by Nora Roberts
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“You’ve got family in San Francisco.”
This time Ryan’s eyes narrowed and sparked. “Be careful, Detective.”
“Just making a comment. Kid was an artist, you got an art gallery out there. I figured you might have known him. Name was Mathers, Harrison Mathers.”
“No, I don’t know a Harrison Mathers, but I can check easily enough to see if we display any of his work.”
“Might not be a bad idea.”
“Is this Mathers what you’d call another dangle?”
“Oh yeah, just one of those things that make you scratch your head. Then I start thinking about that big-deal bronze in Florence, the one that turned out not to be such a big deal. I’d think Dr. Jones would be pretty upset about that, pretty pissed off at her mother too, for kicking her off the project. I found out somebody stole that piece, went right into the storage area at the National Museum over there and took it, slick as spit. Now why would somebody want to take something, risk that kind of theft for something that isn’t worth more than the price of the metal?”
“Art’s a subjective mystery, Detective. Maybe someone took a liking to it.”
“Could be, but whoever did was a pro, not some half-ass thief. Pros don’t waste their time, unless they’ve got good reason. You’d agree with that, wouldn’t you, Mr. Boldari? Being a professional yourself.”
“Certainly.” Damned if he didn’t like this cop, Ryan mused. “I detest wasting time.”
“Exactly. Makes me wonder what that bronze is worth to somebody.”
“If I see it, Detective, I’ll do an appraisal and let you know. But I can tell you, if that bronze was real, if it was worth millions, Miranda wouldn’t kill for it. And I think you agree,” Ryan added. “Being a professional yourself.”
Cook chuckled. Something wasn’t square about the guy, he thought. But you had to like him. “No, I don’t think she killed anybody, and I can’t picture her dancing all over the world pinching pictures and statues. Woman’s got integrity pasted on her forehead. That’s why I know, in my gut, she’s hiding something. She knows more than she’s saying. And if you’re friendly enough with her, Boldari, you’ll convince her to tell me just what that is before somebody decides she’s expendable.”
She was asking herself just how much she could tell, how much she could risk telling. In the South Gallery, surrounded by the art of the masters, she sat with her hands over her face. And suffered.
She knew Cook was upstairs. She’d seen him come in, and like a child avoiding a lecture, had slipped behind a doorway until he’d passed by.
When her mother came in, she let her hands fall into her lap.
“I thought I might find you here.”
“Oh yes.” Miranda rose and picked up one of the champagne flutes from a huddle of them on a table. “Reliving past glories. Where else would I be? Where else would I go?”
“I haven’t been able to find your brother.”
“I hope he’s sleeping. It was a difficult night.” She didn’t add that he hadn’t been sleeping, at least not in his own bed, when she left the house that morning.
“Yes, for all of us. I’m going to the hospital. Your father’s meeting me there. Hopefully Elise is up to visitors, and she’d hoped they would release her by this afternoon.”
“Give her my best. I’ll try to stop by later this evening, either the hospital, or the hotel if they’ve let her go. Please tell her she’s welcome to stay at the house for as long as she likes.”
“It would be awkward.”
“Yes, but I’ll make the offer nonetheless.”
“It’s generous of you. She—It was fortunate she wasn’t hurt more seriously. It could have been . . . We might have found her like Richard.”
“I know you’re very fond of her.” Miranda set down the glass in the precise spot where it had been. She was careful to make certain the stem of the glass fit exactly on the outline it had left on the cloth. “Fonder, I think, than you ever were of your own children.”
“This is hardly the occasion for pettiness, Miranda.”
She looked up then. “Do you hate me?”
“What a ridiculous thing to say, and what an inappropriate time to say it.”
“When would be an appropriate time for me to ask my mother if she hates me?”
“If this stems from the business in Florence—”
“Oh, it goes back much farther, in much deeper than what happened in Florence, but that’ll do for now. You didn’t stand by me. You never have. All of my life I’ve waited for it, that moment when you’d finally be there. Why the hell weren’t you ever there for me?”
“I refuse to indulge you in this behavior.” With an icy stare, Elizabeth turned and started out.
She’d never know what prompted her to ignore a lifetime of training, but Miranda was across the room, grabbing Elizabeth’s arm, whirling her around with a violence that stunned both of them. “You will not walk out on me until I have an answer. I’m sick to death of having you walk literally and figuratively away from me. Why couldn’t you ever be a mother to me?”
“Because you’re not my daughter.” Elizabeth snapped it out, her eyes flaring to a blue burn. “You were never mine.” She wrenched her arm free, her breath coming fast and hard as control frayed. “Don’t you dare stand there and demand from me after all I’ve sacrificed, all I’ve endured because your father elected to pass his bastard off as mine.”
