by Carly Bishop
She felt the battle going on inside his soul—the avenger and the angel now confronted with an even higher truth—and she sought a way to ease the path back to more familiar turf.
“What if we talked to Pilar?” she asked. “Maybe she didn’t know she was setting Gina up to be murdered. If she has children of her own, even if she doesn’t, I think she might talk to me. She probably didn’t see me pick Seth up after Gina was murdered, but she must have seen the news reports and photographs. If we go to her and tell her we suspect someone else was behind the murder, maybe she would tell us what happened.”
Angelo stared at her.
She flushed. “Am I being hopelessly naive again, or what? I think we could get Candless to let you take me to see Father Sifuentes, and Pilar lives very near there. It is a good idea, isn’t it?”
Angelo gave a grudging half-smile. “No, Iso. For a mortal brain stem, my love, it is a brilliant idea.”
ANGELO DEPARTED to prepare for his bodyguard position, leaving her under the watchful care of half a dozen Guardian Angels; Isobel took Seth to see Helena in the kitchen. He had begun this morning fretting and drooling with his first teething pains. She’d given the housekeeper a couple of teething rings to chill in the refrigerator.
Helena was nowhere to be found. Isobel retrieved one of the rings from the ice compartment, poured herself a lemonade and sat down at the glass-top table where she had confronted Harry last night.
Seth had begun to gum the teething ring in earnest, when Patrice Candless, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief, darted into the kitchen. She caught sight of Isobel with Seth and stopped short, her hand on the refrigerator door.
“Is something wrong, Mrs. Candless?”
The woman tossed her head and sniffed. “Not that it’s any concern of yours.” She pulled open the refrigerator, took out the glass pitcher of lemonade and poured her own glass. Isobel had never seen her near the kitchen. “But yes. Bruce has sent for his things. I’ve set Helena to packing.” She gulped. Fresh tears sprang to her eyes. “He has a condo in the city, of course. Has had for years. But he came here weekends, and of late, he’s been staying more often.”
Isobel murmured her sympathy. “This is not a good time, I know. I’m sorry.”
“You know.” Patrice dumped ice cubes into her glass and sat down to tame her agitation, her tone implying Isobel knew less than nothing about the subject. “I understand my husband has hired a bodyguard for you.”
Isobel cleared her throat. “For Seth.” But she saw it would have been kinder not to draw attention to the distinction. The import was clear enough. Candless had hired a bodyguard to protect his new son from the rest of his own family.
“It’s absurd,” Patrice railed. Her blond hair was perfectly styled in a French roll, her makeup flawless even now, but there was such a fragile and hardbitten aspect to her gestures and words that she seemed more claws than class, more defeated than daunting. “I know my children. They all have faults, certainly. I’m not blind to any of their faults. But murder?”
Isobel knew in her heart the resentment Patrice could only express in this sideways manner. She got up to gather a few paper towels to sop up Seth’s fierce drooling, then traded sides of the cold teething between his sore gums. There wasn’t anything as simple as a teething ring that she could say or do to ease Patrice’s pain, especially since she believed one of Patrice’s children, or all of them, had conspired to murder Gina Sellers. “I’m sure you’ll miss Bruce. He seems very caring. Very loyal to you.”
Patrice wrapped both her hands about her glass of lemonade and sighed. “He hasn’t always been that way. Bruce has been angry at me most of his life “
“Why?”
“He wanted me to leave Ian. He couldn’t abide the way we were treated, any of us. He never cared about himself. Nothing Ian could say or do ever really fazed him. He’s a force to be reckoned with and always has been. Bruce was—is—the most stalwart soul I have ever known, child or man. But he hated what went on between Ian and me, and if he’d had his way, I’d have left this marriage before Kelsey was ever born. Or Harrison, for that matter.”
“He felt as if he had to protect you from his father?”
“I suppose he did.” The older woman’s chin trembled. “Considering all that’s happened, he might as well have tilted at windmills.”
“He must love you very much to have tried.”
