Danger in a Red Dress

by Christina Dodd

  “You’re an intriguing case, Hannah Grey. You’re beautiful. You should have the world on a string.” Mrs. Manly tapped her fingertips on her book. “Instead you’re so cautious you hide in sickrooms caring for old people.”

  Obviously stung, Hannah said, “I don’t hide! The sick people need me.”

  “I’m not arguing that I don’t need you. You’ve convinced me that I do.”

  Aha. She had, had she? Exactly as Carrick had told him.

  “But you do hide. I wonder why.” Mrs. Manly rested on the pillows, observing Hannah from eyes heavy with thought. “It can’t be Jeff Dresser who drove you underground.”

  “No.” Hannah spoke emphatically.

  “No, what?” Mrs. Manly raised her brows.

  “No, I’m not playing that game. I’m not going to show you my scars because you’re bored.”

  Mrs. Manly almost smiled. “How about because I showed you mine?”

  “You wouldn’t have done it if necessity hadn’t driven you to it.”

  What scars? What necessity?

  Mrs. Manly continued to rag on Hannah. “You wanted me to be interested in you.”

  “Not that kind of interested. I have found that showing my tender underbelly invariably leads to my guts being ripped out.”

  “You are a frighteningly private person. I wonder what secrets you hide.”

  Yeah, Mrs. Manly, you aren’t the only one.

  But the invalid seemed to know she’d pushed Hannah as far as she could. “So about your ideal man. You want a young man who cares for his health, hair optional. What else?” Before Hannah could answer, Mrs. Manly held up a finger. “Don’t give me that sense of humor stuff. What do you really want?”

  Hannah answered so promptly, Gabriel knew she’d given it a lot of consideration. “I want a man who doesn’t want to use me for anything—I don’t want to be a vehicle for revenge or be the pretty thing that gives a man prestige. I liked old Mr. Dresser, and I appreciate the inheritance, but I didn’t appreciate being the one who helped him teach his family a lesson, and I think he knew people were going to say I slept with him. I won’t be used like that again.”

  “What else?”

  “I want a man who doesn’t lie to me. I want to know the truth about him, and when I think I know it, then I’ll tell him the truth about me.” Hannah ran her fingers through her blond hair. “I am so sick of men and their lies. Jeff Dresser telling the nursing commission that I took the family silver and screwed his dad, while the silver’s rattling around in his car from the one time he came to visit his dad.”

  “What else?” Mrs. Manly was insistent, curious, and Gabriel wanted to cheer her on.

  “I want a man who sticks around. Not one like my father who was there for a good time and gone when it was time to show some responsibility. Oh, and did I mention I expect him not to have a wife?” Hannah glanced at Mrs. Manly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . .”

  Mrs. Manly waved her explanation away. “We both have our battle scars.” She stretched out her hand to Hannah.

  Hannah took it.

  Mrs. Manly said, “I have to believe that somewhere, sometime, a woman will marry a man who’s honest and brave and loyal, and they’ll live happily ever after. If I didn’t believe that, if I didn’t believe in love, I would have ended it long ago.”

  Hannah stood looking at Mrs. Manly, obviously surprised and touched. “I suppose if you, of all people, can believe, I can believe.”

  Mrs. Manly held on to her. “You’re a good girl. Genuine. Strong. Moral in a way I don’t see anymore. I’m sorry for what’s going to happen, but it has to be you.” Mrs. Manly’s mind seemed to be wandering as she said, “There’s no one else.”

  Hannah thought so, too, for she leaned closer. “Mrs. Manly, are you all right?”

  Mrs. Manly still stared intently.

  “I don’t like these moods swings.” Hannah freed herself. “Let me check your blood sugar again.”

  Mrs. Manly seemed to snap back to the present. “For God’s sake, it’s not my blood sugar. I’m old and tired, and if everything goes as planned, I’m going to die soon. Don’t I get to brood occasionally?”

  “Yes, and I get to check your blood sugar when I wish.”

