Veiled Threats Page 4

  But Douglas was waiting for us at the foot of the piano-key staircase. His normally florid complexion was mottled, and his thinning, gingery hair was all askew. Nickie must have gotten her coloring and her heavy dark tresses from the other side of the family. The Parry divorce had gotten headlines, but I'd never seen a photo of Julia Parry, Nickie's mother.

  “Carnegie, good to see you again.” Douglas had a low, gravelly voice and an air of focused concentration, as if he were weighing your every word. “Sorry for breaking in on you. There's a reporter who's been on my back about this King Savings case—”

  “She doesn't need to hear about that, Douglas,” said Grace. She was posed in the doorway to the living room, looking like a photo out of Architectural Digest. “Shall we have coffee?”

  “Of course, of course.” He turned to Nickie and tugged at a lock of her hair, a teasing gesture that he'd probably been making ever since she had hair. “Is there a problem about your dress, Pumpkin?”

  Nickie hesitated, then busied herself pouring coffee as we took our seats around a low Chinese table. The burnt-orange lacquer surface set off a black bowl of perfumed freesias and other, more exotic blooms I couldn't name, though I'd seen them at Boris's studio. Outside the picture window, an emerald lawn flowed in artful slopes and curves down to the glittering lake, with a gardener here and there to ornament the scene. Maybe Eddie was right. Maybe we should charge double.

  “No problem at all,” said Grace. “Wedding gowns don't have to be a perfect white anymore, you know. Niccola will be stunning, but we're not going to give you a peek, are we, Niccola? You'll see the gown at St. Anne's, and not before.”

  Nickie brightened, and her father beamed approvingly at his gracious, warm-hearted wife. Grace was a smooth operator, all right.

  “Fine, fine.” Having resolved one point on the agenda, Douglas moved briskly to the next. “Carnegie, how's the balance holding up on the house account? Good thing I only have one daughter, or I'd need a tax shelter just for the weddings!”

  Grace's coffee cup rapped down on its saucer. “The house account? Douglas, I thought the bills were being held for me to pay.”

  “Well, you were gone for so long, I just gave Carnegie here check-writing authority. Hal Jepsen at First Washington handled it all. This way Carnegie can go ahead and pay the bills for the shindig on Saturday, too.”

  “The fund-raiser?” Grace looked at me, a startling flash of anger in her mismatched eyes. “She's involved in our party for Senator Bigelow?”

  “I forgot to tell you. That one caterer burned down or some damn thing, so I asked Carnegie to get us another. It's all taken care of.”

  Douglas frowned at his wife, and I watched, fascinated, as she visibly calmed herself. Power struggles are so interesting when you're not in them. But why didn't she want me on this particular job? Maybe she didn't appreciate my presence in general, or maybe she thought Nickie was getting too fond of me. Being a stepmother couldn't be easy, and being stepmother-of-the-bride must have its own pitfalls, especially for a stylish young stepmother who's used to being in the spotlight herself. And now with her husband in legal trouble, and nasty letters in the mail, not to mention a horrible car accident …

  “Your original caterer had a fire at their kitchen,” I explained to Grace in a deferential tone. Oil on troubled waters, that's me. “They're out of business for at least a month. I've hired Solveto's, the ones who are doing the wedding reception, but we're keeping the menu you selected, the grilled shrimp and the cucumber terrine. I'm sure you'll be satisfied with the results.”

  But Grace had other shrimp to fry. “Very well, but there's still no need for you to use the checking account. Just send me the bills as usual, and I'll review them before they're paid.”

  “Not necessary.” Douglas frowned, and his voice went flat. “I have complete faith in Carnegie, honey, and I'm sure you do, too.”

  A brief, uncomfortable silence, while Nickie stared out the window and Grace gripped her coffee cup as if it might escape her.

  “Of course,” she said. “I'm really much too busy at the moment to be bothered with all these details.”

  It was a feeble parting shot, and Douglas let it go. “Now, there's been a change in the guest list for the fund-raiser. We're inviting the press after all.” He touched his wife's shoulder and smiled, getting her back on the team. “I wasn't happy about it, but Grace convinced me that it's for the best. The senator needs the coverage, and maybe the reporters will leave King County Savings alone for a while and focus on him.”

