"I wouldn't have been able to let you sleep if I were lying awake next to you," he said simply. He stood up and elbowed his shoulders back as if he'd been sitting in one position for too long, then slapped his flat stomach. "And—I was afraid you'd hear my stomach growling and think a wild boar had got into the room."
Smiling, she said, "Breakfast sounds great. Where should we go?"
"On New Year's Day? Unless you have a thing for Egg McMuffins, I think we should stay right here and scrounge up something," he said, walking over to the bed and sitting on it beside her.
"Here? Hmm. You know, I might be a little low on supplies. I didn't have a chance to go food shopping this week."
Or last. Or the one before that.
"No problem. I'll rustle up some pancakes," he said, taking her hand in his. "You have mix?"
"I... had to throw it out last summer. Moths," she said, feeling desperately ashamed.
"Got any eggs?"
"Egg Beaters. I think. No, wait. I defrosted the carton for a cat I was watching. That was dumb. She hardly went near it. I should've refrozen it."
"Bread?"
"A couple of ends. They might be a teeny bit green," she admitted.
He cocked his head and said, "You're not one of those anorexic types, are you?"
"No! Bring me one of your pies and see for yourself," Olivia said with spirit. She sat up but—intensely aware of the wantonness of their middle-of-the-night coupling—she was feeling suddenly shy, so she kept the sheet tucked demurely around her breasts and under her arms.
He noticed it, of course. "You shower first," he said, chastely kissing the top of her head. "I'll see what's down there. I can always run out to a Store 24."
"In your tuxedo?"
"Oh, hell—right. Boy. Those McMuffins are sounding better and better," he muttered on his way out of the room.
It rankled. "Hey!" she shouted after him. "If I wanted to, I could be a great cook. As it is, I'm a ... perfectly respectable one. Perfectly!"
She had to do it—she just had to tell that lie.
He backed into the room. "Oh, yeah? Pop quiz: how do you make crepes?"
"Crepes? What's the big deal? Some flour and ... and eggs and you mix it up," she said, waving her arms in a wild stirring gesture, "and you bake it and you're done."
He poked his tongue in his cheek and nodded. "Uh- huh," he said with a lazy, knowing smile.
It was only after he was gone that Olivia realized that the sheet had fallen down to her lap and that he had been, in fact, enjoying the view. With anyone else, anytime else, she would have been half annoyed, half embarrassed, but now she felt brazenly flattered.
You shameless little hussy, she told herself, smiling as she threw back the covers. She headed for the shower in a blissful, sated mood and turned on the water. How long had it been since she'd felt this good?
Get real. You've never felt this good.
And now that she had discovered this new and sexy self of hers, was her life about to become richer and fuller at last?
Not without Quinn, dimwit. Not without Quinn.
It was a scary thought: she was never going to be All That She Could Be without Quinn around to make it happen. It had always been true on an intellectual level, and now it was true on the physical. She was doomed, unless she could come up with a plan to keep Quinn in Keepsake. Her mind wandered through a dozen scenarios, all of them equally stupid, before coming back to the only one that made any sense to her.
We have to get married. Obviously. I'm just going to have to propose.
Olivia Bennett was a type A, independent, take-charge kind of woman; but even she could see that Quinn Leary might think she was possibly jumping the gun by proposing. Still, if the time and place were right ...
She was wrapping a towel around herself, relieved to have a plan—no matter how whimsical—when Quinn walked in.
Right time? Right place?
"Chief Vickers is walking up your front steps."
"What?"
As if on cue, the doorbell rang. "Don't answer it!" she cried.
"The man isn't blind, Liv. He looked straight at the Mercedes as he walked past it."
"That could be anyone's. We don't have to open the door—I've seen the cop shows—not unless he has a warrant."
"If that's what you want to do."
Olivia could see that Quinn was convinced she was afraid to be caught with him. Could anything be further from the truth? "On second thought, we have nothing to apologize for," she said, tossing aside the towel and pulling the sweatshirt over her head. She jabbed her foot into one of the legs of her sweatpants. "We're consenting adults. Let's hear what the man has to say."
