Keepsake

by Linda Barlow

  Blackthorn had rattled her, too. She’d been truly terrified when he’d chased her through Central Park. And then that kiss—so sensual, so seductive…

  The last room to check was the spare bedroom, immediately at the end of the hallway. She was using it as an office. Frequently, she would come home at the end of a long day at the Power Perspectives office only to sit for hours in here reading and trying to absorb as much as she could about the company. She listened to Rina’s audiotapes and watched her inspirational videos. She reviewed the notes of her mother’s planning sessions for the various new directions of the company, as well as her personal notes.

  The door to the office was closed. She couldn’t recall whether she’d left it that way.

  As she pushed open the door, the scent that she’d thought she’d imagined burst out at her. It was as if she’d just entered a medical clinic or a hospital—the smell of iodine-based disinfectant was powerful.

  Poised and ready to run, she hit the light switch. There was no sound or movement in the room. But the room was a wreck—drawers open and papers spilled all over the place, books turned out of the bookshelves, utter chaos on the surface of her desk.

  Painted in high mustard-colored letters on the white wall over her desk were the words, “Power Corrupts. You’re Next, Bitch.”

  “I’m sorry to drag you back here tonight,” April said to Rob Blackthorn when he knocked on her door a little later that evening.

  He shrugged in that loose-shouldered manner of his. “Hey, I’m glad to be here, whatever the reason.”

  As he entered she felt a jolt of emotion. Those pesky hormones again. He wasn’t a drop-dead handsome man, but he was the physical type she liked—tall and hard and lean.

  After discovering the mess in the office, April had phoned the police. A pair of cops—a man and a woman named Cirillo and Flack—had come quickly, but they had not stayed long. Cirillo rather rudely made it clear that they had far more important cases to deal with in New York City on a hot June night than breaking and entering. Flack, the woman and “good cop” of the pair, had been more sympathetic, but even she had little consolation to offer.

  If they knew—or cared—about Rina de Sevigny’s murder in California, they gave no indication of it.

  A crime-scene team headed by a couple of young techies had quickly dusted, taken measurements and a few photographs. Lieutenant Flack, meanwhile, had offered April the usual advice about investing in better security locks, maybe an alarm. Then she and Cirillo had packed up and left.

  “I discovered the breakin as soon as I got inside,” she told Rob. “It doesn’t look like anything was stolen. The intention, it seems, was to frighten me.”

  “Did it work?”

  April was about to declare that she was more angry than frightened, but the words stuck in her throat. She folded her fingers together. Her hands felt cold.

  “I think maybe it did,” he said. He touched her upper arm in a light, comforting manner. Something in her body surged, throwing up sensual images from earlier in the evening.

  “I’ve read about how it feels when someone breaks into your home,” she said. “How helpless and vulnerable you feel. I hate admitting it, but it’s true.”

  He nodded. “Psychological terrorism.”

  “It looks as if somebody is trying to scare me, drive me away.” She clenched her fists. “But I’m not going anywhere, dammit.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  He glanced around the living room. “Nice place.”

  “Haven’t you ever been here before? When Rina was using the place, I mean?”

  “My company was hired to guard Rina during her trip to the West Coast, not before.” His eyes came back to hers. “So where’s the damage?”

  “Back there.” She pointed down the hall. “I’ll wait for you here. I don’t want to look at it again.”

  “Why don’t you make a pot of coffee—that’ll give you something to do,” he said, smiling. “And me something to drink.”

  “Okay.”

  “Betadyne,” he told her a few minutes later. “That’s what they used to write the words. You must have had a bottle of it in your medicine cabinet.”

  “Actually the bottle was sitting right there on my desk. I cut myself last night and used it as an antiseptic.”

  “Where’s the stuff now?”

  “The police bagged the bottle and took it as evidence.”

  “That’s what you smelled when you entered the place. You took an unnecessary risk. Whoever broke in could have still been present. You should have backed out your door and called the cops from somewhere else. Or come back down to see if I was still hanging around.”

  She glanced up at him. “Were you?”

  He grinned. “Hey, it was hard to leave. I thought you might change your mind and I might get lucky.”

  “You’re full of shit, Blackthorn,” she said, but she kept her tone light.

  He sipped the coffee she had made for him. “So did the cops believe you about the breakin?”

  “What do you mean? How could there be any doubt?”

  “You could have faked it.”

  She blinked at him. “If you’re here to make more accusations, I’m in no mood, I’m warning you.”

  “Bear with me for just a moment on this.”

  “Blackthorn—”

  “You called me Rob earlier this evening.”

  “There was a point earlier this evening when you actually seemed rather likable!”

  He grinned again. It was almost impossible not to like him, she thought. Despite the seriousness of the situation, that mischievous light kept coming into his eyes. “Look,” he said, “I’m just trying to see this from the point of view of the New York City police. Just how seriously did they take this crime, by the way?”

  “Not very.”

  “If the perpetrator’s intention when he broke in was to mess up your office and write a threat on your office wall, why didn’t he bring his own writing materials? The use of something that was right there in your office suggests a certain spontaneity about the action. Or else, possibly, that you did it yourself.”