“But he never understood what his father went through, how he’d dragged himself up from the other side of the tracks in some backwater little Oklahoma town to where he is today.”
“Perhaps not, but he is your son. From what you said, he understood clearly how much you were hurting.”
Patrice would not be sidetracked. Some part of her insisted on defending Ian Candless even now, even after the worst of betrayals. “I understood him. I truly did. I do even now. Ian was under tremendous pressure, self-imposed and otherwise. He wanted his children to have what he never did. Once that happened, though, he half resented them for having everything he had fought so hard to provide.”
Isobel more clearly understood Bruce’s viewpoint than his mother’s. Nothing in the world was worth having at the cost of making your children feel guilty for what you had given them. She despised the guilt.
But always at the back of her mind was a facet of Patrice’s understanding, Isobel’s own awareness that Ian Candless was victim, too. A victim who, even if he understood the suffering he caused in turn, even if in some perverse way he enjoyed it, didn’t know how else to behave. How else to be.
But despite her defense of her husband against the ill opinion of his son Bruce, Patrice’s pale blue eyes filled again.
Isobel got up to let Patrice compose herself and to get a fresh teething ring from the ice compartment, then settled back into her chair with Seth gnawing at the icy relief it provided. “Did Bruce ever convince you to consider leaving your husband?”
“No. I couldn’t do that.” She took a sip of her lemonade. Her hands, age-spotted and beginning to gnarl at her knuckles, shook. Her tears had abated, but she hadn’t regained much of her composure. “Years ago I bought myself a little pearl-handled gun, though. I learned to use it. I meant to kill him. So many times.”
Her voice had dropped to little more than a whisper. “I should have killed him. I should have done it. I should have taken the gun and put us all out of our misery. Lord knows I had provocation enough a dozen times. A hundred. But what he’s done to this family now is despicable. It’s beyond bad taste. He pulled himself up by the bootstraps with his wretched excess, and now he’s rubbing all our noses in it. He’s slime. He’s—”
“Mrs. Candless—”
“Don’t.” She looked at Isobel now as if she couldn’t believe she had said such things to the nanny of her husband’s illegitimate son. “Don’t offer me your platitudes or your warnings, Ms. Avedon.” She looked for the first time at Seth with a terrible resentment. “My life is in a shambles, my family is destroyed, and my husband is responsible for all of it.”
Isobel understood. Nothing she could say would change the ill effects of Ian Candless’s subtle and not-so-subtle abuses. “Did Bruce tell you why he’s chosen to leave now? Does it have to do with Seth being here?”
“Less than you might imagine.” Patrice swallowed hard. “Bruce and I have…reconciled, I guess one would say, in the last year. He’s been a pillar of support. Very solicitous. Fiercely loyal to me. It’s almost as if he knew, you know?” She swallowed again and dabbed at her eyes. “As if he somehow knew that the worst blow yet was coming to me. He has been the son I always dreamed he would be, but now he is leaving for good, and as far as I am concerned, that’s on Ian’s head as well.”
She rambled on, almost as if Isobel were not there, for several more seconds, but Isobel didn’t hear anymore after Patrice’s pitiable speculation.
It’s almost as if he knew.
SETH NAPPED most of the afternoon. Waiting for Angelo to return, Isobel paced the floor
of the playroom, trying to decide what it was that Patrice suspected Bruce knew.
It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that Emory St. John was not the only member of the Candless clan who knew Gina was pregnant. Gina herself was well known to Bruce, since he was always the one to ferry her to her assignations with his father. Had they developed some kind of bond, a friendship? Wasn’t it likely that Bruce knew of the baby even before his sister’s husband became involved with leasing her condo?
But Gina had told St. John the baby was not Candless’s. Would she have told Bruce just the opposite?
The only possibility that made sense of Bruce’s emotional reconciliation with his mother was that Gina had confessed to him that her baby was the child of Ian Candless. Bruce must have feared that the whole thing would come out, and that when it did, his mother would be devastated.
