by Nancy Martin
“No. You didn’t kill Rush.”
“But I must have done something. It’s got to be my fault that he—that Rush—”
Emma cried then. She clenched her fists against her eyes, but she couldn’t stop the tears. Tough, strong Emma suddenly looked lost and scared and bereft. I hugged her, crying, too, while Spike whined and struggled between us.
Emma pulled away first. I wiped my eyes and watched her try to make sense of the jumbled images in her head. But abruptly Emma gave up. She stopped weeping, shoved her hair off her forehead and blew an irritated sigh. “This is all par for the course, though, right?” she said with a bitter laugh. “We Blackbirds always pick the wrong men.”
“I’m so sorry he’s gone, Emma. I hadn’t realized Rush truly meant something to you.”
“I know better than to fool around with a married man. I almost fell for the old I’m-going-to-leave-my-wife line. Funny, isn’t it? You’d think I’d be smarter than that.”
I hated seeing her heartbroken and hopeless again. I knew if I didn’t figure out what had happened, she was going to tear herself apart with grief and guilt. I’d seen her do it before, and I wondered if she’d survive it this time.
She couldn’t help herself. Not yet. She needed to get healthy first.
“Let’s go get something to eat,” I suggested, putting my arm around her again. Spike licked her face. “You look like you could use a meal and a good night’s rest.”
She leaned against me for the briefest moment and let Spike erase the salty line from her cheek. “What I need is a drink.”
Michael knocked on the door then, and I opened it.
“Ready to go?” he asked.
“Emma’s not getting into the trunk again.”
He grinned. “Whatever she wants.”
I noticed he wasn’t carrying the duffel anymore. He took Spike from me.
By the time we reached the alley again, another car was pulling up beside the parked vehicles. Michael turned, Spike in his arm, and recognized the car. He waved it into a parking space.
I didn’t know the man who got out of the car, but Michael missed a step at the sight of him.
Michael said, “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Aldo sent me. He couldn’t make it.”
“He couldn’t make it? What’d he do, break a nail?”
The new guy grinned. He was younger and not as tall as Michael, but he had a swagger and a hard body under a leather jacket and jeans. He’d make a daunting adversary in a brawl, I found myself thinking. He wasn’t bad-looking despite having slicked his black hair into a ponytail. He said, “Hey, she sent the Shakespeare kid home early, and Aldo’s getting his sister out of custody tonight, so here I am.”
Michael sighed.
Emma went over and said, “Who’s this? Another one of your minions?”
“Nothing minimal about me, baby.”
Michael said, “This is Danny Pescara.”
“Mick’s cousin,” Danny supplied. “Kind of, anyway. Who are you, baby?”
“Cut it out,” said Michael.
“You don’t need to fight my battles for me.” Emma sized up Danny Pescara with a practiced glance. “I can take care of an asshole with one hand tied behind my back.”
Danny smiled and fingered the toothpick in his mouth. “We could do a few more things with your hands tied. What are you wearing, anyway?” He looked at her boots. “That’s some fashion statement you got going.”
“Know anything about horses?”
“I been to the track a few times.”
“I don’t like this,” I said to Michael.
“You and me both. Look, Danny, let’s just forget about this thing.”
“Don’t change your plans on my account.” Emma was looking at Danny as if he might make a good punching bag. “I want to see if this idiot can keep the romance alive for more than three minutes.”
“First we gotta find out if you can interest me that long, baby.”
“Wake up and smell the inadequacy, big boy.”
“Oh, Jesus,” said Michael. “What’s it going to be with you two? Machine guns at dawn?”
“He won’t live that long,” Emma predicted.
Danny laughed and strutted over to the hillbilly car Michael had just vacated. He opened the driver’s side door and bowed to Emma. “You coming?”
She looked at Michael and managed to keep her cool. “Where am I going?”
