Burning Bright

by Anne Stuart; Maggie Shayne; Judith Arnold

  Probably not much, Alana surmised. Not with Jeff Barrett keeping his uncle muzzled.

  Where did a little girl fit into the picture? A student in the Crescent Cove school district, perhaps?

  Or was the little girl a ruse? Had Jeff invented her to distract Alana? If reporters were often likened to bloodhounds, maybe this supposedly sick child was Barrett’s way of tossing a steak at Alana, throwing her off the scent.

  He was an attorney, after all, and he didn’t want Alana to publish a story about his uncle’s legal predicament. But the guy was in hot water, and so was his secretary. Alana owed it to her readers to report the truth.

  Chapter Six

  At eight o’clock, the police chief ordered everyone to go home. Apparently, Eleanor, who was shut up inside her own interview room, refused to talk until her lawyer got back from his ski weekend, and Jeff refused to let Uncle Bob talk until he’d talked to Eleanor’s lawyer. Farrar must have figured neither Bob nor Eleanor was a flight risk, so he suggested they get a good night’s sleep and come back tomorrow.

  The guy seemed reasonable; Jeff had a good feeling about him. After asking Bob to wait for him in the entry, he cornered Farrar alone in his office. “One quick question,” he said. “Strictly hypothetical.”

  Farrar flashed him a grin. “Shoot.”

  “Hypothetically, if all the missing money was returned within a day or so, could we view this entire thing as a major bookkeeping error and let it go at that?”

  Farrar’s face registered surprise. “A bookkeeping error?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hypothetically.” He ruminated. “The auditor’s been through the financials. She didn’t like what she saw.”

  “Right, but—hypothetically—if there was an explanation for the way the budget got a little twisted around, and all the money was restored, what kind of charges would you be looking at?”

  Farrar ruminated some more. “I haven’t talked to the D.A.’s office yet. No charges have been filed. On the other hand, if a crime has been committed, we’ve got to act accordingly.”

  “But if it’s not a crime—if it’s just a really major bookkeeping snafu… The D.A. doesn’t need to be brought in to adjudicate a bookkeeping snafu, right?”

  “I guess not. Hypothetically.”

  “Hypothetically.” Jeff smiled. “Thanks.” He shook Farrar’s hand and left the office. Bob hovered near the entry, gazing dolefully through the glass door at the darkness outside. Flurries danced through the air, looking like white dust. Jeff clamped a hand over his uncle’s shoulder and steered him down the sidewalk to where he’d parked his car. “I’m going to get you off the hook,” he said. “But you have to give back the money. You and Eleanor both. I’ll need to talk to Eleanor so we can work this out together, but I think we can pull it off. If you give back every last dime.”

  “What about Katie?”

  “Eleanor will have to pay for her surgery some other way.”

  “If she could have paid for it some other way, we would never have borrowed the money from the school accounts,” Bob protested.

  Jeff unlocked the passenger door of his BMW and opened it for Bob. He didn’t speak again until they were both strapped into their seats and the engine was warming up. “There’s always another way,” he said. “I bet I could find a charitable organization in Boston that would kick in some money. I’ve got good connections.”

  “Really?” Bob’s face brightened. “You could do that?”

  “I can try. On the other hand, if you and Eleanor don’t return the money, you’ll both wind up in jail. Even if you avoid jail, you’ll lose your jobs. Explain to me how that would help Eleanor’s little girl.”

  “If you can raise some money—”

  “I’ll do my best.” His best meant he’d have to drive back to Boston tonight. Returning to Boston was a good idea in any case. He had paperwork to finish up on the age-discrimination suit, mail to wade through, Christmas presents to buy. He didn’t have time to stick around Crescent Cove, peeling potatoes for Alana.

  Of course, if she ran her damn article tomorrow, Bob would be toast even if the police dropped their investigation. A conviction in the newspaper was in some ways worse than a conviction in court. The court of public opinion could be unforgiving.

  Still, avoiding a criminal charge would count as a huge victory.

