Ty takes a deep breath. “Then in the spring, Marcus graduates. Gets a job offer from Citibank. Goin’ to have a fancy office in a skyscraper and wear a suit every day. Grams about to explode, she’s so happy. Tellin’ everybody she knows about Marcus. This is where Marcus is so damn dumb. He thinks he can quit workin’ for Nichols, the way you quit a job at Wal-Mart. No way Nichols goin’ to walk away from the bizness Marcus built up. And Nichols knows Marcus can’t snitch without gettin’ himself busted. So now Marcus got two jobs—working for the bank all day and sellin’ on campus at night.”
“And that’s where you came in—helping Marcus with his night job?”
Ty jumps up. “No way! I did not sell no drugs, Audge. I told Marcus I ain’t touchin’ nothing that gets me sent back to jail. But Nichols was threatening him, and he couldn’t go to the police without getting in trouble himself and losing his job and that would kill my Grams. So I helped him for her sake, know what I’m sayin’?”
“What exactly did you do, Ty? Why was that Mondel person following you around?”
“I had to get someone else to take over Marcus’s business. The first guy Marcus found didn’t work out so good. Couldn’t keep his accounts straight. That’s when Nichols sent Mondel around, to collect the money he was owed. Marcus don’t know nothin’ about dealin’ with people like that. I had to step in and work it out. Set up Nichols with a guy I knew from inside.”
“So you’re telling me you’re an executive recruiter for a drug dealer.”
“Look, there’s always going to be weed on a college campus, right? If my man don’t sell it for Nichols, someone else will.”
“What kind of crazy rationale is that?” I feel a real rant building. “There’s always going to be kiddie porn, too. And car-jackers, and slave traffickers, and, and… Should we just turn our--”
Ty looks me straight in the eye. “I couldn’t let Nichols kill my cousin.”
There it is: the blood is thicker than water bottom line. I put my head down on my desk and speak without looking up. “Fine. Just tell me it’s over. Promise me you and Marcus are both completely out of Nichols’s business.”
“It’s over. New guy I found is doin’ great. Marcus doin’ great. Everybody happy.”
I keep my head down until I hear the reassuring zip of Ty’s tape gun. I’ll never be able to explain this to Coughlin, but I imagine he’ll give up on Ty when he realizes Mondel Johnson isn’t hanging around anymore. And curtailing the flow of weed onto the Rutgers campus is some other cop’s problem.
Finally I lift my head up and start going through the messages that have piled up. Five from Evan Shapiro. Two from Walt Anthony of the Newark Star Ledger. Two from News 12 New Jersey. One from some dope at the Daily Wretched. I’ve got to talk to someone about how to handle all this. Cal would be the logical choice, but he’s been completely out of touch. I hate when he makes me feel like a teenager, reluctant to make the first call.
“I’ll deliver this stuff over to UPS, and when I get back I’ll drive you home, okay.” Ty says this as a statement, not a question.
“No, no,” I object. “I can drive myself in the van.”
“You still dizzy. You gonna crash. I’ll drive.”
“Well, if you’re sure you don’t mind. I’ll pay you overtime.”
Ty pauses with his hand on the doorknob and looks back at me through narrowed eyes. “I don’t want no overtime. Why would I mind to drive a friend home? Sometimes I think there’s somethin’ wrong with your head, Audge.”
I shuffle papers on my desk until he’s safely out the door. Why did I insult him like that? Why can’t I accept a simple gesture of kindness? I feel the tears pricking my eyes again. How I long for Ethel. The sweet furrow between her brows. The forgiving wag of her tail. I rein myself in. If I give in to this now, I’ll never stop crying.
Purposefully, I sort the mail: junk, bills, payments, info for Jill to file. At the bottom of the pile lies a rectangular, flat cardboard mailer. I glance at the return address: Yearbooks.com. This is the replacement I ordered for Dad’s lost Princeton yearbook. Now that I know Dylan or his supplier were behind all the break-ins, the theft of the yearbook seems even more puzzling. I leaf through the pages until I find Dad’s senior picture. He stares off the page: lean, dark-haired, serious. Not quite handsome, but definitely attractive.
