The Unquiet

by J. D. Robb; Mary Blayney

  Then Oliver ruined everything by saying, “So we’re clear about this psychic, right, Grandfather? No more of that. I’m holding you to your promise.”

  “Oh, hold this,” Charlie said, and closed the door on him.

  TWO

  Hold this?

  Charlie must be going senile. A psychic. What next, wiring money to a Nigerian bank account? Oliver didn’t like the look in his eye either when Grandfather had shut the door in his face. Shifty, that’s what it was. Shifty and untrustworthy.

  If you gave Charlie an inch, he’d take a mile—Oliver knew that from experience. So it was no good saying, Fine, call Madame Romanescu anytime you want, and if it breaks the bank, no problem, I’ll step in and save you. Which he could easily do, but that wasn’t the point. Charlie needed to live within his means for his own good, his own self-respect. If Charlie was tired of being treated like a child, Oliver was tired of acting like the heavy.

  “Madame Romanescu.” What a laugh. He’d seen their ads on late-night cable, the lady fortune-tellers. Such obvious fakes. How could Charlie fall for such a rip-off? Stopped at a light on Connecticut Avenue, Oliver rummaged in his briefcase till he found his grandfather’s credit card statement, and at the next light he punched in Madame Romanescu’s 900 number on his cell phone.

  “Hello,” said a soft, smoky voice in some kind of an accent. “It is Madame Romanescu. What is troubling you today, dear one? What is the problem you cannot solve? Perhaps it’s difficulty with a loved one. Someone you love who doesn’t love you back. Or is it your career? Money problems? Your child; a beloved pet? Maybe a dream, or the memory of one of your past lives. I have helped others, and I can help you. The cost of the call is $2.99 a minute, and I accept all major credit and debit cards. And”—the low-pitched, sympathetic voice rose a note with genuine-sounding goodwill—“today is your lucky day, dear one, a special offer—ten minutes for only $19.95. What an opportunity for us, yes? So call me, and we will talk. For now, I wish you light, life, and love.”

  Then the operator’s voice, completely different, clipped and no-nonsense. “Please enter your credit card number now.”

  Right, thought Oliver, and clicked off.

  Cocktail parties were work, not play—Charlie’s opinion notwithstanding—and if you were smart, you didn’t eat or drink much at them. Otherwise you couldn’t do your job, not to mention that in a year or two you’d be an obese alcoholic. The drawback to all that moderation was that you came home empty but not really hungry, and only buzzed enough to feel sleepy.

  Oliver poured a glass of milk and carried it into the den. Nine o’clock. A useless time of night, too early to go to bed, too late to get any work done. He phoned Sharon, one of his partners at Cullen Pratt McGrath, and told her the evening had been a bust: The senator he was supposed to schmooze never showed up. He’d had a good conversation with a couple of guys working on a geothermal startup in Colorado, but he didn’t bother to tell her that. If work wasn’t directly billable to a client, Sharon wasn’t interested.

  He checked his e-mail. Turned on the TV and flipped through the channels. Nothing but C-SPAN, and he wasn’t in the mood. A movie? He pulled Tombstone from his enormous Western collection and stuck it in the DVR. He knew the film almost by heart, though, and by the time Val Kilmer told Johnny Ringo he was his huckleberry, Oliver was up and pacing the room, restless. Something nagged at him. Something felt unfinished.

  Charlie had given his promise, but he might weaken. He had before. He’d been known to go off the deep end. It was no more than a responsible grandson’s duty to assess this new danger firsthand.

  “Hello. It is Madame Romanescu.” The exotic, honeydipped voice sounded so familiar, he realized he’d been hearing it in the back of his mind all night. He listened to her spiel, happy to hear it was still his lucky day, and when the operator told him to, he punched in his Amex number.

  A series of rings; a pause; another series of rings.

  “Hello?”

  How could anyone get so much . . . not sex, exactly . . . so much tenderness into one word? “Hello,” Oliver said briskly. “Madame Romanescu?”

  “Yes, it is I. How are you?”

  “I’m—My name is Oliver Worth, and I’m calling about my grandfather.”

