Diamonds and Deceptions

by Marie Ferrarella

  Setting the first stack of books down, she went back to pick up more. They’d been left on the seats of the forty or so folding chairs she and her father had put out earlier. She was going to have to clear those away, too, she thought. Otherwise the customers who came in to morrow would find themselves sashaying in between rows of metal chairs as they tried to find books.

  Maybe she should talk to her father about hiring part-time help. There’d be no need if he took an active interest in the shop again, but that didn’t look as if it was in the cards. At least, not anytime soon.

  She had to find a way to make him come around again, she told herself as she deposited a second pile next to the first on the side of the table.

  They’d had a poetry reading at the bookstore tonight. It was a biweekly tradition her father had instituted years ago. Sometimes more frequently if a famous writer was passing through and they managed to prevail upon him or her for a reading. Then advertising would go into high gear and she’d cover the local stores around their shop, as well as all the ones where they lived in Mill Valley with flyers announcing the event. They always had a healthy turnout.

  Readings brought in the diehard fans of whoever they chose for the reading, not to mention the curious and those who were seeking something novel to do. Brooke smiled to herself. No pun intended.

  Books had always been her life—books and daydreams. And her father, she silently added on. Her father had been her first hero, her first knight in shining armor. It killed her to see him like this.

  The moment she’d become aware of his waning interest, she’d tried to get him involved in the store again, in making the decisions. But even the simplest of questions, such as who they should have for their next reading, had gotten nothing but the vaguest of responses from him, coupled with an empty stare, as if he was looking right through her.

  He’d shrugged his thin shoulders when she’d asked and said, “Whoever you want, honey,” before turning back to the window.

  Since he’d returned from the funeral, he’d spent endless hours just staring through the window, completely lost in thought. Certainly lost to her.

  Who was that woman? she wondered. What had she meant to him?

  He hadn’t wanted her to go to the funeral with him, almost hadn’t allowed her to know that he was going himself. But she’d wheedled the information out of him, saying she needed to know where to reach him in case there was something about the shop she needed to ask. He’d told her that she was capable of running the store completely without him.

  His willingness to relinquish all claim had been her first sign that something was wrong. The shop had always been as much his child as she was.

  Just thinking about it now aroused the fear she’d been struggling to bank down. Because her mother had died of leukemia shortly after she was born, Derek Moss was the only parent she had, the only one she’d ever known. And maybe it was childish and selfish of her, but she wasn’t ready to let him go. She needed him and loved him and wanted him to be happy.

  Happiness was everyone’s birthright. Brooke sincerely believed that and she meant to make a believer out of her father.

  God knew he’d had little to be happy about over these years. The man had done nothing but work and devote himself to her over the past twenty-three years, and now he was drawing away from even that.

  Brooke thought back to the funeral. The changes had gone into high gear then. Had the woman been someone he’d once known, before her mother? Someone he’d once loved? Was that why he seemed so deeply affected, like a man who saw the best that life had to offer behind him instead of in front of him?

  She’d be the first to admit that her father had no social life. To her recollection, he had never dated, never even seen women in any other capacity than as a bookstore owner.

  What he needed, she decided firmly, was a life. And somehow, it was up to her to give him one.

  Somehow.

  Maybe that nice Mrs. Sammet, she thought suddenly. The woman came to most of the readings, and she knew that her father was just as much an attraction for the widow as anyone they invited into the store to give a reading.

  Maybe she should extend an invitation to Mrs. Sammet to come to dinner….

  Brooke set the last pile of books down on the desk, her eyes suddenly drawn to the corner of an envelope that was hiding beneath the blotter. Pulling it out, she saw that it was addressed to her father. There were several forwarding addresses stamped on it.

  It was also opened. Had he put it here intentionally, or had it just slipped his mind? Lately he’d allowed things to slip away from him. He’d forgotten to pay the rent on the shop, and there was that shipment of books whose billing had somehow gotten mixed up in the recycled newspapers….

  She frowned, taking the letter out of the envelope. She’d made the transition into her father’s keeper without knowing it.

  Temporary, she promised herself, it was only temporary.

  As Brooke read, her frown deepened. The letter was from a Tyler Carlton. She gathered by reading it that the man didn’t know her father, but was asking him to come forward about something. Some sort of secret that would bring Walter Parks to his knees.

  She was familiar with the name. Walter Parks was a gem czar. It was his diamonds that graced the hands of half the engaged women in the country. Who was this Tyler and what did he want with her father, anyway? Was this the reason her father had become so reticent, so removed?

  She flipped the envelope, looking at the address again. That was when she realized that the letter had come here by mistake. It was addressed to a Derek Ross, not Moss. This Tyler Carlton had to have confused her father with someone else whose name was almost the same.

  Still, maybe reading this letter had upset her father for some reason, triggered something in his mind.

  She had no answers, but she knew that if she left this lying around, her father would see it again and maybe it would send him deeper into his depression. She folded it and slipped it into her pocket. Maybe hiding it wouldn’t accomplish anything, but there was that old saying—out of sight, out of mind, and right now she was desperate to try anything to jar her father out of his mental malaise. At least it was worth a try.

