Homeport

by Nora Roberts

  dark green, and crammed them with books she bought when the library held its annual sale.

  Classics for the most part. Books she’d neglected to read in school and longed to explore now. She did so whenever she had a free hour or two, bundling under the cheerful blue-and-green-striped throw her mother had crocheted and diving into Hemingway or Steinbeck or Fitzgerald.

  Her CD player had been an indulgent Christmas present to herself two years before. Deliberately, she’d collected a wide range of music—eclectic, she liked to think of it.

  She’d been too busy working to develop a wide range of tastes in books and music when she was in her teens and early twenties. A pregnancy, miscarriage, and broken heart all before her eighteenth birthday had changed her direction. She’d been determined to make something of herself, to have something for herself.

  Then she’d let herself be charmed by slick-talking, high-living, no-good son-of-a-bitching Buster.

  Hormones, she thought, and a need to make a home, to build her own family, had blinded her to the impossibility of marriage with a mostly unemployed mechanic with a taste for Coors and blondes.

  She’d wanted a child, she thought now. Maybe, Lord help her, to make up for the one she’d lost.

  Live and learn, she often told herself. She’d done both. Now she was an independent woman with a solid business, one who was taking the time and making the effort to improve her mind.

  She liked to listen to her customers, their opinions and views, and measure them against her own. She was broadening her outlook, and calculated that in the seven years she’d had Annie’s Place, she’d learned more about politics, religion, sex, and the economy than any college graduate.

  If there were some nights when, slipping into bed alone, she longed for someone to listen to her, to hold her, to laugh with her when she spoke of her day, it was a small price to pay for independence.

  In her experience, men didn’t want to listen to what you had to say, they just wanted to do a little bitching and scratch their butts. Then yank off your nightgown and fuck.

  She was much better off on her own.

  One day, she thought, she might buy a house, with a yard. She wouldn’t mind having a dog. She would cut back on her hours, hire a bar manager, maybe take a vacation. Ireland first, naturally. She wanted to see the hills—and the pubs, of course.

  But she’d suffered the humiliation of not having enough money, of having doors shut in her face when she asked for a loan, of being told she was a bad risk.

  She never intended to go through that again.

  So her profits were fed back into her business, and what she sliced off of them was tucked into conservative stocks and bonds. She didn’t need to be rich, but she would never be poor again.

  Her parents had skirted the slippery edge of poor all of Annie’s life. They’d done what they could for her, but her father—bless him—had held on to money as a man holds a handful of water. It had continually trickled through his fingers.

  When they moved to Florida three winters before, Annie had kissed them both goodbye, cried a little, and slipped her mother five hundred dollars. It had been hard-earned, but she knew her mother could make it stretch through several of her father’s get-rich-quick schemes.

  She called them every week, on Sunday afternoons when the rates were down, and sent her mother another check every three months. She promised to visit often, but had managed only two short trips in three years.

  Annie thought of them now as she watched the end of the late news and closed the book she’d been struggling to read. Her parents adored Andrew. Of course, they’d never known about that night on the beach, about the baby she’d conceived, then lost.

  With a shake of her head she put it all out of her mind. She switched off the television, picked up the mug of tea she’d let go cold, and took it into the closet her landlord claimed was a kitchen.

  She was reaching to switch off the light when someone knocked at her door. Annie glanced at the Louisville Slugger she kept by the door—the twin of one she kept behind the bar at work. Though she’d never had occasion to use either, they made her feel secure.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s Andrew. Let me in, will you? Your landlord keeps these halls in a deep freeze.”

  Though she wasn’t particularly pleased to find him on her doorstep, Annie slipped off the chain, released the dead bolt and thumb lock, and opened the door. “It’s late, Andrew.”

  “You’re telling me,” he said, though she wore a plaid robe and thick black socks. “I saw your light under the door. Come on, Annie, be a pal and let me in.”

  “I’m not giving you a drink.”

  “That’s okay.” Once he was inside, he reached under his coat and pulled out a bottle. “I brought my own. It’s been a long, miserable day, Annie.” He gave her a hound dog look that wrenched at her heart. “I didn’t want to be home.”

  “Fine.” Annoyed, she stalked to the kitchen and got out a short glass. “You’re a grown man, you’ll drink if you want.”

  “I want.” He poured, lifted his glass in a half-salute. “Thanks. I guess you’ve heard the news.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry.” She sat on the couch and slipped the copy of Moby Dick out of sight between the cushions, though she couldn’t have explained why it would embarrass her to have him see it.

  “Cops think it was an inside job.” He drank, laughed a little. “I never thought I’d use that phrase in a sentence. They’re taking a hard look at Miranda and me first.”

  “Why in the world would they think you’d steal from yourself?”

