“I’m calm,” Leigh said.
Brenna’s doubtful gaze shifted to Leigh’s hands on the table. They were clasped together and clenched so tightly that the tops of her fingers were white. Leigh hastily unclasped them. Brenna continued, “I sent Joe O’Hara to the pharmacy to pick up the prescription.”
It took Leigh a moment to realize that Joe O’Hara was her new chauffeur-bodyguard. Not only had she forgotten his name in the chaos of the last few days, she’d forgotten that Matt and Meredith Farrell had insisted on loaning O’Hara to her before they left on their world cruise. He was staying at their New York apartment, but he was supposed to drive Leigh about in the Farrell limousine and protect her from further approaches by her stalker.
“I may as well warn you,” Brenna added with a sigh, “he’s a little upset that we didn’t ask him to drive the Blazer for us yesterday.”
Leigh lifted her hands in helpless admission of the embarrassing truth. “That would have been a good idea. I just—forgot he existed.”
“If you ask me,” Hilda angrily announced, “that man doesn’t know his place! He’s supposed to drive you when you want him to, not when he decides he should.” She banged a pot to emphasize her opinion. “He’s just a chauffeur.”
Leigh forced herself to focus on the matter at hand before it resulted in more disharmony in her already disharmonious life. “I understand what you’re saying, Hilda, but he’s not used to being ‘just a chauffeur.’ He’s worked for the Farrells for years, and they think of him as a very loyal member of their family. They told him to look after me while they were gone, and he’s probably going to take that very seriously, particularly right now when—when things are so mixed up.” She was about to say more when the service door into the kitchen from the elevator foyer was flung open, and she half rose in her chair, stifling a cry of nervous shock.
“Sorry, I guess I shoulda knocked,” Joe O’Hara said, striding into the kitchen wearing a heavy black overcoat with the collar turned up over his ears.
A thick-shouldered, heavyset man about five feet ten inches tall, he had the lumbering gait of a grizzly bear and an almost-ugly face that looked as if it had taken serious poundings in either the boxing ring or street brawls. His appearance didn’t daunt Hilda, however. She glared at him over her shoulder and snapped, “Don’t you come into my kitchen without wiping your feet!”
A flash of surprised annoyance made the chauffeur look almost threatening as he glared first at the irate woman across the room and then at his shiny shoes. Dismissing the entire matter with a shrug, he hung his overcoat in the closet and approached the kitchen table carrying a little white bag from the local pharmacy in his meaty fist. “Mrs. Manning,” he said, his gravelly voice tinged with calm resolution. “I realize you don’t know me, and you probably don’t want a stranger underfoot at a time like this, but your husband and Matt Farrell both told me to look after you and make sure you stay safe.”
Leigh had to tip her head all the way back in order to see him, and since that made her neck hurt, she motioned him to sit next to Brenna. “When you walked in just now, you startled me. It’s not that I don’t want you here,” she finished.
“No need to apologize,” he told her, settling his broad frame onto a chair that looked a little too small for him. “But I have to tell you that if you’d let me drive you into the mountains Sunday, instead of driving there yourself, you might not be sitting here grittin’ your teeth so no one will notice how bad you hurt.”
“Thank you for making my effort unnecessary,” Leigh replied, not at all certain whether she liked him or not.
Her reprimand sailed over the chauffeur’s head. “Yesterday, you shoulda called me and let me do the driving. You two women got no business driving around the mountains in the snow by yourselves. You coulda got stuck!”
“Well, we obviously didn’t,” Brenna pointed out.
“Yeah, lucky for you. But if you had, what would you have done, hiked off for help while Mrs. Manning huddled alone in the car, hurt and sick and trying to stay warm after it ran out of gas?”
“They would have managed just fine,” Hilda informed him sharply as she stirred the contents of the pot on the stove.
Leigh observed the uneasy, heated exchange taking place between her three employees as if from a great distance, her entire being focused on the telephone and the clock on the opposite wall. When Logan’s private line suddenly lit up and began to ring, she shoved Brenna back in her chair and bolted for the phone, her injuries forgotten. “Hello,” she burst out breathlessly.