  Gabriel watched Hannah perform the task again, and thought how very well she had acted the whole farce. If he didn’t know better, he would have believed she really was disillusioned about love. If he hadn’t seen that scene downstairs, he might have believed she cared about Mrs. Manly. If Carrick hadn’t told him about her scams, and both Nelson and the state of New Hampshire hadn’t supported Carrick’s tale, he might have believed she was a bedrock of honesty and integrity.

  He would have believed . . . but he didn’t. He was a man of logic. All the evidence pointed to Hannah’s perfidy. And Gabriel had spent too long looking for his family, for his blood kin, and he had them at last. Four brothers, good men, all of them.

  So he believed his brother Carrick.

  TEN

  The next day, after breakfast, as if the previous day’s tantrum hadn’t even occurred, Hannah moved Mrs. Manly into the foyer, and asked the question she always asked. “Before we work on the party, shall we go for a walk?”

  “Yes.”

  Hannah almost tripped on her own feet. Although she always hung the walker on the back of the chair, it had never been used, for Mrs. Manly never wanted to go out. Tentatively, she said, “Shall we go outside?”

  “Where else would we take a walk? In the corridor? Of course we have to go outside.” Mrs. Manly sat like a lump, waiting, while Hannah tried to figure out what had changed. Because Mrs. Manly hadn’t been outside the entire time Hannah had been here, and if Carrick was to be believed, Mrs. Manly hadn’t been outside for fifteen years.

  “What’s the matter, girl?” Mrs. Manly gestured with her ring-covered hands. “Push me.”

  Hannah grasped the handles of the wheelchair and headed toward the entrance.

  “Open the door,” she said to the butler.

  “Miss Grey?” Nelson hovered indecisively.

  Hannah’s voice sharpened. “Open the door and bring two hearty men to help me get Mrs. Manly down to the walk.”

  “I can’t do that. Mrs. Manly doesn’t go outside,” he said.

  Mrs. Manly lunged forward in the chair. With slow, precise words, she said, “Mrs. Manly does as she pleases. Mrs. Manly is the owner of this house, and if, within the next two minutes, you don’t get someone here to help Miss Grey, Mrs. Manly will fire you, and by the time my son hears of it, do not mistake me, you will be long gone, never to return.”

  As her voice rose and the steel of her personality made itself clear, a slow red heat climbed up the butler ’s face. He stiffened and bowed. “Yes, Mrs. Manly.” He strode out.

  “Insolent pup,” Mrs. Manly muttered. “Carrick hired him, but I pay him. He has lessons to learn.”

  In seconds, Nelson returned with two young men dressed in denim overalls, with smudges on their hands. “My apologies for their appearance,” Nelson said. “They’re gardeners.”

  Mrs. Manly waved his explanation away. “Just get me outside.”

  “I’ll push her through the door. You boys help her down the ramp and . . . where would you like to go, Mrs. Manly?” Hannah asked.

  “Take me to the top of the cliff,” she said.

  Nelson looked at Hannah so alarmed that Hannah wondered what Carrick had told him. As Hannah pushed her out the door, she said, “You heard Mrs. Manly. The top of the cliff.”

  It wasn’t really as wild a place as it sounded; every day, Hannah ran along the top of the cliff. A paved path looped up in a long, slow curve to a tumble of huge, smooth granite boulders, and then down toward a sliver of beach, and then up again to the boundary of Balfour land. In the summer, tourists and locals strolled along the walk, trespassing with the Balfours’ tacit permission. Yet the climb was steep, and the two young men were sweating heavily by the time they reached the top.r />
  Hannah set the brake on the wheelchair.

  Mrs. Manly raised her hand imperiously. “That will do. Return for us in an hour.”

  The two young men stood there, uncertain. Then one of them bobbed his head, and they hurried back down the path.

  Mrs. Manly shook her head. “No one knows the rudiments of courtesy nowadays.”

  Hannah stifled her grin. “You have to give them points for trying.”

  “Points for trying.” Mrs. Manly snorted. “Give me a hand.”

  Hannah hurried forward and took her arm. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m walking.”

  “But . . . you . . .” Now, up here, where there was no one to help in case she fell, Mrs. Manly wanted to walk?

  “For God’s sake, girl. If I fall, we’ve got my cell phone. Now give me your arm!”

