The Sign of Seven Trilogy

by Nora Roberts

  “Actually, he’s with a client, but they shouldn’t be much longer if you’d like to…”

  A woman in tight jeans, a snug pink sweater, and an explosion of hair in an improbable shade of red marched out on heeled boots. She dragged on a short leather jacket. “I want him skinned, Fox, you hear? I gave that son of a bitch the best two years and three months of my life, and I want him skinned like a rabbit.”

  “So noted, Shelley.”

  “How could he do that to me?” On a wail she collapsed into Fox’s arms.

  He wore jeans as well, and an untucked pinstriped shirt, along with an expression of resignation as he glanced over at Layla. “There, there,” he said, patting the sobbing Shelley’s back. “There, there.”

  “I just bought him new tires for his truck! I’m going to go slash every one of them.”

  “Don’t.” Fox took a good hold of her before Shelley, tears streaming away in fresh rage, started to yank back. “I don’t want you to do that. You don’t go near his truck, and for now, honey, try to stay away from him, too. And Sami.”

  “That turncoat slut of a bitch.”

  “That’s the one. Leave this to me for now, okay? You go on back to work and let me handle this. That’s why you hired me, right?”

  “I guess. But you skin him raw, Fox. You crack that bastard’s nuts like pecans.”

  “I’m going to get right on that,” he assured her as he led her to the door. “You just stay above it all, that’s the way. I’ll be in touch.”

  After he’d closed the door, leaned back on it, he heaved out a breath. “Holy Mother of God.”

  “You should’ve referred that one,” Alice told him.

  “You can’t refer off the first girl you got to second base with when she’s filing for divorce. It’s against the laws of God and Man. Hello, Layla, need a lawyer?”

  “I hope not.” He was better looking than she remembered, which just went to show the shape she’d been in the night before. Plus he didn’t look anything like a lawyer. “No offense.”

  “None taken. Layla…It’s Darnell, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Layla Darnell, Alice Hawbaker. Mrs. H, I’m clear for a while?”

  “You are.”

  “Come on back, Layla.” He gestured. “We don’t usually put a show on this early in the day, but my old pal Shelley walked into the back room over at the diner to visit her twin sister, Sami, and found her husband—that would be Shelley’s husband, Block—holding Sami’s tip money.”

  “I’m sorry, she’s filing for divorce because her husband was holding her sister’s tip money?”

  “It was in Sami’s Victoria’s Secret Miracle Bra at the time.”

  “Oh. Well.”

  “That’s not privileged information as Shelley chased them both out of the back room and straight out onto Main Street—with Sami’s miraculous bra in full view—with a rag mop. Want a Coke?”

  “No, I really don’t. I don’t think I need anything to give me an edge.”

  Since she looked inclined to pace, he didn’t offer her a chair. Instead, he leaned back against his desk. “Rough night?”

  “No, the opposite. I just can’t figure out what I’m doing here. I don’t understand any of this, and I certainly don’t understand my place in it. A couple hours ago I told myself I was going to pack and drive back to New York like a sane person. But I didn’t.” She turned to him. “I couldn’t. And I don’t understand that either.”

  “You’re where you’re supposed to be. That’s the simplest answer.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “A lot of the time.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been really afraid. I wonder if I’d be so damned edgy if I had something to do. An assignment, a task.”

  “Listen, I’ve got to drive to a client a few miles out of town, take her some papers.”

  “Oh, sorry. I’m in the way.”

  “No, and when I start thinking beautiful women are in my way, please notify my next of kin so they can gather to say their final good-byes before my death. I was going to suggest you ride out with me, which is something to do. And you can have chamomile tea and stale lemon snaps with Mrs. Oldinger, which is a task. She likes company, which is the real reason she had me draw up the fifteenth codicil to her will.”

  He kept talking, knowing that was one way to help calm someone down when she looked ready to bolt. “By the time that’s done, I can swing by another client who’s not far out of the way and save him a trip into town. By my way of thinking, Cal and Quinn should be just about back home by the time we’re done with all that. We’ll go by, see what’s what.”

