He moved down the sidewalk, growing increasingly certain that Terra had come to the end of her involvement in the conspiracy.
Love, hell, he started to think. What kind of fool have I been?
He came to the end of the block, turned the corner and walked straight into Terra.
“Jeez,” he breathed, so relieved to see her he felt dizzy. “What are you—Why are you—”
Looking drenched with relief to see him, she gestured at an automatic teller machine built into the side of the bank building. “I needed some cash.” She drew a deep breath. “What took you so long?”
“I got it gift-wrapped,” he said, gesturing with the bag. “The clerk took forever.”
It wasn’t entirely the truth, but he wasn’t going to tell her what he’d done all that time. She didn’t need to know he’d met with a sleazy lowlife in the back alley who had access to security clearances for hotel employees.
“What next?” Terra asked.
“Not a thing,” he assured her.
They hastened to the boat and returned to Jermain’s Island without further incident. There, Terra got Josh from Lalie’s and left to return the boat.
“HEY,” KENT SAID with surprise when she and Josh arrived at the marina. “Calling it an early night?” He checked his watch. “It’s 11:00 p.m.”
“I guess I’m just not the club hopper I used to be,” Terra said. She tousled Josh’s hair. “I went shopping for Josh instead.”
Josh had Rafe’s gift to him, the Power Ranger set, clutched in his arms like a priceless treasure.
Kent admired Josh’s present, then said to her, “The word going around is your menus are fabulous, to quote Miz Elizabeth. Your job is almost done, I’ve heard.”
Terra nodded. “Three more days to completion. Home again for us, right, Josh?”
“I wanna stay here,” Josh informed them stoutly, his eyes a little sleepy from being awakened to leave Lalie’s.
Kent chuckled. “You’d blend right in with the Jermains, that’s for sure. Miz Elizabeth and Liz are still shaking their heads about you.”
Terra was shaking hers, too, because no one had made any more than a marveling matter of Josh’s Jermain traits. She left the marina and went to her room with Josh, exhausted. In love. Confused. Fearful.
And depressed about everything ending so soon.
TERRA HADN’T KNOWN three days could pass as swiftly as her last ones at Bride’s Bay did. Each one was full to bursting with work, time with Josh, time with Rafe and never enough time with both of them together.
On the last day, she spent late in the afternoon and into the early evening alone with Rafe. In his arms, after making love under the fresco, she sighed and held back her tears.
“What’s going to happen to you, Rafe?”
“Who knows? The Hamiltons come back in three weeks, so that’s it for my hideout. None of the estates stay in mothballs through the summer months, so I’ll have to look elsewhere. Maybe South America if I can make it to there.”
“You’ve abandoned your plan to prove yourself, then.”
He shrugged. “Could be.”
“Don’t ask, in other words. Not about that or Leon or anything else.”
“Stay innocent of me after you leave here, Terra. For your own sake and Josh’s. And my peace of mind.”
“Rafe, if somehow you prove yourself, what would it mean for us?”
He shook his head. “No matter what happens, you’ll have a lot more decent life without me. One thing about being accused of a crime is that the taint lingers even when innocence is proven.
“I don’t see myself with a wife and stepchild whose lives would be shadowed by who I am. So go back to San Francisco,” he said gently, “find some nice, clean guy to love. One that Josh can be proud to call Daddy. Somebody people don’t speculate and whisper about whether he lives one more day or a hundred years.”
Terra framed his face in her hands. “You may be the only man for me, Rafe.”
“Don’t, Terra. Don’t make me guilty of that. And please, please don’t cry.”
“Make love to me again. Maybe I won’t be able to do that and cry at the same time.”
She gave herself to Rafe for the last time and he took her with intense, loving care, making the final shared moments last and last. And before it was over, Terra did cry despite Rafe’s plea. He kissed her tears away, but really there was no telling whose tears were whose at the very end.
It was goodbye. “Our way,” Terra whispered in heartbroken farewell.
