Their astonishment was not without grounds, Molly had to admit. For one thing, she never dated on a weeknight, and for another she had never, ever dated anyone remotely like him. First, he looked about forty. The guys she went out with were generally within just a few years of her own age. Too, it was quite obvious from even the few clipped words he had spoken that he was not a local. And he was dressed all wrong. Although some of her dates had arrived wearing suits when the event called for it, for them it had been an occasional mode of dress: they had seemed self-conscious in their Sunday best. The FBI man was clearly at ease in the dark blue suit he still wore. Although he had removed his tie and his white shirt was unbuttoned at the neck, the effect was far from casual. Black leather shoes gleamed beneath well-pressed trousers. A black belt with a discreet silver buckle circled his waist. The accessories were expensive. So was the suit, and he looked as if he wore one like it every day. Moreover, there was an air about him that said he was at home in a world far removed from the farms and small towns of central Kentucky. Molly had definitely never dated anyone like that.
But he had chosen to present himself as her date, and she was not in any position to contradict him. She was only thankful that whatever he wanted of her, he was willing to wait to reveal it until they were alone.
Because if he was not her date, then the inevitable next question the kids would ask was, who was he? That was the one she didn’t want to have to answer. Not unless she had to.
Molly hugged herself, and tried to marshal her thoughts. The children had to be her first concern. “Uh, Sam and Susan, tonight is your night for the dishes, remember. Then you can watch TV until bedtime, if you want—as long as your homework is all done. Mike, do your homework before you do anything else, and if you go out be home by nine-thirty, please. Ash—”
“I’ll make sure everything gets done, don’t worry,” Ashley said, standing up and coming around the table toward them. Her tortoiseshell glasses had slipped down her nose, and she pushed them into place as she spoke. “Will you be out late?”
Molly opened her mouth. Then, realizing she had no answer for that, she slanted a desperate glance over her shoulder at the man behind her. He shook his head.
“No, not late,” she said to Ashley, then turned to him. “I’m ready. Let’s go.”
“Molly—” Ashley, tall and thin like the rest of them, still wore the tan corduroys and oatmeal sweater she had worn to school. Her caramel-colored hair curled wildly around her head, and as she looked at her sister she tugged at one shoulder-length strand. It was something she often did when she was troubled.
“What?” It was hard to keep the strain out of her voice. Molly fought to project an image of normalcy until she could get herself and the FBI man out the door. Ashley, no fool for all her frequent absentmindedness, clearly sensed that something was amiss. Her expression was beginning to show signs of concern as she and Mike, who still stood near the open door, arms crossed over his chest, exchanged glances.
“Your shoes.”
Following the direction of Ashley’s gaze, Molly looked down at her bare feet. Everyone else in the kitchen, the FBI man included, looked down too. Her unpainted toes curled self-consciously against the cool linoleum.
“Oh.” The single syllable sounded lame, but under the circumstances it was the best Molly could do. She had been ready to walk out into the crisp autumn night barefoot. On what was supposed to be a date, yet. It must be obvious to Ashley and Mike, at least, that she was seriously rattled. But they didn’t know why, and if she could help it they weren’t going to find out. What she had to do was get a grip on herself, and hope they believed that she was flustered because the man waiting for her was so different from the usual run of her boyfriends, and she had forgotten their date.
The sight of her bare feet recalled her to a sense of her other deficiencies of dress. She was wearing ancient jeans that had faded almost to the point of colorlessness and an equally faded gray-and-blue-plaid flannel shirt of Mike’s. Her face was devoid of makeup, and her hair was caught in a ponytail at the nape of her neck by a plain old brown rubber band.
Never, under any conditions, would she have gone on a date looking the way she did. Especially not with a man like him: an older, sophisticated stranger in a suit.
Ashley knew it. So, probably, did Mike.
“I should change,” Molly said with a forced little laugh and an upward glance at her “date.”
