Hideaway

by Roberts, Nora

  No wonder he dazzled Cate. “Come to dinner,” she repeated.

  “Do you eat meat?”

  “I’ve been known to.”

  “There’s a grill out there. I can bring back some steaks.”

  “Steak.” As she repeated the word, Darlie’s eyes went wistful. “I don’t know the last time I actually had steak.”

  “Break time.” Cate opened her studio door. “Where’s that baby? I need a fix. Oh, Dillon.”

  “He came with dairy,” Darlie told her.

  “Nice. And good timing. How about a walk on the beach?”

  “I’ve only got a couple minutes. Catch the kid!” Snatching Luke up, he faked a toss, stopping Cate’s heart, loosing Luke’s gut-laugh. “Just kidding.”

  “He’s coming to dinner, and bringing steak. We’re going to make it a little celebration. I just told my agent to make the deal on an offer for a series on Netflix. Major project, starring role.”

  “Darlie! Break out the champagne!”

  “I’ll take it. Tonight. Think Game of Thrones meets the female, adult Harry Potter. The offer came in a few weeks ago, and I turned it down because it shoots in Northern Ireland, and that’s six months on location for the first season. If it hits, that’s half a year, every year for the three projected seasons. But now . . .”

  She took Luke back from Dillon. “I think it’ll be good for us. Meanwhile, I have a lot of things to tie up, more to plan out.”

  “The family base in Mayo’s close. I’ll come visit.”

  “I’m counting on it.” Darlie gripped Cate’s hand. “I’m seriously counting on it.”

  “When do you leave?”

  “I’ll go back to L.A. day after tomorrow, sew some things up. I’m going to get sloppy on you about that later, but right now I’m going to take this guy upstairs, change him, slather him with sunscreen like a good if obsessive mother, so we can take that walk on your beach.”

  She turned to Dillon. “Medium rare.”

  “Got it.”

  “I’ll see you later. Say bye-bye.”

  Luke said bye-bye, waved over Darlie’s shoulder as she carried him upstairs.

  “You’re going to miss her. And the kid.”

  “Like crazy. It’s such a good move for her though. It’s a smart one on so many levels.” She moved to him, wrapped around him. “I wish you could take that walk.”

  “So do I.” When he rubbed her arms, the way he rubbed them, she drew back.

  “There’s something else.”

  “I think we should keep tonight a celebration, so I’m going to tell you now, get it over. Sparks was attacked a couple days ago in prison.”

  She felt nothing, nothing at all. “Is he dead?”

  “No, the shank missed vital stuff. He’s hurting, from what Red said, but he’ll make it.”

  When she let feeling come, all she had was mild anxiety and speculation.

  “That’s four now,” she murmured. “I don’t know what to think, Dillon. Who would do this? If it’s my mother, she’s not just selfish, greedy, and an all-out shit of a human being. She’s crazy.”

  “I’ve got some thoughts on it. So does Red. We’ll talk about it. You should enjoy your last couple days with your friend.” He pulled her back. “I’ll be back tonight.” He kissed her, drew her up to her toes, deepened it. “I’ll give you tomorrow night for a good farewell.” Tugged her head back, changed angles, went deep again. “After that, you’ll have to get used to being with me.”

  “It’s been over a week, but I haven’t gotten used to not being with you.”

  “Good.” He started to the door, around the toys. “Darlie put the cookies my ladies sent in the fridge with the butter.”

  On a laugh, Cate walked over to rescue them.

  Before she put them in a lidded jar, she took one.

  Not her mother, she thought again. And not because she thought Charlotte wasn’t capable of causing great harm, even for inexplicable reasons. But there had to be an upside for her to make the effort.

  Nothing to gain by this, because if the publicity broke, it wouldn’t flatter Charlotte. More likely, she’d become a suspect, which would only highlight the past in a harsh light.

  She wasn’t one to seek the harsh light.

  Then again, maybe she hadn’t thought about that.

  “And I have to now,” she admitted.

  Because coincidence could only stretch so far. With this last attack, that band snapped.

