by Sylvie Kurtz
“The real estate market is so high right now.” Emma’s forehead crimped with deep furrows. “My advisor told me it was a good investment.”
“The bubble’s already bursting. And Stokke isn’t playing by the rules.”
Emma squinted at the numbers. “I can’t believe I was taken in like that.”
“Like you said, he was very convincing, and he knows how to manipulate the numbers to make his pitch sound great. But I dug beneath the surface. There’s nothing there but sleight of hand.” Nick leaned forward, his mouth suddenly dry. “Can I ask you what this Carter Stokke looks like?”
“He’s a charming man. He has an explosive smile, bright and bulging with confidence. When he smiles, his green irises lighten to jade and sparkle.” She blushed like a schoolgirl. “Listen to me. You’d think I was smitten.”
Nick pulled an old photograph from his briefcase and refused to look at it as he passed it to Emma. He never thought about that person anymore. “Is this the man?”
Emma coyly put on reading glasses and examined the picture. “Why, yes. I mean, he looks younger in this picture. His hair is a handsome silver now and his face more mature. But, yes, I’d say that’s the same man. Do you know him?”
“Unfortunately, yes.” The sour bile that had kept Nick small and sickly as a child returned with a vengeance and curdled the contents of his stomach. “He’s my father. And he’s nothing more than a crook.”
Chapter Ten
The air inside Alma Nisbitt’s doll-size house in downtown Moonhill was thick and sullen and reminded Valerie of a funeral parlor before the grievers arrived. Which didn’t help her stomach any. A low-level nausea had roiled around her gut all morning while she’d waited for Rita at the hospital and showed no signs of leaving. She chewed on another Pepto-Bismol tablet and concentrated on Alma.
Tiny squares and triangles of fabric in a wash of stained glass colors littered a small table near the window. A stack of baby quilts in various stages of finishing were piled in a chair in the corner. Alma had worked busily at the sewing table when Valerie, Nick and Mike had arrived, her sewing machine chugging like an electric train as if the faster she sewed, the faster she could put back together the lost pieces of her life.
Alma now sat in a maple rocking chair in her living room, a cup of instant coffee balanced on her knees, her apple face pruned unkindly by time. Her small fingers jittered against the turquoise melamine of her cup and her gaze kept snapping back to her sewing table as if she were on some sort of deadline she hated to miss.
Mike set up his camera and clipped a mic to the yellowed Peter Pan collar of Alma’s dress.
Nick stood just inside Valerie’s peripheral vision, keeping up the wall to Alma’s kitchen entrance with his shoulder, arms crossed over his chest, tension lapping off him in ripples.
Something had gone wrong with his morning meeting. Not that he was going to share his concerns. She had no reason to let it bother her, either, except that she’d become attuned to his moods in a way she never had with anyone else.
Get over yourself, Valerie. He had his business to run. It had nothing to do with her. And she had a package to put together and three days left to do the job. She couldn’t let his dark vibes drive her crazy. He was never going to trust her. He was never going to trust anybody.
Valerie sat in a straight chair in front of Alma and started with a few questions designed to put her at ease, but Alma would have none of it.
“Cut the small talk,” Alma interrupted, lips pinched. “You want to know about Stanley.”
Though the subject was obviously painful to Alma, Valerie admired her directness. “Yes, I would.”
“Stanley was a good man.” Alma’s gaze went right through Valerie to some unknown place only Alma could see. “He served Rita well. She had no complaints.”
“I’ve heard he was a loyal employee,” Valerie said, seeking to show Alma she was not the enemy.
“He loved her. We all did.” Alma dug a lacy handkerchief from the pocket of her dress and proceeded to worry its edge.
Valerie nudged her. “He was Rita’s landscaper.”
Alma’s face lit up. “Oh, he brought those gardens into glorious beauty!”
“I’ve seen pictures. The grounds were exquisitely kept.”
Alma’s gaze narrowed. “But you’re not here to talk about the magic Stanley made with his plants and flowers. You’re here about that night.”
Valerie nodded. “The night Valentina disappeared.”
