Embers (74 page)

Becky came in with the big brass tray and left it on one of the marble counters—Helen
'
s one indulgence when they redid the kitchen—and pulled out a carved-back oak chair.

"
Why do you want to look her up, anyway?
"
Becky asked, dropping her chin onto the cupped palms of her hands.
"
Isn
'
t that a little ghoulish?
"

"
When you
'
re older, you
'
ll understand,
"
Helen said, flipping through Monday
'
s obituaries without success. She picked up Tuesday
'
s paper and went straight to the deaths, then sucked in her breath.
"
Here it is. It
'
s true, then,
"
she added rather stupidly.

She read the headline aloud—
" 'Linda Byrne, thirty-
two; former art teacher
' "
—and then scanned the rest.
"
Born in Geneva
...
graduated from Wellesley with a degree in art; taught at Boston College before she was married
...
member of a couple of art societies
...
survived by her husband
...
one child
...
a mother and two brothers in Geneva
...
a couple of nieces and nephews.
Huh.
It
'
s not much to go on.
"

"
What do you mean,
'
to go on
'
?
"

"
Hmm?
"
Helen looked up in a daze.
"
Did I say that?
"

"
Mom. Get a grip,
"
said Becky, laughing. She slid the paper over to her side of the table and studied the obituary.
"
Y
'
know, I think I
'
ve seen this name Nathaniel Byrne somewhere,
"
she added, tapping her
m
ulti
-
ringed fingers on the page.

"
The husband? Can
'
t say I have,
"
Helen decided.

"
Yeah
...
wait
...
somewhere in the house
...
I know!
"
Becky dashed out of the kitchen, went flying up the stairs, stomped across Helen
'
s tiny but efficient home office overhead, and came roaring down again.

"
Ta-dah!
'
Nathaniel Byrne, Mutual Fund Manager of the Year,
'"
Becky said, holding up an investment magazine that Helen subscribed to but never had time to read.

"
If he
'
s the same Nathaniel Byrne,
"
said Helen. She took the magazine and studied the cover of the magazine.
"
And anyway, since when are you interested in mutual funds?
"

"
Who cares about those?
He
'
s
what caught my eye when I dumped the mail on your desk. It was like, when you walk into a supermarket and you see
Brad Pitt's
picture on the cover of
People?
 
It was like that. You can
'
t help but look.
"

She was right. The Fund Manager of the Year was a dark-haired, steely eyed, square-chinned, unsmiling male who wasn
'
t the least bit shy about looking straight into the camera and daring it to expose his inner self. His brows were thick and straight, his hair, attractively unruly. He was wearing a heavy wool shirt, khakis, and work boots and was sitting on a massive tree stump in an autumn setting, with his thighs pulled up to his chest and his arms slung loosely across the knees. A gold band adorned his left ring finger and, if Helen wasn
'
t mistaken, that was a Rolex on his left wrist. He was the kind of man that women described as intense rather than hunky.

Near the tree stump was a woodpile with an ax leaning against it. Helen took in the man, took in the setting, and shook her head.
"
Wrong guy. The Byrne I heard about is a workaholic who ignores his family, flies his own plane, and is never at home. He wouldn
'
t have the time or inclination to chop wood. Besides, look at his boots. They
'
re brand-new.
"

"
Mom, you are so naive,
"
Becky said, rolling her eyes.
"
The ax and shoes are just props. If he
'
s Fund Manager of the Year, obviously he can afford to get his wood split and stacked. Look him up, look him up,
"
she urged.
"
See if they say he
'
s from
Salem
.
"

Helen did as she was told. The cover article was long, and it finished up, as all such pieces do, with a few scraps of biographical information.
"
For goodness
'
sake,
"
Helen said.
"
You
'
re right. It says he lives on a
'
prestigious street in
Salem
.
'"

"
Oh, like he
'
s gonna live on a slummy one? What else? Let me read it.
"

"
When I
'
m done,
"
said Helen, pulling the cover away from her daughter
'
s pesty, hovering grip. She read aloud:

"
Byrne and his wife, Linda Bellingame Byrne, to whom he's been married for eight years, have one three-year-old daughter and another child on the way. Mrs. Byrne, an art historian who lectures occasionally in the area, abandoned a professorship at
Boston
College
when her husband began putting in eighty-hour weeks after his promotion to manager of the
Columbus
Fund. in the five years since then, they have taken no vacations.

"'
Nathaniel Byrne has made a lot of money for a lot of investors,
'
Mrs. Byrne told us.
'
After the new baby
'
s born, I
'
m hoping that they let the poor man have a week or two off now and then,
'
she said with a teasing smile at her husband.

