“It won’t do Sam any good for you to feel guilty about getting your bread buttered. In fact, you can help her more now that you’re my purring little love beast. Give her and Jake positive reinforcement born from your new attitude.”
“Purring little love beast,” Charlotte repeated dryly. She held the phone to her ear and listened as it began to ring at the Cove. “Kitten with a whip is more like it.”
“Hmmm. No whips. I might consider a soft pastry brush though.”
“You’re wicked. Wicked and creative. I like that in a cook. Damn. She’s not answering. I’ll give it a few more rings and then I’m … Sammie?” Charlotte sat up. “Did I wake you up? Oh? No, you sound a little strange. I, uh, came by yesterday but couldn’t find you. Didn’t see Jake either.” A sardonic “as usual” stopped on Charlotte’s lips. Ben nodded approvingly, as if he knew she’d resisted. She barely noticed. She was too stunned by her sister’s reply. “Oh?” Charlotte stared at Ben, wide-eyed and distracted. “Uhmmm, okay. Bye.”
Charlotte dropped the phone in her lap. Ben sat up quickly. “What’s wrong? You look like you’ve been slapped with undercooked spaghetti.”
“Let me see if I can recreate Sammie’s side of the conversation—with soundeffects. I’m awake. Gasp. Fine. Thunk. Phone receiver hitting the bedpost. Jake’s fine. Voice about two octaves lower than normal. Breathless. He’s right here. Sound of someone kissing something. I’ll call you back. In a while. Oh! Hmmm. Don’t come over until I do. Ah! It may be a few days.”
Charlotte shook her head. “That was as far as it went. I felt like I’d called dial-a-moan.”
She and Ben traded a long, open-mouthed look. Finally he said, “I told you we’d inspire them. This is good. Must be something in the air. They’ll put a few dozen dents in the mattress, then they’ll start talking. He’ll explain his mysterious newspaper clippings, and we’ll all be happy.”
“What if he doesn’t? He didn’t exactly lay his deepest thoughts on a platter before he went hunting for Malcolm Drury.” Charlotte squirmed out of bed. “What if she gets blindsided by another round of his frontier justice?”
Ben grabbed her by one hand. “You make an excellent prosecutor but a lousy judge of character.”
“I’m going to pay a visit to the great circled one.” Her voice shook with nervous anger. “My cousin’s ex-wife. Are you coming with me?”
Ben cursed wearily, and nodded.
The passenger window of his rusty blue Escort was scattered in pebble-size pieces across the patched bucket seat. He couldn’t believe some bastard had the balls to rip off his crummy car in broad daylight on a busy city street while he was eating lunch in a deli not twenty feet away. That kind of shit happened in places like New York and Atlanta, not Raleigh.
“Hell, Bob, what’d they get? Your eight-track? Your collection of bottle caps?” A fellow reporter with standard-issue wise-ass newsroom sympathy peered over his shoulder as he unlocked the driver’s-side door and jerked it open. What was missing? What the hell could anyone want out of his rolling junkyard?
He knew the instant his gaze fell on the empty floorboard below the passenger seat. “My briefcase!”
“Aw, come on, why? That thing had more duct tape on it than leather. Even a crackhead with no brain circuits left wouldn’t go to the trouble to steal it.”
Bob slumped in the driver’s seat and banged the steering wheel in helpless fury. But someone who wanted my notes on the Lomax story would.
Chapter
Thirty
“What a dump,” Charlotte said sardonically. She and Ben left his car and followed a brick walkway across a pristinely landscaped yard shadowed by dogwoods. “Just your average quarter-million-dollar cottage in one of Raleigh’s finest neighborhoods. I hope she went through my cousin’s assets with a bulldozer.”
Ben glanced at her without a trace of appreciation for her acid humor. “I heard the divorce was amicable.”
“You heard what the Lomax publicity machine wanted you to hear. She probably got tired of Tim punching her around.”
“Interesting theory. Sam’s mentioned that your cousin has an ugly temper, but I don’t recall her saying he likes to beat up women.”