  Brooke stopped, listening. Was there someone still in the store?

  There it was again, a noise at the far end of the store, she was sure of it. She heard it above the wheezing air-conditioning system they had. It needed to be fixed. Something else to look into, she told herself, tacking the task onto the endless list in her head.

  Brooke raised her voice. “I’m sorry, the store’s closing. It’s closed, really,” she amended.

  The reading had ended at nine and the hangers-on had lingered for another half hour, asking Jericho Hazley questions about his motivation, his vision and, very possibly, his exercise regimen, the one that left his frame filled out with delicious muscles that were not the usual part and parcel of a dramatic poet. But even the hangers-on had all cleared out ten minutes ago.

  Or so she thought.

  Maybe this was some kind of groupie, hoping to get Jericho’s personal address or his phone number. They were going to be sorely disappointed if that was the case. She firmly believed that private meant private.

  Brooke made her way to the rear of the shop. Maybe her father had decided to come down after all. Maybe he’d changed his mind about going to bed, she thought, hurrying around a row of folding chairs. Usually her father never went to bed before eleven, but lately that had changed, too, another sign that things were very, very wrong.

  “Dad, is that you?”

  Circumventing another row of chairs, she came around the corner of the last row of books, the ones reserved for romances, both the tried-and-true and the new, and came to an abrupt halt.

  Her gasp hung in the air as she all but walked into a tall, dark-haired stranger standing by the window. Her heart pounded with surprise as her eyes locked on the angry scar that was just below his right eye. A second gasp
followed the first.

  For one terrifying moment, although he was handsome, the man looked like someone out of Dickens’s Great Expectations.

  She was acutely aware that they were the only two people in the whole store.

  It was times like this she wished for a dog. Or, at the very least, an attack cat.

  Chapter Two

  Damn it, he’d scared her.

  Terrified her, if that expression on her face was any indication of what she was feeling. And small wonder, Mark silently upbraided himself. He probably looked like something only several degrees short of Dr. Frankenstein’s experiment to her.

  He turned slightly, so that the scar was hidden from her.

  People always saw the scar first, the man second, and although Mark told himself that it didn’t bother him and that the starkness of the scar helped reinforce the separation he wanted to maintain between himself and the world, he didn’t particularly relish the idea of frightening small children or fragile women.

  His eyes swept over her. And the young woman did look fragile, despite the fact that he judged she was close to five-ten in those three-inch heels she was wearing.

  Mark shifted slightly, moving out from behind the cover of the last row of books and into the main area of the bookstore, careful to keep her on his left side.

  He’d spent the better part of the day sitting in his car across the street, scouting this bookstore and its occupants, watching the comings and goings of the various customers from a distance with the aid of his telephoto lens. The woman before him was the owner’s daughter. His only child.

  Yesterday had been spent checking out their neighborhood in Mill Valley, as well as going through some county records.

  He was fairly certain he was on the right trail. She looked like the photograph of Marla Carlton he had tucked away in his car. Tyler had given him the photograph of his late mother as a young girl. It was taken of her and a young man. She’d told Tyler that was his uncle. Tyler had handed it over to him, along with everything else the man had thought might be remotely useful in tracking down his quarry.

  Quickly, efficiently, Mark took advantage of his close proximity and studied the young woman’s face. The family resemblance was there, in the structure of her heart-shaped face, her high cheekbones, her black hair, her green eyes.

  She was a Ross, all right.

  Derek Ross’s love of rare, old books had brought him to this quaint, thriving bookstore in the first place. As Mark had pursued his line of work, he’d discovered that while people might change their names, move to a different location, dye their hair a different color, they didn’t take as meticulous care about changing who they were inside. Hobbies, interests, preferences, those were far less likely to be abandoned or changed than hair color or names.

  So he’d followed a paper trail, so to speak, and discovered that a man fitting Derek Ross’s age and general description often made the rounds of estate auctions and old curio shops, always on the lookout for rare old books. The man called himself Derek Moss, not much of a stretch, really, Mark had mused, and for the past twenty-four years he’d owned a bookstore, Buy the Book, in the heart of the more touristy region of San Francisco.

  Looking back, Mark judged that this was probably going to be one of his easier assignments. He’d only been at it for a little more than two weeks. It hadn’t really been that difficult finding the man. Initially Mark had expected to have to widen his net, stretching it at the very least just outside the state. Instead he’d discovered that, for whatever reason, Moss had decided to remain fairly close to his place of origin. In a city the size of San Francisco, it was relatively easy to get lost among the faces.

  Hide in plain sight, the best device of all.

  Sight.

  The word brought him jarringly back to the expression on Brooke’s face.

  He must have been a real sight, a real shock for the girl just now, although she appeared to be doing her best to gather herself together, to look as if he hadn’t just managed to scare about ten years off her life and probably give her nightmares for the next five.

  “Sorry,” he apologized with a vague shrug of his shoulders. “I guess I should have called out or said something.” A smattering of contrition entered his voice. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

  The poor man.

