by MJ Rodgers
Brett Merlin knew how to quell an unscrupulous adversary’s slams at his clients. He knew how to make such an unethical attorney quaver and crawl.
And he knew he was about to do all this to Octavia Osborne.
* * *
OCTAVIA DIDN’T HAVE to see Brett’s eyes to feel them. She wasn’t sure why this was so. She suspected it was because of the power behind those eyes, a power that was almost palpable.
He was coming at her from behind. She could feel the change in the air pressure, the spark along her skin, the rush of blood through her heart, the tingle in her fingertips, with every step that drew him closer.
At the precise second he came to a stop behind her, she cut short an answer to the reporter’s question and swung around to face him squarely. He was a man to be faced squarely.
“Yes?” she asked.
The sprinkle of light silver in the center of his black eyes had solidified into stone. She sensed his surface anger and something deeper and more dangerous—and much more difficult to control. The tingling in her fingertips increased.
“I want to talk to you,” Brett said. “Alone, please. This way.”
He bowed in the direction he wished her to go, and then simply waited with the stiff dignity of someone who was accustomed to being obeyed.
Men had made the mistake of trying to order Octavia around. One or two had even tried to take her arm to coerce her. None got a second chance to repeat either mistake.
But Octavia was rather fascinated by the approach Brett Merlin was using to get his way. There was such a polite refinement to it, such an outrageous self-assurance.
What a thoroughly annoying and exciting man. She could barely wait to find out what other emotions this man would engender in her.
But she controlled her curiosity, deliberately making Brett wait, while she turned back to the reporter to conclude their interview. Only then did she deign to accompany Brett to a point some twenty-five feet away from the crowd. She stopped when he did and turned to face him.
He folded his arms across his chest and scowled at her, like a judge about to give a three-time offender a life sentence. The cold anger that solidified the silver in his eyes could have frozen fire.
“You are in serious trouble, Ms. Osborne.”
His voice was rigid and stern. He stood before her so marvelously self-assured and self-important. Octavia’s laughter bubbled up from her throat and erupted into a short, spontaneous roar.
And all the while she laughed, she watched Brett Merlin’s countenance darken until it matched the blackened clouds hanging ominously in the heavy sky overhead.
“What’s so funny?” he asked in a voice that thundered as the silver in his eyes shot through with lightning.
“You are an interesting man, Mr. Merlin,” she said after she had finally gotten her merriment under control. “Your client’s building plans are about to be buried beneath an ancient Indian stone carving and you call me aside to tell me I’m in serious trouble?”
He stepped closer and towered over her—deliberately, she knew. She admired the calculated cunning of the move, almost as much as she admired the breadth of his broad shoulders. The guy was a big, imposing hunk who knew how to throw his weight around with class. She stared steadfastly into his incredibly alive quicksilver eyes.
“I’m going to have you investigated, Ms. Osborne. Thoroughly. Until I know about each and every breath you’ve taken since you were born. And when I connect you with that piece of fakery laying in that pit back there—and I will connect you with it—I am going to see that you are brought up on criminal charges and disbarred.”
Octavia could tell that Brett Merlin fully expected his awesome reputation, presence and words to effect fear and trepidation in her.
His unmitigated pomposity was absolutely magnificent. She put aside her admiration of it long enough to stand on her tiptoes, stretching tall until she was at eye level with him. She tossed her head back, waves of flaming-red hair falling off her cheeks.
“If you ever repeat those slanderous allegations to a third party, Mr. Magician, I will see to it that it is you, not I, who disappears from the legal scene in one highly publicized puff of courtroom smoke.”
She noted with enormous satisfaction the instant shifting of the silver light in his eyes. She sensed she was witnessing a very rare event. Brett Merlin, the deadly Magician of corporate law, reaching to pull a rabbit out of his hat only to find his hand grasping the ears of a tiger.
Octavia chuckled again, thoroughly enjoying the moment.