  “Oh dear. A problem with your grandfather. Yes, I can hear that you are worried, tense—”

  “Yeah, you could say I’m worried. He racked up an eighthundred-dollar phone bill last month talking to you.”

  Silence; he imagined it full of alarm and guilt.

  “Ah,” she said at last. “Is he . . . I can’t divulge a caller’s name. Is he . . .”

  “Charlie, his name’s Charlie. He’s an old man on a fixed income.”

  “Charlie. Of course. A lovely gentleman. He lives in a retirement community.”

  “That’s right. I’ve asked him to stop phoning, but I can’t be sure he will, so I’m asking you to stop taking his calls.”

  “But, Oliver—I may call you Oliver?”

  “Sure, whatever.”

  “Oliver—if he wishes to call, if it’s a help to him, because there is no one else to whom he can say certain things—”

  “Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but if my grandfather needs to talk to someone, I’ll get him a qualified therapist. He lives alone, and he’s vulnerable. The highlight of his day is reading the obituaries and the foreclosures. So I’m asking you, if you’ve got any . . .”

  “Decency?”

  “Any . . .”

  “Integrity?”

  The rueful smile in her voice threw him off. “Look,” he said again, “Madame Romanescu. What you’re doing isn’t illegal, I assume, but in this case it borders, in my opinion, on the unethical. I don’t know what he’s told you, but Charlie doesn’t have that kind of money to throw around. He lives on his savings and his Social Security. That’s it.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “Limited savings. Limited Social Security.”

  “Yes, I see. Very well, then.”

  “Not only that, he’s got a history of not always—What?”

  “I said yes, all right. If you insist. I didn’t understand—naturally I don’t want to make trouble for Charlie. It’s just that . . . I’m afraid it will be sad for him. Because he is lonely.”

  “Oh, is he?” Oliver wavered between annoyance and embarrassment. She was probably right, but it was pretty damned presumptuous of her to point it out. “Everybody’s lonely,” he said in a careless tone he immediately regretted.

  “That’s true,” she said gently. “Yes, that is very true,” and for some reason he felt absolved. No wonder Charlie was in thrall to this woman. “Perhaps you could talk to him, Oliver? A bit more? Spend a little more time with him?”

  “Sure. Of course. Although . . .”

  “No,” she agreed. He and Charlie weren’t all that close.

  “And I’m a . . .”

  “I know,” she said. Busy man.

  “But I could . . .”

  “Yes,” she said. Try harder.

  “Would you stop doing that?”

  “Doing what, Oliver?”

  He heard the smile in her voice again. Extraordinary voice. Not so much sexy as sensual, and so caring, it was practically maternal. “What, uh, if I may ask, what is your accent? I can’t quite place it.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “No, of course not, I just—”

  “It’s only that I prefer to keep the focus on my clients, not myself.”

  “I can see that. Then again, I’m not a client.”

  “That’s true,” she said consideringly. “Well, I grew up in many places, Oliver, mostly around Budapest. But many places.”

  Budapesht, she pronounced it. “A Hungarian Gypsy,” he said with a laugh he couldn’t help. He cut it off quickly. Could any of that be true?

  “No, not I. My mother, my grandmother, they were Gypsies.”

  “But you inherited the gift.”

  “The
gift?”

  “Of fortune-telling.”

  She made a low, humming sound, full of amusement and sly accusation. “With my deep clairvoyant powers, I detect a tiny trace of skepticism, Oliver.”

  “Tell me something about myself,” he challenged on a whim. “My sign, my favorite color. My shoe size.”

  “Ah, you want to play games.”

  “No, seriously.” He almost was serious. This almost mattered. “Tell me something you couldn’t know. Something you could only intuit.”

  A long silence.

  “You there?” he prompted.

  “I am thinking, dear one. I am receiving.”

  He grinned and put his feet up on the coffee table, getting comfortable. This was how the dollars added up so fast. And yet he felt nothing but relaxed and patient, anticipatory. Not much like a chump at all.

  “Something keeps you from contentment. Something is blocking you. Something stands between you and happiness.”