Charlotte bit her tongue and bounded ahead of him up brick steps to a terrace before an ornately carved door flanked by narrow windows of patterned glass. She rang the bell. “Act casual,” she ordered. “We just dropped by to introduce ourselves to my ex-cousin-in-law.”
“Sounds perfectly reasonable to me,” Ben replied. “I know I’d be pleased if relatives of my ex dropped by unannounced. Maybe she keeps tea and finger sandwiches ready, just in case.”
Charlotte glared at him. Eventually a delicate female face topped by feathery blond hair peered at them through a side window. Charlotte smiled as benignly as she could in response. The ornate door opened a few inches, tethered by a length of security chain. Wide blue eyes gazed at them worriedly. Interesting, Charlotte noted. Tim had married a woman who looked like a fragile version of his mother.
“Can I help you?” the poor thing asked in a breathless tone.
Charlotte found herself hunching down to peek back on the same level as those nervous eyes. “Gwen? Gwen Vanderveer?”
“That was my married name. What do you want?”
“I’m sorry to surprise you. I just wanted to meet you and say hello. I’m Tim’s cousin. Charlotte. I was passing through town and I—”
“Tim’s cousin? Alexandra’s sending mysterious cousins to spy on me and harass me now?”
“No, no one sent me. Can’t we talk a minute?” Charlotte gestured frantically toward Ben. “This is my, hmmm, friend. Harmless-looking, isn’t he? Ben Dreyfus—”
“The lawyer?” Gwen Vanderveer’s voice rang with horror. “You brought your lawyer to intimidate me?”
“He’s not here as an attorney,” Charlotte answered urgently. “I didn’t realize he had such a reputation. He’s only—”
“An innocent bystander,” Ben interjected. “And totally confused.”
“I’m through being bullied. You can’t gang up on me. Leave me alone.”
“But I’m not here to—” Charlotte began.
“I’ve been pushed too far. I’m not taking it anymore. Get off my property. I’m calling the police.” She slammed the door. The rattle of locks clicking into place was her good-bye. Stunned, Charlotte peered through a window and watched her flee around the bend of an elegant hallway.
The hot summer day surrounded them with the deceptively peaceful humming of slow bees above pots of colorful impatiens on the terrace. She looked at Ben with growing alarm. “Well, we know this much at least. Something’s going on. Something seriously unnerving to the ex-Mrs. Vanderveer.”
Ben took her by one hand. “Let’s go before the police arrive. I have an aversion to visiting myself in jail.”
“I think we have to tell Sammie about this.” Charlotte let him pull her down the walkway. “Jake knows something’s happening. She needs to know too.”
“It wouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that divorced people are apt to loathe each other. They’re probably still feuding over custody of a credenza and a pair of lamps.”
“That doesn’t explain why Jake circled her picture in the paper!”
He halted abruptly and faced her. “Do you want to disrupt Jake and Sam’s first efforts at reconciliation with a lot of questions that don’t add up to anything significant yet? Is that how you intend to help your sister?”
“No.”
“Then be patient. We’ll give them a few days. In the meantime, I’ll put out some feelers and see what I can learn about the obviously less-than-amicable Vanderveer divorce.”
Charlotte slumped. “You win.”
He kissed her. “Hah. Don’t flatter me.” He searched her face with troubled intensity. “What made you suggest that Tim hits women?”
She froze. “That, my dear Watsonstein, was merely a logical deduction.”
S
he sighed with relief when she heard the faint wail of a siren headed their way. Ben put an arm around her and hustled her to the car.
But she knew she’d sidetracked him for only a little longer.
Highview was shuttered like a fort under siege from invisible armies—the staff banished for the day, the front gate locked, the drapes drawn on the great arching windows, the incessantly ringing phones routed through a single line in an upstairs bedroom, where callers heard Barbara’s efficient, polite voice on an answering machine.
The governor and Mrs. Lomax are not available for calls or visitors today.
