Читать книгу Man With A Message - Muriel Jensen - Страница 8

“NO, MARIAH!” BRIAN, standing beside the stranger, caught her wrist. “He saved your life! I broke the water pipe—remember?—and you slipped on the towel and fell and hit your head. He carried you in here. He didn’t kiss you. He gave you artificial…you know.”

“Resuscitation,” Ashley said knowledgeably. “But I think you kissed him.”

“Yeah,” Jessica said. “I saw it.”

“Me, too,” Peter confirmed.

“Me, too,” Philip chimed in.

Mariah groaned and put her hands to her face. If she didn’t get herself together soon, she had no hope for her future. Once the school found out she was French-kissing strange men in front of the children, she’d have to take the job her sister, Parker, had offered her—working in her massage studio in the basement of city hall. Then she’d never get to Europe.

Mariah felt movement on the bed, and when she lowered her hands, she saw that the stranger was gone.

Brian took off after him, calling over his shoulder, “We’re going to cut off the water!”

The screeching of a siren could be heard outside.

“I’ll let the ambulance men in,” Ashley shouted as she left the room.

The children stood back and Mariah sat up. She was horrified that an ambulance had been called.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to get up,” Jessica said worriedly, sitting beside her.

Mariah’s intention was to tell her that she was fine, but she realized suddenly that she wasn’t. Her head ached abominably, and suddenly everything around her was wobbling.

Two men in white shirts with some kind of insignia on them burst into the room. One cupped her head gently with his hand and leaned her back into the pillows. “What’s your name, ma’am?” he asked.

“Mariah,” she replied weakly.

“I understand you’ve had a fall.”

That’s an understatement, she thought as she battled nausea. The Fall of Mariah Mercer could be a play in three acts.

WITH THE LITTLE BOY NAMED Brian shining a flashlight into the dark corners of the basement, Cam found the cutoff and turned it off. When he raced back upstairs, Brian at his heels, the paramedics were putting a protesting Mariah on a gurney.

“I cannot leave the children!” she insisted. “There are eight children under ten years of age…”

“We’re here, dear. We’re here.” The Lightfoot sisters appeared in the hallway, looking as though they’d just stepped out of a family portrait, circa 1930-something. They wore their usual long black dresses with lace collars. Letitia, the elder sister, had a small gold watch attached to her generous bosom. Lavinia, younger and smaller, had a sprig of silk violets pinned at the waist of her dress. Cam had had several meetings with them to discuss the kitchen renovation, and he’d found them surprisingly sharp in business, considering their vintage clothing and their charmingly old-fashioned approach to education.

“Ashley called us.” Letitia put an arm around the girl’s shoulders. “You gentlemen take good care of Mariah!” she admonished the paramedics, who were heading for the stairs. “I know your mother, Matthew Collingwood. I’ll have a word with her if Mariah isn’t returned to us in perfect health.”

The paramedic pushing the gurney cast a smile over his shoulder. “Don’t worry, Miss Letty. She’ll be fine. Watch the stairs, Charlie.”

“Well, now!” The sisters shooed the children toward the back of the house. “While Miss Lavinia calls the janitorial service to clean up the water, we’re going to camp here. Where are the sleeping bags from our hiking trip during spring break?”

Jessica and her sisters pulled down the attic stairs and fought over who would climb up to get them.

Letty tried to enlist Brian’s help, but he turned to Cam. “I could help you,” he whispered pleadingly.

“Ah…I’m sort of using him as my assistant,” Cam said. “Is it all right if I keep him for another hour or so?”

Letitia appeared concerned. “If you keep a close eye on him. He’s eager to help and sometimes…” She was obviously searching for a diplomatic explanation.

Cam understood. “He’ll be right beside me at all times.”

Brian gave him a grateful look.

“All right, then,” Letitia replied. “Brian, I’m counting on you to do exactly as you’re told.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he promised.

“Good.” Cam put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “For safety’s sake, I’m going to turn off the power. With water everywhere, I don’t want anyone touching light switches, even where it’s dry.”

