by Nancy Martin
“Hello,” he said without getting up.
“Wouldn’t you be more comfortable in a chair?”
“I’m proposing,” he said. “But Emma’s not listening.”
“I’m not,” she agreed, and used her spoon to mash up her cereal.
Earnestly, Duncan explained, “She’s having my baby. I want to marry her.”
“Wait—you’re pregnant with Duncan’s baby? I thought—”
“He thinks it’s his,” she reported. “It’s not.”
“Just in case,” Duncan said hastily, “I want to marry her.”
I gave Duncan O’Keefe a more careful examination. He wore a respectable flannel shirt and heavy khaki pants—the kind suitable for horse work—and an expensive pair of boots in good condition. He had shaved recently. His dark eyes had long fluffy lashes. He looked about eighteen.
In other words, he wasn’t the usual kind of low-down character I assumed Emma hung around with.
I said, “I don’t suppose it would do any good for me to venture an opinion.”
“It wouldn’t,” Emma said, crunching cereal.
“All righty, then. Good luck to you, Duncan.” I grabbed two glasses and a corkscrew from the pantry and headed for the hallway.
“Hey, uh,” Em said after me. “Take it easy on Mick, okay? He’s having a rough night.”
I paused in the doorway, my arms full. “Trouble in the underworld?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say he’s having a little trouble adjusting to the real world.”
We exchanged a glance, and I said, “Thanks.”
Outside my grandfather’s library I found the shattered pieces of a cell phone scattered on the floor. I put the wine and glassware on the stairs and picked up the bits of the phone. Someone had thrown the phone against the wall, and I could guess who.
I knew the signs. Todd had thrown things, smashed things. Many a night I had quietly swept up shattered china, afraid the noise might trigger another rage—or worse, a drug-fueled tantrum that ended with him slamming out of the house to score more coke. The memory cut me like a knife. Todd had evolved into a violent man. But Michael . . . he’d had a violent past. He’d told me as much, although I’d seen very few manifestations of it. Until now.
Steeling myself, I dropped the pieces into a cut-glass ashtray on the table. Then I eased into the oak-paneled room.
It hadn’t changed much since my grandfather’s day—bookshelves crowded with dusty volumes and leather chairs gathered close to a fireplace that often crackled warmly. But tonight the embers were dying, and Michael sat behind the desk, staring at a cell phone in his hand. Hardly the picture of frustrated fury. He looked more stunned than angry.
I leaned against the doorway for a long time, taking in the picture he made here and letting my heart steady at the sight of him engaged in his work. He had a stack of papers at his elbow, and his computer screen glowed. A bottle of beer had been forgotten on the desk. My painful memory of Todd’s ugly behavior faded.
Lightly, I said, “Does the Department of Corrections have rules about what you do with your time while you’re under house arrest?”
Michael snapped the phone shut and collected himself. “Hey, hi. Sorry. No, they don’t. How was your night?”
“I met a secretary of state.” I went over to the desk and gave him a nuzzle. “How was yours?”
“Okay.”
“Emma said . . . Never mind. How about closing for business? Just for a few hours?”
“Sounds good,” he said, but he didn’t get up.
I leaned down to give him a kiss, but felt distraction in his halfhearted response. I drew back and met his eye. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing.” His gaze wandered back to his cell phone. A crease had appeared between his brows. “Sorry. I’m— I just— It’s been a busy evening.”
I wondered what he’d been doing in my absence. His laptop computer was spinning a screen saver. He’d been on the phone for a long time, I guessed. “Are you searching for your embezzler?”
Michael mustered a half smile. “I know where he is now—that’s progress. And I’m buying and selling gasoline, trying to get the gas stations back on track.”
“And the men in my driveway? What’s that all about?”
“Yeah, sorry.” Reluctantly, he admitted, “With my father and brother in jail for the time being, it seems like a good time for me to dismantle a few family rackets. Numbers, video gambling, that kind of thing. Nobody in the organization is happy about that.”
