At the hotel, he raced up the steps two at a time and knocked on their door. “It’s me, Wallace.”
A white-faced Winnie opened the door for him. “What did the police say?”
“They can’t help.” Wallace closed his mouth, not wanting to let Winnie see the depth of his fear. “But the Ashers might know something. We’ll go there next, and I’ll ask them if you can stay with them.”
She opened her mouth, but Wallace didn’t let her speak. “I don’t want you staying here on your own. How long will it take you to pack? In case you need to stay overnight?”
Wallace left the door between their rooms open while he decided if he should pack a few things himself. He couldn’t think of anything, least of all his book manuscript. Its importance had vanished with Mary Anne. He poked his head back into the girls’ room. “Pack a few of Mary Anne’s things as well, please.”
A man of God might kneel on the floor, but Wallace couldn’t stay still. Prayers mixed with frantic thoughts as he paced back and forth.
“I’m ready,” Winnie called, and he entered their room.
A key rattled in the lock, and Wallace jumped. Settle down. It’s just the hotel staff.
A muddy shoe appeared in the doorway. “Winnie? Wallace?”
“Mary Anne!” Wallace opened the door as she collapsed in his arms. He held her close. “Thank God. I saw the man kidnap you. What happened?”
“He let me go.”
A lot more was involved in her reappearance, he was sure, but it could wait. “Let me call room service and get you something to eat.”
Winnie put an arm around Mary Anne when Wallace let her go. “Did that dreadful man hurt you?”
Mary Anne shook her head, but she jumped when a knock came at the door. “Who is it?” Wallace asked through the door.
“The police,” came the muffled reply.
Mary Anne’s face paled, and the hand holding her purse trembled. “The police?”
Everything about Mary Anne screamed her reluctance to talk with the police. But he wouldn’t let her get away with it. Not this time.
Chapter 23
Dryness glued Mary Anne’s tongue to the roof of her mouth and she couldn’t speak.
“Well, are you Mary Anne Lamont, aka Marabelle Lamont, the daughter of Jack R. Lamont, or not?”
She nodded in reply. The police officer, Detective Olney, had allowed Wallace to remain during the interview at the police station. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. He would hear the entire, ugly truth. She wouldn’t blame him if he disappeared from her life once he knew everything.
“We’ve been wanting to speak with you for quite a while, Miss Lamont. Reverend Asher told us you had gone out of town to visit family, but you never got in touch.” Olney’s frown didn’t help.
“I did leave suddenly. Don’t blame Pastor Asher; he didn’t know exactly where I had gone. I just returned to town this week.” Why hadn’t he mentioned the police during their visit this morning?
“What were you doing on the morning of March 30, of this year? It was a Wednesday.”
Mary Anne would never forget, but she couldn’t force the words out. The detective gestured for his sergeant to bring her a glass of water. She drank half the glass in a single gulp and then sipped the rest. After she emptied the glass, she ran her tongue around her mouth, testing it for dryness. Help me, Lord. “I will tell you my story. But please let me tell it my way. Then you can ask me your questions.”
Olney glanced at the clock and called for a stenographer. A petite blonde came in, her steno pad resting on her lap, a pen poised over the page.
Olney placed his hands on the table, ready to listen. “Go ahead.”
Wallace’s silent presence demanded, Look at me while you tell your story. I will listen without judging.
Mary Anne drew a deep breath and began. “It all started after Christmas. Daddy bought a lottery ticket from the local grocery store. He always did that, buying raffle tickets, never betting on games or horses, though. The most we ever won was two tickets to a Dodgers game.” Her eyes misted at the memory.
“The St. Ignatius Children’s Fund sponsored the lottery. And he won! Enough money to make us rich no matter how much we spent. He let me buy whatever I wanted. That’s where the Marabelle business came from. I thought I was too good for plain old Mary Anne anymore. It didn’t take me long to decide I didn’t really like speakeasies and all that.”
Wallace smiled, showing his acceptance of her story. So far.
“Does this have anything to do with your father’s death?”
The detective was being oh-so-patient. Mary Anne didn’t know if he was being nice, or giving her a chance to get caught in her own web.
“It does. Daddy told me I had to stop spending money so wildly. That made me mad, but I didn’t know he’d had some visitors. The man at the grocery shop who ran the lottery begged him to return the prize money. He said the Children’s Fund was a fraud, and Daddy had to give the money back to the sponsors.”
The detective leaned in close. “What grocer was it?” Mary Anne gave him the details.
“But Daddy refused. I had already spent a lot of it, of course.” Heat rushed into her cheeks. “But he thought the grocer was lying. He won the money fair and square, but he was willing to make arrangements with the Children’s Fund if the grocer would just tell him who to talk to.” Her fingers tapped nervously in her lap. “Can I have another glass of water?”
It came, and she drank it. Now for the last, hardest bit. “About a week passed. I had spent the night—Tuesday night, the twenty-ninth—with a friend. When I came home, a car I didn’t recognize sat in front of our house. I parked around the corner and walked through our neighbor’s backyard to our back door. When I opened the door, I saw him. Daddy.”
