Mimosa Grove

by Sharon Sala

  Robert didn’t know whether to argue or be glad that the break had finally been made.

  “Fine. A trip to Europe will probably do you some good.”

  “Oh, yes,” Laurel said. “I forgot to mention the other part of Albert’s news. I’m not going to Europe. I’m going to Louisiana. I’m going home. Grandmother Campion left everything to me, including Mimosa Grove.”

  Robert felt as if someone had just yanked the ground out from under him.

  “What the hell are you saying?”

  “I’m moving. Tomorrow. To the family estate in Bayou Jean, Louisiana, that’s what I’m saying. Maybe my absence will give your life some peace. God only knows what it will do to mine, but anything will be better than this.”

  Having flung down her personal gauntlet, Laurel strode out of the room.

  For once in his life, Robert Scanlon was speechless.

  ***

  Laurel exited the New Orleans airport terminal with the keys to her rental car clutched in one hand and dragging her piggybacked suitcases with the other. The heat and humidity of Louisiana sucked the air from her lungs and stuck her clothes to her body as she struggled to pull the luggage up over a curb.

  “Help you, missy?”

  Startled by the unexpected voice, Laurel jumped as a young black man came out from behind a concrete pillar and pointed at her bags. His features contorted in a constant shift of jerking muscles as he waited for her to answer. Instinctively, her fingers curled around the suitcase handle and she took a nervous step back.

  “No. No. I’m fine, thank you,” she said quickly.

  Instead of leaving her alone, the young man moved closer. Now she could see his bloodshot eyes and the droplet of spittle at the corner of his mouth. When he pointed at her bags, she could see the muscles in his forearm twitching, too. What in God’s name was wrong with him? Did he mean her harm?

  Suddenly he grabbed her by the wrist, and before she could scream, the air shifted. The man’s face began to dissolve before her eyes, and the flesh on his hand melted away, leaving what appeared to be a skeletal hand with fleshless fingers wrapped around her wrist.

  Laurel gasped, then yanked out of his grasp. Immediately, the vision disappeared.

  “Don’t touch me!” she cried, her voice trembling from shock. “I don’t want you to touch me!”

  His expression crumpled as he started to cry.

  “Sorry, lady. Didn’t mean to scare you. Just tryin’ to help. Mama says to help people in need.”

  Almost immediately, Laurel felt sick. This young man couldn’t be more than twenty-two, maybe twenty-three years old, and now that she could see him clearer, she could tell he was simple. And she knew one other thing about him, too. He was going to die. She didn’t know how, and she didn’t know when, but it was going to happen as surely as she knew her own name. Once she would have tried to tell him what she’d seen in hopes that she could stop the inevitability of fate. But she’d learned the hard way that fate could not be changed and people did not welcome such news.

  So instead of spilling her guts, she took a deep breath and made herself smile.

  “It’s okay. Please don’t cry. You just startled me.”

  He jammed his hands in his pockets as he ducked his head, then looked up at her from beneath his dark, shaggy brows.

  “You not mad at me, lady?”

  Laurel sighed. “No, I’m not mad at you.”

  “Okay, then,” he said, and walked away.

  Laurel gave him one last glance and then started on into the parking garage. A few feet away, she felt the urge to turn. As she did, she saw the strange young man walking toward the terminal in a slow, shuffling motion. His head was down, his shoulders hunched around his neck, as if bracing himself for a deadly blow. Laurel quickly turned away, willing herself not to think of what she’d just “seen” and wondering if there was anybody in his life who would grieve for him when he was gone.

  A few minutes later she found her rental car and wearily stuffed the suitcases in the trunk. With a map of Louisiana unfolded on the seat beside her, she settled a pair of sunglasses on her nose, turned the air conditioner up to high and drove out of airport parking.

