The Bloodline Feud (Merchant Princes Omnibus 1) (6 page)

Another message, from Paulette. Miriam tensed. ‘Miriam, honey, let’s talk. I don’t want to rake over dead shit, but there’s some stuff I need to get straight in my head.
Can I come around?’

She hit the ‘pause’ button. Paulette sounded severely messed up. It was like a bucket of ice water down her spine.
I did this. I got us both fired,
she began thinking, and
her knees tried to turn to jelly. Then she thought,
Hold on. I didn’t fire anybody!
That switched on the anger again, but left her feeling distinctly shaky. Sooner or later
she’d have to talk to Paulie. Sooner or –

She hit the ‘next message’ button again.

Heavy breathing, then: ‘Bitch. We know where you live. Heard about you from our mutual friend Joe. Keep your nose out of our business or you’ll be fucking sorry’ –
click.

Wide-eyed, she turned and looked over her shoulder. But the yard was empty and the front door was locked. ‘Bastards,’ she spat. But there was no caller ID on the message and probably
not enough to get the police interested in it. Especially not if Joe’s minions at
The Weatherman
started mud slinging with forged firewall logs: They could make her look like the
next Unabomber if they wanted to. For a moment, outrage blurred her vision. She forced herself to stop panting and sit down again, next to the treacherous, venomous answering machine.
‘Threaten me in my own home, will you?’

The gravity of her situation was only just sinking in. ‘Better keep a gun under my pillow,’ she muttered under her breath. ‘Bastards.’ The opposite wall seemed to be
pulsing slightly, a reaction to her fury. She felt her fingers clenching involuntarily. ‘Bastards.’ Kicking her out of her job and smearing her reputation wasn’t enough for them,
was it? She’d show them –

– Something.

After a minute she calmed down enough to face the remaining message on the answering machine. She had difficulty forcing herself to press the button. But the next message wasn’t another
threat – quite the opposite. ‘Miriam, this is Steve from
The Herald
. I heard the news. Get in touch.’

For that, she hit the ‘pause’ button yet again, and this time frowned and scribbled a note to herself. Steve wasn’t a chatty editor, like Andy; Steve treated words like dollar
bills. And he wouldn’t be getting in touch if it didn’t involve work, even freelance work. A year ago he’d tried to headhunt her, offering a big pay raise and a higher position.
Taking stock of her options – and when they were due to mature – she’d turned him down. Now she had reason to regret it.

That was the end of her mailbox, and she hit the ‘erase’ button hard enough to hurt her finger. Two editors talking about work, a former office mate wanting to chew over the corpse
– and what sounded like a death threat.
This isn’t going to go away
, she realized.
I’m in it up to my neck now.
A stab of guilt:
So is Paulie. I’ll
have to talk to her.
A ray of hope:
For someone who’s unemployed, I sure get a lot of business calls.
A conclusion:
Just as long as I stay sane, I should be all
right.

The living room was more hospitable right now than the chairless den, its huge french doors streaked with rain falling from a leaden sky. Miriam went through, considered building a fire in the
hearth, and collapsed into the sofa instead. The combination of fear, anger, and tension had drained most of her energy. Opening her planner, she turned to a blank page and began writing:

Miriam’s eyes narrowed and she chewed the cap of her pen. This was going to take planning, but at least it was beginning to sound like she had her ducks lined up in a row. She began
jotting down tasks:

*

The next day Miriam went shopping. It was, she figured, retail therapy. Never mind the job-hunting, there’d be time for that when she knew for sure whether or not she was
going insane in some obscurely nonstandard manner. It was October, a pretty time of year to go hiking, but fall had set in and things could turn nasty at the drop of a North Atlantic depression.
Extensive preparations were therefore in order. She eventually staggered home under the weight of a load of camping equipment: tent, jacket, new boots, portable stove. Getting it all home on the T
was a pain, but at least it told her that she could walk under the weight.

