Ivy Secrets (45 page)

“Believe me, we haven’t forgotten. A girl is missing, as is her quarter-of-a-million-dollar property.”

Tears sprung to her eyes. “Are you saying you think I’ve got something to do with Jenny’s disappearance?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe once you realized the girl was gone you saw your opportunity to steal the egg.”

Tess began to tremble.

Suddenly Charlie stood in the doorway. “What the hell’s going on?” she demanded.

“Th-they think I did it,” Tess stammered. “Goddammit, Charlie, tell them I didn’t do it. I’d never do anything to hurt Jenny …”

Charlie rubbed the back of her neck. “Will someone please explain this?”

The agent stood. “Routine questioning, Mrs. Hobart. Ms. Richards, after all, was the last person to be with your daughter.”

“I think if you’re going to ask any more questions, Tess should have an attorney present.”

“There’s no need for that at this time,” the agent answered. “But I don’t suggest any of you leave town.”

“No one is going anywhere.” The husky voice came from the hallway.

Tess turned around. Through her tears, she saw Marina.

Marina folded her arms across her middle and stared into the dark room, the room that looked not unlike it had fifteen years ago. Tess, too, looked the same—older, heavier, and very tired, but the same. Still without makeup, which surely could have helped her now. But it was Charlie who was the most changed, who now carried a certain elegant confidence she’d not had in college: the money, Marina assumed, had provided that.

“This is a closed conversation,” the man near Tess told Marina. “I think you’d better come back another time.”

“I think not,” Marina answered.

Tess twisted her fingers together. “I called her,” she told the man.

“She’s an old friend,” Charlie explained. “She’s come to help find Jenny.”

Joe Lyons stepped forward. Marina had not heard him come in behind her.

“All the way from Novokia?” he asked.

No one answered.

The man next to Tess stood. “Who are you?”

Marina looked at Charlie, then Tess. She extended her hand to the man. “Marina Marchant,” she said as she coolly shook his hand. “Princess of Novokia.”

He withdrew his hand and attempted to conceal his surprise. “Agent Greenberg,” he said. “FBI.” He straightened his tie and gestured to another man who had entered the room and now stood beside him. “This is Agent Connors.”

Agent Connors nodded with a half bow. Marina returned
the nod and suppressed a smile.
If nothing else
, she thought,
using my title to rattle a few cages is amusing.

“Has any progress been made in locating the girl?” Marina asked, keeping her voice steady—interested, yet distant. Apparently the police had no idea that she was Jenny’s real mother, and for that, she silently thanked the others.

“We’re following up on a few leads,” Greenberg said. “But I think we’re finished here for the evening.” He motioned to Connors and Joe Lyons, then turned back to Tess. “I’ll be in touch in the morning. If anything happens tonight, notify Chief Lyons immediately.”

The men filed past Marina, leaving through the kitchen door.

Tess stood, walked over, and gave Marina a short hug. Marina caught the scent of an unwashed body, unchanged clothes. It must have been a grueling two days, she thought.

“Where’s Nicholas?” Tess asked. “Doesn’t he shadow you anymore?”

“Sometimes. But there wasn’t time to find him. I caught the first plane.” She did not tell them that she had ducked her new bodyguard, Reggie, because Reggie knew nothing about Jenny, and Marina intended it to stay that way. “I’m glad you’re here,” Tess whimpered, then put her face in her hands. “This is all so bizarre.”

Marina and Charlie’s eyes met. Charlie’s eyes seemed to contain a warning.

“You look like shit,” Marina told Tess. “Perhaps you should lie down. Charlie will fill me on what has happened.”

“They think I did it,” Tess said bleakly.

Charlie put her hand on Tess’s back. “Marina’s right. You should go lie down. If you get some rest you’ll think more clearly.”

After staring at the floor a moment, Tess shuffled across the room in the direction of what Marina remembered was her bedroom.

“What the hell is going on?” Marina asked Charlie after Tess had left.