THE NEXT DAY, she and Josh boarded the Indigo Moon for the first leg of their trip home. She was surprised and pleased when several Bride’s Bay people turned out at the dock. Columbia and Lalie, of course, and Shad, Joanie, Elise, Caitlin, Bobby.
Miz Elizabeth and Judge Bradshaw were there, but not Liz who had done a mysterious disappearing act again. Joanie had promised to send Terra a news flash if anyone ever discovered where Liz went, and with whom. Even Thomas Graves strolled out and offered his good wishes.
Waving goodbye, Terra blew a kiss over their heads to the estate where Rafe was hidden. Good or bad, guilty or innocent, the only man for her.
BACK IN SAN FRANCISCO, Terra did her best to return Rafe to her past. She immersed herself in the fourrestaurant deal with Bradford Congden. Work was coming in left and right after the Chronicle feature article.
It put Macy in a tizzy of self-doubt about whether she could be the strong right arm Terra needed. Terra set her the task of interviewing the applicants for the secretarial position so that Macy would soon free up to be all she could be.
The return to normal life was consuming and demanding. Terra had to squeeze in time to catch up with her parents and watch the videos of their Mexico trip. Josh’s preschool had an open house, another chunk of time.
Underneath everything, she worried about Rafe, missed him, longed for him. Each night when Josh blessed Kermit in his bedtime prayers, she almost broke down.
Against Rafe’s wishes, Lalie had promised to call if anything happened with him. So far, no call. Maybe Rafe had convinced Lalie not to. Terra wrote a letter, but only with news of herself and Josh, no mention of Rafe. Lalie wrote back in much the same vein.
Each morning when Terra rushed through reading the newspaper, she kept an eye out for news of the Caribbean diplomats’ conference and the President’s vacation. There were a few news items about the conference and the notable dignitaries who were to attend. The Haitian, Clovis Lecours, got most of the coverage. Brief mentions went to Jacquies Noel-Cooke from Montinerro and Puerto Rico’s Javier Delgado.
Terra smiled a little, thinking of the menus they would all consult for their meals, from breakfast to banquet. Her own creative design and copy combined with Columbia’s brilliant cuisine—they could both be proud.
Now Terra had another celebrity chef to please, Bradford Congden of San Francisco fame. She could do Brad proud. And she would. Just as she had done for Columbia Hanes.
ON THE FRIDAY NIGHT of her first week back, Terra left work and stopped by her parents’ house to get Josh. Her father was watching the evening news when she came in.
“Bride’s Bay on the tube,” he said.
Watching with him, she learned that the President’s vacation there was semiofficial. Thomas Graves was shown for a few seconds, affirming that Bride’s Bay security would be more than equal to protecting the First Couple.
Terra’s dad patted her shoulder and spoke to the TV screen. “My sweetpea did the menus there, Mr. President and Ms. First Lady. Three cheers for her!”
The reporter marveled at how the resort had survived the political bombshell of Rafe Jermain’s treachery and continued with its sterling reputation intact. The news piece went on about the diplomats’ conference.
It would begin the next night, with speeches from three of the many key players: Haiti, Montinerro, Puerto Rico. Lecours and Delgado were pictured arriving in the resort’s helicopter. The Montinerran arrived on a yac
ht named after himself.
Describing America’s now-close ties with Montinerro, once a despised enemy, the reporter marveled, “How times have changed in five years. Today, Rafe Jermain could supply all the arms he’d like to Montinerro without even bruising a law, much less breaking one.”
There was another shot of the Montinerran yacht docking in grand style at the marina. Terra thought she recognized Kent on the dock. Then something else caught her eye and held it. The yacht’s name, Noel-Cooke, isolated on the hull.
Suddenly she saw something she hadn’t seen about that name until that very moment, something the average person wouldn’t notice but a word-crafter might.
She pulled in a loud, sharp gasp. “That’s it!
“What?” Her dad stared at her.
She put a trembling hand to her forehead. “I’ve got to go back there. Right away.”
“Back? Why?”
“Leon.”
“Who?”
“Noel spelled backward!”
IT TOOK TERRA all day Saturday to fly from San Francisco to Charleston on short notice, and she got there at five that afternoon by zigzagging across the country on the only flights she could get.
