by Duffy, Sue
Cass dropped her bag and keys on an antique colonial sideboard and turned toward the wall of windows that joined the house to the dunes and water beyond. She paused long enough to drink in the misty blue-grays layered from the back deck to the horizon, then headed for the stairs.
When the room atop the house had been hers, the door to the hall had no lock. For some reason, though, the builder had installed one on the door opening to the small balcony overlooking the beach. When Hans moved into the room, he installed a lock on the hallway door. “I hope it doesn’t offend you,” he’d told Cass and her mother. “I must keep my clients’ records secure and confidential at all times. I hope you understand.”
What Cass didn’t understand was why her mother didn’t have a key to the room. “Oh, you know how fastidious and tight-lipped he is about his work,” Jilly Kluen had reasoned. “He won’t even let the maids in to clean unless he’s in the room the whole time. Then he locks up as soon as they leave. Maybe he’s a little overly cautious, but it’s his business.” It was then she casually mentioned that he hadn’t bothered to change out the old lock on the door to the third-floor balcony. And Cass still had a key.
He must have thought the balcony door was unreachable, Cass thought as she climbed the stairs, a smirk on her lips. It pleased her to know that something about the house was still within her control. She first would check the hall door on the remote chance it was unlocked before taking the strenuous route into the room. What Hans hadn’t realized was that before his arrival, the balcony door to the room had been very accessible to an athletic young teenager wanting to slip in and out of the house undetected on warm summer nights. Her parents had forbidden her to attend the late-night teen parties on the beach for the very reasons Cass was determined to go. She hadn’t forgotten how she did that.
To avoid the creaking stairs, she’d kept a rope ladder in a box of old clothes in her closet. Anchoring it securely to the balcony railing, she would drop it over one side close to the house. After descending, she’d snug the dangling ladder to the house, out of sight—at least to anyone not looking for it, especially in the dark of night. It had always amazed her that no one had ever spotted the camouflaged tieback grips she’d fashioned to secure her telltale escape route. But of course, an aspiring set designer should have accomplished no less. When she would return in the early morning hours, she’d unleash the ladder, climb back up, reel it in, and return it to its hiding place in the closet.
Finding the hall door to the room locked, Cass regretted there was no more dangling rope ladder still in place. So she headed for the garage and the extension ladder no one but the occasional handyman used. It was a heavy and unwieldy thing, impossible for anyone walking the beach not to spot. Struggling to lift the gangly ladder from its wall mounts, she imagined how easily Jordan might do it. As if on cue, the clattering whine of the little Honda suddenly rose above the crash of ocean waves. An involuntary smile sprang to Cass’s lips, and she found herself hurrying to greet him, surprised he’d arrived so soon—surprised at how glad she was.
As she rounded the side of the garage, she saw him climb from the car and visually inspect the front of the house. When he saw her, he lifted a hand in greeting. She moved purposefully toward him, though her emotions pinged in disparate directions. She was glad he was here, yet resistant to what might rise between them. Confident of the solitary, work-laden lifestyle she’d chosen for herself, yet fearful of what lay ahead. She swept all of it into that crowded corner of her mind where the troubling things lived.
“You’re just in time,” she said with a too-big smile. “There’s a ridiculously long ladder in the garage we need to move to the back.”
“We?” He smirked. “I know which one of us that means.”
“Yeah, well, you big guys got that way for good reason, I guess. Moving heavy stuff must be your calling.”
“Really? And all this time I thought it was pushing smelly feet into overpriced shoes.”
Another time and Cass would have bantered with him, but too much pressed against the moment.
It didn’t take long for Jordan to plant the fully extended ladder against the back of the balcony, making sure it was steady on its metal feet. “You’ve got the key, right?” he checked.
“In my pocket.” She’d insisted on scaling the ladder herself.
After an easy ascent, she unlocked the outside door to the study, the inside dead-bolted door to the hall, then the ground-level Dutch door to the back porch. She waited for Jordan to return the ladder to the garage, then led him back to the study.