Intense.
Where else would his picture be? Not in football or basketball—I skim through Sports until I reach cross-country. There he is, thin but muscular. What else? Certainly I won’t find him in these candid party shots, but maybe in something geeky like Chess Club or Latin Forum. I page through, reading the captions, smiling at the shaggy hair and wide sideburns of the late Sixties. I laugh at the Young Republicans and the Young Democrats, pictured on facing pages. The Republicans are dressed in sports coats or polo shirts; the Democrats in torn jeans and tie-dyed tee-shirts. I bet Cal must’ve been in the Young Democrats at Brown. I glance at the candids taken at some rally for George McGovern. A beautiful face leaps out at me. I pull the book closer. Sure enough, it’s my mother. I’d heard from Nana how my parents met. Mom was an English major who’d put off taking her math requirement. Dad met her weeping over her calculus book in the library and tutored her through her final. A knight with a shining calculator.
She was a year behind Dad, so she would have been a junior in this picture. Not surprisingly, a handsome guy has his arm around her, and another guy, his face turned slightly away, is holding a big McGovern sign up in front of the three of them. I read the caption: Charlotte Perry, Spencer Finneran and Roger Nealon leading the charge for George McGovern.
I stare at the caption as if I’m deciphering a sentence in a foreign language, translating each word but still unable to grasp the total meaning. The man in the picture is Spencer, younger, thinner, with dark hair, but definitely the Spencer Finneran, governor-elect of New Jersey. Spencer knew my parents, both of them, long before any of them came to Palmyrton.
Another lie.
Why?
I slap the book shut. My father would know. I suppose I’ll have to go and visit him. I dread making the trip, and without Ethel as a buffer, it will be even worse. Tomorrow, I’ll deal with Dad tomorrow.
Chapter 48
Despite my heartfelt desire to avoid my empty condo, I have no choice but to allow Ty to deliver me here. The place has never looked more barren. We’re perfectly matched, this condo and I—empty, impersonal, stripped of everything that has ever mattered. The featureless beige walls taunt me. There’s nothing to distract you here, they seem to say. Now you have to think about your mother, your father, the fire, Anne, Ethel.
Outside, a car door slams.
Looking out the window, I see Cal emerge from his BMW.
About time he shows up. Even though I defended Cal to Coughlin, I feel a blossom of rage unfolding within me. I’ve barely heard from him since Halloween, apart from that one blurry visit when I was in the hospital. Sure, everything that happened to me was right before and during the election, but still, doesn’t even a low maintenance hook-up like me deserve a little more attention than this? That damn Coughlin’s probably right—I shouldn’t even open the door.
I watch as he struggles to pull something out of the passenger side of his car. Probably some ginormous bouquet of flowers—he figures he can solve everything with his AmEx card and speed-dial to the florist. Well, forget that—the novelty’s worn off. I turn away from the window. Although making him stand on the front stoop begging for admission does hold some appeal, there’s a part of me that worries he might say, “OK, never mind,” and leave. And I have a few things to say to Cal Tremaine.
When I hear his footsteps on the stoop, I fling open the door.
Cal stands there, arms stretched out before him, carrying something wrapped in a lime green beach towel.
“What in the –”
The beach towel moves. A flash of fluffy brown appears.
“Ethel!”
I’m out the door so fast I feel like I’m levitating. I rip the towel back and Ethel struggles to lift her head. She looks puzzled, as if she doesn’t know how she got into this mess but she’s counting on me to get her out.
I gather her into my arms. “How? Where?”
“Let’s get her inside,” Cal says. “She’s really weak. I tried to feed her something but she wouldn’t take it from me. I figured it was best to get her straight to you.”
Ethel has been missing for five days. Her fur is matted, there’s a nasty cut on her front right paw, and she looks about ten pounds thinner. Her eyes are glazed and her nose is dry.
