All Through the Night: A Troubleshooter Christmas

by Suzanne Brockmann

  She took it out of his hands. “No touching.”

  He looked down at her and once again their gazes seemed to lock. And there it was again, that electric spark. “Do you often get mail from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?” he asked.

  Dolphina looked at the return address. Huh.

  “That’s a response to their wedding invitation,” Will realized. “Did Robin really invite President Bryant to his wedding?”

  Jules and Robin had indeed done just that. It was, Jules had reassured Robin, merely an inclusive gesture. Bryant was, after all, his boss’s boss, which made him Jules’s boss, too. But, bottom line, there was no way the U.S. President was actually going to attend.

  Which was a good thing—because both Jules and Robin wanted a small wedding. A quiet, private ceremony with family and friends—really just a few dozen more people than were at today’s party.

  The President’s attendance would turn the affair into a three-ring circus, both in terms of security and media coverage. If they thought they had to fight off hoards of reporters now…God forbid the President showed up—there’d be no way they could keep the press from attending.

  “Hot damn.” Will, meanwhile, had jumped to conclusions. “The President is coming to Robin and Jules’s wedding.”

  “His secretary probably just sent his regrets,” Dolphina said.

  “Open it and see,” he urged.

  She looked at him. “I won’t be able to tell you what it says. It’s not your business.”

  “Yeah, but don’t you want to know?”

  She put the envelope down. “I’ll find out later.” On second thought, she took the entire pile of mail and put it into her desk drawer, locking it shut.

  She picked up her calendar book again. “Kuhlman or Hartz?”

  “Excuse me?” he said.

  “Your last name.” Dolphina again looked up at him. There were two different Williams on the party’s guest list. Well, three, including little Billy Richter, Robin’s pint-sized nephew. William Kuhlman was the real estate agent who’d helped Robin and Jules find this amazing house. William Hartz worked for the FBI.

  Her Will was hesitating, and she could see from his eyes that he was weighing the pros and cons of…lying to her?

  She flipped to her guest list and quickly checked and…Of course. William Kuhlman was attending the shower with his wife, Jodie.

  Nice.

  Apparently he was her type—already married.

  She waited.

  He gazed at her.

  She lifted an eyebrow.

  “What the hell,” he finally said. “It’s Schroeder.” He spelled it for her as she continued to stare at him. “It’s German,” he added, as if that would somehow make it more believable.

  “Really?” she said. “Because Kuhlman sounds German, too.”

  “Kuhlman?” he asked. “Yeah, it probably is. Who’s Kuhlman?”

  “You are,” she said. “William Kuhlman.”

  He laughed. “Wait a sec—you mean Bill, Robin’s real estate agent? I just met him in the kitchen. Nice guy. Glasses. Goatee?” She must’ve continued to exude skepticism, because he took out his wallet. “You want to see my driver’s license?” He held it out to her.

  She took it. Looked at it. William T. Schroeder, six feet one inches tall, born May 22, 1967, 214 Massachusetts Avenue… She turned, flipping on the office copy machine, slipping the license onto the glass and closing the lid.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” Dolphina asked him as she pushed the button to copy his driver’s license.

  “I, uh, kind of do,” he said as the machine whirred.

  She turned it off again, then handed him back his license and put the copy she’d made in with her notes.

  “You can have my phone number, too, if you really want it.” He put his wallet back into his pocket.

  “Considering Jules works for the FBI,” Dolphina said sweetly, “I’m sure we’ll be able to find you. If we have a reason to.”

  “Great,” he said, although he didn’t sound as if he meant it.

  Because William Schroeder was not on today’s guest list. A fact that he clearly knew, since party-crashers tended to know that they were crashing a party.

  Despite the fact that this wedding shower was being held here in Jules and Robin’s home, the official hosts were both Robin’s sister Jane and her husband, Cosmo, and Jules’s best friends, Sam Starrett and Alyssa Locke. Dolphina had helped them by being in charge of the guest list and all the RSVPs that had come in.