  “Can you be out of the office all that time?”

  “Believe me.” He grabbed his coat, his briefcase. “Mrs. H will holler me back if I’m needed here. But unless you’ve got something better to do, I’ll have her pull out the files I need and we’ll take a drive.”

  It was better than brooding, Layla decided. Maybe she thought it was odd for a lawyer, even a small-town lawyer to drive an old Dodge pickup with a couple of Ring Ding wrappers littering the floorboards.

  “What are you doing for the second client?”

  “That’s Charlie Deen. Charlie got clipped by a DUI when he was driving home from work. Insurance company’s trying to dance around some of the medical bills. Not going to happen.”

  “Divorce, wills, personal injury. So you don’t specialize?”

  “All law, all the time,” he said and sent her a smile that was a combination of sweet and cocky. “Well, except for tax law if I can avoid it. I leave that to my sister. She’s tax and business law.”

  “But you don’t have a practice together.”

  “That’d be tough. Sage went to Seattle to be a lesbian.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Sorry.” He boosted the gas as they passed the town limits. “Family joke. What I mean is my sister Sage is gay, and she lives in Seattle. She’s an activist, and she and her partner of, hmm, I guess about eight years now run a firm they call Girl on Girl. Seriously,” he added when Layla said nothing. “They specialize in tax and business law for gays.”

  “Your family doesn’t approve?”

  “Are you kidding? My parents eat it up like tofu. When Sage and Paula—that’s her partner—got married. Or had their life-partner affirmation, whatever—we all went out there and celebrated like mental patients. She’s happy and that’s what counts. The alternate lifestyle choice is just kind of a bonus for my parents. Speaking of family, that’s my little brother’s place.”

  Layla saw a log house all but buried in the trees, with a sign near the curve of the road reading HAWKINS CREEK POTTERY.

  “Your brother’s a potter.”

  “Yeah, a good one. So’s my mother when she’s in the mood. Want to stop in?”

  “Oh, I…”

  “Better not,” he decided. “Ridge’ll get going and Mrs. H has called Mrs. Oldinger by now to tell her to expect us. Another time.”

  “Okay.” Conversation, she thought. Small talk. Relative sanity. “So you have a brother and sister.”

  “Two sisters. My baby sister owns the little vegetarian restaurant in town. It’s pretty good, considering. Of the four of us I veered the farthest off the flower-strewn path my counterculture parents forged. But they love me anyway. That’s about it for me. How about you?”

  “Well…I don’t have any relatives nearly as interesting as yours sound, but I’m pretty sure my mother has some old Joan Baez albums.”

  “There, that strange and fateful crossroads again.”

  She started to laugh, then gasped with pleasure as she spotted the deer. “Look! Oh, look. Aren’t they gorgeous, just grazing there along the edge of the trees?”

  To accommodate her, Fox pulled over to the narrow shoulder so she could watch. “You’re used to seeing deer, I suppose,” she said.

  “Doesn’t mean I don’t get a kick out of it. We had to run herds off the farm
when I was a kid.”

  “You grew up on a farm.”

  There was that urban-dweller wistfulness in her voice. The kind that said she saw the pretty deer, the bunnies, the sunflowers, and happy chickens. And not the plowing, the hoeing, weeding, harvesting. “Small, family farm. We grew our own vegetables, kept chickens and goats, bees. Sold some of the surplus, some of my mother’s crafts, my father’s woodwork.”

  “Do they still have it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “My parents owned a little dress shop when I was a kid. They sold out about fifteen years ago. I always wished—Oh God, oh my God!”

  Her hand whipped over to clamp on his arm.

  The wolf leaped out of the trees, onto the back of a young deer. It bucked, it screamed—she could hear its high-pitched screams of fear and pain—it bled while the others in the small herd continued to crop at grass.

  “It’s not real.”

  His voice sounded tinny and distant. In front of her horrified eyes the wolf took the deer down, then began to tear and rip.

  “It’s not real,” he repeated. He put his hands on her shoulders, and she felt something click. Something inside her pushed toward him and away from the horror at the edge of the trees. “Look at it, straight on,” he told her. “Look at it and know it’s not real.”