Her parents, still wondering what on earth was the matter with her, had Josh at their house for the weekend. She had left them hanging as to when she’d be back.
Lalie met her at the Charleston airport, looking drawn and worried. “Rafe is gone,” she said, tears standing in her eyes. “Without a trace, or a word to me.”
“What? Since when?”
“Since sometime before you called me, I figure. I phoned him right after your call, to tell him you were coming, and no answer. The house is empty. No sign that he was ever there. Everything spic and span, just the way the Hamiltons left it.”
“Oh, no.” Terra hadn’t foreseen this. Rafe gone.
They sat down in the terminal.
“Why have you come back here, Terra?”
“I’m not sure, Lahe. Even if I knew for certain, it might be best for you not to know.”
“You sound like Rafe saying the less everybody knows, the better. Lord, I miss that boy. I’m so afraid he’s dead somewhere. Or sick to death with chills and fever.”
“Oh, Lalie, don’t even think it. Please. If you lose faith, how am I going to have any?” Terra tried to keep calm and be rational. “Rafe gave no clue that he was leaving?”
“Not one. He was the same as always when I took dinner to him last night. Well, not the same, but he hasn’t been himself since you left. Very subdued since then.”
“You didn’t see him after that?”
“No. Then you called early this morning and I called him and here we are.” Lalie dabbed her eyes with a tissue. “How’s that little Josh you left behind?”
“Fine. He blesses you every night in his prayers.” Terra’s throat swelled. “And Kermit, too.”
“Well, we all need blessings right now, that is for certain. Let’s get ourselves up and on our way home. I’m so glad to have company again, since Josh left a big hole.”
They took a cab to the ferry and during the ferry ride Terra revealed her hunch that Rafe’s plan had to do with the conference and the Montinerran diplomat.
She sighed. “If he still has a plan and hasn’t flown the coop. I don’t know, Lalie. Maybe I’m just overimaginative, putting one and one together and coming up with the wrong sum.”
“You got the right sum when you and Rafe put one and one together. Falling in love as you did, that just added up the way things should.”
Terra nodded. “If things could ever work out, Rafe is the only man for me.”
“What do you plan to do now that you’re here?”
“I want to see the keynote speeches tonight. They’ll be televised, I understand, but I’d like to be there. Maybe Columbia could get me in?”
“Us in,” Lalie corrected. “If something’s going to go down tonight, I want to be there.”
“Nothing may happen, as well.”
“You’ve got a strong intuition, though,” Lalie stated. “It led you this far and still hasn’t stopped.”
“If Rafe is gone, though,” Terra mused with tears threatening, “none of it matters. But if he isn’t gone and something terrible happens…” She trailed off miserably.
Lalie went to the phone. “I’ll call Columbia. She’ll get us in or my name isn’t Hanes.”
COLUMBIA DID GET THEM IN, at a small table with Miz Elizabeth and Judge Bradshaw. The couple had not wanted to make tedious small talk with strangers that evening at the banquet, but welcomed a family friend and Terra to dine with them and hear the keynote addresses.
They were naturally surprised that Terra had returned so soon. She waved it off, saying she’d had a bit of business to do in Charleston. “Branching out,” she said, and they thought that just dandy.
Security was high for the occasion, with everyone’s attendance badges checked at the banquet hall door. The media people all wore press badges, and the serving staff had their own union IDs.
Dinner was served, with Terra too nervous to pay more than scant attention to what was set before her. A soup, a main course, a sorbet, dessert. The banquet hall, too, might have been a horse stable for all it mattered to her. Under the table, she pleated and unpleated her napkin with tense, clammy fingers.
Finally, the speeches began, with a change from the printed program that put Jacquies Noel-Cooke first. A suave, handsome man in his mid-forties, he had a deep suntan and an engaging manner.
He spoke at length, words which Terra never quite registered because she kept thinking of what Rafe had said about Leon. If Noel-Cooke was the same person, and Terra felt certain he was, he was a treacherous man, a murderous opportunist who had sold his ideals—if he’d ever truly had any—for his name on a yacht. And he’d sold Rafe down the river, as well.