  Hannah did, hefting her out of the chair and pushing the walker under her hands.

  Mrs. Manly leaned against it, and not until she said, “All right. I’ve got it,” did Hannah step away.

  The path was flat here, and Mrs. Manly headed for the pile of boulders twenty feet away. Once there, she carefully leaned against the broadest one and shut her eyes as if the exertion had exhausted her. But when Hannah hurried toward her in concern, she opened them again and said, irritably, “Stop looking so worried. This is what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. But I thought we’d take it in smaller steps.”

  Mrs. Manly smiled, a painful grimace that faded as she looked out over the ocean. “I don’t think we can. Push the wheelchair away. Then come back here.”

  Hannah did as she was instructed, returning to sit beside Mrs. Manly on the warm granite.

  “This really is the prettiest spot in the world,” Mrs. Manly said. “I’d forgotten how beautiful it would be, so I suppose for that, I should be grateful. But . . . the burden of the house has dragged me down for so long. Too long.”

  The breeze whistled around them, blowing the scents of sea and salt and adventure.

  “You don’t have to stay here.” Hannah gestured across the sea, across the land, and over the thin strip of beach. “You can sell it, give it to the state as a park, run away—”

  Mrs. Manly laughed, a long maniacal cackle. “I can’t. I’m stuck here until the day I die.” She leaned forward in the chair. “Because I know where Nathan deposited his fortune.”

  “Oh, no.” Hannah slid back until she rested flat on her back on the rock, staring up at the blue sky, trying not to hear, trying not to comprehend. “Don’t tell me this.”

  “Who else can I tell?” Mrs. Manly’s face inserted itself into Hannah’s view of scattered and swiftly moving clouds. “You’re the only one I can trust.”

  Hannah stared into the old woman’s insistent eyes. “Who did you trust before?”

  “Torres.”

  “Damn.” Hannah covered her eyes with her hand, trying to shut herself off from the terrible truth.

  Mrs. Manly yanked Hannah’s hand away. “Torres was supposed to outlive me. Instead he keeled over from a heart attack at sixty.”

  “That son of a bitch.”

  “You just can’t find dependable help these days.” Mrs. Manly’s mouth crooked cynically.

  “You sure can’t.” Hannah lifted her head. “How did you know where . . . where he put the money?”

  “I observed. I analyzed. I pried into the records. I found Nathan’s offshore account. I was never as dumb as he believed.”

  No. No, Mrs. Manly was not dumb.

  Mrs. Manly looked down at the mansion, crumbling into decay. “From the day Nathan left me, it was always my intention to funnel the money out of the account and back to the people who had worked for and invested in the company. After I died, I mean. I have no intention of being around for that ruckus.”

  “Of course not,” Hannah said ironically.

  “So first I fixed it so no one could tap that account. I’m a Balfour. I understand finance.”

  Hannah was in awe. “How did you find out who should receive the money? There must have been thousands of people he cheated.”

  “I am his wife. I had access to the financials. And yes, there were thousands, and yes, the computer program to return the money took two years to write.” Mrs. Manly smirked. “That’s why I hired Torres. Carrick always thought he was a lousy butler. Actually, he was a hacker from Argentina, in the country illegally. He acted as my butler, and kept the program current. I paid him very well for his services, and kept him away from the border patrol.”

  “Did you trust him that much?”

  “I don’t trust anybody with that kind of money, so I learned enough about computer programming to keep him honest.”

  “So you are giving the money back to the people Nathan robbed, because they were the ones who were hurt most by his defection.”

  “Look. Don’t give me credit for a warm and giving heart. I don’t give a damn about them and their puny little lives. But I am a Balfour. We live lives of honor. We take care of our people.” Mrs. Manly’s chest heaved, as if being two hundred feet above sea level was too much for her, as if she couldn’t get enough oxygen. “Nathan walked away without a backward glance, leaving me to clean up his mess. And I will.”

  “Noblesse oblige, huh?” Hannah smiled at her, not believing a word of it.

