The four-story brick apartment buildings of Boston slowly transformed into the leafy suburbia and single-family elegance of Newton. MacLean lived up the hill from Nonantum, one of the town’s thirteen villages. George took a right on Chestnut Street and wound past the sleepy lawns and faux-Tudor mansions till he found Twitchell. MacLean’s was the first gated property he came to. Pulling up to the speaker box, he could see a Georgian mansion squatting on a sloping lawn. George rolled down his window. Somewhere out of sight he could hear the sound of a lawn mower, and he could smell the sharp acidity of cut grass in the thick air.
A tinny female voice from the speaker asked, “Name, please?”
“George Foss.”
He waited a moment, and the ornate metal gates began to swing in. He took a deep chest-expanding breath, causing the dull ache in his side to erupt into a sharp twinge. The image of Donnie Jenks rose up in his mind like a shark fin cresting the surface of the sea. Would Donnie be at the house? It seemed possible.
He pulled up next to a landscaping van near the front entrance. He could now see the ride-on mower making a tight circle around a towering maple on the east side of the house. The presence of the gardener made him feel better. If either MacLean or Donnie was planning on burying him in the garden, they wouldn’t do it in front of witnesses, would they?
The mansion was brick and trimmed in white, with freshly painted black shutters and a black front door. Before George got a chance to ring the doorbell, the door swung inward soundlessly. A young woman greeted him. She was probably in her midtwenties, wore a tan cotton skirt and a dark blue polo shirt, and had her streaky blond hair tied severely back in a ponytail. George initially wondered if she was MacLean’s daughter, but her manner, even the way she opened the door, was the officious clipped style of the professional personal assistant. “Mr. Foss,” she said.
“That’s me.”
“Come in. He’s expecting you.”
George stepped inside. MacLean’s house, from the outside, seemed ostentatious, but it was nothing compared to the opulent interior. The foyer was easily twice the size of an Olympic swimming pool, an oblong of intricate molding and white marble. A twisting wooden staircase led to the second-floor balcony. Above the foyer hung a Chihuly sculpture, twisted tubes of multicolored glass, spreading out like an anemone under the sea. George had seen one like it at a casino in Vegas. The white walls were hung with other splashy pieces of art, abstracts in bright neon colors.
“Chihuly,” George said to the assistant and raised his eyes toward the sculpture. She looked up but didn’t seem impressed by his knowledge of the art world.
“Mr. MacLean will be right down. Wait in here.” She led him to a white doorway a couple of hundred yards of marble away. “Can I get you anything while you wait?”
“No thanks,” he said, and she peeled off silently on espadrilles.
George entered the room. It looked like a library, but it had no books. It was windowless and wood-paneled, with leather furniture and several upright globes, some of which looked genuinely antique. The room was in such a completely different style from the foyer that George actually turned back to make sure he hadn’t dreamt the previous space. It was unsettling, like walking through a Miami drug lord’s entryway to find yourself in Lord Wimsey’s secret den. Framed maps lined the wall, including one that was old and yellowed enough to have one of those sea monsters rearing out of the ocean. George was studying it when two men entered the room.
The first man was older and appeared to be MacLean. He was a fit-looking man in his sixties with thick white hair that had recently been given a buzz cut. He wore black pants and a tucked-in shirt in a red-check pattern. He was a little on the short side, and it was clear that he’d spent his life making up for it by working out. Even at his advanced age, his shoulders looked strong and his stomach was flat. There was nothing distinctive about the way he looked or the way he was dressed except for his belt buckle, which was impossible not to notice—a large glass oval, it held what looked to be a real black scorpion, mounted on yellow felt and framed in silver.
The other man was taller, about George’s height but about twice his girth. He was one of those men who, from the waist up, was only marginally overweight, but whose hips spread outward to almost twice George’s size. He wore a tent-size pair of khaki pants with a Pawtucket Sox shirt tucked into the elastic waist. His head mirrored his body—thick around the chin and cheeks, then narrowing toward the top. He had black hair parted on the side and wore a perfectly trimmed mustache.
