Silent Masquerade Page 21

  Tears filled Bill’s eyes, as well. He pulled her to him and held on desperately. “It’s the most thoughtful gift I’ve ever received,” he whispered raggedly.

  Angrily, Cara swiped tears from her eyes and pushed away from him. “Yeah? Exactly how many gifts have you received in your life?”

  That didn’t bear thinking about. Self-pity wasn’t his thing. Or at least it hadn’t been before he met—the love of his life—a love he was about to lose.

  He sniffed and shook his head. She handed him a tissue from what seemed like an endless supply in her jean’s pocket.

  “Go on, Bill,” she ordered. “If we hang out here much longer, the neighbors are going to report us as vagrants.”

  He smiled. He loved the way her humor always got her off the hook emotionally. She was a scrapper, not at all the coward she’d considered herself.

  “You’re going to be a big help to your mom, Cara. And I’ll be listening on my radio,” he said, holding it aloft, “to follow the trial.”

  Their kiss was passionate, desperate, a mixture of intense love and absolute terror. Neither could tolerate the thought of how it would be just an hour from now, when the realization hit home—that they would probably never hold each other like this again.

  Cara stood in the street to watch the car until it, and Bill, were gone from sight.

  Minutes later, she and Lefebre were in the family Buick, headed toward the hospital to pick up her mom.

  * * *

  BILL READ THE SIGN along the highway. “You are leaving Greensville, Massachusetts. Have a good day.”

  He stopped the car and stared at the sign, the irony of it all hitting him full force. He turned and looked over his shoulder. There was the white steeple of the church the Dunlaps had built and worshiped in for a couple of centuries. About two blocks back was the high school from which Cara had graduated. She’d shown him the place with as much pride as if it were one of the best prep schools in the world. If he tilted his head, he could make out the edge of the town square, where a white gazebo was a resting place for the elderly and a play area for children.

  He started to turn back, and his gaze fell on the radio. He turned it on, set it on the seat beside him and restarted the car’s engine.

  He was just pulling away from the shoulder when the announcement came over the radio. He slammed on the brakes and turned up the volume.

  “We repeat,” the announcer said, “the infamous mob leader Franco Alvaretti has been murdered in prison, where he was serving out a twenty-year sentence for tax fraud and other related federal crimes.”

  Numb with disbelief, his stomach spasming violently, Bill held the radio, staring at it. He turned it over. Was it a trick? Had Cara somehow— Was it a tape recorder, too?

  He turned it and turned it. A sob escaped his throat. He could find no sign of a cassette door. It really was only a radio.

  He looked over his shoulder again. The view was the same. There were no fireworks going off in the sky, there was no sign of a parade. All was quiet in the little town. Nobody had any reason to celebrate this incredible news announcement.

  Nobody but Cara. He came to himself then. Cara! He had to tell her the news.

  He threw the car in gear and made a U-turn, headed back toward Greensville and the Dunlap house.

  He was halfway there when doubt and fear took over. So what if Franco was dead? There were still his cohorts, any one of whom would gladly take up the mantle of revenge if Alvaretti had passed it along.

  He pulled over to the curb and eyed the phone booth on the corner. This was not something he could spring on Cara until he was sure.

  His hands shook as he counted out coins, trying to remember the phone number that for two years had been indelibly imprinted in his memory.

  His heart sank when he heard a woman’s voice, until he realized it was Avery’s secretary.

  “This is Bill Spencer,” he said when he heard the lawyer’s voice a couple of minutes later.

  “I’ve been waiting to hear from you.”

  “It’s true, then? He’s dead?”

  “Yes. I’ve just finished making the funeral arrangements, as a matter of fact.”

  Was that relief in Avery’s voice? Bill dared to hope.

  “I need to know what this means for me.”

  There was a meaningful pause. “What do you mean, Spence?”

  “I mean, is the contract ongoing, until it’s fulfilled?”

  “Contract? There was no contract on you, Spence, and I would certainly have known.”

  “Come on, Deke, you can level with me. No way would Franco have let me just walk off into the sunset, scot-free.”

