Keepsake (30 page)

The winding, rutted drive continued on behind the house, but Quinn took the spur and parked his truck directly astride the front door, which apparently was little used. He stepped out of the truck and—because the weather was mild—right into mud. He should have known better than to approach through the formal entrance, but he didn't want the Bennetts to feel that he had presumed by driving around to the back.

Would Rupert be in? Quinn almost hoped not. Betty Bennett didn't sound like the type of woman to say boo without her husband's permission. On the other hand, it was Rupert whose measure Quinn wanted to take. If he seemed nervous or panicky or anything other than predictably hostile, then that would be significant.

Quinn cleaned the mud from his workboots on a metal bootscraper set into a chunk of concrete, then gave a rusted hand-cranked doorbell a turn or two. Its loud, shrill ring was enough to wake up the dead. In a sense, it was what Quinn had come to do.

Eventually the door was opened by a churchmouse. Betty
Bennett was a hundred pounds of fearful impulse bundled in gray sweats. Under a wisp of graying hair, her eyes, washed by too many tears to the color of faded jeans, seemed incapable of returning his direct gaze. A quick, scared glance was all he got from her. He felt like Godzilla trying to sell Girl Scout cookies.

"Mrs. Bennett?" he said gently as he took off his baseball cap. "You probably don't remember me—I'm Quinn Leary. I wonder if I might have just a moment of your time."

To his amazement, she said, "Yes, all right," and opened the door wide.

Well, hell, that was easy enough,
Quinn thought, stepping over the threshold. He followed her across wide-planked floors through a neat, cozily furnished parlor and then through a fireplaced keeping room, all the while wondering whether she wasn't leading him straight into an ambush. It didn't help his morale that a rifle seemed to be missing from an otherwise well-stocked gun case that they passed along the way.

The expected ambush took place in the kitchen: Olivia Bennett, wearing olive silk and a fancy bandanna and looking wildly sophisticated in the austere pilgrim setting, was sitting demurely at a big pine table by a massive hearth with a cup of tea and a giant muffin set in front of her.

Son of a bitch. Now what? Son of a bitch.

He looked at the niece. He looked at the aunt. He looked at the niece again.

"Now why am I surprised by this?"

****

"I can't imagine," Olivia said, forcing herself to seem offhand. "Didn't I mention that I might be stopping by my aunt's? I thought I had."

Quinn had arrived before Olivia had had a chance to prepare her aunt for his request. She'd barely got out the heads-up that Quinn Leary was going to be stopping by when they heard the crank on the bell. Her aunt, predictably, wanted to run and hide under the couch; Olivia had to reassure her that she would stay by her side and give her moral support. And meanwhile, Olivia's Uncle Rupert was due back from town at any moment.

Betty Bennett didn't know what to do with Quinn, that was plain to see, so Olivia took over as hostess. "Can I get your
... something?" she asked, stumbling over the sentence. God, he had a look. Even she was nervous.

"I'm all right," he said in a perfectly even tone.

That
tone. It spoke volumes.

He turned to Olivia's aunt and said in a much more gentle way, "I know it's distressing for you to see me after all these years, Mrs. Bennett. You suffered a terrible tragedy, and I'm a reminder of that time. I know that. I wish I could be someone else right now. I wish I could be someone you knew and trusted—but there's no one else who can make this request of you except me."

He added softly, "I'm here because no one else cares enough about my father to prove that he had nothing to do with your loss of Alison."

Once he put it that way, Olivia understood things much more clearly. He was right. She had no business being there. This was between him and Alison's parents. He
was
right. And so was her mother. What on earth had she been thinking?

Something about Quinn's soft, sympathetic tone made her Aunt Betty murmur, "Please. Sit down."

She pulled out a chair for herself so meekly, it broke Olivia's heart to watch her. Here was a woman as fragile as the butterflies she had raised in her greenhouse before a storm knocked it down. It seemed cruel that sweet Aunt Betty had had to suffer the loss even of a single butterfly. But to have her only
child
murdered, and then to have no one with whom to share her grief except a brooding, remote husband—that was unbearably cruel.

Quinn hooked his jacket over the back of the ladderback chair and sat down. For a big man with solid biceps and a tough-looking haircut, he seemed amazingly unthreatening. Olivia knew how tender he could be in bed; that had a lot to do with her impression. But there was more to it than that. Women responded to Quinn because he empathized with them. Because he was gentle and tough and kind and interesting and curious a
nd chivalrous and, okay, super-
confident, not to mention because he made pies. You could trust such a man. All you had to do was look into his eyes and listen to his voice.

And her aunt was doing just that. Perched almost primly on the rush-seated chair, Betty Bennett folded her hands in her lap and listened intently to Quinn as he presented the reasons that his father had fled in the night so very long ago.

"My father was a shy man, and gentle," Quinn said, without making it sound like a character flaw. "He was appalled at the thought of having to fight to defend himself. He was even more appalled at the threat of being locked in prison, away from his gardens. All my father ever wanted to do was to nurture growing things. He lived very simply. He didn't want money; he didn't need fame. But he needed—truly needed—to be taking care of things."

Quinn might have been describing the woman who was listening to him so raptly. Olivia watched as her aunt nodded sympathetically at one statement after another that Quinn was laying out before her. It occurred to Olivia, really for the first time, that Quinn's father and Betty Bennett would have been a match made in heaven.

How sad, she thought. What a waste of love. She let her gaze wander around the well-kept kitchen. From the gleaming finish of the pine table to the homey, hand-braided rug that her aunt had made from fabric scraps, everything around them spoke of nurturing impulses that had nowhere to go.

How truly sad.

