Mrs. Million (17 page)

There had to be a way. He could stick with the plan, call the woman back, return her husband to her and collect the money. It would take him several hours to get safely out of the country, and even then, how safe would he be? Did the Italians extradite kidnappers and murderers? Also, if he became a fugitive, would he have to abandon his antiques?

André impaled a piece of lamb, placed it upon his tongue, chewed thoughtfully. The heat filled his mouth. This time he let it burn. The flavor was fiery and sublime. He swallowed, felt the heat flow down his throat into his stomach. He took another bite, felt his sinuses open.

André considered actions, reactions, scenarios both probable and improbable. He followed each scheme from outset to conclusion, saw himself free, imprisoned, wealthy, poor, alive, dead. He worked his way slowly through the plate of curry, letting its heat fire his imagination. By the time he finished the last bite he knew exactly what he had to do.

A
RT WOULD BE ARRIVING
any minute. Barbaraannette looked down at herself, frowned. She tiptoed past the snoring Hilde to her bedroom, stripped off her jeans and T-shirt, and flipped through the contents of her closet until she found a navy blue dropwaist dress—she’d bought it for the last MEA conference in Minneapolis—that hit a mark somewhere between frumpy and sexy. She looked in the mirror, ran her fingers through her hair, considered and rejected lipstick. Art was a banker. He probably wouldn’t notice, and besides, this was business. She pulled on a pair of burgundy flats, returned to the kitchen, put a teakettle on the stove, turned on the flame, fitted a filter into the Chemex, added a few scoops of coffee, then waited.

The man who said he had Bobby hadn’t called back yet. Something had happened. Had it happened to Bobby? Had Bobby even been there? Was he even in Cold Rock? Was he even alive? Barbaraannette’s head whirled with doubts. The woman, Phlox, claimed that she had brought Bobby to Cold Rock. Barbaraannette had believed her, but what if that had been a lie, an attempt to extract money? And maybe the man who had phoned was up to the same thing. Maybe Barbaraannette had foiled their plans by insisting on talking to Bobby. So far, she had no concrete proof that Bobby still existed upon this earth. Barbaraannette did not know what was going on, but she did know one thing. Everybody wanted her money.

The teakettle began to whistle, shattering her thoughts. Barbaraannette turned off the burner and slowly poured hot water into the Chemex, letting the coffee-scented steam warm her face. She didn’t usually drink coffee this late in the day, as it gave her strange dreams and a fitful sleep, but on this evening she craved the bits of clarity, or at least the illusion of clarity, brought by caffeine. She watched the dark stream trickle into the glass urn, the water magically drawing flavor and power from the grounds. That was exactly what she needed to do with her life. Distill it down to its essence. Figure out what she wanted.

Until now, she thought, she had never had to think too hard about what she really wanted. Bobby had left her, and she wanted him back. She had seen herself as a martyr without a cause. So long as he was gone she had led a peacefully deprived life, waiting for something to happen, as if losing her husband had absolved her from the responsibilities of volition. At some point she had lapsed into a kind of comfortable stupidity. Was it when Bobby left, or before that? When had she stopped being her own person? She let her thoughts drift back to her wedding. No, it went back further than that, perhaps to the moment she had first seen Bobby Quinn pumping gas into his El Camino at the Shell station. She’d been seventeen years old back then, shortstop and number three batter for the Crockettes, and a straight A student at Cold Rock High. Bobby had been nineteen and the best-looking guy she’d ever laid eyes on. She’d gotten stupid all right. She’d stupided herself all over him and the luckiest thing about it was that she hadn’t gotten herself pregnant right then and there. If she had—and this new thought made her feel very strange indeed—if she
had,
her child would now be the same age as she had been then, letting Bobby have his way with her in the woods in the back of his El Camino. Of course, she had been having her way with him, too, but no matter whose script they’d been playing there could be no question but that as a result she had been stupid and confused for seventeen years now, more than half her life. And in another thirty years, if her genes held true, she would become even more bewildered. Maybe getting pregnant wouldn’t have been such a bad alternative. At least she’d have had someone to take care of her in her dotage.