  He handed his cell phone to Bob. “Call Aunt Marge and tell her you’ll be home in a while,” he said, “and then give me directions to Eleanor’s house.”

  He and Bob spent an hour at Eleanor’s house, a modest ranch cluttered with toys and other baby items. Jeff met Katie, an energetic tyke who preferred running to walking and whose speech was even harder to comprehend than that of most toddlers. She had pretty blue eyes and a cute button nose. With a properly shaped mouth, she’d be gorgeous.

  Eleanor looked ragged, her cheeks tearstained and pale with worry. While she wasn’t overly receptive to Jeff at first, she obviously respected Bob. “If we give the money back,” he said, “Jeff will get the funding for the surgery from his friends in Boston.”

  Jeff was uncomfortable with his uncle’s making such a risky promise—but he needed Eleanor to believe her daughter’s surgery wouldn’t be jeopardized if she returned the money. And damn it, watching the little girl push a toy lawn mower across the worn living-room rug, listening to her squeal, feeling her chubby little arms squeeze around his calf as she gave his leg a hug…he wanted to find the money for her operation.

  “We can say we set up a rainy-day fund for school department employees,” Bob suggested, impressing Jeff with his creativity. “We can say we were trying to see if we could wring some money out of the current budget for employee emergencies.”

  “But what about Katie’s surgery?”

  “Jeff’ll take care of that. Come on, Eleanor. We’ll give the money back.”

  “But that story, about setting up a rainy-day fund—it’s a lie, isn’t it?” She eyed Jeff dubiously.

  “I’m not going to tell you to lie,” he said, mindful of his professional obligations. “However, it seems to me that you actually were setting up a fund for employee emergencies. One employee’s emergency, anyway.”

  “So it’s not a lie?”

  “I’m not saying that. I’m saying you put the money into a fund with the idea that this fund could cover an employee’s emergency.”

  Eleanor scooped Katie into her arms and carried her off to change her diaper. When they returned, Eleanor said she’d back Bob up on his story. “Because it really isn’t a lie,” she asserted. “I realize that now. It’s what we did.”

  Jeff left his business card with Eleanor and wrote down the name and phone number of her lawyer, a fellow named Burt Ammond. Then he drove Bob home. He entered the house only to grab his suitcase and say goodbye to Aunt Marge. From there, he cruised across town to Alana’s house. It was dark.

  Swearing under his breath, he U-turned and drove back to town, to the Chronicle building. He saw Alana’s car parked in the lot—not in the space where she’d gotten stuck, he noted—and pulled into an empty spot nearby. After raising his collar and yanking on his gloves, he climbed out into the frosty, flurry-white evening.

  The building’s main entry was locked, but he saw plenty of lights on through the glass walls of the vestibule. He found a doorbell on one side of the door and pressed the button.

  After a minute, the inner door was opened by the skinny guy with the geeky eyeglasses who’d helped Jeff search the Chronicle’s computerized archives in the basement last Friday. He cupped his hand above his eyes to peer through the glass, then opened the outer door.

  “Is Alana Ross here?” Jeff asked. “I have to talk to her. I’m Jeff Barrett.”

  “Um…wait here, okay?” the guy said, abandoning him in the vestibule.

  Jeff shook off a shiver as the heated air surrounded him. His body temperature rose a few more degrees when he saw Alana approach the inner door and ease it open. How cou
ld a woman with such a steely spine have such gentle eyes, such soft, sweet lips?

  She seemed surprised to see him, and a little wary. “Jeff?”

  “Don’t write the story,” he said.

  SURE. SHE SHOULD STOP work, just because he said so. She should quit her job and crawl into a hole because Jeff Barrett, the high-powered mistake-free lawyer from Boston, told her to.

  A small, treacherous voice in a corner of her brain whispered that any woman would gladly do whatever a man like Jeff Barrett asked of her, a man with snow-bright eyes and a leanly muscled physique and hands that knew how to hold a woman, how to touch her face…a man who knew how to kiss a woman on the mouth and leave her feeling she’d been kissed all over. I’ll do anything you say, Jeff, that wicked voice murmured inside her skull.

