Haunting Rachel (32 page)

“Evidence?” Nick’s voice was also sharp.

Sammy nodded. “Said he’d stumbled across a computer disk when he was doing a job for Walsh a few weeks ago, and the idiot took it.”

“With what on it?”

“Records. A shitload of records, he said. For bribes
and payoffs, bank account numbers. All the big jobs. Hits ordered and carried out. Lists of bought judges and cops— even some government people. His whole Richmond operation, and it dates back further than anybody knew. Walsh has been pulling strings in this town for years, Nick.”

“He never showed his face in Richmond until a few months ago,” Nick said.

“Yeah. But, man, was he here in spirit.”

“Jesus Christ on a pony,” Adam muttered.

Sammy nodded as if wholeheartedly agreeing. “Yeah. That stuff gets made public, and a lot of big shots besides Walsh are going down.”

Nicholas said, “Do you believe he actually had evidence of this?”

“He showed me a disk, Nick, that’s all I know. He said—” Sammy broke off, looking uncertain.

“What?”

“Well, when we talked last night, he said if anything was to happen to him before he could talk to you, I was to take you to a certain place, and maybe that disk would be there.”

Nicholas scowled at him. “Sammy—”

“I swear, Nick. I don’t have a way in to the place, which is why I couldn’t get the disk myself even if I wanted to do that. But he said you could get it. He said you could get it easy. He picked the place special when I first told him about you a couple of weeks ago.”

“Sammy, if you’re lying to me—”

“Nick, I swear to God it’s the truth. Don’t I owe you my life? Didn’t I swear I’d repay you someday? I said I’d be there when you called in the favor, and I’m here, Nick. You can trust me.”

“I hope so, Sammy. I really hope so.”

“I don’t like this,” Adam said. “It smells like a trap.”

Sammy was offended. “No way.”

“You might not know about it, Sammy,” Nicholas pointed out. “He could be using you.”

Sammy looked uncertain a moment, then shook his head. “No. I believe him, Nick. He was on the up-and-up.”

“Okay,” Nicholas said. “Where is this place, Sammy?”

Before the other two could stop him, Sammy had darted back toward the front door. “Come on. He said I was to take you there, not just tell you where it is.”

“Sammy—”

But the worried little man didn’t hesitate. He yanked open the door. For just a moment, he was silhouetted, the light from outside pouring through the open door.

Then a shot.

Adam and Nick reached the door as a squeal of tires outside declared the successful departure of the shooter. Sammy lay in a rapidly spreading pool of blood, and grim experience told both the other men he wouldn’t last long.

“Goddammit,” Adam said bitterly as they knelt beside Sammy.

“Nick …” Sammy reached up and grasped the lapel of Nick’s jacket with bloodied fingers. “Listen—”

Nicholas bent low, his ear no more than an inch from Sammy’s labored whisper.

Then Sammy’s hand dropped away, a rattling sigh left his mouth, and his sightless eyes gazed into eternity.

“Well?” Adam watched as Nicholas straightened. “Did you get it?”

Nicholas looked at him with an expression that defied description, and said slowly, “Yeah. I got it.”

t took Rachel some time to read all the letters. She didn’t want to read them. They hurt more than she would have thought possible. But she forced herself to because she wanted no more secrets in this house.

Why didn’t you burn them, Mom?

Love letters. Love letters from her uncle to her mother. And from what had been written, it was clear they’d had an affair during the summer he had been home from college, just scant months after Rachel’s birth. It didn’t seem to have lasted long, only a couple of months, but it was obviously intense while it was going on.

The only relief Rachel got from reading the letters was in knowing that the affair had begun
after
her birth and not before. That was clear in what Cameron wrote; though he claimed to have been in love with Irene for years, he had not dared to speak until that summer.

No reason for either his silence before or his change of mind that summer was offered.

It was also clear from the letters that Cameron had been the supplicant, wildly begging Irene Grant to leave her husband and infant daughter, promising that he could give her a better life. She had been unhappy, married to a man who had not, apparently, needed her as she’d wanted him to.

Rachel, remembering her pretty, serene mother, also recalled arguments during her childhood when Irene had wanted Duncan to get involved in the society events she had so enjoyed—and he had despised. Rachel had not thought much about the arguments, because they had seemed low-key, with her father’s refusals and her mother’s frustration expressed calmly, almost more like debates than arguments. Neither had seemed particularly upset either during or afterward, and there had always been other escorts available to Rachel’s mother, friends or otherwise “safe” men who could escort a married woman without causing talk.

Rachel wondered now if there had been lovers as well.

Which was a hell of a thing to wonder about your mother.

Her parents had had separate bedrooms as long as she could remember, and though she had memories of affection between them, especially during her sporadic visits home in the last ten years, she could not remember anything even remotely romantic.

Was that it? Had Irene craved the sort of romance that the plain-speaking, practical Scotsman she’d married was incapable of giving her?

Two brothers, one blunt and unromantic, the other artistic and somewhat dramatic—and handsome, in his younger years.

Two brothers, raised by a father who had pitted them against each other, pushed them to compete on every level, rewarding success and ridiculing them when they failed, setting them up to feel that what one had the other had to better.

Two brothers. And a woman who might have loved them both.

“I wish you’d kept a diary, Mom.” Then again, Rachel thought as she slowly retied the blue ribbon around the letters, maybe she didn’t wish that at all. It was profoundly disconcerting for her to face this window into her parents’ troubled relationship, and even more so to learn that her mother had very nearly run off with her uncle.

Because it looked as though that had nearly happened.

