Читать книгу All That Glitters - Mary Brady - Страница 12
ОглавлениеZACH HELD HIS cell phone to his ear and listened as his attorney warned him that there was a reporter in town asking about him.
“She’s here,” he said as he took a loaf of bread and a package of cookies from the grocery bag and placed them on the kitchen’s island countertop.
“At the mansion? That’s not a good idea.” His attorney, Hunter Morrison, sounded worried and he probably had reason to be.
“She ran her car off the road following me up here.”
Hunter snorted. “I guess leaving her in the ditch to sit out a hurricane might have been a bit much. I don’t suppose she did it on purpose.”
Zach thought of how far her car had left the road, how frightened she had been when he had hauled her out and wondered if anyone was that desperate for a story. “I doubt it.”
“You don’t have her in the loft with you.”
It was a nonquestion that begged a negative response. “I put her in the house. We’ve got power now. If Owen did his job, the generator is functioning and there’s plenty of gas.”
“Well, the old guy’s intentions will have been good.”
Zach snorted this time. He didn’t trust Owen Calloway to be a perfect groundskeeper, but he trusted the old guy and his wife not to meddle and not to gossip. Those two qualities made his only close neighbors gems.
“At any rate I’ve got plenty of wood. As long as the fireplace works, and according to the contractor there should be barely a puff of smoke even in a hurricane. We’ve got food and hot water.”
“You might find Delainey and I squatting up there one of these days.”
Hunter had a new fiancé who enriched his life in every way and Zach was glad that kind of thing worked for the two of them.
“Anytime. Anytime,” Zach said putting a bag of apples and one of oranges on the counter beside the bread. “And I’ll keep the reporter at arm’s length.”
“A little farther away might be better.”
“Maybe she’ll stay tucked in the house.”
“They predict the storm could stall.”
“I’ll feed her once in a while.”
“Be careful of what you feed her. She has a lot of good journalism to her credit, but her last story has been labeled as a desperate grab at a Pulitzer. She’s been down and out since, so she’s most likely very hungry.”
“I’ll slip food under her door.”
Hunter laughed. “Yeah. Be careful and good luck, Zach.”
“Thanks, and I meant it about you and Delainey.”
He signed off with another promise to be wary.
Zachary McClure Hale in loyal and patriotic fashion had been named after his grandfather Zachary Hale and an ancestor by the name of McClure who had brought his wife and infant to the very young United States of America in the early 1800s.
By time and attrition the McClures of New England had either died out, or a few, but not many, had left Maine and lost interest in the family heritage. Virginia McClure, his grandmother, had drilled into him that a Mainer knew where he came from and he protected that legacy. For most of Zach’s adult life, it had been up to him to maintain the ancestral home and the antiques within.
The old McClure mansion was his to look after, but caring for the heritage home had not been a burden. Money to keep the house in good repair was also not a problem. At issue, he had little time for the place and there was scant interest outside himself for keeping it in the best historically accurate repair.
He didn’t begrudge the time he gave. The loft above the garage had become a place to retreat, where he didn’t usually allow people to follow him. Since the time when control had been bequeathed to him, there had never been a reporter and never a woman here other than Cammy Logan, who cleaned the house and the loft and kept a keen eye on any repairs or issues that occurred with either.
Reporters he usually met at a café or his office. Women he wished to entertain in private, he met at restaurants or posh hotels. His penthouse condominium in Boston was also private territory.
The mansion on Sea Crest Hill he kept to himself, until today.
He’d deal with this reporter exactly how he’d dealt with those in Boston. She’d get referred to his attorney for a blanket statement neither confirming nor denying any wrongdoing at Hale and Blankenstock. He gave the loft a quick inspection. The windows were specially installed to withstand a strong nor’easter and even an occasional branch or bit of debris. He was hopeful they would hold out in a hurricane.
The interior with its old blond wood of the 1950’s had withstood time and even come back into fashion a few times. The light-colored paneled walls gave the place a feeling that it was larger on the inside than out. And it was a welcome and necessary refuge he needed in his life.
He had updated the appliances last year and made sure the bed was large and comfortable. Cammy had added a pillow here and there, a few fabric wall hangings and a handmade quilt on the back of the couch to soften the man-effect, but he had to admit they added more comfort.
