The Novels of Nora Roberts Volume 1

by Nora Roberts

  “We will. Merry Christmas.”

  “Same to you,” Ashworth added as Dora climbed in the van.

  With a last wave she started the van and pulled away from the curb. Her eyes flicked up to the rearview mirror and she smiled as she saw Ashworth standing on the sidewalk with his pipe in his teeth and his hand lifted in a farewell salute. “What a sweetheart. I’m glad he got that figurine.”

  Lea shivered and waited impatiently for the van to heat. “I hope he didn’t overcharge you for those saltcellars.”

  “Mmm. He made a profit, I’ll make a profit and Mrs. O’Malley will add to her collection. Everybody gets what they want.”

  “I guess. I still can’t believe you bought that hideous painting. You’ll never be able to sell it.”

  “Oh, eventually.”

  “At least you only paid fifty dollars for it.”

  “Fifty-two seventy-five,” Dora corrected.

  “Right.” Twisting in her seat, Lea looked at the boxes packed into the rear of the van. “You know, of course, that you don’t have room for all this junk.”

  “I’ll make room. Don’t you think Missy would like that carousel?”

  Lea imagined the outsize mechanical toy in her daughter’s pink-and-white bedroom and shuddered. “Please, no.”

  “Okay.” Dora shrugged. Once she’d cleaned up the carousel, she might let it spin in her own living room for a while. “But I think she’d go for it. You want to call John and tell him we’re on our way back?”

  “In a little while.” With a sigh, Lea settled back. “This time tomorrow, I’ll be baking cookies and rolling out pie dough.”

  “You asked for it,” Dora reminded her. “You had to get married, have kids, buy a house. Where else is the family going to have Christmas dinner?”

  “I wouldn’t mind if Mom didn’t insist on helping me cook it. I mean, the woman never cooked a real meal in her life, right?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “And there she is, every Christmas, underfoot in my kitchen and waving around some recipe for alfalfa and chestnut dressing.”

  “That one was bad,” Dora recalled. “But it was better than her curried potatoes and succotash casserole.”

  “Don’t remind me. And Dad’s no help, wearing his Santa hat and hitting the eggnog before noon.”

  “Maybe Will can distract her. Is he coming alone or with one of his sweeties?” Dora asked, referring to their brother’s list of glamorous dates.

  “Alone, last I heard. Dora, watch that truck, will you?”

  “I am.” In the spirit of competition, Dora gunned the engine and passed the sixteen-wheeler with inches to spare. “So when’s Will getting in?”

  “He’s taking a late train out of New York on Christmas Eve.”

  “Late enough to make a grand entrance,” Dora predicted. “Look, if he gets in your hair, I can always—oh, hell.”

  “What?” Lea’s eyes sprang open.

  “I just remembered, that new tenant Dad signed up is moving in across the hall today.”

  “So?”

  “I hope Dad remembers to be there with the keys. He was great about showing the apartment the last couple of weeks while I was tied up in the shop, but you know how absentminded he is when he’s in the middle of a production.”

  “I know exactly how he is, which is why I can’t understand how you could let him interview a tenant for your building.”

  “I didn’t have time,” Dora muttered, trying to calculate if she’d have an opportunity to call her father between performances. “Besides, Dad wanted to.”

  “Just don’t be surprised if you end up across the hall from a psychopath, or a woman with three kids and a string of tattooed boyfriends.”

  Dora’s lips curved. “I specifically told Dad no psychopaths or tattoos. I’m hoping it’s someone who cooks, and hopes to suck up to the landlord by bringing me baked goods on a regular basis. Speaking of which, do you want to eat?”

  “Yeah. I might as well get in one last meal where I don’t have to cut up anyone’s food but my own.”

  Dora swung toward the exit ramp, cutting off a Chevy. She ignored the angry blast of horns. There was a smile on her face as she imagined unpacking her new possessions. The very first thing she would do, she promised herself, was find the perfect spot for the painting.