If this is Dad's doing, I swear I'll kill him.
"Fine with me," Quinn said with a shrug. "I'll put on my trousers and meet you downstairs."
Olivia dashed down the stairs and swung the door open to the dour-faced chief.
"Got a minute, Livvy?" he asked her.
"It's not the best time, Chief," she said loftily. "I assume it's important?"
"You tell me," he answered, and marched past her. In the sunlit entry hall he looked more official and misplaced than ever. He glanced pointedly up the stairs, then said, "Would you be missing a black velvet cape?"
"Oh, good. Someone turned it in. But you didn't have to make a special trip."
Unless you're looking for an excuse to spy on me and report to my father, that is.
The chief dumped the duffel he was carrying onto the varnished hall table, making Olivia wince. He unzipped the bag, reached in, and pulled out her sodden cape.
Dismayed, she cried, "Someone threw it in a ditch!"
"Not exactly," he said, holding the cape by the shoulders and letting it drip onto the slate floor of the hall. "Someone hoisted it up the flagpole on Town Hill. It stayed there most of the night until—wouldn't you know it?—poor Father Tom saw it early this morning. But here's the interesting thing," he remarked, spreading the front panels outward for her to see.
The satin lining had been slashed to shreds. Long, frayed ribbons of red hung like thirsty tongues from someone's private hell. Instinctively Olivia stepped back, trying to distance herself from the display of violence she saw there.
Quinn was now behind her. He said quietly to the chief, "I guess we don't have to ask if Father Tom saw anybody hoisting this. Might he have heard someone doing it, somewhere in the back of his mind? The wind was blowing like stink from the northeast, which means that the flag halyard would have been slapping hard against the flagpole all night. But that would have changed over to silence as the cape was hoisted and a load put on the halyard. It would give us a time of occurrence. Father Tom might even have seen a car go by sometime around then—if he could remember when it became quiet."
The chief snorted and said, "What're you, a junior detective now?"
Quinn didn't rise to the bait. Olivia wasn't even sure he heard the crack, so focused was he on the discovery. He took the cape from the police chief with a "May I?" and laid it out on the slate floor.
"It would be good if you could come up with a list of early departures from the gala," he told the chief as he crouched beside the cape, studying the gashes in its scarlet lining. "Or anyone who left and then came back. But I don't have to tell you that."
Apparently he did. Vickers aimed a scowl at the top of Quinn's head and said, "You're implying it was one of Mr. Bennett's guests?"
Quinn didn't bother to look up. "I'm not implying. I'm saying."
Olivia, feeling queasy, stuck in her two cents. "My father doesn't know anybody who hates me that much."
"Not you, Liv," said Quinn. This time he did look up. His brow was raked over with concern and in his eyes she saw something she'd never seen before: fear. For her. Because of him.
She shivered. The chief saw it and said, "Your hair is all wet. You'll catch cold, Livvy."
She tried to be flippant and brave. "Probably someone just walked over my grave, that
's all," she said with a tight smile at Quinn.
"Cut it out!" Quinn said.
"Oh, all right," she answered, deflated by the sharp tone of his voice. "But really—I mean, how can a guy in a tuxedo, no less, stroll in dress shoes through mud and snow and dog poop to the top of Town Hill, then hook up a cape to a halyard and hoist it to the highest point in town, without ever being seen? How?"
"We don't know that he wasn't seen," said the chief. "It's early days yet."
"He might not have been wearing a tuxedo," Quinn pointed out. "Not everyone at the gala came in black tie."
Olivia chewed on her thumbnail. "That's true." She turned to Quinn and said, "Was Coach Bronsky wearing a tux? I can't remember."
The chief exploded. "What the hell are you asking about him for?"
"I ... I don't know," Olivia said, faltering before his wrath. "I suppose because he gave us such an evil look."
"I doubt he was the only one."
"I didn't notice anyone else. Did you?" she asked Quinn.
Quinn was about to say something but stopped himself.
"I suspect the chief is right," he said calmly. "We tended only to notice the good guys."
"Don't go characterizing people around here as good or bad, Quinn. You don't know shit about who's either."
