In a Heartbeat (8 page)

21

“So, where are we going?” she asked, settling into the spacious front seat of the parked BMW.

Ed shrugged. “LA’s your town, not mine. Where would you like to go?”

Her eyes slid sideways and she looked at him, considering what kind of place might please him. He looked such a dude, she thought, all LA casual in a gray cashmere sweater, chinos, and loafers. On an impulse, she decided to take him to Serenata, a funky little Mexican-style place where she was a regular, along with other young wannabes, writers and actors, as well as just locals. It was low-key and busy and they served a terrible concoction they called a wine margarita, of which she was secretly fond.

She ordered two and smiled at him across the table. “You’ll like it,” she assured him when he raised his eyebrows. “Besides, they don’t serve the hard stuff.”

He laughed. “Then I guess I’d better like it. And since I don’t know my way around a Mexican menu, maybe you’d better order the food as well.” Her wide, slightly lopsided smile reminded him instantly of Riley. Like mother, like daughter, he thought.

“It’s nice, being here with you,” he told her.

“On my terms, this time,” she said. Then, remembering the Four Seasons and the ladies who lunched there and the chauffeured limo, she added, “I hate to tell you, but this is reality, honey.”

He nodded. “I know, I’ve been there.”

“You have?” She was astonished. “I thought you were the heir to a fortune, rich kid makes good and all that, empowering the family’s old millions and turning them into billions with your marketing genius.”

He grinned modestly. “It wasn’t quite like that.”

“No? Then tell me what it
was
like.”

“You first,” he said.

So she told him how she was Melba Eloise Merrydew of Merrydew Oaks, an old Georgia plantation house, with a mother who thought she was a modern-day Scarlett and a hard-drinking father who definitely was not Rhett.

“That lasted all of five years,” she informed Ed. “By then Daddy had lost all the family money, so Mommy took charge. She hocked the plantation, put Daddy into rehab, and moved us into a condo in Atlanta. She put me in a private school she couldn’t afford and, still acting the southern lady, got herself a job as a saleslady in Brown Jordans. Actually, she did quite well there. Unlike me, she always did have style. She ended up running the designer department. Quite a feather in her cap, she called it.

“Anyhow, somehow I got through school, worked as a waitress to pay my way through college. Dad never came home—I mean he quit rehab and just disappeared. We never heard from him again until we were notified by the police that he had died in a car wreck, out in Montana somewhere.

“Mom couldn’t imagine what that old southern gent was doing up in the wilds of Montana, but she wasn’t surprised to hear that there were two causes of the accident. One was his alcohol level—the other was the moose he hit.”

She took a sip of the wine margarita and made a wry little face. “I can’t imagine why I like this,” she complained.

“Nor can I,” he agreed, taking a sip. “So what happened to your mother?”

“Oh, she’s living in comfort, if not exactly splendor, in a retirement condo in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Playing bridge—she’s a killer at bridge—and having a wild social life. And though she’s never cooked in her life, she’s always e–mailing me old southern recipes. And
I
live on Power Bars and Diet Coke! She’s still playing the southern belle, though I guess it’s a bit tougher being a southern belle in a Chapel Hill, North Carolina condo than it was at Merrydew Oaks.”

She laughed, still thinking about her mother, and Ed said, “She’s quite a character.”

“She is, and I love her. And now it’s your turn, Mr. Vincent.”

“Mmm.” He turned his attention to the nachos and salsa. “Maybe later. First, I want you to look at this.”

Mel took the letter he handed her, scanning it quickly. It was the report from the P.I. saying that the laser had detected traces of bloodstains that had been cleaned up.

“So now you believe me,” Mel said triumphantly, glad that she hadn’t been dreaming after all. Though come to think of it, it might have been better for Ed if she had.

“I believed you before. This is evidence, though we still don’t know what happened to the body.”

“What do we do now?”

She was looking expectantly at him, as though he was sure to have all the answers. He hated to disillusion her. “You are the one who can identify the killer. I think you might be in danger.”

Mel gulped her margarita. “
Me?
What about
you
? He missed you once, he’s sure to be around for another try. Anyhow, who
is
he?” She glanced suspiciously at Ed from under her lashes; he hadn’t yet told her about his past and now she wondered. “Tell me
why
someone wants you dead.”

“They don’t. The P.I. believes it was just a robbery gone wrong. One robber killed the other and took off with the money. There’s a hundred thousand missing from the safe.”

“A hundred thousand!”
Her eyes bugged and he laughed.

“When you’ve been as poor as I was, you kinda like to have a bit of chump change around. Just in case.”

“Chump change. Huh. The rest of us should be so lucky.”

“It wasn’t all luck,” he reminded her.

“I know, I know, hard work and all that. I believe you, thousands wouldn’t. Not when you start as the heir to millions.”

“About those millions . . .”

“Yes?”

