Patricia Potter (56 page)

Chris nodded. It was certainly a precaution he himself would have taken.

“How long do you want her gone?”

“Four days.”

“When?”

“Today if possible, no later than tomorrow morning.”

“You don’t want much, do you?” Kelly’s voice was more hostile now as he felt total frustration. He was an officer of the court, sworn to protect the laws, and he had the sick feeling that he was getting involved in something very dangerous. And yet he knew from Chandler’s face he wasn’t going to learn much more. He had to take this man and Meara on faith or possibly risk Lisa.

“All right,” he said. “Lisa’s been wanting something more challenging, and I have a case involving a young man originally from Chicago. I need some more background information on him. I’ll send her there, make sure she’s tied up for several days.”

“Can you go with her?”

“No. I have a case in court right now. In fact I’m due back in an hour, and I have a lot to do between now and then if we’re to get Lisa out of the way.”

“Thank you,” Chris said.

“I’m next door to Meara if you need anything.”

Chris nodded.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“No. But there’s no other way,” Chris said.

Kelly stood reluctantly, wondering if he’d made a wise decision.

“Before you go,” Chris said, “I have something for you.” He held out a packet. “If anything happens to me, mail these envelopes.”

Kelly had even more misgivings than before, but he slowly accepted the package. “Damn it—” he started to say.

“You should get back to your office,” Chris interrupted. “I’ll take care of the check.” His expression left no room for disagreement. It was hard and determined, and dangerous.

Kelly wished he knew more about the man. He had no doubt that he was a lumberman; he’d prepared the power of attorney himself and sent it, but Chris Chandler was more than that. Much more. He realized Meara was probably in good hands. It was his job to make sure Lisa was safe.

But still he hesitated. “I care about Meara,” he said, and there was a warning in his voice.

“Doesn’t everyone?” Chandler asked evenly, but the note of sad regret struck Kelly.

“Apparently
almost
everyone,” Kelly amended.

Something flickered in Chandler’s eyes, but Kelly didn’t know quite what it was. Pain. Or something like it.

Meara looked up as the door flew open. Lisa’s face was brighter and more excited than she’d seen it since Sanders’s death.

“I’m going to Chicago,” she said almost defiantly.

“What? Why?”

“For Kelly. He has a client, a young man charged with murder. He thinks there might be some extenuating circumstances in Chicago. Apparently the boy was terribly abused as a child. He wants me to go through records, interview neighbors, the family. It’s what I’ve been really wanting to do. In fact, he has a friend there, a man he went to law school with, who’s now married. He’s going to help and I’m going to stay with them.”

He did it! Chris did it. And Kelly. God bless him.

“That’s wonderful, Lisa,” she said, truly meaning it.

Lisa stared at her a moment. “I thought you might object.”

“Why?” Meara asked. “I think you’re old enough to make your own decisions.”

Lisa practically glittered with excitement. “You know that’s what I want to do…like Dad. Be an investigator.”

“I know.” Meara smiled. “And I know you will be wonderful at it. Now, when do you leave?”

“Kelly’s already booked a flight for me first thing in the morning.”

“I’ll take you to the airport.”

“All right. Kelly has to be in court, and I don’t want to leave the car out there.” Lisa’s car, a present from Sanders and herself on their daughter’s eighteenth birthday, was her most prized possession.

“Do you need any help packing?”

“I think it’s time I start doing my own,” Lisa said with a half grin and a camaraderie they’d never had before.

“Can I at least watch? If I bring some lemonade?”

Lisa looked at her with a little surprise but a quick smile that had been too rare lately. “Sounds wonderful.”

Chris received a phone call that night, Wednesday night. Kurt Weimer was in New York. He was staying in a hotel that evening and was scheduled to leave on Lufthansa in the morning. “Call me when the plane leaves, with Weimer on it.”

“Right,” Matt said.

He then received a second call from Kelly Tabor. “Lisa will be in Chicago with friends of mine for the next few days.”

“Thanks.”

There was a long pause. “Could you come over tonight for a drink?”

For information, Chris thought dryly. “I’m expecting some calls.”

“Then I’ll come over there.” He wasn’t going to give up, and he meant to let Chandler know it.

Chris sighed. “All right.”

When Kelly arrived, his face was set. “I went to the library after court today, and found clippings of that kidnapping attempt. There were two curious aspects…”

Chris furrowed his eyebrows together. “And…”

“How could Weimer possibly be connected? The kidnapper was a former American soldier.”

Chris shrugged.

“There have been rumors for years that the Jekyll Island Club was closed because of German submarines…the possibility of a raid…”

“I wouldn’t know,” Chris said levelly.

“There was a second curious factor.”

“What would that be?”

“There were damned few details, damned few facts for a major kidnapping. It was almost as if the paper had been…censored.”

“I didn’t think that happened in America,” Chris said lazily. “Would you like a beer or Scotch? It’s all I have.”

“What I want is to know exactly what’s happening.” Kelly’s voice was angry. “In addition to Meara and Lisa, my mother is next door.”

“A Scotch, then,” Chris said as if he hadn’t heard anything.

“Damn you, Chandler, who in the hell are you?”

Chris poured several ounces in both glasses. Neither of them needed to lose their full reason. Chris knew Kelly wouldn’t stop now. He was like a bulldog with a bone.

“How much do you care about Lisa?” he asked finally.

“I love her.”

“And Meara?”

“She saved my mother’s sanity when Dad died.”

“Then don’t ask any more questions. I will tell you that part of what you’re thinking is correct. That’s how Sanders and Meara met, and Sanders pulled her through a very rough time. She doesn’t need reminders.”

