Читать книгу Beckett's Cinderella - Dixie Browning, Dixie Browning - Страница 9

Just before his descent into Norfolk International Airport, Lancelot Beckett opened his briefcase, took out a thin sheaf of paper and scanned a genealogical chart. In the beginning, all they’d had to go on was a name, an approximate birthplace and a rough time line. Now, after God knows how many generations, the job was finally going to get done.

“What the hell do I know about tracking down the descendents of an Oklahoma cowboy born roughly a hundred and fifty years ago?” he’d demanded the last time he’d stopped by his cousin Carson’s restored shotgun-style house outside Charleston. “When it comes to tracking down pirates, I’m your man, but cowboys? Come on, Car, give me a break.”

“Hey, if you can’t handle it, I’ll take over once I’m out of this.” Carson, a police detective, was pretty well immobilized for the time being in a fiberglass cast. Now and then, even the Beckett luck ran out. About two months earlier, his had. “Looks like something you can do on your way home anyhow, so it’s not like you’d have to detour too far off the beaten track.”

“You know where I was when Mom tracked me down? I was in Dublin, for crying out loud,” Beckett had explained. They were both Becketts, but Lancelot had laid down the law regarding his name when he was eleven. Since then, he’d been called by his last name. Occasionally, tongue-in-cheek, he was referred to as “The Beckett.”

“I had to cancel a couple of appointments in London, not to mention a date. Besides, I’m not headed home anytime soon.”

What was the point? Officially, home was a two-room office with second-floor living quarters in Wilmington, Delaware. It served well enough as a mailing address and a place to put his feet up for a few days when he happened to be back in the States.

As it turned out, the place where the Chandler woman was thought to be hiding out was roughly halfway between Wilmington and his parents’ home in Charleston.

Hiding out was probably the wrong term; relocated might be closer. Whatever her reasons for being in North Carolina instead of Texas, she’d been hard as the devil to track down. It had taken the combined efforts of Carson’s police computers, a few unofficial sources and a certified genealogist to locate the woman.

And with all that, it had been a random sighting—something totally off-the-wall—that had finally pinned her down. Grant’s Produce and Free Ice Water, located on a peninsula between the North River and the Currituck Sound, somewhere near a place named Bertha, North Carolina. Hell, they didn’t even have a street address for her, just a sign along the highway.

Beckett tried to deal with his impatience. He was used to being on the move while his partner stayed in the office handling the paperwork, but this particular job had to do with family matters. It couldn’t be delegated. The buck had been passed as far as it would go.

He’d allowed himself a couple of hours after leaving the airport to find the place and another half hour to wind things up. After that, he could go back to Charleston and tell PawPaw the deed was done. Any debt his family owed one Eliza Chandler Edwards, direct descendant of old Elias Matthew Chandler of Crow Fly, in what had then been Oklahoma Territory, was finally settled.

The genealogist had done a great job in record time, running into a snag only at the point where Miss Chandler had married one James G. Edwards, born July 1, 1962, died September 7, 2001. It had been police research—in particular, the Financial Crimes Unit—that had dug up the fact that the lady and her husband had been involved a couple of years ago in a high-stakes investment scam. Edwards had gone down alone for that one—literally. Shot by one of his victims while out jogging, but before he died he had cleared his wife of any involvement. She’d never been linked directly to any illegal activities. Once cleared, she had hung around Dallas only long enough to liquidate her assets before dropping out of sight.

Beckett didn’t know if she was guilty as sin or totally innocent. Didn’t much care. He was doing this for PawPaw’s sake, not hers.

In the end, it had been pure luck. Luck in the form of a reporter with an excellent visual memory who spent summer vacations on North Carolina’s Outer Banks and who had happened to stop at a certain roadside stand on his drive south.

He’d called Carson from Nags Head. “Hey, man, weren’t you checking out this Edwards woman a few weeks ago? The one that was mixed up in that scam out in Texas where all these old geezers got ripped off?”

And just like that, they’d had her. She’d holed up in the middle of nowhere with a gentleman named Frederick Grant, a great-uncle on her mother’s side. Check and double-check. If it hadn’t been for that one lucky break, it might’ve taken months. Beckett would’ve been tempted to pass the buck to the next generation, the way the men in his family had evidently been doing ever since the great-grandfather for whom he’d been named had cheated a business partner named Chandler out of his rightful share of Beckett money. Or so the story went.