He shook his head. That non-smile of his appeared again, for the children’s benefit, Molly assumed.
“You look great. Anyway, you’re just going to be showing me around the area, remember? We probably won’t even get out of the car. So grab your shoes and let’s go.”
His tone was light and easy. The look that accompanied his words galvanized her. She glanced around the floor. Her sneakers—old, cracked leather ones that had once been Mike’s before they had started looking so bad that he refused to wear them to school—were in front of the sink. Molly found them, thrust her feet into them, tied the laces, and straightened.
“Are you sure you don’t mind me going like this?” she asked her “date” with an attempt at a bright smile. The question, and the smile, were strictly for her siblings’ benefit. Ashley was frowning as she looked from her sister to the FBI man and back. Mike’s expression was closer to a scowl.
“Like I said, you look great. Let’s go.” The FBI man swung the screen door open. Molly walked toward him.
“Molly—” Mike stopped her with a hand on her arm as she was about to pass him. He looked, and sounded, worried.
“Do your homework,” she ordered in her sternest voice, then, smiling, gave his nose an affectionate tweak. He did not appear completely reassured, but he released her arm.
“I told you, I did it at school.”
Molly grimaced at that familiar refrain, and grimacing, went out the door. The night was cool and still, with only the faintest rustle from the leaves of the big oak suggesting the presence of a breeze. The FBI man caught up with her at the edge of the porch. She had to make a conscious effort not to pull away as his hand curled around her elbow.
Mike and Ashley stood in the doorway with Susan and Sam peeking around them. Molly felt the weight of their combined stares as, under escort, she descended the steps and crossed the lawn to the white car parked just behind their own ancient blue Plymouth.
The FBI man reached around her to open the passenger side door. Molly glanced up at his face, which was impassive in the faint light spilling from inside the house.
“Get in,” he said.
She did, and he shut the door behind her.
Molly managed a wave for her family, and took deep breaths to calm herself as the FBI man walked around the hood, his shoes crunching in the gravel driveway.
7
Pork Chop barked from the porch as the car, tires rattling over the gravel, backed down the drive. Molly stared at the familiar outlines of the ramshackle house and at the dark figures of her family silhouetted in the doorway until the car reached the road. A quick shift of gears and they were moving forward. Her home and family were left behind.
She finally dared a glance at the man beside her. Seen in profile, he had nice features. His forehead was high, his nose straight and not overlarge, his mouth firm and unsmiling, his chin masculine. Everything was in proportion. To a woman in her thirties, sophisticated in pearls and mink, Molly supposed he would seem handsome.
To her twenty-four-year-old, jeans-and-sneakers-clad self, he seemed downright scary.
His attention was on the road, which was narrow and twisty. Although it was only a little past seven, full night had fallen. The moon had not yet risen. The car’s headlights provided the only illumination. The bright beams cut through the darkness, reflecting off the gritty surface of the blacktop and revealing the century-old rock fence that outlined the twelve hundred acres belonging to Wyland Farm. The farm’s Big House, where the family lived, was located more than a mile distant
across vast rolling fields of rich grass. With its white-painted brick, Greek revival facade, the sprawling twenty-two-room mansion could have been the prototype for Tara. A ten-room guest house was a miniature of the Big House, and even the half-dozen barns echoed the elegant style. But the farm’s heyday had been in the seventies and early eighties, when Arab oil money had pushed the price paid for yearlings at Keeneland’s annual July auction into the eight-figure stratosphere. Shortly thereafter the Arabs had gone south along with their oil money, and the farm, like the Thoroughbred business in general, had begun to deteriorate. By the time the Ballards had come to live on the property almost seven years before, Wyland Farm was starting a long downhill slide. From a mid-seventies high of forty racehorses in training, forty-seven broodmares, fifty-eight weanlings and colts, and four valuable stallions, the farm currently had fifteen racehorses, just nine broodmares, eleven weanlings and colts, and one proven stallion, who was unfortunately getting on in years. The farm’s private veterinary hospital was no longer operational; neither was the canteen for the farmworkers. The equine swimming pool, once equipped with underwater treadmills and Jacuzzis for the rehabilitation of racehorses with strains and sprains, was empty of water and equipment, and filled with leaves and other debris. The stallion barn, with only one occupant, did double duty as the farm office. The remaining barns needed various repairs, and a fresh coat of white paint. Even the jaunty cupolas that topped them were no longer the once brilliant emerald that was one of the farm’s racing colors. Time and neglect had faded the cupolas to a soft, mossy green. Molly’s house, one of several tenant dwellings dotted about the property, had once sported the same fresh white and brilliant green. Now the white paint was peeling off in long strips, and the trim could more properly be described as gray.