A couple of hours later she was ready. She checked her watch for the fourth time. She’d taken two ibuprofen tablets an hour ago and it should be doing its job by now.

She tightened the waist strap of her pack and stretched nervously. The garden shed was cramped and dark and there didn’t seem to be room to turn around with her hiking gear and backpack
on.
Did I put the spare key back?
she asked herself. A quick check proved that she had. Irrelevant thoughts were better than
Am I nuts?
– as long as they weren’t an
excuse for prevarication.

Okay, here goes nothing.

The locket. She held it in her left hand. With her right she patted her right hip pocket. The pistol was illegal – but as Ben had pointed out, he’d rather deal with an unlicensed
firearms charge than his own funeral. The rattling memory of a voice snarling at her answering machine, the echo of rifle fire in the darkness, made her pause for a moment. ‘Do I really want
to do this?’ she asked herself. Life was complicated enough as it was.

Hell yes! Because either I’m mad, and it doesn’t matter, or my birth-mother was involved in something huge. Something much bigger than a billion-dollar money-laundering scam
through Proteome and Biphase.
And if they killed her because of it – A sense of lingering injustice prodded her conscience. ‘Okay,’ she told herself. ‘Let’s do
it. I’m right behind myself.’ She chuckled grimly and flicked the locket open, half-expecting to see a photograph of a woman, or a painting, or something else to tell her she needed
help –

The knot tried to turn her eyes inside out, and then the hut wasn’t there any more.

Miriam gasped. The air was cold, and her head throbbed – but not as badly as last time.

‘Wow.’ She carefully pushed the locket into her left pocket, then pulled out her pocket dictaphone. ‘Memo begins: Wednesday, October 16, 8 p.m. It’s dark and the
temperature’s about ten degrees colder . . . here. Wherever the hell “here” is.’ She turned around slowly. Trees, skeletal, stretched off in all directions. She was standing
on a slope, not steep but steep enough to explain why she’d skidded. ‘No sign of people. I can either go look for the chair or not. Hmm. I think not.’

She looked up. Wind-blown clouds scudded overhead, beneath a crescent moon. She didn’t turn her flashlight on. No call for attracting attention, she reminded herself. Just look around,
then go home . . .

‘I’m an astronaut,’ she murmured into the dictaphone. She took a step forward, feeling her pack sway on her back, toward a big elm tree. Turning around, she paused, then knelt
and carefully placed an old potsherd from the shed on the leafy humus where she’d been standing. ‘Neil and Buzz only spent eight hours on the moon on that first trip. Only about four
hours on the surface, in two excursions. This is going to be my moonwalk.’
As long as I don’t get my damn fool self shot,
she reminded herself. Or stuck. She’d brought
her sleeping bag and tent, and a first-aid kit, and Morris’s pistol (just in case, and she felt wicked because of it). But this didn’t feel like home. This felt like the wild woods
– and Miriam wasn’t at home in the woods. Especially when there were guys with guns who shot at her like it was hunting season and Jewish divorcées weren’t on the protected
list.

Miriam took ten paces up the hill, then stopped and held her breath, listening. The air was chilly and damp, as if a fog was coming in off the river. There was nothing to hear – no traffic
noise, no distant rumble of trains or jets. A distant avian hooting might signify an owl hunting, but that was it. ‘It’s really quiet,’ Miriam whispered into her mike.
‘I’ve never heard it so silent before.’

She shivered and looked around. Then she took her small flashlight out and slashed a puddle of light across the trees, casting long sharp shadows. ‘There!’ she exclaimed. Another
five paces and she found her brown swivel chair lying on a pile of leaf mold. It was wet and thoroughly the worse for wear, and she hugged it like a long-lost lover as she lifted it upright and
carefully put it down. ‘Yes!’

Her temples throbbed, but she was overjoyed. ‘I found it,’ she confided in her dictaphone. ‘I found the chair. So this is the same place.’ But the chair was pretty messed
up. Almost ruined, in fact – it had been a secondhand retread to begin with, and a night out in the rainy woods hadn’t helped any.