  Avery’s chuckle was fraught with bitter irony. “Oh, no, you’re right, he wouldn’t have. In fact, he ordered me to have you found.”

  Another pause. “As you know, I was unsuccessful. I’ve got to hand it to you, Spence, you certainly know how to go underground.”

  Disbelief was his strongest emotion. He knew only too well the scope of the mob’s operation—the long reach it had to all four corners of the country, the manpower and technology at its command.

  “And Franco gave up? Just like that?”

  He heard Avery clear his throat. “Not exactly. He ordered me to keep up the search.”

  “I see.” He wasn’t sure he did. “And you kept looking, but you had no luck, and Alvaretti accepted that.”

  “Er...let’s just say Alvaretti got caught up in politics at the prison.” Bill could have sworn he heard Avery smother a laugh just then. “In the end, it was prison politics that killed him.”

  “And now what, Deke?”

  Another of those strange pauses. But when Avery spoke, his tone suggested mirth. “Now Alvaretti really does go underground, as it were, and you go...wherever you like.”

  “It’s over, then?” Bill demanded, ignoring the lawyer’s self-congratulatory laughter and zeroing in on the content of his statement.

  “Yes, Spence. All over.”

  “Listen, Deke, thanks. I mean...well, so long, Deke.”

  He was just about to hang up when Avery said, in a conspiratorial whisper, “If we ever bump into each other again, Spence, I hope it will be a friendly meeting.”

  Before he could react, he heard a click, and then the dial tone.

  Bill hung up and stared at the phone. Had he imagined the emphasis in Deke’s voice when he used the word bump?

  He left the phone booth in a daze, mulling over the implications. If Avery was using the word as a pun, as he was prone to do, was he referring to the bumper-car concession Bill had worked at the boardwalk?

  Bill turned and looked back at the phone booth, a puzzled expression on his face. But that would mean Deke had known all along where he was. And hadn’t reported it to Alvaretti?

  He shook his head. Deke the geek, hold out on Franco Alvaretti? Not likely. And yet...

  He cast his mind back to the time they were in Santa Cruz, trying to get a feel for the people he’d encountered there. Any of whom could have been an agent Avery had sent out to find him.

  He shrugged. This was a mystery he’d probably never solve.

  He glanced up the street and saw the church steeple. A beacon of hope, of welcome, pointing toward heaven.

  He began to run.

  He didn’t even think about the car, but left it where it was and ran as fast as his legs would carry him.

  * * *

  CARA CLOSED her mother’s door and turned in the direction of her own room. From downstairs she could hear Gordon Lefebre’s voice rumbling, followed by the sound of Mrs. Malcom’s laughter.

  Cara smiled. She had to hand it to him. Malcom was a hard nut to crack, but Gordon had managed to soften her up in record time. Cara suspected that was because the housekeeper appreciated the way Gordon catered to and pampered Beth Dunlap.

  Harvard. Beth Harvard.

  Hard to remember that her mother had actually married the man, maybe because the fact was so unpalatabl
e. What she wanted was for the whole nasty business to disappear, to never have happened at all.

  But with the trial set for only a month away, there was no way to play that game of pretense.

  She touched the balustrade as she ambled down the hall. The workers had done a fine job of cleanup and restoration in less than a week. Though it was due in part to the power of money, Cara knew that much of it could be credited to community kindness. People were willing to go that extra mile for them because the Dunlaps had always been there for the community.

  She rounded the corner. This was her first time returning to her room. She had been unable to make herself look inside, as if somehow afraid Doug’s body might still be lying on the floor where she’d left it that fateful night.

  How he had managed to escape the fire she would never know. Perhaps it was God’s way of demanding payment by forcing Harvard to live out his life in prison.

  She opened the door. It was exactly as she’d left it.

  Her heart lurched in her chest when she saw the ties from the library drapes on the bed. And there on the floor was the pottery bowl, the weapon with which she’d fought off Harvard, preventing him from carrying out his plan to leave her and her mother to die in the fire he’d set.