“Come and sit down.” Charlie led her to the sofa.

Marina sat where the FBI man had been. She wondered if he’d felt the lumpy springs in the cushion.

“Did they tell you about the Fabergé?” Charlie asked.

“There was a message that she was missing.” Marina
could not bring herself to call Jenny by name. She could not afford to think of her as anything but Charlie’s daughter. “I talked to no one. I went right to the airport.”

Charlie told her the details. “And apparently,” she added, “Jenny found the picture—the one of us at graduation.”

“When I was pregnant.”

“When you were very pregnant.

Marina winced. “I was so careful that no one find out …”

“No one did. Then. But the way that picture was taken, you were standing at an angle …”

“And it was obvious I had a belly full of a baby. So,” Marina said, trying—as she had since the phone call—to figure out what this could mean. Mean to her, to her family, and, even more importantly, to Novokia. “You think she learned the truth.”

“Jenny, or someone else.” Charlie went on to tell Marina about Willie Benson’s recent reappearance in the area.

“God, not him again.” Marina couldn’t bear to think Willie could have anything to do with Jenny’s disappearance. “Have they questioned him?”

“Joe says they’re working on it.”

“What is this business about Tess being under suspicion?”

Charlie’s face looked pinched. She unclasped the wide gold hairclip at the nape of her neck and shook out her hair. It seemed lighter to Marina, prettier.
Money
, she thought,
can take care of the mousies.

“It’s ridiculous, of course,” Charlie said, but without complete conviction in her voice. Marina may not have seen or talked with Charlie in fifteen years, but she recognized the tone of Charlie’s voice. It was the same one she used when Tess had tried to kill herself. And when Marina had announced she was pregnant. It was the tone she used to convince others that everything was going to be fine. Marina watched her old friend now and waited for the veiled explanation. “It seems that Tess is having some financial problems.”

“I thought her parents left her a fortune.”

“Fifteen years ago. Apparently she’s been living off it. It’s gone.”

Marina glanced around the cluttered room. Obviously Tess hadn’t spent the money fixing up her home.

“Anyway,” Charlie continued, “they have some notion that Tess stole the egg to raise money.”

“If she did, what did she do with … her?” Marina struggled to stay detached, to keep her emotional distance. The struggle was becoming more difficult. She unbuttoned the top button of her shirt and wished this would all go away. Then she looked at Charlie and saw the tears in her eyes.

“Oh, God, Marina, I can’t believe this has happened. It’s all my fault. If only I had paid more attention to her, instead of wasting time trying to please Peter’s mother. Sometimes … I’m afraid that sometimes Jenny felt she was in the way. Elizabeth never accepted me. And she never accepted Jenny.” Her last words came out in a choke.

Marina closed her eyes and tried to shut out the haunting image of her baby, and of the woman named Elizabeth Hobart whom Marina had never met. Had Jenny’s life truly been miserable? Would Marina have given her a better life? An aching sorrow filled her soul, for Marina knew it could never have been. Jenny had been given the best opportunity possible, the best parents, the best home. But even freedom, she realized now, was not immune to pain.

She reached over and took Charlie’s hand. She wondered if the damp, cold palm she felt was Charlie’s or her own. “You love her, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Charlie answered. “Very much. I guess I never knew how much …” her words trailed off into sobs. “Oh, Marina, I tried to be a good mother to her. I didn’t do a very good job.”

In the silence that followed, Marina knew she must take control. Whether Charlie had been a good mother or not, Marina must keep her from falling apart, the way Tess had apparently done. They had to get to the bottom of this, and get to it fast, before any harm could come to Jenny, before anything worse would happen than what may have already happened.

She released her hand from Charlie’s and summoned all her courage. “Bullshit,” she said quickly. “I do not believe for one minute that Jenny ran away.” If Charlie noticed that
Marina had finally spoken Jenny’s name, she did not comment.