  She tried to keep her patience. “I did not do it myself. Nor did I hire a killer to shoot my mother. I’m sure this is very disappointing to you, but you’re going to have to come up with a better solution if you truly want to nail Rina’s killer.”

  He nodded. “That sad possibility has occurred to me.” Again he reached out and touched her arm. Then his hand slipped down until his palm slid into hers. “You okay?” he asked. His voice was gentle.

  She shrugged.

  “I’m sorry if I seem to be continually hassling you. I’m thinking like a cop, you see. Well, maybe more like an FBI agent.”

  She shook her head, saying nothing.

  “And you hate all law enforcement types, right, after what you went through as a teenager?”

  “They’re not my favorite people in the world, no.”

  “I don’t blame you. Don’t like ‘em much myself. Still, cop instincts can be useful, and I’ve got a feeling about this. Seems to me there was more to this breakin than just the determination to frighten you.”

  “But nothing was stolen.”

  “Maybe not. But still—well, let me show you. Come on back with me to the office.”

  As they walked down the corridor together, April was glad, after all, to have him here. There was something very reassuring about his tall, strong build. If they came back… the thought no sooner crossed her mind than she suppressed it. It wouldn’t do to worry about things that would probably never happen.

  “The police told you this was reckless destruction?” he said as they entered the carnage that remained of her office. “I disagree. Things have been tossed about, yes, but look at the way the papers and folders from your drawers are tossed individually around. That means somebody went through them all, one at a time. The drawers were not simply overturned and emptied. They were searched.”
<
br />   “But if they were searching for something, why just in this room? Why wouldn’t they search the rest of the house as well?”

  “Maybe they found it.”

  “Found what?”

  “I don’t know. I was hoping you could tell me.”

  She thought for a moment. “I don’t own anything particularly valuable, and although I’m sure Rina did, there were no personal items of any sort here when I moved in.”

  “There’s no computer here,” Blackthorn remarked. “I see a typewriter, but no computer and no printer. That’s a bit unusual in an office nowadays. Was there a computer when Rina was living here?”

  “No. The furnishings are all hers, and I’ve left things pretty much the way I found them. I don’t like computers and I’ve never learned to use one, so I have no need of one.”

  He poked around some more, then said, “You know, the other possibility is that the rest of the apartment was searched.” Blackthorn tugged on her hand and led her into her bedroom. His fingers seemed to tighten briefly as they were confronted by the king-sized bed, and she wondered what it would be like to be entering this room with him with a pleasanter goal in mind.

  “It’s possible to toss a place without leaving anything to show for it. Perhaps the idea was to get in here and quietly remove whatever it was the perps were looking for, leaving no calling card at all. But when they failed to find it—whatever it is—the plan changed. They decided to scare you into submission.” He opened the top bureau drawer where she kept her underthings. “Very neat,” he noted. “Hate to say it, but it’s easier to search a neat drawer than a messy one.”

  She peered in and felt a little frisson of fear. “Wait a second. That black bra shouldn’t be on top.”

  He turned to her with a slight grin on his lips. “No?” He plucked the black bra out of her drawer and turned the fragile confection over and over in his big hands, as if he expected it to reveal a vital clue.

  “No. I keep the white ones on top. They’re the ones I’m more likely to wear to work.”

  “A shame.” He glanced at the front of her blouse as if trying to see through it and determine whether or not she was telling the truth. “I like black, myself.”

  She smiled. “You and all men.”

  He handed her the bra and returned to rummage around in the drawer. “How about the panties? White ones on top there, I see. No, here’s a silky little scarlet pair, close to the top. Should they be farther down in the pile, or do you sometimes wear red panties to the office?”

  She ignored the comment, opening another drawer to check her hose and stockings. “You’re right. Somebody has been in here.”

  “You sure?”

  “It’s subtle. I didn’t notice before. I was looking for the same kind of disarray we found in the other bedroom.” She abruptly remembered thinking that there was something wrong with the pile of magazines and newspapers in the living room. “But, yes, nothing is exactly the way I left it.”

  “So they were looking for something. Question is, what?”

  “The manuscript,” April said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “Maybe they were looking for Rina’s manuscript. Apparently she was writing an autobiography. It didn’t turn up among her things after her death.”

  His eyes had narrowed. “How do you know this?”

  “Charlie Ripley told me. Actually, he wanted to know if I had it. He’d gotten a call from Rina’s editor inquiring about it.”

  “Why did he think you had it?”

  “I’d received a large manila envelope from Rina via her attorney. Apparently Charlie and Isobelle were speculating that it might have contained the manuscript.”

  “But it didn’t?”

  “No. It was just an old photograph of my mother and me that last summer we spent together on Cape Cod. I guess she thought it would mean something special to me.”

  “An autobiography,” Blackthorn said, musing. “I wonder if, in the course of telling her own story, Rina revealed anything she knew about others. Isobelle told me that Rina enjoyed the power of knowing people’s secrets. She was intimate with a dizzying array of powerful figures—in politics, the arts, business, and even professional sports. If she was thinking of publishing any of these secrets, it could be the motive for her murder.”