  More would come out at the trial, but already they knew the essentials: that Douglas Harvard, with a string of aliases, had murdered three other women he’d married for their money; that he’d deliberately started his wife smoking again and drinking to excess so that the whole town would know of it and ask no questions when she fell asleep with a glass of gin in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. It would have been deemed accidental arson, set by the victim herself.

  Cara took the drapery ties from the bed and dropped them in the wastebasket. There’d been no fire damage on the first floor, but those drapes in the library would have to go. There were some things that just didn’t bear remembering.

  “Life goes on, Cara baby,” she whispered. And then she burst into tears.

  She fell to the bed, curled on her side and began to sob helplessly, holding the pillow against her face to stifle the sound.

  Dr. Zachary had warned her of this pending depression. It was called poststress syndrome, and he’d told her it might attack at any moment, particularly after things began to return to what she considered normal.

  Her mother was home, on the mend. Doug Harvard was in jail, awaiting trial, and after he’d been convicted here, he’d be extradited to Detroit to be tried for the murder of his third wife. Gordon Lefebre had proved a friend to the household and had agreed to stay with the women throughout the trial, for moral support.

  Normal.

  Her sobs increased, and her body shook.

  What was normal when Bill was out there, God know where, alone, on the run, leaving her here to deal with a life bereft of his smile, his voice, his touch, his love?

  She fumbled blindly for tissues and blew her nose. But the tears continued to flow, and her chest heaved with the effort to pull herself together.

  “Self-pity,” she sobbed aloud.

  And why not?

  Because that wasn’t her thing. She was a doer, an upward-looking person who usually found meaning in adversity.

  Her sob broke on a laugh. “As Bill would say,” she said through clenched teeth, “inappropriate humor.”

  She sat up, swinging her legs over the side of the bed, tears still streaming from her eyes.

  “I can’t believe I ever thought anything about you was inappropriate, love.”

  Cara screamed and then flung herself across the room, into the arms of her lover.

  “What are you doing back here, where did you come from, what happened? I can’t believe you’re here.” Endless questions and endless kisses ensued until they were both laughing and crying and barely able to keep their balance in the doorway.

  “I’ll tell you everything, if you’ll just give me a chance,” Bill said, laughing and lifting her off her feet for one last kiss. Her feet touched the floor, and she took a step backward.

  “I know,” she exulted, staring into his face. “I know just by looking at you. Something wonderful has happened.”

  “Alvaretti is dead.”

  A silence hung between them. Cara’s mouth fell open, and Bill waited, eyebrow cocked jauntily, for her reaction.

  “Go on!”

  He grinned.

  She frowned.

  “Get over yourself, Hamlin, this isn’t even funny.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Oh, right,” she snapped. “Big goodbye scene, tears, hugs, promises. You go off into the sunset. I stay behind, try to pick up the pieces on the home front. News flash— Villain is dead. Hero and heroine reunited. All’s well with the world. Fade out!”

  She marched over to the bed and plunked herself down, glaring across the room at him.

  Bill stuffed his hands in his pockets, leaned against the doorframe and cocked his head to the side. “Pretty good scenario, love, almost word for word the way it was.” He grinned. “I always did say you wasted your talents going into business. You should be in drama, or else take up writing.”

  Cara stared at him. Could it be true? She squinted. He had a different look about him. What was it? That tiny line between his eyebrows was gone. But no, that wasn’t it. His jaw didn’t seem so tightly set. Was that it?

  “You don’t look haunted anymore,” she said slowly, as belief crept in.

  “Because I’m not.” He pushed away from the door and strolled toward her. “I’m in the clear, Cara. Free, and unencumbered by debt or threat.” He stopped in front of her. “And I’m all yours, if you’ll have me.”

  They were a different kind of tears that slipped down her cheeks as Cara lifted her arms. “Forever and ever,” she whispered.

  And as he took her into his arms, she whispered something else.

  “What? What did you say?” he asked, while his hands were already pulling her shirt from the waistband of her jeans.

  “I said, as soon as we’ve had a proper hello, I think you should go out and buy a lottery ticket.”

  ISBN: 978-1-4592-8369-5

  Silent Masquerade

  Copyright © 1995 by Marilyn Schuck

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