  She heard Darlie coming down, put it aside. She wouldn’t mar her friend’s last two days with worries and wondering.

  Two days later, she stood with Hugh, watching Darlie drive away.

  Hugh gave Cate a one-armed hug. “She’ll be fine. More than fine.”

  “I know. She’s already hired someone to look for houses in Ireland. She’s going to give herself a month there before she’s due on set to acclimate, to hire a nanny. She said she wanted to clone Julia. Someone kind and loving, who’d already raised a child well. She and her publicist worked on a statement about the divorce.”

  “Get out in front of it.” Hugh nodded. “The smart way.”

  “Maybe I think it lets that bastard off too easy, but it’s what’s right for her and Luke. Anyway, I’m glad I had this time with her. I’m glad you had a couple days, too.”

  “That baby’s a pistol. I’ll miss having that energy around. We need to have a family bash when Lily gets home.”

  “We do.”

  “But for now, it’s just you and me. Do you have time to sit by the pool with an old man for a bit?”

  “No old man around I see, but I’ve got time to sit by the pool with my dashing grandfather. But tomorrow?” She poked a finger in his belly. “It’s back to the gym for both of us.”

  “Slave driver.”

  She walked over with him, crossing the lawn, then over the stone path. She sat with the sun dancing light over the blue water of the pool, stretched out her legs. Barely had time to say ahhh before Consuela walked down from the bridge with lemonade.

  “What? You’re psychic now?”

  With a mysterious smile, Consuela set down the tray. “Fresh berries—good for you. No phones,” she ordered, and left them.

  He adjusted his hat. “I might have mentioned I hoped to sit with you here for a while, and lemonade would go down nicely.”

  “That’s a relief, because a psychic Consuela’s terrifying. I think I’ll start swimming during my afternoon break.” She pointed at him before picking up her glass. “It’d be a good afternoon break for you, too.”

  “Give the weather another month. Still too chilly for me. Now.” He picked up his own glass. “How are things going between you and Dillon?”

  “We’ll see tonight when he comes over for dinner.” When her phone signaled a text, she winced.

  “Cheat,” Hugh told her.

  “I just want to see—Oh, it’s from Dillon. Hailey’s having the baby. He’s on his way to the birthing center. Hailey and Dillon are friends.”

  “Yes, I’ve met her, and Leo and Dave. Consuela’s mother and Leo’s grandparents came from the same area of Guatemala.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “It’s a small old world. Well, a toast to the new family on the way.” He tapped his glass to Cate’s. “Sláinte.”

  “Sláinte. Their lives will never be the same. I don’t mean in a bad way,” she said quickly when he blinked at her. “I saw, firsthand, how having Luke changed Darlie. Example: Before, she’d have skewered Dawson, then fried him up, chopped him to bits before feeding him to the wolves. But her son’s more important than her pride, than slapping back at Dawson.”

  “If love isn’t stronger than pride, it isn’t love.”

  “That’s . . . that’s completely true. And I’ve seen that truth, firsthand, all my life. Like Dad did, Darlie’s choosing her work differently. She said no to this series before because she wouldn’t leave her son for weeks and months on end, and wouldn’t take
him away from his father for the same reason. Now she’s a single parent with a disinterested ex, so she took it. And partly because it removes Luke from the media chaos, the gossip, the speculations. I admire that.”

  “So do I.”

  “Dad did that for me, gave me Ireland. And after, you and G-Lil juggled me with him. One or more of you would always be there.”

  “And now you’re here for me.”

  “I sort of think we’re here for each other.”

  Looking away from the sea, Cate scanned the vineyard, climbing up its tiered terraces, and the pretty little orchard where the April blossoms had fallen and the fruit began to form.

  Season by season, she thought. Year by year.

  “I never missed her, you know. I had such wonderful women stepping into the mother role for me. I hope Darlie finds some good men to do the same for Luke. She doesn’t have a family like ours.”

  “Who does?”

  Smiling, she toasted again. Then set down her glass when she saw Red walking toward them.

  “Hi! Sit. I’ll run and get another glass.”

  “I sure wouldn’t mind it.”