The kindness he showed toward his mother was the only thing he knew to do. And if he had known all those months, then it was not likely he would have been involved in any conspiracy to murder Gina. He was a savvy, respected, wealthy businessman in his own right, and if he’d seen a way to bnbe Gina, he would surely have done it before Seth was ever born. It seemed he’d have done anything to spare Patrice—anything short of murder—including keeping the secret from his brothers and sister.
Which ruled out only one of them. But Isobel was somehow certain that was what Bruce knew. Her heart went out to Patrice. She was not an unwitting woman. She knew of her husband’s infidelities. Her humiliation could only have thrived, knowing what her son had tried to do to shield her from the worst of it.
And if Isobel had to guess, she would guess that Patrice knew, deep down in her heart where she kept secrets even from herself, that Bruce had known all along that Seth would destroy his mother’s already fragile house of cards.
Angelo arrived at four o’clock, driving the BMW they had used before. He had spent two hours going over the territory encompassed by the Candless compound in the company of the security chief. By the time Isobel could share her thoughts with him, they were in the BMW headed to the barrio neighborhood where Pilar Sanchez lived and Gina Sellers had been murdered.
While he was away, Angelo had called Ian Candless, impersonating Father Ramon Sifuentes, asking to visit Isobel and Seth. Candless had suggested instead that they visit him, in the company of her bodyguard. The priest’s arrival at the estate, he said, would cause too much speculation by the rabid journalists camped out near the entrance to the family compound.
When Isobel finally saw the press encampment through the dark-tinted glass of the BMW, she shrank low in her seat. She knew they could not see or photograph her or the baby in his infant seat. Still, the low-keyed frenzy made her shudder.
When they had cleared the gauntlet of cameras, she straightened. “I can’t believe Candless let us take Seth off the estate. Did you hypnotize him or what?”
Angelo gave her a sidelong glance. “You are always accusing me of these nefarious deeds, Iso. What have I done to make you so skeptical?”
“Oh, please. You have done everything but put them all into a coma and invite the INS in to ransack the estate.”
“Well, Candless believes it was his idea for the baby to have an outing.”
“Which is so out of character for him as to make me accuse you yet again.”
“Whatever it takes, Iso.” He flashed her a grin. “Finish telling me what happened with Patrice Candless.”
Isobel filled him in on her accidental meeting and conversation with Patrice, leaving out nothing, concluding with her speculation that it was almost as if Bruce had known another blow was coming.
“Do you think she’s still considering using her pearl-handled gun?”
“I don’t know, Angelo. She’s had enough of the grief and humiliation. More than enough. Thirty years or more.”
Isobel looked carefully at Angelo, at the fully human male he was now. The five-o’clock shadow, the tiny hairs on his knuckles, the way his little finger creased on the steering wheel. His presence as an angel in the guise of a human being was always more ethereal, less real, somehow.
Fully human, his body consumed air, took up space, radiated heat. She couldn’t breathe without taking in the air they shared, or fail to feel the warmth or smell the clean, utterly masculine scent he generated.
“How is it that you can read my mind all the time, and not know what is in everyone else’s?”
He gave her a disbelieving look. “Think of the chaos, Iso, if I heard everyone’s thoughts.”
“I’m serious, Angelo!” She glanced into the back seat. Seth was dozing lightly, lulled by the motion and low vibrations of the BMW engine.
He swallowed, on some disappointment she thought. Disappointment in her.
“What?” she demanded, half afraid to hear how she had let him down.
“The bond we share, Isobel Avedon, is uncommon.”
Now she swallowed hard. It was the done thing, among angels, to have such intimate access to the thoughts of one another. And it was the done thing for Guardian Angels and Avenging Angels to influence the thoughts of their charges in favor of better choices—even to plant in their mortal heads thoughts that would not otherwise have occurred to them, just as Angelo had influenced Candless to suggest the baby should go on this outing with them.
But Isobel didn’t know how it was supposed to work between Angelo and her…hadn’t known that it was the bond between them, and not any higher angelic powers of his, that gave him access to her thoughts.