They surveyed the room’s notable scarcity. “Doesn’t seem to be much business going on here,” Jordan said. “I never saw such empty desktops.”
Cass had rarely glimpsed the inside of the room since Hans had claimed it three years ago, replacing her white, cottage-style bedroom furniture with what she now saw. Everything was dark, modern, angular, with lots of chrome. Only a lamp and pencil cup rested on one desk and absolutely nothing on an identical desk across the room. A long, desk-high cabinet ran the length of one wall with a series of doors beneath.
Trying each door, Jordan shook his head. “I think your snooping may have hit a wall.” He looked about the room. “Unless Hans has hidden a key to these locked cabinets somewhere.”
But Cass had already spotted something she didn’t expect to find—her father’s old armoire from her parents’ bedroom. It was where he’d kept his private stash of chocolates inside a safe he’d had built into the antique piece for storing cash and jewelry, which meant less to young Cass than the candy. She had long ago discovered that there was a key to override the combination lock on the safe, and where that key was kept.
Finding the safe locked as expected, she headed for the open hallway door. “I’ll be right back.”
Jordan examined that door. “Who locks up a room in his own house and gives nobody the key?” he asked as Cass entered the hall.
“It’s not his house,” she said over her shoulder. “It’s mine.”
“Is there anything your father didn’t give you?” he called after her.
She stopped short and looked back. “Yeah. A second thought.”
Jordan frowned at her. “He thought enough to leave you some prime real estate and a bulging stock portfolio.”
From a few steps down, she gazed up into Jordan’s wide-open eyes that so often signaled his struggle to understand her, like now. “That’s what he left his only heir. It just happened to be me.”
On the second floor, she headed for her mother’s bedroom and the dressing table where Cass had watched her apply makeup and jewelry before yet another glittering house party in the Hamptons. Cass also remembered exploring the drawers in that old table one evening after her parents had left and stumbling upon the key. Now, she wondered at her own guile and how little it had troubled her through the years. Until that one irreversible moment.
She flung open the second drawer on the left, dug to the bottom, and uncovered the old rhinestone lipstick holder. The key to the safe was still inside. She marveled at how many times she’d stolen into this drawer, then into the armoire safe without detection, relishing the chocolaty and guiltless reward. She learned never to take enough to trigger her dad’s suspicion. She hoped nothing she did today would invite the same from his successor.
Returning to the third floor, Cass went straight to the armoire. “Let’s see what old times’ sake is good for,” she said without explanation. The key turned as easily as ever. She rotated the knob and pulled open the door.
Jordan issued a shrill whistle. “Would you look at that!” The safe was stuffed with stacks of crisp one-hundred-dollar bills.
“But no chocolate,” Cass mused aloud.
“No what?” Jordan asked, not tearing his eyes from the cash.
She would explain later. Right now, she gently probed between the bundles of money, having no idea what she’d find. But nothing about the past week had been predictable.
&n
bsp; Seconds later, she hit on something that felt different from cold cash. At the back of the safe, her hand closed around a flat, velvet case. Jewelry, she guessed with little enthusiasm. That wasn’t what she’d come for. Carefully, she retrieved the bracelet-size case and opened it. Jordan reacted first.
“Someone has to be hiding in here with a movie camera. This is too good.” He stared into the case. “You found the key to the key. And I’ll just bet this shiny new one opens all those locked cabinets.”
Cass wasted no time in testing that theory. Moments later, all five cabinet doors stood open wide. Inside each one was a row of hanging files.
“Okay, so what are we looking for?” Jordan asked.
Only then did Cass feel the gnaw of guilt. She wasn’t a ten-year-old on a quest for forbidden chocolate. This was a man’s business, his livelihood, his reputation. And more critically, her mother’s security. Still, she had to reckon with suspicion.
“Anything that throws a red flag to you,” she answered. “Maybe something related to that pair in the UN apartment.”
