Читать книгу Til Death Undo Us - Morgan Q O'Reilly - Страница 8

Chapter 2

That day, which had the magic to feel like yesterday and a lifetime ago in the same breath, Brennan had caught the moment we collided and looked into each other’s eyes. In fact, he had taken a series of a dozen photos we made into a collage that hung on our bedroom wall. We called it the moment we fell in love, but really, we both knew it was hours after the fact. Cupid had nailed us both the very first time our eyes met over that horrid vanilla latte. How many people are lucky enough to have their moment preserved on film? We had many photos, both sillier and far more intimate. However, I considered that photo my greatest possession. It was also one of Ryan’s greatest comforts in his final days.

Thinking about Ryan and the hollow spot left by his death was just another way to avoid thinking about the events of my lunch hour. I rocked in my chair, feeling his touch via the piercing I’d gotten for our third anniversary. Lately I’d been noticing it more and more and, at times like this, the pressure of the steel ball positioned over my clit provided stimulation that both distracted and soothed me as I stared at the picture on my desk. That picture had become the source of my calm as well as the focus of a million unanswered questions.

My life since Ryan’s death had been a series of small goals. Goal one: wake up each morning, dress, and pretend I still had a life worth living. Goal two: go to work and immerse myself in the impersonal numbers of other people’s lives. Their bookkeeping, payroll, financial reports and taxes.

I worked for a firm of accountants and tax attorneys. We had a steady business of keeping other businesses on firm financial footing. I was merely a cog in the works, a worker-bee hired by Jacob Levin, the senior partner. Ostensibly I was the quasi office manager. In reality I was pretty much devoted full-time to his cases and clients, even more so since Ryan’s death. It was Jacob’s way of keeping a paternal eye on me.

At one o’clock on a Friday afternoon in the middle of a scorching July, I sat at my desk chilled far more than warranted by air conditioning, staring at the photo, hoping for something to pop up and explain the menacing man who’d cornered me at my house only an hour before during my lunch break. Despite his expensive suit–easily something Italian made and worth more than two months of my salary–he’d had the appearance of a barely civilized mobster. One with red hair and a Boston accent, albeit one affiliated with the Irish gangs of legend rather than Beacon Hill. Ryan had been born in Boston, though raised in a suburb, and had once explained the differences to me. He’d also been quick to point out his parents were fine professional people with no old gang ties from a century before.

Until then, I’d never given his family history a second thought. His parents were lovely people and had used the services of a surrogate, since his mother couldn’t carry to term. He’d had a normal childhood and maintained close ties with his parents. Not for one moment had I ever associated him with what I’d heard during my mid-day break.

What the man had said made no sense whatsoever.

I’d gone home for lunch and found a stranger sitting as calmly as could be in the living room of my restored bungalow. Immediately, I’d turned around, thinking to grab my cellphone from my purse and call the police, but two more men had materialized from near the door. How had I not noticed them? That terrified me as much as the man sitting on my sofa.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Mrs. Malone,” he said. A nod to one of his overdressed goons had me relieved of my purse. The second escorted me to a chair across from where the boss sat.

“I’m Patrick Shaughnessy. No relation as far as I can tell,” he added at my startled hum. “Of course it’s always possible, but I’m not interested enough to dig that deep.”

All right. Not long lost family. “What do you want?”

“Your husband.”

I stared at him. “That’s not funny.”

“I’m not joking. The–” A flash of anger darkened his blue eyes before he cleared his expression in an obvious effort appear cool and unruffled. Though meant to appear friendly, his smile fell far short as he leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees, big hands loosely clasped between his widespread knees, and started again. “Your husband took my money, but hasn’t delivered the goods. I merely want to see what the delay is.” He made it sound so reasonable, sitting there on my doily-covered furniture as if he’d come for tea. I didn’t buy it for a minute. Probably the malicious glint in his eye, and the way he pointedly looked at my lap and breasts, had something to do with it.

I couldn’t stop the recoil that pressed my back into the chair. “That’s impossible.”

“Nothing’s impossible.”

Sickness roiled in my stomach, but I did my best to hide it. In other words, not all that well. “I don’t know who put you up to this, but it’s cruel and sick. Stop this prank, or punk, or whatever it is you’re trying to do, this instant.” I tried to use the Mom-Voice I’d cultivated with my younger brothers, but a quaver stole most of my authority.