Despite this reversal of fortune, the name Wyland Farm still retained a degree of local magic. This was horse country, Bluegrass country, an oasis of manors and manners plunked down in the midst of the rural South. The human population was thin. The people who lived on this rolling savannah were, by and large, native to the region. They lived there because their grandpappy and their grandpappy’s grandpappy had lived there. A few folks, the owners of the big horse farms, were as rich as any in the world, and had been so for generations. But the majority of the population was not. They existed to meet the needs of the property owners, who were the region’s de facto rulers privileged with an unacknowledged but very real droit du seigneur.
The whiskey gentry, as they were called by the less reverent in reference to the fabled sour mash that, along with racehorses, was the region’s lifeblood, were every bit as aristocratic as the titled lords and ladies of England. In fact, Great Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II visited often on the quiet, and was said to be very much at home among the local blue bloods. Movie stars, magnates, and foreign-born billionaires celebrated international success by moving into the region, hoping to acquire for themselves the patina of gentility that, over time, transforms new money into old. The soft southern hospitality and languid drawls that greeted newcomers were deceptive, however. The Bluegrass assessed its people just as it assessed its horses: by pedigree. A foundation of cold steel underlay the welcoming velvet, and the establishment could be ruthless in turning its collective back on those who, in their estimation, did not measure up.
Molly had not been lucky enough to be born into one of the landed families. Her people had never been more than a tiny, unimportant cog in the vast human machinery that served the rich. To her knowledge, her kin had never owned a piece of property, never progressed educationally beyond high school. Faceless and nameless except to their small group of relatives and friends, her family had lived and died in obscurity in a place where bloodlines meant everything.
As a result, she had had to battle all her life against the trap of feeling small and worthless. She fought the sensation anew as she was borne away into the night by a man who had her very much in his power.
“So, do you get most of your dates by blackmail?” Molly was unable to stand the silence a moment longer. Bravado kept her chin up, her voice tart. To ward off the chill that seemed to be attacking her very bones, she folded her arms tightly across her chest.
“No, but then, most of my dates aren’t with thieves.” His reply was cool, his glance at her brief.
To be called a thief stung. Molly abandoned bravado for outright hostility. “What do you want with me?”
“We’ll talk about it over supper.”
“I’ve eaten.”
“I haven’t.”
There seemed to be no reply Molly could make to that. The obvious implication was that she would do as he wished. Under the circumstances, he was right. Molly, who had been sitting rigidly erect, slumped a little in her seat, defeated by the realization.
“If this is about the twenty dollars …”
“Twenty dollars?” He cast her a narrow-eyed glance.
“I spent it on doughnuts and milk for the kids, okay? I’ll pay it back.”
There was a pause. He glanced at her again. “You took a twenty from the five thousand in the feed bag to buy doughnuts and milk for your brothers and sisters?”
“You hadn’t missed it,” she said, chagrined. His tone told her that.
“No.”
“Then what do you want from me?”
“All in good time.”