  She’d spent the past three hours pursuing his lead about the child who needed surgery, though, and finally she had her story. God bless chatty small-town neighbors, she thought. No one in Bridgeport would have gossiped as cheerfully about her next-door neighbor the way Agatha Lewis had. “Oh, that wonderful daughter of Eleanor’s! Such a sweetheart, and it’s so sad about her face. But she’s going to get the surgery, finally. Eleanor scraped together the money for it. Right after the holidays, Eleanor is taking Katie down to Dartmouth-Hitchcock to have the surgery done.”

  Alana could guess how Robert Willis’s secretary had scraped together the money for her daughter’s plastic surgery. Now she had a motive—a heart-wrenching one—to go along with what Jason had told her in his office. She couldn’t cross the line and accuse anyone of anything, but she could report a solid story about what the police chief believed had happened to the school’s budget.

  “Jeff—”

  “Listen to me.” He gripped her shoulders, holding her motionless in front of him, his face just inches from hers. “There was no theft. The police chief is going to reach that finding. It was all a misunderstanding. Not a crime.”

  That wasn’t what Jason Farrar had told Alana. Why should she accept Jeff’s word over that of the town’s chief of police?

  Because Jason never looked at her the way Jeff Barrett was looking at her, as if he could see through her doubts, through her skin, as if he could peer into her eyes and find her soul lying open for him. Because Jason had never kissed her. Because he’d never made her feel as if she had a candle burning inside her, heating and illuminating her, making her glow in the night like the flames of her ancestors, celebrating the triumph of life itself.

  Jeff made her feel things she’d never felt before, made her want things she’d never wanted before.

  And he was asking her to kill her story. He was asking her to ignore her work and her responsibility to the Chronicle, to Chet, to Crescent Cove.

  “I found out about the little girl,” she told him. “The one who needs surgery.”

  “The story’s changed,” he said.

  “The story? What about the truth?”

  “The truth is, by tomorrow Jason Farrar will determine that no crime was committed.”

  “By tomorrow? I’m writing my report today.”

  “Nothing happened today. Your pal at the police station brought my uncle in and then sent him home.”

  “And the little girl you told me about?”

  “Hopefully, she’ll have her surgery.”

  Which would be paid for how? Had someone set up a counterfeit machine to print seventy-five thousand dollars in the basement of the police station? Or maybe over at the school department’s offices?

  In the dim light of the vestibule, she stared into Jeff’s silver eyes. His fingers moved on her arms, gently, coaxing. She wished she could forget about his uncle and the school money and her job and his, and just go home with him, back to her cozy house and her dog and her latke recipe. She wished they could spend the evening getting to know each other better, and letting that knowledge lead them where it would.

  But he was here, holding her, pleading with her in his low, seductive voice because he wanted her to sit on her story.

  “Trust me,” he said. “There’s no crime.”

  She didn’t believe him. But not believing him wasn’t the same thing as not trusting him. And foolish though it was, she wanted to trust him.

  She wanted to kiss him.

  She wanted him.

  Slowly, ruefully, she eased out of his grip. “You’d better go,” she said, turning from him and walking through the door, out of the vestibule and back into the newsroom. She didn’t wait to watch him leave. She couldn’t. She had too much work to do, more calls to make, more people to question. She had a story to report.

  Chapter Seven

  He’d been exhausted after arriving home from Vermont after midnight, but fueled with adrenaline and caffeine, he started the work week with an eight-in-the-morning phone call to Burt Ammond, Eleanor Chase’s attorney, to bring him up to speed. To Jeff’s great relief, Ammond was already on top of things. Eleanor would return the money. She and Bob would make a statement about their attempt to set up a special emergency fund. Ammond would help them draft it. They’d negotiate for nothing more than a reprimand. Ammond promised to keep Jeff posted.