He saw through her act and softened his tone. “We’re just going to keep you out of the limelight for a few days. You’ll be someplace safe. At least,” he added with a meaningful glance at his cousin, “you better be, or I’ll have a smaller family by morning.”
Danny shrugged. “You want safe, call an ambulance.”
Emma lightly punched Michael’s arm. “It’s okay, Mick. I’ll go with this moron if he promises to buy me a steak.”
“Before or after?” Danny asked.
“Just make sure you’re not followed,” Michael commanded. “And you call me every hour, got that?”
Danny raised his eyebrows at me. “You want to be interrupted every hour, that’s no skin off my nose.”
To me, Emma said, “Don’t worry, Sis. You and the love machine have a nice night. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Be careful, Em.”
But I knew I might as well have tossed those cautionary words off the edge of a cliff. Emma went around the car and got into the passenger’s side. Michael reluctantly threw the keys at Danny, who winked and slid behind the wheel. A minute later, they were gone, Danny accelerating so the car’s rear wheels skittered sideways in the snow before catching some traction and speeding off down the alley.
Michael put me into the other car and got in beside me. He sat for a moment, looking thoughtfully into the rearview mirror.
“Is he really your cousin?” I asked.
“My stepmother’s sister’s kid,” he said absently, still frowning at the disappearing car. “You think Emma can handle him?”
“Emma,” I said, “can handle starving alligators on speed. You forget she was married to Jake Kendall.”
Michael stopped frowning at the mirror and stared at me. “Jake Kendall? The football player? Why didn’t I know that?”
“I don’t—”
“Emma’s husband was Jake Kendall?”
“Didn’t I mention his last name? I assumed you knew that.”
“Oh, shit,” he said. “Oh, shit. I don’t believe this.”
He started the car and whipped it around to follow Danny and Emma. But we reached the end of the alley and they were gone. Michael got out of the car, swearing until Spike began to bark.
Michael stood in the snow and punched buttons on his cell phone. Whoever he called didn’t answer, and he started cursing again.
At last, he got back into the car and said, “I think I just made a big mistake.”
Chapter 11
After a minute, he said, “I better take care of this tonight. You mind if I take you home?”
“No pizza?”
“Sorry.”
“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong with your cousin?”
“No,” he said.
Once again I got the message that I was better off not knowing anything that I might have to discuss on a witness stand. But this time the safety of my own flesh and blood was at stake. So I said, “What branch of the family business is Danny in? He isn’t your accountant, is he?”
“He probably has to take his shoes off to count higher than ten. No, he’s not my accountant.” Michael seemed to understand I needed more reassurance. “He might run a few football pools, and sometimes he gets creative with that and there’s trouble.”
“Michael—”
“Don’t ask,” he said. “Not yet. Some things happened long ago, and I was never completely sure how Danny was involved.”
“Football things? Was Jake mixed up in it?”
“Really,” he said. “Don’t ask
. Let me handle it.”
Jake Kendall had been a golden boy, a talented athlete with a big personality, a hot temper and a lot of other larger-than-life qualities that Emma reflected back to him. Despite his wild ways on and off the field, he’d been a straight arrow behind the bad boy persona. Or at least the world thought so. I didn’t want to hear now, years after his sudden death, that things weren’t as they had appeared.
Michael said, “Tell me what Emma said about Strawcutter’s death.”
I told him what I knew, which was that in the early morning hours before the hunt, Emma and Rush had encountered Gussie, Tottie, Dougie and even Tim Naftzinger at the stable. Michael must have heard the frustration in my voice.
“Maybe she’ll remember more detail as time passes,” he suggested.
“I hope so. Meanwhile, I have to keep asking questions. I’m worried about her, Michael.”
“I know. She’s tough, but she’s scared she killed him, isn’t she?”
“She’s confused and upset. She feels guilty.”
“I’m glad to see her get a little emotional with you, though. I was seriously thinking of taking her back to the hospital. She was ready to crack, and not in a good way.”
“Watch her carefully, will you?”
