Treasure Me (8 page)

Some cajoling was in order. “C’mon, Hugh. Your secrets are safe with me.” The hesitancy in his eyes made him more likeable even if she was loath to consider why. “How bad can it be?”

“Let’s just eat and hit the sack.”

“I’m not sleeping with you.”

“I didn’t mean together. Not tonight.” He stabbed repeatedly at the spinach poking out of his omelet. When the leaf was suitably impaled, he stuck it into his mouth.

Now the man was as buttoned up as a stockbroker on Wall Street. Which was fine. He liked putting her on the hot seat with questions about her line of work. Time to take as well as he gave.

She let out a theatrical sigh. “I’m waiting,” she said, and immediately regretted the desire to push. The question bore down on him, curving his shoulders and sending pain flashing across his brow. The fear scuttling his features took her by surprise. He really was upset.

The silence grew full. Finally, he said, “I wrote an exposé fourteen years ago when I started out at a newspaper in Cleveland. It was my first big story, about an investment firm in the city. The guy running the place was playing fast and loose with the sweep accounts.”

She tried to keep up. “What’s a sweep account?”

He warmed to his story. “If a company pours millions of dollars through an account, a bank pays interest daily. Let’s say you keep, on average, twenty million in the account. You rack up interest every day.”

“Nice deal. Where’s mine?”

He swiped his hand through the air, silencing her. “The investment firm used the sweep as a way station for client funds before putting them into the stock market, mutual funds—wherever clients were investing. The firm’s owner stole from the sweep. I found out about it.”

“You wrote an article about the theft?” She’d have to watch her step or he’d be writing about
her
.

“It was front page news.” Hugh laughed, but the sound was hollow. “I was so proud of the scoop even though I knew the guy would only get a slap on the wrist. He had powerful friends and a crack attorney. His wife was wealthy and all the money was repaid to the investors. But it didn’t end there. What I didn’t expect were the repercussions the publicity had on his wife.”

Dread shivered across Birdie’s skin. “What happened?”

“She learned why her husband was stealing from the sweep. He was seeing another woman and had bought her a pricey condo. The works. All sadly predictable—a bored middle-aged man and a hot blonde ten years younger.”

Birdie thought of her mother, how she glided through life on other people’s money. But she stole from innocent men, not bastards who cheated on their wives. The bastards had it coming to them. “Please tell me the blonde took him for all he was worth.”

“She did, but it gets worse. His wife had a shouting match with the other woman in the middle of a department store. Because of the wife’s standing in Cleveland—she was a prominent socialite and philanthropist—it made the gossip columns. Not to mention every radio talk show from here to Cincinnati.”

An awful memory edged to the corner of Birdie’s mind, a fleeting image of a woman in an elegant suit. The woman smelled of roses. She was shouting and someone took Birdie by the wrist to tug her out of the way. It was impossible to grab hold of the nebulous threads of the memory but it left her feeling oddly blue.

“The wife took her boat out on Lake Erie right before a storm,” Hugh continued and she wheeled her attention back to him. To his hands, which he clenched and unclenched, his knuckles white. “They said it was an accident. She drowned.”

His guilt looked overwhelming, which was something she understood. Didn’t she feel the same way every time she lifted money from a wallet?

Rising, he collected the plates and deposited them in the sink. Clearly he’d lost his appetite. They both had.

Absently, he dumped the eggs into the wastebasket and filled the sink with soapy water. He attacked each plate with a dishcloth, scrubbing with single-minded purpose. The set of his jaw was hard. Yet his eyes were vulnerable and Birdie found herself on her feet, walking toward him. What was it like to hold yourself responsible for a death? None of her transgressions compared, not the robberies or the petty thefts. She’d never owned a gun. If it ever came down to risking a life in the commission of a crime she’d walk away first. She’d walk away gladly.

She came up behind him, unsure of how to comfort a man who was little more than a stranger. His back was to her and she noticed his hair was too long even if he did carry it off well. His shoulder blades worked beneath his chambray shirt as he let out the water, then dumped in scouring powder and began scrubbing the sink. Why hadn’t she noticed his height? Standing this close it was easy to see he had a good three inches on her, maybe four, and she was a tall woman.