“He didn’t do what he said he did. He didn’t kidnap that child. He knew what it was like to have your child taken away.” Tears glossed Alma’s faded blue eyes. “We suffered through three stillbirths before the doctor said we shouldn’t try anymore. Three times we buried our babies. Three times we had our hearts broken.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that.”
The lace of Alma’s handkerchief frayed under her busy fingers. “My Stanley, he was a good man, and he loved Rita. He hated to see her suffer the way she was. Ten years ago, he was dying. Cancer. Melanoma. From all his days out in the sun. But Stanley wasn’t one to listen to anybody. He did things his way. He figured if he confessed to kidnapping Valentina, and if he said she died before he could give her back, then Rita could go on with her life. I could’ve told him it wouldn’t be enough.”
“The body?” Valerie asked. “Where did Stanley say he buried it?”
A slow run of tears slid down Alma’s cheeks. “I’ve watched those crime shows. I know that there’s not much hope of finding kids alive if they’ve been missing for more than a couple of days. It’d been years. She had to be dead. But they never found a body. Stanley said he sent it down the river on a raft, but he just wanted to help Rita. She was always so good to him. To us. Even after the drinking got bad.”
“Stanley had a drinking problem,” Valerie said, keeping all accusation out of her voice. The police investigation into Stanley’s confession had proven Alma’s claim of Stanley’s innocence to be true. But that wouldn’t have stopped Nick. How many times had he had the river dragged for evidence of that raft, of a body—just in case?
Alma took in a deep breath. “He wanted a son of his own so badly. After our third baby—a boy—when the doctor said we shouldn’t try again or I could die, Stanley went a little crazy.”
Crazy enough to kidnap Valentina? He couldn’t possibly think he could just give her to his wife and get away with it? Had he wanted the ransom to buy a baby of his own? Had something happened to Valentina before he could return her unharmed? “A little crazy how?”
“He was drunk that night. Like he’d been for almost a month. I got mad at him for drowning his sorrows. I had sorrows, too, you know. He wasn’t the only one who was crushed by the news. Here’s the man I loved more than anything in the world, and I couldn’t give him the one thing he wanted.” Alma slapped the torn handkerchief at her tears. “Anyway, I needed someone to feel sorry for me, so I went to my sister’s in Concord and left him to get himself plastered. I knew I’d be fine in a couple of days. I’d come back. We’d patch things up.”
“So you weren’t home the night Valentina was kidnapped?” Valerie asked.
Alma gulped. “No, but Stanley told me about it. About how he’d seen someone creeping into the woods with a sack on his back. He tried to run after him, but he tripped and knocked himself out coming out of the gardening shed.”
Behind Valerie, Nick’s breathing sped up. Was Alma’s tale reviving his memory? “Did Stanley say anything else about the man?”
Alma shook her head. “No, just that he was big and dressed all in black. My Stanley, he never drank a single drop after that night. He paid for his mistake. He was a good man.”
“He tried to help Valentina,” Valerie agreed, as much for Nick as for Alma.
Alma nodded. “He said he was lying there on the ground and he could hear her bawling, but he couldn’t get up. Valentina’s cries haunted him until the day he died.”
�
�Valentina was crying?” Nick asked. The shards of tension splintering from him prickled through Valerie’s body like sharpened needles.
Alma twirled the cup in its saucer. “He said he thought she was calling out for help.”
Valerie turned in her chair and a cold, tight ball formed inside her chest at the sight of Nick. His stricken gaze met hers in an instant and familiar connection, and the movie from the tower room rolled by much too vividly in her mind, including the end she hadn’t seen before because he’d scared her so badly. Why did Valentina insist on haunting her this way?
The little boy’s eyes black with panic. His mouth open wide, a scream frozen in his throat. His limbs shaking under the blanket, his arms reaching out helplessly to Valentina.
If Valentina was crying outside in the night, then that meant she was alive after she left the house, not dead as Nick had believed for all those years.