At this point there was no next generation. Carson wasn’t currently involved with anyone, and Beckett had taken one shot at it, missed by a mile, and been too gun-shy to try again.

Although he preferred to think of it as too busy.

“Money, the root of all evils,” Beckett had mused when he’d checked in with his cousin Carson just before leaving Charleston that morning.

“Ain’t that the truth? Wonder which side of the law old Lance would’ve been on if he’d lived in today’s society.”

“Hard to say. Mom dug up some old records, but they got soaked, pretty much ruined, during Hurricane Hugo.” He’d politely suggested to his mother that a bank deposit box might be a better place to store valuable papers than a hot, leaky attic.

She’d responded, “It’s not like they were family photographs. Besides, how was I to know they’d get wet and clump together? Now stop whining and taste this soup. I know butter’s not supposed to be good for you, but I can hardly make Mama’s crab bisque with margarine.”

“Mom, I’m nearly forty years old, for cripes’ sake. While I might occasionally comment on certain difficulties, I never whine. Hmm, a little more salt—maybe a tad more sherry?”

“That’s what I thought, too. I know you don’t, darling. Just look at you, you’re turning grayer every time I see you.”

According to his father, Beckett’s mother’s hair had turned white before she was even out of her teens. All the girls in her high-school class had wanted gray hair. “It’s one thing to turn gray when you’re young enough to pass it off as a fashion statement. It’s another thing when you’re so old nobody gives it a second thought,” she’d said more than once.

For the past fifteen or so years, her hair had been every shade of blond and red imaginable. At nearly sixty, she scarcely looked more than forty—forty-five, at the most.

“Honey, it’s up to you how to handle it,” she said as he helped himself to another spoonful of her famous soup, which contained shrimp as well as crab, plus enough cream and butter to clog every artery between Moncks Corner and Edisto Island. “PawPaw tried his best to find these people, but then he got sick.”

Right. Beckett’s grandfather, called PawPaw by family and friends alike, was as charming an old rascal as ever lived, but at the age of one hundred plus, he was still putting things off. Cheating the devil, he called it. When it came to buck passing, the Beckett men took a back seat to none.

Which is why some four generations after the “crime” had been committed, Beckett was trying to get the job done once and for all.

“What’s the latest on the new tropical depression? You heard anything this morning?” Carson had asked.

“Pretty much stalled, last I heard. I hope to God it doesn’t strengthen—I’ve got half a dozen ships in the North Atlantic using the new tracking device. They all start dodging hurricanes, I’m going to be pretty busy trying to find out if any of them are being hijacked.”

“Yeah, well…take a break. Go play fairy godfather for a change.”

“Easy for you to say.”

When his mother had called to say that PawPaw had had another stroke, Beckett had been in the middle of negotiations with an Irish chemical tanker company that had been hijacked often enough for the owners to feel compelled to contact his firm, Beckett Marine Risk Management, Inc. “Just a teeny-weeny stroke this time, but he really would like to see you and Carson.” She’d gone on to say she didn’t know how long he could hang on, but seeing his two grandsons would mean the world to him.

Beckett came home. And, as Carson was still out of commission, it was Beckett who’d gotten stuck with the assignment.

So now here he was, chasing an elusive lady who had recently been spotted selling produce and God knows what else at a roadside stand in the northeast corner of North Carolina.

“PawPaw, you owe me big-time for this.” Beckett loved his grandfather. Hadn’t seen much of him recently, but he intended to rectify that if the old guy would just pull through this latest setback. Family, he was belatedly coming to realize, was one part anchor, one part compass. In rough weather, he’d hate to be caught at sea without either one.

So, maybe in a year or so, he thought as he crossed the state line between North Carolina and Virginia, he might consider relocating. He’d incorporated in Delaware because of its favorable laws, but that didn’t mean he had to stay there. After a while, a man got tired of zigzagging across too many time zones.

Pulling up at a stoplight, he yawned, rubbed his bristly jaw and wished he had a street address. He’d called ahead to rent a four-wheel-drive vehicle in case the chase involved more than the five-lane highway that ran from Virginia to North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Having experienced back roads of all descriptions from Zaire to Kuala Lumpur, he knew better than to take anything for granted. So far it looked like a pretty straight shot, but he’d learned to be prepared for almost anything.

“We’re out of prunes,” came a wavering lament from the back of the house.