The car paused at a stop sign, then turned onto old Frankfort Pike. Molly realized that they must be headed toward Lexington. Rural, agrarian Woodford County, where Wyland Farm was located, offered little in the way of restaurants. But it was only a brief drive away from Lexington, the small but busy city that was known as the Heart of the Bluegrass.
“What are you doing for money, now that you’ve lost your job?” he asked, breaking the silence.
“Is that any of your business?”
“Yes,” he said. “I think it is.”
The unspoken message was plain: He had the right to ask her anything, and if she knew what was good for her, she’d better answer.
“I have almost two weeks pay coming from Don Simpson. Then I suppose I’ll look for another job.” Not for anything was she going to let on about how truly desperate she was. Having quit one stable, she was unlikely to be taken on by another. The local horsemen stuck together.
“Your phone’s been disconnected,” he said.
Molly stiffened. It had only happened that morning, after less than a week’s notice that the cutoff was pending. Southern Bell, long used to dealing with the impecunious Ballards, no longer cut them much slack. “How do you know?”
“I tried to call before I came. I thought you might appreciate some warning.”
“You’re right, I would have.” Sudden, acute antipathy toward him sharpened her voice. Molly welcomed its presence. It helped to blunt the edge of an embarrassment so painful that it made her want to squirm in her seat. Having the phone—or the electricity, or the gas—disconnected was nothing new, but she still hated anyone to know when it happened. Especially him.
“Forget to pay your bill?”
“I didn’t have the money, all right?” A perverse kind of pride kept Molly from lying. Besides, what was she going to say that he would believe? The family had been on vacation and they’d forgotten to send in the check before they left? She’d tried that one in sixth grade, and gotten laughed right out of school.
“I suppose some of the five thousand dollars was going to go to get your phone turned back on.”
“Yes, it was.”
He said nothing more for a moment. Then, “How much did you make, working for Wyland Farm?”
None of your business was the reply that sprang to Molly’s lips, but she didn’t bother to say it. He would get the answer out of her anyway. Grudgingly she named a figure that made his brows lift.
“Not much,” he commented.
“Enough to get by on.”
“Is that your sole income? Do you get money from any other source?”
&nb
sp; “You mean like a million-dollar trust fund? No, my folks never quite got around to setting something like that up.”
“Some kind of state payments for your brothers and sisters, maybe,” he asked, ignoring her sarcasm.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I just don’t, okay?”
“I should think you’d be eligible …”
“Well, we’re not,” she said shortly.
“No one else in the family works?”
“Sam and Susan are eleven years old. No, they don’t work. Mike’s fourteen; sometimes he’ll help some of the neighbors in their fields, but there’s not a lot of jobs around here for a kid his age. And Ashley’s busy with school.”
“She couldn’t get a job in the afternoons? She looks old enough.”
“She’s seventeen. A senior in high school this year. With a straight-A average. If she can keep it up until graduation, she’ll get a full college scholarship. That’s her ticket out of here, not some dead-end minimum-wage job flipping burgers or checking out groceries. So no, Ashley doesn’t work. She knows I’d skin her if she tried.”
To Molly’s relief, he let the subject drop. As the silence lengthened, Molly gradually relaxed in her seat. Wind whooshed past the windows in a soothing whisper. Gently swaying treetops were dark against the night sky. A single star appeared on the horizon, to be followed by another, then another as the cloud cover that had darkened the sky to pitch-black passed to the west without disgorging so much as a single drop of rain. The car lurched unexpectedly as its right front tire hit a pothole left from the previous harsh winter. Another car approached, its headlamps as it passed briefly lighting up the interior of the Taurus. Glancing at the man beside her, Molly saw that he appeared deep in thought.
The car crested a rise, and suddenly small, picturesque Lexington was spread out before them like an illuminated Christmas village. Home of the University of Kentucky, Lexington bustled at 7:30 p.m. during the school year, even on a Wednesday night. Still, the traffic heading into the downtown area was extraordinarily heavy. The Taurus slowed as it became caught up in the congestion.
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