But the chuckle died in her throat the instant she heard the cry behind her. Startled, she swung in the direction of the outburst.
She was just in time to see her grandmother falling face-first into the excavation pit.
Chapter Three
Brett turned with Octavia at the sound of the cry. The second he saw Mab Osborne falling, he moved. He reached the rim of the pit and scrambled down its sides, slipping the last few feet to the soft, muddy bottom where the elderly woman lay. He dropped to his knees, gently lifting Mab’s head out of the mud and resting her on his knee as he pressed his finger to the pulse point in her neck.
But his fingers were caked in the slippery mud and he couldn’t feel her pulse.
“Mrs. Osborne?”
She lay limp and absolutely still in his hands.
A sudden movement beside him drew Brett’s eyes. Octavia dropped next to him. His first reaction was surprise at how fast she must have moved to have gotten here so soon after him.
His second was admiration for her coolheaded composure and farsightedness as she calmly dug into her shoulder bag for a compact mirror and immediately placed it beneath her grandmother’s nose.
“She’s breathing,” Octavia said as the mirror fogged.
Octavia raised her head and voice to address the quiet spectators watching from the rim of the pit. “Someone please get an ambulance.”
“John Winslow has already gone to call 911,” one of the seniors yelled down.
Brett watched Octavia nod solemnly and direct her attention back to her grandmother. She slipped out of her mud-splattered suit coat and draped it over the unconscious woman. She held her grandmother’s shoulders firmly as she spoke in a tone of stern sobriety that caught him completely off-guard.
“Listen to me, Mab Osborne, you wake up. You don’t have time for this nap. You have a radio broadcast to give this afternoon. You know how important your broadcasts are. There are homebound people out there counting on you.”
To Brett’s continuing surprise and amazement, Mab Osborne began to stir. Her eyes fluttered open. Octavia stared down into them and smiled.
“Hi.”
“Octavia,” Mab said. “What was all that about my missing my broadcast?”
“Not to worry. You have plenty of time now. How do you feel?”
Slowly, Mab lifted each arm and each leg in turn. “I think I’m a little bruised is all.”
“Any headache?”
“No, but it’s cold, isn’t it?”
Octavia scooted around in the mud in order to transfer Mab’s head from its resting place on Brett’s knee to a new resting place on hers. She wrapped her jacket more closely around her grandmother’s shoulders.
“We’ll have you out of this excavation pit just as soon as the medics get here,” she promised.
“Why am I in this pit?” Mab asked.
For the first time, Brett heard a small annotation of anxiety underlying the normally mellow mark of Octavia’s voice.
“Mab, don’t you remember falling?”
“I didn’t fall, Octavia. I was pushed. I want to know why.”
“Pushed?” Octavia said as though she must have heard wrong.
“Yes, pushed,” Mab repeated.
“Who pushed you?” Octavia asked.
“Let’s just say I can make a good guess,” Mab replied as she stared up at one particular face looking down at her.
Brett followed the d
irection of Mab’s eyes. He was decidedly uncomfortable, but not surprised, to find himself looking into his uncle’s sallow, bitter expression as he peered over the edge of the excavation pit.
“I’ll go flag down the medics,” Brett said as he got to his feet and climbed out of the pit.
When Brett reached the rim, he grabbed Scroogen and pulled him along toward the street where the medics would arrive. He waited until he and Scroogen were out of hearing distance of the crowd before he confronted him.
“Did you push her, Dole?”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“No, I didn’t push the old bag,” Scroogen’s grating voice said, clearly angry at being asked.
“Where were you when it happened?” Brett asked.
“I was at the car placing that call,” Dole said.
“Who did you speak to at the Community Development Department?”
“The line was busy. I was just about to redial when I got distracted by the commotion at the pit. I hung up the phone and went over to see what was happening.”
“So you don’t have an alibi.”
