On The Way To A Wedding Page 9

  Ever since Sunday morning, they’d done their best to keep out of each other’s way. She spent her days down at the TV station, and when she was here, most of their conversation was limited to topics like Duxbury or this charade they were carrying on. They were careful not to touch on anything too personal. As a matter of fact, they were careful not to touch at all. And that should have been fine with him. He had good reasons for keeping away from her—she still had the power to expose him at any time.

  And yet more often than he’d like to admit, he found himself thinking about her.

  She continued to be as politely aloof as ever, but yesterday she’d loosened up enough to buy doughnuts, the jellyfilled, rolled-in-sugar kind. She hadn’t objected to his insistence on sharing the cooking, either. Instead, she’d drawn up a schedule to divide the duties fairly. Sure, she was a stickler for neatness, and a canary would have a hard time living on the kind of stuff she preferred to eat, but underneath the silk and pearls, she was a lot more human than she wanted to let on.

  Lauren reached for a ruler and drew a line through something on the page in front of her, made a precise little check mark, then turned to the next page.

  He glanced at his own crumpled papers and haphazard piles of notes and grimaced. “Find out anything new today?”

  “Mmm?” she answered absently.

  “I asked if you found anything new.”

  She capped her pen and set it down beside the notebook before she looked up. “Nothing useful.”

  “Let me be the judge of that. What is it?”

  “I was checking out the society pages and learned that the Duxburys always spend Sunday afternoons at the Van Ness estate.”

  “You’re right. That’s no use.” He drummed his fingers against the cushions. “Damn, this is going too slow. We’re getting buried in trivia.”

  “Maybe I could try contacting that man who went to South America. Kohl, wasn’t it?”

  “It wouldn’t do any good. Besides, I don’t want word getting back to Duxbury that you’re snooping around.”

  “I prefer to call it background research.”

  “Whatever.”

  She shot a glance at the mound of crumpled printouts beside the couch, then returned her attention to her notebook, uncapping her pen again to print a neat little note in the margin. “It might help if you let me organize the information you have. It’s probably difficult to keep track of things when they’re spread over half the living room floor.”

  “No, thanks. I can keep track of things just fine,” he said. Pulling his left leg off the coffee table, he pushed himself to his feet and hobbled across the room. He opened the glass door that enclosed her sound system and changed the radio to a country station.

  Lauren shook her head without looking up and made another check mark. “I thought we agreed to take turns, Nick. It’s your choice tomorrow.”

  Muttering an oath under his breath, he returned the tuner to where it had been. Their taste in food wasn’t the only thing they differed on. Naturally, she had made up a schedule for this, too. As the refined sounds of a jazz quartet drifted from the speakers, he limped to the dining table and pulled out the chair across from Lauren.

  This time she did look up. “Your mobility seems to be improving. How’s the knee today?”

  He reversed the chair so that he could straddle it as he sat down, stretching his bad leg out beneath the table. “Getting better. The swelling’s finally starting to go down.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Yeah,” he said, tapping his fingers against the chair back. “Another day or two and I should be able to walk farther than across a room.”

  “Your headache hasn’t come back, has it?”

  “No.”

  She leaned forward, focusing on his forehead. “That cut’s healing well. There’s no sign of infection.”

  “Thanks to you.”

  “I’d say it has more to do with your natural recuperative powers. You’re really an exceptional man, Nick, considering the shape you were in a few days ago.” She paused, then drew back and dropped her gaze to the table as if regretting the compliment.

  Don’t confuse my concern for your welfare.... Nick’s frown deepened. Simply because she’d proven to be attuned to every spasm of pain and each small sign of recovery he’d experienced didn’t mean anything. She was a professional observer, right?

  “I know you must be losing patience with our lack of progress,” Lauren said. “Tomorrow I should have more information about Duxbury’s real estate holdings. If we could find something that might have brought him to the neighborhood where the accident happened, we’ll have a point to work back from.”

  “Good idea. I appreciate the help.”

  She waved a hand in dismissal and underlined a word in her notebook. “It’s for my story.”

  The music on the radio changed to a complicated piano solo, and Nick realized he was tapping his fingers in time to the rhythm. Was he starting to get used to this stuff? “Mind if I ask you a question, Lauren?”

  “Mmm?”

  “When did you start believing me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “About Duxbury. You said it yourself. You’ll get your story whether I’m right or not, but you’ve been knocking yourself out trying to help me.”

  She paused. “I don’t like basing my opinions on a hunch, so I’m not counting the way Duxbury makes me uneasy. But the way he’s been ingratiating himself with Gord and taking such an interest in your fate is definitely suspicious. Now that I know more about the type of man he really is, your story is more plausible.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “Well, I’ve heard you have a reputation for integrity with your colleagues on the police force.”

  “Those are all very logical reasons.”

  “I prefer chess to poker,” she said, her lips softening into the hint of a smile. “Besides, I’m not really knocking myself out to help you. I’m working the way I always do.”

  He gestured toward her open notebook. “Do you always work in the evening?”