“How do you come into it? Were you in the FBI then?” It made sense to Kelly. Chris Chandler was no ordinary businessman. There was something elusive about him.

“It’s Meara’s story,” Chris said finally, slowly. “You will have to ask her.”

“But I can’t, can I?” Kelly said bitterly. He remembered the vulnerability in her eyes at lunch that day.

“Just know I mean her no harm, nor Lisa. They are both very important to me.”

“That’s all I’m going to get?”

“That’s all,” Chris said.

Kelly stared at him, the blue eyes that revealed so little. Blue eyes like Lisa’s. He suddenly sat up straight in the chair. Lisa’s blond hair. What was it about genetics? Sanders’s eyes had been brown, and his hair also brown. And Meara? Green eyes and red hair.

Good God.

He knew his face, which could always be so inscrutable in court, reflected his thought, and he watched Chris Chandler tense.

Kellen Tabor wished like hell that particular moment that he had never demanded to come over. He swallowed his drink. He didn’t know whether his sudden realization was correct, but he did fully grasp that if true, this fact would indeed hurt Lisa Evans. She had always adored her father.

He had asked the question earlier at lunch. Now he asked it again. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“Yes.”

“Then what can I do?”

Kurt Weimer left his hotel at dawn for the New York airport. Now that he knew he was being followed, he readily spotted the tails. He would make them work to his benefit this time.

He’d made several phone calls to Odessa contacts in public phone booths. All the arrangements had been made. He hadn’t contacted Stefan yet, however. He wasn’t ready for the confrontation, even by phone. He’d made some very bad mistakes, and he knew it. But more than one person was going to pay for them.

He paid the taxi driver and tipped him, generously and slowly, until the car following him drew up. It was, in a way, an amusing game to play. But he played it better than the others.

After checking one of his bags at the counter, he took a small satchel and sauntered to the international gates, waiting until a particularly large group deplaned from an international flight and headed for the restroom. He mixed in with them.

His eyes ran around the room until they found a man who was amazingly similar in build and coloring as his own. Kurt went into one of the stalls and started stripping his clothes off. When a satchel matching his own was nudged under the separating wall, he placed his own clothes in his, and exchanged the two. The satchel contained a pilot’s uniform with a captain’s cap and a pair of sunglasses.

Kurt heard the other stall door open and he waited, looking at his watch frequently. Five minutes. Ten. It should be safe enough now. He opened the door and found the restroom almost clear now. He didn’t recognize any faces. He put the glasses on, pulled the cap down, and strode purposely out the door toward the exit. In another twenty minutes he had rented a car under one of his aliases, and was pulling out of the airport.

Jekyll Island was about twenty hours away.

Chapter Thirty-One

M
EARA DROPPED
L
ISA
off at the airport and returned to the island. For the first time in several years, she drove around to the old Millionaire’s Village as the Jekyll Island Club was now called by the tourists.

She had avoided the area for a long time, both because of sad memories and because of regret over the dilapidated state of the clubhouse and cottages.

All of them were vacant. Peeling paint, broken windows, an empty, broken swimming pool, were sad echoes of a unique time and place in American history.

For her that time had been enchantment. A chapter from a fairy tale, complete with its own Prince Charming. She had made her prince into a black villain for many years, but now she was discovering he was not that.

As a child and young adult, she knew she had always seen things in terms of black and white, good and bad, with little in between. She had never accepted that where there was black and white, there must also be gray. Little in the world is absolute. She had, however, stubbornly clung to that belief because it had been easier for her to judge Michael harshly, to condemn him totally because it somehow made her own sins seem less. To believe he had purposely planned to use and seduce her had made the seduction somehow not her fault. It made him black and she white, the helpless victim. But the fault had been no less hers. She had avoided that knowledge, the guilt, all these years. She had wanted him so desperately that she had tossed aside all her upbringing, all her values.

She had remembered everything in the past few days, even those moments she had stuffed in the back of her mind: the times he had tried to pull away, the veiled warnings, the sadness and regret in his eyes, the loneliness in the often squared shoulders that seemed to defy the world. And in the end? If Sanders’s enigmatic comments led to a logical conclusion, Michael had betrayed his country for her and the Connors’ children.

Why hadn’t she considered that before? Because the other emotion, hatred, had been easier to bear. Because she couldn’t accept gray, either in him or in herself. Absolutes.

She turned off the ignition of her parked car and walked around the grounds. Memories. Memories of a spring day when a sky had been so blue she wanted to cry and the air smelled of newly bloomed flowers and the birds sang with the pure joy of being alive. Memories. Memories of a tall man, limping impatiently across a lawn with a wry smile at the corner of his lips. Memories. Memories of a walk, of falling down on the rich earth among the fragrant pine needles and feeling the first thrill of love, the touch of tender lips, the initial tingling of nerves that hinted of emotions and feelings yet undiscovered.

Memories. Memories of another man, a gentle man, who had given her a good, rich life.

It had been good. For both of them. She knew it now. Perhaps she hadn’t been able to give Sanders the furious, splendid passion she’d shared with Michael, but they’d had something else, something really fine: a rare friendship, a warmth, an understanding, a deeply shared love of their daughter. She swallowed, her body and soul a rushing river of emotion and need and sadness and even happiness.

Grays. Not extreme joy or extreme sadness, but mingling colors and shades that gave a portrait depth and richness and character. Until now she had locked her life in black and white, and her picture of him that same way. She had tried to do the same to Lisa in order to protect her, never giving her enough room to test her own wings, because she believed she had made such a mess of her own. But she hadn’t.