  “Should I arrange a space for interviews and cameras?” I asked. “Solveto's will need to know if they can't use all the tent space for the buffet.”

  This tricky political decision on his part was just another logistical problem for me. Weather permitting, the fundraiser for Senator Samuel Bigelow was to be a garden party, casual Seattle-style, with picnic tables scattered around the lawns down to the water's edge.

  “Talk with Sam's PR people,” he replied, taking a leather-bound notepad from his breast pocket and scribbling some names and numbers. “They'll probably use the terrace or the gazebo.”

  Nickie spoke up. “Daddy, I've been meaning to ask you— will Uncle Keith be there? I mean, I know he's close to Senator Bigelow.”

  “He'll be there,” said Douglas, his voice grim at the mention of his former friend. “Sam insisted. Just as long as Guthridge stays sober and steers clear of me. And keeps his mouth shut around the reporters. They call it freedom of the press, and then they print all kinds of speculation, just to sell their damn—”

  “You know,” I said, groping for an exit line, “I'm heading downtown next, to the dressmaker's. Nickie, if you'd like to come with me we could have lunch and shop for the bridesmaids’ gifts, and then I'll bring you back.”

  Nickie bounced to her feet with a relieved smile. “Great!”

  “Theo will be delivering some papers to Holt Walker's office about three o'clock,” said Douglas, as we all rose. “Why don't you go over with Carnegie and then meet him there later on? He can bring you home.”

  Nickie ran upstairs for the gown, accompanied by Gus. Grace walked me to the front door and then, with a glance back to see that Douglas was heading for his office, came outside with me. Theo had the hood of the Rolls up, and there was a smear of grease on the chest of his mint-green polo shirt. He probably just threw them out when they got dirty, like Louis XIV using new dishes at every meal.

  “You were saying something about last night?”

  “I don't want to alarm anyone,” I began, though of course that was exactly what I was going to do. “But last night, during the ceremony, I saw a man walking down the drive away from Sercombe House. He could have been somewhere near Nickie's car.”

  “Near her car. What do you mean?” Grace's mismatched eyes were intense and unblinking, and I began to flounder.

  “Well, I wondered if he, if someone, might have done something to the Mustang. To, to make it crash.”

  Grace snapped her head around so fast that her hair whirled around her face. “Theo!”

  He joined us on the front steps, moving heavily, like an overmuscled boxer.

  “Theo, Carnegie thinks someone is trying to harm Nickie. Tried to kill her, in fact, by tampering with her car last night.” Put like that, it sounded insane, but Grace was taking me very seriously. More seriously than I was ready for. “I want someone with her at all times from now on, and I want the car examined. By experts. Find an expert.”

  “No problem.” Theo looked at me curiously, but continued to address Grace. “She saw somebody?”

  “Just a man in the distance,” I told him, “not to recognize, but I don't think he was a wedding guest. And it seemed strange that he was on foot.” What had I started here? “Are you going to tell Nickie?”

  “Only if it's necessary,” said Grace. “And we will absolutely not tell Douglas, is that understood?”

  “Understood,” said Theo grimly. “If it's
Keith Guthridge, I'll kill him. I'll—”

  “Theo.” Grace put a hand on his arm and he stiffened, like a snarling dog recognizing its master. “Theo, we don't even know if it's true. In fact I doubt very much that it is. I'll discuss it with Lieutenant Borden and perhaps he can help us with the car. Then we'll decide what to do next. Carnegie, thank you so much for telling me. I'm sure it's nothing, but I appreciate it all the same. You're a real friend of the family.”

  “All ready!” Nickie came breathlessly out the door, all smiles, with the dress box in her arms. She beamed at Theo, and his stolid expression warmed up at the sight of her. Nickie, I knew, sometimes referred to Theo fondly as her big brother. Surely Eddie was right. Who would hurt a girl like this? It didn't make sense.

  “I TAKE IT THE WEDDING IS STILL ON?” I ASKED NICKIE AS WE recrossed Lake Washington toward Seattle. Ahead of us in the west a barricade of leaden clouds obscured the Olympic Mountains that rise up beyond Puget Sound. Behind us a similar barricade loomed across the eastern horizon, blotting out the Cascades. Rain in the Olympics, rain in the Cascades, and maybe snow as well at the higher elevations, even in June. But here, in between, we drove under a portal of serene, oblivious blue.