“Look in the pantry,” Liza called. “They’ve changed the name—they’re called dried plums now, but they’re still the same thing.” She smiled as she snapped her cash box shut and tied a calico apron over her T-shirt and tan linen pants. Uncle Fred—her great-uncle, really—was still sharp as a tack at the age of eighty-six, but he didn’t like it when things changed.

And things inevitably changed. In her case it had been a change for the better, she thought, looking around at the shabby-comfortable old room with its mail-order furniture and hand-crocheted antimacassars. A wobbly smoking stand, complete with humidor and pipe rack—although her uncle no longer smoked on orders from his physician—was now weighted down with all the farming and sports magazines he’d collected and never discarded. There was an air-conditioning unit in one of the windows, an ugly thing that blocked the view of the vacant lot on the other side, where someone evidently planned to build something. But until they could afford central air—which would be after the kitchen floor was replaced and the house reroofed—it served well enough. Both bedrooms had electric fans on the dressers, which made the humid August heat almost bearable.

Liza hadn’t changed a thing when she’d moved in, other than to scrub the walls, floors and windows, wash all the linens and replace a few dry-rotted curtains when they’d fallen apart in her hands. Discount stores were marvelous places, she’d quickly discovered.

Shortly after she’d arrived, Liza had broken down and cried for the first time in months. She’d been cleaning the dead bugs from a closet shelf and had found a shoe box full of old letters and Christmas cards, including those she’d sent to Uncle Fred. Liza and her mother had always done the cards together, with Liza choosing them and her mother addressing the envelopes. Liza had continued to send Uncle Fred a card each year after her mother had died, never knowing whether or not they’d been received.

Dear, lonely Uncle Fred. She had taken a monumental chance, not even calling ahead to ask if she could come for a visit. She hadn’t know anything about him, not really—just that he was her only living relative except for a cousin she hadn’t seen in several years. She’d driven all the way across the country for a few days’ visit, hoping—praying—she could stay until she could get her feet on the ground and plan her next step.

What was that old song about people who needed people?

They’d both been needy, not that either of them had ever expressed it in words. We’re out of prunes. That was one of Uncle Fred’s ways of letting her know he needed her. Danged eyeglasses keep moving from where I put ’em. That was another.

Life in this particular slow lane might lack a few of the amenities she’d once taken for granted, but she would willingly trade all the hot tubs and country clubs in the world for the quiet predictability she’d found here.

Not to mention the ability to see where every penny came from and where and how it was spent. She might once have been negligent—criminally negligent, some would say—but after the lessons she’d been forced to learn, she’d become a fanatic about documenting every cent they took in. Her books, such as they were, balanced to the penny.

When she’d arrived in May of last year, Uncle Fred had been barely hanging on, relying on friends and neighbors to supply him with surplus produce. People would stop by occasionally to buy a few vegetables, leaving the money in a bowl on the counter. They made their own change, and she seriously doubted if it ever occurred to him to count and see if he was being cheated. What would he have done about it? Threaten them with his cane?

Gradually, as her visit stretched out over weeks and then months, she had instigated small changes. By the end of the year, it was taken for granted that she would stay. No words were necessary. He’d needed her and she’d needed him—needed even more desperately to be needed, although her self-esteem had been so badly damaged she hadn’t realized it at the time.

Uncle Fred still insisted on being present every day, even though he seldom got out of his rocking chair anymore. She encouraged his presence because she thought it was good for him. The socializing. He’d said once that all his friends had moved to a nursing home or gone to live with relatives.

She’d said something to the effect that in his case, the relative had come to live with him. He’d chuckled. He had a nice laugh, his face going all crinkly, his eyes hidden behind layers of wrinkles under his bushy white brows.

For the most part, the people who stopped for the free ice water and lingered to buy produce were pleasant. Maybe it was the fact that they were on vacation, or maybe it was simply because when Uncle Fred was holding court, he managed to strike up a conversation with almost everyone who stopped by. Seated in his ancient green porch rocker, in bib overalls, his Romeo slippers and Braves baseball cap, with his cane hidden behind the cooler, he greeted them all with a big smile and a drawled, “How-de-do, where y’all from?”

Now and then, after the stand closed down for the day, she would drive him to Bay View to visit his friends while she went on to do the grocery shopping. Usually he was waiting for her when she got back, grumbling about computers. “All they talk about—them computer things. Good baseball game right there on the TV set and all they want to talk about is going on some kind of a web. Second childhood, if you ask me.”

