by Linda Barlow
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Part Three
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Her Mother’s Legacy— A Secrel to Destroy Her…Or Bring Her Love
Part One
Chapter One
Anaheim, California
“You’re kidding me,” Maggie said. “Your mother had an affair with JFK?”
“That’s right,” said April. She stood, flushed, and unlatched her stall in the ladies room of the Anaheim convention center bathroom. She collected her sack of pamphlets, flyers, advance-reading copies, and one thick-bound galley and moved to the mirror to brush her shoulder-length auburn hair. It was still thick, and mercifully, no gray had yet appeared, but she should have had the ragged ends trimmed before coming out to California. She pulled it taut and knotted it atop her head.
Rina’s blonde hair had always been perfect.
“Wow,” said Maggie from one of the other stalls. At least two others were occupied and a tense-looking woman with a severe chignon was washing her hands at one of the sinks, but Maggie made no attempt to lower her voice. “How’d she meet him? Was this when he was president? Did you meet him, too?”
“I met him, sure,” April said. She adjusted her skirt, tucking her blouse in more smoothly, and straightened the name tag that was pinned to the lapel of her suit jacket. April Harrington, it read. Bookseller, Poison Pen Bookshop, Boston, MA. “I was never very nice to him, though. One day I told him that both he and my mother were going to hell.” She smiled. “I was a judgmental kid.”
Maggie came out of her stall, smoothing her red dress down around her generous hips. “What was he like?” she asked, joining April at the mirror. The name tag on Maggie McKay’s chest identified her as a bookseller from Somerville, MA, where she specialized in romance novels. She and April had met at a New England Booksellers Association conference four years before and become close friends. “Was he as sexy as everyone says?”
“God, Maggie, I was only nine years old. Besides, I was very angry with him. He had been my hero—as he was to so many of us in those days. I’d looked up to him, respected him, adored him. I watched the Kennedys on television and yearned for a family just like theirs. Then I found out he was sleeping with my mother, and I hated him for that. It wasn’t common knowledge in those days that he was a philanderer. I’d believed, like everybody else, in the Camelot myth of the perfect marriage to Jackie, the darling children, the American dream. When that was shattered, well… I just didn’t understand.”
“So it was a relationship? Your mother saw him more than once or twice?”
“Oh, yes. My mother was quite a woman and this was quite a coup. She wasn’t one to let go of such a golden opportunity.”
“This is an incredible story, April!” Maggie said. “I can’t believe you never told me this before.”
With a flick of her wrist April replaced her lipstick. She pursed her lips to even the color, trying to concentrate on the mundane task she was performing. But her stomach was churning and her palms were sweaty. There were a lot of things she had never told Maggie, not only about her mother, but also about herself.
“We moved to Washington.” She took a tube of mascara from her purse to touch up her lashes. She opened it, then changed her mind and put the tube away. She always made a mess with mascara. “She saw him off and on for the next several months. She was good. ‘Always sleep with the top dog’ was my mother’s motto. Once she got him, a man didn’t want out on Rina, even if he was president of the United States.”
“Wow,” Maggie said again. “In all the time I’ve known you, you’ve never even mentioned your mother.”
April caught her eye in the mirror. “I haven’t mentioned her because she abandoned me when I was twelve years old to follow her newest lover—a Frenchman whom she met through her association with Kennedy—back home to Paris. She promised to send for me. She never did.”
Maggie nodded, her dark eyes sympathetic. The woman with the severe chignon nodded, too. She had been taking an inordinately long time to wash and dry her perfectly manicured hands. Now, picking up her own pile of convention material, which was topped by the latest celebrity biography, she turned to April and said, “Pardon me, but I couldn’t help overhearing.” She considered the name tag on April’s lapel, then said, “You’re the mystery expert, aren’t you? April Harrington? I saw the piece about you in Publishers Weekly a couple of months ago.”
“Well, it’s our readers who are the real experts,” April said. “All we do is try to cater to their tastes with a broad selection of new and classic mystery novels.”
“Is your mother still alive?” the woman asked. She obyiously wasn’t interested in the mystery bookselling business. “If so, she should do a book.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a card, which she extended to April. Sandra Lestring, Literary Agent, the engraving read, followed by an address and telephone number in New York.
April nodded as she recognized the name. Sandra Lestring represented several well-known clients, including a couple of movie stars, politicians, and even a novelist or two.
“A lot of people are still interested in anything to do with JFK,” the agent added.
April smiled. “Thanks, but you’re too late. She’s already got an agent.”
Sandra Lestring shrugged. “Nevertheless, I’d appreciate it if you’d keep me in mind. You never know. Sometimes these things don’t work out.”
“I’ll do that,” April said politely as the woman turned to leave the ladies room.
Maggie was watching April in the mirror. Her huge brown eyes were round with speculation. “April? What do you mean, your mother’s got an agent? Who exactly is your mother? Is she in publishing? Jeez, April, is she here at the convention?”
