Veiled Threats

by Deborah Donnelly

  So I was left alone with Grace Parry. Closing my eyes, I could hear far-off sounds of the party winding down in the living room and library. I wondered if Holt had left yet. Grace smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and brandy, entwined with her own perfume. Her scent triggered something, a fragment of memory. Roses, the smell of roses, back there in the woods. But had it been roses, or something else, something odd … ? Something cold brushed my leg and I jumped. It was Gus's inquisitive nose. He nuzzled my hand for a moment, just checking in, then padded away to follow Nickie.

  “I need to ask you a favor.” The urgency in Grace's tone made me look up abruptly. She refilled my cup from the delicate china teapot. One of her coral fingernails was broken, the jagged edge not yet filed smooth. “If you're sure you're not seriously hurt, I'd rather not tell Douglas about your accident. This whole affair with Keith Guthridge has been very upsetting, of course, and then the car crash. He's having chest pains again. So if you don't mind—”

  “Oh, I see. No, of course I don't mind. It was my own fault, anyway. I probably scared Theo just as much as he scared me.”

  She smiled in obvious relief and her features softened, her asymmetrical eyes just a slight, humanizing flaw in a pretty face. “Thank you, Carnegie. Shall we see if the lovebirds are ready?”

  They were. Ray piloted me home, keeping me amused on the way with a long, silly story about a famous soprano, a piano tuner, and a flooded basement at a New Year's Eve party. It was the first time Ray and I had been alone together, and I liked him better by the mile. For the first time, it occurred to me that his easygoing compliance in all the wedding plans didn't make him an easygoing man. A concert pianist, after all, needed more than talent. He needed single-minded determination, and a healthy ego. No doubt Ray had both. When he pulled up at my dock, I invited him in for a drink while he waited for his cab.

  “A ctually, I'm going to walk. Nickie thinks the city is dangerous at night, so I don't tell her.”

  I looked at his face, handsome but misleadingly bland, profiled against the driver's side window. He kept his hair short and brushed forward a bit, very trendy, like his wardrobe. I had never been attracted to an Asian-American man, probably because I towered over most of them, but I could see the appeal for Nickie. And not just in his looks. The world might judge that Ray Ishigura had caught himself an heiress, but the heiress was a lucky young woman herself. “Anything else you don't tell her?”

  “Well,” he said solemnly, “I don't actually care whether we have orchids or dandelions at the reception.”

  I laughed, and even though it made my head hurt it felt good. “Ray, there's never been a bridegroom yet who truly cared about half the details of the wedding.”

  “Just so long as Nickie is happy.”

  “I'm sure she will be,” I said, and meant it.

  THIS TIME I UNPLUGGED BOTH PHONES, AND SLEPT LONG AND hard all Saturday night and half of Sunday. When I woke up, my temple was the size and color of an overripe plum, but I was otherwise sound. Physically, anyway. While I artfully prepared a gourmet breakfast of toast with toast—I'd have to go shopping soon—I puzzled over yesterday's events.

  Keith Guthridge was murderously angry at Douglas Parry, that was plain, and Aaron Gold believed that Guthridge was dangerous. Two hours after Gold told me that, someone attacked me in the woods on the Parry estate. But Theo said the someone was himself, and there was no attack, just an accident. Anyway, Theo obviously saw Keith Guthridge as the enemy, so how could he be involved in Guthridge's threats? And I'd smelled an odd sweet scent in the woods, but I'd been around Theo enough to know that he always smelled like plain soap. Besides, why would Theo or anyone else attack me? Putting on a wedding for Douglas Parry's daughter hardly qualified me as a target, for disgruntled investors or imaginary mobsters.

  Lots of questions, but only one thing for sure: I was going to check out those business cards. To hell with waiting. I poured another cup of coffee and called Lily.

  “Somebody clobbered you on the head?” she said.

  “I think so. I'm pretty sure.”

  “And you think it was Theo.”

  “Well, it certainly could have been. He was right nearby. And if it was somebody else, why would Theo say it was an accident?”

  “Good point. OK, what do we do next?”