“I don’t know how it will come to be, Iso, but what is between us is not going away. Not in this or any other lifetime. We are meant to be together. It would mean a great deal to me if you could find it in your heart to put some faith in us.”
Her turn, she thought raggedly, breathlessly, to swallow hard again. The same swaggering attitude that had galled her to no end in every moment up to this, galled her no more. She would be his, as he would be hers. She knew it. What finally swayed her opinion she could not have said, but Isobel Avedon finally believed.
THE CHEAP TRACT HOUSE where Pilar Sanchez lived, no more than fifty yards from where Gina Sellers had been shot to death, lay silent. Though dusk had fallen, there were no lights, no sounds coming from inside, not so much as a radio. But for Angelo’s still extraordinary powers of observation, they would not have known Pilar was at home.
She was.
They walked up the sidewalk to the cracking cement stoop, Isobel toting Seth, and Angelo rang the doorbell.
The door opened a couple of inches. From the darkened interior, a small Hispanic woman looked out at Isobel, then prayed softly, calling upon the Mother of God. “You are the one to save the baby.”
“Yes. My name is Isobel Avedon. This is my…my friend, Angelo. May we come inside a few moments and talk to you?”
She shook her head rapidly. “I have told the police everything I know—”
“Please,” Angelo interrupted, slipping into a soft, sonorous plea in Spanish.
Isobel didn’t know what he’d said. The exchange went on a few more seconds, then the woman opened the door and gestured them hurriedly inside.
She asked them to make themselves comfortable on an old orange plaid sofa, and took for herself a small, worn rocker covered in an inexpensive celerycolored velvet. Her gaze rested on Seth.
“It is a miracle that you saved this sweet baby.” She crossed herself, offering a small prayer for the baby’s mother.
“I think so too,” Isobel responded warmly. “He is precious, isn’t he?”
“Si.Precious.” Pilar Sanchez began to wring her hands, glancing back and forth between Isobel and Angelo. “I had nothing to do with the mother’s death. I—”
Again, Angelo soothed her fears, calling her by name. “Don’t worry at all, Pilar. We believe you knew nothing of what would happen. There are others who intended the baby’s death, and his mother’s. We think they used you. That they lied to you.”
Pila
r shook her head, denying even that much. “I know nothing of this.”
Angelo took a newspaper clipping from his jacket pocket and handed it to Isobel to pass to the woman.
“Pilar,” she began softly, “please look at this photograph. It was in all the newspapers several days ago. I’m there in front, with the baby. See? Can you tell us if you recognize anyone else?”
Pilar took the clipping, lifted the glasses that hung around her neck by a chain, and looked at the photo for several seconds, her gaze moving slowly, left to right, studying the faces of the Candless family with whom Isobel had posed her first night on the estate.
Still looking, she shook her head. “I’m sorry, I don’t—” she broke off.
A hissing noise came from her lips, and Pilar Sanchez went starkly still.
Chapter Thirteen
“Who are these people?”
Isobel exchanged looks with Angelo. “They are the family of the baby’s father, Ian Candless.”
“No,” Pilar insisted. “It is not possible.”
“That someone in this photo wanted to kill this baby and his mother?” Angelo demanded gently. “One of them came to you, is that right? One of them asked you to do something, to get this baby’s mother to come here?”
She clapped a bony hand over her mouth to stifle her cry.
Isobel reached out to cover the woman’s other hand with her own. “Which one of them came to you, Pilar?”
Tears sprang to Pilar’s eyes, splashing her glasses. She jerked them off and let them fall on their chain. Her head never stopped shaking back and forth, denying, Isobel thought, what she was seeing, that one of the baby’s own family would arrange his mother’s murder. His own murder, for that had been the intention.
“Can you at least tell us what happened?”
Pilar struggled to regain her equilibrium. She took a tissue from the sleeve of her sweater and mopped her eyes. “I tell you, I had no notion that anyone would die.”
“But one of these people asked you to get the baby’s mother to come here, to your home?”