  Consuela met her with one halfway across the bridge.

  As she started back, she looked down, saw the two men in what read as heavy conversation.

  Not a social call, she decided, though she’d expected just this.

  She put on a casual smile as she walked down to pour Red a glass.

  “Okay, now you can start over from the beginning. What do you think, feel, believe, suspect about Sparks, about all the rest?”

  After fiddling with his Wayfarers, Red puffed out his cheeks. “I hate to pull you back into this, Cate.”

  “I’ve never been all the way out of it.” Reaching over she rubbed her hand over Hugh’s. “Stop worrying about shielding me.”

  “It’s always the first instinct, even when I know better.”

  “Let’s think about it this way. Forewarned is forearmed.”

  “I wish I had more facts,” Red told her. “More definites to give you. I can start with some of those. Sparks was stabbed in a communal area, just before the start of a scheduled movie viewing, so you’ve got a lot of inmates coming in, milling around some before they settled in. The shank missed vital areas.”

  Demonstrating, Red tapped a fist to the left of the small of his back. “A couple inches over, it would’ve hit a kidney, and he’d be in more trouble. Sharpened toothbrush. He says he felt a sharp pain, reached back, got ahold of it, tried to pull it out. Went down.”

  “It sounds painful, if not lethal.”

  “Oh, he felt it. But a shank like that, you want to hit something important, and you want to hit more than once. If someone was trying to take him out, they did a sloppy, half-assed job of it.”

  “Do you think it was more of a warning? Something not a part of any of the rest. Just some prison problem.”

  Taking his time, Red drank some lemonade. “That’s a theory.”

  She caught the tone, angled her head. “Not yours.”

  “He’s got almost twenty years inside, never an incident. Mic and I go up and talk to him a few weeks ago, let him know we’re looking at him. He gets shanked, sloppy and half-assed.

  “Denby gets shanked, multiple stab wounds, gut wounds, heart wounds—nothing sloppy about it. Scarpetti’s attacked, held underwater until he drowns. Clean, quick, done. The two who came after me? Bad luck for them I know the road better than they did, bad luck they boosted a car the driver couldn’t handle. But they sure as hell killed my truck, and they sure as hell planned it out.”

  She spread her hands. “Leaving us with this being sloppy and halfassed. So different than the others.”

  “Could be whoever’s behind this chose poorly this time out.”

  Reasonable, Cate thought, nodding. “But that’s not your theory either.”

  “I’m thinking it through, running it through with Dillon after I got word on it. The morning after it happened. We’re out there moving cattle from pasture to pasture. I’m saying it doesn’t add up for me, doesn’t smell right. And he says what I’m thinking.”

  Red leaned forward. “What if the son of a bitch did it to himself?”

  “Stabbed himself?” The air went out of her at the idea. “But that’s crazy, isn’t it? You said he barely missed his kidney.”

  “But he did miss it, didn’t he? The man knows his body. He’s spent most of his life working on it.”

  “Sloppy’s one thing. Jabbing a sharpened toothbrush into your own body, that’s another. He could’ve miscalculated, or gotten jostled at the key moment.”

  “He didn’t. He wasn’t.”

  “Still an enormous risk,” Hugh put in. “For what possible gain?”

  “How I figure he figures? It takes him off the suspect list. ‘Look at me, I was attacked, too.’ The man’s a liar, one who’s run his life on lies and cons.”

  Face set, Red tapped a fist on the table. “I tell you as sure as I’m sitting here he lied to me and Mic when we talked to him. A load of horseshit about just wanting to do his time, how he deserved what he got. He made sure to shift some of the blame to Denby and Dupont, but claimed he’d put it behind him.”

  Red took another drink. “Horseshit.”

  “You really believe this? Dillon believes this?”

  Red nodded. “It’s what adds up for me. It smells right to me. Mic, well, she’s about halfway there on it. The other half doesn’t see him as having the spine to do it, to hurt himself.”

  “He’s still in prison,” Cate pointed out. “How could he do all this from prison?”

