Elementary, My Dear Watkins

by Mindy Starns Clark

  There, I told you. Please don’t try to find me. I got nothing to do with this, I just heard about it and thought you deserved to know. I’ve seen you on your website and in the newspaper, and you seem like a nice person and I don’t think this is right.

  Be careful and watch your back.

  The note was signed, as before, by Trying To Stay Out of It. Underneath was a PS: One of the toaster ovens I’m looking at has a Teflon interior. What do you think? Would a nonstick coating be worth the extra cost?

  “Hello, beautiful.”

  Jo looked up, startled.

  There, in front of her, was Bradford, smiling and holding out a dozen roses.

  2

  Flustered, Jo found the button that would save the e-mail, quickly exited the program, and closed the device. She didn’t know how to process any of it: the e-mail telling her she was in danger or the fact that Bradford was standing here in front of her. The last time she’d seen him, she was flat on her back in the hospital, terribly injured, and he had barged into her room without warning, hidden behind a giant bouquet of flowers. Funny, but she almost felt as helpless now as she had then.

  “I guess the roses are a little over the top, huh?” he said, the smile fading from his face. He let his arm fall down by his side. “Sorry about that. Here I go again, trying too hard. I can tell I’ve upset you.”

  Jo tried to pull herself together, her mind still racing from the e-mail. Maybe this toaster oven guy really was just some nut out for kicks, like the Kreston detective had said. Forcing herself to focus, Jo tucked away her PDA and turned her full attention on Bradford. She would deal with the e-mail later, after he was gone.

  Bradford stood there in front of her, a little weathered but still movie-star handsome, with blond hair and blue eyes and a chiseled jaw straight out of GQ magazine. Truly, he was so gorgeous that Jo wouldn’t have been surprised to look out of the window onto Times Square and see his face on a billboard. She didn’t know why it had never crossed her mind before that he was better looking than she was. In a world that favored equal-beauty dating, somehow she had bagged one slightly beyond her limit—physically speaking, that is. She wasn’t unattractive, but she was more cute than pretty, kind of like her surname, a tulip, sitting there looking up at a rare orchid.

  Correction. Not a rare orchid, that was too lovely. Bradford is more like a carrion flower—beautiful on the outside, putrid on the inside.

  “Have a seat,” Jo said, finally finding her voice.

  Bradford set the roses on the coffee table and took the chair that was at an angle to hers, his knees coming to rest against her thigh. Back when they were dating, he had been a very physical guy, always standing close, sitting even closer, brushing his legs against hers or running his hands lightly along her back. Back then, she’d thought it was sexy, if sometimes a little forward.

  Now it seemed almost threatening.

  Jo sat up straight, visibly pulling her leg a few inches away so that they were no longer touching.

  “You said you were completely recovered,” he told her, spotting her foot propped up in the cast. “That doesn’t look good.”

  “Just a sprain, taking its time to heal. It’ll be fine soon.”

  “Good. Otherwise, you look great. You look beautiful, Jo. But then, you always do. With all your injuries in that explosion, you’re so lucky you didn’t have any cuts to your face.”

  He flashed her what she’d always thought of as his million-watt smile. She studied it as if it were some sort of artifact. How that smile used to captivate her. Now it only seemed foreign and somehow artificial. Jo wondered what it was like to be so perfect—and if he expected his loved ones also to be perfect. If so, would cuts to her face and the resultant facial scarring have disqualified her from his affections? She felt nauseous at the thought that she had almost married this man.

  “You wanted to talk, Bradford. So talk.”

  He glanced away, seeming nervous. Wringing his hands in his lap, he looked furtively around the room and then back at her.

  “Just hear me out,” he said, his voice suddenly very low. “Because you’re going to have trouble believing what I have to tell you.”

  Oh, please. Here we go with the drama.

  “Bradford, why did you walk out on our wedding?” Jo asked, not bothering to lower her voice. That was the question she’d been wanting to ask for months. It was high time he answered it.