“Money in the bag?” the older man said, jerking his head in the direction of George.
George nodded, held out the bag. The large man came forward, moving in an awkward waddling fashion, and took it from him, then handed it to the older man. “Pat him down, DJ,” MacLean said.
The man called DJ turned to George and mimicked stretching out his arms. “Do you mind?” he asked.
George told him he didn’t, then held out his arms. DJ quickly patted him along his sides, from his ankles to under his arms. Instead of bending at the waist to reach George’s ankles, he went slowly down on one knee, then slowly back up. One of his knees popped audibly, startling George. He wondered if the man was looking for a weapon or a wire. Probably both.
While George was patted down, MacLean placed the gym bag on a side table, unzipped it, and quickly riffled through the stacks of bills. He re-zipped the bag. George thought he heard him sigh.
“He’s clean,” DJ said to MacLean.
“All right. Thanks. You can leave us alone for a moment.”
“Do you want me to take the money?”
“That’s okay. I’ll deal with it.”
DJ left the room and pulled the door closed behind him.
MacLean took a couple of steps toward George, but it was clear that he wasn’t going to come all the way forward to shake his hand.
“You’re Jane’s friend,” he said.
“I am.”
“That’s a precarious position to be in,” he said, and one corner of his thin lips went up in a joyless smile. George felt like a tongue-tied child faced with an adult. MacLean sighed again. “Well, have a seat.”
George sat on one of the leather chairs. It creaked slightly as he settled in and gave off an acrid smell of floral cleaning product. MacLean sat on the end of a couch, perched very close to its edge, as though he had no intention of staying any longer than he needed to. He placed his hands, palms down, on his knees. His face was pinkish-red under his thatch of white hair, his eyes were slits, and his mouth was virtually lipless. Outside, George could hear the lawn mower shut off, then start again in a high, whining drone.
“I’m sorry, but what is your name again?” MacLean asked.
“It’s George Foss. I was briefly in college with Jane, many years ago.”
“Okay, George Foss. I’ll just assume that’s probably not your real name, but I won’t nitpick. I’ll also assume she’s been fucking the living daylights out of you or else you wouldn’t be here.”
“You can think what you want, but she’s an old college friend.”
MacLean sniffed, then pinched the bridge of his nose. “Sure. So if you’re just an old college friend, what’s in it for you?”
“I’m just doing a favor. I figured I was doing you a favor as well. You’ve got your money back.”
“Some of my fucking money back.”
“Right. And now you’ll call off Donnie.”
MacLean’s thin lips went up again in an involuntary startled smile. “Call off Donnie? Call off Donnie from who? You?”
“No. From Jane. He’s been threatening her.”
MacLean lowered his brow in confusion. “Who are you talking about? Are you talking about Donnie Jenks? DJ?”
George suddenly felt confused. “The guy you hired to get the money from Jane. I met him yesterday.”
“Well, you also met him today. He just patted you down. Donald Jenks. DJ. He’s an investigator in my emplo
y. I don’t know who the fuck you’re talking about.”
Chapter 7
After a moment, George said, “There’s someone else pretending to be Donnie Jenks. I met him yesterday.”
“What did he look like?”
George described him.
“He doesn’t sound like anyone I know. He’s probably just some friend of Jane’s, trying to scare you into doing her a favor.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. It’s because of him that she decided to return the money.”
MacLean pressed his lips together and squeezed the bridge of his nose again. “Is that what she told you?”
George told him what he knew, about the man’s threats to Liana, the way he’d been following her since she’d left Atlanta. “Clearly he knows enough about you to know you hired a man named Donnie Jenks to recover the money, and he’s using that name.”
MacLean flicked his fingers in a gesture of dismissal. “Either way, it’s not my problem. If some gun-for-hire wants to chase down Jane, I’m not going to lose any sleep. Something makes me think Jane’s behind it anyhow. I don’t know why, but I wouldn’t put it past her.”