  “This?” She shook her head. “This is my list of wedding details. I was just crossing out what my sister and I have already done.”

  “Wedding details?”

  She flipped back a few pages and started to read off points. “Choose bouquets and boutonnieres. Order flowers for the church. Check the menu with caterer. Change color scheme of decorations. Arrange limo—”

  “Whoa. Enough. Why not throw some beers on ice and invite everyone for a barbecue?”

  “Angela’s a romantic. She wants the whole fairy tale.”

  “You don’t seem too enthusiastic about it.”

  “I’m not particularly fond of weddings, but this is what she wants, so I’m doing it for her. She’s been especially busy lately putting in extra hours at the accounting firm where she works so that she can take more time off for her honeymoon.”

  He looked at the check marks and neatly underlined words. “I’ve seen plans for international drug busts that seemed less complicated than that. How big is this going to be?”

  “She’s my only sister, but we have an aunt in Montreal, uncles in Cleveland and cousins all over the country. So far, everyone’s planning to attend.”

  “What about your parents?”

  She hesitated. “Our mother died when Angela finished high school. Our father said he’d try to make it for the ceremony, but we can’t be certain.”

  “Where’s your father?”

  “Somewhere in Russia, the last I heard.”

  “What’s he doing there?”

  “He’s a foreign correspondent for Reuters. He’s covering the civil unrest in the southern republics.”

  Nick whistled through his teeth. “Sounds like a dangerous job.”

  “It suits him. He likes to travel, and he’s an astute observer.”

  “Is it because of your father that you chose a career in TV journalism?”

  “
I suppose it was. He’d always send Angela and me postcards from wherever he went. The things he described were fascinating, like flipping television channels. It struck me as a wonderful way to look at the world.”

  “That must have been rough, though, growing up with your father away so much.”

  She fiddled with her pen, flipping it over between her fingers a few times before she responded to his comment. “My parents divorced when I was eight.”

  He paused. “That must have been rough, too.”

  “It seems to be common enough, according to the statistics I’ve read. Marriages don’t usually last.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Gord mentioned you were divorced.”

  “We all make mistakes. It’s okay as long as we learn from them.”

  Lauren’s expression grew distant. “After my father left, my mother went through two more weddings and two more divorces. She was on a cruise with the future number four when she died.”

  There was sadness in her tone, and a tinge of pity, but her voice was as matter-of-fact as if she were reporting a story, as if she were using the detachment she practiced as a journalist to protect herself from what had to be painful memories....

  As Nick watched her efforts to maintain her poise, he felt a stirring of sympathy. “No wonder you don’t like weddings,” he said quietly.

  “Yes, well, I probably take after my father in that, too.”

  A comment she had made after the crash came to his mind. He decided to paraphrase it. “You’d rather be an observer at a wedding than a participant, right?”

  “Well put,” she said, closing her notebook and setting it aside, obviously doing the same for the subject.

  The conversation turned back to Duxbury then, yet Nick found it difficult to concentrate. Instead, he found himself thinking about Lauren. Again. Yeah, under the silk and pearls she really was a lot more human than she liked to let on. Trouble was, once he started speculating about what she kept hidden underneath the silk...

  Despite the differences in their personalities and their living habits, he still found her to be an extremely attractive woman. The more his body recovered, the more he was reminded of it. And that was yet another reason why his frustration over the lack of progress on the case—and this entire situation—continued to escalate.

  The memorial service for the victims of the crash was held the next day. Lauren couldn’t stomach the idea of joining Gord and the crew for the coverage, and she didn’t want to risk displaying her feelings to a crowd of strangers, so she came home early to watch it on TV.

  Nick was uncharacteristically subdued as he cleared the stack of printouts off the living room chair for her. He settled on the couch, watching in silence as the camera panned over the crowd that had gathered to pay their respects to the dead.

  Although Lauren had done her best to push the nightmare ordeal of the crash out of her thoughts, the memory of her terror was still vivid. She wiped her palms on her skirt, then clutched her hands in her lap, trying to keep them steady.

  She and Nick had been so lucky. At times she almost felt guilty over her relief at surviving when so many others died. She looked at the way Nick was sitting forward, his fists braced on his thighs. It must be so much worse for him, not being able to let anyone know he was alive.

  The coverage of the service blended smoothly into a number of interviews with people in the slowly dispersing crowd. There was a man with a cast on his arm, his other arm firmly around an energetically wiggling young boy. The child was the same one Nick had passed to a fireman just before he’d staged his disappearance. The boy’s father blinked back tears as he related the rescue. Nick shifted on the couch and slumped back into the cushions.

  “You really were a hero,” Lauren murmured.

  “The kid would have made it anyhow. Your pal Gord’s just trying to milk his story.”

  Several other survivors gave their own accounts of escaping the burning plane and the long, disorienting struggle to reach the shore. Lauren curled her feet beneath her and clutched her hands more tightly in her lap.

  “Did I ever thank you for saving my hide?” Nick asked.

  “Yes, when you came to. I still don’t know how I managed not to drown us both.”

  “Neither do I.”