“We’ll talk about it later,” he said, tucking into a plate of beans and rice with guacamole, chicken tacos, and a green sauce that almost blew his head off. He gasped, agonized. “You don’t need a gun, this is a killer.”

She ignored the food. “But someone wants to kill you. I heard him say so, on the phone.”

“You’re dreamin’, honey.” He grinned. “What we do know is that the robber was an expert. Or at least he was certainly expert at getting rid of the body and cleaning up the place. Even the safe had been relocked, as well as the front door. The flooding obliterated any tire tracks or footprints. So, as they say, Zelda honey, that is that. Now, why don’t you enjoy some of this killer food.”

“There is nothing,” she said, picking at her tamale, “so foolish as a man. Especially a rich man. And you still haven’t told me that story.”

“I will,” he promised. “Later.”

“I’ll drive,” she said when they left the restaurant. “I’ve never driven a BMW, and besides, I want to take you somewhere special.”

He climbed into the passenger seat and she streaked off, heading west down Pico to Santa Monica, then north on Pacific Coast Highway, driving alongside the ocean, through Malibu until she finally made a sweeping U-turn and parked on the rough shoulder on the ocean side of the highway. She pressed a button and the windows slid down. A mere sliver of moon failed to cast any light on the dark waters, but the soft slur of waves on the shore wafted gently into the car, along with the cooler night air.

“Peace,” she sighed, laying her head back against the cool black leather. She turned her head slightly and her eyes met Ed’s.

“Now, tell me about your childhood,” she said quietly.

22

It was not easy for Ed to talk about his family. And in fact he had done so only once before. And that was to another woman.

Ed was the youngest of a brood of six, born in the wooded upslopes of Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains, in a two-room shack with a corrugated tin roof, and plank walls patched with tarpaper on the outside and wallpapered with newspapers on the inside.

For the first fourteen years of his life, Ed never went more than fifteen miles from his homestead. His daddy’s ancient Dodge pickup barely made the trip into Hainsville on a Saturday, loaded with the root vegetables he grew for market. The locals said his pa could grow anything on his small but fertile five acres, but still and all, he barely made enough to keep a roof over their heads and feed his hungry brood, who craved more meat than potatoes.

Trout, smallmouth bass, and rock bass from the streams were not enough to stave the eternal hunger of six growing kids, who endured squash and beans only because they had no choice, and who were sent out to scavenge the woods for the plentiful wild mushrooms and seasonal berries and nuts to add to the family’s larder.

Like his three brothers and two sisters, Ed was a skinny kid, always hungry, always on the alert, and handy with a rifle, scouting for quail and squirrel or woodcock, anything to bring variety to the stewpot his mother had constantly on the stove.

Once a handsome woman, Ellin was so thin that her skeleton showed through her translucent flesh, every bone apparent, the sinews knotted like ropes in her work-weary body. Her meager breasts had nourished six children in quick succession; her calloused hands had soothed their fevered heads when they were sick. She had sung them to sleep in a tired soprano, and smiled as she kissed them good night, promising that one day, soon perhaps, things would be better.

“Then I’ll buy you a new dress, Ma,” young Ed had promised.

“And no doubt I would have also promised her a diamond ring,” Ed said to Mel, “had I known about diamonds then. Which, being only an ignorant young hillbilly, I did not.”

All six kids looked like their ma: narrow hard-boned faces, deep-set blue eyes sunken beneath strong black brows, ears set flat against the head, strong white teeth that flourished without the aid of a dentist. Thanks, their daddy told them, to their diet of vegetables, and to their little milk cow and the few scrawny chickens that provided tiny eggs. Steak was an unknown, boiled fowl an occasion to be savored and remembered, and hog killing a wondrous annual feast of pork and cracklin’.

All the kids had their ma’s luxuriant black hair, straight as a plumb line and thick as hay in a summer meadow, and they all spoke with a Tennessee mountain accent, so dense it sounded like a foreign language.

They ran barefoot from spring to autumn, by which time their feet were Indian-hard, their skin berry-brown from the sun, hair streaked a dozen shades lighter. In September, they filed reluctantly to school again, wearing roughly cobbled shoes that rubbed the skin off their heels. Reluctantly, that is, except for Ed and his eldest brother, Mitchell, who, for entirely different reasons, couldn’t wait to get there.

“My two intellectuals,” Ma called them, smiling as they pored over geography books and history and math. Ed didn’t know what an intellectual was, and neither did Mitch, but each had his own urge to learn. Both wanted something more than this rough, deprived existence.

“Not that I knew then I was deprived,” Ed said to Zelda. “When you’re a kid, you don’t. It’s all there is. If you don’t know about any other way of life, how can you miss it? Yet somehow, somewhere, I believed there was a better life. And it wasn’t a tidy little three-bedroom house with indoor plumbing and a picket fence in Hainsville I longed for. It was a far bigger dream; a wider world.