“You got your money back,” George said and shifted in his seat. He was ready to go. It had suddenly occurred to him that the miniature assassin going by the name of Donnie Jenks was most likely an employee of MacLean’s, an employee MacLean had no intention of owning up to. Someone paid under the table. MacLean was the worst kind of dirty, someone who pretended he wasn’t.
MacLean, as though reading George’s mind, held up a hand and said, “Look, let me do you a little favor for no good reason. Let me tell you my story about Jane. It probably won’t change your mind about her, but I’ll feel better.” He looked at his watch, a chunky piece of metal that hung loosely on his thin wrist.
George shrugged.
MacLean slid a little farther back into the couch. “As you probably know, I have some money to my name. Not Walmart money, but I’ve done okay for myself. I’ve had two wives. The first one died from eclampsia giving birth to my only daughter. That was thirty-seven years ago. My first wife’s name was Rebecca, and she had black hair and blue eyes. Raven black hair and eyes that were the palest kind of blue you can imagine. She was like a poem, the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I met her on a golf course on a Saturday afternoon in Georgia. She was quite the golfer. Today she would have gone pro and been one of the best lady golfers in the country, but back then she was happy enough to be my wife.
“After she died, I didn’t think I would recover, but I did. I met Teresa fifteen years ago at a charity event up here in Boston. Like my first wife, she has very dark hair and very blue eyes. And like my first wife, she will die before me. She’s dying right now in this very house. It’s entirely possible that she will die in a matter of days, not weeks. What do you think the probability is that I would have two wives who looked so very much alike and who both met such cruel fates? Don’t answer. That’s a rhetorical question.
“The answer is that both of them dying young is just another piece of shitty luck, but any psychologist worth his hourly fee would tell you that they looked alike because I am attracted to women with black hair and blue eyes.”
He paused, staring at George, challenging him to interrupt his tale. George said nothing.
“Which brings us to Jane Byrne,” he continued, then coughed twice after saying her name. “The lady that you’re interested in. Jane’s not her real name of course, but it’s all that I have to go on. I met her at the Cockle Bay Resort in Barbados. I was down there on business, and she was working the reception desk. She checked me into my room, and like Rebecca and like Teresa, she had very dark hair, almost black, and very blue eyes. Not only that, but she shared the same haircut that my first wife had. Shoulder length and flipped under a little.”
MacLean demonstrated the curve of the hair with his own hand. It was a curiously feminine gesture coming from such a masculine man.
“Now, I know that everything old is new again and old styles come back, but it did remind me of my first wife. Not that I was suspicious at the time. I wasn’t of course—why would I be? But I remember thinking that I had just seen the spitting image of my first wife, and no offense to Teresa”—MacLean looked at the ceiling as he said her name—“but I had met the second most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
“That night I was having a drink in one of the resort’s bars with an employee, and Jane came in and sat at the bar and got herself a glass of wine. I assumed it was the end of her shift and she wasn’t ready to go home yet. She never looked in my direction, but—and I am to blame for this—I went over and introduced myself. I told myself I just wanted to let her know that she reminded me of my departed wife and that the very sight of her had warmed an old man’s heart. I was going to get it off my chest, and then I was going to go back to my table and leave her alone. But she was talkative, asked me questions about my life, about my work. She’d been in Barbados a year and was sick of it, but she loved the weather and she loved the people. We talked till about two or three in the morning. She lived in an apartment building about a quarter mile down the beach, and I walked her home. She was not flirtatious exactly, but she was clearly interested in me. To tell the truth, I thought that she wanted a job in my company, that she saw me as a way out of Barbados.
“I stayed at the resort for about three more days and had a drink with Jane every night. On the last night, I walked her back, I gave her one of my business cards and told her that if she was interested in a position, there might be something for her at my corporate headquarters. I remember she laughed at me, said, ‘You think I’ve been having drinks with you because I thought you could get me a job?’ I told her it had crossed my mind and asked her why in fact she was interested in me. Well, she kissed me, and God forgive me, I kissed her back. You won’t believe me, but I’ve had two wives, plus a serious girlfriend in high school and a serious girlfriend in college, and I had never cheated on any of them. That’s the honest truth.”
