. Go home. You’ve probably got wedding details to plan.”
“They’re already planned. The wedding’s Christmas Eve.”
“Very romantic. Not to mention it’ll be easy to remember your anniversary.”
“I’m not a forgetful person,” Hart said.
The electricity in the room was starting to feel like the buildup of lightning before a thunderstorm. Hastily, I gathered my jacket and Aunt Madeleine’s ledger and began to edge toward the doorway. “Michael, why don’t you and I . . . ?”
He deliberately ignored my suggestion, continuing to glower at Hart. “Maybe Em needs some help here.”
“I can fight my own battles, big guy.”
“Michael,” I said again.
Unwillingly, he headed across the kitchen. “Okay. G’night, Em. Glad to see you out of jail.”
She made another anatomically impossible suggestion without taking her glare from Hart’s equally stormy face. Together, Michael and I fled the kitchen before the thunderclaps started.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Upstairs, I stripped off my sodden clothes and ran a hot bath in the claw-foot tub. I hung the McQueen feather jacket on a hanger and gave it a long look. Only a miracle worker was going to save it. My hands must have trembled on the hanger, though, because the next moment Michael was taking them into his own, his palms warming my suddenly freezing fingers.
“You okay?” he asked.
“It’s been a long night. I— There wasn’t time to tell you earlier, but I found another body.”
He cursed. “What the hell?”
“Not a body, exactly, but a skeleton. While I was blundering around in the woods, I slipped and fell and—well, suddenly I was holding a bone. I landed in the middle of—of—”
“Nora.” He took me in his arms and held me tightly. “Why didn’t you say something earlier?”
I wrapped my arms around him and held on, pressing my cheek to his chest, very glad to be home at last. “I don’t know. You came along, and there was Carrie to worry about, and I just—I forgot, I guess.” Letting my weariness slip, I said, “I should call the police.”
“Not this minute.” He held me away and looked into my face. “You’re shaken up.”
“I was afraid to call 911,” I admitted. “Because I’d have to explain what I was doing out in the woods. With Emma get
ting arrested—I have to get my story straight, don’t I? That sounds awful, but . . .”
“You’re right. You have to think it through,” he said, sounding just as sorry about the situation as I felt.
I told him about falling and knocking the wind out of myself and how I’d ended up with a human bone in my hand. I hadn’t been thinking straight.
“You were in shock,” he said gently. “I should have realized it before. C’mon. Take a bath and relax. Those bones aren’t going anywhere. We’ll figure out what to say to the police, and you can call in the morning.”
He ran the hot water while I stripped off my underwear. When his cell phone rang, I sprinkled bath beads into the water and swirled it with my hand. Suddenly I couldn’t wait to soak my cares away.
In the adjacent bedroom, Michael sat on our bed and spoke briefly to his caller. Then he checked his cell phone messages.
“Anything from Carrie?” I called as I sank into the blessedly warm depths of the tub. I shook a few more bath beads into the water and breathed the fragrance.
“Not yet.” His voice carried easily from the bedroom. A moment later, he asked, “What’s this book?”
“I stole it out of Aunt Madeleine’s house.” I lathered up a loofah and set about scrubbing Quintain mud from my skin. “Take a look, if you like.”
As I shampooed my hair, I wondered what might be transpiring in the kitchen below.
Emma and Hart weren’t exactly an odd couple. Hart, for all his sedate bankerly ways during the workweek, had a reputation for partying hard on the weekends. He rode a fast horse with one of the suburban fox hunts, and he had been known for knocking back a lot of liquor without showing many side effects. Like Emma, he enjoyed a good laugh. I imagined they partied hard when together.
I thought Hart had ended his roguish bachelor ways when he proposed to Penny Haffenpepper, who had the kind of pedigree as well as social and business contacts that could launch Hart into the top tier of the banking hierarchy. Penny’s clan had a few quirks, of course, but they were very family-oriented. Strict values, emphasis on education and quality time spent with each other. I thought her influence might have tamed Hart a little.