  She blushed. “It's still on. Ray called this morning. He was all worried about the accident, and we made up. I guess I was overreacting. I've been so worried about Daddy.”

  “About these letters, and his heart condition?”

  “Did Grace tell you? Yeah, his heart, and now his testimony to the grand jury.” She wound a strand of hair around her fingers and tugged at it. “He's really worried, I can tell. Uncle Keith must be feeling betrayed, but Daddy can't lie, can he?”

  “No, of course not. Are you still on good terms with your uncle? I mean, with—”

  “With Keith,” she said firmly, like a child with a lesson. “Grace asked me to stop calling him Uncle, but I forget. It's pretty weird. Sometimes he calls me, wants to know if I'm OK.”

  “Have you talked to him lately?”

  “What about?”

  “Oh, your wedding plans, other things. About going to Diane's wedding?”

  She shrugged. “He doesn't know Diane.”

  Although, I thought, if he's having her watched she wouldn't need to tell him. He'd know where she left her car. I changed the subject.

  “So who's Holt Walker?” I asked.

  “One of Daddy's lawyers,” said Nickie, unaware that some daddies don't have any lawyers at all. “I thought you'd met him already. They're old friends, and Holt comes to the house a lot, especially since his wife died a few years ago.”

  I nodded, picturing a gray-haired family retainer with bifocals and a dry cough. “And what's all this about a reporter?”

  She frowned, as fiercely as her gentle features would allow. “Aaron Gold. He's a reporter for the Sentinel. He writes about King County Savings in nearly every issue, and he's not fair at all.”

  The Seattle Sentinel was a weekly paper, livelier and more liberal than the stuffy dailies. It usually focused on politics and the arts scene rather than business, but tying the savings-and-loan scandal to a local magnate was pretty juicy stuff.

  “Don't worry about it,” I told her as I threaded through downtown and pulled into a parking lot near the Pike Place Market. “Nobody believes everything they read in the papers anymore, and even if they do they forget it the next day. I'm starving. Let's find some lunch.”

  The Market was bustling. Tourists and local lunchers crowded along the open-air concourse of produce stalls and craft displays, and inside the shops and restaurants that purveyed everything from kites to sushi to collectible comic books. Strawberries in ruby rows, painted T-shirts fluttering on racks, whole crabs and gaping salmon, stacks of hand-woven baskets, bundles of fresh herbs, tables of carved wooden toys—everything looked appropriately wholesome, quaint, whimsical, or just plain tempting.

  The street entertainers were out in force: a bluegrass fiddler, a team of jugglers, a one-woman puppet show with a tall cardboard box serving as a theater. I watched her for a moment, then I followed the heavenly aroma of cioppino wafting from a fishmonger's kettle. Nickie and I loaded up our trays and found a table set back from the sidewalk, out of the breeze. I was grateful for Nickie's sweatshirt, though purple was hardly my color. As we wrestled with our clams and mussels and sopped up the broth with French bread, I asked another, more personal question.

  “Did you ever get an RSVP from your mother?”

  Julia Parry had moved to New Mexico soon after the divorce, when Nickie was seventeen. That was all I knew about her, except that her name on the invitation list had triggered a family quarrel. Douglas put it there, Grace objected, and Nickie, with a very adult bitterness in her voice, pointed out that since Julia hadn't shown up for her high school or college graduation, or anything else, she certainly wouldn't come to the wedding, so what difference did it make? End of quarrel, and the creamy envelope with its stately calligraphy had gone off to Santa Fe.

  Now, Nickie rattled the ice in her empty paper cup. “Not yet. She won't come. I know she won't.”

  “Would you rather she didn't?”

  “I don't know.” She tossed the cup at a garbage can, missed, and got up to retrieve it. When she sat down again, she didn't look at me. “She was an alcoholic, Carnegie. I don't know if Daddy told you.”

  “No, and you certainly shouldn't if you don't—”

  “It's OK.” She let out a long sigh, as if the truth had been trapped in her lungs. “They didn't tell me at first, but I knew. She went to a clinic for a while, and we thought she was better, but she wasn't. Then there was a car accident.”