The male voice on the other end was deep and unfamiliar. “Mrs. Manning?”
“Yes, who is this?”
“Michael Valente.”
Leigh slumped against the wall, unable to hide her disappointment. “Yes, Mr. Valente?”
“I’m sorry to disturb you. From the sound of your voice, I assume you haven’t had any word yet about Logan?”
“No. Nothing.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again. He hesitated a moment and then said, “I know this isn’t good timing, but Logan has some documents I need. He had them with him at your home when he called me from there Saturday afternoon. I’m only a few blocks away. Would it be at all possible for me to stop by and get them?”
“I have no idea where they are,” Leigh said, disliking the idea of anyone going through Logan’s things when he wasn’t there.
“They are the plans and a prospectus from another project of mine that Logan borrowed.”
The documents were his property, not Logan’s. He was making that courteously but abundantly clear. Leigh swallowed her resentment and disappointment that the call wasn’t from or about Logan. “I see. Then come over and get them.”
“Thank you very much. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
Leigh forced herself away from the supporting wall, hung up the phone, and looked around at the occupants of the kitchen. A few moments ago, they had merely been employees who seemed to be bickering over nothing, but as she looked at the three tense faces etched with raw anxiety, sympathy, and concern for her, her heart melted. They truly cared; they wanted to help in whatever way they could. She had a thousand acquaintances, but she knew she couldn’t count on their discretion or their silence. She knew from experience that Hilda and Brenna were completely trustworthy, and she had a feeling that Joe O’Hara probably was, too. Right now, those three people were her closest friends and allies, her family.
She gave them a wan smile, but disappointment over the phone call she’d answered made her face even paler, and Brenna noticed it. She opened the bag from the pharmacy, removed the prescription bottle, and held it toward Leigh. “Leigh, Dr. Winters was insistent that you take these.”
Leigh gently but firmly pushed the bottle away. “I don’t like drugs that affect my mind. I don’t need them. Later, if I feel that I do, I’ll take them. I promise.”
Satisfied that the pill issue seemed to be resolved, O’Hara tackled the issue that was foremost on his own mind. “If you’ve got a spare room I could use, I think it would be a good idea if I stayed here until things settle down.”
Leigh’s apartment had sixteen rooms, including two small suites that were intended to be used as “servants’ quarters,” one of which Hilda occupied. The other was vacant, but Leigh felt a sudden, almost superstitious need to keep everything exactly as it had been before Logan disappeared. So long as everything stayed the same, his absence was only temporary, but making a change—that might encourage or imply permanence. “That’s very nice of you, but I’m not alone. Hilda stays here.”
His reply made Hilda whirl around and glower. “I’m real sure Hilda could beat up an omelet or wallop the dust right out of a rug,” he mocked, “but until your husband comes back, I really think you need a man around here to deal with people problems. The lobby’s crawling with reporters, you got fans lined up out on the sidewalk, and you got a stalker who knows your husband is out of the way now. There’s no telling
when somebody’s gonna pay off your doorman or find some other way to sneak up here, but sooner or later, it’s gonna happen.” Sensing that Leigh was wavering, he quickly played his trump card. “I’m sure your husband would expect me to stay here and look after his womenfolk,” he stated emphatically, and to Leigh’s shock, he cast a benevolent look around the room that encompassed indignant, self-sufficient Hilda and displeased, independent Brenna in the category of “womenfolk” O’Hara felt obliged to protect.
Somewhere in her frantic mind, Leigh noted that O’Hara had a small, startling knack for diplomacy and wily persuasion, because he’d scored his win as soon as he deftly turned his wishes into Logan’s wishes. “You’re probably right, Mr. O’Hara. Thank you very much.”
“You’re welcome. And please call me Joe,” he reminded her. “That’s what Meredith—I mean, Mrs. Farrell—calls me.”
