Changes (The Magic Jukebox Book 1)

by Judith Arnold

  “Our inventory is low after the holiday shopping sprees,” James informed her. “We’ve got space in the warehouse. If we can move everything in one full-size van, we can schedule a pick-up for Thursday. But if this turns out to be a bomb, and all these fabulous pieces turn out to be junk, it’s coming out of your hide.”

  “Fair enough,” she said, then mouthed the word confidence. “As long as I get a bonus if all these fabulous pieces turn out to be treasures.”

  “I hope you’re right.” Again James paused, as if choosing his words with great care. “You’ve changed Diana.”

  “For the better, I hope.” The David Bowie song echoed faintly in her mind. “I’m going to give the woman an offer she can’t refuse. And I’m going to earn that bonus. Because you know what? I am right.”

  ***

  Lenore had been thrilled to accept Diana’s offer of ten thousand dollars for everything in her grandmother’s house. Diana wrote up an agreement and promised to call as soon as the moving van had been scheduled. Once she and Lenore had shaken hands, she climbed back into the rental car and drove to the inn, humming “Changes.”

  Had she changed? What, besides confidence, had James heard in her words, in her voice? Could he tell, just from talking to her, that last night she’d experienced the hottest, wildest, most arousing kiss in her life?

  No. That was not the sort of thing a person could detect in a voice. She was pretty sure they couldn’t, anyway.

  She warned herself not to think about Nick, his kiss, and the way she’d felt in his arms. She couldn’t think about it while she still had the engagement ring Peter had given her, stashed inside her rolled socks in a dresser drawer at the inn.

  Peter. Surely she loved him. She’d agreed to marry him, hadn’t she? Just because Nick Fiore had bewitched her with a kiss didn’t mean she should throw away everything she and Peter had.

  As she thought about it, though, she wasn’t quite certain she’d ever really agreed to marry him. That they would get married had always just been a foregone conclusion. Her parents and Peter’s had been close friends for years, and when Peter and Diana had been born, their parents had begun planning. Like royalty, they’d plotted the merging of their two families when Diana and Peter had been toddlers splashing each other in the wading pool in the backyard of Peter’s parents’ grand brick mansion. When Diana and Peter had reached primary school—the stage at which boys and girls generally loathed members of the opposite sex—their parents had blithely ignored their squabbling and bragged about the magnificent grandchildren Diana and Peter would someday produce for them. They’d sent Diana and Peter to the same prep school, where somehow Diana and Peter had drifted from antagonists to cautious friends to a couple. She recalled Peter’s invitation to the prom when they’d been seniors: “I guess we’re going together, right?”

  She’d had a crush on Griffin Stanhope that year. She’d dreamed of Griffin asking her to go to the prom with him. But of course he never did. He couldn’t. Everyone knew she belonged to Peter.

  Everyone knew it in college, too. It was a given. A law of nature. When Peter had presented her with that gaudy diamond ring, he hadn’t asked her to marry him. He’d handed her the box and said, “Moving right along…”

  At the time, she’d laughed. But it hadn’t been funny. It hadn’t been the romantic proposal she’d dreamed of. No rose petals strewn across the floor. No bended knee. Not even an I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Just “Moving right along…”

  She’d moved right along. She hadn’t questioned any of it. Like the apprentice she’d been at Shomback-Sawyer, she’d listened and observed and done as she was told. It was what everyone expected. Diana Simms was not the sort of person who got on the phone and persuaded people to do what she wanted.

  Until now.

  Strange fascination, she thought as the song floated through her head. She was turning, and she was facing change.

  #

  The message light on her bedside phone at the inn was flashing when she entered the room. For a moment, she worried that the message was from Peter, calling to demand that she stop gallivanting around the North Shore and come back to Boston where she belonged, as he’d said yesterday. But he would have contacted her on her cell phone, not the hotel’s phone. So would James, or her parents. Or Claudia’s friend Lenore if, God forbid, she’d changed her mind about allowing Shomback-Sawyer to cart away her grandmother’s belongings. The business card Diana had left with Lenore had Diana’s cell number printed on it.

  She tossed her purse on the bed, reached for the phone and pressed the button for messages. “Hi,” came a man’s voice, deep and soft yet slightly gruff, like pebbles wrapped in velvet.

  Her memories of kissing that man came rushing back, swamping her, warming her deep inside.

  “I never got your phone number,” Nick’s message continued, “so I’m trying the OB number instead. I know I—we—well, whatever. I’m refereeing a b-ball game at the community center this evening. Middle school kids, but they’re pretty good. I thought you might like to see what I do for a living. At least some of what I do. The game starts at six-thirty—it’s a school night, so the kids play an early game. Anyway, I hope I’ll see you there. This is Nick, by the way.” He recited a phone number, said goodbye, and disconnected.

  Diana listened to the queue of instructions following his message, then pressed the button to replay it. This time, she jotted down his number, and laughed when he said, “This is Nick, by the way.” As if he’d had to identify himself. She would know his voice anywhere. Even if he’d whispered, if he’d had laryngitis, if his voice had been filtered through one of those identity-disguising machines so he came out sounding distorted, she would have known the caller was Nick.