“But if Jenny didn’t run away …”

Marina put a finger to her lips. “We are not going to anticipate the worst. Now get some sleep and let me try to think.”

    Marina stepped outside, drew in a deep breath of the warm summer night air, and decided to go for a walk. She was glad she hadn’t taken the time to find Nicholas; walking alone in Northampton would allow her memories to flow unhindered.

    She crossed Elm Street and headed for the main campus, trying to sort through the fragments in her mind. It was entirely possible, Marina supposed, that Jenny—upset at her argument with Tess—had returned to the house and dug through the old photo album, looking for pictures of Charlie and Peter when they were young. It was possible that when she saw the graduation photo she realized that Charlie—svelte, even in her dark robe—was not six-plus months pregnant, and therefore was not her mother. It was entirely possible that Jenny realized Marina had been the pregnant one. Jenny could have taken the picture, grabbed her prized Fabergé egg, and run away, hoping for whatever it was that fourteen-year-olds hoped for when they felt their world had caved in on them.

It was entirely possible.

She put her hands in the pockets of her loose linen pants, stopped, then turned down the walk toward the art museum. Little had changed here in fifteen years, Marina thought. She smiled as she passed through the walkway and noticed the ivy that crawled up the outside of College Hall. Except for a few new buildings, probably little had changed in over a century.

She sat on a bench on the main campus, beneath a wide oak tree. She rubbed a hand along the cool stone and wondered if she had ever sat on this very bench; if she had ever sat here and thought about Viktor, about Novokia, or about Edward James. She wished the bench could tell its story of
who had passed by here, who had rested here, and how their lives had changed.

Yes, Marina thought, Jenny’s disappearance could have been as easy as running away. Or it could be something else. Tess? Marina shook her head. She really didn’t think that, money or not, Tess was capable of doing something so awful. She could not have kidnapped the girl and done … what? Killed her? Marina shivered.

Then another thought came to mind.

“What if Jenny ran away first?” she muttered aloud. “What if Jenny ran away and Tess stole the egg to make it look as though Jenny had taken it with her?”

A group of students stared at Marina in passing. She lifted her chin, as though talking out loud was nothing unusual. She was in Northampton, after all, where tolerance for unusual people was an unwritten law.

Unusual people … like Willie Benson?

Could Willie Benson have abducted Jenny? But why? To get back at Charlie? Did he have enough intelligence to pull it off?

She rose from the bench and walked toward Morris House, down the well-worn path where her footsteps had fallen so many, many times. Hers, and Nicholas’s. Hers and Viktor’s.

Viktor.

As Marina approached Morris House she looked across the street, across Green Street, toward the apartment that Viktor, then Nicholas, had occupied.

A dull ache came into her throat. Was Viktor somehow behind Jenny’s abduction? Had he somehow learned that Jenny was her daughter? Was he going to use her as bait in his quest to take over the government?

She walked to the side of Morris House and stared up at the window that had once been hers. The window shade was pulled down. Then she turned and looked at the apartment again. And suddenly she remembered the night … the night she had planned to go to Viktor … the night she had seen the woman coming out of his apartment. Dell.

Marina gasped. Dell. Dell could be the answer. Dell. The woman Tess trusted so well. The woman who had delivered Jenny, who had enabled Marina to avoid the hospital, avoid word leaking out.

Dell.

She had probably kept in touch with Viktor. What was it she’d said the night Marina went into labor? She kept Viktor’s secrets? Marina’s heart raced. Somehow, Dell Brooks must be at the bottom of this. And maybe … just maybe … Jenny’s disappearance was also connected to the recent news about Viktor Coe … that his rebels were ready … that the monarchy of Novokia was about to be exiled. Dell and Viktor. They could have been planning this for years.

Suddenly, Marina feared for her life. For her life—and for Jenny’s. And in that instant, Marina knew that if she were killed, Jenny would never be found. Because no one else had all the pieces. She had to find refuge. She had to get back.