  It was just after eleven in the morning as she hit the highway and headed south toward the little town of Bayou Jean, which, according to the map, was located somewhere between Houma and the Atchafalaya Bay on the coast. If nothing happened, she would reach Mimosa Grove by late evening.

  ***

  Robert Scanlon parked his BMW in the garage, pressed the button on his automatic garage door opener and waited for the door to slide shut before he got out. As a federal prosecutor, being careful about everything was part of the job. Once he was satisfied that he was alone inside his own garage, he grabbed his briefcase and got out.

  He entered the house through the utility rooms, at once smelling the inviting scent of beef Stroganoff that Cook was waiting to serve. He started to call up for Laurel to come down, then remembered that she was no longer here. Regret was not a familiar emotion for Robert, but his shoulders slumped as he realized that, unless he was entertaining, he would now be eating all his meals alone.

  “Mr. Scanlon?”

  He looked up. Estelle was standing in the doorway.

  “Yes?”

  “Will you be wanting dinner soon?”

  “Whenever Cook is ready, let me know.”

  “Is thirty minutes all right?”

  “Perfect,” Robert said. “It will give me enough time to enjoy a glass of wine beforehand.”

  Estelle eyed him curiously, then hurried away to deliver the message, once again leaving Robert to himself.

  He tossed his briefcase on the sofa, took off his suit coat and draped it on the back of a chair, reminding himself that this was all for the best. He and Laurel had been spoiling for this break for years, and while it would be damned inconvenient to be without a hostess the next time he entertained, he felt a separation would be in their best interests.

  Still, the wine he poured seemed flat despite the fine vintage, and when he sat down to dinner, the beef Stroganoff was not as satisfying as he’d expected. All in all, Laurel’s absence had left a bigger hole in his world than he would ever have believed.

  When Cook served dessert, he waved it away, took his coffee to the office and opened his briefcase. Earlier this week, a woman had come to the federal prosecutor’s office with allegations that had blown their minds.

  The woman’s name was Cherrie Peloquin, and she was claiming that her boss, Peter McNamara, was involved in illegal activities. Robert had been in on the initial meeting and had been the first to suggest that she should have taken her suspicions to the D.C. police and not the federal prosecutor’s office. At that point, she’d dropped the rest of her bomb when she’d fixed her gaze on Robert.

  “Mr. Scanlon, isn’t it?”

  Robert nodded.

  “I know you’re telling me I’ve come to the wrong place, and if I have, I apologize. But I was under the impression that anything that had to do with the United States military would come under the auspices of the federal government. Was I wrong?”

  Robert frowned. “No, Miss Peloquin, you were not. But please explain yourself.”

  Her hand was shaking as she tucked a wayward lock of hair behind her ear. He could see she was wavering between continuing the conversation and getting up and leaving before anything else was said. At that point, something told him that she was on the up-and-up.

  “It’s all right,” he said, softening his voice just enough to give her the courage to continue.

  “You don’t understand,” she whispered. “I really like Peter. I kept trying to tell myself I had to be wrong about him, but I’m not, and I know it.”

  “Please continue,” Robert said.

  She took a slow breath, as if bolstering her courage with the momentary delay; then it all spilled out.

  “I work for Peter McNamara—”

  “Of McNamara Galleries?
” Robert asked.

  She nodded.

  “Sorry, please continue,” Robert said, hoping that he’d masked his surprise, but everyone who was anyone in D.C. knew of Peter McNamara, and to think he was about to be implicated in any way in something illegal was shocking, even to him.

  “About two months ago, I was getting ready to go out of town for the weekend when I realized that I’d left my plane ticket at the office. I tried to call Peter, hoping he was still at the gallery, and that he could get the ticket and drop it by my apartment, but there was no answer. My flight was very early the next morning, so I felt I had no option but to go back that night or take the chance of missing my plane. I let myself into the gallery and started up the stairs to the offices. I was hurrying, not thinking about anything but what I still had to do when I got back home, when I realized I was hearing Peter’s voice. At first it surprised me, because I’d called and he hadn’t answered, remember?”