  “Well, I think we go to the Powerhouse and the pool hall and that Flair place, whatever it is, and try to find out if Theo is a customer. He's so weird looking, it shouldn't be hard. Also we try to track down Crazy Mary, so we have something definite to tell the police. But listen, Lily, are you sure you want to get involved in this? What if it gets dangerous?”

  “Oh, shut up. The library's got a list of Seattle women's shelters; I'll start calling them about Mary.”

  “Great.”

  W e made a date to check out the gym the following Tuesday afternoon, then I put on jeans and a sweater—June had reverted back to April, with a fine, silvery drizzle—and went upstairs to the office to check the answering machine, my head pounding with each step. Just one new bride, let there be a message from just one possible, potential new bride. The machine was recording as I unlocked the door, with a man's voice amplified through the staticky speaker.

  “This is Holt Walker, Carnegie, we met at the Parrys? There was no answer at your home number, so I'm trying your office—”

  I dropped my keys and sprinted. “Hi, this is Carnegie.”

  “Oh, you're there! How's your head?”

  Better than my heart, I thought inanely, but said, “Fine. I mean, a headache, but fine. I guess someone told you what happened. Not Douglas, I hope? Grace didn't want him to worry.”

  “No, Grace is the one who told me. To be honest with you, I called her to get your phone number.”

  “You did?”

  “Well, she mentioned yesterday that you're single, and that we might have a lot in common.”

  You being gorgeous, I thought, and me being a fan of gorgeous. Thank you, Grace, you wonderful client, you.

  “I enjoyed talking to you yesterday,” I said. “Brief as it was.”

  He laughed. Nice laugh, to go with the shoulders. “Would you like to have dinner, and talk at length? How's Wednesday night?”

  He didn't sound too doubtful about my answer, but then he didn't have to be. I made a pretense of checking my calendar.

  “Wednesday's fine.”

  “Five-thirty?”

  “That's a little early …”

  “Indulge me,” he said. “The restaurant I have in mind is a bit out of town.”

  “Okay. Wednesday at five-thirty.”

  And that was how I discovered a miracle cure for headaches. I called Lily back, just to share my medical breakthrough.

  “Guess what? Our long national nightmare is over. I've got a date.”

  Lily laughed at me, but then she often does. “OK, who is he?”

  I told her about Holt. I tried not to gush, but I must have tried too hard.

  “Let me get this straight,” she said. “He's not actually handsome, he's just tall and curly-haired with amazing green eyes. And he's a hotshot lawyer, but that's nothing special. And he asked you out for dinner, but of course he's not really interested in you. Have I got that right?”

  “Okay, he is handsome, and maybe he's sort of interested. I just don't want to get my hopes up.”

  “I can understand that.” Lily sighed. “I've been burned before. So I don't suppose you want me to look him up in Martindale-Hubbell?”

  “Oh, could you?”

  She laughed again. Martindale-Hubbell is a Who's Who of attorneys. It couldn't hurt to know something about Prince Charming's background. “I'll call you from work.”

  Librarians are so great. Lily called me Monday morning, right after Eddie and I had muttered our apologies for that childish argument on Friday afternoon.

  “No word yet on Mary,” she announced, “but Holt Walker is hot stuff. Rhodes scholar, Harvard Law School, with a year at Ox
ford at some special international program. Practiced in Chicago, now here—he's migrating west—both times at big corporate firms. He's thirty-eight, has a penthouse apartment downtown and a time-share condo on Maui. Goes rowing on Lake Washington every morning for exercise, does pro bono work for a senior citizen group. And half the women at Voigt, Baxter, McHugh have a crush on him.”

  “It says all that in Martindale-Hubbell, does it?”

  Lily guffawed. “Well, it just so happens that the legal librarian at VBM is a friend of mine.”

  “Lily! You didn't tell her why you were asking?”

  “Are you kidding? I said I'd been referred to a Harold Walker, a really boring old guy who writes wills, and she spent fifteen minutes telling me why Holt Walker couldn't be him. Smart, huh?”

  “Brilliant. What else did she say?”

  “Well, he's a widower. His wife died in a boating accident a couple of years ago and he hasn't really dated much since then, except for taking female friends to benefits and office parties. Lots of women at VBM would like to help him back to the land of the living. Are you still there?”