  The blood was so red, so wet. It flew in ugly rain, smearing the winter grass of the narrow field. “It’s not real.”

  “Don’t just say it. Know it. It lies, Layla. It lives in lies. It’s not real.”

  She breathed in, breathed out. “It’s not real. It’s a lie. It’s an ugly lie. A small, cruel lie. It’s not real.”

  The field was empty; the winter grass ragged and unstained.

  “How do you live with this?” Shoving around in her seat, Layla stared at him. “How do you stand this?”

  “By knowing—the way I knew that was a lie—that some day, some way, we’re going to kick its ass.”

  Her throat burned dry. “You did something to me. When you took my shoulders, when you were talking to me, you did something to me.”

  “No.” He denied it without a qualm. He’d done something for her, Fox told himself. “I just helped you remember it wasn’t real. We’re going on to Mrs. Oldinger. I bet you could use that chamomile tea about now.”

  “Does she have any whiskey to go with it?”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me.”

  QUINN COULD SEE CAL’S HOUSE THROUGH THE trees when her phone signaled a waiting text-message. “Crap, why didn’t she just call me?”

  “Might’ve tried. There are lots of pockets in the woods where calls drop out.”

  “Color me virtually unsurprised.” She brought up the message, smiling a little as she recognized Cybil’s shorthand.

  Bzy, but intrig’d. Tell u more when. Cn B there in a wk, 2 latest. Tlk whn cn. Q? B-ware. Serious. C.

  “All right.” Quinn replaced the phone and made the decision she’d been weighing during the hike back. “I guess we’ll call Fox and Layla when I’m having that really big drink by the fire you’re going to build.”

  “I can live with that.”

  “Then, seeing as you’re a town honcho, you’d be the one to ask about finding a nice, attractive, convenient, and somewhat roomy house to rent for the next, oh, six months.”

  “And the tenant would be?”

  “Tenants. They would be me, my delightful friend Cybil, whom I will talk into digging in, and most likely Layla, whom—I believe—will take a bit more convincing. But I’m very persuasive.”

  “What happened to staying a week for initial research, then coming back in April for a follow-up?”

  “Plans change,” she said airily, and smiled at him as they stepped onto the gravel of his driveway. “Don’t you just love when that happens?”

  “Not really.” But he walked with her onto the deck and opened the door so she could breeze into his quiet home ahead of him.

  Ten

  THE HOUSE WHERE CAL HAD GROWN UP WAS, IN his opinion, in a constant state of evolution. Every few years his mother would decide the walls needed “freshening,” which meant painting—or often in his mother’s vocabulary a new “paint treatment.”

  There was ragging, there was sponging, there was combing, and a variety of other terms he did his best to tune out.

  Naturally, new paint led to new upholstery or window treatments, certainly to new bed linens when she worked her way to bedrooms. Which invariably led to new “arrangements.”

  He couldn’t count the number of times he’d hauled furniture around to match the grafts his mother routinely generated.

  His father liked to say that as soon as Frannie had the house the way she wanted, it was time for her to shake it all up again.

  At one time, Cal had assumed his mother had fiddled, fooled, painted, sewed, arranged, and re-arranged out of boredom. Although she volunteered, served on various committees, or stuck her oar in countless organizations, she’d never worked outside the home. He’d gone through a period in his late teens and early twenties where he’d imagined her (pitied her) as an unfulfilled, semidesperate housewife.

  At one point he, in his worldliness of two college semesters, got her alone and explained his understanding of her sense of repression. She’d laughed so hard she’d had to set down her upholstery tacks and wipe her eyes.

  “Honey,” she’d said, “there’s not a single bone of repression in my entire body. I love color and texture and patterns and flavors. And oh, just all sorts of things. I get to use this house as my studio, my science project, my laboratory, and my showroom. I get to be the director, the designer, the set builder, and the star of the whole show. Now, why would I want to go out and get a job or a career—since we don’t need the money—and have somebody else tell me what to do and when to do it?”