“An alibi? For what? She topples five feet, face-first, into the mud, and she doesn’t even break anything.”
“Don’t sound so disappointed. That’s the one piece of good news we’ve gotten today. No one would have benefited by her being injured.”
“What do you mean no one would have benefited? I’m no hypocrite. If the old bag had broken a few bones—or even better her neck—that would have been an end to her and her trouble-making. And that would have been a huge benefit to me.”
It rather sickened Brett to see a human being so caught up in himself and the furthering of his own interests that he couldn’t find even a little compassion for the pain and suffering of another. He consoled himself that at least no blood tied him to Scroogen.
“You would do well to refrain from expressing those sentiments to anyone else, Dole.”
“I’m no fool, Merlin. I know who I can talk to.”
“Go on and make that call to Community Development,” Brett told him through a tight jaw. “Let’s just try to get this mess over with as quickly as possible.”
* * *
“MRS. OSBORNE, ARE YOU sure someone pushed you?” Detective Sergeant Paul Patterson of the Bremerton Police asked.
“Of course I’m sure,” Mab answered.
Octavia could tell by her grandmother’s frown that she was clearly disgusted with the question and the stocky detective with the big mustache who had asked it—for the fourth time.
“I questioned everyone at the scene,” Sergeant Patterson said, tapping his pen on his notepad, a skeptical look in his grayish eyes. “No one saw anyone push you.”
“That’s not surprising. Everyone was looking at the carving on the stone in the pit. He would hardly have come up behind me and pushed if someone were watching him.”
“You said ‘he.’ You’re sure it was a man who pushed you?”
“I’m sure it was Dole Scroogen.”
“Did you see Dole Scroogen push you?”
“No. But he’s the only one who would do such a thing.”
Octavia read a growing impatience in the sergeant’s unconscious tapping of his notepad.
“Mr. Scroogen said he was on the car phone making a call when you fell into the pit.”
“Well, what did you expect him to say?” Mab challenged. “That he had crept up behind me and pushed?”
“Mrs. Osborne, you said you were standing on the edge of the pit, trying to get a good look at the carved stone, right?”
“Right.”
“Crowded together with the other seniors?”
“Yes.”
“Rubbing shoulders?”
“Yes.”
“Mrs. Osborne, isn’t it possible that the pushing you felt might have been one of your fellow seniors inadvertently bumping you from behind while he or she shifted, trying to get a better look at the carving?”
“If one of my fellow seniors inadvertently bumped me, I am sure he or she would have come forward.”
“Not necessarily. If one of your fellow seniors was responsible for knocking you into that excavation pit, he or she might be very embarrassed to admit it.”
“I do not believe that is what happened.”
Sergeant Patterson cleared his throat as he tapped his notebook some more.
“Think it over. I’ll finish this report later. I can see that you are still quite upset by your experience.”
Without waiting for confirmation or denial, Sergeant Patterson flipped his notebook closed, turned and trod out of the hospital room.
Octavia watched as Mab crossed her arms over her chest in a dignified anger that most people could not have pulled off covered only in a hospital smock and the single sheet provided with an emergency room bed.
“He doesn’t believe me.”
“If you had pointed a finger at one of the workmen, he might not have been so hesitant to inquire further. But Scroogen is one of those well-to-do financial pillars of the community that everyone is so fond of admiring these days.”
“And I’m seventy-six.”
“Yes. Our society’s favorable biases toward people of wealth and unfavorable biases toward people of age are still very much with us.”
The emergency room doctor sailed into the room then with a big smile on her young, chubby cheeks.
“I have nothing but good news for you, Mrs. Osborne. There’s no sign of a concussion and you’ve no broken bones, which is an absolute wonder.”
“Wonder has nothing to do with it, young lady,” Mab informed her soberly. “Getting enough calcium and vitamin D, and taking an hour’s walk and lifting weights every day is the only way to keep one’s bones healthy.”
The young doctor dimpled at the lecture. She then referred to the clipboard in her hands.