“Bastard?” Her world, already shaky, tilted away under her feet. “I’m not your daughter?”
“No, you are not. I gave my word that I would never tell you.” Infuriated that she’d allowed temper and fatigue to undermine her control, Elizabeth strode to the window, stared out. “Well, you’re a grown woman, and perhaps you have a right to know.”
“I—” Miranda pressed a hand to her heart because she wasn’t sure it continued to beat. She could only stare at the rigid back of the woman who’d so suddenly become a stranger. “Who is my mother? Where is she?”
“She died several years ago. She was no one,” Elizabeth added, turning back. The sun wasn’t kind to women of a certain age. In its glare Miranda saw that Elizabeth looked haggard, almost ill. Then a cloud rolled over the sun and the moment was gone. “One of your father’s . . . short-term interests.”
“He had an affair.”
“His name is Jones, isn’t it?” Elizabeth said bitterly, then waved a hand as if annoyed. “In this case, he was careless and the woman became pregnant. She was not, apparently, as easily shaken off as most. Charles had no intention of marrying her, of course, and when she realized that, she insisted he deal with the child. It was a difficult situation.”
A quick, nasty stab of pain lanced through the shock. “She didn’t want me either.”
With the faintest of shrugs, Elizabeth walked back and sat. “I have no idea what the woman wanted. But what she chose to do was demand that Charles raise you. He came to me and outlined the problem. My choices were to divorce him, live with the scandal, lose what I had begun to build here at the Institute, and give up my plans for my own facility. Or—”
“You stayed with him.” Beneath the shock, the hot edge of hurt, was a simmering outrage. “After a betrayal like that, you stayed with him.”
“I had a choice. I made the one that was best for me. It was not without sacrifice. I had to go into seclusion, lose months while I waited for you to be born.” The memory of that could still swim to the surface like acid. “When you were, I had to present you as mine. I resented the fact of you, Miranda,” she said evenly. “Perhaps that’s unfair, but it’s accurate.”
“Yes, let’s be accurate.” Unable to bear it, she turned away. “Let’s stick with the facts.”
“I’m not a maternal woman nor do I pretend to be.” Elizabeth gestured again, with some impatience in her voice. “After Andrew was born, I had no intention of having another child. Ever. Then through circumstances that were n
one of my doing, I was given the responsibility of raising my husband’s child as my own. You were a reminder of his carelessness to me, of his lack of marital integrity. For Charles you were a reminder of a serious miscalculation.”
“Miscalculation,” Miranda said quietly. “Yes, I suppose that’s accurate too. It’s hardly a mystery now why neither one of you could ever love me—love at all if it comes to that. You don’t have it inside you.”
“You were well taken care of, given a good home, a fine education.”
“And never a moment of true affection,” Miranda finished, turning back. What she saw was a woman of rigid control, towering ambition, who had traded emotion for advancement. “I beat myself up all of my life to be worthy of your affection. I was wasting my time.”
Elizabeth sighed, got to her feet. “I’m not a monster. You were never harmed, never neglected.”
“Never held.”
“I did my best by you, and gave you every opportunity to prove yourself in your field. Up to and including the Fiesole Bronze.” She hesitated, then rose to open one of the bottles of water the cleaning staff had yet to clear.
“I took your reports, the X rays, the documents home. After I’d calmed down, after the worst of the embarrassment faded, I wasn’t quite sure you could have made such blatant mistakes, or that you would skew test results. Honesty has never been something I doubted in you.”
“Oh, thank you very much,” Miranda said dryly.
“The reports, the documents were stolen out of my home safe. I might not have known, but I wanted something before I left to come here. And I saw they were gone.”
She poured water into a glass, recapped the bottle, then sipped. “I wanted to get your grandmother’s pearls, to bring them here and put them in the safe-deposit box I keep at the local bank. I was going to give them to you before I left.”
“Why?”
“Perhaps because while you were never mine, you were always hers.” She set the glass aside. “I won’t apologize for what I’ve done or the choices I’ve made. I don’t ask you to understand me, any more than I have ever been able to understand you.”
“So, I just live with it?” Miranda demanded, and Elizabeth lifted a brow.
“I have. I will ask you to keep what we’ve spoken of in this room. You are a Jones, and as such have a responsibility to uphold the family name.”
“Oh yes, one hell of a name it is.” But she shook her head. “I know my duties.”
“Yes, I’m sure you do. I have to meet your father.” She picked up her bag. “I will discuss this with him if you like.”