"I guess we'll find out, won't we?" Quinn said as he got to his feet again.
The two men were the same height and standing eye to eye. All that separated them were twenty years and a beer belly. During all of those years and all of those beers, Chief Vickers had nourished a keen grudge; Olivia couldn't remember him ever saying a positive thing about either Quinn or his father, and she could see why. He blamed Francis Leary for getting away, and Quinn for the fact that his own son had never done much with his life.
It was hard to say which of the men standing there resented the other one more just then, but Olivia had no intention of finding out. "Does my father know about this yet?" she asked, tossing out the question like a biscuit between two growling dogs.
Chief Vickers turned and snapped it up first. "Mr. Bennett had a long night; I didn't want to barge in on him too early. And I wanted to make sure this was yours. I thought I saw you arrive in it last night," he said, crouching down to roll up the cape. "If you don't mind, I'll keep it for a little while."
"By all means," Olivia said, glad to see it go.
He stuffed the rolled cape back into the green-and-white duffel bag—a Keepsake Cougars team bag—and then he gave the visor of his hat a yank.
"Enjoy your day," he said with one last glance at Quinn. It was meant to be insinuating, and Olivia took it that way.
She closed the door after he left and leaned against it, mostly for support and partly to keep the man from coming back in. "Well, that was exciting," she said. "And I thought last night couldn't be topped."
Quinn shook his head. "It's not a joke, Liv. These attacks are too choreographed. Whoever is doing it is nuts and he's fearless; it can't get more dangerous than that."
Olivia used the sleeve of her sweatshirt to blot a small puddle on the glossy surface of the hall table. "Do you really think so?" she asked, angling her head to see that she'd got all the water. "I don't. I mean, they're pranks, that's all. Vicious, maybe, but they're still pranks."
"The effigy was a prank. Slashing the lining, that was an act of terror."
She looked up from her task at him. "I wish you wouldn't look like that, Quinn," she said softly. "You're scaring me."
"I want you to be scared, dammit! We don't have a clue what we're dealing with here. You may be the Princess of Keepsake, but trust me, that's just a figure of speech. You saw the cape. That could've been—"
The unfinished thought hung in the air between them like a half-spun web.
Quinn let out a sigh of exasperation and took her in his arms. He held her tight. "This thing is so damned frustrating—I can't think straight."
"Because you're hungry," she said in a muffled voice as she buried her head in his shoulder. "C'mon, let's go to McDonald's. They have a drive-through."
Olivia pulled a hooded sweatshirt over her head while Quinn donned his topcoat; they made a comically incongruous pair.
"All set?" he asked, holding the door for her.
"Starving," Olivia said. She stepped around the puddled image on the floor as if it were a chalked-in body at a crime scene, and let Quinn lead the way to his car.
Chapter 16
Ray Buffitt was the same amiable slob he'd always been, only now he was able to convert his bad habits into a social asset: The rented house in which he dwelled was considered a paradise by every one of his wife-fearing pals.
Quinn was given a quick tour of the place before the six men who were gathered there hunkered down for their marathon of football viewing. Since Quinn had never had the chance to go away to college, what he saw was an eye-opener.
Half-full beer cans, empty Doritos bags, crumpled Ding Dongs wrappers, and dried-out bean dip floated throughout the house like water lilies on a pond. There were exotic waterfalls, two of them: one from the leaking sink in the kitchen, and one from the sink in the downstairs—no one in his right mind would call it a guest—bathroom. There was white sand: from a litterbox tucked in a corner of the kitchen, its gritty contents half kicked out and grinding underfoot. There were tropical fish (four guppies swimming in a tank) and tropical snakes (a boa constrictor in another tank, waiting perhaps to be fed the fish). All in all, a paradise, a fantasy.
A pigpen, just as Mike Redding had said.
As for the media equipment, it was all state of the art and thoughtfully arranged. The big flat-screen TV was integrated with the sound system and jammed against a window to block the sun from washing out one's viewing pleasure. The CDs, many hundreds of them, were arranged on the eye-level shelves of two bookcases for easy selection (the Sports Illustrateds, except for the dog-eared swimsuit issues, were confined to the lower shelves and were harder to peruse, but it couldn't be helped). A pair of speakers as tall as Quinn were situated for excellent sound separation on each side of the non-working fireplace, which itself was being used to house part of Ray's vast and valuable collection of beer bottles.
