by Carly Bishop
“I’m sorry,” Isobel began, anger catching up with her now. How had Angelo become so adept, so sure, such a skilled liar, when lies were forbidden an angel? “I didn’t realize the topic of my breast-feeding Seth would become an issue.”
She’d managed to provoke an uncomfortable silence. She let the moment draw itself out painfully. Not one of them met her eyes, or anyone else’s either.
“Indulge us with an explanation,” St. John insisted, gathering his wife’s approval and Candless’s reluctant nod.
“It’s not so extraordinary at all.” Her chin went up. “There are shots—hormones—a woman can take to begin producing milk. My last position was as a wet nurse for a baby whose mother died in childbirth. Would you like to know more?”
St. John lowered his eyes, Candless coughed and Kelsey backed off, shaking her head, swallowing her venomous look. She was pregnant. She didn’t want to hear about childbirth disasters, and while Isobel’s explanation wasn’t a true story, there were hundreds like it that were.
Kelsey Candless St. John had never, Isobel was sure, had to face anything much more upsetting than a broken fingernail, until now. Until her father brought home a new baby that threatened them all.
“She’s running scared,” Angelo agreed softly. He had stopped playing the piano. “She’s a smart cookie and she sees the handwriting on the wall. Producing a grandchild might have restored her to her father’s favor—or, at the very least, kept her comfortable if Candless decides to skip a generation and leave his fortune to his grandchild. Seth blows that hope to kingdom come.” He stood now, unseen and unheard, and moved to the green marble hearth so that when Iso looked at him, the direction of her gaze would not cause suspicion. “Get out your sewing,” he added, “and press your advantage.”
She didn’t want to press the narrow advantage.
He said he knew that.
She didn’t want to do anything but get up and take the baby back to her rooms, away from this family who would rather have taken a snarling rabid animal into their midst than their father’s illegitimate son and his nanny.
Angelo agreed she had every right to want to get away.
She would have come up with another thought, but he preempted her.
“You have to stand up to them, Iso, or they will eat you alive.”
She knew he was right. She must make a stand, draw a line in the sand. Staying with Seth depended on keeping Candless’s respect.
“Really, please ask,” she went on, following up on Angelo’s warning and her own question to them all. She drew out a square of material on which she’d started to embroider. She brought her threaded needle up through the fabric, then let her gaze rest in turn on each member of Ian Candless’s family. “If you have any other questions, maybe we should get them out into the open now.”
Kelsey’s expression hardened. “I assume you can prove this, provide the names and dates—”
Candless exploded in impatience. “Stop this right now,” he ordered his daughter. “Your claws are showing, my pet, and it is a most unattractive sight. If you have a point to make, spit it out.”
“I just think it’s terribly convenient, Daddy. Think about it. If something smells in Denmark, it’s because something smells.”
“Oh, this is rich,” Harrison sniped at his sister. “Kelsey mangling Shakespeare—who lived in an age, I might add, when wet nurses were the rule. Give it a rest, Kels.”
Candless sat in his high-backed chair reveling, Isobel thought, in the strife he had caused. Bruce shot Harrison a look to shut him up, then cajoled his sister. “I think you owe Isobel an apology, Kelsey. She’s obviously entirely legitimate.”
“Unlike the kid, you mean,” Conrad tossed out.
“Yes, Connie, unlike Seth,” Candless agreed, “who, unlike the rest of you, may turn out to be worth a tinker’s damn.”
“Daddy, you don’t mean that! And I didn’t mean to suggest that Isobel—”
“The hell you didn’t,” her father interrupted contentiously. “Why don’t you simply come out with it? Seth hardly resembles any of you.”
“Well, he doesn’t!”
“You may regard that as proof of some idiotic notion that he is not my son, but I assure you, the lab which performed the paternity testing is the finest anywhere in the world.”
Isobel stared at him. His doting glance lit often on Seth, but he had deliberately added fuel to the fire, wrecking Bruce’s attempt to get his siblings under control.