  His smile faded. “Isn’t that a home run for just about everybody ? ‘Something.’ I don’t suppose you could be more specific.”

  Another thoughtful pause, after which she said, “Guilt?” so softly he barely heard. “Guilt for no reason.”

  He stood up, knocking over a stack of magazines. He controlled his temper by gripping the phone and squeezing. Beep. He must’ve hit a number—

  “Oliver ? Hello?”

  “How do you do it when you don’t have an inside source? Keep it vague, I guess, stick with ‘something.’ ”

  “ An inside—Do you mean Charlie? He’s told me nothing. Oliver, I’m sorry if I’ve upset you.”

  “Just stay away from my grandfather. Do we agree on that?”

  “Yes, I’ve told you—”

  “Because he can’t afford you.” He hung up quickly, before he could add, “Neither can I.”

  THREE

  “You’re having a bad day.”

  “Oh, hi, Aunt Kit. Hang on a sec.” Molly McDougal stuck her cell phone under her chin and shifted a stack of books and notebooks to one arm so she could reach across with the other to retrieve the ticket on her windshield. It said her student parking permit had expired. “How did you know?”

  “I didn’t divine it. Must’ve been something about the way you took my head off with ‘Hello.’ ”

  “Sorry. I’m fine, really.” Especially now that, after a minimum of coughing and gasping, the Pontiac had fired up. Molly pulled out onto Nebraska Avenue and headed for home. “It’s just a medium-bad day. How are you? What’s new in Hoboken ?”

  “Everything’s peachy, now back to you. What’s wrong?”

  Molly believed in empathy, not psychic power, and certainly not in mind-reading, but sometimes her great-aunt could be scarily acute. Don’t think about the foreclosure notice in the paper this morning, Molly told herself—which was like a camper telling herself, Don’t think about that bear snuffling around the sleeping bag. She thought instead of the second worst thing that had happened to her in the last two days. “I just lost my favorite caller.”

  “Who? Not Charlie. Oh no! Did he—”

  “No, no, he didn’t die.”

  “Thank goodness. I love that guy.”

  “But I’m not allowed to talk to him anymore.” She told Aunt Kit about the call from Oliver Worth, how she’d agreed not to take his grandfather’s calls anymore.

  “I think you should anyway.”

  “No, I can’t—apparently he’s broke. And we were going to meet—I didn’t tell you this—Charlie wanted a private reading, and I said yes, even though—but he’s such a nice old guy, and after I told him my incredibly psychic great-aunt just sent me her old crystal ball—”

  “Did it get there in one piece?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Well, I miss it, but you’ll get a lot more use out of it than I will, now that I’m retired.”

  “ Anyway—after I told him about it, he really wanted a face-to-face reading.” For which he’d have paid her a hundred dollars. A hundred dollars.

  “This Oliver guy sounds like a prize stiff,” Aunt Kit decided.

  “Charlie calls him a stuffed shirt. But fondly,” Molly added in fairness. “He always speaks of him with affection. I think he works for the energy lobby.”

  “Perfect. But this is terrible—you love Charlie.”

  “He was one of my first callers. I’m really going to miss him.”

  “ And I liked hearing about him. But there will be plenty of others, dear. It’s slow in the beginning,” Aunt Kit advised, as if she’d been in the phone psychic business for years. “But it’ll pick up when word gets around.”

  “What word is that?” Molly asked, making a left on Connecticut.

  “Word of mouth, about the amazing Madame Romanescu. People will tell their friends, and they’ll tell their friends, and the phone will start ringing off the hook. You’ll have to hire employees.”

  “I’d be happy just to recoup my losses.” Oh, she wished she hadn’t said that—going into the phone psychic business had been Aunt Kit’s brainstorm. But she’d had no idea how big an investment it took to get started.

  “What losses? You mean the calling service?”

  “Right, they charge for the setup.” Eight hundred dollars, plus a fifty-dollar-a-month “maintenance fee.” On top of that, Molly only got $1.69 of the $2.99 people paid for a minute. So far, her new part-time job was a serious net loss.

  “Guess what,” she said to change the subject. “I got an A minus on my Advanced Adolescent Psych exam.”