  Mrs. Manly grunted, unwilling to admit to any finer feelings except the ones she’d been trained to feel. “I’d tell Carrick, leave the whole matter to him, but Carrick . . . it’s my fault. By the time I got pregnant, I knew what Nathan was. I knew his son could be charismatic, talented, and absolutely without morals or worth. But I thought . . . I let myself hope for a real child, a legitimate son who would stop Nathan from wandering. I was a fool.”

  “The other children were real, too,” Hannah said gently.

  “Not to me. I didn’t care about the first one. Or the second one. I’d been raised to think every great man had the right to take a mistress or two. Even though everyone knew about the infidelities, even though Nathan bragged about his sons, I could hold my head up, because now I had a son, too.” Mrs. Manly looked down toward the wheelchair. “I realized almost at once Carrick was like his father—a charmer who was rotten to the core. I tell myself that if I’d had Carrick to myself, I could have fixed him. Injected him with some character, some morals. Instead, I had to watch while his father swooped in every month or so, teaching him by example how successful a man could be if he didn’t give a damn about doing the right thing.”

  “That is a difficult role model to overcome,” Hannah said gently.

  “Do you know, I’ve followed the other sons’ careers. They’re men. Real men, with ambitions and work ethics and now every one of them is married and loyal to his wife, and happy. They started out with so much less than Carrick, and now they have everything, because they built their lives on good foundations.” Mrs. Manly’s hands shook. “I hate Carrick because he’s a worm willing to betray me for a dollar. He’s a failure. My failure.”

  “My mother used to tell me that she could teach me the right thing to do, but in the end, I was responsible for the person I became. It’s true of me, and it’s true of Carrick. He’s not your failure. He’s a failure of his own making.”

  Mrs. Manly lifted her head. “You are a nice girl, but you’re not a mother. There isn’t a mother in the world who believes she couldn’t have done better with her child. Certainly not me.”

  “Certainly not you,” Hannah agreed. Certainly not this woman who carried responsibility to such extremes.

  “I don’t trust him. The house is watching us, because somehow he’s fixed it so it does. Anything I do, he’s recording it. Anything I say, he’s recording it.”

  Hannah glanced down the hill. “You think your wheelchair is bugged?”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you check and make sure?”

  “I will.” Hannah started to climb off the rock.

  Mrs. Manly stopped her with a gesture.
“In a minute. Right now I don’t want anyone to know we know.”

  “Correct.” Because whoever would put video cameras in an old woman’s house and microphones in an old woman’s wheelchair was truly a scum bucket of epic proportions.

  “Why didn’t you come forward when Nathan disappeared?” Hannah asked.

  “The government considered me right from the beginning. If I had admitted knowing where the money was, they wouldn’t have said, Thank you. They’d have said, We knew it all along, and put me in prison.”

  Hannah squared her shoulders. “All right. Tell me what I need to know.”

  Mrs. Manly didn’t even have the decency to act surprised by Hannah’s decision, and she certainly wasn’t grateful. “You can’t tell anyone before I’m dead. Any sooner, and I’ll go to jail when the government realizes that I knew the location of the fortune and whisked it away from their greedy, grubby hands.”

  “Right.” Hannah nodded.

  “All you have to do is get down to the butler ’s office in the basement. You were there the day you arrived.”

  “I remember.” How could Hannah forget? It was there she’d first discovered Carrick’s perfidy.

  “The computer on the desk has a program called Household Accounts.”

  “Household Accounts,” Hannah repeated.

  “Open it, and go to Silverware, Inventory.”

  “Silverware, Inventory.”

  “The password is capital B, as in Balfour, capital H, as in House, small N, as in Nathan, capital M, as in Melinda, small C, as in Carrick, asterisk, 1898, as in the year Balfour House was completed. Not started, completed.”

  Hannah repeated every word, visualizing them, using her finger to trace them on the stone. Yet as she did, fear built in her. She didn’t dare forget the password. She didn’t dare leave Balfour House. She was all too aware of the precariousness of her position. She was trapped here, waiting for Melinda to die, or for Carrick to do something desperate. After Mr. Dresser ’s death, and after living her whole life on the brink of disaster, she had glimpsed financial security. A brief flash, and then it was gone, lost in an often-regretted moment of defiance that had branded her as a tramp and Mr. Dresser as an old fool.