  Robert nodded.

  “Anyway, I stopped.” She flushed as she looked away. “I’m not in the habit of eavesdropping, but I didn’t want to walk in on Peter and one of his women friends, you know?”

  “Were there lots of different women?” Robert asked.

  She shrugged. “I guess, but he wasn’t married, and to my knowledge, neither were the women he dated.”

  “So you waited,” Robert echoed, urging her to resume the story.

  “Yes, but I soon realized he was alone… and talking on the phone.” Tears pooled, but she pinched the bridge of her nose to keep from crying as she continued. “He was speaking Russian…. I knew because I’d had a friend in college who was from Odessa. I didn’t understand all the words, but I knew enough to know something was wrong, you know?”

  “Yes,” Robert said. “Continue.”

  “He was angry. And there was a tone in his voice that I’d never heard. He sounded cold, almost frightening. I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I didn’t want to be found outside his door.”

  Robert frowned. “You had to hear more than some Russian words to make you suspect something was going on. Am I right?”

  Tears rolled from her eyes and down her cheeks.

  “I recognized enough of what he was saying to know it wasn’t good.”

  “You might have misunderstood. Remember, you said you don’t speak the language.”

  “No, but I understand enough to get by.”

  “So what did you hear?”

  “I heard him telling someone that the money had to be wired to the account before they got the goods.”

  “Look, Miss Peloquin… he sells art objects. This in itself could be completely innocent.”

  “I know. I’m not a fool,” Cherrie said, swiping angrily at the tears on her cheeks. “But how innocent is it to say that what he had to sell would change the art of war?”

  Robert’s heart skipped a beat. “Okay, I’m listening,” he said.

  Cherrie sighed. “Then he said something to the effect that it was easy to steal from fools. That was when I took off my shoes and ran back down the stairs to make a reappearance, one that Peter would hear. I opened the door again, letting it slam as I came in, and started singing ‘Do You Know the Way to San Jose,’ because that’s where I was going.

  “He heard me coming up the stairs and came out of his office. His phone was still in his hand, but he was smiling.

  “I should have gotten an Oscar for my performance. He told me my serenade was darling but unnecessary. I laughed and told him I’d forgotten my ticket, sailed past him as if I didn’t have a care in the world, retrieved it from my desk, waved it in his face on my way out the door and cried all the way home.”

  Robert nodded. “I’ll need to make some calls, see if anyone in the military is aware of any wrongdoing. Would you be willing to testify if it becomes necessary?”

  She hesitated.

  “We can make sure you’re kept safe.”

  “But can you do it forever?”

  Robert wanted to assure her this was so, but he couldn’t, and she knew he couldn’t.

  “Look, Miss Peloquin, for now, let’s play this by ear. We’ll stay in touch. If we can corroborate your accusations, we’ll go from there.”

  “Can you keep my name out of this?”

  “Right up until the moment you testify,” Robert said.

  “Then that will have to do,” she said.

  Moments later, she was gone, leaving Robert and his staff with what amounted to a smoldering bomb.

  ***

  A year ago, Peter McNamara had been named one of Washington, D.C.’s, most eligible bachelors, and four days ago he’d made the headlines again by being arrested for selling government secrets. Once his name and face had gone international, it hadn’t taken long for the new Russian regime to start denying any knowledge of his crimes.

  The Russian ambassador had been caught between a rock and the proverbial hard place. Older than McNamara by ten years, he was well versed in the games his country had once played with the most powerful government on earth. But that had been then and this was now, and the Cold War was supposedly over. The Berlin Wall was long gone, and a half-assed order of democracy was trying to take root in what was left of the USSR. But having the truth of McNamara’s background emerge would destroy the ambassador’s tenuous credibility.