  She sank onto the bed, trying to ignore the fact that the mere sound of his voice could fill her with a warmth intense enough to melt her soul—and her resistance. He’d contacted her despite her having fled from him yesterday. Had she not made herself clear? Or had he seen past her rejection and sensed that behind her words lurked a desperate yearning for him?

  She recalled that she hadn’t said no to him last night. She’d said, “I have to think.” He probably believed a full day of thinking was sufficient and he could approach her again.

  She shouldn’t go to the game. Honestly, why would anyone who wasn’t a parent of one of the players want to sit through a basketball game played by a bunch of thirteen-year-olds? What she should do, she chided herself, was put her damned ring back on her finger, call Peter and tell him she’d be back in Boston tomorrow.

  Or return to Boston without putting the damned ring back on. Because whenever she went home, whether it was tomorrow or next week or next year, she was going to have to confront the fact that something was changing. She was changing.

  She couldn’t shake the suspicion that if she tried to put the ring back on, it wouldn’t fit.

  ***

  Chapter Eight

  He must have been nuts, leaving that message for Diana. If she came to the game, he’d want her, just as much as he wanted her yesterday. If he wanted her, he was going to have to tell her the truth about himself, who he was, where he’d been and what he’d done. If she knew that ugly truth, she sure as hell wouldn’t want him.

  But Ed Nolan had reminded him of who he really was: a fighter. Someone who didn’t run scared. Someone who confronted his challenges and dealt with them as best he could, even if his best might get him into a shitload of trouble.

  What did he have to lose? If he didn’t try for Diana, he’d never have her. If he did try for her and she decided his background was too awful, he’d never have her. But there was a chance, however slim, that she’d decide that his screwed-up background was forgivable, that he had somehow redeemed himself, that an attempted murder conviction notwithstanding, he was worthy of her love.

  Oh, and she’d have to dump her fiancé, too. Just one more minor detail.

  He watche
d as the teams lined up, nine in red T-shirts along the bench to his left, ten in green T-shirts along the bench to his right, a mix of girls and boys. At their age—early teens—some of the girls were taller than some of the boys, and he didn’t have enough players to create an all-girl league and an all-boy league, so he’d created a single co-ed league. He coached both of these teams, which was why he had to referee the game. He couldn’t stand on the sidelines with one team or the other. He had to remain neutral.

  These were his kids. He worked with them in an after-school program he’d designed with the middle school. The combination of high-stakes proficiency testing and budget shortfalls had cut into the amount of physical education and recess time the students received each day, and he’d convinced the school board that any after-school program he set up needed to include physical activity for everyone, regardless of their athletic ability. At first, some of the boys balked at having to form teams with girls, and vice versa. But a grudging respect had grown among the players. Some of his girl players were pretty damned talented. Some of his boy players had more ego than athletic prowess. He divvied the teams up carefully so they’d be evenly matched. And they loved playing evening games at the community center. They felt like varsity jocks when they played there.

  Volunteer coaches stood with the two teams. Nick pulled a ball from the rack, bounced it twice to make sure it was fully inflated, and then crossed to the center of the court. The two tallest players joined him, and eight other players, four in red and four in green, shaped a circle around them. Nick blew his whistle and tossed the ball. The girl in red jumped higher than the boy in green, and the game got underway.

  Nick had to watch the game closely. He had to monitor for traveling, elbows, all manner of fouls. Some of his players were meek and clumsy. Some were almost thuggishly aggressive. His primary objectives were to make sure no one got hurt, everyone had fun, and all the players left the game feeling better about themselves than they’d felt before the tip-off. Achieving those goals demanded his full attention.

  But it received only ninety-nine percent of his attention. The last one percent skimmed the stands, searching. Friends, siblings, parents, a few school and community center workers sat scattered along the scuffed wooden bleachers. Not exactly a capacity crowd. If Diana came, he would see her.

  He did. Right after the first basket was scored, he spotted her. Not knowing any of the other people in the stands, she sat by herself, dressed in a simple beige sweater and jeans, her hair falling in tawny waves around her face, her dazzling eyes fixed on the players.

  A boy—Will Czerny, a brilliant kid with serious anger issues whom Nick had been working with for a year—dribbled toward him, and Diana followed the action until her gaze met Nick’s. She smiled hesitantly and fluttered her fingers in a tentative wave.

  That one tiny gesture infused Nick with energy. He gave a quick nod, then turned and jogged down the court, watching Will dribble past a guard and make his lay-up. Nice play, and Will hadn’t plowed anyone down en route. Nick left his whistle dangling around his neck—no need to blow it—and glanced up at the scoreboard in time to see two more points added to the red team’s score.

  The game went well. Only one minor flare-up occurred, between two boys Nick happened to know were good friends. He’d assigned them to separate teams because if they’d been teammates they would have combined to terrorize their opponents. On separate teams, they negated each other.

