Red Dawn Rising (Red Returning Trilogy) (16 page)

“
This
time, you mean,” Cade said.

Ian shook his head with conviction. “That first marriage was a travesty, Son. You were ganged up on by that drug-addled young woman, my own money-hungry son, and his drunken wife. And you know what? We’re not going to speak another word about those unfortunate souls, not now anyway. They’re all gone, and God has brought you the bride of his choice. I know it’s true because me and the Lord are always talking things over.”

Cade reached over and closed his hand over Ian’s but didn’t speak. Ian guessed he couldn’t. So it was time to return the day to its intended celebration. “Tell you what,” Ian said. “Give me time to clean up, then go wake up that bride of yours. We’re going to dine fine this morning.”

Climbing the stairs to Liesl’s room, Cade tried to dismiss his fears for her safety. Liesl had refused to discuss the implications of the bomb planted in her piano just five days ago. “It was only the biggest hiding place on that whole platform,” she’d reasoned. “It was the president they wanted.” Still, security agents ordered by President Noland himself now monitored the house and all Liesl’s comings and goings, much to her dismay.

When Cade reached Liesl’s bedroom door, he knocked lightly and waited, but not long. Already dressed in paint-spattered jeans, a baggy gray sweater, and old sneakers, Liesl threw open the door and reached for him. He hugged her to him, inhaling a wisp of lavender soap. “Hmm, you smell good.” He set her down. “And I’m certain you’re going to look a whole lot better tonight.”

After the punch to his arm, she invited him in to see what she’d packed for their honeymoon. An assortment of ski clothes were rolled inside a wheeled duffle bag. Airline tickets to Austria lay nearby.

Cade turned her to him and nuzzled her neck, then found her lips and kissed them. And again. “Remind me why we waited so long,” he whispered.

“You wanted to be the chief breadwinner, remember? Had to get Charleston’s new metro magazine up and running, pulling in money to feed us and our children.” He watched her eyes sparkle at the prospect of a family. At forty, he also was ready. With God’s grace, they would both discover what
family
was meant to be.

They heard another bedroom door open nearby, and Henry Bower looked into his daughter’s open doorway as he passed by. He smiled at the couple and slipped quietly down the stairs.

Liesl looked thoughtfully after her father. “There goes the main reason we waited,” she said.

Cade tightened his arms around her. “It was the right thing to do, Liesl. Your father had just returned from the dead after twenty years. You both needed this time together, to heal. You have. In time, he will, too.”

A smile skimmed her face, then disappeared. “But the guilt is eating him alive, Cade. What his drinking did to us all. The accident that killed Aunt Bess. Mom’s illness. He believes that was his fault too. I pray every day for God to forgive him and to make him know he’s forgiven. That it’s done and over.”

A gravelly voice came bellowing up the stairwell. “Breakfast will be served on the main deck!”

“And that’s the end of that conversation.” Liesl grinned, pulling Cade along toward the staircase. “Ian has been so good for Dad. Starting that
charter
-fishing business with him and giving him a livelihood, a reason to get up in the morning—sober. And making him laugh.”

Halfway down the stairs, Cade pointed toward one of the tall, transomed windows overlooking the front porch. “Henry’s not the only one drawn to the crusty old sea captain.”

Liesl saw Ava Mullins cross the porch toward the door, a party-size coffee urn in her arms and bulging grocery bags swinging from both wrists. Cade went to lend a hand.

“Oh, thank heavens,” Ava groaned when he opened the door and took the bags from her. “Someone keeps adding more steps to this porch every day.” Though she was approaching sixty, Ava’s small form was both girlish and rock hard. And since that day when Liesl had personally ushered her into a new wardrobe and hairstyle, Ava had continued to wear her peppered gray hair cropped in the spiky hairdo that had first rendered Ian speechless. Now, dressed in a black turtleneck and designer jeans tucked smartly into black suede boots, Ava strode purposefully through the door of the house that she, admittedly, had come to love as the only familial gathering place she knew. The former Harvard music professor and now-retired CIA agent was long divorced, and her son was a career marine who seldom visited.

When Liesl approached, Ava gave her the tall silver urn, a quick peck on the cheek, and a cursory appraisal. “Now I know why the groom isn’t supposed to see his bride just before the wedding.” Her eyes slid over Liesl’s attire. “The guy might change his mind.”

Cade winked at Liesl as they all headed for the kitchen. “Pop finally found his match.”

Liesl’s grandmother, Lottie Bower, and her caregiver, Margo Blanchard, were now seated at the big oak table still bearing Liesl’s initials, which she’d carved with a fish hook in third grade. Lottie rarely spoke these days, another small stroke pushing her further along a continuum of clouding coherence. But she often smiled and gestured feebly, signaling to those who knew her best that she was glad for their nearness.

