Last Kiss

by Luanne Rice

  Gavin had been moving fast since encountering Nell after his swim that morning. She’d told him about Jeff Quill; they’d gone to the Renwick Inn, then Nell had dropped him at the boat to pick up some paperwork—including a faxed note from Joe saying the NYPD had missed Randy’s connection to Cumberland. Then he’d gone up to see Sheridan. He’d wanted her to be as happy as he was about last night, but he’d found her sitting under a tree, looking haunted. She’d seemed so closed off, almost regretful about last night.

  He felt thrown by Sheridan’s retreat, by how it seemed almost as if last night hadn’t happened at all. She had taken a step back into the shut-down state of mind she’d been in when he’d first arrived, full of hurt and mistrust. Gavin knew he had to keep moving, just to stay sane. If he lost her again now, he didn’t know what he’d do. But did he even have her to lose?

  He’d told her that Charlie was like a child to him. He’d really said that: like his own son. Now, walking up toward the trestle from the beach, he cringed at how presumptuous that sounded. What would she think of him daring to say that after keeping his distance all these years? He’d lost his chance to really know Charlie—to spend time talking to him, hearing his thoughts and watching how he made his way in this world. That was over—not just for Gavin, but so profoundly for Sheridan. She’d never see her son again. So why had he said that to her?

  The truth was, he felt it. He loved her so much, and that meant he loved Charlie, too. He was going to fight for him now, find out what had happened to him that night a year ago. Even if it was the last thing he could do for Sheridan—if she really didn’t want him in her life—he’d do this now. His foot throbbed from the long walk from the beach, and he settled down to wait just outside the railroad bridge at Hubbard’s Point, in the post office parking lot, until Vincent’s Bentley came humming over the hill and around the bend.

  “Thanks for doing this,” Gavin said, climbing in.

  “I’m just glad I was free,” Vincent said. “Opposing counsel canceled a deposition at their offices in Greenwich. The little wimp’s afraid of having his ass kicked in front of his client again. I’ve already won the case—survival of the fittest. It’s just a matter of him deciding it’s time to say ‘uncle.’ So it’ll be fun—you and me on the road.”

  “Do you ever think,” Gavin said as Vincent sped down Route 156, “about the ethics of you using some client’s corporate Gulfstream as a favor to me?”

  “Not corporate—private,” Vincent said. “We’re playing in the big leagues now. This woman’s feet never touch the ground; she wants to play golf at Farm Neck, she flies the G4 to the Vineyard. She has a date at Nick and Toni’s, she takes it to East Hampton.”

  “Why’s she letting you take it today?”

  “Because I got her everything she wanted and more. Nearly half. She has full custody of their two kids—he can’t leave the state with them without the court’s permission, and he’d been threatening to move to Los Angeles. She’s thankful to me for getting him to see reason.”

  “How’d you do that without my help?”

  “You’ve been elusive lately—hiding out in Maine, working for other people, whatever. I didn’t really need an investigator…just needed to let the other side know I wouldn’t be backing down any time soon. I wore them down. They were just like bald tires when I was done….”

  “Bet her husband hates you.”

  “They all do,” Vincent said, chuckling. And his women clients—he specialized in getting good deals for women—loved him.

  “You don’t have to come with me,” Gavin said.

  Vincent started to smile, as if he were going to make a joke. But then he stared, dead serious. “You might need my help.”

  “I think I can get the answers I need.”

  “I want to make sure you get them without getting yourself in any trouble.”

  “You mean you want to keep an eye on me, make sure I don’t use deadly force on one of my least favorite people alive,” Gavin said. He wasn’t joking, and Vincent didn’t take it as if he was.

  “What’s the deal?” Vincent asked.

  “Randy sent his son Jeff up here,” Gavin said. “I want to find out why.”

  “You mentioned that on the phone. What makes you think Randy sent him? Why couldn’t the kid have come on his own?”

  “He’s driving a car registered to Randecker Studios,” Gavin said. “I’ve always believed it’s about the money. Randy didn’t want to pay out Charlie’s trust fund. Maybe he promised Jeff a piece…”

  “And maybe he didn’t. That’s a stretch, Gav.”