  “Because…” he said, nervously tugging at the back of his hair, “because I realized I was falling in love with you.”

  Jo just stared at him, wondering what Twilight Zone episode she had wandered into. She thought she was beyond caring about this, but suddenly she could feel her chest fill with an emotion she couldn’t name. Hurt? Righteous indignation? She supposed that rage was the best word for it. She was furious.

  “Isn’t love supposed to be part of a wedding?” she asked, trying to hold her temper. “Kind of a big part?”

  He nodded, his expression grave.

  “Yes, but when you came walking up the aisle, and I looked into your beautiful green eyes, I knew I couldn’t do it, not that way. I was in love with you. You deserved better than that.”

  “Better than a fiancé who says ‘I don’t’ rather than ‘I do’ and then runs away?”

  “Jo, I—”

  “Better than a groom who cashes in the two coach-class honeymoon tickets to Bermuda for one in first class and takes the trip without the bride?”

  “I had to get away,” he pleaded. “I had to think.”

  “I hope you enjoyed the honeymoon suite.”

  “I was miserable. I never expected love to enter into it. But you deserved better than to be the victim of a hoax.”

  Jo squinted at him, trying to understand.

  “You’re calling our wedding a hoax?” she cried. “Funny, but I seem to recall paying actual money for the wedding gown, not to mention the cake and the flowers and everything else. I certainly used real friends as my bridesmaids, and my own, actual father walked me down the aisle. Even the pastor at the front of the room was a bona fide, ordained minister. I know that for a fact. If he had pronounced us husband and wife, it would’ve actually stuck. Yeah, sure sounds like a hoax to me.”

  Jo didn’t like the sarcastic bitterness in her own voice, but she was unable to stop herself. Until that moment, she hadn’t realized how much anger she still carried about the whole incident. Obviously, she still had a ways to go in the forgiveness department.

  “Look,” Bradford said softly, “when I first walked out, I tried to figure out how I could tell you the truth about what had been going on without losing you. But I knew that could never happen. You were lost to me forever.”

  “Hey, you ran out on me!”

  He nodded miserably.

  “And I knew that if you found out the truth, you’d never take me back. Finally, I just tried to get over you. Tried to forget about you. Tried to go on with my life.”

  “Good. I’ve certainly gotten over you.”

  “But it hasn’t worked for me because somewhere in all of that pretense, I really fell for you. I fell hard, Jo. Finally I decided the only chance I might have of winning you back was to come completely clean. That’s why I showed up at the hospital and why I’m here now. I want to tell you everything, and in spite of it, I want you to consider giving our relationship a second chance.”

  Jo ran a hand through her hair. She wouldn’t get back with him if they were the last two beings on earth and her only choice for companionship was between him and a potted plant. At least the potted plant would be exactly what it was, not something else it only pretended to be.

  The image of Danny suddenly filled her mind, and she felt a deep, silent gratefulness that God in His infinite wisdom had sent Bradford running out at the last moment, saving her from making the mistake of a lifetime. But even if Danny weren’t in the picture, which he most absolutely was, Bradford was so over, so been-there-done-that, so finished. Their
relationship was as done as done could get. He had hurt her beyond belief, and even though in the end his rejection had turned out to be a tremendous blessing in disguise, it had still been a hard pill to swallow.

  “Bradford, please get to the point. What sham? What hoax?”

  “Our relationship. It was all fake.”

  Jo’s eyes widened.

  “Fake?”

  “From the very beginning. The courtship, the engagement, even the engagement ring.”

  “That’s not true. That diamond was no fake and you know it.”

  Before the wedding, Jo had had the ring appraised for insurance purposes—and she’d been shocked to learn that it was worth almost $25,000. Given that, once everything felt apart, she had shipped the ring back to Bradford heavily insured, along with a note kindly suggesting he get a refund and use it to sponsor the national budget for a small country.

