Silk and Stone

  “Oh, yes, there is.” She thought to herself, If I were eighteen, I’d go anywhere you asked me to go. I’d stay with you. I’d learn all about you, and I’d do every shocking thing I’ve thought about since I first read the sexy novels Mom keeps hidden under her bed.

  Jake said something under his breath. It sounded like Down, boy, but was spoken in such a hoarse whisper, she couldn’t be certain. “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing. If you were eighteen—”

  “If I were eighteen, I’d—” She stopped. Daydreams faded into reality. “I’d still have to think about Mom and Charlotte. Because Aunt Alex would still control their lives.” She leaned toward him urgently. “Can’t your folks make peace with her? I know she caused hard feelings between your mother and your uncle. I know she feuded with your mother over that—whatever you call it—the ruby your mother was supposed to inherit. But your uncle died a long time ago, and a ruby’s just a rock.”

  A flash freeze couldn’t have changed the atmosphere more. His expression hardened. She shivered at the cold, clear glitter in his eyes. “She’s a thief,” he said through gritted teeth. His voice was soft, but vibrated with some emotion Sam couldn’t analyze. Warning, or contempt. Or some sinister brand of respect. “And she’s dangerous.”

  “A thief? Dangerous? I can think of a dozen ugly ways to describe her—narrow-minded, and snobbish, and … even Mom admits she’s spoiled rotten—but you make her sound like a monster. She’s not. She has a conscience. It may be a shriveled little thing, but it exists. And she loves her family in her own sneaky way.”

  He leaned toward her. “You don’t know her the way I do.”

  “Then tell me what you know.”

  He started to say something, then stopped. Some inner struggle strained his expression; he looked as if he were fighting a hopeless battle. There were such angry, tragic shadows in his eyes that she made a small sound of distress. He sighed heavily and looked defeated. “She made my uncle miserable. She separated him from his family, and she used his money and name to turn our town into a place where money is the only thing that’s important. It started when she married Uncle William and took the ruby that should have been my mother’s. It’s not just a rock.”

  “It’s a very valuable rock,” Sam told him. “Valuable enough to make people fight over it. But she didn’t keep it—she buried it with your uncle. She made a sacrifice. Can’t you? Can’t you just forget about it?”

  “No. Because I don’t think she sacrificed a damn thing. I think she lied about burying it.”

  Sam stared at him. Her heart sank. “What would have been the point? She couldn’t sell a ruby like that without someone finding out; she couldn’t wear it.”

  “Common sense doesn’t always tell you what you want to know.”

  “But it’s better than wild ideas you can’t prove.” She didn’t want to argue with him; Aunt Alex stood in their way too much already. “I don’t want you to be right about her,” she said wearily. “Because you’ll always think about that when you look at me.”

  “No.”

  A terrible new thought occurred to her. Maybe he sees me as a way to get back at her. Because he knows she doesn’t want anything to do with his family. Maybe he’s using me to cause trouble. “Stop it,” he said. She stared at him. He was breathing roughly. He searched her eyes, and she couldn’t look away. Then he said, very slowly, “I could have left you and your mother and sister to go bankrupt in that crummy shop in Asheville. I could have left you to smother in that antique trunk.”

  How had he guessed her fears? And was he just saying what she wanted to hear now? She eased away from him, and suddenly her hand felt trapped, not safe, inside his. She tried to pull it loose. He wouldn’t let her. “Don’t be afraid of me,” he said quickly. “That’s what she wants. You’ll belong to her. She’ll use you. You’re worth more to her than Uncle William was—worth more than Tim is too. Because she thinks you can be just like her, and she’s proud of that.”

  “Stop talking about her as if she’s got horns and a forked tail!”

  “I wish she did. You couldn’t be fooled, then.”

  “I don’t believe anything I can’t see, or touch, or prove, or—”

  “You have to. You have to believe.” He almost yelled the words. Sam jerked her hand out of his and stood. “You’d better go,” she told him. “Unless you want her to find out you came here, to make her mad.”