  “Jeff Quill’s been in trouble,” Gavin said. “I had Joe check him out.”

  “And?”

  “And he’s got a record. His juvenile records are sealed, but as an adult he’s been in trouble for breaking and entering. Randy could have enticed him into doing something to Charlie.”

  “So what’s your theory?”

  “I think Randy was in New York with Cumberland that night. Maybe Jeff, too.”

  “And what? They lured Charlie to the club, then down to the river so they could kill him and keep his trust money?”

  “Something like that,” Gavin said.

  “And what about the girl? That Lisa? She was the bait?”

  Gavin had wondered about that, thought it was a possibility. But that was before he’d known about Jeff. Besides, Sheridan and Nell were so persuasive about Charlie’s loyalty. “I’m not sure. It’s one of the things I plan to ask Randy.”

  “Where’s Jeff now?”

  “On his way back to Nashville, I hope. Joe sent out a bulletin all down the East Coast to pick him up. Nell was sharp, getting his tag numbers.”

  “What was her take on him?”

  “Well, at first she was sentimental about the fact he was Charlie’s half-brother. Apparently he’s a dead ringer, and I’m sure that didn’t hurt his cause. But once we figured out he’d lied to her about the Renwick Inn, she got wise very fast.”

  “You think he might be hanging around the area?” Vincent asked.

  “No,” Gavin said. “I think he’s on his way out.”

  “Well, why would he come to Connecticut in the first place?”

  “Maybe curiosity, wanting to see Hubbard’s Point, where Charlie came from; maybe Randy sent him to Sheridan’s bank.”

  Vincent nodded. “Black Hall Savings,” he said. “I remember it from the settlement papers. They administered the trust. But you realize the whole thing became moot after Charlie died.”

  “Yes, but maybe Randy had to make sure.”

  “Let me have Judy call over there and see what’s going on.”

  Gavin nodded. He was hoping Vincent would say that. They headed east on I-95, and Gavin stared out the window, listening to him on the phone. Vincent held while Judy made the call, then thanked her and hung up.

  “You were right,” he said. “Judy talked directly to Sam Peyton, and he said that two days ago a young man was there, asking about a trust set up by Randy Quill. Specifically, he wanted to know whether it could be liquidated or dissolved or assigned to another party.”

  “Charlie’s trust?”

  “That’s the strange thing,” Vincent said. “The trust is no longer in Charlie’s name. It was reassigned after Charlie’s death, to be split evenly between Randy’s other issue.”

  “‘Issue’?” he asked.

  “Randy’s two surviving sons: Clinton Alderson of Encino, California, and Jeffrey Quill of Nashville, Tennessee.”

  “What was he wanting them to do?” Gavin asked, thrown off by the mention of the other son.

  “Sam didn’t know,” Vincent said. “Jeff Quill didn’t say.”

  Gavin was silent as Vincent drove across the Thames River and the Gold Star Bridge, toward the Groton–New London Airport. As promised, the jet was ready. He parked in front of the hangar, and the two men boarded the aircraft.

  NELL SKIPPED WORK and went back to the cemetery. She ran down the
dirt road, under the spreading tree branches, into the bright sunlight of the open graveyard. The sun was high in the sky, and none of the trees were casting long shadows. It was one big patch of sunlight filled with grass and gravestones.

  She walked straight to Charlie’s grave, sat in front of it. She stared at the headstone as if it were a door. If she knocked, would he come out? If she fell asleep, would she dream of him again? Her hair was sleek and salty from her earlier swim out to Gavin’s boat; she wore her bright green bikini beneath her T-shirt and shorts, the one that had always been his favorite. She ran her fingers over the carvings on the stone.

  The letters of his name, and the dates of his birth and death, were scored so neatly and deeply into the granite. Leaning her head against the stone, she felt the coolness in her skin. She wanted to embrace the marker because it was the closest she could get to embracing Charlie. But she didn’t.

