by Duffy, Sue
Hans pushed his way through a growing crowd that the police were trying to disperse. But he kept moving until he stopped before the young mother now cradling her injured son. How old is he? Hans screamed silently. Could he be nine? Can he speak English? Does this gash in his head and the blood running down his face mean he will die?
Did I do this? Did I kill this child?
Hans fell to his knees before the unconscious boy and sobbed, rocking back and forth on his heels, his face buried in his hands.
Then something happened that wasn’t possible. Not here. Not to him. But it did.
The young woman lifted one hand from her child and reached for Hans. She firmly gripped his chin and raised his face to hers. “Pray for my child!” she pleaded with anguished eyes. “God will answer you if you pray.”
Hans lurched back, staring incredulously at her. Him, pray? Was she insane? He had done this! God should strike him dead!
His eyes trailed to the boy, and he saw his brother’s face. Without a word, Hans staggered to his feet and ran.
Chapter 17
Her forehead pressed against the tiny window, Cass looked down at the foamy mat of the Atlantic. As the jet gradually descended toward Charleston, she wondered what reception she’d get from Liesl Bower. A strange girl comes to her door on a Saturday morning and tells her that it was she, not the president, they wanted to kill. Why shouldn’t the celebrity pianist slam the door and call the police? She probably would. Then what? Cass would have to reveal her evidence? Implicate her mother?
Maybe Jordan was right. “Can’t you just call her anonymously?” he’d reasoned. “Detach yourself from it?”
She remembered her answer. “I’ve been detached since I was nineteen years old. Nothing good has come from it.” And that was the moment—late last night in her apartment—when Cass told him about Rachel. When she’d finished, she said, “If I can stop a death instead of causing one, I’m going to do it the best way I know how. And that’s not long-distance. Or anonymously.”
After he heard Rachel’s story, including Cass’s drunken tryst with Adam Rinehart, Jordan had enfolded her in his arms and let her cry. When she’d finished, he released her gently, wrapped her in a blanket on the sofa, and kissed her forehead. The only thing he’d said before he left was, “It’s time to heal.”
But Cass believed her wound would never heal. There’s no one to forgive me, she thought, watching a tanker bob like a bathtub toy far below her. No one should. She glanced at Jordan, dozing in the seat beside her. Even after the story she’d told him last night, he remained at her side. There was something so selfless and unconditional about that, and she didn’t understand it. She could only welcome it as one gulping oxygen after a painful ascent through drowning waters.
Her hand slipped lightly over his, and he stirred. “We’re almost there,” she whispered. Her heart swelled with affection for him, and she smiled.
Straightening in his seat, he looked closely at her, then rubbed his eyes and yawned. He glanced back at her and said, “It’s a good thing I’m here.”
She nodded agreement and was about to comment on his amazing devotion to her when he added, “You’ve got something blue stuck between your teeth.” He pointed at her mouth. “Probably a blueberry from your muffin.” He looked away and she could see his cheeks bunch with amusement.
“And this is the kind of help I can expect from you today?” she said, pulling a mirror from her bag and finding no such intrusion between her teeth. Then she looked out the window and grinned.
“See,” Jordan said, leaning forward to catch her expression. “It worked. Now we can die with smiles on our faces.”
Cass sighed and finally relaxed against her seat. Ten minutes later, they were on the ground at barely eight o’clock.
“I still can’t believe you got that guy in the Juilliard office to give you her home address,” Jordan said as they deplaned with only one backpack apiece.
“He would have flunked chemistry in high school if I hadn’t helped him almost every day after class,” she answered, trying to match Jordan’s long stride.
“So the debt is paid?”
“He assured me it was. They could fire him for that.” After all other attempts to find Liesl Bower’s home address had failed, Cass remembered that the pianist occasionally taught music workshops at the Juilliard School in New York. “By the way, have you logged her address into your handheld?”
“Yeah.” Jordan pulled out his mobile GPS as they navigated the busy corridor. “Tidewater Lane. Looks like it’s in the South of Broad district, which, I understand, is the epicenter of Charleston aristocracy.” He steered her into a café. “Let’s get some hot brew and food before we go any farther.”