  Bit by painful bit, that truth finally came out. McNamara wasn’t really Peter’s name. He was actually Dimitri Chorkin, and as a young man, he’d been planted in the U.S. by the old Russian KGB. It was still up in the air as to whether or not he’d been spying for his government all these years, but the accusations were strong enough for an indictment. Added to that, he had been making big bucks for the past eleven or so years by selling military secrets to enemies of the United States, which really put the ambassador on edge. He’d had two meetings with the President and was scheduled for a quick flight home to Moscow tomorrow to update his superiors there. He didn’t have any kind of news they were going to like and daily wished Chorkin to hell on a fast-burning boat.

  During this time, Robert Scanlon had been officially named lead prosecutor, becoming part of the process that would bring an end to Peter’s charade. But by refusing to admit he was regretting his daughter’s absence, Robert was stuck with nothing but work to keep him occupied. Having gotten himself in this situation with his temper, he now decided to get a head start on things by reviewing the files on the impending case. There was no need worrying about a daughter who didn’t wish to comply with society’s standards.

  ***

  Despite his public persona, Peter McNamara had always been something of an enigma. He owned a popular, upscale art gallery, which put him high on the party-circuit guest list. He enjoyed the popularity as well as the notoriety that went with being in the public eye. With district attorneys, senators, even foreign ambassadors, as friends and clients, McNamara had lived secure in the knowledge that his circle of friends represented the crème de la crème of Washington, D.C. But the truth of his existence wasn’t that simple. He was a rich, single, remarkably handsome and fit fifty-four-year-old heterosexual male who was living a lie.

  Dimitri Chorkin was born in a small village outside of Minsk in the old Soviet Republic of Russia, and it had soon become evident to those around him that his intelligence was far beyond that of his humble parents’. At that point he’d been removed from his home by government officials and taken into a state-run institution for education. By the time he was eleven, he’d acquired the equivalent of two Ph.D.s, one in mathematics, the other in the sciences. At that point, another branch of the government had taken over his education, and by the age of eighteen, he knew everything there was to know about subversive activities. With forged papers and a new identity, he appeared on the campus of Harvard University in the fall of 1968 as a freshman named Peter McNamara and began to assimilate himself into American society, fully expecting to be called upon at any time to do what he’d been trained to do.

  But the years pass
ed without further communication from the government that had created him. During that time, the lines between reality and fiction began to blur. Dimitri liked the freedom of the United States as well as the opportunities. By the time he was thirty, he rarely thought of Dimitri Chorkin, and when he did, it was only in the past tense.

  He lived as others around him lived, making friends, celebrating holidays and Christmases with his woman of the moment, but never letting anyone see past the obvious. Then he moved to Washington, D.C., opened an art gallery with money he’d made on a dot-com company before it went bust, and after getting drunk at a party with a general’s son and some hooker he’d been trying to impress, he became what he’d been trained to be.

  Selling military secrets had been an easy and productive addition to his financial portfolio, and it had lasted eleven good years. When they’d arrested him, he’d been stunned. Even after he’d hired a lawyer and been told there was the possibility of a witness in the offing, as well as a traceable connection to the military, he’d scoffed. He was too brilliant to make mistakes like that and felt confident that there was nothing solid linking him to anything illegal, only the revelation of his true identity.

  Except, of course, that general’s son.

  2

  It was nearing seven in the evening when Laurel drove into Bayou Jean. The heat waves coming up from the concrete hung like a curtain of steam between her car and the town’s only stoplight as she waited for it to turn green. An old hound lay immobile on the street comer, immune to everything, including the flies buzzing around his ears. A small child on the opposite comer of the street was so curious about Laurel’s presence that what was left of the Popsicle she’d been licking melted and ran between her fingers as she stared.

  The light turned green. Laurel grinned and wiggled her fingers at the little girl. Startled, the child ducked her head and turned to run back into the nearby grocery store. As she did, she caught the toe of her sandal on a crack in the sidewalk and fell face first onto the concrete.