“For what purpose?” Suddenly Miranda was weary, too weary to worry, to wonder, or to care. “Nothing’s really changed at all, has it?”
“No.”
When she was gone, Miranda let out a half-laugh and walked to the window. The storm that had been threatening all day was rolling in on a blistered sky.
“You okay?”
She leaned back as Ryan laid his hands on her shoulder. “How much did you hear?”
“Most of it.”
“Eavesdropping again,” she murmured, “sneaking in on little cat’s paws. I don’t know how to feel.”
“Whatever you feel, it’s right. You’re your own woman, Miranda. You always have been.”
“I guess I have to be.”
“Will you talk to your father about this?”
“What would be the point? He’s never seen me. He’s never heard me. And now I know why.” She closed her eyes, turned her cheek into his hand. “What kind of people are they, Ryan, that I come from? My father, Elizabeth, the woman who gave me to them?”
“I don’t know them.” Gently, he turned her until they were face-to-face. “But I know you.”
“I feel . . .” She drew a long breath, and let it come. “Relieved. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been afraid I was like her, had no real choice about being like her. But I’m not. I’m not.”
Shuddering once, she laid her head on his shoulder. “I don’t ever have to worry about that again.”
“I’m sorry for her,” he murmured. “For closing herself off to you. To love.”
Miranda knew what love was now, the terror and thrill of it. Whatever happened, she was grateful that part of herself had been opened. Even if the lock had been picked by a thief.
“Yes, so am I.” She held on, one last moment, then drew away to stand on her own. “I’m going to go to Cook with Richard’s book.”
“Give me time to get to Florence. I didn’t want to leave today, not when you had all this on your mind. I’ll leave tonight if I can manage it, or first thing in the morning. We’ll cut it back to thirty-six hours. That should do it.”
“I can’t give you more than that. I need this to be over.”
“It will be.”
She smiled, found it easier than she’d imagined. “And no sneaking into bedrooms, no riffling through jewelry boxes or safes.”
“Absolutely not. As soon as I’m finished with the Carters.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
“I won’t steal a thing. Didn’t I resist those pearls of your grandmother’s? All that lovely Italian gold of Elise’s? Even the pretty little locket I could have given one of my nieces? I’d have been a hero.”
“Your nieces are too young for lockets.” She let out a sigh and leaned her head on his shoulder again. “I didn’t get mine until I was sixteen. My grandmother gave me a very pretty heart-shaped one that her mother had given to her.”
“And you put a lock of your boyfriend’s hair in it.”
“Hardly. I didn’t have boyfriends. She’d already put her picture in it anyway, and my grandfather’s. It was to help me remember my roots.”
“Did it?”
“Of course. Good New England stock always remembers roots. I’m a Jones,” she said quietly. “And Elizabeth was right. I might never have been hers, but I was always my grandmother’s.”
“You’ll have her pearls now.”
“Yes, and I’ll treasure them. I lost the locket a few years ago. Broke my heart.” Feeling better, she straightened. “I need to get maintenance in here. We have to put this place back in order. I’m hoping we can open the exhibit to the public tomorrow.”
“You do that,” he murmured. “I’ll meet you back at the house later. Go straight there, will you, so I don’t have to search you out.”
“Where else would I go?”
thirty
A ndrew whistled as he walked into the house. He knew a grin was plastered on his face. It had been there all day. It wasn’t just the sex—well, he thought, jogging up the stairs, the sex hadn’t hurt. It had been a long dry spell for old Andrew J. Jones.
But he was in love. And Annie loved him back. Spending the day with her had been the most exciting, the most peaceful, the most amazing experience he’d ever known. It had been almost spiritual, he decided with a chuckle.
They’d cooked breakfast together, and had eaten it in bed. They’d talked until his throat was raw. So many words, so many thoughts and feelings bursting to get out. He’d never been able to talk to anyone the way he could talk to Annie.
Except Miranda. He couldn’t wait to tell Miranda.
They were going to be married in June.
Not a big, formal wedding, nothing like what he and Elise had done. Something simple and sweet, that’s what Annie wanted. Right in the backyard with friends and music. He was going to ask Miranda to be his best man. She’d get such a kick out of that.
He stepped into his bedroom. He wanted to get out of the wrinkled mess of the tuxedo. He was taking Annie out to dinner, and tomorrow, he was buying her a ring. She said she didn’t need one, but on that one issue he was going into override.
He wanted to see his ring on her finger.
He shrugged out of his jacket, tossed it aside. He vowed to shovel out his room sometime that week. He and Annie wouldn’t be moving in after they were married. The house was Miranda’s now. The new
Dr. and Mrs. Jones were going house hunting as soon as they got back from their honeymoon.