  He rose as fast as she had, towering over her, a head taller than she. There was a kind of self-aware control about him that confused her even more, because if he didn’t care about her, he could have easily looked intimidating. “Here’s another thing you have to believe,” he said. “I don’t want to draw her attention. Someday I’ll have to, but people will get hurt if I’m not careful. So I’ll keep waiting. You may be the only one who can stop her. I don’t know. But I know that I’d rather die than see you get hurt by her.”

  Sam cried out and refused to look at him. “I couldn’t even stop a crummy con man from swindling my mother.”

  “Do you have a picture of him? I … do some tracking work for the Sheriff’s Department in Pandora. I know some detectives.”

  “We already gave a picture of the jerk to the police here.”

  “Well, give me one, and I’ll pass it along to the people I know. It couldn’t hurt.”

  Bewildered and depressed, she went to a small desk in one corner and fumbled in the drawer. “Here. I had a bunch of copies made. It’s a snapshot Mom took of him the day they went to some kind of numerology workshop.” She held it out reluctantly, not wanting to touch his hand again. “It’s the original. I guess—I hope—Mom won’t care if I get rid of it.” Jake took the photo slowly, but his fingers brushed hers. “My help,” he said softly, “doesn’t come with strings attached. I promise.”

  “You’d better go.” She wavered, stared firmly at him, her heart pounding. She couldn’t stop the rush of emotion swelling in her throat, then blurted out, “I hope you liked the quilt. Some of the piecework is silk. I thought about the silk in star rubies, so I … well, it’ll last practically forever, it’s nearly impossible to tear silk, but try not to spill anything on it, because it will stain. And only dry-clean it—”

  “Samantha, I love … it. I do … love it.”

  She turned her back, her shoulders hunched in misery and rejection. She heard the faintest whisper of his soft boots on the floor as he left the shop. The chimes jingled with careless charm as the door closed behind him. “I love you too,” she whispered.

  “Yesterday I drove up to Asheville to see Samantha Ryder.”

  Wiping his grease-stained hands on an oily rag, Jake told his father in the shadowy privacy of the barn. Blossom had long since gone to bovine heaven; they bought their milk at the gleaming new supermarket on the Highlands road, a few miles outside Pandora, A few years earlier they’d given Grady to a family on the main reservation, where he was teaching a younger generation to respect ill-tempered ponies.

  The barn had become a toolshed and garage. Father, sweating in the muggy heat, peered at him over a pair of bifocals and stopped working, one honey-colored hand holding a wrench as delicately as a scalpel. Cars or people—Father liked to fix both. Very little shocked Father. He simply gazed at Jake from under the open hood of the big old Cadillac Jake had bought that spring for five hundred dollars and a promise to tow it out of the owner’s yard.

  Jake could afford better, but he liked the personality of the big old convertible. It had a solid character that rust spots, sun-faded upholstery, and a badly patched vinyl top couldn’t diminish. Father began fiddling with the carburetor again, black brows flattened in a thoughtful frown. “Why?”

  “Her mother lost their savings to some guy with a smooth mouth and a gimmick to sell. I had to go.”

  “Bad timing,” Father said, and he didn’t mean the Caddy’s engine. “Don’t mention it to your mother. Not right on the heels of your sister’s hell-raising graduatio
n speech and your cousin’s broken nose.”

  “I thought Mother was proud of all that.”

  “She is. But it stirred up her battle juices.” He looked at Jake somberly. “I’ve kept your secret from her for a while.”

  “Secret?”

  “I treated Joe Gunther for a sprained back last year. He gets talkative after he’s swallowed a couple of muscle relaxers. Told me he’s been baby-sitting the Ryders for you in return for you taking him to your best gem digs.”

  “I don’t like doing things behind your and Mother’s backs, but I had to. It’s not disrespect.”

  “Hmmm.” Father popped the carburetor filter out and probed it with the same studious attention he gave to swollen tonsils and broken toes. “A doctor gets a firsthand look at the problems young people get themselves into,” Father said casually, continuing to examine the filter. “Drugs, liquor, fistfights, stupid car accidents, idiotic pranks. Young men who show up in my office needing a shot of penicillin for the same reason they needed it a half dozen times before. Girls no older than your sister claiming they’ve got a ‘friend’ who needs to know where to go for an abortion.”