  “Hmm?” I was off in a reverie. So Holt had been solitary since losing his wife, keeping up a good front but not getting close to anyone new. And now he'd taken a chance and asked someone out: me. I was flattered, and touched.

  “Listen, Carnegie, I've got to get back to work. See you tomorrow, okay?”

  “Okay. Thanks, Lily. You're a peach.”

  “You bet I am,” she said.

  WITH WEDNESDAY NIGHT BECKONING ON MY CALENDAR, Monday and Tuesday flew by in a blur of checklists. The lists were designed and printed out by Eddie and then covered with my scribbled notes about typefaces, foreign postage, bridesmaids’ hats, videographers, ring engraving—someday I'd have to count up how many decisions and telephone calls go into a wedding. Three or four hundred, anyway. Eddie noticed the lump on my temple, but I played it down as a minor fall at the Parry estate.

  Nor did I mention that curious remark my mother had made about the loans. If Eddie wanted to reassure her with his pumped-up confidence about Made in Heaven's financial future, that was fine with me. Peace at any price. When Eddie gave me a list of checks he needed for Nickie's florist, liquor distributor and so forth, I wrote them up without a murmur. This wasn't standard procedure—he would normally give me the invoices themselves—but I wasn't going to challenge him. I'd resolved to go over our books with him later in the summer. Meanwhile, he was the accountant. If he gave me the numbers, I'd write the checks, no questions asked.

  I even let him win an argument. Eddie had scheduled me to make the two-hour drive to Ellensburg, east of the Cascades, on an upcoming Friday for some preliminary arrangements on a country-western-type wedding. That would have been fine, but he wanted me to spend the night, meet with the pastor after breakfast, and then drive back to Seattle on Saturday morning.

  “Eddie, that's the day of Anita's reception at the Glacier View! I can't drive back from Ellensburg that morning and down to Rainier that afternoon!”

  “Why the hell not?” he demanded. The younger generation's lack of fortitude was a pet peeve of Eddie's. One of many. “Are you going to call Fay Riddiford, one of the only four clients we've actually got at the moment, and tell her to cancel her plans because you're too feeble to drive five whole hours in one day?”

  I sighed, and drew some arrows on my big desk calendar. “All right, all right. Lily's got friends in Ellensburg. Maybe she'd like to come with me and we can share the driving. Satisfied?”

  “I'd be more satisfied if you'd do some marketing instead of—”

  “Time out!” I held up a hand. “Tomorrow and Friday, I will faithfully call every single one of our past brides and ask them for referrals, and I'll reserve a booth at that bridal show in Tacoma. I'll even get working on our Web site. OK?”

  “OK,” he said, mollified for the moment. Then, in his own gesture of peace, he tossed me the newspaper. “There's a laugh for you, halfway down on the business page.”

  I read it, but I wasn't laughing. The headline said “Wife of King County Savings Chair Linked to Insider Deals?” and the byline was Aaron Gold. A former colleague—and obvious ally—of Keith Guthridge was suggesting some nasty things about Grace Parry. No outright accusations, libel laws being what they are, but the implication was that Douglas Parry had made a practice of discussing King County Savings’ loan customers with Grace. And that Grace just might have used the information in her securities trading, to her own and her clients’ advantage. Near the end of the story, Gold sketched in Grace's background as Parry's second wife, a prominent socialite, and, in the words of one anonymous employee, “hell on wheels” to work for.

  I dropped the paper on my desk and groaned. Hell on wheels. I said that, I was the anonymous employee—how dare he quote me without my permission? What if Grace figured out who was talking behind her back? Damn Aaron Gold, and damn my trusting nature. This was my own fault, but that didn't stop me from calling the Sentinel. I got a receptionist, and then the unmistakable flat, East Coast voice.

  “Hi, this is Aaron Gold's voice mail. Leave me a message and I'll call you. Don't talk faster than I can write, OK?”

  The beep sounded and I exploded, even angrier because I didn't have the satisfaction of doing it in person.

  “This is Carnegie Kincaid, and what the hell do you mean quoting me as an anonymous employee, you snoopy son of a bitch? That was an offhand, flippant remark and you know it. Don't you have any ethics at all? And anyway I'm not an employee, I'm a consultant.”

