by Nancy Martin
“Who would I—?”
“Dammit, Nora, this has gone too far. What if you’d been here when this happened?”
“It’s just vandals. They wouldn’t have come if I’d been here.”
“You need help, for godsake.”
“Not from the police!” I shouted.
He let go of my wrist. The house was absolutely silent.
“Now that,” he said very quietly, “calls for some explaining.”
“Please,” I begged. “Let me figure out what’s happening. Just give me time to think.”
“All right,” he said, calmer. “Maybe you better take a look around to see what’s missing.”
“My laptop is still here.”
The computer sat undisturbed on the kitchen table. We both looked at it blankly.
“Any self-respecting thief would have taken that first thing,” he said.
I nodded. My heart began to throb.
“Anything else you want to check on?”
“Y-yes.” But I couldn’t seem to move.
“You want me to look for you?” he asked.
“No,” I said, gathering myself with tremendous effort. “But I have to go upstairs.”
He saw that I was afraid to be alone. He said, “Okay, let’s go. I’m right behind you.”
In my rush, I caught my foot on the books scattered on the dining room floor. I knelt and found the three precious first editions I owned—a book of Whitman poems, a Dashiell Hammett and a rare volume of Richardson’s Pamela. I carried them, hugging the books instinctively.
In the sitting room, more books were all over the floor, but the CD player was still in its cabinet with all of Todd’s jazz collection. A group of Libby’s early watercolors had been thrown on the stairs in a shower of broken glass. The sight of my sister’s paintings damaged gave me my first boost of angry adrenaline. On the upstairs landing, the linen cupboard shelves had been emptied onto the carpet.
Behind me, Abruzzo walked carefully, on alert.
In my room, my jewelry box still contained the meager collection of costume jewelry and the few family pieces I owned. Even Grandmama’s sapphire ring was there. My bedclothes had been ripped off, and the mattress was askew on the box springs. Nervously, I leaned closer to see if some weirdo had left his calling card. But the bedclothes were clean, thank heavens.
Abruzzo stepped into the room and spotted the small rabbit-eared television on my dresser. “What about jewelry?”
“It’s all here.”
I took a deep breath and opened the second drawer in my dresser. In my lingerie drawer, I had left the folio wrapped in a black lace slip buried under a collection of pastel bras. By some miracle, the vandals hadn’t dug down through the bras to find the prize.
With trembling hands, I lifted out the folio and unwrapped it. The slip floated to the floor at my feet.
“What is it?” Abruzzo asked at my shoulder.
“It’s Rory’s,” I said.
Unsteady again, I sat down on the bed.
Abruzzo sat beside me and gently pried the folio out of my hands. He thumbed the latch and the leather case opened.
Everything started to get murky, so I put my head between my knees again. I said, “Your self-respecting thief was probably looking for this.”
“What is it?” he asked.
“Rory collected erotic art.”
“Oh, yeah?” Abruzzo leafed through the pages. “He didn’t mention this hobby down at the boys’ club.”
“It’s very valuable,” I said. “It’s what Jonathan Longnecker asked me about this afternoon.”
“How come you have it?”
I sat up again as my head cleared. “I have no idea.”
Abruzzo continued to look through the pages.
I said, “Libby sent it to me. She wanted me to return it to Rory’s collection without telling anyone. It’s such a stupid idea that I can’t imagine what she was thinking. Except ...”
“Except?”
“Maybe Libby is doing work that’s not entirely legal. Obviously she wanted to keep her connection to this folio a secret. She didn’t want anyone to know she had it—and I have to assume that includes the police.”
Abruzzo didn’t appear to be listening. His attention was fully engaged by the pages in front of him. “Uhm,” he said.
“So I can’t tell the police yet. And I can’t report this break-in until I’ve figured out what Libby wants me to do and why. I don’t want her going to jail.”
“Uhmmm.”