“Right.”

He was about to ask Miss Letty if she had a flashlight to lead the children in the dark house, when she shouted up the attic stairs, “Jessie, bring the camp lanterns down with you, too!”

Cam grabbed the flashlight from his tool kit and, with Brian glued to his side, hurried back downstairs to shut down the power. He handed Brian the flashlight.

“This is so cool!” Brian said. “Nothing exciting ever happens around here.” Then apparently he realized what he’d said and looked sheepish. “I mean, I know it’s all my fault and it’s caused everybody a lot of trouble. And you probably charge a whole lot.”

“Yeah, I do.” With all the circuit breakers flipped, Cam and Brian stood in darkness except for the glow from the flashlight. “And the guys who have to clean up the water cost a bundle, too.”

Brian sighed. “I was going to take everybody to Disneyland for summer vacation if I found the gold.”

Cam turned him toward the stairs and let him lead the way with the light. “You mentioned that before. What gold are you talking about?”

The boy told him a story about a Confederate spy trying to escape to the South with a satchel full of gold. “He was in this building when he was shot, and the Yankees and the Lightfoots who owned the Manor then found the satchel, but not the gold. Everybody knows the story.”

“I’ve never heard it.”

“Mr. Groman told me. He teaches here, you know. Some rebel soldier stole it off a train and hid out with it in the carriage house. When they tiled the bathroom floor, they covered up the blood!”

The kid had a flair for theatrics, Cam thought, and was probably destined for a career in front of a camera.

They climbed the stairs, Brian holding the light to his side for Cam’s benefit. “But if it hasn’t been found in a hundred and fifty years…”

“A hundred and thirty-seven,” Brian corrected him.

“A hundred and thirty-seven,” Cam said obligingly, “why did you suddenly think you’d find it in the bathroom wall?”

They’d reached the main level. Brian waited while Cam closed and locked the basement door. “Because I thought about it. They didn’t find it when they tore up the floor to put down new stuff, so where else could it be?”

“Somewhere in the attic?”

“Looked there.”

“And you probably checked the basement.”

“A couple of times.”

“Maybe this spy had an accomplice and passed it on or something.”

Brian frowned. “I guess that could be. But that’s not in the story.”

They made their way carefully toward the stairway to the second floor. “There’s probably an old newspaper account of the incident,” Cam suggested. “In the library. Old newspapers are scanned into the computer. Or maybe they could help you at the Mirror.”

Brian grinned in the near darkness as they went up the stairs side by side. “Maybe Mariah will take me,” he said hopefully. Then suddenly his expression turned doubtful. “If she can forget that I almost killed her.”

Cam ran a knuckle down his own cheek, remembering her slap, and patted Brian’s shoulder. “I don’t think she was as near death as it seemed. Apologize first, then ask her.”

In the bathroom once again, Cam tore out more tiles to get at the pipe connection while Brian held the flashlight for him.

“About your plans for the gold,” he said. “Aren’t you all going home for the summer?”

“Yeah, but Ashley doesn’t have parents, you know. She just has a guardian and he’s pretty old. She never gets to stay home with him. He sends her on trips with people she doesn’t know and she hates it. They think she doesn’t know, but he’s going to die pretty soon.”

When Cam looked down at him, not sure what to say to that, Brian added with a shrug, “We hear the teachers talking. She’s going to have to go live with somebody else. My mom’s a movie star.”

Cam had difficulty focusing on the plumbing and the conversation. “No kidding?”

“No. She’s very pretty, but she’s always on a movie set somewhere far away and I stay with the housekeeper. Pete and Repeat’s mom and dad are stunt people and they’re working with my mom in a movie right now. In Mongolia.”

“Pete and Repeat?”

“The twins.”

“Ah.”

“They’re really Pete and Philip, but their dad calls ’em ‘Pete and Repeat.’ Now everyone does. Their dad jumps off cliffs and out of airplanes and over waterfalls. Their mom once jumped out of a building on fire! I mean she was on fire. ’Course, the building probably was, too, or she wouldn’t have been. She had a special suit on so she wouldn’t get burned. Cool, huh?”

