Cheddar Off Dead (22 page)

It took her a while, distracted as she was, but she finally stopped and stared dumbly at the black water. “Where the hell are the boats? I told Marco to meet me here; we're going to leave in the dark, and no one will realize we're not on land anymore.”

“Not even when they find Wendy's car at Belmont Harbor?”

She waved this thought away. “They won't find it for a long time. Why would they? They're not going to be looking here.”

“Doesn't your cousin know that boats are in winter storage?”

“He doesn't usually get to drive the boat. It's my uncle's, like I said. He doesn't trust Marco with it.”

I wondered which uncle this was. Her uncle Enrico? Or another Donato brother that Parker knew nothing about? Certainly Donatos seemed to have a way of multiplying. In any case, cousin Marco sounded about as bright as Cleo was. Perhaps he was driving up from some suburb and unfamiliar with the city boating policies. If that were the case, though, then could he be trusted to pilot a boat? None of this made sense; I wanted to be gone.

“How about if I leave you here, Cleo?”

She flicked her red hair over her shoulder with her free hand, then looked at her watch. “You're going where I tell you.”

“Find your cousin and go. You're running out of time.” Police sirens wailed distantly. I wondered if they could be for me.

Cleo focused in on me. Her eyes shimmered resentfully in the dark. “Don't threaten me!”

“I'm not threatening you; I'm trying to help you.”

“No you're not. This is because of
you
,” she said. She raised her gun and pointed it at my chest. “This is all because of you!”

I fought to find words in my own defense, but my body was frozen with terror. Was this really how I would die, at an empty boat harbor in the dark, with Christmas lights
shining all around me? Had Brad Whitefield believed he would die in a Santa suit?

“Don't, Cleo,” I managed.

“Why not? Give me one good reason why not?”

My mind, dulled with fear, supplied me with only one answer. “Brad said I deserved a second chance.”

Her eyes grew huge. “He said that? When you two were there in the parking lot?”

“Yes. We were talking about life. He said some beautiful things.”

She scowled at me; this had clearly not been the right thing to say. I was about to die.

The gun seemed to tremble in her hands. Then her eyes widened, her body stiffened, and she crumpled to the ground. Behind her stood a man with some type of weapon in his hand.

“Hello, Miss Drake,” he said.

It was Enrico Donato. Even in the dark I saw that he was still wearing his
slippers.

I
stared at him, my mouth open and ready to scream. “Did you kill her? Did you kill your niece?”

He sighed and shook his head. “As I assured you long ago, Miss Drake, I am not in the habit of killing people. This is a Taser, and I regret that I had to use it, but Cleopatra had become unstable. She always was a difficult child.”

“Cleopatra? My God, this family,” I said, staring down at Cleo, who looked like a cement statue of herself.

A suspicion entered my mind, and my head whipped up so that I could study Enrico Donato, who held very still with his Taser in his gloved hand. “How did you know we would be here? You couldn't possibly have known unless she told you.”

He shook his head. “Or unless Frank told me, which he
did. Frank is loyal to me, and for the last few days that meant he was loyal to you.”

“Then why didn't he report the shooting of my house? He must have seen it?”

Donato shrugged. “He recognized my nephew. We weren't sure what he was up to, but we were confident that Eduardo had not committed the crime, since he was with us at the time. I told Frank to watch things more closely. That is how we found out that my niece had betrayed us all and killed a good man.”

He shook his head and slid the Taser into his pocket. “I owe you an apology, Miss Drake. I assured you that no one in my family had hurt Brad Whitefield; now I find out that is not true. I can promise you I did not believe at the time—”

“I understand,” I said. There was genuine grief in Donato's voice, and despite everything—my fear, my anger, my almost overwhelming relief—I felt sorry for him. “But you do know we have to call the police, right?”

“I have already called them. This is a matter of family honor, and we will do the right thing.”

The sirens had grown louder; they had been for me after all.

I shoved my hands into my pockets. “If you're here and Frank came with you, then who was going to drive the boat? The supposed boat, I mean,” I asked, pointing at the empty harbor.

Donato sighed again. “I fear it is one of my less than intelligent nephews. Cleo likely lured him with talk of Brad's sizable life insurance policy.” He met my eyes with
his arresting gray ones. “But I do not believe murderers can collect on those contracts.”

“No—I don't believe they can.”

We stood there in the cold. I could hear the police cars as they screeched onto the Belmont exit and toward the path. “Thank you for saving my life,” I said.

He looked down at Cleo. “I saved both of you. She makes unwise decisions, and too often we have not made her face consequences. Even now, her father and I will provide a team of lawyers for her defense. Yet she will face stern consequences, I fear.”

“Yes. She's already facing some. She misses Brad.”

“Love is a mysterious thing,” said Enrico Donato, looking past me, and I turned to see Jay Parker running down the path toward me, his coat flapping in the cold wind.