“I assure you, madam, this is no prank. Ryan Malone took a briefcase full of my hard earned cash, a down payment, and promised to return a week later with the goods in exchange for the rest of the money. That was two weeks ago.”

“No.” I gasped for air through a dry throat. “Impossible!”

Shaughnessy spread his hands wide, imploring me to come clean. “Tell me where to find him, Mrs. Malone, and I’ll go away and never cross your shadow again. It’s that simple.” Straightening, he leaned back on my loveseat, arms draped across the back. As if he had nothing to hide and I could trust him completely.

Simple, my ass, but if there was a chance of making him go away, I’d take it. “I’ll tell you exactly where he is.” I gave him an address. A number. Glared at him, daring him to verify it.

Which, of course they could do without ever leaving my house. Goon One whipped out his iPhone, input the address and zoomed in for the benefit of his boss. Patrick took the device, stared at the screen, then scowled at me, all pretense of genial civility forgotten. “Not funny, Mrs. Malone.”

“As I said earlier.”

“This is the address for Oak Knoll Cemetery.”

“That, Mr. Shaughnessy, is the final resting place of my husband, Ryan Malone, who died September eighteenth, two years ago. He’s been buried for twenty-two months, to be precise. I don’t know who you were doing business with, but I can assure you it wasn’t my husband.”

In return, he rattled off a few numbers himself. Birth date, parents, social security number, schools, dates attended and degrees earned. Our wedding date and the location. All of which were accurate. Hell, he even had my birth date and the names of my father, mother, and all my brothers, and an accurate description of Ryan before he became ill.

What he knew absolutely petrified me.

“How do you know all this?”

“I do background checks on everyone I do business with, Mrs. Malone. If I wanted, I could find out what they ate for dinner and exactly when they crapped it out.”

I flinched at the crudeness, which I knew was designed specifically to frighten me. It worked. The fingers clasped in my lap were attached to a body that trembled.

“Then you can find the specifics of his death. All of which were witnessed, as he spent his last days in the hospital.”

The meeting went downhill from there. Shaughnessy showed me a photo of a man who looked identical to my Ryan. Held side-by-side with the wedding photo one of the goons had found in my home office, I might have been fooled, if I could forget holding Ryan through the wasting from his disease. I countered Shaughnessy’s belief that we’d faked Ryan’s illness by showing photos of the month-by-month erosion of the lovely man I’d married. That might have convinced him, though he didn’t admit it.

Shaughnessy threatened to hurt my family if I called the authorities, who wouldn’t help me anyway since Ryan’s promise to him involved defense secrets amounting to treason. I’d only find myself in jail or tied up in lawsuits that would make me wish I’d died alongside my husband. I was also put on notice he’d be watching me. Very, very closely. Just in case we’d cooked up this scheme complete with a faked death. And another note for the record, he added, keeping my handgun in the bottom desk drawer wouldn’t be of much help if someone broke in during the night. A threat, or a dare?

He left, and I made an attempt to slap a sandwich together. Which I couldn’t do, and wouldn’t have been able to eat if I had. I moved the gun to my bedside table and stashed it at the bottom of a box of tissues.

I returned to work where I sat, trying to ease the petrifying panic from my head. Think. Okay, I had it–safety measures. The man had jimmied the locks on my house, in my safe, quiet neighborhood, in the middle of the day. Obviously I needed better protection. I looked up the number for the security company Jacob used and placed the call. Fifteen minutes later, I had an appointment to meet the owner, a man named Russ Steigart, at the house at five.

Thinking I might be set until I figured out something else, I turned the problem over to my subconscious and focused on work, tuning out the phones and the slow, steady stream of foot traffic. I was good at that. Denial. If I didn’t want to see it, I put my nose to the grindstone and, poof, my problem went away. I owed Jacob a good day’s work. Lord knew he’d been the perfect boss, the epitome of patience throughout Ryan’s illness and the aftermath.

To show my appreciation for all he’d done for me, I did my best to put on a happy face each day. Barring that, I did my work with as much efficiency as possible, keeping my mien as neutral as possible. If not cheerful, at least I avoided doing an Eeyore impression. Minimal drama, maximum production. I’d been slowly making progress the last eighteen months and now made it through most of my days without wanting to crawl into Ryan’s grave and join him.