Leigh nodded as she shifted her attention to Hilda, who was placing two bowls on the place mat in front of her. “What is this?” Leigh asked, staring at a bowl containing a thick white substance that looked like gritty paste. Beside it was a smaller bowl of nasty-looking brown lumps that made Leigh’s stomach churn.
“It’s Cream of Wheat and prunes,” Hilda said. “I heard Mr. Manning say that was what you were going to have for breakfast from now on.” When Leigh continued to stare blankly at her, she added, “I heard him say it on Sunday morning, just before he left for that place in the mountains where you were supposed to meet him.”
The achingly sweet memory washed over Leigh. “No more pears,” Logan had teased her. “You’re addicted. From now on, it’s Cream of Wheat and prunes for you.” Tears blurred Leigh’s vision, and without realizing what she was doing, she put her arms on the table around the two bowls, encircling them, trying to gather them to her and protect the happy memory. Her head fell forward, and her shoulders began to shake with helpless weeping that embarrassed her and alarmed the people in the kitchen. Trying to gain control and make light of what had happened, she turned her face away and brushed the tears from her cheeks with her right hand. With her left hand, she reached toward Brenna and opened her palm. Brenna understood and put one of Sheila Winters’s prescription pills in it.
“I’m sorry,” she told the three of them. They looked at her with such intense, speechless sympathy that she had to blink back a fresh surge of tears.
“I’ll fix you your usual breakfast,” Hilda announced, relying as always on domestic matters to achieve balance in an otherwise unbalanced, disorderly world.
“I think I’ll eat this one today,” Leigh said, giving in to a fresh rush of painful sentimentality as Brenna got up to answer yet another call on the main line.
Chapter 13
* * *
With her gaze riveted on the kitchen clock, Leigh forced down part of her breakfast while she tried to gauge how long it would take for Shrader and Littleton to determine if the state trooper had actually found the location of her accident.
In Brenna’s office in the next room, the phone continued to ring incessantly, and each time Brenna answered a call, Leigh tensed, waiting. . . . When Brenna finally reappeared in the kitchen, holding a cordless phone in her hand, Leigh jumped up from the table and nearly overturned her chair, only to have Brenna quickly shake her head and explain, “It’s Meredith Farrell. They’ve just heard about your accident and everything. I thought you might want to talk to her.”
Leigh nodded and took the call. The shipboard satellite hookup was poor, and there was the usual brief delay that caused both parties to either talk at the same time or stop and wait unnecessarily to see if the other person was finished speaking. Meredith volunteered to cancel their trip and fly back to New York, and Matt Farrell offered the services of a large investigative firm that was among the companies he owned. Leigh declined both offers and thanked them sincerely. She was certain the Farrells’ offer to cancel their trip had been a courtesy that they knew she would decline, but she was surprised and touched by it nonetheless.
After that call, she went into the living room and sat down at her desk, waiting for something to happen. Within moments, Brenna walked in to give her news she didn’t want: “Horace down in the lobby just called and said that Mr. Valente is here. I told Horace to send him up. Do you want to go into the other room and let me handle him?”
Leigh very much wanted to do exactly that, but she did not want anyone touching anything in Logan’s study unless she herself was there. “No, I’ll take care of it,” Leigh said as a buzzer announced the arrival of her unwanted visitor at her door.
Brenna let him in and automatically offered to take his coat. To Leigh’s dismay, he shrugged out of it and handed it to her, which evidently meant he intended to stay longer than the time it would take to find his papers and leave. Leigh had no intention of granting Michael Valente a social visit, but as he strode swiftly down the foyer steps and crossed the living room toward her, it was a little difficult to believe the tall, immaculately groomed, athletically built man striding toward her was a criminal. Dressed in an exquisitely tailored dark blue suit, pristine white shirt, and a navy blue and dark gold silk herringbone tie, he looked like an expensively dressed Wall Street banker. But then, so had John Gotti.
As he came toward her, he subjected Leigh to the same sort of intense scrutiny he’d focused on her the night of her party, and she found it just as discomforting and overly personal. She stood rigidly while he finished inspecting every feature on her face at close range, but she ignored his hands when he held them out to her and said quietly, “How are you holding up?”