Dismantling sounded like good news to me. But the presence of guards stationed outside our door was unsettling.
A year ago, I had seen a newspaper story that included a family tree—a chart of the hierarchy of the Abruzzo family with Michael’s father—Big Frankie—at the top and perhaps thirty men arrayed at various levels beneath him. They had names like Petey Pop Pop and Road Kill, and instead of educational degrees listed after their names, the newspaper had included their indictments. Michael’s name had floated out in the margin of the article. Now, I realized with an awful pang, with his father in jail, it would be Michael’s name at the top of the chart.
Anxiety throbbed in my chest again. My voice came out softly. “Are we in danger?”
He put his hand on the small of my back to reassure me. “Not with the crew out there. They’re my father’s guys—old school, taking it seriously, going to the mattresses. More than we need, but I don’t like discouraging enthusiasm. Don’t worry.”
“What will happen when you’re finished . . . dismantling?”
“Everything will be great.”
Chances were, he was already thinking far ahead, and I had to trust that he was being smarter than everyone else. But, still, I worried. Gently, I touched a stubborn cowlick of his hair that needed to be trimmed by a more expert barber. “Are you ready to take a break?”
“Yeah, in a minute. How was your night?”
He hadn’t been listening the first time he asked, so I said again, “I met a former secretary of state. She gave a wonderful speech. I learned a lot, in fact. The people I sat with talked about the situation in Iran, and then I met a woman whose sister can’t get out of Syria. I got to thinking on the way home, I wish there was a way to help her. Do you think that’s a crazy thing to do?”
He blinked. “What?”
I felt another twinge of concern. I’d thought he’d be eager to carry me upstairs for a hot night together. But clearly his mind was far, far away. “Michael . . .”
He snapped back to the present again and apologized sincerely. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. Look, maybe we better have a talk.”
My heart gave a real jerk of fear. There was definitely more to the family problems than he’d first let on. “What is it?”
He stood up and pulled me over to the leather sofa. “Let’s sit down a minute.”
“I don’t want to sit down. Sitting down means bad news.”
“Okay, so we’ll stand. That phone call just now—she—” He stopped.
“Oh, God.” My imagination was suddenly jammed with awful possibilities, and the room didn’t have enough oxygen. “It’s something terrible, isn’t it?”
“There’s this girl,” Michael said. “She wrote me a letter a week ago, and when I got out today, she decided she wanted to see me. I’m still getting used to the whole idea, but—”
“Slow down,” I said. “What are you talking about? A woman contacted you while you were in jail? You mean, a prison correspondence thing?”
“I—”
“Now there’s a crazy person who’s decided to be in love with you?”
“No, no, no. She’s completely normal.”
“Who is she?” I asked, panic rising. “A friend? An old lover?”
“She’s my daughter,” Michael said.
For a second, I couldn’t comprehend. My whole brain froze while I absorbed the bombshell. I sat down hard on the sofa.
Michael stayed on his feet befo
re me, but he ran one hand over his hair in bewilderment. “I didn’t know she existed until last week. Yeah, that sounds lame and stupid, but she’s the daughter of a girl I knew back in, like, high school. We went out a few times before I went to jail for stealing motorcycles. Then I got locked up, and I just—hell, I forgot about her. I never thought about what might have happened to her or if—”
“You have a daughter,” I said.
“I know, it’s crazy, right?” He looked as dazed as I felt.
“How old is she?”
“Nineteen. Get this. She’s in the army.”
“The army?” I knew I was sounding stupid, but the core of the matter was hard to accept.
“Yeah, serving her country, be all you can be, you know?” Michael began to pace aimlessly. “Her mom died a month ago, so she’s home on leave for a while. Back from Afghanistan. Can you believe it?”
“Afghanistan.”
“She drives convoy trucks. While she was home, she decided to figure out what happened to me. So she tracked me down. We talked on the phone earlier today, then again just now. She’s a little emotional. Hell, I guess I am, too.”