Zach had barely finished the conversation when the lights flicked out again. He’d have to check the generator.
He grabbed the flashlight and a baseball cap from the ones on the wall pegs and headed down the stairs where he donned a dry jacket from a hook in the garage. Then he sprinted toward the generator shed.
The wind slapped him and the rain did its best to blow him off course as he approached the shed, where behind the lawn mower, weed whacker and other tools to maintain the exterior of the old home, would sit the rarely used generator that powered the essentials of the house whenever necessary. Right now all he needed were two rooms.
When he got inside, out of the storm, the shed smelled of old wood, fuel and age. Built sometime in the middle of the last century the wooden frame could withstand a direct hit from a hurricane if it had to.
The bright beam of his flashlight spread out, illuminating the shed as he closed the door behind him. The fuel cans sat lined up behind the lawn mower next to the generator. Zach moved the mower and grabbed a can of fuel. The can lifted easily. Empty. The second can, same as the first.
Owen did outside maintenance and kept the gasoline rotated and stocked in the shed for emergencies, or he was supposed to keep the fuel stocked. Today two cans stood full and all the spare cans were dry as “bones guarding a pirate’s treasure,” Owen would say. That meant there was enough fuel to fill the generator with a bit to spare. Apparently Owen had mowed and weed-whacked all summer and he was always “Ah-yuh, goin’ ta get more gas tomorra.”
If the reporter used the space heater, the lights, her computer and who knew what else the woman would plug in, the gas would last less than a day. This storm was not going to pass for at least thirty-six hours.
He rubbed the back of his neck as he considered the fix Owen had left him in. A day. Maybe a day.
He dropped his hand to his side. By himself, he could make the generator last several days.
He should have left that woman in the ravine. Other than claiming to be a reporter, he had no idea who she was and didn’t want to find out. Grandmother might frown on his spare hospitality, but he hoped the woman would sit huddled in front of the space heater, burn up the gas with a hair dryer and use her laptop as long as the power lasted and then sit in the dark under a quilt and wait out the storm.
He poured gas in the generator, and when he pushed the start button, it snapped from silent to loud in an instant.
That was luck.
With his hands over his ears, he stood waiting to make sure the old thing continued to run, that nothing had clogged during the year or so of only being started as a test from time to time.
Two things were “at leasts” today. At least he had gotten back from Boston in time to get the house closed up and at least the woodpile out under the tall white pines behind the house had been stacked high and straight.
He’d have a heat and light source when the gas burned up.
What he wouldn’t have for the day or two it took for the storm to pass was peace from a sensation seeker. Now all he had to figure out was how to keep Ms. Bonacorda in the dark, literally, when the lights went out.
These days most reporters he came into contact with were gossip seekers who could take a corn-flake-sized bit of banal and build it into a sensational story. Worse, when a story was written with enough adjectives or read with enough enthusiasm it would be considered by the masses to be gospel. He wondered how many adjectives this woman had in her cache.
He let his hands fall to his sides disgusted with himself. Whatever and whoever this woman was, he had gotten into the mess with Hale and Blankenstock, and he knew the world was going to demand answers from him.
Answers were going to be tough to come by.
Convinced the generator would continue to run, he turned to leave and spotted the note tagged to the door.
Me and Margaret Louise are hunkered down and well taken care of. Don’t you worry about us. You come over if you want to. It was signed Owen and Margaret Louise.
He had no choice but to smile. “Well taken care of” meant the two of them were holed up with enough food for a small regiment and plenty of scotch for the whole army. Owen knew creature comfort and he deserved them, and Margaret Louise knew how to cook, therefore the food in Zach’s freezer...
He tugged the hood of the jacket back on over his baseball cap and stood in the doorway of the shed. He was fascinated, watching the show presented by nature. Lightning flickered in various degrees of strength for almost a minute before it abated to small flashes.
In the near dark, he saw no light coming from the room where he’d sent the reporter. He could have gotten lucky—maybe she’d gone to sleep already.
He doubted it as soon as he thought it.
When he sent her away, she had looked shocked and might have left in a disappointed huff. She might even have been foolish enough to go back out in the storm to see if she could rescue her car. He could have told her that car was going nowhere until O’Reilly’s tow truck hauled it out of the ravine. She was lucky she hadn’t gone in a few yards farther up the road, as that part of the ravine ran down the steep side of the hill.