  She’d done significantly better with that task than she had with her job of getting the grooms to the surprise party in something other than their underwear.

  “So, do you drink?” Will asked her now.

  Dolphina found herself blinking at him. Surely he knew that she now knew he’d crashed this party…

  “Because if you do, maybe we could, you know, go out for drinks some time,” he finished.

  “You’re asking me out,” she clarified.

  “Yes, I am.” He was definite. “The stupification’s wearing off. I find I’m regaining my usual working vocabulary, and I would like very much to go out with you. I don’t suppose you want to copy your driver’s license for me?”

  That was so not going to happen. “Thank you, but no, Mr. Schroeder,” she told him. “Both to the copying and the drink. I’m very much unavailable. For the entire rest of my life.”

  “So…” he said, actually settling in to talk, perching on the arm of the leather sofa that was under the bay windows that looked out onto the busy street. “You’re seeing someone and it’s serious?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not. But thanks for offering that as an option for a tactful excuse. Thing is, I’m just not feeling the need for tact right now.”

  He laughed. “Then you’re just…not interested?” he asked. “Because maybe I’m wrong, but I’m picking up what feels like at least a little bit of interest.”

  “Absolutely,” she admitted truthfully. “I think you’re very interesting. Too interesting.”

  “Too interesting,” he repeated. “Is that really possible?”

  “You tell me,” she countered, sitting down behind her computer and turning it on. “Or should I just Google you?”

  He was so busted—there was no way now that he was going to just sit there and pretend that he wasn’t.

  “Look,” he started to say, but whatever he was going to tell her, he didn’t get a chance to finish.

  “Hey, Dolph.” That was Jules shouting down the hall. “Is Robin with you?”

  “No, he’s not,” she shouted back. They really had to get an intercom. “He said something about giving someone a tour of the house?”

  “Will you do me a favor?” Jules came down the hall to ask at lower decibel levels. He was carrying Robin’s little nephew on his hip. “Oh, hey, hi, how are you?” he greeted Will. “I’m sorry, Dolph, but would you mind running to the third floor, see if he’s maybe locked in the library again?” He rolled his eyes at Will. “We have a slight issue with the locking mechanisms on the doors. They’re all really old—the wood’s mahogany. They’re beautiful, but you never know when a knob’s going to just…come off in your hand. You pull and…If it happens when the door’s closed…you’re screwed.”

  “Don’t go anywhere,” Dolphina ordered Will. “Don’t talk to him,” she likewise ordered Jules.

  “What? Why?” she heard Jules ask, clearly bemused, as she took the stairs up, two at a time.

  Terrific. Wonderful. Freaking great.

  Robin could not believe this.

  He was locked in the basement.

  He’d been giving a tour of the house to a group of Jules’s friends from the FBI, including Gina Bhagat. Gina was an old friend of Jules’s who was now married to his boss, Max. Robin had met Max a number of times in work situations, and it was funny. He’d nearly tripped over the man in the kitchen today, and he hadn’t recognized him wit
hout his dark suit and tie. Wearing jeans and a sweater, smiling, with his arm around his beautiful wife, Max Bhagat seemed like a completely different person.

  Gina had been fascinated by the history of Jules and Robin’s home—particularly the rumor that the place had been a stop on the underground railroad. Slaves escaping north to Canada had been hidden here, probably in this very basement.

  So Gina had wanted to see it.

  While they were down here, Robin had noticed that one of the narrow ceiling-level windows had blown open, and a puddle of icy water was collecting on the cellar floor. Since this was the last stop on the house tour, he’d sent his little group back upstairs where it was warm, and went about finding a stepladder so he could push the window shut.

  It wouldn’t latch, though. He was handy enough when it came to fixing things, and he quickly saw that part of the metal lock had rusted through and snapped off. He ended up jamming a piece of wood against the window, which did the trick of keeping it closed.