  He wished there had been some sort of afterschool sports program when he’d been thirteen, a place where he could have burned off his own anger by running and sweating and shooting a ball into a hoop. A place where he could have talked to an adult who had some familiarity with what was going on in Nick’s home, in his life, without telling Nick he was imagining things or warning him that as long as the violence didn’t touch him personally, it was none of his business. That was what his parents had told him, and he’d known they were lying. The violence had touched him personally, and it had been his business.

  He wished there had been a safe place where he could have hung out, away from his father’s temper and his mother’s passivity, a place where he would not have to be a hero—or a criminal.

  It was just such a haven he provided to the kids in his afterschool programs. He saw himself in some of them, and if he could keep them from being sucked into the system the way he’d been, he would consider his life well spent.

  The game ended with the green team winning by four points. If the game had been played on Friday, he would have packed both teams into a few cars driven by volunteers and taken everyone to the Pizza Pit for a post-game feast. But it was a school night, and the players’ parents and guardians swarmed down the rickety bleachers to collect their kids. Nick thanked the coaches and scorekeeper, gave the players a brief speech about how proud he was that they’d played clean and fair, ascertained that everyone had a ride home and reminded them to do their homework. That final remark was greeted by a chorus of good-natured groans. “Wanna tell us to brush our teeth, too?” Will hooted.

  “You especially,” Nick shot back. “And brush your tongue, too. It looks green.” The kids erupted in laughter and stuck their tongues out at one another for inspection. “Yours is blue!” “Yours is black!” “That’s ’cause I eat fire!”

  He felt Diana’s presence even without looking at her. He knew she was standing on the periphery, not wishing to intrude on his pep talk with the kids. Once they headed for the exits, he turned to her.

  She wasn’t wearing the diamond.

  Did that mean she was ready to pick up where they’d left off last night? Had she done the thinking she’d said she needed to do, decided she was done with her Boston fiancé, and come to the community center for the sole purpose of throwing herself at Nick?

  Nothing was ever that simple—and nothing in life had ever been handed to him. Ed was right. If he wanted Diana, he would have to fight for her.

  Still, the absence of her engagement ring was a good sign.

  “That was fun,” she said.

  Sure it was. Nothing more entertaining than sitting on a hard wooden bleacher and watching a group of unevenly talented tweeners playing a game of hoops that ended in a score of 43-39.

  Yet Diana was smiling. The past hour couldn’t have been too painful for her.

  “I’ve got to lock up the equipment and wash up,” he said. “Then we can grab a bite to eat, or something to drink.”

  “Do what you have to do,” she said. “I’ll wait.”

  #

  Fifteen minutes later, they were seated across a table from each other at the Pizza Pit, splitting a mushroom pizza. He hadn’t wanted to take her to the Faulk Street Tavern, in part because bar food wasn’t Gus’s strength and Nick was hungry, and in part because he didn’t want to risk some other song pouring out of the jukebox and snaring them in its sticky web.

  “So I got the go-ahead to buy the entire lot,” she was telling him. “It wasn’t just that I’d stumbled onto some real treasures in that house, but that my boss trusted me. He trusted my judgment. It was practically like getting a promotion, his letting me buy an entire lot like that. We’re going to make a really nice profit on it, even if we wind up tossing or donating half the stuff. The other half is fantastic.”

  Nick didn’t understand much about antiques. Yeah, his Honda Civic had more than a hundred-fifty thousand miles on it, and his house was furnished with pieces purchased at the Goodwill store. But nothing he owned, no matter how old, was worth much.

  Her excitement about the estate purchase she’d engineered was infectious, though. He recalled the first time he’d seen her, across the room at the Faulk Street Tavern while David Bowie crooned. Even at that distance and in the dim lighting, he’d noticed that she’d looked drawn. Beautiful but pensive, maybe a little worried.

  Not now. Now she glowed.

  “When I got your message,” she said, “I wanted to see you, to tell you about this.”

  “Ab
out the house full of stuff?”

  “About how empowered I feel. I exceeded expectations, Nick. And I love it.”

  Oh, man. He loved it, too. He loved her for being so excited.

  Not that he loved her. He just loved how psyched she was, radiant and bubbly. This wasn’t about love.

  Turn and face the strange… The lyric bludgeoned his brain with the force of a lead pipe, nearly flattening him. He covered by reaching for another slice of pizza.

  He didn’t love her. Of course he didn’t. But damn, if this—this thing was going anywhere—and who the hell knew where it was going, but if it was—he had to come clean. He had to tell her who he was.

  How could he, when she was so happy? Congratulations on your big score today. By the way, I was convicted of attempted murder when I was fifteen.

  Telling her the truth was the right thing to do. But before he could do that right thing, she started talking again. “I’m so glad you invited me to the game. In all honesty, I wasn’t going to come.”

  “I wouldn’t have blamed you,” he said, managing a smile. “A group of middle-school kids too short to execute a slam-dunk? Not exactly a thrill.”

  She smiled. “I wasn’t expecting a Celtics game. But…it wasn’t that.” She sipped from her glass of iced tea, then smiled again, a forced, feeble smile. “I phoned Peter after I got your message. My…”

  Her hesitation stretched into a full-fledged silence. “Your fiancé?” he guessed.