  High in the glittery tower of a silver building overlooking the cramped streets of LA, Edmund Finley enjoyed his weekly manicure. The wall directly across from his massive rosewood desk flickered with a dozen television screens. CNN, Headline News and one of the home-shopping networks all flashed silently across the wall. Other screens were tuned in to various offices in his organization so that he could observe his employees.

  But unless he chose to listen in, the only sounds in the vast sweep of his office were the strains of a Mozart opera and the steady scrape of the manicurist’s nail file.

  Finley liked to watch.

  He’d chosen the top floor of this building so that his office would overlook the panorama of Los Angeles. It gave him the feeling of power, of omnipotence, and he would often stand for an hour at the wide window behind his desk and simply study the comings and goings of strangers far below.

  In his home far up in the hills above the city, there were television screens and monitors in every room. And windows, again windows where he could look down on the lights of the LA basin. Every evening he would stand on the balcony outside his bedroom and imagine owning everything, everyone, for as far as his eye could see.

  He was a man with an appetite for possessions. His office reflected his taste for the fine and the exclusive. Both walls and carpet were white, pure white to serve as a virgin backdrop for his treasures. A Ming vase graced a marble pedestal. Sculptures by Rodin and Denaecheau filled niches carved into the walls. A Renoir hung in a gold frame above a Louis Quatorze commode. A velvet settee reputed to have been Marie Antoinette’s was flanked by gleaming mahogany tables from Victorian England.

  Two high glass cabinets held a stunning and esoteric display of objets d’art: carved snuff bottles of lapis and aquamarine, ivory netsukes, Dresden figurines, Limoges ring boxes, a fifteenth-century dagger with a jeweled handle, African masks.

  Edmund Finley acquired. And once he acquired, he hoarded.

  His import-export business was enormously successful. His smuggling sideline more so. After all, smuggling was more of a challenge. It required a certain finesse, a ruthless ingenuity and impeccable taste.

  Finley, a tall, spare, distinguished-looking man in his early fifties, had begun to “acquire” merchandise as a youth working the docks in San Francisco. It had been a simple matter to misplace a crate, to open a trunk and to sell what he took. By his thirtieth year he had amassed enough capital to start his own company, enough savvy to play heavily on the dark side and win and enough contacts to ensure a steady flow of merchandise.

  Now he was a wealthy man who preferred Italian suits, French women and Swiss francs. He could, after decades of transactions, afford to keep what appealed most to him. What appealed most was the old, the priceless.

  “You’re all done, Mr. Finley.” The manicurist placed Finley’s hand gently on the spotless blotter on his desk. She knew he would check her work carefully while she packed up her tools and lotions. Once he had raged at her for ten minutes for missing a minute speck of cuticle on his thumb. But this time, when she dared to glance up, he was smiling down at his buffed nails.

  “Excellent work.” Pleased, he rubbed his thumbs and fingertips together. Taking a gold money clip from his pocket, Finley peeled off a fifty. Then with one of his rare and disarming smiles, he added another hundred. “Merry Christmas, dear.”

  “Oh—thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Finley. Merry Christmas to you, too.”

  Still smiling, he dismissed her with a wave of his buffed fingertips. His sporadic generosity came as naturally as his constant greed. He relished both. Before the door had closed behind her, he had swive
led in his chair, folded his hands over his silk vest. Through the stream of sunlight he studied his view of Los Angeles.

  Christmas, he thought. What a lovely time of year. One of goodwill toward men, ringing bells and colored lights. Of course, it was also the time of desperate loneliness, despair and suicide. But those small human tragedies didn’t touch or concern him. Money had catapulted him above those fragile needs for companionship and family. He could buy companionship. He had chosen one of the richest cities in the world, where anything could be bought, sold, possessed. Here youth, wealth and power were admired above all else. During this brightest of holiday seasons, he had wealth, and he had power. As for youth, money could buy the illusion.

  Finley scanned the buildings and sun-glinted windows with his bright green eyes. He realized with a vague sense of surprise that he was happy.

  The knock on his office door made him turn as he called out, “Enter.”

  “Sir.” Abel Winesap, a small, stoop-shouldered man with the heavy title of “Executive Assistant to the President,” cleared his throat. “Mr. Finley.”