They took a seat and ordered. Cass looked around the crowded restaurant, then back at Jordan, who was watching an overhead television screen behind her. “I only spoke to her a couple of times in passing that day at the Carnegie. I wonder what Liesl Bower’s really like.”
Jordan glanced at her. “You mean on a normal day when no one’s trying to blow her up?” He shifted his attention back to the television.
Cass stared at the empty tabletop. “This is nuts,” she said in a raspy whisper, not wanting anyone else to hear. “How do we tell her what we know without revealing how we know it. She’s going to want evidence, and I can’t give it to her. I can’t do that to Mom.”
She waited for Jordan to turn his attention to her. But something on the screen had already captured it. “Jordan, you’re not listening to—”
“Cass, look!” he pointed over her head.
Before she could turn in her seat, she heard, “The bombing of the Supreme Court Building in Washington earlier this morning …” Cass jumped to her feet and spun toward the screen as the on-scene reporter continued.
“Explosives apparently buried in the side yards detonated about fifteen seconds before the bomb that gutted the basement where maintenance storage, the garage, and the high court’s mail-handling facility are located. Two people were killed, a mail-room clerk and a security guard. Only a few bystanders were injured by the exterior blasts, one of them a young boy with a critical head wound. Authorities attribute the few casualties to the early-morning hour, the extreme cold, and to the fact that the building is closed on weekends.”
Cass turned fiery eyes toward Jordan, remembering his words last night in Hans’s study. Why would he have blueprints of the U.S. Supreme Court Building?
Why would he have a diagram of the inauguration platform and the blast pattern centered on Liesl Bower’s piano? Cass’s whole body went rigid, and she struggled to bend her mind around what was happening.
“Jordan,” she said, leaning close to his ear. “This isn’t going to stop.”
Chapter 18
The old house on Tidewater Lane had been prepped for a day like no other. A wedding day. The caterer, florist, grounds crew, and a string ensemble of Liesl Bower’s music students from the College of Charleston would arrive at intervals throughout the day.
But only one person was up when the bell on the sidewalk door rang early that morning. Ian O’Brien trudged down the porch steps in flannel pajamas barely concealed by a woman’s pink chenille bathrobe, the quickest thing he could grab on his dash from the kitchen. “Gonna wake up the whole house,” he grumbled to himself while scratching his gray beard. He opened the door fronting on the sidewalk and glared at the three men who, at first sight of Ian, seemed to forget why they were there.
“Let me guess,” Ian said, eyeing the truck at the curb. “You’re the yard crew, right?”
While two of the men stared openmouthed at the pink robe, the third didn’t miss the appropriate beat. “And you must be the lady of the house.”
As the three men struggled to contain themselves, Ian stepped out in front of them, standing taller and at least fifteen pounds heavier than any of them. The men eyed him carefully. “If you hadn’t shown up at the crack of dawn,” Ian growled, “I wouldn�
��t be standing out here looking like a ninny trying to make you stop ringing this bell.” He looked them square in the eyes. “Now, don’t you think it’s a little early to be running power tools out here? I got a house full of folks up there trying to sleep, not to mention the neighbors.”
The one who’d spoken earlier cleared his throat and pulled a piece of paper from his pants pocket. “Sorry, sir,” he said, avoiding Ian’s scowl, “but our instructions are to clean up the yards and bring all those potted palms we got there in the truck into the house.” He scratched his head. “Guess we could do the quiet part first.”
“And which part is that?”
“Well, we can rake without a lot of noise, don’t you think, fellas?” he asked, turning to his coworkers. “I mean, we don’t have to chant or anything like that.”
As they all nodded agreeably, something unspoken tugging at the corners of their mouths, Cade O’Brien emerged from his ground-floor apartment. “What’s going on, Pop?” he asked, blinking hard. “And, uh, want to tell me why you’re wearing Liesl’s robe?”
The three men couldn’t take any more. One by one, they shuffled off toward the truck to retrieve their tools, their shoulders heaving. “Shh!” one whispered, looking quickly back at Ian.