  “Yes, the ring was real. But what I mean is, I’m not the one who paid for it.”

  Jo’s eyes suddenly filled with tears.

  “My feelings were real,” she said softly, irritated that she was crying. But the tears weren’t for Bradford—they were for her hurt, her shame, her humiliation. Sometimes she wondered if she’d ever get over the shock of what he’d done to her. Now it seemed as if there would be even more to get over.

  “Jo, listen,” he said, leaning toward her, elbows on his knees. He leaned so far forward that his face was only inches from hers. Her heart pounding, she wondered if he was the danger to her, if he, in fact, was the one that the Kreston e-mailer had warned her about. In her gut Jo didn’t think so, but she couldn’t be sure. At the very least, she was glad they were in a public place.

  “From the moment we met,” he continued, “our entire relationship was…engineered.”

  “Engineered?”

  “I don’t know any other way to tell you this: I was paid. I was paid to make you fall in love with me.”

  “What?”

  “Jo, I was paid to marry you.”

  “This makes no sense,” Danny said finally, shaking his head. He wasn’t worth $175,000 to anyone yet. He was good, but not that good, especially in a studio. “I’m sorry, but my field of study, my focus, my art is in nature.”

  “So pose the perfume bottles around a waterfall or something,” Luc quipped, and Chester laughed, nodding.

  “You’re an outstanding photographer,” the older man said, “and we want the artistic perspective you bring to the table. If that includes getting out of the studio and into nature, we might be able to make that happen. I know talent when I see it, son, and I see it in you.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Danny replied humbly, his mind spinning.

  “And don’t forget,” Chester added, “you’d be working with some of the most beautiful models in the world.”

  Danny studied the man in front of him, fully aware of the most obvious question: Why me? Most of his photos hadn’t received enough exposure yet to merit this kind of attention—and the few that had were all landscape shots, not fashion spreads.

  Something seemed fishy about the whole deal, and he didn’t just mean the crabmeat in the appetizers.

  “Have you seen the models in Haute Couture, Danny?” Chester continued, lowering his voice and winking. “A good-looking fellow like you could find plenty of, uh, side benefits in that situation, if you know what I mean.”

  Chester and Luc both chuckled, but Danny wasn’t smiling.

  “Sorry,” Danny replied, “but I have a little trouble thinking of beautiful women as being mere ‘side benefits.’ They’re people, not perks.”

  Chester and Luc laughed in surprise.

  “I forget to tell you, monsieur,” Luc said to Chester, “that our Danny is a man of morals.”

  “Morals, eh?” Chester asked, eyeing Danny with a bemused expression. “Now there’s something you don’t see every day.”

  “Not to mention he already has a girlfriend, soon to be a fiancé, I think. The models would not tempt him, pas de tout.”

  “Yeah, I’m going to take a pass on the job,” Danny said, setting his napkin on the table, trying to keep the interview off the personal level, “but thank you very much for the offer.”

  Chester’s expression didn’t change. He merely tapped his smelly cigar against the ashtray and then seemed to try a different approach.

  “A girlfriend,” he said. “Is she here in Paris with you?”

  Danny shook his head slightly.

  “She’s back home. In Pennsylvania.”

  “And you’re from…what’s it called? Mulberry Bush?”

  “Mulberry Glen, just south of Moore City.”

  “Moore City? Why, that’s just a few hours from New York. If you scheduled your shootings efficiently, you could practically commute.”

  For a flicker of an instant, Danny was tempted: great salary, close to Jo, working as a photographer for one of the most prestigious magazines in the world…

  But it wasn’t his dream, not even close. Why should he have sacrificed so much to come this far, only to compromise in the end?

  He took a deep breath and searched for the words that would convince this man that he should look elsewhere.

  “Sir, I am flattered by your persistence, and believe me, your offer is more than generous. But I’m not a fashion photographer; I’m a nature photographer. My ultimate goal is to use the knowledge and experience and connections I’m gaining here in Paris and parlay them into a full-time career back home in Pennsylvania as a contract photographer for one of the major nature photography markets. No offense, but I have zero interest in living in New York City and working for Haute Couture magazine.”