Michael reached across and touched my face. “Don’t worry too much.”
An impossible request.
Michael took me home, and he wasn’t happy to see an unfamiliar truck parked in the rear driveway. “Who’s this?”
I went inside to speak with Mr. Ledbetter, the man who had done his best to look after Blackbird Farm during my parents’ occupation. He still possessed a key, and he was standing in the kitchen wearing the same overalls I remembered from my childhood, along with an orange-and-blue parka that advertised the furnace company he used to own.
He rubbed the stubble on his face with an elderly baseball cap and began shaking his head. “This is very bad, young lady. Very, very bad.”
I introduced Michael, and they shook hands solemnly. Mr. Ledbetter continued to wag his head.
“What’s the prognosis?” I asked. “Why do I have a swimming pool starting in my kitchen?
“It’s the roof.” He looked grim. “You gotta leak up there like Niagara Falls. The water’s running down between the walls and ends up here ’cause there’s no place else for it to go, unless you want me to put in a drain right here.” He tapped his steel-toed boot on the tile floor. “But you’ll never fix the trouble until you fix the roof, same as always. Pretty soon, the walls will start to buckle and the whole place will come down. That dang roof is always the trouble.”
“Yes, I know, and it’s too expensive to fix properly.”
“Well, we can patch it up with some of those slates out in the barn, but they’re old and brittle, too, y’know, and won’t last. New ones aren’t going to match the old ones, plus you could put a whole new roof of composite shingles on for the same price it’s gonna take to patch just one of the big holes up there with slate. But I know what you’re gonna say about that.”
“The house was meant to have a slate roof,” I said on cue.
“Well, putting slate on the whole roof is gonna cost more than you got, young lady, so my advice, which you’re not gonna take, is for you to sell this old mansion before it’s a pile of rubble.”
“What can we do in the meantime?” I asked with as much schoolgirl charm as I could muster, having grown up observing my mother shamelessly flattering Mr. Ledbetter for his expertise.
He sighed mournfully. “I guess I could put up a tarp tomorrow. It won’t fix anything, mind you, and it’s going to look like Hades.”
“But it will hold back Niagara Falls for a little while?”
“It won’t hold it back, but it’ll make it so’s there’s no standing water in your kitchen or eating away at your walls, which isn’t safe, y’know.”
“All right,” I said. “If you could bring a tarp out here tomorrow, I’d be very grateful. Do you have somebody who can help you? Or do you want me to—”
“You’re not climbing out on no roof,” Mr. Ledbetter said. “I’ll bring my boys out, and we’ll see what we can do. I won’t promise nothing.”
“Thank you.” I showed him to the door. “Thank you very much. How is Mrs. Ledbetter?”
He pointed at the table. “She sent you some of her pierogies. Fresh-made today. All’s they need is some butter in a frying pan. You’re a real favorite with her, y’know.”
Quite honestly, I said, “She’s a real favorite with me, too.”
He lingered in the doorway. “You ready to go, young man?”
Michael smiled. “I think I’ll stick around for a little longer.”
“Not too long.” Mr. Ledbetter gave him a steely stare, his face flushing. “This young lady is so pretty because she gets her beauty rest, you know what I mean?”
“Yes, sir,” said Michael.
I waved good-bye, and a red-faced Mr. Ledbetter clomped off into the night.
“Stay for some food,” I said to Michael, who suddenly looked as if he’d just flown across the Atlantic under his own power. “You’ll catch up with Emma and your cousin eventually.”
Michael sat down at the table and peeled back the foil on a plate of Mrs. Ledbetter’s pierogies. Spike was hungry, too, and didn’t bother chasing Mr. Ledbetter to his truck.
I took off my coat, put a sauté pan on the stove and lit the gas flame. While it heated, I poured a portion of puppy chow into Spike’s dish and gave it to him, then retrieved a bottle of chardonnay from the refrigerator and placed it on the table in front of Michael. While Spike ate and Michael opened the wine, I got a broom out of the pantry and tried to sweep the worst of the water out the back door.