Something will have to change, thought Barbaraannette. She poured herself a mug of coffee. The doorbell rang.

The single most wonderful moment of Bobby’s recent life had to be when the bearded man handed him a tall glass of cool water. Moments before, the man had cut the tape from his mouth and his arms. Bobby’s legs were still immobilized but he could sit up. The block wall of the basement felt cool against his back.

Bobby’s hands were shaking as he raised the glass to his lips and sipped. The water hurt going down his swollen throat, as delightful a pain as he had ever felt.

The bearded man, still holding the knife, stood back a few feet, staring at him intensely.

“Thank you,” Bobby said. His gratitude was real and overwhelming. He drank some more. “Thank you, sir,” he said again.

The bearded man said, “My name is André.”

“Thank you, André.”

“You are welcome, Bobby.”

Bobby drank again, a small sip, savoring it.

André asked, “How are you feeling?”

“Better. I’m sorry about your chair.”

André nodded. “Yes, well, these things happen. I must tell you that I, too, am sorry—about all of this. It was not my idea, you know.”

Bobby’s eyes moved to the corpse, then quickly away.

André said, “It was Jonathan who brought you here. I asked him to let you go, but…” He shook his head ruefully. “Our lives take strange turns, do they not?”

Bobby waited, then gave a shallow nod when he saw that André required a response.

“Strange turns indeed. You and I, for instance, are very different people. I am an academic. I live in a world of ideas. I make my way through life by exercising the powers of my intellect, whereas you…what is it you do?”

Bobby said, “I sell boots.”

“Yes, of course. We are each of us concerned with different ends of the human form. And then one day, through pure chance, your wife wins the lottery. Suddenly we are brought together. Do you believe in fate, Robert?”

“I guess.”

“That is because you are a boot salesman. But you do not want to be a boot salesman the rest of your life, do you?”

“I reckon not.”

“And you won’t be. Tell me, Robert, what were your plans here? Were you planning to return to your wife to become a rich woman’s husband?”

Bobby thought quickly, trying to figure out which of the many lies available to him would be most likely to get him out of this basement, but because he didn’t know what André wanted from him, he fell back on the truth. “My girlfriend was supposed to turn me in.”

André said, “Ah! I understand. Were you then planning to stay with your wife, or were you going to split the money with the girlfriend?”

Bobby cleared his throat. “I kinda hadn’t decided.”

André nodded. “Because your girlfriend and you would have split the money, a million dollars, but your wife has far more money than that.”

“Something like that. Only, I think Barbaraannette might make life kinda rough for me. Like I said, I was thinking it out both ways.”

“That is very intelligent.” André smiled. “Let me ask you this. How would you like to return to your wife and, at the same time, have one-half-million dollars of your own money. Escape money, if you will, just in case things don’t work out for you. You could even go back to your girlfriend, if you wished.”

Bobby didn’t move a muscle.

“You are interested?” André asked, a smile forming in his beard.

Bobby nodded. It sounded like a way out of the basement.

André’s smile broadened, showing teeth. “Excellent. Let me explain to you how this is going to work, and why.”

“There’s really not much to it,” Art said, touching the tip of his ballpoint pen to the loan agreement. They were sitting at the kitchen table. “You’re already approved. Your lottery payments are all the collateral we need. I’m authorized to make the loan at one-quarter point over prime, adjusted quarterly, plus a small origination fee, with a fifteen-year repayment plan. Your payments would be, initially, eight thousand four hundred and one dollars and twenty cents per month, or slightly more than one hundred thousand dollars per year. All you have to do is stop by the bank tomorrow morning and we’ll get everything signed and notarized, and you can write checks on the full amount beginning immediately.”

Barbaraannette said, “Suppose I need it in cash?”

Art clicked his pen a few times, searching her face. “The entire amount? In cash?”

Barbaraannette nodded.

“We could get you cash. It might take an extra day. I can’t say I recommend it.”

“How much space would that take up? Could one person carry it?”

“Sure.” He thought for a moment, imagining a hundred packets of hundred-dollar bills, one hundred bills in each small bundle. He indicated his briefcase. “It would fit in there. Can I ask why you’d want it in cash?”