So they hadn’t visited as much lately. He seemed content at home, and that pleased her enormously. Granted, Liza thought as she broke open a roll of pennies, they would never get rich. But then, getting rich had been the last thing on her mind when she’d fled across country from the chaos her life had become. All she asked was that they sell enough to stay in business, more for Uncle Fred’s sake than her own. She could always get a job; the classified ads were full of help-wanted ads in the summertime. But Fred Grant was another matter. She would never forget how he’d welcomed her that day last May when she’d turned up on his doorstep.

“Salina’s daughter, you say? All the way from Texas? Lord bless ye, young’un, you’ve got the family look, all right. Set your suitcase in the front room, it’s got a brand-new mattress.”

The mattress might have been brand-new at one time, but that didn’t mean it was comfortable. Still, beggars couldn’t be choosers, and at that point in her life, she’d been a beggar. Now, she was proud to say, she earned her own way. Slowly, one step at a time, but every step was straightforward, documented and scrupulously honest.

“I’ll be outside if you need me,” she called now as she headed out the front door. Fred Grant had his pride. It would take him at least five minutes to negotiate the uneven flagstone path between the house and the tin-roofed stand he’d established nearly forty years ago when he’d hurt his back and was no longer able to farm.

Gradually he and his wife had sold off all the land, hanging on to the house and the half acre it sat on. Fred ruefully admitted they had wasted the money on a trip to the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville and a fur coat for his wife. He had buried her in it a few years later.

Now he and Liza had each other. Gradually she had settled into this quiet place, far from the ruins of the glamorous, fast-paced life that had suited James far more than it had ever suited her.

By liquidating practically everything she possessed before she’d headed here—the art, her jewelry and the outrageously expensive clothes she would never again wear—she had managed to pay off a few of James’s victims and their lawyers. She’d given her maid, Patty Ann Garrett, a Waterford potpourri jar she’d always admired. She would have given her more, for she genuinely liked the girl, but she’d felt honor bound to pay back as much of what James had stolen as she could.

Besides, her clothes would never fit Patty Ann, who was five foot four, with a truly amazing bust size. In contrast, Liza was tall, skinny and practically flat. James had called her figure classy, which she’d found wildly amusing at the time.

For a woman with a perfectly good college degree, never mind that it wasn’t particularly marketable, she’d been incredibly ignorant. She was learning, though. Slowly, steadily, she was learning how to take care of herself and someone who was even needier than she was.

“Good morning…yes, those are grown right here in Currituck County.” She would probably say the same words at least a hundred times on a good day. Someone—the Tourist Bureau, probably—had estimated that traffic passing through on summer Saturdays alone would be roughly 45,000 people. People on their way to and from the beach usually stopped at the larger markets, but Uncle Fred had his share of regulars, some of whom said they’d first stopped by as children with their parents.

After Labor Day, the people who stopped seemed to take more time to look around. A few even offered suggestions on how to improve her business. It was partly those suggestions and partly Liza’s own creativity she credited for helping revitalize her uncle’s small roadside stand, which had been all but defunct when she’d shown up. First she’d bought the secondhand cooler and put up a sign advertising free ice water, counting on the word free to bring in a few customers. Then she’d found a source of rag dolls, hand-woven scatter rugs and appliquéd canvas tote bags. She’d labeled them shell bags, and they sold as fast as she could get in a new supply. Last fall she’d added a few locally grown cured hams. By the time they’d closed for the winter, business had more than doubled.

Now, catching a whiff of Old Spice mingled with the earthy smell of freshly dug potatoes and sweet onions, she glanced up as Uncle Fred settled into his rocker. “You should have worn your straw hat today—that cap won’t protect your ears or the back of your neck.”

The morning sun still slanted under the big water oaks. “Put on your own bonnet, woman. I’m tougher’n stroppin’ leather, but skin like yours weren’t meant to fry.”

“Bonnets. Hmm. I wonder if we could get one of the women to make us a few old-fashioned sunbonnets. What do you bet they’d catch on?” Mark of a good businesswoman, she thought proudly. Always thinking ahead.

She sold three cabbages, half a dozen cantaloupes and a hand-loomed scatter rug the first hour, then perched on her stool and watched the traffic flow past. When a dark green SUV pulled onto the graveled parking area, she stood, saying quietly to her uncle, “What do you think, country ham?” When business was slow they sometimes played the game of trying to guess in advance who would buy what.