  Instantly Brooke’s heart went out to him, creating all kinds of romantic scenarios revolving around a long-suffering, misunderstood, hauntingly handsome hero. The man before her transformed from a Dickensian character into Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff, the hero who had brooded across the pages of Wuthering Heights.

  “You didn’t frighten me. I mean, you did, but you didn’t.” She was tripping over her own tongue. Backing up, Brooke started again. For all the time she spent reading books, communication was not always her best subject. “I mean, there’s not supposed to be anyone here.” She pressed her lips together, offering him an apologetic smile. “I thought you were a rat.”

  Faced with such innocent honesty, Mark could feel his mouth curving. He was probably more surprised than she was at the smile that was trying to get a toe-hold. “I’m a little tall for that.”

  Brooke’s eyes widened as, just for a second, she thought of a vermin vaguely approaching the man’s proportions. That would have made the rat about six feet tall.

  “I’ll say.” Realizing that he might think it strange that she mistook the noise he made for the movements of a rodent, she made a stab at explaining. “We had a vermin problem several months ago. It was nothing major,” she added quickly in case the man, a potential customer after all, was turned off by the idea of thumbing through pages of a book while some rodent hovered about, looking over his shoulder. “Just one wayward rodent.” She held up an index finger to underscore the number. “A mouse, really. Not even a large one.”

  His smile widened just a fraction of an inch. “And you exterminated it.”

  “Not really.” She’d never had the heart to kill anything, outside of mosquitoes, but that was a battle of nature that fell into a “them vs. me” arrangement. “I caught it in one of those safe traps, then took it out to where I live and let it go. There’s a field not too far from the house.”

  She was talking too much, Brooke thought. She did that when she was nervous. She debated telling him that, then abandoned the idea as being a tad too honest. He might misunderstand and to protest might just make things worse. But it wasn’t the man’s scar that made her nervous, it was stumbling across him in a shop she’d thought with a fair amount of certainty was empty.

  “I don’t like killing things,” Brooke finally explained.

  He looked into her eyes for a moment. Green, like the first shoots of spring. And soft. “You have a kind heart.”

  The observation made her smile. She took his words as a compliment, and because it was a compliment, she was compelled to frame a denial.

  “Maybe I’m just squeamish.”

  Despite the fact that she still looked fragile, she didn’t strike him as the squeamish type. “If you were squeamish, you would have had the exterminator come in and kill it, not carried it off in a little wire cage to an open field.”

  His voice was deep, low. Romantic, she thought, although she’d been willing to bet he probably didn’t think so. And now that she looked, aside from being soft and brown, his eyes were sad. Incredibly sad. He was a man who’d been through a great deal. Maybe even a tragedy. He had been a star-crossed lover, she guessed, her mind leaping to the topic that was never far from her thoughts. Romance was what made the world go around and someday, she was going to have one of her own.

  Someday.

  Abruptly Brooke stopped herself before her mind slipped into high gear. She still had a lot to do before she went home herself.

  “Um, we are closed, Mr.—” Pausing, she looked at him expectantly.

  He thought of giving her an alias. It was a simple enough thing to do. He certainly had enough identification on him to back him u
p if he gave her another name. But then he decided there was no need for the extra deception. He sincerely doubted that she had any idea who he was or what he did for a living.

  From what he’d managed to gather about her, Brooke Moss had led a very sheltered life. Young, sheltered women had no need to concern themselves with people who made their living as private investigators.

  And keeping the lies down to a minimum made them easier to keep track of.

  “Banning,” he finally told her. “Mark Banning.”

  “Banning,” she repeated, wrapping her tongue around the name. She liked it. It was strong, uncomplicated. Uncompromising. Like him. “Were you here for the poetry reading?”

  She didn’t remember seeing him, but then, there’d been a lot of people here tonight, she might have not noticed him—although a man like Mr. Banning was hard to miss.

  He shook his head. “I just missed it. I slipped in afterward.” On purpose. He wanted to mill around the store when it was filled to capacity so that he wouldn’t attract too much attention. “During the autographing period.”

  “Are you interested in collecting autographs?” Even as she asked, Brooke knew the answer had to be no. The man she was talking to didn’t look like someone who cared about collecting other people’s names scribbled on pieces of paper.

  “No, but I am interested in San Francisco.” It was the cover story he’d prepared for himself. Ross owned a bookstore that specialized in the unique, the books that didn’t turn up on the shelves at local chains, as well as a sampling of the usual current fare. Going out of his way to seek out Moss’s establishment because of the kind of books it carried seemed to be a good excuse for him to be there.

  “Well, we are in San Francisco.” She laughed as she stated the obvious, then sobered just a little. “I don’t mean to be rude, Mr. Banning—”

  He realized he was staring at her smile and forced himself to focus.

  “Mark,” he corrected.

  He’d also found that people tended to talk more easily to people they were on a first-name basis with, although now that he had met her, he had a feeling that talking was the one thing Brooke Moss or Ross had absolutely no trouble with.