  Right now she was filled with hate. She’d never felt anything like it before. It tasted like poison in her mouth, pure hatred for whoever had killed Charlie. She stared into space, wondering what she would do if she came face-to-face with that person. She would attack whoever it was, and make him or her suffer for what had been done to Charlie.

  Meeting Jeff, she’d almost forgotten what she was doing, that she’d hired Gavin to investigate Charlie’s death. She’d been so swept away by Jeff’s likeness to Charlie, by the fact she’d found him at the grave, the way he’d almost seemed to be praying. Their short time together had been so intense; she’d cut it off, she realized now, not really so much because of the mention of Lisa Marie Langton, but because she’d been unable to withstand being in the presence of Charlie’s half-brother.

  On Gavin’s boat, she’d felt so excited—ready to lead him to someone who might be able to help them piece together the clues that would lead to Charlie’s killer. It had never crossed her mind that Jeff might have had anything to do with that. How could it? He was Charlie’s flesh and blood. But now, learning what a liar he was, that he’d led her on for some reason, and for some reason disappeared, she began to wonder whether he was connected somehow.

  What was he doing, driving a car owned by Cumberland’s record label? Had he lured Charlie to the club that night—or had Charlie merely stumbled in? Was there any way in the world Charlie had planned to see Cumberland and not known they were connected to his father and half-brother? Had he known them from Nashville? She closed her eyes. She was back to the most painful part of all: why hadn’t he talked to her about it?

  “Charlie,” Nell said out loud.

  He didn’t respond, and she was really listening for anything—the wind in the pines, a bird singing overhead, clouds spelling out words. She wanted a message from him, she so badly wanted to be with him again. In her dream, Charlie had told her he’d come because she’d whispered his name. So she tried that now: “Charlie, Charlie, Charlie…”

  The wind was still, and the pines didn’t move, and the sky was blue and cloudless, and Charlie Rosslare stayed in his grave. He didn’t answer her at all.

  But Jeff did.

  HE’D SPENT THE WORST NIGHT of his life in that little house up by the railroad tracks, and he’d spent some pretty bad nights. There was a long stretch when he was twelve, when the court sent him to juvenile hall for assault. He’d come home one night, found his mother passed out with a guy who had previously beaten her up, and gone crazy. He’d grabbed an empty bottle, swung it at the sleeping man, broken his jaw in three places.

  The court had sent him away for that. His mother had begged the man not to press charges, but he wasn’t coming back to her anyway, and his jaw and teeth were damaged for life. So Jeff had done two years in a place with bars on the window and rats in the walls and the meanest kids in Tennessee in the bunks around him.

  Later, when he was fourteen, he’d gotten out just in time to go to his mother’s wedding to John Thorpe, a man with three kids of his own: two boys and a girl. Jeff’s mother had been so happy; Jeff remembered how she’d bought him a suit, pinned a boutonniere on his lapel, and told him, “Jeffrey, you’ll have a father now.”

  “He’s not my father.”

  “He’ll be good to you, Jeff,” she’d said. “He’s a wonderful dad to his three kids, and he wants to be that to you.”

  “He won’t be,” Jeff had said.

  “You’re wrong,” his mother had said, smiling so hopefully. She’d had her hair dyed blonde, the curls all ironed out. She’d had her nails done, and she was wearing a pink dress that could have been made for a princess. Jeff couldn’t remember seeing her so bright and lucky before, so he’d just shrugged. But he’d known.

  And he was right. But so was she—he was a good father. To his own three kids, he never said no, he bought them presents, he drove them to their games. He called his daughter “Angel,” and he told Jeff that she was an angel, a real one, blessed from above, and that if he ever caught him even looking at her, going near her, just taking one step toward her, he’d cut off his balls.

  His sons were going to go to college. Maybe even law school. They got new clothes and shoes at the end of summer in preparation for school. When winter came, John bought them warm coats from the best store in town. He praised them for their schoolwork, which he always read. He went to their ball games, cheering louder than anyone there.

