by Sheedy, EC
“A no-brainer. The woman’s a single mother. Wants to put her kid in college. Dinah treats her like shit and pays her the same.”
“She’ll be making less than shit when Dinah hears about your cozy relationship.”
“Dinah’s not going to hear about it. Because you’re not going to tell her.”
“Yeah? Why’s that?”
“Because if you do, there’s a good chance that nun will get herself roughed up, good and proper.”
“Are you actually threatening the woman?” Gus’s stomach tightened. Visions of out-sized jeans, bright red hair, and those oddly dark take-no-prisoner blue eyes flashed across his mind.
“No. Not me!” He shook his head. “You honestly don’t get it, do you?”
“What the hell are you talking about, Marsden?”
“I’m talking about Dinah’s goddamn secret, that’s what. Something my hellish ex-wife will do anything to protect. Hell, there’s nothing the bitch won’t do to get her way. If that nun doesn’t oblige—” He picked up the knife Gus had been toying with and dragged its point across the stiff white tablecloth, leaving a clear, straight rut in the linen. “Shame to see the woman hurt.” He eyed Gus carefully. “You want to be responsible for that?”
Gus eyeballed him back but said nothing. Dinah was forceful, stubborn, calculating, and yes, selfish, but capable of violence? He wasn’t so sure. The woman had her dark side, but that was mostly sexual—and consensual.
Dinah physically hurting someone? He turned the thought over, and over.
She’s not above hiring the services she needs. He was proof of that. Still, the idea didn’t process.
“And you want this information, so you can hold it—whatever the hell it is—over Dinah’s head.” Gus smiled thinly. “You can’t tell me you give a shit about Keeley Farrell.”
“Oh, I give a shit, all right, and so should you. Farrell’s the keeper of the keys, born and grew up in that house. If anybody knows anything about anything, it’s gotta be her. And if the little lady crosses Dinah … well, then I’d like to be the beneficiary on her insurance policy. You understand what I’m saying?”
“I understand you’re talking about blackmail.”
“Better a little all-in-the family blackmail—and one live nun—than the alternative.”
“And if I do find out what’s going on, why the hell would I tell you and not Dinah?” He’d done a lot of things in his time, but he’d never knifed someone in the back, figuratively or otherwise. He didn’t intend to start now. “Your IQ is even lower than I thought, Hagan.”
“Is that so? Then maybe this will take it up a notch.” He leaned forward. “Because if you don’t do what I want, I’ll get someone who will, and it’s you who’ll be the loser, Hammond. Big time.”
“I don’t want your fucking money, Marsden. You got that?”
“Good, because I wasn’t planning on giving you any. What I’m after is a trade. Your services for a little information.” He settled back in his seat, looking like a tomcat about to down a rat steak. “That sister you’ve been looking for? What’s her name again? April, right?”
Gus fused to the chair. What the hell…
Hagan dropped the tight smile. “Cute, those parents of yours naming you and her for your birth months.” Smoothing his red silk tie down his chest, his voice as cold and flat as dank water, he added, “The thing is, I know where April is, and if you’re a good little whore-boy, and get up close and personal with that Mayday House woman—get me the information I want—I’ll drop her address on you.” He snickered and leaned back in his chair, enjoying himself. “Hell, you’ve fucked for money before, Hammond, all I’m asking is you do the same for information. Farrell, being an ex-nun and all, is probably panting for it. With your creds … should be no problem at all.”
CHAPTER 5
Keeley headed out at first light.
With the house so quiet—neither Bridget nor her new guest had a fondness for mornings—she had the next couple of hours to herself.
The graveyard called, and until now she hadn’t had time for a proper visit.
Now that’s a whopper, Keeley Farrell. You’ve been putting it off because you’re afraid. Afraid, you’ll start crying and never be able to stop.