  She’d crooked her finger so he leaned down to her. And she’d laid a hand on his cheek. “You’re such a sweetheart, Caleb. You’re going to find out that not everybody wants what society—in whatever its current mood or mode might be—tells them they should want. I consider myself lucky, even privileged, that I was able to make the choice to stay home and raise my children. And I’m lucky to be able to be married to a man who doesn’t mind if I use my talents—and I’m damned talented—to disrupt his quiet home with paint samples and fabric swatches every time he turns around. I’m happy. And I love knowing you worried I might not be.”

  He’d come to see she was exactly right. She did just as she liked, and was terrific at what she did. And, he’d come to see that when it came down to the core, she was the power in the house. His father brought in the money, but his mother handled the finances. His father ran his business, his mother ran the home.

  And that was exactly the way they liked it.

  So he didn’t bother telling her not to fuss over Sunday dinner—just as he hadn’t attempted to talk her out of extending the invitation to Quinn, Layla, and Fox. She lived to fuss, and enjoyed putting on elaborate meals for people, even if she didn’t know them.

  Since Fox volunteered to swing into town and pick up the women, Cal went directly to his parents’ house, and went early. It seemed wise to give them some sort of groundwork—and hopefully a few basic tips on how to deal with a woman who intended to write a book on the Hollow, since the town included people, and those people included his family.

  Frannie stood at the stove, checking the temperature of her pork tenderloin. Obviously satisfied with that, she crossed to the counter to continue the layers of her famous antipasto squares.

  “So, Mom,” Cal began as he opened the refrigerator.

  “I’m serving wine with dinner, so don’t go hunting up any beer.”

  Chastised, he shut the refrigerator door. “Okay. I just wanted to mention that you shouldn’t forget that Quinn’s writing a book.”

  “Have you noticed me forgetting things?”

  “No.” The woman forgot nothing, which could be a little daunting. “What I mean is,
we should all be aware that things we say and do may end up in a book.”

  “Hmm.” Frannie layered pepperoni over provolone. “Do you expect me or your father to say or do something embarrassing over appetizers? Or maybe we’ll wait until dessert. Which is apple pie, by the way.”

  “No, I—You made apple pie?”

  She spared him a glance, and a knowing smile. “It’s your favorite, isn’t it, my baby?”

  “Yeah, but maybe you’ve lost your knack. I should sample a piece before company gets here. Save you any embarrassment if it’s lousy pie.”

  “That didn’t work when you were twelve.”

  “I know, but you always pounded the whole if-you don’t-succeed chestnut into my head.”

  “You just keep trying, sweetie. Now, why are you worried about this girl, who I’m told you’ve been seen out and about with a few times, coming around for dinner?”

  “It’s not like that.” He wasn’t sure what it was like. “It’s about why she’s here at all. We can’t forget that, that’s all I’m saying.”

  “I never forget. How could I? We have to live our lives, peel potatoes, get the mail, sneeze, buy new shoes, in spite of it all, maybe because of it all.” There was a hint of fierceness in her voice he recognized as sorrow. “And that living includes being able to have a nice company meal on a Sunday.”

  “I wish it were different.”

  “I know you do, but it’s not.” She kept layering, but her eyes lifted to his. “And, Cal, my handsome boy, you can’t do more than you do. If anything, there are times I wish you could do less. But…Tell me, do you like this girl? Quinn Black?”

  “Sure.” Like to get a taste of that top-heavy mouth again, he mused. Then broke off that train of thought quickly since he knew his mother’s skill at reading her children’s minds.

  “Then I intend to give her and the others a comfortable evening and an excellent meal. And, Cal, if you didn’t want her here, didn’t want her to speak with me or your dad, you wouldn’t let her in the door. I wouldn’t be able, though my powers are fierce, to shove you aside and open it myself.”

  He looked at her. Sometimes when he did, it surprised him that this pretty woman with her short, streaked blond hair, her slim build and creative mind could have given birth to him, could have raised him to be a man. He could look and think she was delicate, and then remember she was almost terrifyingly strong.