Rub his back? It was how a friend offered comfort. Yet the gesture felt like an invasion. Her hand froze in mid-air, her confusion unnoticed by the man who’d dried the dishes until they squeaked and rattled them into a stack inside the cupboard. He polished the forks and flung them into a drawer. When he’d finished he gripped the edges of the counter and stared out the window above the sink. She understood suddenly what he’d meant by a play-by-play. His dream, or nightmare, rather—the image haunting him—was a play-by-play of the woman who’d drowned, the woman he believed he’d sent to her death with an article written in his youth.

Offering solace with a phrase was inadequate.
It’s not your fault
.

Hugh wasn’t to blame—people did all sorts of crazy things. Hadn’t Birdie’s own mother shaken out a handful of heart-shaped pills on the day she’d threatened suicide? The Valium looked pretty, like candy, but it threw a wall up in their tumultuous relationship. And how could a teenager convince her mother not to die? Birdie had felt responsible; she knocked the fistful of Valium from her mother’s hand, sending the pills scattering across the motel’s filthy bathroom floor. On hands and knees she scrambled after them. Every last pill landed in the toilet while her mother clawed at Birdie’s scalp, yanking hair out by the handful.
You bitch, don’t you dare throw my drugs in the toilet.
Seared by the belief she was responsible for her mother’s mental state, she’d barely felt the hair wrenched from her scalp.

Did Hugh carry the same remorse?

“Hugh, it’s all right.” She rested her hand on his back. He tensed, a fierce little movement, and her heart clenched. “Fourteen years is a long time to punish yourself. Let it go.”

His arms lowered to his sides. “If you were in my shoes, would you let it go?”

“I’d try.”

“You don’t know what it’s like. Wondering if you could’ve done more. Wondering if everything would be fine if you’d done nothing at all.”

Flinching, she saw herself at sixteen, when she had given up on trying to live with her mother. The canvas tote bag stolen from a boutique was stuffed full of everything she held dear. The contents were light, inconsequential, as if her life didn’t matter to herself or to anyone else.

“Still, I’d try,” she said, the hurt cascading over her in waves. “No one said life is simple. You keep moving. You try to forget the bad stuff and move on.”

Hugh turned and regarded her. “I tried letting go.” He smirked but she wasn’t fooled. He was raw and didn’t like showing it. “First, I broke my engagement to my college sweetheart. I screwed up the next relationship too.”

“Hugh—”

“Afterward, I had a love affair with Scotch,” he said, refusing to let her get in a consoling word. It seemed he needed to flail himself in front of her even if she didn’t understand why. “I drank my way out of a few good jobs. Talked my way onto other newspapers. I’m beyond rehabilitation even if I have gotten myself off the sauce. Birdie, some mistakes don’t go away. You live with them like a disease you manage but never cure.”

He did look sick, the guilt a cancer on his soul. She couldn’t cure him. It wasn’t wise to try. Yet she felt compelled to do something, if only to wash the moment clean.

She went up on tiptoes like a clumsy ballerina. Pressing herself against his chest, she took his face in her hands. She kissed him full on, the way she’d kiss a man she knew intimately. Hugh shuddered. Then he jerked his hands up, splaying them across her back. Her heart tripped as he took control of the kiss as if she were his first taste of heaven.

Curving into him, she sank into sensation. The pads of her fingertips scraped across the bristle shadowing his cheeks. She let her eyes drift shut to better focus on the experience. Hugh felt like heat and tasted like glory. No hesitation, no doubt—he kissed her as if he’d done so a thousand times before.

When he’d finished, he let her go. A mistake. Her knees dissolved and she nearly slumped to the floor. Deftly, he grabbed her by the shoulders.

She blinked. “Thanks.” She edged out of his grasp.

“Thanks for catching you or for kissing you?” He took a strand of her hair and rubbed it between his fingers. There was a nice flush on his cheeks and some of the light was back in his eyes. “You have incredible hair. Spun gold.” He drew away. “Goodnight, Birdie.”

He left without another word. No sexual innuendo trailed in his wake. Steadying herself, she leaned against the counter. Rating a man’s kissing ability was silly but Hugh deserved a ten.

He’d put a lazy sort of luxury into her veins and she couldn’t clear her head. It wasn’t worth the effort to analyze why she’d kissed him. It would be even worse to analyze why she’d like to do so again.

Finally she remembered the parchment tucked inside her bra. At the other end of the apartment the bathroom door clicked shut. Seating herself at the table, she withdrew the parchment and unfolded it.