“Apologize to Ms. Avedon, Kels,” Bruce urged again, “and be done with it.”
Several looks passed back and forth before Bruce finally won out. Kelsey turned to Isobel. “I apologize. Maybe what I asked was uncalled-for. But, I mean, who could have guessed? I’ve never even heard of a wet nurse outside of movies.”
Bruce laughed out loud, looking sheepish, purposely, Isobel thought, defusing the tension. “I’ll go you one better, Kels. I never even knew what a wet nurse was.”
“Stop. You’re joking,” his mother scolded.
“And why would I know, Mother? I admit I’ve an irrational fondness for the anatomy, but as to function…I’d no idea women went around doing that for other women’s babies.”
Patrice rolled her eyes as if this were her most incorrigible offspring, but Isobel saw that she was obviously fond of him. Charm spilled naturally out of him. “Gormley” is what Isobel’s fellow Brit guardians would have called it. That sort of selfdeprecating, devastatingly sexual, aw-shucks, irrepressible, lock-of-hair-on-the-forehead routine of a Hugh Grant type worked splendidly with most women. Bruce had it in spades.
She could see why Patrice Candless would dote on her eldest son, but Isobel mistrusted him. He was in some kind of pitched battle with his father over the loyalty of his brothers and sister. Patrice was already clearly in his camp, but if he had handled his father’s peccadilloes, even to protect his mother, was he capable of handling them to death?
Candless’s daughter had wicked instincts, a ruthlessness about her as well. She would as soon drown Seth, Isobel thought, as look at him. Would she have it in her to hire Gina Sellers’s murderer?
Or Conrad? Perhaps the timid, paranoid Harrison? Isobel’s mind reeled. It could be any one of them, or none. But any man who could even conceive of putting his family through such a wringer as this could expect little more.
She wouldn’t stand by and watch Seth grow into another version of Bruce or Conrad or Harrison. If anyone thought Isobel would stay long at this ball, they had another think coming.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Halpern drove Isobel—and Angelo, though the chauffeur didn’t know it—to the police station. She gave her statement and answered questions for hours. She knew she could be of little help. The only thing she had been interested in was saving Seth from sharing his mother’s fate. Isobel couldn’t tell them which house Gina had come from, or much of anything, other than the fact that the gunmen were Hispanic.
She gave them the identical reasons in the same words that she had used to explain her presence in the barrio neighborhood to the Candless family the night before. They took her through her story twice, confirming that it was in fact a drug deal that she had stumbled into in the shoe-repair shop.
Beyond that, she knew nothing, and by noon the police let her leave with Halpern.
After the family meeting to introduce Seth, which provoked the kind of backbiting reaction Caroline Mapes had predicted, the family members settled into a kind of armed truce. Whether Isobel’s presence motivated some sort of code of silence or what, the agents couldn’t tell. It appeared to them that the family had drawn its wagons into a circle.
Still, there were little things evident in passages Angelo appropriated from the tapes. He could listen to them at twice the speed of sound, accessing the tapes by remote cell phone, so it wasn’t much of a trick to pull together the telling snippets.
Harrison got drunk that same night and lost a small fortune—along with his hot date—in a private gamb
ling club. The chauffeur went on about it at length to the mechanic who spent his days fine-tuning the thirty-seven cars belonging to various family members.
Conrad spent two nights at the office, and Michele left town in a huff. Kelsey fired her maid. St. John hired the tearful woman back, and wasn’t pleased at having to mop up Kelsey’s mess with the domestic help.
The agents had no way to relay this information to Isobel, which they had considered to be a problem, but it wasn’t. Angelo followed their progress almost hourly, and in spare moments, reproduced conversations at will for her from thin air.
Among the siblings, Bruce was the only one who went out of his way to be friendly during meals, asking if there was anything Isobel wanted or needed, expressing an interest in and holding Seth.