“I was already in love with the idea of travel and adventure. I didn’t know how, but one day I knew I would spring like a bird from the cage of those forested green foothills and fly around the world on a jet plane. I would dine in Paris and saunter through the London parks, maybe even shake hands with royalty.” Ed smiled. “Nothing seems impossible when you’re just twelve years old.”

Ed’s brother Mitch was different. Narrower eyes half hidden behind prominent cheekbones gave his face an almost Cherokee cast. Of course, those eyes were his mother’s family blue, but the rest of him was closer to his father. Huskier, with muscular shoulders, a tapering back, strong neck, and jutting jaw. He was the odd man out in his sapling-growth family, a full-grown tree before he was even fifteen. Sure, he had that same mark of deprivation, the pinched look of almost-hunger, the wariness about the eyes, the quickness with the rifle. But it was different with Mitch.

Privately, his ma believed she had a changeling on her hands. Though she told herself she loved him equally with the others, she didn’t understand Mitch. There was a streak of cruelty in him. He enjoyed killing animals even if they were not for the pot. He liked to torment his brothers, using his superior weight and strength to wrestle them, screaming, to the ground. And he teased his sisters to the point of tears. He beat up other kids in school and in church, scrapping in the woods after the sermon and shaming his family. He’d even been caught by the deputy brewing moonshine in the forest, reeling about, drunk as a lord.

“Mitch didn’t care what anyone thought,” Ed said to Zelda. “He was a bully who swaggered his way through life. Whatever was bad, he seemed to find it. To our poor mother, it seemed he even sought it out. And no matter how hard Dad whupped him, it didn’t daunt him.

“At seventeen, Mitch towered over our daddy. He could have killed him easily, with just one blow of that powerful arm, one crazed shot from the rifle. And he was an expert marksman. Living with Mitch was like living on the edge of a volcano. You never knew when it might erupt.

“But Dad was so proud of the fact that he owned his five acres and that he owed nobody. The four hundred dollars needed to purchase that strip of land had taken him twenty long years to accumulate.”

“Mitch wants too much,” his daddy said to Ed one day when they were riding into Hainsville in the rusting old white pickup, taking the produce to Saturday market. “Mitch ain’t content to be no scrabble farmer, even though we own our own piece and ain’t sharecroppers no more.

“Hard work is the only answer, son,” he told Ed as they descended through the wispy morning fog, splashing through sparkling streams and over polished rocks. Through meadows waist-high with wildflowers where orange-and-black butterflies unfurled their wings as the early sun warmed them. Down the rutted lane onto the narrow blacktop road that led into the local town, fifteen miles away.

“But mark my words, Mitch ain’t one for hard work. He wants it all and he wants it now. No matter what it takes to get it.”

“And that’s the way it was growing up.” Ed’s tone was deliberately light, but Mel heard the undertone of despair.

She said in a choked voice, “I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “No need to be. I wasn’t the only kid to grow up poor.”

“But you fought your way out of that poverty.”

“Not for a long time after that.” He paused. “A long, long time,” he said softly, and there was such a note of sadness in his voice that Mel was afraid to ask what he meant, so instead she leaned over and kissed him. A sweet nothing of a kiss, light and airy.

While he was still dazed, she started up the car and breezed slowly back down the highway, back home to Santa Monica.

“I’m returning to New York tomorrow morning, early,” Ed said reluctantly. His eyes linked with hers.

She nodded. “And I have to move Mr. and Mrs. Barton Forks from Encino to Sherman Oaks. My, how full life is.” She dropped another kiss, on his cheek this time. “Honey,” she said with a wicked grin, “I surely enjoy playing detective with you.” Then she was out of the car, slamming the door, waving good-bye.

Ed watched her take the front steps in a giant leap, then she turned and waved to him from the door. He was still laughing as he drove away.

They met many times after that—he just couldn’t keep away from Santa Monica. He chartered a small jet and every Friday evening he was there. They went to dinner; took Riley to the Lakers games, and to the Kings, freezing in the ice hockey stadium, eating hot dogs and laughing. They
always
seemed to be laughing. And Riley held on to Ed’s hand as though she never wanted to let him go. Neither of them wanted to let him go . . . even Lola was coming around and didn’t bite him anymore. “And I have the scars to prove it,” Ed had said, laughing. Mel had taken him to all her favorite places; he had met her friends, though she had never met any of his.

“Don’t you have any friends?” she had asked.

“Not too many,” he’d admitted. “I’m a cautious man.”

“I wonder why,” she’d said, puzzled, and he had looked back at her with that strange expression in his blue eyes, sort of faraway, a remembered pain . . . she didn’t quite know what he was thinking.

“Maybe someday I’ll tell you” was all he had said. And then he had changed the subject and whisked her and Harriet and Riley off to the Bel-Air Hotel for a sumptuous Sunday brunch, outdoors in the pretty courtyard. But he never talked about his past again, after that night.