  “Start with Denby. Nobody liked the bastard. He got his ass kicked regularly, did time in solitary. I’m betting you could barter his murder for a couple packs of smokes. With nearly two decades in, you can be sure a man like Sparks made connections, made friends, knows who’ll do what and what they want to do it. Grifters, they’re going to grift inside or out.”

  Hugh looked over the pool to the deeper, bolder water of the Pacific. “The others wouldn’t be that easy.”

  “Connections. An ex-con doing a job, taking a quick score for it. There are ways to make money in prison, to get it in, get it out. Sparks would find ways. The two that came for me did time. Not in San Quentin, but you put the word out, order the hit.”

  Tapping that fist, Red scowled out to sea. “We’d have gotten it out of them if they’d lived. Sparks got lucky there.”

  “This isn’t just a theory for you,” Cate realized.

  “It’s a theory until I can prove it.” Red reached into the bowl of berries, eating absently. “His lawyer? He hired this one over a year ago. She’s a writer, too, one with a bad-guy fetish.”

  “I’m not sure I want to know what that means, exactly.”

  Red gave Cate a half smile. “A lot of women get hung up on men in prison. Write them, visit them, hell, even marry them. This one writes about them. She’s got a couple of true crime books under her belt. I read one of them, and maybe it’s just the cop in me, but my take? She leans toward the side of the criminal. She got clearance to interview Denby and Sparks for a book she’s going to write, or is writing.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Jessica Rowe,” he told Hugh.

  “That’s familiar. Give me a minute.” He rose, took out his phone, walked to the other end of the pool.

  “I’m not playing devil’s advocate, but it seems logical a criminal would want a lawyer who sympathizes with criminals.”

  “She’s forty-six, single. Never been married. And don’t give me grief for saying she’s on the sturdy side, and plain-looking.”

  “And how is that relevant?”

  “What’s relevant to me is since she’s been representing Sparks, since she’s been visiting him at least weekly, she’s spruced up. Taken off some weight, wearing better clothes, had the gray taken out of her hair, that kind of thing.”

  “You think she’s doing that for him? That sh
e’s fallen for him, like my mother fell for him?”

  “It slides right in to the adding up.” He glanced over as Hugh walked back.

  “I needed to check. Jessica Rowe contacted my publicist last year, and again six months ago, trying to arrange an interview. She pitched for an interview with you, honey, three times.”

  “I never heard of her.”

  “What have you told our mutual publicist to say regarding interviews or comments on the kidnapping?”

  “The answer’s always no.”

  “And she said no, every time. I’m going to assume she tried to contact Aidan, Lily, other members of the family.”

  “My mother.”

  “Most certainly. Charlotte wouldn’t have said no if she saw any advantage.”

  “Which would connect her with Sparks again,” Cate murmured. “I still don’t see what this writer, lawyer, could mean in all this.”

  “What would you do for love?” Red speculated.

  What would she do? Cate asked herself after she walked back home.

  Not kill, not help to kill. Not kidnap a child.

  But what other lines would she cross?

  She didn’t know. She’d never been tested.

  Maybe because she’d learned—early—to take care with who she loved.

  Her family, always her family. Darlie, who was the next thing to a sister to her. Luke, but who wouldn’t love such a sweet, happy boy?

  Noah. Oh, she had loved Noah, as openly, as freely, as fully as she’d known how. And if, in the end, he’d disappointed her, she’d never blamed him. Not fully.

  She walked to the glass wall, looked out to sky and sea, so much blue, so much beauty, and searched her heart.

  No, she hadn’t fully blamed him, but a part of her had. Maybe still did. And fair or not, holding on to that part of her had made her wary of loving like that again.

  She’d given her body if not her full and open heart to two other men who hadn’t deserved it. Who wouldn’t be wary?

  After all, when a Sullivan loved, really loved, it was forever.

  With that on her mind, she went upstairs to her bedroom, opened what she thought of as her memory box. Playbills—including the one she’d had signed by the cast and crew of Mame—ticket stubs, all the way back to her childhood, the recipe for soda bread—one she’d committed to memory long ago—in Mrs. Leary’s careful handwriting.