But alone with Angelo their fifth night on the Candless estate, distracted and discouraged, Isobel went about picking up toys from the floor while Angelo sat in the rocker, quietly turning pages of a book with Seth.
“What are you thinking, Iso?” he asked.
She unloaded an armful of designer, stuffed alphabet blocks into one of the toy boxes and plunked down on the thick, peach-colored carpet. “This is going nowhere, Angelo.” She was referring to both her relationship with him and the investigation into Gina’s murder.
He arched an eyebrow at her. “It’s only been five days.”
“I know how long it’s been.” She saw that he would only talk about the Candless issues. It was a start.
“What is the point of my being here? It’s as if after that first night, they all went secretly off somewhere and agreed that the best strategy is to simply ignore what Candless has done by bringing Seth here. So what if everyone is on edge? Why wouldn’t they be? How is this helping to resolve Gina’s murder?”
“It’s not. At least not directly.”
“What would you be doing differently if I were not involved, if you didn’t have to hang around making sure no harm came to us?”
Since their kiss, while Helena stayed with Seth, there had been no others. He had not touched her. He’d been careful to keep his smoldering looks from her.
Every time she looked at him, she wanted more of his kisses. Every time she came upon him smiling at the baby, she wished Seth were his. Every time she opened her mouth to speak, it was to plead their case.
She never did.
He gave a half smile, adjusting Seth’s small body more comfortably in his lap. “There is no telling, Iso, since you are here. But I think you underestimate the potential here.”
“How?”
He looked closely at her. “Can’t you feel it, really?”
“With my primitive mortal brain stem, you mean?”
“Even you, poor mortal, yes,” he teased, then grew serious. “It’s like they’re sitting on a powder keg, Iso, but they can’t see where the flare is coming from that is going to set it off.”
“Do you mean all of Candless’s adult children?”
Angelo nodded. “And the spouses.”
“But there are tensions like this in every family, Angelo. What does it prove? That they’re ordinary, that’s all. Subject to the same stresses as anyone else.”
“There are other things.” Seth twisted in his lap, and Angelo picked him up and laid him against his shoulder. “St. John is tearing his hair out, trying to figure your angle, but he’s got his hands full. The Feds picked up a handful of illegal immigrants crossing back over the border.”
She didn’t question how he knew this. He must have somehow been there, in his spectral form, to see it happen. “Why is that trouble?”
“Because one of the illegals was beaten up pretty badly and is not in a mood to keep his mouth shut.”
“What can he tell them?”
“That his way into this country was paid. That he was working in a clothing factory in south central Los Angeles. The Feds already suspect a clothing plant belonging to Candless Industries. It’s his word against a Candless spokesman, of course, as to whether they paid to get him here, or knew he was illegal, but word gets around and then there are more malcontents to deal with.”
The connection of illegal immigrants to Seth’s mother was just so nebulous. Except that the Feds had recruited Gina, Isobel wouldn’t have believed there could be any ties at all. But Angelo obviously believed the illegals trying to escape back across the border meant something. “What does that have to do with Gina’s murder?”
“The gunmen were illegals, Iso.”
Even before he’d answered, she knew. “Couldn’t they be hired anywhere, though? I mean, they wouldn’t have to come from the pool IJ Candless smuggles in.”
“True. In fact, it would be better if they didn’t have any Candless contact. They could pretty easily be traced back. But here’s the thing. Do you know the theory behind Six Degrees of Separation?”
“Yes, but—”
“Think of it, Iso. It’s mathematically sound. It means human beings are only six people away from knowing every other human being on earth. ‘A’ knows six people and ‘B’ is one of them. ‘B’ knows six more people and ‘C’ is one of them, all the way to ‘F,’ at which point you’ve accounted for every living human being.”
Seth had raised his head from Angelo’s shoulder and was watching him with such rapt attention that Isobel laughed. Angelo lifted the baby to his face and they nuzzled. “Seth knows where I’m going with this, don’t you, big guy?”