Barbaraannette did not reply immediately. Her eyes slid away, and her hands met around her coffee mug. Art watched thoughts come and go on her face. There was an instant when he believed she might be about to cry, then her mouth tightened and two kidney-shaped blotches of red appeared on her cheeks, as if she was about to explode in anger. He drew back, bracing himself, but her face changed again, her mouth softening. In every manifestation, he found her face to be a thing of beauty. When she had answered the door he almost told her how nice she looked in her dark blue dress but then it was too late. To say something now would be awkward.

Barbaraannette raised her hands and pressed them against her cheeks, massaged her jaw, dropped her hands and shook her head slowly. “Art, if I tell you why I want cash, you’ll think I’m the biggest fool in the whole blamed state.”

Art took a breath. “Barbaraannette, let me put your mind at rest. There’s nothing you could do or say that would strike me as being more idiotic than offering a million bucks to bring Bobby Quinn back to Cold Rock in the first place. Okay?”

Barbaraannette cocked her head. “You mean, since you already think I’m an idiot, what difference can it make?”

Art felt a grin turn up his mouth.

Barbaraannette began to giggle.

Art started laughing, too, then he heard a strange cackle and turned around to see Hilde Grabo, orange wig askew, standing in the archway, a huge grin on her wrinkled features. The moment their eyes met, Hilde’s mouth snapped shut.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

Barbaraannette and Art both fell headlong into laughter. Hilde pushed out her lower lip, walked around them and began to look through the cupboards.

Barbaraannette got her laughter under control and watched. After a minute she asked, “What are you looking for, Hilde?”

“Do you have any raisins?”

Barbaraannette got up and located a box of raisins. Hilde took the box from her and poured a generous portion into a cereal bowl. She sat down beside Art at the table and began to eat them with her fingers.

Barbaraannette gave Art a helpless look and shrugged. “Hilde’s version of raisin bran. So, you can get it for me in cash?”

“You still haven’t told me why you want cash.”

“The man who called—there were two men, actually—demanded cash. But I still don’t know for sure whether Bobby was with him, or if they were lying to me. They were arguing. I could hear on the phone that they were fighting. Then they hung up, and then one of them called me back and said he was going to put Bobby on the phone, and then there was all this screaming and they hung up again.” Barbaraannette winced. “Maybe it was some kind of joke.”

Art was not smiling. “Do you think he’s being held against his will?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“What about the woman who was here. Do you think she’s part of it?”

Barbaraannette shook her head. “I don’t think she knows what’s going on. She said she was going to go find Bobby, but I don’t know how she thought she was going to do that.” She remembered the way Phlox had driven her around, helping her search for Hilde. “She’s a pretty resourceful woman. I liked her.” She reached across the kitchen table and patted her mother’s shoulder. Hilde, intent on her raisins, did not seem to notice.

Art said, “But you do think that Bobby came to town with her?”

“She knows Bobby, that’s for sure. I think he was with her. She says he was chased off by Hugh Hulke and Rodney Gent. You remember them?”

Art nodded. “Hugh took out a home equity loan to invest in Bobby’s dude ranch. He’s still trying to pay it off. Was it Hugh who called?”

“No. This was a very cultured sounding man. He had a way of talking, not quite British, but almost. And the first man was very rude, said he was a Gulf War veteran.”

Art lifted his coffee mug and peered into it as if reading tea leaves. “Barbaraannette, I really think that you should call the police about this.”

“That’s the last thing I need.”

Art looked up, surprised. “Why is that?”

“I don’t need to be owing any more favors to Dale Gordon.”

“What do you mean favors? It’s his job.”

“Not really. We don’t even know for sure if there’s been a crime.”

“At the very least, you’ve been threatened over the phone.”

“They didn’t threaten me. They threatened Bobby.”

“Nevertheless—”

The telephone rang. Barbaraannette was on it before the second ring.

“Hello?”

“Mrs. Quinn?” It was the man who had called before, the polite one with the educated voice.

She said, “Who is this?”

“I understand you are trying to locate your husband?”