April met her eyes and nodded. This, after all, was why she had come all the way out to California for this year’s American Booksellers Association convention, leaving Brian, her business partner, to run the bookstore and deal with the customers, which was his special talent, anyhow. Brian could spend hours discussing the plot, characters, and every red herring of a fictional murder case with a happy group of middle-aged women who gathered around to listen to him lecture. He remembered whodunit in every Agatha Christie novel. He could recite Adam Dalgleish’s poetry. He seemed to possess intimate knowledge of James Lee Burke’s New Orleans, and he loved to tell the customers that he’d once ridden in a taxi driven by Carlotta Carlyle.
Brian knew the genre, and the customers adored him. It was good to know that she could leave the business in the capable hands of somebody she trusted.
She glanced at her watch. In fifteen minutes, Rina, her mother, whom April hadn’t seen in nearly thirty years, would be making one of her rare public appearances.
She was planning to confront her.
Rob Blackthorn was staring at Jessie’s photograph again.
Shouldn’t do this, he told himself.
Pointless.
Waste of time.
Unhealthy.
He should be beyond this now. Everybody said so. It had been nearly two years.
He glanced over at the minibar, which was tastefully disguised as a cabinet in the luxurious Four Seasons Hotel in Newport Beach. It h
ad been tempting him ever since he’d checked in the previous evening. The minibar key was on top of the chest of drawers, right next to the ice bucket and the wine glasses.
Blackthorn glanced at his watch, which read 12:39 P.M. It was not 12:39. It was twenty to ten. He’d forgotten to set his watch to California time when he’d arrived last night.
Only 9:30 in the morning, and he wanted a drink.
Not that he had a drinking problem. That is, not anymore.
Nah, man, you’re addicted to something else. Someoneelse. You’re a Jessie junkie. Hung up on a woman who’s dead and gone. And there’s no damn Betty Ford Center to treat that.
Blackthorn’s eyes flicked back to the minibar. Bound to be some Chivas in there. Chivas was just the thing to help him escape the fact that he was back in California, where Jessie had died.
Jessie. Oh, Jesus. Jessie, Jess, Jess.
The hell with it. He picked up the key, jammed it into the lock, opened the small refrigerator, and removed a tiny bottle of Scotch. He placed it on top of the TV, where he could admire its sensuous, dark golden color as the sun from the plate glass window struck it.
You can look, but you’d better not touch, darlin’. You ever start drinking like those other idiots in your family and I swear I’ll come back and haunt you.
That a promise?
You won’t like my haunting. I won’t be one of those sad, wispy little ghosts. I’ll be a demon, clawing at you, destroying your sleep. So no booze. No sinking into the great Blackthorn Escape. Promise me.
He’d promised, of course. And kept it, too. So far. In all the months since he’d buried Jessie he’d managed to avoid cracking open that top. Today, though
The name Rina de Sevigny assaulted him. That’s who he was supposed to be concentrating on. Focus on Rina. That oughtta cure you, sucker, he thought.
Come on, then, Jessie, haunt me. That’s what you’ve been doing anyway for all this time. I’m no good without you, sober or drunk.
He reached for the bottle of Scotch. The phone by the king-sized bed interrupted him before he could break the seal. Blackthorn smiled and shook his head. The same thing had happened once or twice before. Maybe she was still around. Not his demon, but his guardian angel.
He walked over and picked up the receiver. “Yeah?”
“Blackthorn,” said a sharp female voice that he recognized instantly—Carla Murphy, who worked for him at World Systems Security. “I’m calling from the convention center in Anaheim.”
“Hey, Carla. What’s up?”
“I think you’d better get on over here.”
“Why? I’m not due on the scene until the glitzy party this evening.”
“Well, it turns out the client is not happy about that arrangement,” Carla said. “Actually it’s her husband who’d like to have you here. Says he’d feel safer that way.”
“Yeah, right,” Blackthorn said. He didn’t much like Armand de Sevigny.
“Listen, I sympathize,” said Carla. “The whole case is a waste of our time, in my opinion. She’s not even a particularly famous author, as far as I can tell.”
“Actually, she is pretty famous,” said Blackthorn. “A little more so in Europe than here, perhaps, but she’s had a large following here, too, ever since the release of that TV video piece that runs on cable of odd hours of the night with all the senators, astronauts, and movie stars lauding Power Perspectives, her personal transformation program.”
“Yeah, so who wants to kill her? Somebody whose personality didn’t get transformed? Jeez. I could be at a Mafia stakeout and here I am stuck at a goddamn booksellers’ convention.”
Blackthorn grinned. Then he sighed, eyeing the whiskey again. At his direction, Carla had done most of the work for this case so far. She’d been the one to analyze Rina’s needs and lay out a plan to protect her. This had been fine with Blackthorn. Perfect.
“So why do you think somebody wants to kill you?” he’d asked Rina when she’d insisted, in her imperious way, that he take the case.
“Perhaps because I know too many secrets about too many people,” Rina had said, which had reminded Blackthorn that she knew a few of his own secrets, as well.