“On the other hand, I don’t want to get myself in trouble either.” I looked down at the writhing figures depicted on the lustrous page between us. The man’s erection was huge. I blinked, and my brain snapped back to reality, which was me sitting on my bed with Michael Abruzzo while he looked at erotic pictures. I said, “Maybe I’m panicking. Maybe this really was just vandals.”
“Mmmm,” he said.
“Kids, perhaps.”
“Brave kids to break in here in broad daylight.”
“Well, it could have been teenagers looking for excitement.”
“They didn’t find it,” Abruzzo said, turning to the next page.
I sat on the bed and looked at the wreckage of my bedroom. My eyelet sheets had been ripped to the floor, and my down-filled pillows thrown to opposite sides of the room. My slip was on the carpet, too. I wondered if Abruzzo had noticed it.
He seemed pretty absorbed by something else at the moment.
I reached for the folio and took it from him. I began replacing the pages into the leather covers. I heard myself saying primly, “I think you’ve seen enough to get the general idea of Rory’s taste in art.”
He leaned back, hands braced on the bed behind him. “If that’s art, I’ll give museums a second chance.”
“Rory had a very specialized collection.”
“He sure did, the old dog.”
I hastily snatched the black lace slip off the floor and used it to rewrap the folio. I was clumsy, though, and he reached to help. “I can manage,” I said.
“You could have put this in a safety-deposit box, you know, but you’ve kept it up here in your bedroom.” His smile made me think about kissing him outside in the dark. “What are you doing? Looking at the pictures before you go to sleep at night?”
“I thought it was safest here,” I said, ridiculously prim, and stashing the folio back in my drawer. “Turns out I was right, Mr. Abruzzo.”
He rose to his feet and let his gaze sweep over the bed, the eyelet lace, and my pillows on the floor. “You called me Michael before, you know. It wouldn’t hurt to keep on doing it.”
Somehow, using his first name in that particular location didn’t seem like a good idea at all.
He turned and slouched against the door, waiting.
I couldn’t meet his eye. “Thank you.”
“For?”
“Not making me call the police.”
“No problem,” he said.
“And I shouldn’t have told you about the folio,” I began. I tried to find a way to say more.
When I looked up, he smiled somewhat wryly. “You don’t have to worry about me. I’ll keep your secret.”
“Thanks.”
“But you’re in danger. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to see that.”
Maybe I was, but just then it didn’t feel like vandals were going to give me the most trouble. Suddenly I didn’t want Abruzzo anywhere near my eyelet sheets. The good news was that he wasn’t treating me like a hysterical child. The bad news was that I wouldn’t mind being treated like a grown woman just then.
Caution won. I said, “Let’s go downstairs.”
“Just one second,” he replied. “What are the chances Libby did this herself? Maybe she was trying to get this thing back.”
“No, she’d never make a mess like this.” I was thinking of the watercolor paintings torn off the walls on the staircase. “She wouldn’t destroy things.”
He shrugged
. “Just a thought.”
He stood aside and let me precede him out of the room.
On the way down the stairs, I picked up the three framed watercolors that Libby had painted. Looking at them, I used the phone in the kitchen and dialed Libby’s number.
Ralph answered. Although it was late, I could hear the kids arguing in the background.
“I’m sorry to call so late,” I said, “but, Ralph, I really need to talk to Libby.”
“She’s not here,” he said placidly, despite the shouting near him. “She went to New York.”
“What?” My voice cracked. “What for?”
“To look for a dress.”
“A dress,” I said. A huge crash resonated over the phone line.
“Lucy, cut that out, please. Leave your brother alone. You know,” Ralph said to me, “for the wedding.”
“She’s shopping,” I said stupidly.
“Yeah, I think she’ll be back in a couple of days.”
“Listen, Ralph, do you know where’s she’s staying? What hotel?”
The children’s altercation turned into a brawl. I could hear shrieking, but Ralph said calmly, “She’s with a friend. At her friend’s apartment. Sylvia somebody. I don’t have the number, though. She usually calls home to check in.”