Downstairs, Alexandra paced the elegant spaces of the vaulted living room with ferocious energy, thinking, planning, refusing to believe the foundation beneath her carefully built world was crumbling. Orrin huddled in an armchair, his stately face pale with anxiety, his shoulders hunched. He raked his hands through his silver hair every few seconds. Alexandra struggled to block his desperation from her mind; she had always been calmer and more tenacious than he, and she wouldn’t let his fears pull her down. If she did, she’d begin to think of defeat, not solutions. The galling truth would seep through her defenses.
Everything they’d accomplished together, using the Vanderveer legacy as a stepping-stone, was threatened by the one part of that legacy she had never wanted but had been forced to carry along with her. William’s son. Her son too, but only a perpetual reminder that she’d been required to breed like a prize mare in order to secure her hold on the Vanderveer name.
“This is what we’ve been reduced to,” Orrin said suddenly, his voice hollow. He swept a hand toward a table littered with papers and notepads. “Sending one of my aides to steal the scribblings of a newspaper reporter.”
Alexandra strode to the table and snatched a handful of the material. She shook the wadded papers at him. “Would you rather we have gone on guessing about his intentions? Hearing nervous reports from people who’ve been subjected to his prying questions? Not knowing whether he was simply playing with rumors or had significant details to back him up? Years of work, your political future, the party’s consideration for much bigger things—all of it’s at stake!” She threw the papers down. “I’ll strangle this black son of a bitch with my own hands if he doesn’t stop.”
Orrin groaned. “I wish it were that simple. But someone is obviously feeding him information. Someone else knows.” He dropped his head into his hands. “You realize the irony here, don’t you? You and I have steered our way safely through the mine fields all these years. We’ve finessed our share of political deals that wouldn’t stand up under public scrutiny. Yet none of them have come back to haunt us.”
Alexandra knelt by him and clutched his shoulders. “I promise you, we’ll be all right. He can ask all the questions he wants. The people he’s talking to wouldn’t be foolish enough to admit anything. They have their own interests to protect.” She shook him lightly. “My darling, I’ve told you so many times that I’d take care of my son’s stupid mistakes. I have. I know this situation inside and out. I’ve covered the weak points. I’ve insulated you from any consequences.”
He laughed bitterly. “Don’t you understand? If my stepson is accused of peddling his influence as a state senator to the highest bidder, the next step will be an investigation of the cover-up.”
“But that will never happen. And you had nothing to do with it. I took care of everything.”
“Alex, you’re grasping at straws. You know how pathetic that defense would be.” He spoke will dull sarcasm. “What should I do if my wife is implicated in hiding her son’s criminal misuse of public office? Claim I had no idea of it? I’d rather not become a laughingstock as well as an accomplice.”
She bent her head to his knees. “I swear it won’t come to that. I was so careful, so methodical about damage control. Even if one of Tim’s contacts were pressured into revealing something, it could be handled. No one knows enough to put the whole picture together.”
“Even Gwen?”
“Gwen is a spineless creature muzzled by a large divorce settlement. She was no match for Tim or me. Tim has kept tabs on her. She’s the least of my worries.” She took Orrin’s hands in a firm, reassuring grip. “Now, listen, my darling. I want you to relax. Leave this to me.” She nodded toward the papers scattered on the table. “I’ll find out who’s behind this nonsense. It won’t go any further.”
She rose and turned at the doorway, cool, certain of the next steps to take. “I’m holding this family’s public image together by sheer willpower. I haven’t even decided how to maneuver Samantha and Charlotte yet. I’m not going to add an estranged son to the problems. Please, just let me deal with Tim.”
Orrin sank back in his chair, looking defeated.
“Seen Jake much lately?” Joe asked. He sat on the porch steps, nursing a bottle of beer. Clara was ensconced in one of the rocking chairs, swaying slowly, her girth overflowing its narrow wooden boundaries, a glass of bourbon wrapped in her brown hands. Her hands and the glass rode her lap like a buoy on an ocean of flowered skirt. Sam, leaning against a porch post, was hypnotized by the patient motion. Every kind of rhythm made her think of Jake. Timing. The ebb and flow of wildly consummated reunions. She and he had been obsessed with the pulse of pleasure. It obscured the need for troubling conversations, but that couldn’t go on forever.