“I can’t remember the last time I had potato pancakes, Mr. O’Brien,” Margo told Ian, who was hunched over two large cast-iron skillets, one bearing the cakes, the other sausage and bacon. Warming nearby were a pot of cheese grits and a pan of scrambled eggs. A platter of fresh fruit was already on the table. “I used to make waffles for my husband before he died of a brain tumor. Well, sometimes he wanted oatmeal to go with them, though I never could understand that combination. But anyhow, he still couldn’t start his day without a plate of my waffles. Sometimes I’d put blueberries in them, that is if I could find them when they weren’t so ridiculously overpriced, and sometimes I put pecans in them. He loved pecans, and I didn’t mind shelling them fresh. And sometimes I wouldn’t put anything at all in my waffles. It just depended on his mood, which, as you can imagine with someone afflicted with any brain disorder, was likely to change without warning. Know what I mean?”

Ian turned pained eyes toward Liesl, who’d joined him at the stove and was flipping the last batch of pancakes. “Hurry up and give that woman something to put in her mouth,” he whispered. “When she’s through eating, we’ll use duct tape.”

Liesl valiantly choked off a laugh and started dishing food into plates, Margo’s first. Soon, they were all talking excitedly around the table. The topic, of course, was final preparations for the evening’s wedding at St. Philip’s Church and the reception at the house.

Forty-nine guests would attend, but the two friends Liesl wanted most to see couldn’t come. She hadn’t expected Max Morozov to fly from Israel with his tight concert schedule this year. Before he’d become the first-chair violinist for the Israel Philharmonic, he’d been Liesl’s prankster friend and fellow student at the Moscow Conservatory. One of his better stunts had once landed him and Liesl in a Moscow police station.

In the midst of the good-natured exchange at the table, Liesl looked away and remembered another day years after Max’s clownish prank in Moscow. It was the day he led an Israeli commando squad to evidence that his father was a Russian spy—the day the light went dim in the heart of Max.

Liesl looked about the table and caught the concern on Cade’s face.
And
there it was on Ava’s, too. Liesl knew why. There was a burn hole in the piano she’d played last Monday, and no one was willing to forget it, certainly not the federal agents who roamed about Tidewater Lane.

She smiled weakly at Ava. The woman may appear to have lost the razor edge of a veteran CIA agent, but Liesl knew that Ava Mullins—even retired and settled into a new life in Charleston—was temporarily back on task and once again running security for her famous charge.

Ridiculous!
Liesl refused to believe there was intent to harm her.
That’s over
. And she certainly wasn’t going to let unwarranted fear spoil the most joyous day of her life. In just hours, she was going to marry the man she loved so desperately, and nothing was going to interfere with that.

Then she thought of Ben Hafner. He and Anna had called the night before, begging her forgiveness for canceling their intended trip to the wedding. “Fallout from the attacks on Monday,” Ben had told her. He was dreadfully sorry, he’d said, but there was something else in his voice. Few besides his wife knew his subtle intonations as well as Liesl. Ben had been like a brother to her since their Harvard days. Why wasn’t he here?

She recoiled from the mental jabbing that threatened to undo her.
No more of this!
she scolded herself, glancing about the table.
Climb out of this pity hole and be thankful. “This is the day the Lord has made,”
she recalled from the psalms.
“Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”

She looked up to see Cade smile reassuringly at her as if he’d heard her thoughts.

Ava, however, had pulled on her professional mask. Liesl decided she’d put an end to that.

“Ava, we are going to make divinity candy this morning, aren’t we?” Liesl affected a buoyant, oversized smile, visibly urging Ava’s agent-on-guard countenance to relax.

“I did bring the ingredients,” Ava allowed, but her face was still grim.

Liesl brushed her hands together and rose from the table. “Ava and I have serious work to do,” she told the group, most of them still lingering over the last crumbs of Ian’s potato pancakes.

Later, Liesl was chopping pecans and Ava was measuring out corn
syrup
when Cade brushed past them and turned on the small television mounted on the wall. “Someone just bombed the Supreme Court Building,” he announced.

Ava set the measuring cup down hard on the tile countertop, and Liesl dropped the knife. They both pivoted toward the small screen and latched on to every word. When the reports of the three explosions finally turned from fact to conjecture from contributing analysts—meaning no one was sure of anything beyond the first reports—the three looked at each other, trying to piece together something they couldn’t see.

“Just five days after the inauguration,” Ava noted. “No one claiming responsibility for that, either.”

Without a word, Liesl hurried out of the kitchen. She wouldn’t listen to any more of this. Not another horror, not on this day. She would fight her way around it and keep going. Lift another prayer for protection. Then force her way back to peace.

She was pulling on a light jacket, bound for a restorative stroll in the garden, when the bell on the sidewalk door rang.
Ah, the florist
, she hoped. And her spirits lifted.

“I’ll get it,” she called, her voice rising with expectation. Few things could flood a house with celebration and renewal like fresh flowers. And lots of them, which Liesl had ordered.

But when Liesl opened the ground-level door, there was no florist. Instead, a young couple she’d never seen before greeted her nervously. “Are you … Liesl Bower?” said the young woman. Her short blond curls fringed a pretty face with a fresh-scrubbed look. But the face made no attempt to smile.

Liesl tensed. She was used to fans approaching her in public places, but not here. How did they know where she lived? Then she remembered a few tour guides who, since her move back to Charleston last year, had begun pointing out her house to their patrons. That is, until Ava Mullins put a stop to it.

Liesl studied the two before her now. Just tourists, she presumed, then wondered what Ava would do if she knew they’d come right up to the door and rung for admittance.