“Come on in, Pop. They just don’t appreciate your feminine side like I do.” Cade laughed all the way up the steps to the main door of the house. It was one of Charleston’s iconic single houses. From the front entrance on the sidewalk level, an open-air stairway led to the second-level porch and formal entrance to the living quarters. The stately three-story dwelling had been the Bower family home since the early 1900s.
“Now that’s enough!” Ian stomped up behind him.
“Why were you upstairs anyway, Pop?”
“I just came up to start breakfast for everybody when those guys started punching that doorbell. And by the way, it’s ten degrees warmer up here. We’ve got to do something about the damp cold in that apartment of yours. I don’t know if I can take another winter down there.” They quietly shut the front door behind them and went straight to the kitchen, closing up the two entrances to it as well.
“You don’t have to,” Cade said in a low voice, focused tightly now on Ian. “After tonight, you’re moving up here with me and Liesl.” He grinned with unabashed pleasure.
“Nothing doing,” Ian said too loudly, and Cade shushed him. In a gale-force whisper, Ian added, “There’s already too many people up here. Her dad, her grandmother, and that caregiver woman who talks a blue streak. She’s got that long braid wrapped so tight around her head, it’s interfering with the on-off switch.”
Ian poured coffee for Cade, who moved to a chair at the kitchen table and looked wistfully out the window, unfazed by his grandfather’s rumblings. “This is my wedding day, Pop.”
Ian clapped a hand on Cade’s shoulder, handed him a mug, and settled into a chair next to him, his voice finding its moderate tone. “‘And God saw that it was good,’” Ian quoted from the first chapter of Genesis.
“This time, you mean,” Cade said.
Ian shook his head with conviction. “That first marriage was a travesty, Son. You were ganged up on by that drug-addled young woman, my own money-hungry son, and his drunken wife. And you know what? We’re not going to speak another word about those unfortunate souls, not now anyway. They’re all gone, and God has brought you the bride of his choice. I know it’s true because me and the Lord are always talking things over.”
Cade reached over and closed his hand over Ian’s but didn’t speak. Ian guessed he couldn’t. So it was time to return the day to its intended celebration. “Tell you what,” Ian said. “Give me time to clean up, then go wake up that bride of yours. We’re going to dine fine this morning.”
Climbing the stairs to Liesl’s room, Cade tried to dismiss his fears for her safety. Liesl had refused to discuss the implications of the bomb planted in her piano just five days ago. “It was only the biggest hiding place on that whole platform,” she’d reasoned. “It was the president they wanted.” Still, security agents ordered by President Noland himself now monitored the house and all Liesl’s comings and goings, much to her dismay.
When Cade reached Liesl’s bedroom door, he knocked lightly and waited, but not long. Already dressed in paint-spattered jeans, a baggy gray sweater, and old sneakers, Liesl threw open the door and reached for him. He hugged her to him, inhaling a wisp of lavender soap. “Hmm, you smell good.” He set her down. “And I’m certain you’re going to look a whole lot better tonight.”
After the punch to his arm, she invited him in to see what she’d packed for their honeymoon. An assortment of ski clothes were rolled inside a wheeled duffle bag. Airline tickets to Austria lay nearby.
Cade turned her to him and nuzzled her neck, then found her lips and kissed them. And again. “Remind me why we waited so long,” he whispered.
“You wanted to be the chief breadwinner, remember? Had to get Charleston’s new metro magazine up and running, pulling in money to feed us and our children.” He watched her eyes sparkle at the prospect of a family. At forty, he also was ready. With God’s grace, they would both discover what family was meant to be.
They heard another bedroom door open nearby, and Henry Bower looked into his daughter’s open doorway as he passed by. He smiled at the couple and slipped quietly down the stairs.
Liesl looked thoughtfully after her father. “There goes the main reason we waited,” she said.
Cade tightened his arms around her. “It was the right thing to do, Liesl. Your father had just returned from the dead after twenty years. You both needed this time together, to heal. You have. In time, he will, too.”