  Jeff’s next phone call was to a woman he knew from the charity circuit who sat on the board of a foundation that funded medical care for uninsured children. She was moved by his description of the little girl whose plastic surgery was deemed a luxury by the insurance company. An hour after his call to her, she called back and told him her foundation would supply the money to cover Katie Chase’s surgery, contingent on the board’s meeting with Katie and Eleanor and granting its approval.

  ’Tis the season, Jeff thought as he sipped his fourth cup of black coffee and gazed out the window of his office on an upper floor of the John Hancock Tower. Below him, Boston was dressed for the holidays. The Common was blanketed in white, the shops of Copley Plaza were decked out with enticing holiday displays, lights sparkled like stars on the branches of leafless trees and Salvation Army Santas rang their bells on every street corner. And a little girl was going to get the surgery she needed.

  Would his uncle get what he needed? His name cleared, his job preserved, his lesson learned? Or would a stubborn reporter insist on reporting that Robert Willis had done something illegal? Even if ultimately no harm was done, would she ruin Jeff’s uncle’s life?

  Would she ruin Jeff’s life, too? Or would his memory of her eventually fade? Would he someday meet another woman who made him laugh the way Alana did, who challenged him, whose convictions he couldn’t help but admire even though they stood in the way of his goals for his uncle? Would he ever stop thinking about her lush hair and her even lusher lips, and all the sexual promise in that one amazing kiss they’d shared?

  “This fax just arrived for you,” his secretary said as she swept into his office and placed several sheets of paper on his desk.

  He tore himself from the window and dropped into his chair. The cover sheet indicated that the fax was from Aunt Marge. “From today’s Chronicle,” she’d written.

  He pushed the cover sheet aside and scanned the fax of the front page of the Chronicle, reduced to print so small he had to squint to read it. There, below where the fold would be, he read a headline: Police Locate Missing School Dept. Funds. “After a long weekend of active investigation, including an extensive audit by Town Comptroller Dorothy Callahan, Police Chief Jason Farrar has announced that the funds missing from the school department’s accounts last week have been recovered. School Superintendent Robert Willis and his administrative assistant, Eleanor Chase, admitted responsibility for shifting the funds to a new account in a bookkeeping experiment. Although proper procedures were not followed in the manipulation of funds, Police Chief Farrar said he did not believe the actions of Willis and Chase rose to the level of criminal activity.”

  Jeff released his breath in a long sigh. Alana had rewritten her story. He wasn’t sure how much she knew about what Bob had done, but she must have realized it wasn’t qu
ite so innocent. She’d written the innocent version, though. She’d let Bob off the hook. Jeff closed his eyes and sent a silent prayer of thanks skyward, although he suspected Alana was the one he ought to be thanking.

  He skimmed the rest of the article, which included reactions by several members of the school committee, who felt Willis should receive a two-week suspension without pay. “We set the budget,” the chair of the school committee was quoted as saying. “If the superintendent has a problem with the budget, he should come to us. He shouldn’t be playing games with the money behind our backs.”

  Two weeks without pay sure beat two years in the slammer. Uncle Bob and Aunt Marge ought to be celebrating.

  He flipped the page to read the continuation of the article. Alongside it was another article: Surgery a Holiday Gift for Chase’s Daughter. Under Alana’s byline, the article described the particular challenges Eleanor Chase faced as a single mother with a daughter in need of surgery. “The Chronicle has set up a special fund to help defray the costs of Katie Chase’s surgery,” the article reported, along with an address where donations could be sent.

  Alana had done that, too. Not only had she spared his uncle, but she’d talked her boss into collecting donations for the little girl. She’d come through with more generosity than Jeff could have hoped for.

  His gaze shifted from the fax to the files awaiting his final review on the age-discrimination suit he’d settled last week. He could get through them by the end of the day if he worked non-stop. Tomorrow morning he’d have them ready for the final signatures. By the afternoon he could submit his hours to the billing department and congratulate himself on a job well-done.

  And then…he could drive back to Crescent Cove and plead his own case.

  “I’M FINE,” Alana told Nellie as she wiped a tear from her cheek. “I’m missing Grandma, that’s all.”