"He had'em appraised once," Mike explained to Quinn as they slugged down their Coors before the first game. "They're worth a fortune. Take that Blow Hole from Wyoming, Rhode Island," he said, pointing to an unopened bottle with a pristine label. "That one alone is worth two hundred bucks—extremely limited edition," Mike said in a voice of envy.
"I'd love to have an awesome hobby like that," Mike added with a sigh. "But Mitzi says beer caps only, no bottles." He shrugged and dropped his empty Coors can into a bamboo magazine rack. "What're you gonna do?"
Quinn made sympathetic noises, but the whole scene was beyond him. He had been raised by his father to be both methodical and thorough, and acts of domestic defiance left him unimpressed. Besides, seventeen years of exile had made him something of a loner; it was unlikely that he could ever feel like one of the guys the way he once did.
And yet they had welcomed him into their haven easily enough. Mike, Ray, Neal, Cutter, Todd—all of them were friendly and accepting in an offhand way. As far as they were concerned, Quinn was just another fist pumping in the air after a kick-ass play.
Quinn settled into a plaid easy chair whose arms had been shredded by the cat he now knew was called Digger, and began munching his way through a bag of Ruffles as Tennessee kicked off against Nebraska in the Cotton Bowl. His interest in the game was minimal; he was there strictly to keep his eyes and ears open for useful scuttlebutt.
In fact, he hadn't wanted to come at all, not after the cape episode. But Olivia had refused to let him stay behind just to stand guard over her. She was bound for the outlet malls with Eileen, she had told him, while Rand stayed home with the kids. Eileen would have her head if Olivia begged out of their annual foraging expedition.
In any case, Olivia was far too independent to be watched over. It was bot
h her great strength and her maddening flaw.
"Bronsky said the guy couldn't run—hah! Look at 'im go!" crowed Neal. "Bronsky don't know from squat!"
They watched the replay and then Cutter turned to Ray and said, "You ever gonna let Coach back in your house, Buffitt-man?"
"No way," Ray said. "Not after that."
Quinn's ears pricked up. "What'd he do?"
Ray said, "Ah, the asshole got drunk and smashed up some of my beer bottles. I like a drinker as well as the next guy, but I hate a mean drunk. If he—way to go, Dejuan! How many yards was Dejuan good for this year, Todd?"
Whenever anyone needed to know something, he asked Todd. An accountant by trade, Todd had an encyclopedic memory. Not to mention, he'd once won a pair of tickets to the Superbowl in a bar-sponsored trivia contest.
The game was pretty good. After a scoreless first quarter, the lead moved back and forth between the two archrivals. Quinn made sure that he hooted and hollered with the rest of them, but his mind was fixed firmly on the torn-up cape that Chief Vickers had recovered early that morning.
While the others gnawed on beef jerky, Quinn chewed on the ongoing mystery. Was he the only one who believed that each of the "pranks" was more ominous than the one before it? The goal was obvious—to get Quinn out of Keepsake—but how far was some creep willing to go to achieve it?
By halftime, the score was tied and everyone in the room was beered up and pumped. They switched to another game, but it was laughably uneven. Ray Buffitt, ever the perfect host, had anticipated the dread possibility and had programmed the best of two dozen CDs into a nonstop blitz of rock and roll.
"Don't wanna lose momentum, right?" was his explanation as he cranked up the volume.
Between the music and the two or three conversations being shouted back and forth over one another as the game played on the giant screen, there was a real danger of sensory meltdown. Quinn, used to the serenity of the outdoors, was going nuts. It was probably quieter in the commodities pit the day after Oprah told her audience that hamburgers scared her.
Quinn was about to rip the CD player out of its perch in the bookcase and throw it into the fireplace when Cutter shouted to him, "Hey, I forgot! Guess who asked me about you the other day?''
Keepsake Page 16