  “Zero?” the man asked skeptically, still looking as if he weren’t getting the point. Danny had a feeling that offers like this weren’t made every day—much less rejected, particularly by a nobody like him.

  “Yes,” Danny said, his mind’s eye seeing $175,000 slipping through his fingers. “Less than zero.”

  “It’s true,” Bradford said to Jo earnestly. “Before we ever met, I was given lists, long lists, of everything about you. Favorite food, favorite movies, favorite pastimes. I memorized them and pretended they were my favorites, too. Didn’t it ever occur to you how strange it was that we had so very much in common? Practically from the night we met, we seemed like soulmates.”

  Jo looked down at her neatly manicured nails, remembering that night. She’d been visiting with her parents in the city, and they had all but forced her to go on a blind date with a young man who worked at the family company.

  “You’ll just love Bradford,” Jo’s mother had gushed. “He’s simply perfect for you.”

  Jo had agreed to the date only to get her mother off her back, but after spending the evening with Bradford, Jo had been shocked to find that what her mother had said was true. Bradford was handsome, smart, funny, sensitive—and they had so much in common. By the end of the evening, they were already making plans to get together the next day. Within two months, they were engaged.

  “So what you’re telling me,” Jo said, “is that the Bradford I thought I knew doesn’t exist?”

  He shrugged.

  “You knew me, Jo,” he said. “For the most part. You knew my personality and how we got along. You just weren’t clear on certain things about my life or my preferences. Or my plans for the future.”

  “And what are those plans?”

  “I was paid all through the engagement, but our wedding was supposed to guarantee me one huge final financial payoff, plus a Fifth Avenue condo, a big promotion at work, and a raise. I would also be put on the fast track toward the ultimate position of CEO of Bosworth Industries, stepping into your father’s shoes upon his retirement, if I proved myself worthy between now and then.”

  “And history would repeat itself,” Jo said quietly to herself. “Just as my father married into my mother’s family business and eventually took over from my grandfather, you would do the same through me.”
>
  “It worked out well for your parents and the company, didn’t it?”

  “That’s only because my father is brilliant at business. And he worked his way up legitimately—unless you’re telling me that someone paid my father to marry my mother too.”

  “No, not that I know of,” Bradford replied, shaking his head. “Just that the dynamic would be the same, yet again a son-in-law working his way up to the helm. It seemed perfect to everyone involved. They really want to keep things in the family.”

  “So who is ‘everyone involved’? And why did they do this? Did my grandmother pay you to marry me?”

  “Your grandmother? No, I don’t believe she knows anything about it.”

  “Who, then? My father? My mother? The company? Was this just about locking in a good CEO through marriage?”

  “No, of course not. It’s so much more complicated than that. The fact that our marriage would keep the business in the family was simply a nice side benefit. The fact is, they needed you to marry someone, anyone. They just liked the choice of me because they knew I could make it happen fast—”

  “Boy, did you ever.”

  “—and they knew I was a nice guy, great at business, and loyal to Bosworth Industries. I was the perfect choice.”

  “Especially because you were just amoral enough to do what they wanted.”

  Bradford’s eyes were pleading as he gazed at her.

  “Jo, you have no idea the amounts of money they were throwing my way. Anyone could’ve been swayed.”

  Not me. Not Danny.

  “Again, who paid you to marry me, Bradford? Who was behind this? And why were they in such a hurry? What difference does it make to anyone if I’m married or not?”

  Bradford opened his mouth to speak, but then his head jerked up, turning toward some movement Jo had also spotted from the corner of her eye. She glanced in that direction as well but didn’t see anything unusual.

  “We can’t stay here,” Bradford whispered. “Is there somewhere we could go?”

  Jo felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.

  “Why?”