She went out the back door of Mayday House, careful to close the screen door soundlessly, not because she thought anything short of a semi ramming the house would wake her sleepers, but from force of habit. Plus she reveled in the clear, soft stillness of the morning air, the scent of last night’s light rain clinging to it like an exotic fragrance, and the deep silence surrounding the stirring of birds in the trees. She had no wish to disturb it.
She crossed the backyard, the grass squishy under her feet, and went past the garden shed and the lumpy old sandbox. When she got to the tangles of the overgrown, misshapen cedar hedge, she stopped, uncertain if she was in the right spot. There was a chance that over the years it had grown over, that her “peephole to heaven,” as Mary and her mother had called it, had closed up. Brushing aside some wet leaves and branches, she realized she was a few feet off her target. A couple more steps, a bit of pushing and pulling at sodden branches, and she was there; the secret passage had grown over, but with effort she pushed through the grasping shrubbery to the graveyard beyond.
A torn shirt was a small price to pay for entry to St. Ivan’s Churchyard, the final resting place for over three hundred of St. Ivan’s early parishioners—her mother being among the last of them.
Keeley stepped carefully around the gravesites with their old sod and aging markers, some wood, some granite, and some merely iron plaques embedded in the grass.
Her mother’s grave was two rows in; its headstone, a simple stone marker in the shape of a Celtic cross, stood straight and strong, as had the woman now lying beneath it. The words on the stone were simple.
This is my Mom, who I will love forever. She has gone to be with God.
Keeley swallowed, remembering Mary coming to her, asking her for the words, telling her she was the only one who knew exactly what to say.
She ran her hand slowly over the epitaph. “I still mean it, Mom.” She choked up. Oh, God, she was going to weep buckets. For Mom, for Mary, for everything. “And I still miss you,” she whispered.
“Are you here for the morning service?”
The soft voice came from behind her, a few feet away, and she turned, rubbing at her nose, to see a balding man, probably ten or so years older than her own thirty-five, approaching her. He wore jeans and a sweater that appeared too large for his tall, thin frame.
“No,” she said with a not so subtle sniff. “I’m visiting my mother.” She pulled a tissue from her pocket and daubed at her nose. “She’s been gone for years, yet she’s here.” She nodded at the grave. “It always gets to me.”
“I’m the same. In a graveyard time stops.” He came up to her and put out his hand. “Glen Barton. Father Barton if you’re of the faith.” He smiled.
His hand was big and warm and their greeting brief. “Keeley Farrell. I live behind the hedge.” She gestured to the high shrubs and cedar trees at the edge of the churchyard.
“Ah, Mary’s … what? Godchild?”
“Yes, I suppose that’s right.” Grandchild was more how she saw it.
“And a nun?”
“Ex-nun, Father.” She looked him in the eye, beat back the vaguely uncomfortable feeling that came with any conversation with people of the cloth. “A few years now.”
“But still a believer, I hope.” He tilted his head.
She met his steady gaze. “You looking to make a new convert, Father—or an old convert new again?”
He laughed and his eyes crinkled as if they were used to it. “No. I’m getting too old for the arduous work of changing minds. From here on I’m counting solely on my charm.”
“Smart,” she said, smiling.
“Lazy,” he replied. “Charm takes much less energy.” He glanced at the headstone where Keel
ey rested her hand. “Your mother, you say?”
“Yes. She was almost the last person buried here.” She gave the stone one final caress and pulled her hand back. “Twenty-four years ago now. I was eleven when she died.”
“That would have been Father Randall’s time,” Father Barton said. “He went to God a couple of years ago.”
“Yes, I remember him.” She paused, her chest thick and tight again. “He was kind to my mother, to Mary, and me. A good man.” It was Father Randall who’d arranged for her to stay on with Mary. And it was Father Randall who’d assured her that her mother was “happy and healthy again in paradise,” a thought she’d clung to with the passion and heart-wrenching need of a little girl who’d lost her mother, her only family, far too young.
As if sensing her pensive mood, Father Barton said, “I’ll leave you to your privacy now, but perhaps we’ll meet another time.” He raised both brows and smiled down at her. “Sunday Mass, perhaps?”