‘It’s real,’ she said quietly, with profound satisfaction. ‘I’m not going mad. Or if I’m confabulating, I’m doing it so damn consistently –
’ She shook her head. ‘My birth-mother came here. Or from here. Or something. And she was stabbed, and nobody knows why, or who did it.’ That brought her back to reality. It
raised echoes of her own situation, hints of anonymous threatening phone calls, and other unfinished business. She sighed, then retraced her steps to the potsherd. Massaging her scalp, she sat down
on the spot, with her back to the nearby elm tree.

She stopped talking abruptly, thrust the dictaphone into her hip pocket, pulled out the locket, and held her breath.

The crunch of a breaking branch carried a long way in the night. Spooked, she flicked the locket open, focused on its depths, and steeled herself to face the coming hangover: She really
didn’t want to be out in the woods at night – at least, not without a lot more preparation.

*

The next morning – after phoning Andy at
The Globe
and securing a commission for a business supplement feature on VC houses, good for half a month’s income,
with the promise of a regular weekly slot if her features were good enough – Miriam bit the bullet and phoned Paulette. She was nerving herself for an answering machine on the fifth ring when
Paulette answered.

‘Hello?’ She sounded hesitant – unusual for Paulie.

‘Hi, Paulie! It’s me. Sorry I didn’t get back to you yesterday, I had a migraine and a lot of, uh, issues to deal with. I’m just about getting my head back together. How
are you doing? Are you okay?’

A brief silence. ‘About as well as you’d expect,’ Paulette said guardedly.

‘Have you had any, uh, odd phone calls?’

‘Sort of,’ Paulette replied.

Miriam tensed.
What’s she concealing?

‘They sent me a re-employment offer,’ Paulie continued, guardedly.

‘They did, did they?’ asked Miriam. She waited a beat. ‘Are you going to take it?’

‘Am I, like hell!’ Paulette sounded furious. Miriam hadn’t expected Paulie to roll over, but it was good to get this confirmation.

‘That bad, huh? Want to talk about it? You free?’

‘My days are pretty open right now – listen, are you busy? How about I come over to your place?’

‘Great,’ Miriam said briskly. ‘I was worried about you, Paulie. After I got past being worried about me, I guess.’

‘Well. Should I bring a pizza?’

‘Phew . . .’ Miriam took stock.
Just a bitch session together? Or something more going on?
‘Yeah, let’s do that. I’ll lay on the coffee right
away.’

‘That’d be wonderful,’ Paulette said gratefully.

After she’d put the phone down, Miriam pondered her motives. She and Paulette had worked together for three years and had occasionally hung out together in their off-hours. Some people you
met at work, socialized with, then lost contact after moving on; but a few turned into friends for life. Miriam wasn’t sure which Paulie was going to turn out to be.
Why did she turn the
re-employment offer down?
Miriam wondered. Despite being shell-shocked from the crazy business with the locket, she kept circling back to the Monday morning disaster with a rankling sense of
injustice. The sooner they blew the lid off it in public, the sooner she could go back to living a normal life. But then the locket kept coming back up.
I need a sanity check,
Miriam
decided.
Why not Paulie?
Better to have her think she’d gone nuts than someone whose friendship went back a long way and who knew Iris. Or was it?

An hour later the doorbell rang. Miriam stood up and went to answer it, trying to suppress her worries about why Paulette might be coming. She was waiting on the doorstep, impatiently tapping
one heel, with a large shopping bag in hand. ‘Miriam!’ Paulette beamed.

‘Come in, come in.’ Miriam retreated. ‘Hey, what’s that? Have you been all right?’

‘I’ve been worse.’ Paulie bounced inside and shut the door behind her, then glanced around curiously. ‘Hey, neat. I was worried about you, after I got home. You
didn’t look real happy, you know?’