“As well as can be expected,” Leigh said politely but impersonally.
He slid his rejected hands into his pants pockets, an odd smile lurking at the corner of his mouth, and said absolutely nothing, which made Leigh feel awkward, rude, and ill at ease. In that state of momentary uncertainty, she felt compelled to add something. “I feel better than I look,” she said.
“I’m sure you must,” he said with his ghost of a smile. “I’ve seen faces that looked worse than yours—but their owners weren’t breathing.”
Leigh figured he’d probably seen a lot of dead people, at least one of whom he’d killed himself, and she turned abruptly toward Logan’s study. “I’m not certain what you’re looking for, but—”
“Leigh!” Brenna burst out, running into the living room, while Hilda and Joe O’Hara both crowded into the kitchen doorway. “Detective Shrader is on the telephone! It’s important.”
Leigh grabbed for the closest telephone, one that was on an end table next to the living room sofa. “Detective Shrader?”
“Mrs. Manning, we’re pretty sure we’ve found the spot where you went off the road. There are some boulders near the top of an embankment with fresh black paint on them, and there’s a path of broken branches down the embankment. There’s a small clearing at the bottom and we’ve just determined there’s water under the snow and ice there. We’ve also detected a large mass of metal in the water, and we’ve called for trucks with winches—”
“What about my husband!” Leigh burst out. “He has to be somewhere close to there!”
“We’ve got search teams on the way to the area; they’ll start circling out over—”
“I’m coming out there. Where are you?”
“Look, why don’t you just stay by the phone. It will take you several hours to—”
“I want to be there!”
Michael Valente touched her sleeve. “I have a helicopter—”
Leigh’s momentary annoyance at his interruption gave way to dizzying gratitude. “Detective Shrader,” she said into the phone, “I have use of a helicopter. Tell me where you are—” As she spoke, Leigh looked wildly about for paper and a pen. Valente reached for the phone with one hand and into his jacket pocket for a pen with the other. “I’ll get the directions,” he told her. “Go and get ready to leave.”
As Leigh rushed for the bedroom, she heard him say into the phone, “Exactly w
here are you, Detective?”
It took Leigh several painful minutes to pull on her boots, and when she emerged carrying her coat and gloves, Valente was already standing in the foyer with his coat on, flanked by Brenna and Hilda. He frowned as he watched her walking toward him; then he took her coat from her. “Stand still, and let me do the work,” he instructed, and then he drew each sleeve over her arm, rather than merely holding the coat behind her.
The procedure took only moments, but to Leigh it seemed much longer. She was already out the door with him when she called over her shoulder to Brenna and Hilda, “I’ll phone you as soon as I know anything.”
“Don’t forget,” Brenna said.
In the elevator, Leigh felt Michael Valente’s eyes on her, but she was so grateful to him that she was able to ignore his scrutiny and even managed to give him a wan smile as she said, “Thank you very much for what you’re doing.”
He dismissed that without reply. “A couple of reporters were hanging around the entrance to your building,” he said instead. “I had your secretary phone my driver and tell him to bring my car around to the service entrance. Where is it?” he asked as they stepped out of the elevator.
“Follow me.” The elevators were blocked from the view of people on the street by a veritable forest of potted trees in the lobby, and Leigh carefully stayed behind them as she turned right, toward the rear of the building. They emerged into an alley blocked by two identical black Mercedes limousines with chauffeurs standing at attention beside each of the vehicles’ open passenger doors.
Valente’s car was in the rear. His chauffeur was a clean-cut man in his early thirties, who looked like a Secret Service agent who ought to be driving a dignitary’s car. Joe O’Hara, with his bulky body and prizefighter’s broken face, looked as if he should be driving a former convict’s car. Valente started to steer Leigh toward his own car, but O’Hara stepped purposefully into his path. “I’m Mrs. Manning’s driver,” he informed Valente.
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