"
So she was pregnant,
"
Helen mused.
"
How sad.
"
She added,
"
It
'
s funny that the article lets her have the last word.
"

Becky, meanwhile, was impressed.
"
This is so cool. You know this guy, Mom!
"

"
Number one, I don
'
t know him,
"
Helen reminded her daughter.
"
And number two, there
'
s nothing cool about it. The timing of this is tragic.
"

With the ruthless indifference of youth, Becky shrugged and said,
"
It sounds like Linda Byrne wouldn
'
t
'
ve been all that impressed by an article about him anyway.
"

"
Rebecca! A little less cynicism, please.
"

Brought up short by her mother
'
s sharpness, Becky defended herself.
"
I only said what you just told me, Mom. Why are you taking this so seriously?
"

"
I don
'
t know,
"
said Helen, staring at the man on the cover.

What she did know was that her headache had retreated even further. She lifted her hand to the back of her head, just to make sure her head was still there. Yep. And hardly any pain.

Well, for Pete
'
s sake,
she thought with a bemused smile. Was it the soup, the pill—or the sight of his face?

Buy 
Beyond Midnight

Antoinette Stockenberg

RITA award winner.

"Booksellers' recommended read."

--
Publishers Weekly

A showdown between a U.S. Senator (with a house on
Martha's Vineyard
) who believes in ghosts and a reporter who doesn't.
 
What could possibly go wrong?

Chapter 1

Emily Bowditch threw down her notes in disgust.

"Can you believe this?  The
United States
is gazillions of dollars in debt, and Senator Arthur Lee Alden III wants funding for intergalactic communication.  Can you
believe
this?"

No one in the newsroom paid any attention to her; everyone was on deadline.  Emily turned her monitor on and began setting up a new file.

"Not to worry, E.T.," she muttered to no one in particular.  "If the senator gets his funding, pretty soon you
will
be able to phone home." 

The minutes ticked by.  Her hands flew over the keyboard; her muttering became more indignant.  "Of all the hopeless wastes of taxpayers' money ... of all the liberal spendthrifts ... of all the misdirected ... serendipitous ...  irrational ... downright
weird ...."

Stan Cooper looked up annoyed from his computer screen.  "What’re you going on about?"  He swiveled his chair to face Emily and reached for his coffee mug.  "Tell me now and get it over with, for God's sake, so I can get back to work."

The irritation in his voice didn't bother Emily at all.  She assumed that all forty-eight year old bachelor newsmen came that way.  "It's Senator Alden."

Stan's eyelids flickered.  "Yeah?  What about him?"

"I've just got hold of a letter he wrote urging the National Science Foundation to fund a heck of a lot more psychic research than they've been doing.  I didn't know they were doing
any
," she said through gritted teeth.  "And now, apparently, they're going to do more."

"How much more?" Stan asked.  His voice was low and still, the way it got whenever he talked about Senator Alden.

Emily shook her head.  "It doesn't say."  She fished her copy of the letter from a school of papers on her desk and read from it aloud.  "'We urge you' -- blah, blah, here it is -- 'to allocate substantially greater sums for psychic research which, among other benefits, can have far-reaching ramifications for both our domestic and foreign intelligence'."

Stan's laugh was short and derisive.  "FBI.  CIA.  Yeah.  Rumors have been going around for years that they've been fooling around with psi."  Stan drained the dregs of his coffee and made a wry face.  "So how you gonna handle the story?"

Emily sighed.  "I'm sure the Chief'll want me to play it straight; he respects the senator too much to feel any moral outrage here."

"No problem," Stan said with a deadly smile.  "Between you and me we have more than enough."

"Well, it
is
outrageous!"

"I agree."

"I mean it, Stan.  Our government is out of control, absolutely out of control.  Our bridges are falling down, our sewers are disintegrating, our schools need overhauling and this guy calls for -- psychic research!  Who needs psychic research?  We need concrete; pipes; schoolrooms."

Stan swiveled slowly around to face his computer, effectively ending the coffee break.  "What an innocent you are," he said in a tired voice.  "I suppose it comes from living and working in
New Hampshire
." 

Emily flushed.  She'd met Stanley Cooper when he was on assignment in
Manchester
seven years earlier.  She was a junior reporter then, really just a Gofer, and she'd been thoroughly awed by the hard-boiled political reporter from the
Boston Journal
.  He liked what little she'd written, though, and when she took a job in
New Bedford
covering municipal affairs for the local paper, his name was on her list of references.