“I think she’s dehydrated. It hasn’t rained all week. She probably couldn’t even find a puddle to drink from.”
Sure enough, when I hold her in my lap with a bowl of water in front of her, she laps it all up.
“How did you find her?” I ask.
“This past week has been so crazy. The election…the fire… you in the hospital…everything. I felt so out of control. And this morning I woke up and said to myself, “I want to make one thing right, one thing. And I realized,” Cal traces my jaw with his index finger, “I realized, I want to make something right for Audrey.”
The anger drains out of me. Cal has spent the day, not with Spencer, not with his high-priced clients, but looking for my little lost mutt.
Cal jumps up and starts pacing. “I know I didn’t offer much support when Ethel got lost—too concerned with my own problems. But today I sat myself down and tried to think like a dog. When I was a kid, our dog got lost and he turned up a week later all the way across town at the nature trail where my parents used to walk with him. The vet said dogs return to a place that smells familiar.
“I knew you took Ethel to visit your dad at his nursing home. So I thought, maybe she’s there, maybe that’s a place that would smell familiar to her. I went out there and walked around the grounds. One old guy told me he’d seen a dog running around a few days before. So I kept searching, and I found her curled up under some branches.” Cal leans over and strokes Ethel’s head. “She’d just about given up, huh girl?”
Ethel sighs and closes her eyes.
I look at Cal’s perfectly manicured hand on Ethel’s matted fur and all my doubts and insecurities melt away. He found Ethel. No one has ever done anything kinder for me in all my life.
Cal and I spend the early evening at the vet’s where Ethel is cleaned up, patched up and dosed with antibiotics. He doesn’t even suggest we go out to dinner, just meekly calls in my order for Thai carry-out and runs to fetch it after carrying Ethel back into the house and settling her on the sofa. When he returns I’m sitting on the floor, my head buried in Ethel’s neck, breathing in her sweet, musty dogginess. Cal slides down next to me and pulls me into his arms, kissing my tear-stained cheeks, my singed hair, my canine medicine-coated fingers. We make love while the Thai basil chicken cools on the counter. Later Cal runs me a bubble bath and sets me to soak while he dishes up the food. We eat, sharing bites with Ethel.
After dinner we snuggle in bed watching Seinfeld re-runs. I stroke Ethel’s head; Cal strokes mine. I have peace. I have Ethel, and Cal, and sex, and affection and food, and rest. Don’t I deserve this? Can’t I simply enjoy it for a few hours? Is that so much to ask?
And yet, and yet…. Other thoughts, awful thoughts, push insistently into my head. Now that the extent of Dylan’s drug-dealing is known, does Cal still think Anne only wanted to talk to me…that the fire was an accident? How will he react when I tell him I plan to testify against Dylan? And does Cal realize that Spencer knew both my parents in college, long before my mother worked on Spencer’s first campaign?
“Cal?”
“Hmm.” His eyes are riveted to the antics of George and Kramer on the screen as his fingers idly brush my bangs off my forehead.
“Cal, we need to talk about Anne and the fire and …things.”
Cal throws his head back on the pillows and closes his eyes. “I know, baby, but this has all been so overwhelming for me too. I can barely get my head around it.”
I sit up. “So you believe me when I say that Anne started the fire and tried to trap me in the house.”
Cal’s eyes are open, but he’s looking up at the ceiling, not at me. “I believe you, yes, but…but, there’s just got to be some explanation. I mean, I’m mourning the Anne I knew—the kind, generous friend—at the same time that I’m coming to grips with the idea that she nearly killed the woman I—” He looks me in the eye. “The woman I love.”
Ah, geez, I wasn’t expecting that. Speechlessly, I let him kiss me. For a while, his lips, gentle yet demanding, drive all rational thought from my mind. But as his hand slides under my t-shirt, I come to my senses.
“Cal, did you know that Spencer knew both my parents at Princeton? He and Anne lied to me about that—why?”
Cal pulls back as if I’d slapped him. “Really? They lied?”