  She glanced at him quickly, then sighed when she saw his wry smile. “This is hard to watch, isn’t it.”

  “Yeah. Want to turn it off?”

  “Maybe we should,” she said, reaching for the remote. She had her finger poised over the off button when the camera panned to a group of uniformed police officers who were standing on the edge of the crowd. Gord moved up to the heavyset middle-aged man who was closest.

  Nick hissed through his teeth. “I don’t believe it.”

  “What?”

  “That’s Captain Gilmour. And the two guys on the right are Epstein and O’Hara. I haven’t seen them that spiffed up since...” He paused. “Since Joey’s funeral.”

  Gilmour said a few brief words of regret over the death of his fellow officer, then praised the selfless heroism that led to Nick’s death. O’Hara went further, saying what a fine man Nick was, and how his loss would be keenly felt among all who worked with him.

  Gord turned to a red-haired policewoman next, and the camera zoomed in on the tears that gleamed on her cheeks.

  “Who’s she?” Lauren asked.

  “Ramona Brill.”

  “She looks really upset.”

  “Yeah. Poor kid. She’s a friend of Rose’s, was always hanging around the house when they were growing up, so she was like a member of the family.”

  Lauren listened to yet another testimonial of Nick’s character and was struck by the sincerity of everything that was said. He was obviously a man who inspired deep respect among his colleagues, and judging by Ramona’s grief, in her case he probably inspired something more. She was no “kid.”

  As the scene switched to another camera, Lauren muted the sound and looked at Nick. “Have you thought about contacting someone on the force and asking for help?”

  He shook his head. “I wouldn’t get any help if they found out what I’m doing. My captain was getting ready to pull me off the case.”

  “But they obviously think very highly of you.”

  “They’re only saying that because I’m dead,” he muttered.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I’d rather give this plan a chance before I risk involving anyone else. They all have families, too. I wouldn’t want to—” His words cut off as he sat forward once more, his body tensed.

  Lauren looked at the screen. The camera was back on Gord. He was holding the microphone in front of a tall, vaguely familiar woman. “Isn’t that your mother?” Lauren asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Natasha Strada was almost as tall as Gord. She held herself with stiff dignity, her shoulders squared beneath the black dress that she wore. Her white hair was cut short, framing a feminine echo of the broad cheekbones and blue eyes that were evident in her son. Yet her cheeks looked hollow, and the skin around her eyes was bruised by dark circles of grief.

  “She’s been crying,” Nick said, his tone grim. “Her eyelids get puffy like that when she cries. It happens whenever she peels onions or watches those sappy Christmas movies.”

  Lauren didn’t know what to say. She hated seeing the woman’s grief made public like this, but if she had been doing the coverage, she probably wouldn’t have hesitated. That was her job, just as it was Gord’s. “I’m sorry, Nick,” she murmured. “I’ll turn the set off.”

  “This whole crazy scheme was my idea. I might as well see what I’ve done.”

  Gord’s conversation with Nick’s mother was mercifully brief. A pair of dark-haired teenagers emerged from the crowd and moved to either side of her, slipping their arms around her waist as they drew her away from the camera.

  “Barb and Tina,” he said. “I’ve never seen them looking so quiet.�
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  “They seem to be very protective.”

  “A Strada trait.” He rubbed the back of his neck, not taking his gaze off the screen. “I always thought of them as the babies. They look so serious and grown-up.”

  The last two women Gord spoke with were Rose and Juanita, the remaining sisters. Rose’s long hair was the same rich brown as Nick’s and the twins’, her eyes so dark they appeared black. Like her brother, energy seemed to pulse in the air around her, even when she wasn’t moving. Juanita was closest in appearance to their mother, with her short blond hair and slender height. Yet like all the Strada women, their faces bore the same traces of grief.

  “The last time I saw them was a month ago,” Nick said. “Rose had trouble with her truck and we put in a new starter motor. One-up had just come back from another race.”

  “One-up?”

  “That’s what we call Juanita. She’s kind of competitive.”

  “Another Strada trait?”

  “You guessed it.”

  “What kind of races does she attend? Cars? Horses?”

  “Marathons. And she doesn’t attend them, she runs in them.” His eyes clouded. “I’ve never seen her so still. Even Rose looks as if she’s been crying. She never does, no matter what. Tough as nails, that’s Rose.”

  The coverage of the memorial service finally wrapped up. Gord’s special followed, opening with the tape of Nick’s death that was by now famous nationwide.

  Nick didn’t watch. With one hand on the arm of the couch, he levered himself to his feet. “I hate putting them through this.”

  “I’m sure they’ll understand when you have the chance to explain.”

  “Right, but it doesn’t help them now, does it.”

  She clicked off the TV. “I’m sorry, Nick.”

  He limped to the window and grabbed on to the edge of the frame. “Damn,” he muttered. “It’s Duxbury I’m after, but I’m making my entire family suffer in the meantime.”

  “You’re doing this to protect them.”

  “The effect is the same. My death is the only thing that’s phony here. Their feelings are real.”