She must have thought he was story-worthy to risk her neck and she helped shore up the old mansion without question.
Did those things make her someone he’d be interested in knowing or someone he should lock out of the loft and hope she went away without actually damaging the old home and contents? His grandmother had loved the mansion on Sea Crest Hill and his own mother had rejected it as the shabbier side of life.
He turned and gave the generator a last visual once-over. Satisfied, he shifted the cap so the storm had less of a chance to blast rain into his eyes and headed out.
The wind whipped the pine trees relentlessly over his head and the rain pelted down as he fled sure-footed along the stone path to his refuge. In five minutes he’d have a fire going and a glass of finely aged red wine in his hand.
Hopefully that reporter was tucked away in the four-poster bed, her computer in her lap, capitalizing on someone else’s misfortune.
* * *
WHEN ADDY HEARD the sound of boots tread on the steps to the loft above the garage, she drew herself up to her full five foot five inches and whispered encouragement to herself. There was a time when no man could make her back down, but this man had already shown signs of ignoring her and had all but thrown her over his shoulder and carried her off to his cave.
One of his many talents, no doubt, along with the ability to talk, bully and cajole people out of their money, was to carry women off. Already he had shown her that murdering her to keep her out of his business was not plan number one. If he wanted to kill her to shut her up, he could have just left her in her car. She might have been silenced by a flying tree limb or been washed off down the hill into the ocean if he had left her to fend for herself.
Most likely he just planned to stick her up in beguiling Millie McClure’s room full of antiques and ignore her.
She smiled and a shot of courage buzzed inside her.
The door swung open and the man who appeared in the dim light was not the slick swindler she had seen in Boston, nor the Maine backwoodsman. Nor was he the man who would show up briefly, a glittering beacon of humility according to her sister, Savanna, at the holiday parties for Hale and Blankenstock where her sister had met him exactly twice. He would stay for a few minutes, greet each employee and then leave, according to Savanna.
Everyone now knew the glittering beacon was part of a lie.
Hat in hand, the shadows made the furrow of his brows deeper and his unguarded expression more dramatic. He was handsome in his rough and outdoorsy look, and in this moment he appeared to be a man who had many troubles to deal with, many concerns for which he had to be responsible.
Under other circumstances, she might want to walk up to him, put her hands flat on his chest and brush his damp hair back off where it had fallen on his forehead. She would sweep her hand across the furrows of his brows, draw his head down and put her lips against his full and slightly drawn ones. And...
What was she thinking?
This was the enemy of the people.
Hale slowly swung his gaze in her direction as if he had expected her to be there. His features relaxed to neutral, he became a hybrid between woodsman, because of the four-or five-day growth of sandy whiskers, and slick swindler, because of years of practice.
Addy drew in a breath to sort out her thoughts.
“I wanted to speak with you,” she said into the silence. They were in his territory, and short of death by storm or felony theft of his SUV, she was stuck here. She wanted to sound nonconfrontational, perhaps professorish, someone who was just looking for facts, not trying to crucify him.
If his guard went down to anywhere near what it had been when he had opened the door, she’d get something related to the truth, or at least as much of the truth as a person like him could find in his life.
He didn’t answer, but hung his hat on a peg, turned and walked out.
Degenerate...
Running away. Or maybe it was a ploy to have her follow him and then he’d get her out of the loft and out of his hair if he ran back inside and locked the door with her on the outside.
A kid’s game, like musical chairs. She’d be left out. Too bad, so sad. But that was not going to happen.
Make herself useful. That’s what she should do.
What did men like? Couldn’t resist?
She looked at the bags of groceries on the island counter.
Food. Even swindlers had to eat.
She couldn’t cook at all—not even boil a decent pot of water, but maybe she could manage something. She grabbed the nearest bag and started poking around.
Fusilli? Other than being pasta—she knew because she could see its curly shape through the window in the box—she hadn’t known anything about it, hadn’t needed to know what it was named to eat it. Nope. Just stick a fork in it.
Cans of plain tomato sauce. What the heck was she supposed to do with that?
The door across the room popped open and Hale entered with his arms bulging with firewood. He turned his back to her as he unloaded and stacked wood in the bin near the fireplace.