“Parker,” I said, walking to meet him. Then suddenly I was in his arms and squeezing him too tightly and realizing just how afraid I had been. Other police officers flowed past us, but I never let go of Parker, who in turn was holding me with a fairly solid grip.

“I seem to always show up too late, after you've already been through danger. I wanted to protect you, to save you,” he said, squeezing me spasmodically. “When I talked to Cleo on the phone, I could tell she was unbalanced. I've never been so afraid, Lilah.”

“You and me both.”

He let me go and looked past me to the deck, where people were tending to the stiffened Cleo. “What happened?”

“Her uncle tased her,” I said, and suddenly I was laughing. It was unforgiveable and inappropriate, and it drew
more than one glance from the team at work behind us, but I couldn't stop. Parker looked concerned; he probably figured this was my last fall from sanity. He pulled me back against him.

I stayed there, giggling into his chest, enjoying the warmth of him, the familiar smell of him, the security of his arms around me. Finally I was able to stop laughing and take some deep breaths. I pulled away and looked at him more carefully. His normally perfect hair was in utter disarray, and his face, for the first time since I had known him, was unshaven. “This has been rough on you,” I said.

“It's been a tough week. It got a lot better when I saw that you were all right.”

“I was scared, Jay. She had a gun, and I thought she might kill me. She shot Wendy!” I cried.

He stroked my hair. “Wendy is okay. They're going to release her tonight. She was shot in the arm, but it was—a lucky place to take a bullet.”

“Oh God.” I shook my head at the weirdness of it all. “Enrico Donato saved my life.”

Parker glanced past me to Donato, who was speaking in his quiet voice to the authorities around him. Then his eyes were back on me. “Let's get you home,” he said.

O
n Christmas Eve, my parents' house was a Christmas fantasy, with real pine swags wound around the stair rails and a magical tree filled with the ornaments I remembered from childhood. Cam and Fina sat close together on the couch, and Fina displayed her wedding ring to my beaming parents. Across from them sat Wendy and Bets, my mother's new best friends (and mine). Like all people who go through trauma, we found ourselves compelled to talk about it, to tell the story to one another even though most of us had been a part of it. We had spent much of the evening rehashing our harrowing adventure, all of us occasionally touching Wendy's bandaged arm as a sort of talisman of good fortune.

Mick was in his element. He wore a red holiday scarf
and strolled from person to person, getting endless petting and probably too many treats.

Wendy had been distressed since the previous night when Cleo turned on us; she felt it was unprofessional of her to allow her weapon to be taken in that way, although all of us had assured her that we, too, had been fooled into thinking Cleo had been in real danger. Parker understood the situation, and after a couple of interviews with Cleo, he told Wendy that she had in fact succeeded in keeping me safe, since Cleo had admitted being put off by Wendy's presence and had been unwilling to approach me, despite her fears that I might remember something about her involvement in the crime.

I was hovering near a gold plate covered in generous pieces of my mother's homemade fudge, eating too much of it, as I did each year. I occasionally switched to a different plate and retrieved a piece of cheese for Mick, who had relocated to a spot under my table. His red scarf brushed softly against my arm.

“Lilah, come back to us,” my mother said. She had been beaming widely all evening, a smile that was mostly due to relief and partly due to spiked eggnog. I had learned my lesson about that particular drink and was sticking to hot tea.

“I'm here,” I said. “Eating fudge, just like every Christmas. But we need to change the subject. We should be talking about holiday things. Baby Jesus and the snow outside, and the stockings hung by the chimney with care.”

My mother laughed. “This is the best Christmas ever. I'm so happy that you are all here and safe. All my children, by birth and by marriage and by adoption.”

That last part was for Bets and Wendy, who smiled and lifted their glasses.

When the doorbell rang, everyone stiffened for a moment; my father left the room, and we heard his voice mingling in friendly tones with the voice of Jay Parker. The two men appeared in the doorway. Parker's eyes sought mine, but whatever he might have said was drowned out by Serafina screaming. “My purse! My beautiful bag!”

She leaped from the couch and dove on Parker, who was in fact holding Serafina's lovely Italian leather handbag. “Where did you find it?” she cried.

Parker shrugged. “I just had to check a few Dumpsters near your apartment.”

I stared at him, openmouthed, while Serafina continued to hug him until her husband stood and pulled her away. I said, “You went Dumpster diving on Christmas Eve just to look for Serafina's purse?”

Serafina was on the couch now, examining the inside of her bag. “It is all here—everything—just the money is gone. Money is the least important thing, yes?” Now she transferred her joy to Cam in the form of hugs and kisses, and he accepted them with a smug expression.

He did manage to say, “Thanks, Jay. That was really cool of you. I should have thought to look there.”