“So do I,” Isobel protested. But her mouth had gone dry, wanting that easy intimacy for herself, too.
He tucked Seth back onto his shoulder. Seth stuck his thumb in his mouth and rested his head. Angelo’s dark, shadowed eyes met hers. “Do you, Iso?”
For a moment she couldn’t remember. It was within his powers to hear her thoughts, as easily as the seagulls cawing half a mile away, or the tinkling of wind chimes in Tibet. She didn’t think he could read her thoughts often, except when she couldn’t speak in front of others. She believed he had heard her now, her longing for the nuzzling he so naturally gave to Seth.
What good would it do to admit her longing, or that she had even had the thought? He had turned her away, and he would keep turning her away. She couldn’t bear it.
She broke off her eye contact with him. Her head dipped low and she forced herself to return to his point. “What you’re saying, I think, is that once you get into smuggling illegals, or exploiting them, the world sort of shrinks. Now you don’t have to know someone who knows someone six times removed. Now the person you hire to commit a murder is likely to know someone who knows who brought them illegally across the border in the first place.”
“Exactly.” His eyes had grown carefully neutral. “So even if whoever hired the gunmen took every possible precaution to find men unknown to any Candless enterprise, chances are good one man knew the next, and if the police are clever, they will connect the dots and Gina’s murder will lead straight back to IJ Candless.”
“Have the gunmen admitted anything?”
“No.” He shifted the forearm supporting Seth and began rubbing gentle circles over his backside. “These are tough hombres, Iso. They haven’t so much as admitted to holding the guns, when the burn marks are right there on their hands. But the guy they caught trying to cross back over last night is squawking. Loudly.”
“But the police haven’t made the connection?”
“No.”
“How can you let this go on, Angelo?” With everything in her, she appealed to his sense of justice. She didn’t want Seth here one heartbeat longer than he had to be. “Isn’t it in your powers to make them spill the truth? Can’t you strike such fear into Candless’s family that the guilty party falls all over himself confessing? What good are you, really?”
He glowered at her. No one had ever taken him to task about his abilities as an Avenging Angel. No one. “These are not easy matters, Isobel. Suppose I exercised that power. Suppose I became so enamored of my own righteousness that I took every decision into my own
hands. What could stop me from making the Pope cop to some terrible crime for my own amusement?”
“That’s a ridiculous exaggeration,” she snapped. “In—”
“It is not such a stretch as you might imagine, Iso. There are mighty forces on the side of evil, a battle being waged between the light and the dark for all our souls.” He paused. “You know it’s true.”
“But you are different. You would not go over to the side of evil.”
“You chose to leave,” he said, just as quickly, “and return here for the sake of this child. I could choose to abuse my powers, and it would take a small army of the most powerful angels to defeat me. We are not immune to temptation, Isobel.”
Oh, but he was, wasn’t he? Isobel thought bitterly. Immune to her. Angelo de Medici was immune to any temptation that might compromise his almighty image of who he was.
His eyes narrowed dangerously. He knew the train of her thoughts, or he could guess. Again, she clamped her lips shut against speaking them aloud.
“Then what is next? What can we do? I can’t stand sitting around this place waiting for something to crack open. Couldn’t you at least connect the dots for the police?”
“We have to let this play out, Iso. The informant is an illegal. After everything that has gone down in this city in the last few years, they have to be able to prove their charges—especially against a family as powerful and wealthy as this one. But the pressure is on St. John and whoever started running those factories with illegals, because sooner or later the press will draw the connection.”
“Maybe the Feds have already got their break, then, and they don’t need me here at all.”
“They do, Iso. They need all the help they can get. Like it or not, Seth represents a threat to this family, and the worse things get, the more likely they’ll crack wide open.”
“I don’t like it. I don’t want to be here when that happens, I don’t want—”