Then he walked out again.
A fire, of course. She was probably much better at fire-starting than cooking. Actually, she once tried to combine the two. Unfortunately, the smell of burned pizza stuck around her condo, and to be fair, the hall of her building, for a week.
She hustled over to the fireplace and searched for fire-starter logs or those cute pinecones stuffed with candle wax or something to make fires start easier.
There wasn’t so much as a fireplace match, just a book of matches with the name of the bar in town. Braven’s. She could have, should have stayed there in the bar. Too late.
She poked around for fire-starting aids and gave up.
She wasn’t any better at fire-starting than she was at cooking, so when she heard the footsteps on the stairs, she fled back to the kitchen area where she could keep the center island between them, duck behind it if she had to.
He unloaded the wood and knelt on the floor in front of the fireplace. Then he reached inside and opened the flue. Oh, she would not have remembered that. With wood chips and bits of flimsy bark, he started a small fire, feeding it twigs and shards of wood, and of course, he had used the stubby matches.
Just like now, she always managed to have someone around to start her fires and usually to cook. She wondered if he expected her to do it, to cook. Good luck with that one, buddy.
The fire grew tall and she was a bit envious. She’d have to research fire-starting when she had time.
When the fire blazed, he stood and headed in her direction.
His sandy blond brows drew together in fierce concentration. There was clearly a side of this man she knew nothing about, possibly a deeply dark and sinister side. She should be running away. She should go back to the house, push the four-poster bed up against the door and tie the sheets together to let herself out the window in case she needed to flee into the storm.
He paused and dropped his keys into a dish on the long table behind the couch.
His expression did not challenge nor welcome as he continued toward the kitchen.
Nonreactive. Ego-sheltered.
Serial killer? Chain-saw murderer? At least the two of them weren’t in a basement alone. A basement? Did the place have a basement? Yes, the lift up doors in the breezeway would lead to a cellar of some kind. Maybe that’s where she’d be buried.
She was crazy, the chatter in her head crazier.
Maybe it was he who should be afraid.
As he drew closer, he seemed to grow in size and his expression in intensity. She stiffened, searching for the best exit if she had to run.
And then she relaxed.
Yeah.
She could run away, go back to a world where she would cover stories for microfame and a couple of dollars.
Then she could go live under a bridge in a refrigerator box and wear newspapers on her feet and stuffed into the sleeves of her lightweight coat as she had done when she investigated and had written the series Life Without a Cause to critical acclaim only four short years ago.
Hale came around the counter and stopped a mere two feet from her. He placed one hand, deliberately it seemed, on the counter beside her, and she inhaled.
By being here in his living space, she had made her move, set out her pawn. The next move was his.
A second later he stepped around her to the freezer, from which he took two glass bowls filled with something green. He took off the lids, popped them into the microwave and covered them with a sheet of crinkly sounding paper he’d taken from a box in the drawer under the microwave.
Eat? His move was to feed her. Or maybe he was hungry and planned to eat both...in front of her...while she salivated.
Addy watched the bowls spin on the microwave’s carousel and then realized he was heating pea soup.
Food was a good move on his part. She hadn’t eaten since early this morning. If she accepted food from him, she would be in his debt.
Yeah, as if she wasn’t already—deeply.
He pulled two plates from the cupboard.
He was dreadful at portraying himself as a bad guy, or he was as “diabolically clever” as the tabloids had called him when they alluded to his making off with a few billion dollars.
If she didn’t have an absolutely reliable source, she would begin to doubt the veracity of her facts. The SEC, Securities and Exchange Commission, a U.S. government agency set up to prevent investment fraud, had come down hard on Hale and Blankenstock.
More importantly, according to her younger sister, Savanna, this guy was worse than a robber or a thief who stole once and disappeared into the night, Hale was heartless. He had repeatedly taken from Savanna—trusting, single mother Savanna—and many others.
He went back to the fire, hunkered down and carefully placed a pair of logs on the flaming pile. He stayed squatted, silhouetted in the soft light until the fire roared.
He looked handsome. And fit. She wondered how fit—she couldn’t help it, picturing him naked and... It was easy to see, this man lifted heavy things, not just fountain pens and martini glasses.