Coming out of her trance, she found Joe and Clara watching her curiously. Joe repeated the question. Sam dropped to the edge of the porch and forced her restless hands to be still atop her jeans. “All the time. He moved back into the house four days ago.”
She let that amazing announcement simmer for a few seconds. Clara stopped rocking. Both she and Joe studied Sam hopefully. Sam nodded. “Yep. I’ve got my husband back.” She looked away, gazing blindly across the tree-shadowed yard, planning her words carefully. “At least in some ways.”
Clara cocked her head and squinted at Sam. “What you thinkin’, girl, askin’ Joe and me to come visit today? You don’t need a couple of wrinkled old chaperons around.”
Sam smiled grimly. “Jake told me he’d be going into the mountains for a couple of hours this afternoon. Said he needs his routines. What he didn’t say is that we’ve calmed down enough to start talking. He doesn’t want to talk much. He knows what I want to ask him.” Sam hesitated, then added pensively, “So I invited you two here to ask you about the subject he won’t discuss. I believe y’all are the people most likely to know the truth about him.”
“The truth?” Joe repeated. Something dark and worried glimmered in Clara’s eyes. Sam homed in on it. “I went with him to track a lost child. I saw how he works. It’s no ordinary skill. In fact, it’s nothing short of miraculous. A gift.”
Clara’s eyes were burning holes in Sam. “Yes, it sure is,” she said carefully.
“You’ve always known about it, haven’t you? Both of you.”
Joe looked from her to Clara, his mouth open. “I suspected,” he said finally. “All the times I watched him go over a piece of ground like he was seeing the best spot to dig for gemstone. I’ve tried to ask him about that ever since he was a kid, but he was close-mouthed about it.”
“And you?” Sam asked Clara. “How did you know?” Clara’s silence made Sam scrutinize her worriedly. Without her false teeth in place, Clara could, when a dour mood struck, compress her lower face into a lipless hummock. I’ll need some pliers, Sam thought with giddy despair. “Please tell me what you think,” she urged.
“Granny Raincrow had the touch. The day Jake and Ellie was born, Granny told me they had it too.”
“Ellie,” Sam repeated, dazed. Her stunned thoughts went back to the night Ellie had coaxed Charlotte to tell the Raincrows about Tim’s attack. Ellie’s intuition about people who were hurt in some way.
“Don’t be mad with me because I kept the secret from you. Jake’s of his grandma’s clan. Same as me. I got a duty to him. I wanted him to tell you about it himself. I couldn’t do it for him.”
r /> “Do you know why he’s never trusted me enough to tell me the truth? Why he still won’t admit it to me?”
“Once, I told you that a clan of the little people live in the ravine back of this house, and you smiled real polite, like you thought I was a sweet old crazy woman.”
Perplexed by the strange change of subject, Sam shook her head. “I’m sorry. But what—”
“Do you see very far? Can you look inside the shadows on the nights when the moon is full and see the spirits that might be looking back at you? Do you hear the almighty talking to you when you’re lost?”
“I’m a … a practical person. I had to be that way, Clara, because my mother was just the opposite. So, no, I don’t believe in ghosts or anything I can’t, can’t”—she held up her gloved hands—“anything I can’t touch or create for myself with these ten fingers.” Dropping her hands onto her stomach she added wearily, “I think of God as a high-school principal who’s too busy to leave messages on the bulletin-board.”
“Then you’re goin’ to walk a long road before you understand Jake.”
“Please. Please help me to try.”
Clara was majestically still. Then she said, “God talks, and Jake’s got a rare gift for knowin’ how to listen. He touches people and learns about ’em. He touches the things they touch, and those talk to him too. Even the mountains talk to him.”
Joe whistled softly. “Man, that explains a lot.”
Sam hugged herself and bent her head. “I’ve thought about all the times when we were kids. When he was there every time I needed him. I never understood how he knew.”
“It’s not that he don’t trust you with it,” Clara said. She was frowning harder every second, as if caught up in some dilemma she didn’t quite know how to resolve. “It’s that … well, he learns painful things about people, and it can bring on terrible trouble to talk about them.”
“What do you mean? What sort of things?”