“Okay,” I said steadily. “It’s important that she call me, Ralph. I really need to talk to her. As soon as possible.”
“Sure,” said Ralph. “I’ll tell her. Is there anything I can do? Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” I said. The last thing I wanted was anyone else dragged into the quagmire. And it sounded as though Ralph had his hands full with the kids. “Just ask Libby to call me soon—it doesn’t matter what time.”
“Will do,” Ralph promised before signing off to deal with Libby’s wild animals.
I phoned Emma next. She listened to my story and promised to arrive in twenty minutes.
While we waited for her, I cleaned the broken glass out of the picture frames and looked at the small watercolors Libby had painted when we were still in school. Even then, her technique had been beautiful, outshone only by her flare for capturing a moment of action and figure with simple brush strokes. She had sketched all three of us one evening when we’d gone skinny-dipping in the river and added paint later. She’d even managed to insert her own, fuller frame between Emma’s and my own, the three of us laughing in the half-light-natural girls teasing each other into showing off our teenage bodies. My throat clogged as I looked down at those three sisters bound by countless such evenings together. We hadn’t always gotten along or been happy, but nothing kept me more grounded than my bond with my sisters.
By the time Emma arrived, I was angry. Someone was trying to break that bond.
Chapter 15
Emma stared at me when Abruzzo had fled—apparently not wanting to be in the same house with two women he’d kissed on the same night. Emma said, “Are you nuts?”
“What have I done now?”
“Why did you bother calling me when you had the gangster studmuffin here?” She wagged her head in despair. “Some day, Nora, you’re going to explode from all those pent-up hormones.”
I looked at her askance. After the funeral she had changed into jeans and a sweatshirt. The shirt was smeared with something that could have been dried horse slobber, yet my sister still managed to look like a sex kitten. I asked, “Did you have a good time with him?”
She grinned. “Can’t blame a girl for trying. I jumped him when he walked me to the parking garage. He cooperated, but his heart wasn’t in it. Did you have better luck?”
“My house has been vandalized, Em.”
“I get it. No time for nooky. Okay, tell me what’s going on.”
Blase as she pretended to be, Emma actually became solicitous and made us one of her trademark margaritas to share. Then we went upstairs and made my bed while I spilled the whole story. I showed her the folio along with the note Libby sent me.
“And now she’s gone dress shopping in New York,” I added, running my finger along the rim of the glass for the salt. “And Ralph doesn’t have her phone number.”
Emma curled up on the bed with the folio and became as engrossed in the pictures as Abruzzo had been. “So? The wedding is next weekend. She needs a dress.”
“But, Emma—”
Emma turned another page. “She’s shopping for clothes, for Pete’s sake. You know the whole Treese family will look like they’ve been to Paris. Libby will want to look just as good.”
“I’m so sorry Libby has to obsess about her wardrobe! Dammit, Emma, I’m going crazy. She dumped this on me and skipped town! Did she say anything when she gave you the folio?”
Emma looked up from the folio at last and blinked. “I thought it was a bag of books. She didn’t say what it was. So I took it and left.”
“Back up. Did she call you to come get it?”
“No, I stopped at her house on my way to Paddy’s barn. I take doughnuts to the kids on Saturday mornings. A little sugar jazzes them up. Sometimes I think those kids need to cut loose.”
“Was Libby okay?”
“Of course. I mean, she was her usual self, if that qualifies as okay. Maybe she was a little upset, I guess. Jill Mascione was there.”
“Jill? At Libby’s house? What on earth for?”
“She was talking to Ralph about the menu for the rehearsal dinner. Ralph was angry and Libby ran outside to talk to me while he argued with Jill about chicken or something.”
“Ralph was angry?”
Emma shrugged and went back to the folio. “As angry as Ralph ever gets. I certainly didn’t hear him shouting. The whole wedding has gotten out of hand, I think. It’s expensive. Ralph was looking for a way to cut the cost.”