“All of your lab results have come back perfectly normal. Mrs. Osborne, there are fifty-year-olds who would love to have your blood pressure and lung-capacity readings. You’re in great shape.”
“Thank you, Doctor. Octavia, hand me my clothes and let’s get out of here. I have that radio broadcast to do.”
“I’ll leave you to get dressed,” the doctor said as she twirled out of the room.
“Your clothes are nothing but mud patties, Mab,” Octavia said as she picked the once-beautiful, bright blue-and-white flowered silk pantsuit off the chair.
“So are yours and you’re wearing them.”
“I wish you hadn’t reminded me. Look, it won’t take but a few minutes for me to drive to your house and get you some fresh clothes and bring them here.”
“I’ll be late for my broadcast if you do. Octavia, this is radio I’m doing, not TV. I have to tell the seniors about our sale of the Scrooge dolls at the community center this afternoon and tonight. I need to remind them to keep calling and writing. And they need to learn about the carved stone that’s been found next door. People are counting on me to tell them what they need to know. I’m not going to let them down, even if I have to wear this hospital sheet to the radio station.”
Octavia knew her grandmother meant it, too. At any age, she had always been gutsy. Her all-time heroine. She smiled.
“All right. We’ll both go looking bedraggled.”
But as she helped Mab on with her mud-caked clothes, Octavia found her smile didn’t have much staying power. Despite the cleanup the doctor had attempted, Mab’s face and hair still contained streaks of caked dirt, reminding Octavia only too forcibly of those awful first seconds of seeing her lying so deathly still at the bottom of that muddy pit.
And of the hand that had put her there.
Dare she hope Sergeant Patterson was right? Dare she hope that Mab had been accidentally bumped by a fellow senior?
Octavia felt the telltale vibration of her muted beeper, fitted snugly on the waistband of her suit skirt. She drew it out and checked the calling number. It was A.J.
&nbs
p; She excused herself and left Mab to finish dressing as she went to find a pay phone. A.J. answered on the first ring.
“Did you know Merlin’s legal firm uses the Coltrane Detective Agency?”
“No, A.J. Why do you say that as though it’s bad news?”
“Because it is bad news if anyone has anything to hide on your side of this legal fight.”
“Coltrane is that good?”
“He’s tenacious and will literally leave no stone unturned, and that carved stone on Scroogen’s property in particular.”
“Well, I didn’t expect Merlin to employ a run-of-the-mill investigator. Don’t worry, A.J., my back is covered. You learn anything yet about Scroogen?”
“A little. He makes good money on his septic business, because his overhead is low. His only regular employee is his son and he pays him a pittance. All the rest are ‘occasional’ part-time employees, even his secretary. That way he only has to pay minimum wage and doesn’t have to provide any medical coverage, holiday pay, vacations or other fringe benefits.”
“In perfect keeping with his Scrooge of a character. Well, I appreciate your calling to let me know about him.”
“I didn’t call you specifically to tell you about Scroogen, Octavia. Or even Coltrane. It’s something about Merlin.”
“You’ve found out something important?” Octavia asked, barely able to keep the eagerness out of her voice.
“Let’s just say I think it’s going to explain why he’s in this fight.”
* * *
“DID YOU HEAR that woman’s radio broadcast this afternoon?”
Brett sat down in the chair next to the phone in his hotel room. He had just walked in when Dole had called.
“No, Dole. After I got cleaned up I was with the Building Department and the State’s historical representative all afternoon trying to expedite this rock carving evaluation. Now what’s the problem?”
“That Osborne woman told her listeners she hoped the stone carving found on my property interfered permanently with my condominium development project!”
“She has a right to her hopes, Dole.”
“She doesn’t have the right to ridicule me. She described a Christmas Scrooge doll they’re selling to raise money and it’s me, Merlin! They’re selling a damn doll they’ve made to look like me!”