Her voice cracked, and she waited until she could continue. “He was tied to a chair. A man wearing a black coat and gloves held a revolver in his hand. He demanded that Daddy give him back the money.”
The detective jotted something down. “Would you recognize the man if you saw him again?” The detective drilled her to the back of her seat with his eyes.
“Yes.” Mary Anne swallowed. “He’s the same man who found me at the cemetery this morning.”
Wallace leaned forward.
“Do you know his name? Or the name of the man he answers to?”
“They called him Rocco. I don’t know any other names.”
“I drew a picture of the man who kidnapped her, if that will help.” Wallace pulled his sketchbook out of his coat pocket and leafed through the pages.
“Rocco Fiori.” The detective nodded in recognition and sent his sergeant on an errand. They waited until he returned.
The sergeant slid a photograph facedown across the table. Olney glanced at it and handed it to Mary Anne. “Is this the man Rocco took you to see this morning?”
Mary Anne didn’t have to answer. The tremor in her arms and legs gave her away.
Detective Olney nodded as if satisfied. “I thought so. So the DiNapoli gang was behind the lottery. There were rumors back in March that they had suffered a major setback.” A smile flickered across his face. “An ordinary man and a young woman dealt a blow to the DiNapoli gang.”
Mary Anne failed to see humor in a situation that led to her father’s death. “That’s not all. I would gladly give him the money. It already cost me too much. But most of it is gone. He said not to worry, he had a job for me to do.”
She looked at Wallace, begging him to understand. “He knows where I’ve been the past six months. And he wants my help in running whiskey from Canada down to New York City.”
* * *
“I have to come with you. They’re expecting to see me.” Mary Anne crossed her arms over her chest, refusing the
chair Wallace had pulled out for her.
Jacques Gerard, the town constable, had been brought up to speed as soon as they returned to Maple Notch. “This is no place for a woman.” He spoke as if that settled it.
Wallace could have told him differently. In spite of the differences in their life stories, Mary Anne shared a certain boundless determination with his grandmother. They both would reject any reason other than sound logic.
Wallace couldn’t think of one, but he had promised to protect her. How could he do that if she refused to stay where it was safe?
“I ran away when my father needed me. I won’t do it again.”
That kind of experience could change a person. The Wallace who emerged after his parents’ deaths wasn’t the same boy he had been before.
“She’s right, you know.” FBI agent John Smith—at least that was the name he gave them upon his arrival—spoke from his corner of the living room.
Triumph blossomed on Mary Anne’s face and she sat, no longer afraid she’d be ousted from the discussion.
Smith spoke with implacable logic. “DiNapoli’s men aren’t stupid. They’ll smell a setup a mile away. She has to meet them, alone, at the bridge, as she promised.” He pointed at Mary Anne. “We want you to see if you can get them to agree to the place and time you suggest.”
Mary Anne shook her head. “They already know I can’t slip away before nightfall without someone noticing, so the time isn’t a problem. But I can’t tell them to meet me at the bridge without revealing I know their secret.”
Was the woman determined to put herself in harm’s way? Once she climbed into the car, she might never return.
Smith nodded. “One of my men will follow you, in case they change their minds. If they bring you to the bridge the way we expect them to, it’s up to you to get them in sight of the cave. Have you been there before?”
Her dark eyes connected with Wallace’s. “Not yet, but he’s told me about it.”
He had told her the family story of how his ancestors had taken refuge in the cave during the Revolutionary War. How strange that the same cave would play a part in his history as well. “We’ll go tomorrow night, about the same time she expects to meet Rocco the next day, so she’ll know what to expect.”
Her smile reassured Wallace that things were all right between the two of them.
They stayed up late into the night, making plans. Smith’s men would stay at the farm, minimizing comment in town.
The rest of the week sped by. Wallace waded through the editor’s comments on his book. How unimportant the visit with his editor seemed now, compared to everything else that had happened during their trip to New York. Worrying about Mary Anne’s future pushed the often cutting editorial remarks into insignificance. He took Mary Anne to the cave at sundown the night before Halloween. Aside from seeing her at church on Sunday, they had no other contact, and that was the hardest of all to bear. Never had he taken the Lord’s command to pray without ceasing so seriously.
Constable Gerard had come out to the farmhouse the previous evening. “They’ll be here tomorrow night.” When the authorities made final arrangements, Smith almost demanded that Wallace stay home. He wasn’t an officer of the law and had no authority. Neither Wallace nor Howard agreed.
On the night they expected the DiNapoli gang, they met with the federal agents and Constable Gerard in the cave by the bridge. God must have blinded the gangsters to it. A steady rain fell, gray clouds limiting visibility to a few feet in any direction.
“How will we be able to see Mary Anne in this mess?” Wallace fidgeted near the entrance, unable to pace out his anxiety in the cramped space. Rain sent cascading streams into the depths of the cave. The Feds sat as still as statues, as if they could wait until the next new moon without budging a muscle.