He would pack on another layer of blame he didn’t deserve. She wanted to go to him, to hold him, to tell him he couldn’t have altered the course of events that night. Maybe that’s what Valentina wanted her to do—let Nick know he wasn’t responsible. But he wouldn’t thank her for making his weakness public, and she had a job to finish. They would talk later.
Sending him one last understanding glance, she turned back to Alma.
If Valentina had been alive, that changed everything.
AS NICK DROVE AWAY from Alma Nisbitt’s house, frustration hummed across his skin like the electric current therapy he’d had for tendonitis in his shoulder a few years back.
None of the reports he’d paid a small fortune for had spelled out that Stanley Nisbitt had heard Valentina cry out for help. But Valerie’s questions had freed the secret Alma had kept for her husband all these years.
Add that revelation to the one he’d made this morning, and Nick didn’t like the picture the pieces were forming.
Gordon Archer, aka Carter Stokke this time around, was back and his real estate scheme was a smoke screen. He was after revenge—just as he’d promised Holly twenty-six years ago when Nick’s mother had left him. He’d vowed to destroy her and everyone who’d helped her, including Rita.
Was he the one who’d taken Valentina? What better way to ruin Rita’s life? A child for a child. That would make twisted sense to someone like Gordon.
In Gordon’s skewed sense of values, people willingly gifted him what he’d “earned.” But that was many years and many prison terms ago. Would he resort to violence now?
Valentina was alive after she’d left the tower room. Had Gordon sold her to hurt Rita? What was his plan now? Did he want something more than to separate Rita from her cash in a bad investment?
If Valentina was alive, then Nick had tried to bury the wrong ghost for all these years.
He peeled onto Main Street past Memorial Square. “Where to?”
“I need coffee,” Valerie moaned. One hand clamped on her stomach, she wound down the window and breathed in the cool afternoon air.
She didn’t look well. “You’ve had too much coffee already. No wonder your stomach hurts.” He handed her the bottle of water he always kept handy. “Here. You need hydration.”
He ground his teeth and focused on the road. Valentina’s bloody face kept reappearing against the black canvas.
He could have saved her. She’d been alive.
Cripes, she’d cried for help, and he’d been stone and ice watching her disappear.
“I could use a bite to eat,” Mike grumbled from the back.
Nick shook his head, tearing apart the dark mirror of memory. “I don’t know how you people get any work done.”
The memory seeped in again. Everything he’d believed in all these years was suddenly turned around. All that blood. Those dead eyes. The limp body.
She’d cried. He hadn’t heard her. She’d been afraid. He’d done nothing to help her. She’d called out to him, and he’d lain frozen in place under her pink blanket in the tower room. The thought of her horror as she’d been dragged farther and farther from her home squirmed like bait through his gut.
He could’ve saved her. If he’d only—
Valerie squeezed his knee. “You’re going to drive yourself crazy with all the ‘what-ifs.’”
The golden dusk gathering at the window swam in her hair and he wanted to plunge his hands into that inviting silk, forget all the horrors darkening his mind. Back at Alma’s house, she’d seemed to understand him on a gut level, and she was doing it again, reading him like a profit-and-loss statement. This growing connection between them was a problem. Separating his feelings from his duty was becoming harder. She looked too much like Valentina would. She was the wrong person to turn to.
Was that why Valerie was here? Was Valentina’s ghost speaking through her to lead him to the truth?
He’d been around the professor too much to come around to that conclusion. Not that much made any sense at this point.
There was nothing he could do with the information Alma Nisbitt had given him until he got in touch with Joe later tonight and gave him this new direction for a search.
Nick goosed the gas pedal and the engine growled into life along the deserted stretch of 202. “What’s the address we’re looking for?”
With a crook of her eyebrow Valerie gave him Brent Weir’s address. Nick steered the car toward Peterborough, concentrating on the road, on the changing colors of the leaves, on the gushing waters along the Contoocook River—on anything but the sympathy on Valerie’s face.
“Brent Weir was nineteen when Rita hired him to replace a retiring chauffeur.” Valerie scraped a thumbnail along the edge of the closed file folder on her lap.
