Keepsake (32 page)

"How easy for you to say."

"But it would be so much better if this were all resolved," she said, pleading with him to rally around to her view. "The truth is always better. Always. I agree with Quinn completely on that one. And I'm not just promoting that agenda for my sake."

Her brother let out a short, bitter laugh, but his voice turned almost wistful as he said, "You honestly believe that, Livvy? That you don't have an agenda in all this?"

"Wel
l
... yes."

When they were young,
Rand
had a little thing he did when he wanted to make a point: He would give her earlobe a gentle yank and say, "Listen up, little
twin
."

With a sad, sweet smile, he gave her left ear that gentle yank. But he didn't have to tell her to listen now; she was rapt with attention.

"
W
alk inside that house. Take a good, long look at our mother right now. Then come back out," he said softly, "and tell me that you believe this is all for the best."

Olivia shook her head. "That's not fair,
Rand
. Mom has always been an extremely emotional woman. She overreacts to everything."

"You say that about most women."

"Maybe most women overreact."

He sighed. "You're the brains of the family, Olivia. As by now we all know. But I wonder if you have the emotional smarts to back up all that theorizing."

This was new. "Meaning what?" she said testily.

"Meaning sometimes you have to hide the truth from someone you love
because
you love them."

"But then your whole relationship is based on a lie. No, I can't buy into that,
Rand
," she said, shaking her head emphatically. "I've never done that in a relationship, and I never will."

He shrugged and said, "You don't have relationships."

The point was offhandedly made, and yet it practically blasted Olivia out of the seat of his car.
You don't have relationships.
Is that how her family viewed her? As an uninvolved, ambitious, hard-driving witch?

"I do have relationships," she said, devastated by his remark.

"None that matter, Liv."

"I have Quinn Leary," she insisted, near tears now.

"Quinn? How do you figure you have Quinn? Are you married? The mother of his child? How do you have him? Where's the commitment?"

She bowed her head. "Quinn matters to me," was all she could say.

"Assume that he does,"
Rand
allowed. "Would you lie to spare him pain?"

"Never!" she said with a fierce look at her brother. "Quinn wouldn't want that. And neither would I. And he knows it," she insisted. "We tell each other everything!"

But even as she said it, she could hear the Bard whispering in her ear.
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Letting his head fall back on the headrest,
Rand
stared at the folded-up visor before him. "Yeah, well, you two have an unusual relationship. To say the least."

"It's true," she murmured, leaning back and staring in the mirror of her own visor, which had been flipped down;
but she looked and sounded as if she was trying to convince herself now. Quinn was so obviously
not
being truthful with her. The only question was, was he simply holding something back, or was he out-and-out lying to her?

Sighing heavily, Olivia rolled her head in
Rand
's direction and said, "I assume Mom and Dad are both aware that some people think Uncle Rupert had an incestuous relationship with Alison?"

She watched him close his eyes and mutter an oath. "We haven't chatted about it specifically," he said without opening his eyes. "But, yes, you can assume they've heard the worst."

"Then why did Mom get so upset af
ter I told her that I was going
to help Quinn persuade Uncle Rupert to agree to an exhumation? You would think she'd be happy to have the scandal cleared up."

She saw her brother's brow furrow, as if he'd been hit with a sudden, blinding headache. For a moment he was silent. Then, "Resolving the issue of paternity doesn't do much about the rumor that Uncle Rupert murdered Alison."

"Oh, but it does!" Olivia said. She sat up straight and turned to her brother. She was bursting with theories, some of them years old, some of them hours old.

"It's more than likely that whoever got Alison pregnant was the one who murdered her," she speculated. "Maybe to keep her from exposing him, because—who knows? It could be that he was married. Or in love with someone else. He could have been an older man. Someone prominent—the mayor, the coach, her doctor, anyone. And Alison was a minor, don't forget. It would have destroyed the career of anyone of any importance."

Rand
sighed and said, "You've worked it all out, have you, Sherlock? Take some advice. Don't run all your brilliant theories past Mom just now. I doubt that she'll be as impressed as you are with them. If I were you, I wouldn't bring up Uncle Rupert at all."

"See, that's another thing I don't understand. Why is she so concerned for the sake of Uncle Rupert? Or even Aunt
Betty, if that's who she's worried about. It's not as if they're still close. Or do you think it's just the Bennett name in general that's concerning her? That makes sense, although I still say she overreacted this morning. Did she tell you about our confrontation? I mean, she really freaked. She—''

"I gotta go,"
Rand
said, cutting her off.

"Well—all right. If you're in
that
much of a hurry," Olivia said, hurt, as she swung her door open.

She had one foot on the macadam drive when he said her name with that apologetic, melancholy smile that somehow always made things okay again between them.