For supper, they ate cold sandwiches and drank coffee from a thermos, with men taking turns guarding the entrance. As the rain increased in intensity, water collected on the floor of the cave.
Wallace stepped to the entrance. Where once he could see riverbanks, a thin layer of water spilled. It licked at the edge of the cave and spilled into the interior, covering the soles of their shoes.
“They’re here.” Smith’s voice whispered across the cave, and the men fell into position, poised to explode from the opening as soon as Mary Anne gave the signal.
The trickling water turned into a stream, rising past their ankles then their calves. The bridge. Wallace pushed past the entrance, heedless of discovery or flood.
“Mary Anne!”
With a groan deep enough to tear heaven in half, the bridge cracked and broke.
Chapter 24
Mary Anne saw the cresting river precious moments before DiNapoli’s men did. She ran from beneath the bridge to the bank, where she gained a handhold.
The water tugged at her feet as she climbed into the limbs of the nearest tree. She wrapped arms and legs around the tree which had endured centuries of cold and ice, wind and rain. If anything survived this flood, the tree would.
“‘And he arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.’” She repeated the words from Mark’s gospel over and over again while the flood waters rose higher and higher, lapping at her feet and ankles and creeping up to her knees. She shivered uncontrollably in the icy water. With all the strength she had, she pulled herself higher into the tree.
The sounds of groaning, breaking, shattering wood rode on the tide of the storm. Water ran over and around her, threatening to pull her into its deadly flow.
Exhausted, she clamped her body around the trunk with her last bit of strength. Riding on the top of the flood she spotted broken beams and patches of wood. The bridge was gone. Help, God.
If Noah survived forty days of nonstop rain, she could survive this. This flood wouldn’t last nearly that long. God had promised.
Thoughts of Noah didn’t make Mary Anne any warmer. God would never again destroy the earth with a flood, but people died in flood waters every year. Her life could end here, tonight.
Minutes felt like hours and hours felt like days. Mary Anne clung to the branch, repeated Bible verses embedded in her mind, and waited for the water to pass. After a time, she realized that rain splashed her body and not river water.
If she had stayed in New York and gone to the police after her father’s death, she wouldn’t be clinging to a tree during a flood. She wouldn’t have been crossing the bridge into Maple Notch on that fateful Thursday night seven months ago.
If she hadn’t crossed the bridge, she wouldn’t have run into Wallace’s car, and she couldn’t imagine life without him.
If she had a life.
What a mess.
“Mary Anne?” A voice sliced through the rain and darkness.
“Wallace?” She peered through the darkness below her but couldn’t see him.
“Mary Anne?” He sounded a little closer.
She slumped in relief. “Wallace!”
“Mary Anne!”
They continued their flood-induced version of hide-and-seek until Wallace sloshed through the water at her feet.
He looked up into the tree, his glasses knocked askew, joy written on his face. “I love you, Mary Anne Lamont!”
“I love you, Wallace Tuttle!” she yelled back.
With a grin defying the gravity of the situation, he locked his arms over the bottom limb and climbed until he joined her midway up the trunk. “Help is coming.”
Mary Anne’s heart melted. The silly man had braved water and destruction to join her in her tree perch. “Can’t we climb down?”
He shook his head. “It’s not safe for man nor beast down there. I don’t want to put you in any further danger.”
“Then why did you come?”
>
“I figured, if I couldn’t protect you from the flood, I could at least face it with you.”
This man meant what he said. The rain flattened his thick brown hair against his forehead, giving her a glimpse into what he would look like if he went bald. Still a handsome man, she decided.
She didn’t have time for any further thoughts as he leaned closer, closer, and claimed her lips in a kiss.
* * *
Wallace cherished every minute he spent with Mary Anne in the tree. Mary Anne shared details he had never before known about her. Now that she had torn the lid off her past, all her hidden dreams escaped in an outpouring of memories big and small.
She demanded the same of him. “What about you, Wallace? Do you want to write more books?”
“I thought I did. That’s what I told my family I wanted to do, and they let me pursue my dream.”
“And now you’ve written a book. I can’t wait to see it.”
Wallace hoped the editor felt the same way. “I think I had to write this book, about our birds.”
“Those baby raccoons are so much fun, you should write a book about them, too.”
He shrugged, his shoulder bumping hers. “Maybe. But the question is what God wants for me. I’ll always be involved with the Audubon Society, but I don’t know about more books. Not yet.”
With Mary Anne in his arms, Wallace felt strangely warm. On a night of the impossible and improbable, one thing had yet to be uttered.
“There is one thing I know for sure about the rest of my life.”
“Oh? What is that?”
“Who I want to spend it with. You. As soon as we put this mess behind us, I’m going to ask you to marry me. So you need to decide if a city girl like you wants to spend the rest of her life with me, here in Maple Notch.”
“I don’t need time.” Mary Anne smiled so sweetly that he kissed her again.
Hidden Dreams Page 15