  “People do, all the time. Insurance company’s investigating. We’re being thoroughly studied.”

  “It’s just routine.” Concerned now, she reached up to take his hand and draw him down beside her.

  “Yeah. Routine sucks. I loved that bronze.”

  “What? The one that was taken?”

  “It said something to me. The young David taking on the giant, willing to pit a stone against a sword. Courage. The kind I’ve never had.”

  “Why do you do that to yourself?” Irritation rang in her voice as she shoved against him.

  “I never take on the giants,” he said, and reached for the bottle again. “I just roll with the flow and follow orders. My parents say, It’s time you took over the running of the Institute, Andrew. And I say, When do you want me to start?”

  “You love the Institute.”

  “A happy coincidence. If they’d told me to go to Borneo and study native habits . . . I bet I’d have a hell of a tan by now. Elise says, It’s time we got married; I say, Set the date. She says, I want a divorce; I say, Gee, honey, do you want me to pay for the lawyer?”

  I tell you I’m pregnant, Annie thought, and you ask if I want to get married.

  He studied the liquor in his glass, watched the way the light from her floor lamp slipped through the amber. “I never bucked the system, because it never seemed to matter enough to make the effort. And that doesn’t say much for Andrew Jones.”

  “So you drink because it’s easier than seeing if it matters?”

  “Maybe.” But he set the glass down to see if he could, to see how it felt to say what else was on his mind without the crutch. “I didn’t do the right thing by you, Annie, didn’t really stand by you the way I should have all those years ago, because I was terrified of what they’d do.”

  “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “We never have, mostly because I didn’t think you wanted to. But you brought it up the other day.”

  “I shouldn’t have.” A little finger of panic curled in her stomach at the thought of it. “It’s old business.”

  “It’s our business, Annie.” He said it gently because he heard a trace of that panic.

  “Let it alone.” She drew away from him, folded her arms defensively.

  “All right.” Why scratch at old wounds, he decided, when you had fresh juicy ones? “We’ll just move along th
rough the life and times of Andrew Jones. At this point in it I’m waiting patiently for the cops to tell me I don’t have to go to prison.”

  This time when he reached for the bottle, she grabbed it, stood up, and walking into the kitchen, poured the contents down the sink.

  “Goddamn it, Annie.”

  “You don’t need whiskey to make yourself miserable, Andrew. You do fine all on your own. Your parents didn’t love you enough. That’s rough.” Temper she hadn’t known crouched inside her sprang free. “Mine loved me plenty, but I’m still sitting alone at night with memories and regrets that rip at my heart. Your wife didn’t love you enough either. Tough break. My husband would get himself oiled up on a couple of six-packs and love me whether I wanted him to or not.”

  “Annie. Christ.” He hadn’t known that, hadn’t imagined that. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re sorry,” she fired back. “I got through. I got through you and I got through him by realizing I’d made a mistake and fixing it.”

  “Don’t do that.” Out of nowhere his own anger spurted up. A dangerous light glinted in his eyes, hardening them as he got to his feet. “Don’t compare what we had with what you had with him.”

  “Then don’t you use what we had the same way you use what you had with Elise.”

  “I wasn’t. It’s not the same.”

  “Damn right, because she was beautiful, and she was brilliant.” Annie jabbed a finger into his chest hard enough to make him take a step back. “And maybe you didn’t love her enough. If you had you’d still have her. Because I’ve never known you to go without what you really want. You may not pick up a stone and go to war for it, but you get it.”

  “She wanted out.” He shouted it. “You can’t make someone love you.”

  She leaned on the tiny counter, closed her eyes, and to his surprise, began to laugh. “You sure as hell can’t.” She wiped at the tears the fit of laughter had brought to her eyes. “You may have a Ph.D., Dr. Jones, but you’re stupid. You’re a stupid man, and I’m tired. I’m going to bed. You can let yourself out.”

  She stormed by him, half hoping she’d made him angry enough to grab her. But he didn’t, and she walked into the bedroom alone. When she heard him go out, heard the door click behind him, she curled onto the bed and indulged herself in a good, hard cry.

  ten

  T echnology never failed to delight and amaze Cook. When he started out as a beat cop twenty-three years before, he’d seen that a detective’s job involved hours of phone calls, paperwork, and door-to-doors. Not as exciting as Hollywood liked, nor as he—young and eager—had intended to settle for once he joined the ranks.

  He’d planned to spend this particular Sunday afternoon doing some fishing in Miracle Bay, as the weather had turned calm and the temperatures had crept into the sixties. But he’d detoured by the station house on a whim. He believed in following whims, which he considered a short step down from hunches.

  There on his desk, stacked among the files cluttering his in box, was the computer-generated report from pretty young officer Mary Chaney.