Together they watched the tall, tanned man approach. His easy way of moving belied the silver-gray of his thick hair. He couldn’t be much past forty, she decided. Dye his hair and he could pass for thirty. “Maybe just a glass of ice water,” she murmured. He didn’t strike her as a typical vacationer, much less one who was interested in produce.

“That ’un’s selling, not buying. Got that look in his eye.”

Beckett took his time approaching the tall, thin woman with the wraparound calico apron, the sun-struck auburn hair and the fashion model’s face. If this was the same woman who’d been involved in a high-stakes con game that covered three states and involved a few offshore banking institutions, what the hell was she doing in a place like this?

And if this wasn’t Eliza Chandler Edwards, then what the devil was a woman with her looks doing sitting behind a bin of onions, with Grandpaw Cranket or Crocket or whatever the guy’s name was, rocking and grinning behind her.

“How-de-do? Where ye from, son?”

“Beg pardon?” He paused between a display of green stuff and potatoes.

“We get a lot of reg’lars stopping by, but I don’t believe I’ve seen you before. You from up in Virginia?”

“It’s a rental car, Uncle Fred,” the woman said quietly.

Beckett tried to place her accent and found he couldn’t quite pin it down. Cultured Southern was about as close as he could come. She was tall, at least five-nine or-ten. Her bone structure alone would have made her a world-class model if she could manage to walk without tripping over her feet. He was something of a connoisseur when it came to women; he’d admired any number of them from a safe distance. If this was the woman he’d worked so damned hard to track down, the question still applied—what the devil was she doing here selling produce?

He nodded to the old man and concentrated on the woman. “Ms. Edwards?”

Liza felt a gaping hole open up in her chest. Did she know him? She managed to catch her breath, but she couldn’t stop staring. There was something about him that riveted her attention. His eyes, his hands—even his voice. If she’d ever met him before, she would have remembered. “I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake.”

“You’re not Eliza Chandler Edwards?”

Uncle Fred was frowning now, fumbling behind the cooler for his cane. Oh, Lord, Liza thought, if he tried to come to her rescue, they’d both end up in trouble. She had told him a little about her past when she’d first arrived, but nothing about the recent hang-up calls, much less the letter that had come last month.

“I believe you have the advantage,” she murmured, stalling for time. How could he possibly know who she was? She was legally Eliza Jackson Chandler again, wiping out the last traces of her disastrous marriage.

“Could I have a glass of that free ice water you’re advertising?”

On a morning when both the temperature and the humidity hovered in the low nineties, this man looked cool as the proverbial cucumber. Not a drop of sweat dampened that high, tanned brow. “Of course. Right over there.” Indicating the container of plastic cups, Liza fought to maintain her composure.

When he tipped back his head to swallow, her gaze followed the movement of his throat. His brand of fitness hadn’t come from any gym, she’d be willing to bet on it. Nor had that tan been acquired over a single weekend at the beach. The contrast of bronzed skin with pewter hair, ice-gray eyes and winged black eyebrows was startling, not to mention strikingly attractive.

The word sexy came to mind, and she immediately pushed it away. Sex was the very last thing that concerned her now. Getting rid of this man overshadowed everything.

But first she needed to know if he was the one who’d been stalking her—if not literally, then figuratively, by calling her in the middle of the night and hanging up. Just last month she’d received a letter addressed to her by name at Uncle Fred’s rural route box number. The return address was a post office box in South Dallas. Inside the plain white envelope had been a blank sheet of paper.

“I don’t believe you answered my question,” he said, his voice deep, slightly rough edged, but not actually threatening. At least, not yet.

“First, I’d like to know who’s asking.” She would see his demand and raise him one.

“Beckett. L. Jones Beckett.”

“That still doesn’t explain why you’re here asking questions, Mr. Beckett.” If that really is your name.

“The name doesn’t ring any bells?”

Liza turned away to stare down at a display of summer squash. Had any of James’s victims been named Beckett? She honestly couldn’t recall, there had been so many. With the help of her lawyer, she’d done the best she could to make amends, but even after liquidating everything there still hadn’t been enough to go around. Of course the lawyers, including her divorce lawyer, whom she’d no longer needed at that point, had taken a large cut of all she’d been able to raise.

He was still waiting for an answer. “No, I’m sorry. Should it?”

“My grandfather was Lancelot Elias Beckett.”

“He has my sympathy.” Her arms were crossed over her breasts, but they failed to warm her inside, where it counted. Uncle Fred, bless his valorous heart, had stopped rocking and stopped smiling. His cane was at the ready, across his bony knees.