  “So whoever killed her would naturally want to suppress the autobiography.”

  “Exactly. Had Charlie or Isobelle ever actually seen this manuscript?”

  “I don’t think so. Nor has Armand. I asked him about it the same day.”

  “But her editor at Crestwood-Locke-Mars knew of its existence?”

  “That’s what Charlie said. But I know a few authors as a result of my business, and they often bounce ideas off their agents and editors long before they’ve got anything down on paper. In other words, Rina may have intended to write her autobiography, but not yet actually done so.”

  “The phantom manuscript,” Blackthorn said. “Did it exist or not? And if it did, was there something in it that was secret enough—and dangerous enough—to get her killed?”

  He stayed for half an hour longer. April refreshed his coffee, which they sat down to drink in the living room. She deliberately chose a seat on the chair opposite the sofa where he was sitting.

  From the coffee table he picked up the photograph of her standing with Rina in front of the cottage. She usually kept it in her bedroom, but after the breakin she had removed it from her bedside table and brought it with her into the living room. She wasn’t sure why. Silly, really, the way she kept studying the old photograph as if she expected it to reveal some vital piece of information.

  Blackthorn, too, peered closely at it. “Is this the picture she left you?”

  “Yes. The keepsake, as her lawyer referred to it. It’s so strange. She leaves me the business she’s built with her bare hands, but it’s not personal, and despite all the propaganda, it’s hard to find her there—Rina the real woman, Rina, my mother. That photograph is the only clue, the only link to the woman I once knew.”

  “You must have had other mementos of your life together.”

  “I left them behind when I ran away from school. I was furious with her. I didn’t want anything that would remind me.”

  “Maybe this picture was her only link to the past, too.”

  April shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “She was a beautiful woman.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You look like her.”

  “Thanks. I guess.”

  He smiled. “I meant it as a compliment. I like the red hair better than the blonde, though.”

  “It’s not red,” she objected, smiling. “It’s auburn.”

  “That’s what all red-headed women say.” He glanced down at the photograph again. “Where was this taken?”

  “On the Cape. We had one of those ‘housekeeping cottages’ in Brewster for the summer that year. 1963. She met Kennedy there. He came into the restaurant where she was waitressing. My mother was never one to miss an opportunity.”

  “Well, there’s something to be said for that quality.” He beckoned to her, then patted the spot beside him on the sofa. “Come here.”

  April felt the spark run through her again. He looked very tempting, lounging there, his long legs stretched out to the side of the coffee table, his lean body giving off an air of lazy masculine assurance. She felt very vulnerable. He seemed to penetrate her defenses without even trying.

  And yet… she liked the way he made her feel. It was as if the conflict between them that she’d felt ever since the day of Rina’s murder had built earlier this evening to a crescendo when he’d chased her through Central Park and confronted her about her past. Since then, with empathy and understanding, it had begun to resolve itself. Besides, they both wanted to solve the mystery of who had murdered her mother.

  And now, because of the way he had kissed her, touched her… they both wanted something else as well.

  But it was ha
ppening too fast. She was not ready for any further complications.

  “I’d better not,” she said.

  He gave her a long look, then nodded slowly. “You’re right, of course. You’d better not. I’d better not. We’ll both be sensible, and I’ll go.”

  She bit her lip.

  He paused, then said, “And if he returns?”

  This was intimidation, pure and simple! “If I require your services as a bodyguard, I’ll be sure to call you.”

  A glimmer of a smile appeared. “Touché.” He rose with obvious reluctance. “Actually, I don’t think you have anything to worry about. They’ll look elsewhere for the missing manuscript, and so will we. As for the ‘You’re Next, Bitch,’ my gut feeling on that is that it was a gratuitous threat, designed to mislead us.”

  “I hope you’re right,” she said as she showed him to the door.

  “I’ll see you Friday night, okay? Eight o’clock. Lock up securely after I leave, okay?”

  “Okay. Yes.”

  She wondered if he would kiss her as he left, but he did not.

  Sensible.

  How sensible would they be on Friday night?

  Chapter Nineteen

  The large-screen video in the conference room came alive with an early morning panorama of the Brooklyn Bridge (shot at huge expense from a helicopter) and the sound of Power Perspectives’ energizing theme music. The camera angle narrowed as the shot closed on a figure standing in the middle of the bridge’s span, her arms stretched out as if to embrace the entire city of New York. The woman was smiling, her long auburn hair was blowing in the wind.

  “The world at your feet?” the woman said, her lilting voice blending in nicely with the upbeat music. “Anything is possible when you focus on what you want and go for it!”

  The shot then angled toward the city and zoomed in slowly on several landmarks—the World Trade Center towers and Wall Street, Rockefeller Center, Fifth Avenue, Park Avenue, the United Nations building, and the Plaza Hotel.

  All the while the woman’s voice-over was saying, “At our Power Perspectives Lifechange seminars, we teach you to find that magical quality within yourselves that will make your dreams come true. The future is what you make of it. Your life is yours to shape. The power is within you—all you need to do is unlock it. Power Perspectives will give you the key!”