Terra’s tense anticipation began to diffuse as Noel-Cooke began his concluding remarks. He wound up his speech and everyone applauded, and as Noel-Cooke stepped back from the podium, one of the banquet waiters hurried up to him with an envelope on a gleaming, silver, message tray.
The waiter, a mustachioed, carrot-top redhead in horn-rim glasses waited at attention while Noel-Cooke opened the envelope and read the message. Almost instantly, the diplomat stepped up to the podium again and cleared his throat several times.
“A few more words, ladies and gentlemen.” The lights for the TV cameras picked up a sheen of sweat on Noel-Cooke’s suntanned face. He took a handkerchief out and mopped his forehead, his cheeks, the back of his neck. “Words regarding…” He paused and reexamined the message as if it would explode any moment.
A murmur swept through the room at the visible change that had come over him. Sweat dripping off his chin, in fact.
“An estimable gentleman we all have heard much of in past years.” He mopped again. “An unfairly maligned man, in fact, whose good name has been decimated for a crime he did not—I personally witness to you he did not—commit. He is Mr. Rafe Jermain and—”
The cameras zoomed in and the audience erupted, cutting him off. Elizabeth gripped the judge’s arm.
“Of course Rafe was not a criminal,” she maintained in a stout, steely voice. “Too little too late from this twit, whoever he thinks he is.”
Lalie broke out in a broad smile and clasped Terra’s hand. “Amen and amen.”
Mr. Noel-Cooke, handkerchief soaked, had to shout to be heard, and what he continued to say tallied exactly with what Terra had heard from Rafe, except for any mention of Leon.
She bolted to her feet and scanned the room around and around, knowing Rafe had to be there somewhere. Where? Too many people were milling around to tell. Newspaper reporters were galloping out of the hall to phone home.
“Cameron,” Elizabeth said, “where is Mr. Graves?”
The judge stood. “Somewhere near, I’m sure. I’ll find him.”
“‘I’ll go with you,” she said, and they left the table.<
br />
A chaos of sound ricocheted in the room, everyone talking at once, and Noel-Cooke shouting above it all that Rafe Jermain was not a traitor, repeat not a turncoat.
Terra stayed on her feet, scanning, searching the sea of faces. She saw Thomas Graves approaching the podium with Cameron. Graves tapped Noel-Cooke on the shoulder and the diplomat turned. They had a brief, animated discussion away from the microphone and Terra saw Graves examine the message. His eyebrows rose, and he stared hard for a moment at the waiter who’d delivered the silver tray.
Graves stepped to the podium, radiating a subtle power of command that quieted the audience and riveted all eyes on him. “The keynote addresses are postponed until further notice,” he said. “Television coverage will also cease at this time. Please be seated so that coffee can be served. Thank you very much for your kind cooperation.”
Simple words, powerfully spoken, they subdued the atmosphere and within moments the banquet had resumed a reasonable measure of its earlier pace.
Graves, Elizabeth and the judge left with Noel-Cooke and the waiter in tow. The chatter in the room lowered accordingly.
Terra sat down and said to Lalie. “Do you see Rafe anywhere?”
“Nowhere. But I have a feeling it won’t be long. Speaking of feelings, Terra…” She gave a double thumbs-up.
“Lalie, thank heaven he’s alive. I’m dying to see him.”
“I know,” Lalie replied, “and I’m dying to see the wedding you two are going to have.”
Terra shook her head wistfully. “Rafe was set against it when I left. In fact, I don’t know why I’m sitting here feeling so relieved and happy, except because it seems he’s alive. It’s not as if I have a future with him.”
Suddenly a hand came from behind her and settled on her shoulder She gasped, tipped her head back and looked up at the banquet waiter who’d delivered the message to Noel-Cooke. The mustachioed, carrot-top waiter in horn rims. Up close she saw that his eyes were deep blue behind the thick, lightly tinted lenses.
Stranger In The Night Page 16