It was the first time Cam had ever called Parker by his first name, and Parker's face brightened with surprise. Then my family closed around him, patting his back and asking him questions and (in the case of my mother) plying him with food. I went into the kitchen and retrieved Mick's leash and my coat. Parker was still wearing his, but he wouldn't be for long if he planned to stay.

I went back into the living room and waved to him. “I was just about to walk Mick. Do you want to go with me?”

Six people around Parker now suddenly found reasons to walk away from him, talking among themselves. “I would like to, yes,” Parker said.

We went out into the early evening cold. It wasn't snowing, but the occasional random flake hit our faces as the weather sorted out what it wanted to do. I handed the leash to Parker so I could zip up my coat. He looked very natural walking Mick, so I let him keep doing it.

“Lilah,” Parker said.

“I didn't mean to interrogate you over the phone yesterday.”

“I don't want this to be a problem. I want to be with you. I made a mistake the first time, and I missed you.”

“I missed you, too. And I don't want to create problems. But it seems to me the truth is a pretty big thing to have a disagreement about. I can't be with someone who thinks I'm dishonest.”

“I don't.”

“But what if you do, deep down? And then there comes a time that you need to trust me, really trust me, and you find that you can't?”

Mick stopped to sniff a patch of snow, and Parker faced me. “Lilah, I regret the way I handled a lot of things. And I am sorry that I lied to you about my mother. All I can do is try to start from this point.”

I took his gloved hand, the one that wasn't holding a leash, and held it. “When I was driving down the Lakeshore last night, wondering if Cleo was crazy enough to shoot me, I tried to think comforting thoughts—of my family and
Mick—but mostly of you. I've only known you for a couple of months, but I can't seem to stop thinking about you.”

Parker looked earnest. “What if we just made a pact right now to only look forward? And we'll both promise not to lie to each other ever again?”

I studied his face, strong and finely chiseled in the evening light. “So we're at that point when we're talking about second chances, like you said in my house, when this all started?”

“We are at that point, yes.”

“I would like a second chance with you, Jay Parker. And I will never lie to you again.”

“I won't lie to you, either, Lilah.”

“Okay. Can I kiss you now?”

“I wish you would.”

I stood on tiptoe and pressed my lips against his. Parker slid one arm around me. Mick's nose had moved to Parker's shoes. Finally Parker broke away and laughed. “He's licking my feet.”

“He's affectionate, like me,” I said. “Hey, do you have time to come back in and celebrate Christmas with us?”

“For an hour or so. Can you spare some time after that to come over to Mom's with me? Nothing would make her happier than to see me come home with a girlfriend.”

“Am I your girlfriend, Parker?” I said, batting my lashes at him.

He let go of Mick's leash and slid both his arms around my back. “Do you know what? I hear your name in my head all day. When I first met you, I thought it was a pretty name, but now it's almost like music to me.
Lilah
.” He kissed me. Mick sat down directly on our feet, clearly not pleased to
lose our attention. “And yes, you are my girlfriend. Tell that to your Italian chef.”

I sent him a regretful look. “He's offered me a regular spot. Is that going to be a problem?”

His mouth was near mine; I could feel the warmth of his skin. “I know he's good for your career. Just keep it in the studio, okay? I don't want to have to compete with that guy.”

“You never would, Jay. He had his chance, and he lost.”

“And I won.”

“You did. I keep thinking of what Brad Whitefield said, about his island of escape. Maybe he did want to be alone, but I think he would have chosen to be with Isabel eventually. I think he was in love with her; I understand, because that expression on his face—I see it on my own in the mirror, when I'm thinking about you.”

*   *   *

Two hours later we drove to Ellie Parker's house. Ellie, my good friend, had tried to initiate a relationship between her son and me back in October, and the attempt had failed. Now Parker and I had reconciled, but Ellie didn't know that yet.

Parker got out of the car, looking like a mysterious sailor in his dark coat, then came around to my side to help me out. “You look pretty,” he said.

I smiled, and we made our way up the driveway, past a couple of other cars. Parker's brothers were there with their families.

Parker had texted his mother that he was coming, and she met us at the door. “Hi, sweetheart. I'm so glad you could make it, and—is that
Lilah
?” Ellie practically dragged me
across the threshold and gave me a big hug. “You worked things out?” she said in my ear.

“We did,” I murmured.

She turned to hug Jay and wish him Merry Christmas. “Thanks for getting me the present I wanted,” she said to him.

He grinned. “It's the present I wanted, too.”

I said nothing, but I realized it was what I had asked for, when I spoke with a costumed Brad Whitefield on that fateful day when we stood together in a delicate snowfall. I wanted a second chance, I'd told him, and he had smiled at me and told me to believe in my dream.

Now Jay Parker and his mother and I walked together to the main room, where Jay's two brothers, their wives, and three little children sat around the tree. They looked up at us, their faces bright and expectant.

Parker stepped forward, holding my hand, and said, “Everyone? This is
Lilah.”