  He’d put away the ladder and gone up the stairs and…

  The fricking doorknob came off in his fricking hand.

  Jesus, if he didn’t love this old house so much, he would hate it. Just last week he’d gotten locked in, up in the third floor library.

  And okay. Just because the knob was in his hand didn’t mean that he couldn’t manipulate the mechanism and open the door and…

  Thud.

  The metal rod and other knob fell out on the other side of the door, leaving nothing for him to grasp and turn. The hole where it had once been was too small for him to fit more than one finger in—his pinky at that—and he couldn’t disengage the lock. The hinges, of course, were on the other side.

  Robin banged on the door for a while, but the basement entrance was out of the way, in the back of the kitchen mudroom. If the additional door between the mudroom and the kitchen was closed, that, combined with the noise from the party, meant that no one was going to hear him no matter how loudly he banged and shouted.

  There was a basement door leading out into the tiny back garden, but it was dead-bolted shut, and there was no key in sight.

  And, of course, his cell phone was up in the bedroom that he shared with Jules—plugged into its charger and set on silence. Let’s have a no-cell-phone day, babe. That had been Robin’s brilliant idea, conceived as they hurriedly changed into dry clothes after getting the bejeezus surprised out of them by fifty of their friends and coworkers.

  He still had to smile at that expression on Jules’s face when he’d realized he’d just told nearly everyone that he knew—including his boss—that he wasn’t wearing any underwear.

  It was usually Robin who stuck his foot in his mouth that way.

  “Welcome to my world,” Robin had murmured to Jules, who had laughed as they’d dashed upstairs to get dried off and changed.

  But now, after too many minutes of sitting on the chilly basement stairs, just waiting for Jules to notice he was missing, Robin got the ladder out again and went back to the window with the broken latch.

  He saw that he could, with just a little effort, knock away the wood frame, and take the entire window out of the wall. The screen came out with the assembly, leaving an open hole that was slightly larger than the window itself.

  Larger was good, but larger than tiny was still pretty freaking small.

  There was a half-circular stone well outside of that opening. A strip of flower garden—with what looked like bunches of freeze-dried marigold plants, blackened and skeletal—was actually several feet above both that leaf-filled well and the window. If Robin was going to crawl out there—if he really could fit his head and shoulders through the narrow slot—the only way to do it would be backward, with his face to the top of the window, so he could haul himself up, into a sitting position, with his back to the wall of the well.

  Good thing he’d been doing his ab work religiously.

  The rain was coming down harder now, blowing in onto him, thick and cold.

  Robin went up the stairs and hammered on the door. “Hey! I’m locked in down here! Anyone?”

  But no one answered.

  He went back to the window and rolled up his sleeves.

  “We haven’t met,” Jules said to the man who’d managed to pull Dolphina away from the party—no small feat, that. “I’m Jules, and this is Billy, my soon-to-be nephew-in-law.”

  “Will,” he said, coming over to shake Jules’s hand. He had a solid grip and a nice smile. He ruffled Billy’s hair. “Hey, I was a Billy when I was little, too.”

  “No,” Billy said.

  “Yeah,” Jules told the little boy, laughing. “Billy and Will are both nicknames for William. And you met Uncle Robin’s friend Bill in the kitchen, remember? He’s a William, too. And William’s your dad’s middle name, right?”

  “No,” Billy said, but he nodded his head yes.

  “Yeah, you’re just being silly now,” Jules said.

  “You silly, too, Unca Jules,” Billy told him.

  “I am very good at being silly. You got that right,” Jules agreed as the little boy hugged him hard around the neck. Yeah, he could get used to this. “So why doesn’t Dolphina want me to talk to you?” Jules asked the larger William.

  “I asked her out,” Will admitted. “Maybe she’s afraid I’m going to talk you into pledging my troth for me. Assuming that…troths still get pledged.”

  Jules laughed. “And I would do that for you because…?”