  I stopped for air, and then slammed down the phone. What else was there to say? Eddie was leaning back in his chair, hands behind his head, deck shoes up on the desk.

  “You said that about a client? To a reporter?”

  “Eddie.” I closed my eyes. “Eddie, it was a dumb thing to do, but I don't want to talk about it, all right? I'm going to go run a couple of errands. If Aaron Gold calls back, tell him to drop dead.”

  My first errand was the trip to the Powerhouse, but I wasn't going to tell Eddie that. He thought I'd put the Mustang crash out of my mind. Lily and I met in Ballard, a Scandinavian neighborhood that was once a hardworking little fishing and sawmill town in its own right. Seattle had spread out to engulf Ballard long ago, and lately the rising tide of Seattle's well-paid software types had discovered its low real-estate prices. Now the old brick business district was an uneasy mixture of ancient taverns and new vegetarian restaurants. There was even a hair salon and day spa. I remembered Eddie sneering about that. He lived in Ballard, where he'd been going to the same barber for twenty years.

  “OK, what's the plan?” In honor of the occasion, Lily had worn running shorts and a zippered sweatshirt. She was fiddling with the zipper as we hesitated above a set of cement steps leading down from the sidewalk to an unappealing door marked Powerhouse Gym. The afternoon sun illuminated the shards of a broken beer bottle and some nasty-looking stains. “Who says what? Do we just ask right out, does a guy named Theo come here?”

  “Something like that. I thought I'd—”

  “S'cuse me, ladies.” A small, tough-looking man wearing Eau de Sweat came out of the gym and held the door open for us. A moment passed, then another, but he still stood there. Chivalry was not dead in Ballard. Lily looked at me, round-eyed, and we plunged down the stairs.

  Inside was not nearly as off-putting as outside had been. A perky receptionist smiled at us from her glassed-in cubbyhole, and beyond her an array of weight machines, treadmills, and stationary bikes were in use by a mix of fit and not-so-fit Seattleites, mostly men. Over it all blasted that staple of gyms everywhere: really loud, really bad seventies arena rock. At present we were being favored by Foreigner playing “Hot-Blooded,” but at any moment I expected REO Speedwagon or even, heaven help us, Lynyrd Skynyrd doing “Free Bird.”

  “Hi, I'm Mindy. You guys want to look around?” Mindy wore shorts and a thin white Powerhouse T-shirt stretched to the breakin
g point over a lacy black bra.

  “That would be great,” I said. “We're thinking about joining—”

  But she was already bouncing through the place, rattling off her sales pitch. None of the customers even glanced up, and Mindy seemed to be on automatic pilot herself, almost shouting over the music.

  “All the usual stuff, free weights, Nautilus …”

  “Well, I'm hot-blooded, check it and see”

  “No swimming pool, that's why our fees are so cheap, I mean reasonable …”

  “I got a fever of a hundred and three …”

  Lily clutched my shoulder as we trotted along behind. “If they play ‘Free Bird,’ I am out of here.”

  “Shhhh!”

  “Locker rooms are down there if you want to check 'em out. I'll be up front, OK?”

  “I was just wondering if a friend of mine ever—” But she was gone, in pursuit of a ringing phone, before I could bring out my carefully rehearsed inquiry about Theo. I made to follow her, but Lily stopped me and pointed to an open file box on a counter, in the hallway leading to the locker rooms. It held an alphabetical set of cards that the customers used to record their day's rounds on the weight machines. And at the top of each card was a name.

  “Bingo!” said Lily. “What's Theo's last name?”

  Theo's last name. As far as I knew, it was Driver, and his middle name was The.

  “You don't know, do you?”

  “Well, no.”

  She rolled her eyes, but I grabbed half the cards and handed her the other. We shuffled through them, turning our backs nonchalantly when anyone came down the hall past us. I had the back of the alphabet: McFadden, Ogura, Palmer, Quillen, Stern, Thorpe, Vandenack, Wignall, Wyble …

  “For I'm as free as a bird now,

  And this bird you cannot change.”

  I heard Lily groaning, but I was busy staring at one particular card, out of order at the very end.

  “Hey, what are you doing? Cut it out!” Mindy was bearing down on us. Lily dumped her cards and retreated through the nearest door. I followed, fast.