Michael took his time removing the cork from the bottle. By the minute, he looked more interested in sleep than anything else. “Ledbetter seems like a regular around here.”
“He took care of the house for years. My father likes puttering with a croquet mallet, not a hammer, and my mother suffers from household hysterical blindness. Mr. Ledbetter has kept this place from falling into ruin.”
Michael poured wine into two glasses. “It’s as close to a ruin as a house can get and still not be condemned, Nora.”
“I know.” I swept harder.
“You want a loan?” he asked.
“No, thank you.”
“I earned it,” he said. “It’s legal.”
I put the broom away and let Spike out the back door. Then I slid the pierogies into the sauté pan. I found a bag of prepared salad in the fridge, and freshened it up in a bowl. While the food warmed on the stove, I mixed a quick dressing in a cruet. In three more minutes, I had the salad on the table and the pierogies on two china plates.
I slid one plate in front of Michael. “Give me your coat.”
He shrugged out of it and put it on the corner of the table. He took an experimental bite of Mrs. Ledbetter’s famous pierogies. “Not bad,” he said around a mouthful.
Definitely jet lag, I decided. He would never had eaten anything as mundane as Mrs. Ledbetter’s bland food if he weren’t exhausted. He hadn’t shaved in more than a day, and there was a decided drop in his usual energy. He almost looked vulnerable.
“How long have you been awake?”
He frowned and swallowed before saying, “A couple of days, maybe.”
I leaned down and kissed his rough cheek. “Thank you for coming to the rescue.”
His smile was tired, but still flickered with a certain alchemy that warmed my insides.
Until that moment, I hadn’t been sure he ever needed sleep. When I’d first met him, I had visions of him tossing and turning with a guilty conscience over his life of crime. Or maybe he’d spent so much time resting in jail in his youth that he didn’t need sleep anymore. But I’d come to see how much he preferred wakefulness—the better to indulge his many appetites.
As my touch lingered on his cheek, I wondered if it might be wise to cho
ose a night when he wasn’t up to full strength to invite him to bed. I wanted to take him by the hand and slip upstairs with him. We could spend the night snug in the bedroom, shutting out the world for a little while and learning new things about each other. It was a tantalizing idea.
He seemed to absorb that thought, too, and his gaze sharpened with interest.
He reached for me with heat flickering in his eyes.
“Eat your dinner,” I said, easing his hand away reluctantly but firmly. “It’s not truffles, but it will keep your strength up.”
He sighed. “Venice sure feels far away right now.”
“Want to see my blackmail letter instead?”
“Is that a trick question?”
I found the envelopes and photos in the drawer where Libby had stuffed them. Michael ate one-handed and shifted through the paper until he came to the photographs, which he lingered over. I stood behind him, looking down at the pictures, too.
“This is the doctor?” he asked, looking at the shot of Tim inhaling my perfume.
“Tim Naftzinger, yes.”
“How long have you known him?”
“Years. He was a classmate of my husband’s. We used to be a foursome, doing things together.”
“What kind of things?”
“Boating, mostly. Weekend antiquing.”
“Looks like you know each other very well.”
“That’s the creepy element about this,” I said. “The photographer caught something that isn’t really there. The pictures look dreamy, don’t they?”
“Dreamy?”
I put my hands on his shoulders. “Thing is, I am beginning to wonder if Tim has a yen for Emma. Of course, every man alive goes for Emma—”
“Hey, now.”
“—so maybe I’m just imagining it, but I wonder if Tim—Well, his wife will never recover from her injuries. He’s been grieving for her for a year, but he can’t say good-bye, can he? Not while she’s alive. So he spent time with Emma, and you know what kind of effect Emma has.”
“Doesn’t look like he’s got Emma on his mind here.”
“That just proves what a good photographer this person is. Tim can barely speak to me.”