  “You’re a romantic,” Will told him. “You’re getting married in a month to a guy who’s over the moon about you. I’m not gay, but even I’m a little jealous after talking to him. He loves you very much, you know.”

  Jules nodded. “I do know, but thanks. It’s always nice to hear.”

  Will was looking at him in the weirdest way, like he was about to confess to being the real Boston Strangler or something equally awful. But then he said, “You’ve got something really good going, and…it’s human nature to try to infect all your single friends with your couple-itis. And here I am—new to the scene, but smitten with your inimitable Ms. Patel. She, in turn, finds me interesting. Her word choice. Unfortunately, she’s going to have a vastly different word for me after she comes back downstairs. One that Billy probably shouldn’t hear.”

  “Because…you’re a writer,” Jules realized, and Will nodded.

  “I am,” he admitted.

  Oh, this was not going to be good.

  Jules looked at Billy. “Go and find your daddy, okay?”

  “No,” Billy said, but again he nodded yes, and Jules put him down, watching as the little boy ran into the living room. It was only then that he turned back to Will.

  “What paper are you with?” Jules asked, as he heard the sound of Dolphina’s footsteps, coming lightly down the stairs.

  “Robin’s not up there,” she called down, as Will reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a business card.

  It was bent and slightly battered around the edges, kind of like the man himself. William Schroeder, Jules read. The Boston Globe.

  Oh, good. The Globe.

  “Who invited you?” he asked the man, working to keep his voice even.

  “No one,” Will said. “I just…heard about the party and thought I’d show up. See if I couldn’t get in. See who I could talk to.”

  Robin. Damnit, he’d said he’d talked to Robin.

  “So what do you want?” Jules asked. “Money? Because that’s not going to happen.”

  “What? No. God.” It was possible that Will really was offended. Or, he was simply a good bullshit artist. “I just, I don’t know, wanted to give you a chance to comment. On the record. It doesn’t have to be right now, we could set something up for later in the week. Do it right. Sit down, the three of us, and do a real interview.”

  Jules was already shaking his head. “I think you better leave.”

  Dolphina was back, and she was looking from Will to Jules and back. “Interview?” sh
e said, horror in her voice.

  Jules handed her Will’s card. To her credit, she didn’t start to scream. But she was a good outside-of-the-box thinker, and she immediately started brainstorming. “Can we have him arrested?” she asked. “He crashed the party. He didn’t break and enter, but you don’t need to do that to make it a crime, do you? Home invasion. Isn’t that what it’s called?”

  “I’m betting someone invited him in,” Jules said.

  “Yeah, but it’s not like he’s a vampire,” she countered hotly. “He knew he wasn’t really invited, yet he came in anyway.” She turned to Will. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  “I guess hooking up for drinks is off the table,” Will said.

  “You think?” Dolphina said. “Can we sue him?” she asked Jules. “Or how about if we just kill him and bury him in the basement?”

  “Now, that is a crime,” Jules pointed out. “Mr. Schroeder was just leaving.”

  “I’d love to get a comment from you,” Will said, “at least about the news that the President’s going to be attending your wedding.”

  Jules looked sharply at Dolphina.

  But she was shaking her head. “We received his reply today,” she told him. “But it hasn’t been opened.”

  That was the last thing they needed right now. Not just the President attending—which would be bad enough—but news of it leaking out before they organized their game plan.

  “Time to go,” Jules told Will. “Do me a favor please, Dolph, and just…go find Robin?”

  It was then that the doorbell rang and kept ringing as if someone insane were out on the front porch.

  The locked door handle rattled, too.

  Jules pushed aside the curtains on the door’s window and…

  It was indeed someone insane out there—someone insane enough to be in the cold without his jacket on. Robin stood there shivering, and…Oh, God. The parts of him that weren’t soaking wet were covered in…mud? He had leaves matted in hair that was plastered to his head.

  But he was grinning at Jules and pointing to the sky, where the rain had finally changed from sleet to big, white, fluffy snowflakes.