“And Libby promptly went to New York to buy a dress?”
“Nobody ever said Libby is sensitive. Remember, she was the one who upstaged you at your own wedding by going into labor.”
“Hardly her fault.”
“She could have kept the screaming to a minimum until the minister finished.”
I sighed. “I want to shake her right now.”
“Get in line.”
I sank down on the bed and put the empty glass on the nightstand.
“We’ll find her.” Emma kicked me gently, which was as supportive as my younger sister ever got. “But not tonight. You look like you’ve been wrung out like a towel. Is this what sex does to you? Because I can see why you avoid it if—”
“I did not have sex with anyone.”
“Too bad,” said Emma. She lay back on the bed and noticed the horse slobber stain on her shirt. She picked at it. “You should give him a chance.”
I flopped back on the bed and looked at the ceiling. Too much adrenaline had exhausted me, but I knew who she was talking about. “Libby says he’s a criminal.”
“Consider the source.” She gave up on the stain and stretched out her stiff leg. Then she looked at the ceiling, too. “I thought he was kinda sweet. An Old World sort of guy, who’d maybe kill a man for touching his woman, you know? A little macho. But sweet.”
“Sweet?” I had not considered him sweet when for an instant I thought he was ready to beat up Jonathan Longnecker on my behalf. The possibility had horrified me. “No, he’s not sweet.”
“Lighten up. He’s trying to be nice. He’s trying to take care of you. And from the looks of this place, you could use it.”
We continued to gaze at the ceiling. Some water damage was starting to show in the corner. Before winter, I’d have to do something about the roof.
I said, “Why do people feel I need to be taken care of? I’m not a pushover.”
“You’re—I don’t know—feminine. That automatically
gives people the impression that you’re helpless.”
Looking over at my sister in her riding clothes, I decided nobody would ever mistake her for a helpless female. Yet I knew she was as soft on the inside as a woman could get. I ma
de an inner vow to start exuding more self-confidence. Or buy myself a pair of riding boots and a slobber-stained shirt.
Emma said, “I’ve got to get up early and run over to Paddy Horgan’s place. Dibs on the first shower. When I get back, we’ll go look for Libby. Meantime, quit worrying. Libby might be a twit, but she’s not stupid.”
On Wednesday morning, I started putting the house back together and listened for the telephone. I willed Libby to call. She could explain everything, I was sure, and tell me what she wanted me to do. Meanwhile, I swept up glass and filled garbage bags with the broken rubble smashed by the vandals.
My collection had been scattered all over the floors. It needed a good thinning, I knew, but it was hard for me to part with books of any kind, even to a good cause like a library sale. Some of my shelves had been broken, so I stacked volumes on the kitchen table and in some of the cardboard cartons left over from my move to the farm.
Libby didn’t call.
I took a break from cleaning to phone Detective Bloom. I figured he might have learned something about Rory’s art collection by now. Surely the police had their hands on an inventory. It was only a matter of time before they discovered the folio was missing. And Jonathan Longnecker would point them straight at Libby.
I planned my questions to pry the most information out of Bloom without arousing his curiosity. But he was away from his desk, and his cell phone didn’t answer.
At noon I brewed tea, and worked up my courage to phone Abruzzo. I found his business card with his various phone numbers. I tried them all, but he didn’t answer.
Of course, I remembered. Abruzzo had made arrangements to meet with Detective Bloom that morning. I hung up. No wonder I couldn’t reach either one of them. They were probably slugging it out at the police station.
Around one, Emma returned with Wawa hoagies, a local delicacy that provided most of Emma’s weekly calorie intake.
“I should go out this afternoon,” I said. “I have an assignment for work. But I hate to leave the phone. What if Libby calls?”
“I’ll stay here,” Emma said, eating her sandwich as she poked through the pile of books on the table. “I can clean up a little. If you want, I’ll haul this trash and broken furniture out in my truck. And I’ll try phoning some of Libby’s PTA pals, too.”