“Her mother is dead? Your old girlfriend?”
“She wasn’t a girlfriend. Just somebody I knew.”
“You must have cared about her.”
“I was sixteen. What do sixteen-year-olds care about?”
“You slept with her!”
“We had sex in a car a couple of times, Nora. I hardly remember her.” He stopped pacing and squinted into the murky distance of memory. “I think she used to wear an old fur coat to school. Drove the nuns crazy. Or maybe that was somebody else.”
“Michael,” I said, gathering my wits at last, “whatever you say to this girl on the phone, do not say her mother was meaningless to you.”
“Right,” he said. “Good thinking. Anything else?”
“Give me a minute,” I said. “I’m trying to get my brain around the idea of you having a daughter.”
“That makes two of us,” he said, and we both contemplated for a moment.
“The other thing is,” he went on, his voice heavy, “she’s just figuring out who I am.”
“You mean—?”
“Yeah. Not just some guy her mother knew.”
“You’re Big Frankie’s son,” I said.
Locating her father wasn’t the big headline, I realized. Michael’s daughter had also discovered her daddy belonged to a family of notorious mobsters. I could only imagine her reaction. A girl’s fantasy probably ran to waking up and finding herself with a doting handsome prince for a dad or maybe a dashing tycoon who could grant her every wish. Instead of a dream come true, she’d found a crime family with a sordid history. No wonder Michael was doubly shaken.
His phone rang, and I jumped.
He pulled me to my feet. “It’s probably her again. She hung up on me a few minutes ago,” he said. “I better talk to her. Run some hot water into that bathtub of yours. I’ll be up in a few minutes.”
But he didn’t come. I stripped off my black lace suit and hung it carefully in the closet. I took my bath and tried to read in the tub. But Michael didn’t come upstairs. Alone in bed, I stared at the ceiling for a long time, thinking about Michael’s idea of family and how a teenage daughter might fit into the picture.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I didn’t know when he came upstairs, but I was aware that Michael tossed and turned most of the night—on his side of the bed. He finally fell deeply asleep about the time I woke for the day. To the sound of early-morning rain pattering against my leaky roof, I slipped out of bed and pulled on jeans and a warm sweater. As I dressed quietly, I tried not to look at the electronic monitor around Michael’s ankle.
But I couldn’t help watching him sleep for a moment. In the days before he went to jail, I had felt him withdrawing. He pulled everything inside himself—not just his emotions, but his opinions, his sense of humor, as many outward signs of his personality as he could tamp down. I could only guess what he’d been through while imprisoned—the people he associated with, the lack of privacy and free will.
Now he was home . . . and he’d been hit with a whammy. A daughter.
What was he feeling? The smashed cell phone, the man he’d punched in my kitchen—surely these were signs that there was much more turmoil going on in his head than he wanted me to know.
How was I to help him through this?
I slipped out of the bedroom and carefully closed the door behind me. I leaned my head against the door and let myself have a maudlin moment of self-pity. I’d always hoped Michael and I could start a family together. As a couple, we could have experienced all the miraculous steps along the way. But now that he already had a child with someone else—no matter who or how long ago—had another door been shut for me?
Downstairs, I found Emma in the same place as the night before—eating cereal in the kitchen. She was watching Sesame Street with the sound off. Judging by the condition of her boots, I guessed she’d already been out in the barn feeding ponies. Toby lay attentively at her feet.
“Whoa,” she said, taking a look at my face. “Why aren’t you upstairs taking advantage of the just-released prisoner?”
“Let’s go to the grocery store,” I snapped. “I need chocolate.”
She heard my tone and dumped her bowl in the sink. “I gotta pee first.”
As we blasted past Checkpoint Charlie at the end of the driveway, two of Michael’s minions tipped their invisible hats. The other one spat on the gravel. Across the road sat a state trooper in an unmarked car. Keeping an eye out for escaping prisoners, I supposed. Nobody was going to get in or out of Blackbird Farm without being noticed.