That Irene Grant had not left her husband appeared to be, at least according to Cameron’s bitter words, almost solely due to her love of social position. Duncan, as the elder son and likely heir to his father, had far greater potential than Cameron, the younger son and a struggling artist to boot.

She had apparently ended the affair shortly after her father-in-law had died, and did not change her mind when her husband deeded half his inheritance to his brother.

With only Cameron’s letters to tell the story, Rachel had no idea how accurate his assessment of the situation was. He had been clearly bitter and unhappy, hugely resentful of his brother, and had accepted Irene’s decision with the declaration that he would never love anyone else.

Rachel didn’t know what she felt about this. She had no idea if her father had known of the affair. She had no real idea of what her mother’s emotions and motivations had been.

And it had been nearly thirty years ago.

But Rachel did wonder, now, if her mother’s serenity
had been natural to her personality before the affair with Cameron. Or had that tranquility, like her daughter’s twenty years later, stemmed from an agonizing loss she had been unable to completely recover from?

There was, of course, no way for Rachel to know now. But wondering made her feel the loss of her mother more bitterly than she ever had before, because it seemed possible that they’d had far more in common than Rachel had ever guessed.

“I thought there’d be time,” Rachel murmured to herself, gazing down at the evidence of her mother’s secret soul. “I thought I’d come home one day, when it didn’t hurt anymore, and we’d have time to fix all the broken things between us and be close.”

But there hadn’t been enough time, that plane crash stealing forever any chance Rachel might have had to repair the damaged relationships with her parents. While she had remained in New York, working long hours so she didn’t have to think or feel, keeping herself in limbo because that had been less painful, they had been snatched from her life, her future.

Rachel faced that for the first time.

She had thought loss was the most painful thing of all, but now she knew there was something more painful. Regret.

When she finally got hold of herself once again, Rachel discovered that she was lying across her mother’s bed, the letters thrown aside. Instinctively, she reached under the pillows for the lavender-scented handkerchief that had always been there, and not finding it made a fresh wave of grief sweep over her with a force she couldn’t fight.

It was a long time before Rachel finally pulled herself off the bed. She went into her mother’s bathroom and splashed cold water on her face, avoiding any glance in the
mirror. She undoubtedly looked awful, though she certainly felt better. Drained, but more at peace somehow.

She returned to her mother’s desk and gazed down at the letters for some time, thinking, before she finally made her decision. This was not her story. It had not affected her life while her parents had been alive, and it did not seriously change her feelings, in any negative way, for either of them now that they were gone.

It wasn’t her business, all things considered. And the only surviving member of that triangle deserved his privacy.

Cameron’s urgent search, undoubtedly for these letters, was clear evidence of his feelings on the matter; she had no doubt he would have destroyed them—or kept her from knowing about them, had he discovered them himself.

Rachel’s first impulse was to leave them on his pillow to find when he returned from the trip he had taken today into D.C. to check out various galleries. But when she thought of both of them being painfully aware of her knowledge of the affair, it was simply not something she wanted to have to deal with.

She would never be close to Cameron, but she did not want old secrets and regrets to shadow her relationship with her uncle. There were some things a niece just didn’t need to know.

With that decision made, Rachel picked up the phone and called Darby.

“Hey, pal,” she said when Darby answered. “I need a favor.”

“You’ve got it,” Darby replied without hesitation.

•   •   •

If Nicholas had not wielded considerable influence over numerous, officials within the Richmond police force because of his background and connections in law enforcement, and commanded enormous respect among its various politicians because of all the successful business ventures he had backed, he and Adam would have no doubt been forced to spend the entire day with the police answering questions about Sammy’s murder. Even so, it still required a couple of hours for them to tell their story —the one they had decided to tell, at any rate—and be granted leave to be on their way.

As long as they didn’t leave the city, of course.

“It’s a good thing you routinely use informants to gather information for the bank,” Adam commented as they finally left the warehouse and the crowd of police officers and technicians behind. “How long do you think it’ll be before somebody starts to get very curious about exactly what information you wanted that would have gotten Sammy killed?”

“A few days, if we’re lucky.” Nicholas shrugged. “Not that it’ll matter if we get our hands on that disk and it holds even a fraction of what Sammy claimed it does. We’ll just go public holding a hand full of aces, and all will be forgiven.”

“If we get our hands on that disk.”

“You always tell me to think positive. Now it’s your turn.”

Adam looked at him curiously. “You really think the disk is where Sammy told you it would be. Why?”

“Because,” Nicholas said, “the irony is just wonderful. And I’ve always believed the universe had a wicked sense of humor.”

Adam was puzzled, especially since Nick had not yet told him where the disk was supposed to be. But, moments
later, when the big black car turned into the parking lot beside the bank, puzzlement turned to surprise.

“You’re kidding,” Adam said.

“Like I said.” Nick turned off the engine and smiled. “The irony is wonderful.”

Rachel was just closing the basement door behind her when Fiona appeared.

“Miss Rachel, I’m going to the market now. Is there anything special you want me to get?”

“Nothing I can think of, thanks, Fiona.”

The housekeeper frowned at her, but did not comment directly about swollen eyelids. “There’s cold chicken and salad in the refrigerator. You need to eat, Miss Rachel.”

“I will—if I get hungry.” She smiled. “Don’t worry about me, Fiona. I’ll be fine.”

Fiona sniffed. “If you say so. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

“Take your time.”

Alone once again, Rachel slowly went back upstairs. She turned toward her father’s room, intending to try once more to figure out where he might have hidden a key for her to find. But she stopped dead in the middle of the hallway just past her own room, staring.