  Jeff and his mother moved into the Thorpes’ house after the wedding. Even though each of the other kids had their own room, and even though there was a spare room that had been their mother’s sewing room—after she died, they’d just started using it for storage—Jeff had to sleep on the TV room couch.

  John said that the kids would be too traumatized to see their mother’s sewing room turned into a bedroom. Their poor dead mother had loved them so much, and she’d always been sewing for them, making them clothes, had been sitting right there in front of her big black Singer almost every day when they got home from school. So he just couldn’t let Jeff’s mother clean the room out, move in a bed and dresser and all the belongings of a teenage boy.

  Because of Jeff’s past trouble with the law, John wrote him off as a student and as anything much besides a delinquent. He didn’t think Jeff should do the same after-school activities as his kids, like sports and clubs, because they cost money. Better for Jeff to get an after-school job, start earning, and prove himself. If he wanted to be treated like part of the Thorpe family, he had to gain respect.

  Jeff had felt angry for a long time. He’d like to have blamed it all on the state home, and the way he was treated there; or maybe, going back, on the guy he’d attacked, the one who’d given his mother two black eyes and some broken ribs. The way John Thorpe acted toward his kids made his rage grow. But when he looked way back, all the way through grade school and kindergarten, all the way back to when he was just a little kid, he knew he’d started getting angry every time he saw someone with a father.

  People were supposed to have two parents to protect them. And not just that—to do things with, teach them, have fun with them. Activities for kids were best done with mothers and fathers. Going to Six Flags, you wished you could go with your dad. Or having a hot dog at a ball park, you knew it would taste better if it was bought for you by your father. That’s the way life was supposed to be.

  Jeff had always known that. From the time he started school, he knew he lived in a single-parent home. Other kids did, too. But he didn’t think of them; it didn’t reassure him to know he wasn’t alone, even though some of the others had it much rougher than he did. At least he and his mother were comfortable; his grandfather had owned car dealerships, and he’d paid all the bills.

  There were stories that Jeff’s father had been after his mother for the money. His grandfather loved to throw that at her, whenever she had to ask for a little extra to buy something nice for herself or Jeff. “Too bad you were so free with my money before this one came along,” his grandfather would say. “You waved it around, and you attracted the wrong kind of guy, and now
you’re paying for it.”

  By “paying for it,” Jeff knew his grandfather meant him. His mother had gotten pregnant, had to get married. She and Jeff’s father had had a shotgun wedding, then lived together in a seasonal hunting cabin owned by her family. Jeff’s father had stayed married to her for two years, running around with every girl in Nashville. Just to get rid of him, Jeff’s grandfather had paid him off: given him a good sum just to disappear and get out of their lives.

  His name wasn’t ever to be mentioned again, but Jeff knew it: Randy Quill. Jeff had been born Jeffrey Quill, but after the ugly divorce, he and his mother went back to using her maiden name. He’d sign Jeff Easton on his school papers, but inside, he was always Jeff Quill.

  He liked the name. It reminded him of an eagle feather, something with grace and nobility. He pictured a quill pen and an inkwell, the kind of writing instruments Ben Franklin would have used. It was old-fashioned and strong: his father’s name.

  From the time Jeff could tell stories, he had one going about his father. Mainly he’d imagine it himself, but sometimes he’d tell the kids in his class. His father was a long-haul trucker, crisscrossing America. He came home, sure, but never for long. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to stay—it was just that the company relied on him to deliver the goods from Richmond to Seattle, and then from Portland to Miami, endlessly.

  His father would arrive home at night, after dark, when the neighborhood was asleep. That’s why no one ever saw him. He would let himself into the house, wake up Jeff and his mom, tell them everything that had happened since they’d last been together. Jeff’s mother would cook him his favorite foods, and they’d let Jeff stay up with them, talking and planning the day his father could quit and they’d all live together.

  Gifts were bought on the road, sometimes from truck stops, sometimes from gift shops in small towns. Jeff would bring the things to school, show them to his friends. That’s how he’d started stealing. He’d needed items to prove his father had been home, had loved him and his mom, had brought them things.