A smile skimmed her face, then disappeared. “But the guilt is eating him alive, Cade. What his drinking did to us all. The accident that killed Aunt Bess. Mom’s illness. He believes that was his fault too. I pray every day for God to forgive him and to make him know he’s forgiven. That it’s done and over.”
A gravelly voice came bellowing up the stairwell. “Breakfast will be served on the main deck!”
“And that’s the end of that conversation.” Liesl grinned, pulling Cade along toward the staircase. “Ian has been so good for Dad. Starting that charter-fishing business with him and giving him a livelihood, a reason to get up in the morning—sober. And making him laugh.”
Halfway down the stairs, Cade pointed toward one of the tall, transomed windows overlooking the front porch. “Henry’s not the only one drawn to the crusty old sea captain.”
Liesl saw Ava Mullins cross the porch toward the door, a party-size coffee urn in her arms and bulging grocery bags swinging from both wrists. Cade went to lend a hand.
“Oh, thank heavens,” Ava groaned when he opened the door and took the bags from her. “Someone keeps adding more steps to this porch every day.” Though she was approaching sixty, Ava’s small form was both girlish and rock hard. And since that day when Liesl had personally ushered her into a new wardrobe and hairstyle, Ava had continued to wear her peppered gray hair cropped in the spiky hairdo that had first rendered Ian speechless. Now, dressed in a black turtleneck and designer jeans tucked smartly into black suede boots, Ava strode purposefully through the door of the house that she, admittedly, had come to love as the only familial gathering place she knew. The former Harvard music professor and now-retired CIA agent was long divorced, and her son was a career marine who seldom visited.
When Liesl approached, Ava gave her the tall silver urn, a quick peck on the cheek, and a cursory appraisal. “Now I know why the groom isn’t supposed to see his bride just before the wedding.” Her eyes slid over Liesl’s attire. “The guy might change his mind.”
Cade winked at Liesl as they all headed for the kitchen. “Pop finally found his match.”
Liesl’s grandmother, Lottie Bower, and her caregiver, Margo Blanchard, were now seated at the big oak table still bearing Liesl’s initials, which she’d carved with a fish hook in third grade.
Lottie rarely spoke these days, another small stroke pushing her further along a continuum of clouding coherence. But she often smiled and gestured feebly, signaling to those who knew her best that she was glad for their nearness.
“I can’t remember the last time I had potato pancakes, Mr. O’Brien,” Margo told Ian, who was hunched over two large cast-iron skillets, one bearing the cakes, the other sausage and bacon. Warming nearby were a pot of cheese grits and a pan of scrambled eggs. A platter of fresh fruit was already on the table. “I used to make waffles for my husband before he died of a brain tumor. Well, sometimes he wanted oatmeal to go with them, though I never could understand that combination. But anyhow, he still couldn’t start his day without a plate of my waffles. Sometimes I’d put blueberries in them, that is if I could find them when they weren’t so ridiculously overpriced, and sometimes I put pecans in them. He loved pecans, and I didn’t mind shelling them fresh. And sometimes I wouldn’t put anything at all in my waffles. It just depended on his mood, which, as you can imagine with someone afflicted with any brain disorder, was likely to change without warning. Know what I mean?”
Ian turned pained eyes toward Liesl, who’d joined him at the stove and was flipping the last batch of pancakes. “Hurry up and give that woman something to put in her mouth,” he whispered. “When she’s through eating, we’ll use duct tape.”
Liesl valiantly choked off a laugh and started dishing food into plates, Margo’s first. Soon, they were all talking excitedly around the table. The topic, of course, was final preparations for the evening’s wedding at St. Philip’s Church and the reception at the house.
Forty-nine guests would attend, but the two friends Liesl wanted most to see couldn’t come. She hadn’t expected Max Morozov to fly from Israel with his tight concert schedule this year. Before he’d become the first-chair violinist for the Israel Philharmonic, he’d been Liesl’s prankster friend and fellow student at the Moscow Conservatory. One of his better stunts had once landed him and Liesl in a Moscow police station.