“Be careful, Father. It wouldn’t be wise to use up all that charm of yours the first time out.”
He laughed again. “If nothing else, you’ll make an interesting neighbor, Keeley Farrell.”
When the priest left, Keeley knelt beside her mother’s grave. It had been too long since she’d been here—far too long—and it was comforting in some strange way to think of her mother resting beside the church she’d loved and attended so faithfully, only a few yards from the only home she and Keeley had ever known together.
She scanned the gravesite. At first, it had been raised, a soft grassy hump in the earth, but time had flattened it, leveled it to the rut of the path winding through the graveyard. She ran a hand over the plot, carefully and with intent, pressing her palm into the damp earth, stopping when the familiar rough lines of the stones touched her palms.
They were still here…
As Mary had promised they’d be. “The grass will grow around them, Keeley, darlin’, and protect them. They’ll be with her forever. Like our love for her.”
Keeley traced the carefully set pattern, the stone daisies she and Mary had formed, then pushed deep into the soft sod during one of their early visits to the grave.
Mary had been right … about so many things.
In the days before she’d left the Sudan, Keeley had come across a mother burying the last of her four children in a shallow, dusty grave beside the road leading out of Darfur. Keeley closed her eyes against the pain of remembering.
So many dead, and with them gone, so much lost: the innocence and joy of children, the love and nurturing of women, the lore and stories of the elderly, the hope and power of so many young men.
So much killing …
Mothers left with no time to grieve. Or with no grief left in a soul battered by it. Children, women, the elders: in the Sudan, they were fresh meat to the brutal Janjaweed militias who arrived without warning and slaughtered without cause.
With only minutes to spare before forced relocation, the child’s burial was a hasty roadside affair lacking ritual or tradition, attended by only a fragmented group of people whose homes and hearts were too damaged and shocked by the raid—and their own losses—to speak.
Keeley had knelt beside that mother—as she was kneeling now beside her mother’s grave—her psyche numbed by the hunger, pain, and horrific violence of her final weeks in Africa. She’d picked up a handful of stones, and while the mother watched vacantly, she formed a stone daisy over the child’s grave.
Another woman, then another, joined to form a silent circle around the shallow little grave. Each made a flower, each touched the shoulder of the grieving mother. Each then shuffled toward the dust of the road and into an unknown future.
Kneeling in St. Ivan’s well-tended graveyard, Keeley’s vision blurred; her mother’s grave became a thousand graves, graves solitary and long forgotten, left to the sand and soil, embraced only by earth, wind, and fire.
She bowed her head and prayed, first for the mothers of Darfur, then for the nameless child by the side of the road.
With the memories came pain and a surging sea of regret.
She should have done more, so much more, instead she’d been weak, sabotaged and made useless by her own fractured nerves, finally told to go home. A right decision, but her failure all the same.
She stood and looked down at the grave.
In the past, Keeley Farrell, that’s all in the past. Let it go. Let it go.
Her life was here now, doing Mary’s work, helping one person at a time, loving one person at a time, and making sure the doors of Mayday House remained open to the women who needed sanctuary.
It might be a small thing, but it was her calling, and she’d give it everything she had in her to give.
Gus strode out of the bank, enough cash in his jeans to tide him over while he was in Erinville—which he hoped wouldn’t be too long.
As usual the amount of money in the account made him uneasy. Over a million and a half. Hell, he might as well stuff the cash under his mattress for all the thought he gave it. He’d worked his butt off—literally—for years to get it, and now he had no idea what to do with it. In the beginning it was for Josh.
And to open the road to April.
If there was even a chance Hagan knew anything about his sister, Gus had no choice; he had to act on it. The last time he’d seen her she was nine and he was eleven. Since then, no matter how much time he put in, how much money he spent, he’d found no trace of her.
How the hell Hagan learned about his missing sister was anybody’s guess, but he’d put his money on Cassie. She’d probably been through his bank statements, picked up on the funds funneled to private investigators from a time he couldn’t risk returning to Seattle to look for April himself. No giant leap for Hagan to take it from there.