He stared across at George as though daring him to say otherwise. George scratched an elbow.
“Well, you don’t need to hear details about the next part, but I started going down to Barbados every chance I could get, and pretty soon I told Jane that I needed her a lot closer to me than a four-hour flight away, and she agreed to come to Atlanta and work as my personal assistant. This was a couple of years ago. Teresa was seeing a different specialist every week, and each one told us something different, and all the while that was going on I was setting up an apartment for Jane in Atlanta. I felt pretty sordid about it back then, but not as bad as I feel now. I won’t say Jane used witchcraft on me, but it was pretty near. I couldn’t get enough of her. I’d never felt that way before.”
MacLean rubbed the back of his neck, and for a second George thought he might get up and leave the room, but he continued. “It was pretty clear that Teresa was going to die, and there was no doubt in my mind that after a decent period I would ask Jane to become my wife. It seemed like the natural progression of things. Then two things happened.” MacLean held up two fingers as though he were giving a presentation. “First, one of the higher-ups at my company came to me and said that he’d been working late one night, and that when he came to see if I was in my office he found Jane going through my file cabinets. He said that he wouldn’t have thought twice about it, but that she had one of the drawers completely pulled out and was running her hand along the insides of the cabinet, as though she was looking for something hidden, maybe an envelope, or something stuck to the inside of the cabinet. Here’s the rub. I actually did have my office safe’s number stuck inside one of my cabinets. I didn’t generally use it because I have the numbers up here pretty good”—MacLean tapped his right temple—“but just to be on the safe side, I’d written them out on an envelope label and stuck them inside one of the cabinets. I had no recollection of ever telling Jane anything about hiding away secret stuff like that, but I might have. I di
dn’t know what to make of it. The thing was, if Jane had really wanted the safe combination, I would have gladly given it to her.
“Then came the second part. One night I was staying over at Jane’s apartment, and she had to step out for a few things. I won’t pretend I wasn’t snooping, but I happened to be sitting at her desk, looking at her computer, and I started going through her desk drawer. There wasn’t much in it, but there were a few photographs, including a couple of snapshots from Barbados. I knew they were from Barbados because she was right in front of the Cockle Bay. I thought they must be pretty old photographs because (A) they were actual photographs, not something from a computer, and (B) in them Jane had long hair that was kind of a streaky blond. It totally changed her appearance. I flipped the picture over, and it had one of those time stamps on it, with the date, that tells you when the photograph was taken. The picture was from just one month before I’d come down to Barbados, just one month before I’d met Jane.
“And it suddenly all clicked. Jane knew that I had a lot of money and that I was booked to come to the Cockle Bay, and she must have researched me, or Googled me or whatever, and found out I’d had two wives. I’m sure she saw pictures of them, and she changed her hair so that she’d look like my first wife. I could prove none of this, of course, in a court of law, nor did I want to. But I felt like a fool. I didn’t say anything to Jane right away, but I did have her checked out. I hired . . . this person to look into her background, and he found absolutely nothing. And not nothing as in nothing bad, but nothing as in nothing at all. There was no Jane Byrne. There were people with that name, of course, but none of them were the woman I knew. There was no past history, nothing to make it seem like she had actually ever existed.”
He paused again, and George asked, “What did you do?”
“I didn’t go to her with everything I suspected because . . . because I don’t know . . . but I did tell her that spending time with Teresa . . . with Teresa dying . . . had changed my mind about my relationship with her and that I needed it to stop. But she knew that I knew, and I saw something go out of her eyes, like she didn’t need to pretend anymore. She told me she’d remove herself from my life, and I foolishly decided to not have her escorted from the office that very minute. I told her she could stick around till she figured out what to do next.
The Girl with a Clock for a Heart: A Novel Page 6