  “Was she hurt?”

  “We both were.” She drew back her lips in a quick grimace. “That's how I got all these teeth capped. When she got out of the hospital, Daddy told her not to come home.”

  “Nickie, I'm so sorry. The crash last night must have been horrible for you.”

  She seemed not to hear me. “I've been reading these books, about adult children of alcoholics? About forgiving and letting go of anger and all that. Daddy says she doesn't drink anymore, and I think he misses her sometimes. But I don't know if I ever want to see her. She used to get pretty scary. And she made kind of a nasty phone call when he and Grace got married.”

  I thought about my own mother, so fussy and prosaic and always, always there when I needed her. And my father, my stern hero who often seemed to forget that he even had children, let alone that they needed him. I wanted to comfort Nickie, but she wasn't asking for comfort this time. She was trying to make peace with reality by explaining it to me.

  “It's hard to forgive your parents,” I said. “It's hard to allow them to be ordinary, or to have troubles of their own.” She nodded, but I couldn't tell if she was listening to me. “There's so much we never understand about their lives—”

  “Grace has been terrific, you know.” Nickie was rushing her words as if to convince herself as well as me. “She's a financial genius, everybody says she's just brilliant, and she does investment counseling for elderly women. They love her. She's incredibly busy, but she's been really good to me. Just like a mother.”

  She reached for her tote bag. “Could we get going now?”

  “Sure.”

  W e spent two pleasant hours wandering through the market stalls and the shops nearby, finding just the right handcrafted thank-you gift for each bridesmaid. Rain clouds rolled in. I'd left my bride's-hairdo-protecting umbrella in the van, so Nickie and I ended up with wet shoes and hair dripping into our eyes, but we laughed it off. After last night's horror, it was comforting to laugh a little. Our shopping done at last, we ducked inside a café to warm up with espresso. Warm up and wake up, since neither of us had slept much.

  Outside the café the light changed on First Avenue, and a horde of pedestrians hurried across toward our seat by the window. Touristy couples with maps. Young skateboarders with pants baggy enough for clowns. The usual perforatti, punk kids
with pierced eyebrows, nostrils, lips, and God knows what else, though if God does know he can keep it to himself. Everybody hurrying, except one little old bag lady trailing behind, still in the crosswalk long after the Don't Walk had lit. Some bozo in an SUV honked at her, and I looked more closely. Crazy Mary.

  Suddenly I was hearing her old, rustling-leaves voice: “I saw him.” Crazy Mary, who always rode the bus, would have walked up the drive in the rain. No headlights to warn anyone of her coming. What had she seen?

  “Nickie, I'll be right back.”

  I scrambled through the door and out to the corner, just in time to intercept her dogged progress up the street.

  “Mary? Hi, Mary, I met you at the wedding last night, at Sercombe House?”

  She stared up at me without recognition.

  “I was wondering if you could tell me, did you see anyone, um, anyone suspicious out on the driveway? You said something last night about someone breaking things and stealing things. Did you see someone doing that?”

  She looked confused, almost afraid, and then her face brightened. “Cake!”

  “I'm sorry?”

  “The bride said I could have some cake. But it fell on the floor. No cake, no, no, no.” She shook her head vigorously and began to march away, the crowd closing around her.

  “Wait!” I tried to follow, but I was blocked by a field-trip flock of school kids, noisy as starlings. Then a hand caught my arm.

  “Carnegie, Holt is here!” said Nickie's voice. She'd come out to the corner and was waving to a tall, familiar figure approaching us. “Holt, we were just coming to your office! This is Carnegie Kincaid.”

  I lost sight of Mary, and focused on Holt Walker. So this was the old family friend, the one I'd pictured as an elderly widower. Except that this widower stood six feet four and owned a pair of astonishing green eyes. My nonwaiter, quite properly dressed this time in a fashionable gray suit and wine-colored tie. Expensive wine, a tie with a vintage. He smiled at Nickie and then, a bit blankly, at me. His teeth were just as endearingly crooked as I remembered. I probably had fish scales in mine. I certainly had wet hair and clashing clothes. What a time to meet Prince Charming.