"I'm not sure how familiar you are with forensic science, Mrs. Bennett," Quinn said, easing into his painful request, "but nowadays there are methods to prove someone's innocence that weren't around seventeen years ago."

"What kind of methods?"

"Well... have you heard of DNA testing?" he asked her softly.

"I do have some idea, yes, from watching news about the O. J. Simpson trial. But I didn't watch the trial itself," she added with a troubled shake of her head. "It was too awful to see."

"You were better off," Quinn agreed with a sympathetic smile.

Olivia began a major project of rearranging crumbs into a circle around the edge of her plate and didn't look up during the painful pause that followed.

"A DNA test means that they would take just a few cells of tissue to determine the genetic makeup of the
... unborn child," Quinn explained while Olivia held her breath. "And they would compare them to a DNA profile which they would get from analyzing strands of my father's hair. The two won't match, you see, and that will clear my—"

"Oh! Your father wants to return to Keepsake, then?"

Her aunt did not want to understand the implications of what Quinn was saying; Olivia was sure of it. She was rerouting her attention from her dead daughter and unborn grandchild to Quinn's father and where he should live. That, she could handle.

Quinn said softly, "My father died just before Thanksgiving."

"Oh, I'm
... sorry."

Olivia glanced at Quinn and then at her aunt. They were sharing a moment of hurt, an awareness of loss, that drove home how wrong it was for her to be sitting at the table with them. She'd give anything to be able to leave them alone. But she couldn't just stand up and go; she'd be trampling all over their fragile connection. She went back to arranging her crumbs with renewed intensity, as though the fate of the free world depended on having a perfect crumb wreath on the rim of her cake plate.

"The thing is, Mrs. Bennett, he was a really good man and he deserves to have his good name back. I've never known anyone more steadfast
... more loyal
... more heroic."

"Heroic?"

Olivia was curious about that, too. It was the second time that Quinn had referred to his father that way. She saw color rise on Quinn's neck as he said, "After he left Keepsake, my father did some good things."

"So you want to do this DNA test and clear his name," Betty said. "I can't blame you, Mr. Leary, but
... well
... I'm not sure. I think it would be very"—she took a deep breath and blew it out—"hard."

Catching a lock of hair at the back of her neck, she tugged at it nervously as she stared at the clean-swept hearth. "Hard on my husband, you see. People would—they'd start talking again. Rumors
... they can be
so
hurtful."

She returned her hands to her lap and forced herself to look Quinn in the eye. It didn't last long. She dropped her gaze and studied the butter crock on the table instead. She said apologetically, "I think maybe we should just leave things be. I don't think my husband will agree to this at all."

Olivia looked from her aunt to Quinn. She expected to see his jaw set the way it did when he was opposed. Instead he said softly, "Those rumors have already surfaced, ma'am. There's only one way to lay them to rest now."

Olivia blinked. What rumors? They weren't talking about Francis Leary any longer. What rumors?

Her aunt had turned as pale as the whitewashed walls of her kitchen. She stood up and seemed to shake herself free of Quinn's spell, like a child who's lingered too long in the park and knows she's going to catch hell at home. "You really should go now. My husband could be back anytime. I'm sorry we can't help you. I'm sorry," she said with something like urgency. "Your father sounds like a nice man."

But she was too late. They all heard the door to the mud shed slam loudly, and they all turned at the same time to behold Olivia's Uncle Rupert letting himself through it to the kitchen. Olivia hadn't seen him in over half a year. When she stopped by for her Aunt Betty's birthday in August he'd been asleep, and when she dropped off her Christmas presents in December he hadn't been home.

He looked much the same: lean and leathery and dour.

He sneered at Quinn and said, "Well, well, well. Look what the cat dragged in." He didn't seem surprised, and Olivia wanted to know why. Would he really know Quinn's truck?

Olivia had wanted to be invisible
, and a
pparently she'd got her wish
:
her uncle didn't seem to be aware of her at all. "Hello, Uncle Rupert," she said rather loudly, as if he were not only blind but hard of hearing. "I haven't seen you for a while. How are you?"

He was watching Quinn the way a torn regards a stray who's wandered through his territory. Without taking his eyes away from him, he said to Olivia, "Since when do you care?"

He was right, of course. Olivia had never cared for him, not for as long as she could remember.

When she was a little girl and he was still part-owner of the mill and their families were closer, Olivia used to sleep over occasionally. He always came into Alison's bedroom to kiss them both good night, and Olivia had never liked it. His mouth was too wet, and he often smelled of old beer. After a while, she began to insist that Alison come over to
her
house for sleepovers. But her uncle had nixed the idea, and that was that. She a
nd Alison stopped having sleep-
overs.

But now, what had seemed like an irrational childish aversion to a grown-up suddenly took on another meaning altogether. Something deep inside of Olivia seemed to shift and move, like ice over a pond in the January thaw. She felt her cheeks turn hot and her heart take off on a sickening run.

Quinn, still seated, broke the brutal silence. "I don't pretend to be here out of anything beyond self-interest," he said in a much more steely voice than he had used so far. "I've come back to Keepsake for one reason only: to prove my father's innocence."

"If you want my blessing, you're in the wrong place," her uncle growled. "Go see Father Tom."

"No," Quinn said coolly as he leaned into his forearms on the table. "It's the district attorney whose blessing I'll need. I'm here to say that the only way to clear my father's name—and yours—is for us to throw in our forces together."

"What are you talking about?"

"I think you know."

"Suppose you tell me."

Olivia saw Quinn glance at Betty Bennett, who looked ready to burst into tears. She realized in a blinding flash that her uncle was banking on Quinn's natural reluctance to inflict pain on downtrodden women. It was a game of psychological poker, and Uncle Rupert was calling Quinn's bluff.