The Redhead and the Preacher: A Loveswept Historical Romance (44 page)

“He was based on real people, people like these boys,”
Laura argued. “Look at that puzzle. Could you do it? I couldn’t.”

He glanced with distaste at the twins bent over the puzzle. They were working swiftly, and had assembled almost a fifth of it already.

“I wouldn’t
want
to,” he muttered. “I got enough puzzles in my life.”

“That’s not the issue,” Laura said. “Could you do it? That fast?”

He shrugged. He swore again. He still had his overcoat on, and sweat was starting to bead his face.

“When was your birthday?” Laura asked.

He scowled. “What? Now we’re gonna play astrology?”

“I’ll show you what they can do. When’s your birthday?”

“April twenty-seventh, 1941,” he muttered. “Curse the day.”

Laura rose upright again and turned to the work table. “Rickie—tell me what day of the week was April twenty-seventh, 1941.”

Rickie did not look up from the puzzle. “Sunday,” he said without hesitation.

She turned back to Valentine. “Well?” she said.

He looked both displeased and startled. “He got lucky.”

“Try him on anything,” she challenged.

“My sister got married in 1963,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “September seventh.”

“Rickie,” she said, “what day of the week was September seventh, 1963?”

“Saturday,” Rickie replied without looking up.

She picked up her appointment book. She looked back to the first part of the year. She pointed to an entry in January. It said, “Rickie excused. Dentist—filling. 1:30.”

“Rickie,” she said carefully, “the dentist gave you a filling. Tell me the time and place.”

Rickie took a drink of juice and wiped his mouth. He picked up a puzzle piece. “January eighth. Friday—one-thirty. The office has an aquarium. Thirteen fish. Six striped ones. Four black ones. Three gold ones.”

She flipped through the book. She saw the entry reminding her of Herschel’s birthday party in July. She pointed it out to Valentine. “Rickie, when was Herschel’s birthday party?”

Rickie yawned. “July fourteenth. Wednesday—three-thirty.”

She reached to her desk, picked up her calculator. “Rickie, tell me the number of candles on Herschel’s cake.”

“Twenty-nine.”

Laura held the calculator so that Valentine could see it. She punched in the numbers. “Rickie, what’s twenty-nine times twenty-nine?”

As soon as she said it, she hit the
equals
button.

“Eight hundred forty-one,” Rickie said, almost as quickly as the number came up in the calculator’s window.

“What’s eight hundred forty-one times eight hundred forty-one?” she asked, punching in the numbers.

The number 707,281 displayed almost simultaneously as Rickie said it.

She kept throwing challenges out to Rickie. He met them effortlessly, until Valentine seemed impressed in spite of himself.

She started to push in another set of numbers, but Valentine gestured for her to stop. “No more,” he said, shaking his head. He gave Rickie another cold look. “He’s a goddamn freak.”

Laura was infuriated. But Oliphant opened the door and reentered. Because now she and Valentine had an audience, she tried to temper her reply, but she still spoke with passion.

“He’s not a freak,” she said. “
They’re
not freaks. They’re human beings, just like you and me.”

“Human beings,” Valentine muttered, as if he held the entire species in contempt.

Laura clenched her fist. “Listen,” she said from between her teeth. “They can help you find out who killed that lovely old man. He was always such a gentleman. He never really talked to us, but he was always so nice—”

Oliphant cleared his throat. He walked to the desk. He
gave Laura an ironic sideways glance, but he spoke to Valentine. “They got a make on the victim.”

“Yeah?” Valentine said. “Well?”

“Well, hang on to your ass. It’s ‘Saint Frankie’ Zordani.”

The name meant nothing to Laura, and she was surprised by Valentine’s strong reaction. “The hell you say,” he said, as if in a mixture of shock and awe. It was the first time she had seen the man show an emotion other than suspicion or disapproval.

Valentine turned his attention back to Laura with a smile that was close to a sneer. “Well, well,” he said with false pleasantness. “This wasn’t your average ‘Let’s drive by and kill somebody’ shooting. This wasn’t random. This has got
interesting
.”

“Interesting?” Laura said, doubt in her voice. What she had seen was terrible, shocking; how could he find it interesting?