Postman, office supply delivery, a package from Fed Ex, a tall dark man in a suit, all these events passed with little notice from me until I heard the man say my name.

“Mrs. Malone?” Brandy questioned the man standing at her desk. Through the smoke-tinted glass panel and assorted hanging plants screening my desk from reception, I couldn’t tell much. “Who may I say is asking?”

“Niall Malone.”

“In regards to?”

“It’s personal.”

I cringed. Based on the suit, my first thought tagged him as one of Shaughnessy’s goons. However, he didn’t have a Boston accent, or East Coast for that matter. He could have passed for local.

Second thought had to do with his last name. Could he be a long lost relative who’d just heard of Ryan’s death? Pretty slow on the uptake if so. I leaned sideways to peek around a leaf and noted he looked tan with dark hair and light eyes, possibly blue. Broad shoulders and chest. Quite possibly well-toned abs. Ryan had resembled my family, with varying shades of red hair. This stranger was darker. Other than coloring, he looked a bit like Aidan after a long summer of wielding a hammer–in a word, buff. But there the similarities ended. The shape of his jaw, the line of his nose were all more refined than the Shaughnessys I knew. He didn’t look at all like Ryan. And he wore a suit. Dark charcoal, crisp white shirt, dark tie. Few people in our valley, fifty miles east of San Francisco, wore suits and ties, especially in summer.

Government? Gangster? Police? My shivers of terror returned.

“You don’t have to talk to him,” Jacob murmured in my ear, suddenly bending over a file he placed on my desk. I hadn’t even heard him approach.

A relatively small man, Jacob was in his late fifties with liberally gray-salted brown hair, but looked much older due to the heavy wrinkles on his tanned face. Too much time sun worshipping, he’d confessed. And he still indulged. He and his wife liked baking beside their pool, and both were as brown and wrinkled as walnuts. Once Ryan had been diagnosed, they’d become my support away from home, part of the reason I felt I owed him loyalty and a full day’s effort. He often said I was too hard on myself. To tell the truth, we both knew it was to keep my mind off my all-encompassing grief.

I suppose I could have told Jacob about my noon time caller, but I didn’t want to trigger deeper feelings of responsibility in him or endanger him. A tiny part of me insisted once Shaughnessy had proof of my Ryan’s death, he’d go elsewhere and threaten someone else. I listened to that part instead of the side that wanted to pack my bags and run home to Daddy.

The phone on my desk rang and the man waiting for me looked my direction. No point in picking up. Brandy had pointed me out as clearly as if she’d turned and around and used her finger.

“I don’t like the look of him.” Jacob frowned, deepening the many wrinkles around his eyes. “Looks like a mobster to me.”

I glanced at the stranger again, moving a little to see around the spider plant. The suit looked a little more up-town than regular government issue. Still, he had the bearing of man who’d probably served in the military and possibly carried a weapon.

“He’s not going away. Either I talk to him here or he ambushes me outside the office,” I murmured to Jacob.

Smoothing my black linen skirt over my hips, I stood and made my way to the front. At home I’d swapped out my usual high heels for flatter sandals. I’d figured they were easier to run in, just in case. Considering only a few thin strips of leather held them to my feet, my logic was seriously flawed. As a result, I felt shorter than usual. In my heels I usually just about matched Jacob for height. In flats, I stood half a head shorter.

The man at the desk towered over both of us, but he paid little attention to Jacob, who followed me. Instead, the stranger’s blue-eyed gaze swept me from head to toe and back again. I felt as if I’d been scanned as surely as if I’d been slapped down on the printer-scanner on my desk. I also felt as hot as if I’d spent ten minutes baking in the one-hundred-and-ten-plus outside temperature. One hundred ten in the shade, but low humidity. I’d come to prefer it to the moist heat of the mid-west.

If the tall, dark stranger appreciated my appearance in any way, he didn’t show it. His eyes stopped briefly on the black hand-crocheted top I’d made, a camisole and cardigan in the style of Irish lace. Not that I cared one way or the other, but I was used to people either noticing my creations, or taking in my lack of height and making judgments on my age.

When it came to age, they usually underestimate by five years or so. Ryan had earned some scathing looks over the years from people assuming I was half his age. As a nineteen-year-old bride, someone from the hotel we’d stayed at had called the cops thinking he’d kidnapped an over-developed–but still underage–girl. Fortunately, we’d chosen a hotel in our town and the cops had known me from playing softball with my brothers. At twenty-six, I’d earned a few grief lines around my eyes, making me look more my age.