“Anne specifically told me that Spencer first met my mother when she was working on his first campaign. But I found a picture in the Princeton yearbook that shows Spencer and my parents together in 1968.”
Cal massages his temples. “I don’t know, Audrey. I don’t understand anything anymore. I tried to talk to Spencer yesterday, but he’s in shock. The police, the press, Dylan’s lawyers, all his kids—they all want a piece of him. And without Anne, he doesn’t know how to manage it. He begged me to give him a little space. Of course I said yes.”
“Reporters have been calling me too.” I take Cal’s hand. “I understand. You’ve given so much of yourself to this campaign, and you won, and you should be celebrating, but instead—”
Cal sits up in bed and faces me. “A man who’s been my idol is suddenly a stranger to me.”
The stress and confusion of the past week have actually altered his appearance. The perfect regularity of his features has been disrupted. Cal looks rumpled—not his clothes, because he’s only wearing boxers—but his very being. And I’m glad. His uncertainty draws us closer. For the first time since I’ve met him, I don’t feel intimidated.
I open my arms and Cal curls into my embrace. I twine my fingers through his and gently kiss his eyelids. He moans and pulls me on top of him. Soon, tee shirts are flying, legs are thrashing and Ethel, grumbling, abandons the bed.
I awake to a sunny bedroom, a whining dog and a ringing phone. 9AM—my God, I slept like a rock. No wonder poor Ethel’s crying.
“Okay, Eth—we’ll go outside in a minute. Let me see who’s calling.”
The caller ID says Manor View. Probably more planning for Dad’s discharge. That can wait until after Ethel’s walk. I’m not ready to deal with anything concerning my father yet. As I swing out of bed, I notice a note on the pillow next to mine.
Thanks for making everything better. Talk to you later today.
Love,
Cal
While I get dressed for our walk, I switch on the TV news.
“…we’re seeing the coolest temps in Connecticut and Long Island, slightly warmer in the city.”
“Thanks, Al. I’ll tell you where it’s really hot—New Jersey, where controversy continues to swirl around governor-elect, Spencer Finneran.”
Despite Ethel’s frantic scratching at the front door, I sink down before the TV, one sneaker on, one off.
The camera zooms in on the anchorwoman. I watch her lips moving and her eyebrows bobbing under her helmet of stiff hair as she tells me that there’s no official word on what Anne Finneran was doing in the house on Skytop Drive that burned to the ground. But sources who refuse to be named hint that her presence there may be linked to the arrest of her grandson, Dylan Finneran, on drug possession charges. And then a picture of my own condo appears on the screen as the newsreader tells the world that the woman who lives here escaped the fire that killed the governor-elect’s wife.
I keep watching, waiting to hear if they’ll report that Anne set the house on fire, that Anne tried to kill Audre
y Nealon. But the anchor woman moves on to reports of suspected terrorists, impending hurricanes and Wall Street shenanigans. I take Ethel’s leash and head out the door. Across the street, twenty people mill around three vans sprouting antennae and satellite dishes. The reporters surge forward. I pull Ethel back inside and slam the door. Now what? The poor dog’s gotta go. I look out my back window to the grassy courtyard shared by four of the condo development’s units. There’s a path between the buildings that will eventually get us out to the street behind the buildings. No reporters lurking there, so we make our escape.
How good it feels to be walking Ethel, following behind the familiar plume of her tail! Waiting while she sniffs her way through each pile of leaves on the curb, I vow I’ll never yank her leash again. With Ethel back in my life, everything seems manageable. Even my dad. Even Cal. Even those reporters. I keep glancing over my shoulder. When I see two people approaching from far down the street, I decide it’s best for us to get back inside.
As Ethel settles herself on the sofa, I remember the call I declined to answer this morning. I press the play button and listen to my message:
“Ms. Nealon? This is Manor View Nursing Home calling. I’m afraid we have some upsetting news. Your father has had a second stroke. He’s at Palmyrton Memorial right now.”
Another Man's Treasure (a romantic thriller) (Palmyrton Estate Sale Mystery Series Book 1) Page 28