  For himself, Cook approached the computer with the caution and respect of a street cop approaching a junkie in a dark alley. You had to deal with it, you had to do the job, but you knew damn well anything could go wrong if you missed a step.

  The Jones case was a priority because the Joneses were rich and the governor knew them personally. As the case was on his mind, he’d asked Mary to run a computer check, searching for like crimes.

  Such information as he had in his hands would have taken weeks, if he’d ever been able to gather it, in his early days at this desk. Now he had a pattern in front of him that made his fishing plans slide out of his mind as he tipped back in his chair and studied it.

  He had six likes over a period of ten years, and twice that many other hits similar enough to warrant a mention.

  New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Kansas City, Atlanta. A museum or gallery in each of those cities had reported a break-in and the loss of one item in the past decade. The value of each item ranged from a hundred thousand to just over a cool million. No damage to the property, no mess, no alarm sounded. Each piece had been covered by insurance, and no arrest had been made.

  Slick, he thought. The guy was slick.

  In the dozen that followed, there were some variations. Two or more pieces had been taken, and in one case a guard’s coffee had been drugged and the security system was simply shut off for a period of thirty minutes. In another an arrest had been made. A guard had attempted to pawn a fifteenth-century cameo. He was arrested and confessed, but claimed that he’d taken the cameo after the break-in. The Renoir landscape and the Manet portrait that had also been stolen were never recovered.

  Interesting, Cook thought again. The profile that was forming in his mind of his quarry didn’t include sloppy trips to pawnshops. Could be he enlisted a guard as an inside source. It was something to check out.

  And it wouldn’t hurt to see where the Joneses had been during the dates of the other thefts. It was, after all, just another kind of fishing.

  The first thing on Miranda’s mind when she opened her eyes on Sunday morning was The Dark Lady. She had to see it again, examine it again. How else would she know how she had been so completely mistaken?

  For as the days passed, she had come to the painful conclusion that she’d been wrong. What other explanation was there? She knew her mother too well. To save Standjo’s reputation, Elizabeth would have questioned every detail of the second testing. She would have insisted on, and received, absolute proof of its accuracy.

  She would never have settled for less.

  The practical thing to do was to accept it, to salvage her pride by saying nothing more on the matter until the situation cooled. Stirring the pot could accomplish nothing positive because the damage had already been done.

  Deciding she could make better use of her time than brooding, she changed into sweats. A couple hours at the health club might sweat some of the depression out of her.

  Two hours later, she returned to the house to find Andrew stumbling around nursing a hangover. She was just about to go upstairs when the doorbell chimed.

  “Let me take your jacket, Detective Cook,” she heard Andrew say.

  Cook? On a Sunday afternoon? Miranda pushed her hands at her hair, cleared her throat, and sat down.

  As Andrew led Cook in, Miranda offered him a polite smile. “Do you have news for us?”

  “Nothing solid, Dr. Jones. Just a loose end or two.”

  “Please sit down.”

  “Great house.” Cop’s eyes below their bushy gray brows scanned the room as he walked to a chair. “Really makes a statement up here on the cliffs.” Old money, he thought, it had its own smell, its own look. Here it was beeswax and lemon oil. It was heirloom furniture and faded wallpaper and floor-to-ceiling windows framed in a burgundy waterfall of what was probably silk.

  Class and privilege, and just enough clutter to make it a home.

  “What can we do for you, Detective?”

  “I’ve got a little angle I’m working on. I wonder if you could tell me where you were, where both of you were, last November. First week.”

  “Last November.” It was such an odd question. Andrew scratched his head over it. “I was here in Jones Point. I didn’t do any traveling last fall. Did I?” he asked Miranda.

  “Not that I recall. Why is that important, Detective?”

  “Just clearing up some details. Were you here as well, Dr. Jones?”

  “I was in D.C. for a few days in early November. Some consult work at the Smithsonian. I’d have to get my desk calendar to be sure.”

  “Would you mind?” He smiled apologetically. “Just so I can tidy this up.”

  “All right.” She couldn’t see the point, but she couldn’t see the harm either. “It’s up in my office.”

  “Yes, sir,” Cook continued when she left the room. “This is quite a place. Must be
a bear to heat.”

  “We go through a lot of firewood,” Andrew muttered.

  “You do much traveling, Dr. Jones?”

  “The Institute keeps me pretty close to home. Miranda’s the frequent flier. She does a lot of consulting, the occasional lecture.” He tapped his fingers on his knee, and noted that Cook’s gaze had shifted to linger on the bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the table beside the sofa. His shoulders hunched defensively. “What does last November have to do with our break-in?”

  “I’m not sure it does, just tugging on a line. You do any fishing?”