  “Do you know the true meaning of Christmas, Abel?” Finley’s voice was warm, like mulled brandy poured over cream.

  “Ah . . .” Winesap fiddled with the knot of his tie. “Sir?”

  “Acquisition. A lovely word, Abel. And the truest meaning of this delightful holiday, don’t you agree?”

  “Yes, sir.” Winesap felt a shiver whisper down his spine. What he had come to report was difficult enough. Finley’s happy mood made the difficult more dangerous. “I’m afraid we have a problem, Mr. Finley.”

  “Oh?” Finley’s smile remained, but his eyes frosted. “And what might that be?”

  Winesap gulped in fear. He knew that Finley’s frigid anger was more lethal than another man’s rage. It had been Winesap who had been chosen to witness Finley’s termination of an employee who had been embezzling. And he remembered how calmly Finley had slit the man’s throat with a sixteenth-century jeweled dagger.

  Betrayal, Finley believed, deserved quick punishment, and some ceremony.

  Winesap also remembered, to his dismay, that it had been he who had been delegated to dispose of the body.

  Nervously, he continued with his story. “The shipment from New York. The merchandise you were expecting.”

  “Has there been a delay?”

  “No—that is, in a manner of speaking. The shipment arrived today as expected, but the merchandise . . .” He moistened his thin, nervous lips. “It isn’t what you ordered, sir.”

  Finley placed his pampered hands on the edge of the desk and the knuckles turned bone white. “I beg your pardon?”

  “The merchandise, sir. It isn’t what was ordered. Apparently there was a mix-up somewhere.” Winesap’s voice petered out to a whimper. “I thought it best to report it to you at once.”

  “Where is it?” Finley’s voice had lost its jovial warmth. It was a chilly hiss.

  “In Receiving, sir. I thought—”

  “Bring it up. Immediately.”

  “Yes, sir. Right away.” Winesap escaped, grateful for the reprieve.

  Finley had paid a great deal of money for the merchandise, and a great deal more to have that merchandise concealed and smuggled. Having each piece stolen, then disguised, transported from various locations to his factory in New York. Why, the bribes alone had run close to six figures.

  To calm himself, he paused by a decanter of guava juice and poured generously.

  And if there had been a mistake, he thought, steadier, it would be rectified. Whoever had erred would be punished.

  Carefully, he set the Baccarat low-ball glass aside and studied himself in the oval George III mirror above the bar. He brushed a fussy hand over his thick mane of dark hair, admiring the glint and gleam of silver that threaded through it. His last face-lift had smoothed away the sags under his eyes, firmed his chin and erased the lines that had dug deeply around his mouth.

  He looked no more than forty, Finley decided, turning his face from side to side to study and approve his profile.

  What fool had said that money couldn’t buy happiness?

  The knock on his door shattered his mood. “Come,” he snapped out, and waited as one of his receiving clerks wheeled in a crate. “Leave it there.” He jabbed a finger toward the center of the room. “And go. Abel, remain. The door,” he said, and Winesap scurried to shut it behind the departing clerk.

  When Finley said nothing more, Winesap blanched and walked back to the crate. “I opened it as you instructed, Mr. Finley. As I began to inspect the merchandise, I realized there had been an error.” Gingerly he reached into the crate, dipping his hand into a sea of shredded paper. His fingers trembled as he pulled out a china teapot decorated with tiny violets.

  Finley took the teapot, turning it over in his hands. It was English, a lovely piece, worth perhaps $200 on the open market. But it was mass-produced. Thousands of teapots exactly like this one were on sale across the world. So to him it was completely worthless. He smashed it against the edge of the crate and sent shards flying.

  “What else?”

  Quaking, Winesap plunged his hand deep into the crate and drew out a swirling glass vase.

  Italian, Finley deduced as he inspected it. Handmade. A value of $100, perhaps $150. He hurled it, barely missing Winesap’s head, and sent it crashing against the wall.