“Blackthorn?” Carla said. “You still there?”
“Yeah, I’m here. You want to run it by me again? What exactly is the problem this morning?”
“It’s not just the husband who’s complaining,” Carla said. “Rina’s friend Daisy Tulane is concerned as well.”
“The feminist who would be senator.”
“Exactly. Apparently Rina helped Ms. Tulane get her head together a couple of years ago and now Daisy’s turned protective. She insists they contracted with us for four bodyguards and we’ve only given her three.”
“The contract says, ‘multiple bodyguards’ and ‘sufficient protection,’ for chrissake. Two would have been more than sufficient.”
“Well, not really. It’s a tricky situation, Blackthorn. Rina insists on meeting her ‘friends,’ as she calls them— the strangers who have bought her books and tapes and tried out her empowerment program. She’s signing autographs as I speak, in this cavernous hall with hundreds of people crowded about.”
“We didn’t authorize that. How does she expect us to protect her if she won’t follow orders?”
“How do I know? All I can tell you is there’s a lot about this situation that’s making me crazy. This place is impossible to secure. It’s huge, for one thing, and there are people milling all over, with arms full of books and assorted publisher giveaways. It’d be easy as hell to slip in a piece. You could hide an Uzi in one of those book-bags. We can’t cover her adequately with only three of us. Shit, it’d be difficult with ten.”
Terrific, Blackthorn thought. It looked like he’d have to show up, after all.
“Blackthorn?” Carla paused, then said slowly, “I’m not interrupting anything, am I? You don’t have a date, do you? I could, uh, call back in a little while.”
He grimaced at the eagerness in her voice. Along with all his friends, Carla was always watching for some sign that he was ready to resume the life of a normal, red-blooded, single male. Everybody seemed to think there was something wrong with him because he hadn’t been able to let go of his dead wife.
Well, maybe there was something wrong. Maybe there was a lot wrong. And maybe he was taking care of it in his own way.
“Look,” he said. “Cut off the autograph session right now. Then stow Rina in her hotel room until I get there. I’ll have a little talk with her ladyship about what she can and cannot do.”
“I can’t stow her anywhere until after her talk. She’s conducting a session on Power Perspectives at 10:30. The seminar room’s secure, but we can’t screen every single person who crowds in to hear her.”
“Do your best, then. I’ll be there soon.”
“Thanks, Blackthorn.”
“You bet.”
He hung up the phone and put the little bottle of Chivas back into its rack in the minibar. “Good for you, Jessie,” he said.
God, how he missed her! Out there in the real world you knew who your enemies were—the guys with the guns. You could do something about them. But there wasn’t a single damn thing you could do about the silent, cellular-level killer that had taken Jessie. Not even the best bodyguarding in the world could protect you against cancer.
Still, she didn’t have to die of it, dammit. She might have lived, if she’d only been willing to accept the proper medical care.
Stop it, he ordered himself. Focus on Rina de Sevigny, whose life you’ve been hired to protect.
“We’d better get moving if we want to make this seminar,” April said to Maggie. She consulted the floor plan one more time, then led the way through the crowd in one of the more congested aisles of the main display section of the convention center.
Publishers, both major and minor, had booths lining the aisles. These areas were crammed with displays of the fall lines. The most renowned American and internat
ional publishers had the largest allotments of floor space for their displays, some of which were outlandishly extravagant. There were huge posters of book covers and blowup photographs of famous authors.
Celebrities—including novelists, sports figures, politicians, film and TV stars—were making appearances all over the hall, many of them promoting their latest books. At one booth, advance-reading copies of a new work by a well-known black female novelist had just been laid out by her publicist. The crowd buzzed as the rumor flew that the author herself was about to make an appearance. She was hot, her books were wildly successful, and everybody wanted to meet her.
April barely glanced at the celebrities. Instead, she steered Maggie toward the large room that had been reserved by Crestwood-Locke-Mars Publishing, Inc., better known as CLM. The room was filled with rows of folding chairs facing a dais that was graced with life-size posters, a podium, and a large video screen. Taped music with an upbeat, energizing tempo was playing loudly as eager conventioneers pushed into the room and settled into the rows of chairs.
Maggie hung back. “Jeez, April, you’re not going to subject me to one of those crazy human potential, seize-your-power sort of things? I’ve heard that under all that jazzy music are a bunch of subliminal messages saying stuff like ‘pay your money, join our team’ to sucker you into signing up for their week-long seminars in Hawaii or the Cayman Islands.”
April grinned. “Don’t worry, I’ll hold you down if you start to stumble mindlessly toward the dais to testify.”
They found two seats together toward the back and sat down. April took an aisle seat, just in case she felt the need to get out in a hurry.
A crimson banner hung over the dais. It read, Power Perspectives—the Key to Inner Strength and Outward Success. Suspended from the ceiling just in back of the podium was a bright yellow poster with a blowup of a book jacket, a portrait of the female author’s animated face, and several quotes in large blue letters extolling the book’s “incredible, life-transforming inspiration.”