And read the heavy, sloping script:

A jewel beyond compare stitched tight

With red, blue and white.

Theodora Hendricks propped her Remington pump shotgun at the snowy base of an oak, surprised to see Landon Williams making his way across the wooded acres of her property.

Worry formed a tense patchwork of lines across his long-jawed face. His shoulders, set rigidly in his tall frame, seemed posed to ward off a blow. Surely he’d arrived at daybreak without invitation not because he’d misplaced his manners—Landon was courteous to a fault—but because he required her counsel.

And although she was hard-pressed to admit it, their unlikely friendship was a cherished part of her rich and unusual life.

Nearing her eighty-first birthday, Theodora still enjoyed hunting when she wasn’t piloting her sky blue Cadillac through the streets of Liberty. She was something of a fixture in town, a crusty old black woman who’d lived long enough to see it all and then some. She had more acquaintances than anyone should be cursed with, but Landon was one of her few real friends. Most of the people she’d once cared about had been whittled down to nothing more than memory while she chafed under the curse of longevity.

There was no figuring why life worked out the way it did. Squirrel stew, buttermilk biscuits and venison steaks had kept her fit and irritable for years. Or maybe the hunting kept her in shape. She’d always been irritable.

“Morning, Landon,” she called when he started down the incline.

The former investment banker brightened at the sound of her hard, grating voice. He came around a poplar tree, waved, and then frowned at his boots. This far back in the woods the land was swampy, the smell of earthworms and fungus thick in the air. She chuckled as he sunk ankle-deep in a patch of mud.

Behind him the sun crested the forest in a glow of pink light. A Canada goose lifted from the lake, breaking the silence with a honk.

Landon stopped and looked around. “You didn’t answer the doorbell. I assumed you were out hunting.”

“I have a hankering for duck.” She motioned toward the trees guarding the lake. “I’m on my way to fetch tonight’s supper.”

“My apologies. I shouldn’t have disturbed you.”

“You didn’t.” She rubbed her arms, silently cursing the arthritis that never abated until noon. Above, the goose arced into the sunlight, its black wings beating air. “Do you want coffee? You look damn cold.”

Landon stomped his feet. “Would you mind if we walked instead? I’ve had too much coffee as it is.”

Picking up her shotgun, she headed toward higher ground. The gun was nearly as tall as she was—the one thing aging
had
taken was her height and she’d never been tall in the first place. She drew the weapon over her right shoulder like a fishing pole. She glanced up at Landon, who looked pitifully sad, and waited.

He kicked a stone from the path. “Meade is worried about me. It was a misunderstanding, but I couldn’t find a way to explain.”

“It doesn’t take much to worry your daughter.” Of course, Landon’s depression gave the girl reason to fret. “What happened?”

He cast a murky glance. “I inadvertently led her to believe I’m seeing ghosts. Cat’s ghost, in fact.”

“Lordy.” Meade didn’t much trust Landon’s mental state as it was. “If she thinks you’re having visions of your late wife she’ll pack you off to a fine institution.”

“I should’ve cleared up the misunderstanding.” He raised his hand then wearily lowered it to his side. “Meade arrived unexpectedly. She found me in the boathouse.”

Had she found him weeping? Theodora sighed. Landon was a good man, and not nearly as off-center as his daughter thought. But he’d shielded too much of his life from Meade, especially after his wife drowned in Lake Erie fourteen years ago. He was like a magician lost in his own smoke and mirrors.

“Why did she think you’d seen Cat’s ghost?” Theodora asked.

“I saw someone in town, someone who left years ago. I couldn’t explain.”

“Why the blazes not?”

“Meade never would’ve believed me. I’m hoping you will. In fact, I’m sure you will.”

His implicit trust slipped a latch in Theodora’s brain, opening her to memories vast and distended, like a drawn-out sigh. Her oldest daughter, in first grade, insisting on the concrete fact of the tooth fairy’s existence. Her husband, shortly after Kennedy’s inauguration, working over her heart with soft words while she fingered the lipstick-splotched collar of his Tasty Cream uniform. The fish tales she’d heard from friends who tried marijuana in the seventies and repented the following Sunday or, in the eighties, surreptitiously bleached their skin along with their hair. Recently, the whoppers she endured came from her great niece who was between jobs and always hungry for a handout.