For hours they sorted carefully through files they didn’t understand, neither one versed in the intimidating lexicon of high finance. Jordan, too, had inherited his entry into the business world. But unlike Cass, who never dallied there longer than it took to sign whatever her financial advisor occasionally urged her to, Jordan had acquired just enough spreadsheet acumen to run his family’s shoe store, one of Manhattan’s oldest.
Jordan closed one cabinet and opened another, lifting the first file he came to and a large document tube lying next to the file. In a chair in front of the open cabinet, he quickly flipped through an assortment of tourist brochures and Internet printouts on historic American landmarks. “Well, this is different.”
“What is?” Cass mumbled. She was sitting on the floor, her head bent over yet another client file on assets, stocks, and trust funds. Things that were none of her business, and certainly not Jordan’s. Why had she let him come? She was almost queasy with guilt over her intrusion into Hans’s privacy, beginning to believe she’d let her imagination run amok.
“Nothing financial,” Jordan answered. “Just a bunch of travel stuff on”—he waved random pieces from the file one by one—“Ellis Island, steamboats on the Mississippi, an aerial view of a dam.” He put down the file and picked up the document tube, removing its scrolled contents. “Hey, look at this,” he said, holding up the unrolled sheets. “Why would he have blueprints for the U.S. Supreme Court Building?”
Cass glanced over her shoulder. “Oh, he’s always been a history and architecture buff. He and Mom travel a lot. She says he likes to explore places on his own, though. So they go their separate ways and meet for dinner. Strange, I think.” She gazed into space and thought about that a moment, then continued her tedious survey of the cabinets, glancing occasionally at Jordan.
He replaced the file and the blueprints tube, then opened a large brown envelope in the next file. After a few moments, he said, “Better come look at this.”
“Wait. I’m almost—”
“No, you need to look at it now.”
She turned quickly toward him. The set of his face was different. He didn’t say anything more as he picked up the contents of the envelope and held them out to her.
“What is it?”
“Just read,” he said without taking his eyes off her.
She took the handful of pages, then placed them in her lap. The first thing she picked up was a yellowed New York Times article on the 1996 killing of Schell Devoe, a Harvard music professor. He’d been the victim of an armed robbery in his home, the article said. Cass picked up another clipping from about the same time. Displayed prominently in the article was a photograph of Liesl Bower, identified as Devoe’s protégé and sole witness to the murder. It was reported that the young student couldn’t identify the assailant, whose head was covered by a ski mask. Otherwise, the writer had suggested, the gunman would probably have killed her, too.
Cass was taken aback by the coincidence. She’d just mentioned this to Jordan at the inauguration on Monday, though she hadn’t known the details of the story. So this was it. But why was Hans interested enough to save the news clippings? Cass glanced up at Jordan, her eyes squinted in confusion.
“Keep going,” he instructed evenly.
She gazed curiously at him, surprised at how unreadable he was at this moment. Her focus shifted back to the pages in her lap. Next in the stack was a small clipping from the Boston Herald reporting the death of Devoe’s widow. The same thing again. What’s this all about? Cass read that the woman had suddenly left her husband prior to his death and sort of disappeared into Canada, her whereabouts unknown until her death.
Cass stared at the newsprint, growing more intrigued. That’s what this is. Hans thought it was a good story, too. That’s all.
Then she picked up the next item. Her hands began to tremble. It was a diagram of the inaugural platform.
It wasn’t the detailed seating arrangement of the dignitaries, the marked spot where President Noland would be sworn into his second term of office, nor the designated Secret Service positions on and around the platform that struck hardest at Cass. It was what someone had penciled over the diagram. Someone had clearly marked the position of the piano on the upper tier of the platform, the exact time Liesl Bower was scheduled to perform, and a series of lines emanating like a sunburst from the piano. Penciled over that were two words, TIMED BLAST.
All sense of space disappeared, and Cass felt herself falling backward into an abyss. Until someone’s arms caught her and held her close. “Cass!”