  “Yay!” Sounds of applause from Aunt Kit. “Go you! You’ll have that master’s soon, and then nothing but good times. You’ll be back doing what you’re supposed to do. I feel it.”

  “Two and a half more semesters. I wish I could go faster.” But she could only afford nine credits a term, even after adding phone psychic to her other two jobs: dog walker and house sitter.

  “You work too hard,” Aunt Kit said—reading her mind. “After exams are over, you come up here and see me. I miss you.”

  “I miss you, too, but I don’t think I’ll be able to visit anytime soon.”

  “Think about it. Hoboken in springtime.”

  “So tempting. Heck, I’ve got another call—”

  “Go. And if it’s Charlie, talk to him. Don’t let that stuffed shirt boss you around.”

  But it wasn’t Charlie. It was a man from the loss mitigation department at the bank, calling to say his boss wouldn’t go for her pro bono lawyer’s proposal for paying down her mortgage. So the sale of her house was still on.

  FOUR

  And she loved her house. Her haven, her sanctuary, her pride and joy—but most of all, the brick-and-mortar proof she’d needed, after the divorce, that she wasn’t anybody’s helpless dependent. A 1940s bungalow with only two bedrooms, it had beautiful floors, small but perfect proportions, and a dream of a front porch. She’d bought it during the boom, and paid too much—easy to see that now. But she’d fallen in love, and they’d given her such a great deal.

  Until the interest rate went up and, practically the next day, she’d lost her assistant counselor job due to budget cuts at Stone Creek Private Academy for Girls.

  “This is an opportunity,” Aunt Kit had tried to convince her from Hoboken, but for Molly (a positive person—“obnoxiously optimistic,” her ex used to call her), it was hard to see the progression of her life lately as anything but a slow slide backward. Underwater.

  “It’s only a house,” she told Merlin, her cat, settling beside him on the porch swing with her Evolution of Human Behavior textbook. “Just bricks and wood and glass.” And she was only thirty, she could start over—she’d done it before. And for now, at least, she could still watch the world go by on sleepy Palmer Street, behind pansy-filled planters, on a beautiful late April afternoon. Really, life was what you made it. She used to say that to the girls at Stone Creek, so . . . so it might or might not be true.

  Her psychic
line rang.

  “Romy, honey,” Charlie said, his customary greeting, and immediately she dropped her accent. She’d dispensed with it long ago with Charlie, although neither of them could remember quite when or under what circumstances. It had just happened naturally.

  “Charlie, hi, how are you?”

  “You tell me.” He always said that, too, and it was her cue to say something clairvoyant.

  “Hmm . . . I think you’re a little tired today.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you’re not in such a great mood.”

  “Bingo!” Her perspicacity always amazed him.

  “But nothing terrible has happened, and you’re going to feel better soon. Very soon.” While they were still talking, if history was a predictor.

  But he was calling too often—she could hardly believe how much money he’d spent talking to Madame Romanescu last month, at least according to his grandson. “Charlie,” she said reluctantly, “I think we might have to—”

  “So listen, I had this dream. I’m in the store, but it’s the first one I had, the one on Cordell Avenue, and I’m young.” For forty years, before he retired, Charlie had owned Worth’s Fine Men’s Wear. “And who walks in but Dottie.” His wife, dead for two years. “And she says to me, ‘I could use a new hat,’ and she winks. So I’m thinking she doesn’t mean hat, but what does she mean? I don’t want to make a mistake, see, leap to conclusions, because even though it’s Dottie, in the dream we don’t know each other yet. So I say, ‘I got a whole new shipment of hats in,’ but I can’t tell if that’s the right answer because just then, bam, the lights go out, and that’s it, I wake up. So whaddaya think?”

  “Um, I think you still miss her a lot. And I think right up to the end she kept you guessing.”

  “She was a helluva gal. I didn’t tell her that often enough.”

  Molly knew where this was leading. “We all take our loved ones for granted, it’s just human na—”

  “So what time do you want to come over Tuesday?”

  “Well, about that, Charlie, I’m going to have to—”