“I’m Cassidy Malone.”

“Niall Malone.” He didn’t offer a hand to shake. A part of me was glad, because I couldn’t have disguised my sweaty palms.

Jacob stopped at my side and I had the distinct impression he wanted to step in front of me. “Jacob Levin, senior partner here. What do you want with Mrs. Malone?”

The intense blue eyes shifted to my boss for a moment. “I’m afraid it’s personal. Mrs. Malone, is there some place we can talk?”

“I’m in the middle of a project with a deadline, if you could give me a hint of what this is about?”

“I need to ask you a few questions about your husband.”

“All right.” I folded my arms and waited.

His gaze flicked from Brandy to Jacob and back to me. “Really, if we can do this in private it would be best.”

“Who are you?”

“Niall Malone.” He extracted a business card from his breast pocket and handed it across the reception desk to me.

Raghnall (Niall) Malone, it said in plain black letters. I recognized the logo of the lab where Ryan had worked, and noted the word security.

On the heels of Shaughnessy, and his mention of defense secrets, I wanted to throw up.

“Cassie?” Jacob took my arm and glared at Malone. “She’s been under an incredible amount of stress. I can’t imagine what you have to say will make it better.”

“Nevertheless, it’s important. Mrs. Malone, we can do this the easy way, here and now, or the hard way.”

I didn’t need him to spell that out. I’d watched too many crime dramas. “Give me the first question and I’ll decide if it’s good enough to drop what I’m doing. Otherwise we’ll have to schedule something for later.”

That didn’t go over well. A muscle in the side of his cheek twitched and his lips tightened for a moment. “All right. Just tell me how to get in touch with your husband.”

Ever had one of those moments when it seems the world stops moving? The blood stops, then draws inward, leaving the sensation of limbs filled with ice water, heavy and cold. The roaring in my ears might very well have been the rush of blood leaving my head. This was far worse than when I’d had this same conversation not two hours ago.

Jacob plucked the card from my numb fingers and studied it as Brandy gasped.

“That’s not funny,” I managed to whisper from a throat so dry I could barely swallow.

“I’m not joking.”

“You want to know where my husband is?” I could feel my voice rising, sense it reaching to the very back of the office. Silence settled down around me and Jacob’s hand cupped my shoulder.

“Yes. Please.”

“All right.” If this were some sick joke, I’d play along for a minute. Maybe Shaughnessy had been setting me up after all. I didn’t think so, but the same conversation, twice in one day, less than two hours apart, who knew? “You know this town?”

He nodded.

“Well enough to recognize an address?”

He nodded again.

I gave him the same street and number as I’d given Shaughnessy. Included one more. I drove past it every single day. Sometimes stopped and sat on the grass to pull the weeds and tend to the Forget-Me-Nots I’d planted there.

I watched as he drew the map in his head. A crease formed between his heavy black eye brows. It took a minute, but he had it.

“That’s the Oak Knoll Cemetery.”

“Precisely.”

“Why that address?”

“Look, Mr. Malone, agent whomever, hear me clearly. I won’t say it again, because if this is a joke it’s in poor taste.” I’d begun to tremble and Jacob’s hand tightened as I wrapped my arms across my stomach. “Twenty-two months ago he moved into that cemetery and is saving me a spot next to him. My husband, Mr. Malone, is a permanent resident at Oak Knoll. Six feet under.”

I hadn’t cried in months–okay days–but I felt the tears burning at the back of my throat.

“He’s deceased?”

“My, they must hire only the quickest wits at the department of…”

“Security Division at the Lab,” Jacob supplied.

Niall Malone flushed, from anger or embarrassment, I couldn’t tell. “That’s just not possible. Your husband is not dead.”

“I don’t know who is pulling your leg, but if you’re trying to pull mine, I don’t find it funny and I don’t appreciate it. But I do assure you, Mr. Malone, my husband is very much deceased. I held his hand as he died, and I held it for a solid hour afterward. Unless vampires really do walk this earth, there is no way he’s risen from the dead. Only one man was good enough to pull that off, and while Ryan was a good man, he wasn’t that good.”

Malone reached into the breast pocket of his coat and extracted a photo, which he held out to me. “Then explain how a security camera picked him up on the premises of the lab two weeks ago.”