  “There’s—there’s teacups.” Winesap’s eyes darted to the crate and back to his employer’s stony face. “And some silver—two platters, a candy dish. A p-pair of crystal goblets etched with wedding bells.”

  “Where is my merchandise?” Finley demanded, biting off each word.

  “Sir, I can’t—that is, I believe there’s been . . .” His voice drained out to a whisper. “An error.”

  “An error.” Finley’s eyes were like jade as he clenched his fists at his sides. DiCarlo, he thought, conjuring up an image of his man in New York. Young, bright, ambitious. But not stupid, Finley reminded himself. Not stupid enough to attempt a double cross. Still, he would have to pay, and pay dearly for this error.

  “Get DiCarlo on the phone.”

  “Yes, sir.” Relieved that Finley’s wrath was about to find a new target, Winesap darted to the desk to place the call.

  As Winesap dialed, Finley crunched shards of china into the carpet. Reaching into the crate, he systematically destroyed the rest of the contents.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  Jed Skimmerhorn wanted a drink. He wasn’t particular about the type. Whiskey that would burn a line down his throat, the seductive warmth of brandy, the familiar tang of a beer. But he wasn’t going to get one until he’d finished carting boxes up these damn rickety back steps and into his new apartment.

  Not that he had a hell of a lot of possessions. His old partner, Brent, had given him a hand with the sofa, the mattress and the heavier pieces of furniture. All that remained were a few cardboard boxes filled with books and cooking utensils and other assorted junk. He wasn’t sure why he’d kept even that much when it would have been easier to put it all in storage.

  Then again, he wasn’t sure of a lot of things these days. He couldn’t explain to Brent, or to himself, why he’d found it so necessary to move across town, out of the huge old Colonial and into an apartment. It was something about fresh starts. But you couldn’t start fresh until you’d ended.

  Jed had been doing a lot of ending lately.

  Turning in his resignation had been the first step—perhaps the hardest. The police commissioner had argued, refusing to accept the resignation and putting Jed on extended leave. It didn’t matter what it was called, Jed mused. He wasn’t a cop anymore. Couldn’t be a cop anymore. Whatever part of him had wanted to serve and protect was hollowed out.

  He wasn’t depressed, as he’d explained to the department shrink. He was finished. He didn’t need to find himself. He just needed to be left alone. He’d given fourteen years of his life to the force. It had to be
enough.

  Jed elbowed open the door to the apartment and braced it with one of the boxes he carried. He slid the second box across the wooden floor before heading back down the narrow hallway toward the outside steps that served as his entrance.

  He hadn’t heard a peep from his neighbor across the hall. The eccentric old man who had rented him the place had said that the second apartment was occupied but the tenant was as quiet as a mouse.

  It certainly seemed that way.

  Jed started down the steps, noting with annoyance that the banister wouldn’t hold the weight of a malnourished three-year-old. The steps themselves were slick with the sleet that continued to spit out of the colorless sky. It was almost quiet in the back of the building. Though it fronted on busy South Street, Jed didn’t think he’d mind the noise and Bohemian atmosphere, the tourists or the shops. He was close enough to the river that he could take solitary walks when he chose.

  In any case, it would be a dramatic change from the manicured lawns of Chestnut Hill, where the Skimmerhorn family home had stood for two centuries.

  Through the gloom he could see the glow of colored lights strung on the windows of neighboring buildings. Someone had wired a large plastic Santa and his eight tiny reindeer to a roof, where they were caught in the pretense of flying day and night.

  It reminded him that Brent had invited him to Christmas dinner. A big, noisy family event that Jed might have enjoyed in the past. There had never been big, noisy family events in his life—or none that could have been called fun.

  And now there was no family. No family at all.

  He pressed his fingertips to the ache at his temple and willed himself not to think of Elaine. But old memories, like the ghost of past sins, snuck through and knotted his stomach.

  He hauled the last of the boxes out of the trunk and slammed it with a force that rattled the reconditioned Thunderbird down to its tires. He wasn’t going to think of Elaine, or Donny Speck or responsibilities or regrets. He was going to go inside, pour a drink and try to think of nothing at all.