  He paused, turning the filter in his hands as if it commanded all his attention. “And I say to myself, I’m the luckiest man in the world.” He raised his head and looked at Jake. “Because somehow your Mother and I were blessed with a pair of Tibetan monks.”

  “Monks?” Jake almost smiled.

  “Good-hearted, with good judgment. Smart. Responsible. I keep wondering when you’re going to do something to turn our hair white.”

  “Well, Ellie has always been single-minded about getting a scholarship to medical school, and that didn’t leave much time for raising hell.” Jake added silently, And she keeps away from boys because she gets mental postcards from their sweaty little one-track intentions. Jake had pointed out to her that, in his experience, rampaging females were just as determined, but she stuck to her superior attitude.

  “And you?” Father asked. “What single-minded vows have you taken?”

  “I’m not interested in bad habits that waste my time.”

  “I take it Samantha Ryder has never fallen into that category.”

  “No.”

  “You ever consider the fact that she’s a good bit younger than you? I hate to put it this way, son, but there are laws—”

  “They’re not half as strong as the laws I judge myself by.” Jake was torn between defending his dignity and guarding the private ways that defined everything he felt about her. “She’s worth waiting for. I’ll wait.”

  Father exhaled a long, slow breath. “All right.” He regarded Jake with a grim smile. “I’ll spend the next few years thinking of ways to prepare your mother for the day when you bring Alexandra’s niece home. Thank you for the warning.”

  “Mother won’t turn her back on Samantha. That wouldn’t be fair.”

  “No, but your mother’s sense of fair play has been strained to its limits a few times too many.” Father held up the carburetor. They had temporarily exhausted all manly capacity for deep conversation, and Jake knew it. Jake bent over the engine, and they went back to work. But he had to say one last thing. “I’m going to the Bahamas to look for the guy who stole Mrs. Ryder’s money.”

  Chapter

  Eleven

  Malcolm Drury woke up slowly in the luxurious heat of the tropical sun. He was stretched out on a lounge chair by the faux-rock waterfall of a hotel pool, with a view of the ocean in front of him and a melted rum punch on the table beside him. He lazily scratched a sunburned streak of skin along the edge of his low-riding bikini trunks and considered his good fortune. Then he draped his hand over the lounge’s side to fumble for the folded towel that hid his watch and wallet.

  His hand collided with another. He jerked upright and peered through expensive sunglasses directly into the steely green eyes of a young man of such considerable height and lanky, muscled build that he was overwhelming even though he had squatted beside Malcolm’s lounge, calmly cradling Malcolm’s possessions in thick, sinewy hands. In a place dominated by relaxed tourists in bright resort clothing, the intense, blue-jeaned, T-shirted intruder looked entirely out of place, and entirely dangerous.

  Malcolm had spent all his adult life profiting from an innate sense for preying on the gullible and avoiding everyone else.

  What he saw in the deadly gaze aimed back at him made his skin crawl. “Hey, get the hell away from my stuff,” Malcolm ordered, his voice cracking.

  “You’ve spent the money already,” the threatening stranger said in a low, thick drawl. “What you stole and what she paid you too.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Malcolm snatched at his belongings, and the stranger dropped them on the pink tile beneath the lounge. “Alexandra Lomax,” the unwelcome visitor said.

  Malcolm’s breath rattled in his throat. He lied automatically and well. “I never heard that name before. What do you want?”

  “She hired you to wipe out the Ryders’ bankroll, and you did it.” The stranger stood, leaned over, plucked Malcolm’s designer sunglasses between long, thick fingers, then closed his fist around them. The plastic bridge gave a nerve-racking crack when it broke. The stranger dropped the mangled sunglasses on Malcolm’s oiled stomach. “I thought I could get some of the money back. Too bad.”

  Without another word he walked away. Malcolm Drury sat in petrified silence, afraid to move or speak, for a long time. When he could catch his breath, he cursed raggedly, grabbed his belongings, and jumped up, scanning the crowded pool patio. The intruder was gone.