“I’m not sure I’d want to be on fire, even in a special suit.”

“Jessie and her sisters’ mom wants to take them to New York with her to visit a friend of hers. So they don’t want to go home for the summer, either.”

“Jessie and her sisters are those four dark-haired little girls who all look alike?”

“Yeah, only they get smaller and smaller. Like those toy things that fit into each other. You know?”

Cam had to grin at him. The kid had such an interesting little mind. “Yeah, I know. But what’s wrong with meeting their mom’s friend? New York’s a very exciting place.”

“He’s a guy.”

“Well, so are we. Is that bad?”

Brian seemed to like being considered a guy. Cam had to remind him to hold up the light.

“It’s because their mom likes him and they don’t want another dad.”

“What happened to the first one?”

“He and their mom got divorced.”

“Ah. That’s too bad.”

There was a moment’s silence, then Brian announced, “I don’t have one.”

“What? A father?”

“Yeah. I never had one. And he didn’t die and my mom’s not divorced. I mean, he’s probably somewhere, but he’s not my dad.”

Cam nodded empathetically, catching the significance of that detail from the boy’s tone of voice. Brian wanted to adjust to that fact but still hadn’t.

“I had a father,” Cam said, carefully applying pressure to the wrench. “But he was drunk a lot and most of the time it was like I didn’t have one.”

“Did he beat you up?”

“No. Most of the time he didn’t remember I was there.”

“Did you have a cool mom?”

Cam wasn’t sure how far to carry this empathy. He wanted Brian to know he wasn’t alone in an unfair world, but he wasn’t sure what it would serve to tell Brian it could get worse than he knew.

“No,” he replied simply. “She was gone most of the time.”

His mother had been out of jail only three weeks when she and a male friend had been picked up for armed robbery. Cam and his siblings had had the misfortune of being with her at home at the time, their father passed out on the sofa, beer cans and a bottle of whiskey beside him.

With their mother going to jail and their father deemed unfit to raise them, he and his siblings had been placed in foster care. He’d argued zealously that he’d taken care of himself and his brother and sister most of his life—that all the other times his mother had gone to jail his father had also turned up drunk and Cam was the one who had cooked and done laundry and gotten himself, Josh and Barbara off to school.

No one had cared about that. Their grandfather had died, their grandmother was in a nursing home and the three Trent children were placed together in foster care with a middle-aged couple who lived in the heart of the city.

Deprived of the choice of how to live his life, Cam became bent on destroying it. Fortunately, he’d been caught with a few of his friends holding up a restaurant while the owner was closing. A few months in juvenile hall had turned him around. Foster care seemed like heaven after that.

“My mom’s always in another country ’cause of the acting thing,” Brian said. “What’d yours do?”

“Ah…” He had to think to recollect what had identified her place in his life besides the drugs and the jail time. “She worked in a furniture factory.”

“She drink, too?”

Cam was so surprised by the question that he stopped what he was doing to focus on the boy.

Brian shrugged. “It’s a statistic that a lot of people who drink do it with a husband or wife or boyfriend.”

Cam was sure that was true but he wondered how the boy knew. “Who told you that?”

“My mom’s in rehab a lot.” It seemed to be something he had accepted. “It happened one time in the summer, and the housekeeper took me to visit her. We had to sit in at this meeting about families of substance abusers.”

Cam had never known the politically correct term because there’d been no one to take him to meetings.

“Come on,” he said. “We’re going out to the truck. Remember to keep your hands off the switches.”

“We going to the shop or something?” Brian asked excitedly, taking the lead with the flashlight.

“No. I’ve got pipe in the truck.”

They reached the third stair from the bottom and Brian leaped down, the carpet squishing as he landed. “So, is it cool to be a plumber?”

Cam could feel his soaked shoes and socks and jeans and smiled into the darkness. “Oh, it’s way cool.”