Jordan? She heard his voice in her ear. He was cradling her like an injured child. When her head cleared, though, she pulled away from him. When she looked up and saw the fright in his face, saw him reach for her again, she could bear no more. No one could ever make the grotesque things right. No one ever had.
She shot to her feet, grabbed her jacket, and ran from the room, pounding the worn treads of the stairs to the bottom landing. Jordan followed, but she had wound her way through the house and fled through the back door before he could reach her.
Chapter 14
Cass half ran, half stumbled into the back yard and across the withered grass to the dunes. She stopped long enough to look back and see Jordan emerge from the house, calling to her in a voice she’d not heard before. His soothing baritone now shrieking her name, imploring her to stop. But she couldn’t. What had seized her in the study now swung her around and pushed her roughly down the weathered planks that stepped loosely over the dunes.
When she reached the beach, she paused long enough to confront the scolding surf and its unrelenting echo. Then she turned to the old shed, where she and her young friends used to throw back the latch and drag the Hobie Cat from its sandy mooring. In the affected heave-ho cadence of Volga boatmen, the giggling teens would haul the small vessel across the beach and into the breakers, unfurling its sail like a victory flag. They would hop aboard and fling themselves at the Atlantic, feeling it draw them to its risky playground. They feared nothing.
“Cass, wait!”
Feeling his eyes boring into her back, Cass turned east and sprinted down the night-shrouded beach only faintly lit by a lopsided moon. She ran full stride for as long as it took to reach the hurting place. Like an animal that hungrily gnaws its wounds, Cass had returned many times to the spot, to scrape its salt deep into the grain of her sinful flesh. That’s what it was, she thought as she ran. Sin. The church word that never meant much. Not until it meant everything that she was.
And now, sin raged again. Hans had brought it back home, if it had ever left. Whatever he had done, whatever his connection to that monstrous assault on the steps of the Capitol, it would pull her mother into the abyss, too. She couldn’t let that happen. She didn’t care what happened to Hans. If he’d visited the shame of a nation upon them, he deserved whatever he got. But not her mother. Cass would stop him. And the others. Y
ou don’t know who you’re messing with.
“But I’ll find out!” she cried as she ran into the biting wind.
Then something else threw its weight at her. The news clippings, the story, the piano and its bomb. With all certainty, she knew the timed blast was meant for Liesl Bower.
Cass was almost there now. Near the inlet, she slowed and angled toward the open water, hugging her jacket close to her body and feeling her inner garments sponge the sweat trickling down her. She pulled the hood over her damp hair and stood before the filmy curtain of black over the horizon.
She looked toward the inlet waters running swift with the tide. Nearby, a house rose behind the dunes, a security light in its back yard casting sparkles of light over the tumbling currents. She could almost see the fire her friends had built on a night like many others. Just another forbidden, late-night gathering on the beach with friends, but this time, Rachel wasn’t there. She and Adam had broken up, and Cass was glad, for right and wrong reasons. She’d caught Adam flirting with other girls behind Rachel’s back, though Rachel excused him for it when Cass regretfully reported her observations. “Oh, he’s just full of himself, that’s all,” Rachel once said. “He just wants to make friends with everybody.”
Soon, though, it was obvious to all but Rachel that Adam had lost interest in the “homespun mountain kid,” as the sleeker city girls had tagged her.
But something else had been working on Cass, something that had made her ashamed, as few things had. As much as she’d resisted it, she, too, had fallen for the handsome soccer player, even catching his eye a few times in unguarded moments of mutual admiration.
The day Rachel finally announced that she and Adam had permanently parted ways, Cass knew it was a unilateral decision. Rachel’s tears had told her so, though her words sought to convince Cass that it was for the best. “I would only hold him back,” Rachel had said. “He’s way too sophisticated and smart for such a homespun twit as me.” She’d caught Cass’s raised eyebrows. “What? You didn’t think I knew what they called me?”