She shook her head at the silliness of her thoughts.
He had set out a pea soup pawn. Now she was going to have to sit down and eat with him or give up the game without trying and walk back to town beaten down by the storm and failure.
Lunch it was, and so be it.
She pulled open a drawer in the butcher-block island and found place mats and napkins that most likely had never been used. Carefully she set them on the table in strategic places. At right angles so she could better watch him when she wanted and ignore him if it seemed necessary.
She took the plates he had placed on the counter, where they would have sat side by side on the bar stools, and moved them to the table.
If she was to get a story, if she was going to find out what made this guy tick, she’d have to make nice. Pea soup with a swindler. She had done scary things before to get to the truth.
She’d do worse to get his real story if need be.
She opened another drawer where she supposed spoons would be and bingo, there was a tray of flatware. She took a soupspoon for him and a teaspoon for her. Soupspoons were too large and made her slurp soup. She preferred a teaspoon where the contents cooled faster and the spoon fit her mouth. Her former boyfriend had called her a delicate flower for demanding such things. He never did understand her.
Her former boyfriend had also deserted her when the fiction she had unwittingly written had hit the fan.
Former. Back in the part of her life when she soared, Wesley had stuck himself to her side whenever she was home in Boston. He hadn’t liked the falling-flat part, however, so he split quickly, taking with him everything from her condo she had thought was theirs.
So long and good luck.
When Hale left the fire, he came over to where she stood waiting for the microwave to finish. Reaching into the cupboard beside her head, he grabbed a bag of oyster crackers.
He smelled of wood smoke and she could feel the heat of the fire radiating from him. She inhaled and when she shivered, the quaking in her knees wasn’t just because the place was one degree warmer than freezing. She wanted to...move in on the story, grab it and not let go until she had everything she could ever want.
But she held her ground. Letting him know how eager she was would not help her bond with his deepest soul.
When he took the oyster crackers and turned away toward the table she asked, “Why are you doing this? Why are you treating me as if you don’t hate me? You must hate me.”
“You give yourself too much credit,” he responded calmly without turning around.
Good one, she thought. Attack her and keep her on edge. Maybe he didn’t want to play nice after all.
“All right.” She moved around so she could see his face. “You don’t hate me, but you know why I’m here. Is there anything you want to tell me?”
His shoulders stiffened and he drew in a breath. “You have all your facts and you’re looking for that personal touch to make your story more sensational.” Again his words were not angry.
Under his assessing gaze, she suddenly felt as if he knew exactly who and what she was. As if he had been there that day when her source in Afghanistan had been exposed as a liar.
She felt the humiliation try to submerge her again, as if he was qualified to judge her.
She gathered her wits. “You did what you did and I came here to try to make some sense of it. To try to understand.”
In Afghanistan she had been stupid and too eager. She had almost caused others to lose their lives, and that might make her as morally corrupt as he was.
Disgust and repugnance aimed at herself suddenly seemed much worse than it had ever been. It made her sick to her stomach, made her head flood with the images floating around on the internet that portrayed her to be the lowest kind of life-form.
She looked up and he was standing almost toe-to-toe with her.
“What do you think you will be trying to understand?”
His question brought her back into reality, the loft, the hurricane, the many people this man had cheated. His words had been soft as if trying to assess her again, not to challenge her.
“How—how things started. I thought you might tell me how things started.”
He stepped away but watched her warily.
With both palms pressed to the counter she continued. “Did it start out as a swindle?”
She expected him to smile at this, to pull out his charm to deflect her. Perhaps put on enough of a show to make her believe he had been wronged, to make her go sit in the four-poster room and use what she already had about him, type up a tidy article that looked just like everyone else’s.
Not to dig around inside his head for deeper motives. Maybe his mother withheld love. Maybe his father exiled him to the military academy he attended for four years and supposedly hated.
He didn’t smile at all. He looked tired. He had a right to be exhausted. She’d give him that. He had been out saving boats and rescuing women who wanted to tear his life apart. And that was exactly what she wanted to do, to tear his life apart as he had torn apart her sister’s.
She wanted to disassemble him.
Limb by limb, she thought and then asked, “At what point did you realize things were spinning out of control? That you were going to have to distance yourself from the fray so as to look innocent?”