She glanced at him sideways as if measuring his mental health. What did she think he was going to do? Commit hara-kiri to atone for his sins? A quick and easy death wasn’t an option for him. Never had been. He’d given his all to protect Rita and his mother and had hoped that, one day, he’d bring Valentina’s body home where she belonged and give them both a form of closure. He’d assumed he’d seen her die. All the information he’d gathered had agreed with that conclusion.
But what if she’d lived?
“Brent had been on the job for only six months and pulled a disappearing act the night Valentina was kidnapped,” Valerie continued. “That put him at the top of the suspect list for a while.”
A vague image of the chauffeur formed on the edge of Nick’s memory. As polished as the Bentley he drove for Rita, young Brent had looked sharp in his crisp uniform and shiny car. He could talk about engines and horsepower and performance with Nick’s father. But he’d also hated Valentina’s constant reel of questions, and so Nick had hated him in return—especially after Brent had turned the hose on Valentina one spring day, then laughed as if it was all a big joke.
“Come on, kid. Can’t you take a joke?”
A sopping wet and hiccuping Valentina stood in the middle of the garage crescent where Brent was washing the cars until Nick tugged on her hand. “Hey, wanna see something cool?”
She sniffed. “What?”
“It’s a secret.” He bent close to her ear so Brent wouldn’t hear. “You have to promise to be quiet or you’ll scare them away.”
That pricked her attention. Her body softened and her hand slid companionably into his. “What is it, Nick? What is it?”
“You’ll see.”
He led her toward the pond and the little cove he’d discovered last week. As he got close to the special spot, he put a finger against his lips. “Shh.”
He got down on his belly on the tall grass and urged Valentina to do the same. She giggled as they crabbed toward the reeds and the duck’s nest he’d meant to keep to himself. Five fat eggs rested under the Mama duck and, as they watched, one of the shells started to crack.
“Oh, Nick, look!” And with wonder in her big, blue eyes, she’d watched the duckling peck its way into the world and forgotten all about Brent and his cruel joke.
“The police found o
ut Brent had learned that day that his fifteen-year-old girlfriend was pregnant,” Valerie said. “The girl’s father threatened to have Brent arrested for statutory rape if he didn’t marry her.”
“Sounds like a real peach,” Mike said. “He’s not going to want to talk?”
“He ended up marrying the girl and they divorced a year later.” Valerie turned in her seat to look at Mike. “You never know. He might.”
“I’ll bet you ten bucks that bringing up a marriage that started with the business end of a shotgun is going to get you a door slammed in your face.”
“We have to try.”
Brent lived on the bottom floor of a pale blue triple-decker that had rental stamped all over it. The bare necessities were there, but no extras that made a house a home. Yellowed grass in need of a cut ran from curb to foundation. They walked up a cracked concrete walkway to a plain white front door, grayed by dirt from the street.
The forty-three-year-old version of Brent Weir was like a poster used by high school health teachers to warn students against drug use. Whatever good looks he’d had twenty-five years ago were long gone. A soft belly hung over his belt. Cuts and bruises marked the backs of his hands. He hadn’t changed from his day job and his stained jeans and sweatshirt smelled like a dirty kennel and sour resentment.
He spotted Mike’s camera as soon as he opened the door and his expression darkened. “What do you want?”
“I’m Valerie Zea from WMOD-TV in Orlando. I’d like to talk to you about the night of Valentina—” Valerie started.
Brent’s meaty hand turned white against the door frame and his face quaked with rage. “Leave me alone, bitch. I don’t need no finger pointed at me for something I didn’t even do. I didn’t kidnap neither of them kids.”
“There was more than one?” Valerie asked.
Brent spit a wad of tobacco juice at her feet. “As if you didn’t know. She sent you, didn’t she?”
“Who?”
“That bitch Hillary, that’s who.” Brent leaned forward into Valerie’s face. Nick stepped up to stand next to Valerie. If Brent so much as breathed too hard on her, he’d end up on his can. “Hil thinks she can use the anniversary to make me crack. It ain’t gonna work. You can go to hell. All of you.”