  Malcolm checked out of the hotel minutes later, booked a room on a cruise ship leaving for the States within the hour, and hyperventilated during the taxi ride to the dock. It didn’t occur to him to return to North Carolina and confront Mrs. Alexandra Lomax about her damned carelessness in letting someone discover their little business deal; his instincts had told him from the first that she would chew him to shreds if he crossed her. He was not into confrontation; he was into easy living, and tucked into his luggage was a fist-size bag of cocaine that would keep his lifestyle rolling as soon as he peddled it to the right people in Miami.

  At the dock, he anxiously waved off the helpful hands of the lithe, smiling porters and hurried toward a huge cruise ship. Suddenly he was surrounded by lithe, unsmiling customs officials and policemen, and his luggage was pulled away, and Malcolm Drury stared in shock as his belongings were scattered across the gleaming white concrete and the bag of coke was quickly confiscated.

  He thought of the brutal Bahamian prisons and drug laws, and his knees collapsed. He sank to the pavement as they were cuffing his hands behind his back, protesting loudly that he was innocent, that someone had planted the drug in his luggage.

  As they dragged him toward a police van, he began to cry. It wasn’t fair. No one could have known. No one.

  They had had many unusual people in the store, Sam thought, but never an FBI agent. He looked exactly the way one should look too—in a dark suit with a small leather folder held open in one raised hand, showing his credentials. Mom stared at him over the cash register and nearly dropped a bag of Charlotte’s whole-grain muffins.

  “Just thought you’d like to know, Mrs. Ryder,” the agent said. “We picked up some information on Malcolm Drury. He was caught in the Bahamas. Drug possession.”

  Mom sagged against the counter and put her head on the top of the cash register. Sam stepped in front of her and looked up at the agent with unblinking regard. “Do they lock people up and throw away the key down there?”

  “Yes, they do.”

  Good, Sam thought, but didn’t say so. “Can we get any of our money back?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Do y’all think we had anything to do with him buying drugs? That we were going to fence them for him, or something?”

  The agent smiled at her as if she were the quaintest creature he’d ever seen. “No, miss, you an
d your family aren’t under suspicion.”

  Sam nodded. “That’s all I need to know then. Oh, except—how did they catch him?”

  “Someone made an anonymous phone call to the customs officials.”

  Dressed in pale gray riding britches and a matching blouse, carrying tall black riding boots and thin socks in one hand, Alexandra breezed down the marble staircase and halted on the landing where, a little more than ten years earlier, William had Iain with the life slipping out of him. Bare feet planted cozily on the cool marble tile, she nodded to her secretary, a slender, bespectacled young black woman who was extremely efficient and whose employment added a discreetly open-minded touch to Orrin’s conservative political image. North Carolinians shunned nosebleed liberals like the plague, and nutty right-wingers like Jesse Helms stole the national spotlight, but she and Orrin knew the future lay in cultivating the moderates.

  Orrin would be governor someday. She was planning the route with unerring attention to detail. “Good morning, Barbara.”

  Smiling at her over an armful of notepads and mail, Barbara said, “Good morning, Mrs. Lomax. I’m all set. We can get through the day’s business quickly. I know you want to get to your horses.”

  “You know I do.” Alexandra nodded greetings to Matilda, a housekeeper she’d imported from England, who scurried out of the downstairs office as they walked to a broad antique desk. As always, Matilda had placed a silver coffee service on one end of the desk, and the secretary poured coffee into two china cups as Alexandra dropped her boots and sank into a damask-covered chair across from her.

  Barbara settled onto a chair on the other side and began studying a large notepad, a pen in one hand, as Alexandra nibbled a bran muffin. “Get Dole Hopkins on the phone today and tell him not to let the DuLanes have the Owl Creek Road property for one penny less than twelve five an acre. I didn’t buy that land to lose money on it, and I’m not going to let the DuLanes waddle their rich fannies up here from New Orleans expecting a bargain. If Dole continues to go limp on the negotiations, tell him I’ll broker the deal myself.”