Gus’s stomach clenched. If that son of a bitch was lying about what he knew, he was a bigger fool than Gus pegged him for—and he’d made the biggest mistake of his life.
When Gus stopped being Dinah’s paid plaything a while back, and went into the personal security business, he’d made more money than he’d ever figured he would. It seemed the rich and paranoid were willing to pay plenty for a bodyguard who looked good in a tux and had the ability to take out a man’s eye with a knife from fifty feet.
Yeah, he’d made more than enough for himself and Josh, and in the last couple of years, enough to hire the best of the best to look for April. All of which had netted him zero, leaving him coldly furious and dangerously frustrated. Feelings that had worsened since his return to Seattle. Being on the other side of the country made it easier to forget—at least intermittently. Here on the coast, the memories roared back.
Pushing thoughts of his failure aside, he walked out of the bank into a cool misty day and headed up the street to where he’d parked his Jag.
He wasn’t happy getting tangled up in Dinah’s life again, even if it was to save her sophisticated ass.
But if she was in trouble …
He cursed himself, pushed thoughts of Dinah aside.
Damn it, this job wasn’t about her—or the crazy nun—it was about finding April. He unlocked his Jag, got in, and shoved the extra cash into the duffel bag in the back seat of the car.
Fifteen minutes later he was heading southeast on the road to Erinville.
Lightly scratching the scar on his jaw, Gus turned his mind to the problem at hand which was how to find out what was going on at Mayday House, while lying through his teeth to a woman who had a pair of lie detectors for eyes.
Dinah was right about one thing: his male “attributes” weren’t going to help with Farrell. Which didn’t mean he wouldn’t give them a try.
Even if he wouldn’t touch that nun with a barge pole.
Dinah Marsden drank the last of her morning coffee, her thoughts divided between the unceasing ache left by Gus’s absence and the drone of Cassie’s voice telling her about her schedule.
“… the opera tonight with the Smythes and the Uri
ens—”
“Who in hell are the Uriens?” Dinah snapped, forcing herself to the matter at hand.
Cassie, sitting across from her at the breakfast table, flipped through Dinah’s schedule. “Friends of the Smythes and the Connellys. You met them at the AIDS fund-raiser in March?” Cassie looked at her in that irritatingly quizzical way she used when she knew damn well Dinah had no idea what she was talking about—but should. It was an expression she used more and more of late.
Dinah made an impatient hand-it-over gesture with her fingers, and Cassie shoved the schedule across the table.
Dinah read, then shook her head. “I have no idea who these people are.” And it made her nervous. People made jokes about senior moments. Although what was funny about forgetting things, forgetting seriously important people, she’d never know. One thing was obvious; all the cosmetic surgery in the world didn’t stop brain seepage. She pushed the book back across the glass-topped table toward Cassie. “Check them out, will you?”
When Cassie nodded, took a bite from her toast, and picked up the novel she’d set beside her plate, Dinah added, “Now, Cassie.”
She dabbed her mouth with her napkin. “Of course,” she said and gave Dinah that increasingly common dead-fish look of hers that said nothing and everything. She started to get up.
Dinah shot out a hand and closed it over hers. “Oh, God, I’m sorry, Cassie. Sit down. Finish your breakfast.” She forced a smile, tamping down her edgy impatience, a feeling that dogged her more and more of late. “The Urine can wait.”
“It’s Urien, Dinah.”
“What a difference an E makes!” she quipped, receiving only a faint smile in response.
Rodina came in and filled both their coffee cups.
“Oh… I remember now,” Dinah said, relieved. “Miles and Bunny Urien. Construction. He’s building the Balustrada Towers at the other end of South Beach. She’s director of the Canterby Foundation. Something to do with illiteracy.” Both of them worth knowing. She sighed. Which didn’t change the fact that she hated opera, or that she hated her life— since Gus had walked out of it.