“New Horizons didn’t send you over to my place. And the check you brought was a forgery.” He took strength from the slight check in the knife’s motions. “Just tell me who set you off against me.”
“That’s the trouble with you lawyers. You see conspiracy behind the simplest deal. I did a favor for a friend. That’s all there is to it.”
“Who is the friend?”
“Always did have a terrible head for names.” He closed the knife, stowed it away, slammed his boots to the floor. “We done here?”
“You’re really so concerned about protecting somebody that you’d risk further indictments?”
“Ain’t concerned about it at all.”
Marcus rose to his feet, eager now for a breath of untainted air. “I’ll give you a day to think about this.”
“Five seconds’ll do, bub.” He rose to his feet, offered a final grin. “But you feel welcome to come visiting anytime you like.”
Marcus left the office and stomped down the stairs. Back in the parking lot, he propped one foot on his front tire and used his handkerchief to smear around the dust. “All he’s given me is a load of questions I don’t need.”
“Y-you want me t-to arrest him?”
“No. He’s right. We won’t be able to make an assault charge stick.” Marcus started on his other shoe. “The man’s too confident to be sitting in there on his own.”
Darren waited until Marcus slid behind the wheel to say, “T-that’s what they pay you for, to p-put together the p-puzzles.”
CHAPTER 10
Dale Steadman’s library bar was built into a corner opposite the rear French windows. Sunlight played a reflector’s game off the dual mirrors and the crystal glasses and the bottles. Dale studied his own fissured reflection. None of the guilt or anguish showed, only a stone-flat gaze and features that had gained fifteen years’ worth of creases in the past eleven months.
He dropped ice cubes into his highball glass and poured in two inches of bourbon. He knew he should wait until after he had met with the attorney. But the worry and the strain and the huge empty house were bearing down hard. And the silence. Before, there had always been music. He had told the architect that every room had to be wired to a central system. Every single room, even the seven bathrooms, even the kitchen pantry. The house had thirty-four rooms and over three hundred Bose speakers. The amplifier was the size of a double oven and hulked beneath the cellar stairs. He had dreamed of the moment when Erin would step across the threshold and hear her favorite aria soaring from every room. A welcome fit for a queen, one guaranteed to woo her and bind her firmly to her new home.
He had been wrong before, but seldom so completely.
Dale poured another two inches, then added more ice. He carried the glass and bottle and ice bucket over to the sofa. Despite the plastic sheet blanketing the entire northern wall and the air conditioner on full blast, the room still stank of oily ashes and sawdust. The contractors were gone for the day. He missed their chatter and hammering and the tinny radio and the saws. He knew he should move out, find a place where he was not plagued by the ghosts of past errors. But he could not think beyond the one next step.
He glanced down and was surprised to find his glass empty. He poured another couple of inches, decided he didn’t need to bother with ice. The bourbon had a different heat when taken straight, a liquid smoke to match the flames he saw every time he shut his eyes. Dale glanced at his watch. The minute hand was cemented to the same place it had been since his arrival home, or so it seemed. This one final glass, he decided, then he wouldn’t have any more until after the meeting.
He stared out the rear windows past the slate patio to where the sun was turning the Intracoastal the color of a blast furnace. Despite the constant rush of cold air, Dale was sweating heavily. He looked down at his glass, and watched how the tremors in his hand cut fierce little ripples across the bourbon’s surface. The glory days, was how he had always thought of his move back to Wilmington. The start of how things should have been from the beginning.
The sound of tires drumming over his private bridge drew him to his feet. Dale picked up the bottle and glass and carried both into the front hall. He fought to bring his chest and his emotions back under control as the car pulled around his drive. When he was certain he could hold the bottle steady, he poured another glass. Then he set it on the side table untouched. He just wanted something to anchor the moment, and the one after.
The drive from Rocky Mount to the coast had been a journey through aeons. High-tech modernity was soon replaced by an atmosphere of crinoline and molasses. East of I-95, they traversed a region where older men still tipped their hats to passing ladies, where sidewalks were used as an extension of front parlors, and tobacco remained undisputed king. Kirsten kept her face turned toward the summer greens as she first recounted her telephone conversation with the senator’s aide, then summarized her findings about Dale Steadman. The efficient researcher briefing the top guy. A perfect picture, minus the heart.
“UNC-Wilmington had a football team up until ten years ago,” Kirsten related to Marcus. “They axed it in favor of soccer and other equality sports. Dale Steadman was a walk-on the team’s fourth year.”
“Where was he raised?”
“Burgaw. A reporter at the Wilmington newspaper described the town as, blink and you’ve missed all the fun.” Her hair caught the sunlight and teased him with the afterglow. “According to the same reporter, Dale took the UNC-W team from the swamps to the treetops. He won the conference title his junior and senior years, more or less single-handedly.”
“Now I remember where I’d heard his name before.”
“The paper dubbed him the Wilmington Wonder. The Bengals took him in the second round. But during the final game of the regular season, he was hit bad and broke both his collarbone and his hip. He was stretchered off, never to return.”
Kirsten recounted Dale’s rehabilitation and MBA and return to Wilmington without referring to her notes. “The company barely held its head above water for three years. Then Dale hit pay dirt when, of all things, a leading maker of wedding gowns offered him a long-term agreement. They liked his precision sewing, they wanted an American supplier. Dale’s turnover doubled in eleven months. Four years later, New Horizons bought him out.” She pointed ahead. “That’s your turn. The Steadman residence should be four miles down on the left.”
Marcus halted at the traffic light, studying her and the vast distance between them. Her skin glowed with the fabled luminosity of a perfect blonde. The open file in her lap did not quite cover the stockinged legs emerging from the sky-blue linen skirt. Her lips were as pale as her lashes and just begged to be kissed. Kirsten turned to him then, and recognized the hunger. She did not draw away. Instead, the gemstone gaze melted with resignation and fear.
The question was out before he could halt it. “Who hurt you?”
Her lips parted, reaching not for words but air.
“Did it ever occur to you that maybe the only answer is in trusting me? Just for a moment, long enough to separate me from whatever it is you’re carrying around inside?”
Kirsten began trembling. He could see the tight shivers attack her frame. He reached over, but halted his hand in midair when she flinched from the coming touch.
A horn honked behind them.
Marcus took the turn and drove a tunnel of country greens down to where the road forked. A half-mile farther on, he started across a long plank bridge that led to Dale Steadman’s private island preserve. Before them rose a faux French manor of cream-colored brick, with gray shutters and a peaked slate roof and eleven dormer windows on two floors. Marcus cut off the motor and sat there.