Valentine’s superior smirk stayed in place. He nodded. “Your ‘lovely old man’? ‘Such a gentleman’? Who was. ‘so nice’?”

“Yes?” she asked with a frisson of foreboding.

“A drug lord,” Valentine said with satisfaction. “This wasn’t any random violence you witnessed. This was planned. It was a hit. A major drug war hit.”

Her scalp prickled, and a cold lump formed in her throat. She couldn’t speak.
Planned? A hit?
she thought sickly.
A drug lord and a drug war?

“The D.A.’s office wants a statement. Then they want those kids in protective custody. Maybe the woman, too,” Oliphant said. “Immediately.”

Valentine nodded. He rose and picked up his hat from the desk. He looked Laura up and down.

“Get your coat,” he ordered. “And the kids’. They’re material witnesses in this—if what they say can hold up in court. Let’s go.”

“Protective custody?” Laura said, stunned. “Material witnesses? Court? You mean these children might be in danger?”

“Worry about number one, lady,” Valentine said. “You might be in trouble yourself. You got yourself in the
middle of something big. Oh, you’ve done it up right, no mistake.”

A tide of horror swept her. It had never occurred to her that she had to do anything more than have the boys tell the police about the license number. Now Valentine was talking about courts and witnesses and drug wars and protection—it was incomprehensible. “But—” she protested. “But—”

Valentine gave a snort of cynical laughter. “The D.A. ain’t gonna believe
this
. We got witnesses—but they’re eight-year-old idiots.”

Don’t use that language
, Laura wanted to say, but the words stuck in her throat. She could only stare at Valentine’s unsympathetic face.

“Blue rhubarb, blue rhubarb, blue rhubarb,” said Trace.

“Cows fly in outer space,” said Rickie.

Charlie Hobart packed the suitcase, unsure whether she should feel happy or sad. Peter’s overbearing mother was dead—reason, certainly, to celebrate—but Jenny would be leaving tomorrow to visit Tess. The absence of her fourteen-year-old daughter always unsettled Charlie and evoked more than a little guilt.

She sighed and tucked a pouch of maxipads into the inside pocket. Though Jenny was mature for her age, Charlie still worried when she went off to visit Tess: Tess, after all, had no children, not even a husband. And though Charlie knew, from their years together at college, that Tess was able to take care of herself, she wondered if her long-ago friend was capable of looking after another human being. The summers Jenny spent with Tess still had not quelled Charlie’s fears, for, at thirty-seven years of age, Tess had seemingly forever dodged responsibility, sequestered in her glassblowing studio, doing God only knew what. Yet Jenny loved her “aunt” Tess, loved spending summers with her in Massachusetts. And Jenny’s absence enabled Charlie and Peter to come and go as they pleased—to the Hamptons, to Newport, to the Berkshires. So far, they had all survived the arrangement.

“Don’t you think Jenny’s old enough to do that?”

Charlie closed the lid on the suitcase. She didn’t turn toward her husband’s voice in the doorway. “I’m making sure she has everything she needs.”

“Tom Williamson is in the library. He’s here to go over Mother’s will.”

Charlie crossed her arms and looked out the window of her daughter’s bedroom, across the rolling, lush grounds of
the Hudson Valley estate. Jenny, Charlie knew, would not miss Peter’s mother either. The woman had a subtle, yet distinct way of informing Jenny that she didn’t measure up to Hobart quality. Charlie knew the feeling.

“I’ll be down in a minute,” she said.

She heard Peter’s footsteps retreat and wondered what was going through his mind. Terror, probably, mixed with mounds of insecurity. Many offspring of a matriarch such as Elizabeth Hobart might feel tremendous relief at her death. They might languish in the release of such a heavy, dark burden. They might, at last, find peace.

She wondered if Peter would. Peter had been overly dependent on his mother. After his father’s death when Peter was six, he watched as his mother lorded over the family’s textile mills with the determination and fortitude of a man, in an era when only men were allowed to show such strength. He watched, and he labored to master his legacy. Yet along the way, Peter had acquiesced, becoming another of his mother’s people-possessions, to be ruled, molded, and manipulated. Charlie feared that despite Elizabeth’s death, the woman would remain in control.