In Emma’s ancient pickup truck, speeding along the road to New Hope, I ate an apple for breakfast. Toby sat between us, panting happily, while I took out my frustration on the fruit.
Emma glanced uneasily at me a couple of times and finally started talking. “I’ve got nine kids coming for pony class on Saturday. It’s a four-week introductory class for beginners.”
“Um.”
“The kids will be around for a couple of hours. I’ll teach ’em how to saddle and mount and maybe trot around the paddock a few times. Nothing too strenuous. Mostly, I thought it would be a good way to get my name spread around among the parents, you know? So I can build up to more classes with more students in the spring.”
“That’s nice.” I slumped in my seat, my mind far away.
“I mean, it could be a good living for me. Some of the other barns have quit teaching preteens because the kids are a pain in the butt, but that’s where the real money is. So I thought I’d give it a shot. That is, if you don’t mind me using the farm.”
“Right,” I said.
“And I talked to Shirley van Vincent, like you asked. She said Madeleine helped bring Pippi here from Moscow back in the day when that kinda stuff didn’t happen much. I got to thinking, maybe Madeleine did the same thing for Shirley, too—before Shirley married up. I mean, Shirley’s German accent? She’s not the Main Line heiress you’d expect van Vincent would want on his arm, right? Shirley’s a dirt-under-her-fingernails girl, if you ask me. So how’d she end up in this neck of the woods? It’s a little puzzling.”
“Okay.”
“You know she’s hosting the big coach-and-driving show next week. You’ve been invited to the opening shindig, right? It’s going to be a big deal. Competitors from all over the world. Maybe there will be somebody we can ask.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Have you heard one word I’ve said?” Emma finally exploded. “What the hell’s going on? You should be bouncing off the walls with joy to have the Love Machine home again, but you’re acting like—like—I don’t know what, but it’s weird. What’s happening?”
“A lot of stuff.” I threw my apple core out the window. I told her about Michael’s newfound daughter. To her credit, Emma didn’t drive into a tree when she heard the news.
“Holy shit! I knew something big was going down. I assumed it was a big disturbance in the Abruzzo force. Does the kid know what kind of family she just walked into?”
“I think she figured it out fast. Thing is, Michael didn’t come up to bed until I was asleep.”
Emma nodded sympathetically. “Yeah, it would take something this big to put his light saber on the fritz. Too bad you missed out on the great first-night sex.”
“It certainly wasn’t the night I expected to spend with him.” I took a deep breath and tried to calm down. “Don’t get me wrong. Sure, there’s nothing I want more than making love for hours after he’s been gone so long. But I’m truly concerned about Michael. About his state of mind. He was a little off when he first got home, but now this complication has made things worse. And he’s not talking. At least, not to me. Did he say anything to you last night?”
“Sorry. I was busy.”
I shot her a look. “Oh, right. With your young gentleman caller. Should we be making wedding plans?”
“Nope.” Emma rolled down her window as if she suddenly needed some air. Her short hair blew around her head in a whoosh. “Duncan’s a nice kid. But I don’t want to be tying his shoes and opening his juice boxes all my life, you know?”
I almost brought up Hart Jones at that moment. The father of Emma’s baby had been a verboten subject these last few weeks.
But Emma said, “Forget about me. I’m feeling sorry for Mick.”
“Me, too,” I admitted, my spirits sinking lower. “I shouldn’t expect him to be his normal self right away. He needs time to decompress, I guess.”
“Yeah, the surprise daughter must be a kick in the gut. And jail can’t be a picnic, even for him. He looks like he spent the whole time lifting weights. I mean—hubba hubba. But do you think he had to fight his way through a bunch of crazy convicts to be the top dog? Or is that haircut the worst of his punishment?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I searched for the right word to describe how Michael had acted last night, and I came up with one that surprised me. He had been . . . troubled. Which was so far out of character he might as well have been orbiting Mars.