In all these years, the only time Peter had wavered from his mother’s wishes was when he married Charlie—unacceptable, undeserving Charlene O’Brien, from a working-class family of eight, from Pittsburgh, of all places. But Elizabeth apparently had determined that living with Charlie’s background was preferable to living without her son, especially when Peter and Charlie arrived at the Hobart manor from college with a marriage certificate in one hand and a crying infant in the other. Elizabeth Hobart had gritted her teeth and let them in. And Charlie—and Jenny—had been paying for it ever since.

Maybe now things would change, if not for Peter, then at least for herself. And Jenny.

Charlie turned back to the suitcase and slowly closed the lid. She was, she knew, procrastinating going downstairs. Even after all these years, Charlie still wasn’t comfortable with brandy and stiff chatter and the hard Victorian settee in Elizabeth Hobart’s library. Even after all these years Charlie would have preferred jeans and sweatshirts, and curling her legs underneath herself on lumpy, overstuffed cushions. She wondered if Peter knew that, or if he had, instead, chosen to
believe that Charlie enjoyed her leading role as dutiful wife, society lady, the role she had worked so hard to win, to cultivate, then play out so well.

She stooped to check her hair in the mirror of Jenny’s dressing table, to be sure that no golden-brown loose strands had escaped the big gold clip at the nape of her neck. But as she caught her reflection, Charlie ignored her newly rinsed hair and looked instead into her eyes, eyes that had once been bright blue, but now seemed to have lost their enthusiasm, their zest. Age, she suspected, had done that. Age, motherhood, and Elizabeth Hobart. A small spark of excitement tingled through her. Now that the woman was dead, maybe Charlie would begin to live. Maybe she could stop playacting at being a woman she wasn’t. Maybe she could finally become the woman she was meant to be. Whoever that was.

She glanced at the photos inside the edge of Jenny’s mirror, neatly clipped magazine photos of scary-looking rock groups with unfamiliar names, and a photo of Jenny herself—thick-dark-haired, huge-eyed Jenny—crouched beside a shaggy beige-colored dog, Tess’s dog. In the picture, Jenny was smiling. Charlie realized it had been a long time since she saw her pensive daughter smile. Perhaps it was the company of the dog that brought out that beautiful smile; perhaps it was because the photo had been taken last summer when Jenny was with Tess.

For all her oddities, Tess was probably still the warm, comfortable woman Charlie had grown so close to in college. It was hard to know: Charlie had changed, wouldn’t Tess have, too? In the last few years, they had drifted into speaking only at Christmas and again in the spring to arrange Jenny’s schedule. Charlie touched the image of her smiling daughter in the photo and wondered if she and Tess would have bothered to stay in touch at all if it hadn’t been for Jenny. Jenny, the teenaged enigma in Charlie’s life.

Charlie knew she hadn’t spent enough time with Jenny. Years ago, she had let herself become swallowed up by a busy life of charities and gallery openings and round-robins at the tennis club—anything to pretend her life was full and happy, anything to try to gain the respect and acceptance of Elizabeth Hobart. Anything to prove to herself that she could have a better life than her own mother did; Her mother
who had been tied to a drafty old house by the bondage of diapers and never-ending worries, and who, even today, clipped food coupons and bought a new dress only for special occasions.

Being awarded the scholarship to Smith College and then landing a man like Peter had been Charlie’s greatest achievements, her way out. But Elizabeth had quickly tainted the dream, and instead of enjoying her success and her well-earned comforts, Charlie had found herself struggling to keep peace, struggling to live up to Elizabeth Hobart’s demands, to become the kind of woman Elizabeth wanted for a daughter-in-law: Someone more like the woman Peter’s brother John had married. Ellen was pretty and sweet and soft-spoken, and always knew how to act, what to do. The fact that she had been brought up “well-moneyed” allowed her to glide into Hobart life with seamless ease. Ellen and John’s two children were, of course, equally flawless. So Elizabeth Hobart had coddled and spoiled them. She had not coddled Charlie. And she had not spoiled Jenny.