"Look," he told her, "maybe it's just that time of year. You know how intense Mom gets about the holidays. Afterward, she invariably feels let down. Statistically, this is when people are most depressed and anxious, you know—when they're most likely to kill themselves or, if they're sick, just give up and die. Did you ever think that maybe Mom just has a case of the January blues?"

"Oh, come on,
Rand
," said Olivia. "You're not blind. Has she ever looked at you and burst into tears before in January?"

"I gotta go," he said doggedly.

They were twins. Olivia may not have possessed her brother's emotional acumen, but she knew when he was being less than candid. He was refusing to look her in the eye; obviously he was far more upset than he was letting on.

"Bye," she said, puzzled by his response. "Tell Eileen I'll call her tonight."

He drove off. Olivia decided, after all, that she did not want to face her mother just then. She told herself that she wasn't being cowardly, exactly, but that she and her mother needed a little time away from one another to calm down. Fortunately her parents lived in the back rooms of the house except when they entertained. They wouldn't even know that she had come and gone.

A cold blast of wind cut through her, making her decision suddenly easier. Better to be with Quinn, snuggled in front of a fire.

She glanced at the main-floor windows in the front of the house before she turned to go back to her car. As she did so, a figure retreated behind the drapes and out of her view, but not quite far enough to be undetected by her.

In the soft light of the reception room, the same room that had been converted to a cloakroom for the New Year's Eve gala, Olivia recognized her father. He had been watching as she sat in the car with
Rand
. She was sure of it.

****

Quinn Leary felt like a man being sawn down the middle as he sat alone at a table at Vincent's, a small and nearly deserted Italian restaurant three miles outside of Keepsake. He nursed his beer, despite the waitress's efforts to replace it with a new one, as he watched twilight deepen into night. Myra Lupidnick Lancaster was late.

He was about to blow out the sputtering candle in the chianti bottle when she came in, looking different than she had at the tree lighting on Town Hill. Was it the big hair? She looped her coat on a peg near the register and turned to him with a self-conscious smile.

Holy cats, she was decked out for a prom: the dress, red and shiny and drifting somewhere above her ankles, was not exactly business as usual. On the other hand, spaghetti sauce wouldn't show on it, so maybe that was why she wore it. Quinn stood up with a hapless smile and pulled out a chair for her. The woman was married and the mother of four children; he hoped she remembered that.

"I'm really glad you agreed to meet me, Quinn," she said as she let him angle her chair for her. "I've been in such agony ever since I saw you on Town Hill."

Quinn didn't like the sound of that at all. He took in her red, red lips and black, black mascara, and then he motioned for a waitress just so he'd have somewhere else to look. "What'll you have?" he asked.

"Oh, a beer is fine."
Myra
looked up at the approaching waitress and ordered it herself: Miller draft, if they had it.

She turned back to Quinn and said, "When I called and you said that you had been thinking of calling
me,
that's when I knew. I told myself, this is definitely an act of God."

She made a small, quick sign of the cross which was so completely at odds with her getup that Quinn sat back in his chair, partly relieved but completely confused. "It must have been hard for you to get away," he said. "You have a big family."

Remind her, remind her.

"You're right about that," she said, rolling her eyes at him. "But George is home. Actually, he's been home all week on vacation. Well, not vacation, actually. Not in the regular sense. He's helping me and the kids pack. We're moving to
Albuquerque
. On Monday."

"Ah." Okay, so Quinn was a jerk who couldn't read women. He relaxed his guard and said more congenially, "It'll be a big change from
New England
."

"We're hoping. Two of our kids have asthma. And the living is so much cheaper there. George's people are out there—his father is a plumber, too, and George is taking over the business. Another good thing is that we'll have help with the kids when I go back to work."

"Oh?" He shouldn't ask, but he did anyway. "And what is it that you do?"

She said, "You'll laugh. I'm a nail stylist."

"Why is that funny?"

She wiggled her slender, pretty hands in front his face. The nails, once red, were broken and peeled. "I've been packing frantically all week, and seeing you was definitely a last-minute decision, so I didn't have time to—"

"Oh, that's all right," he said, aghast at the possibility that she'd primp any more for him than she had already. "I won't tell if you won't."

Something in what he said sent the gaiety in her face plunging into a free fall. "That's why I called you, Quinn," she said. "That's exactly why."

Trying not to act mystified, he nodded and said, "I see. Because—?"

"I can't take the responsibility any more. It's just too much. And now that we're leaving, I was going to just throw them out or give them to I don't know who. But then you came—really, it
was
an act of God, your showing up in Keepsake and then George's father getting that heart attack out in
Albuquerque
. An incredible coincidence, don't you think?"

"I don't know what else you can call it," he deadpanned.

She plunged one hand into the sack of a purse she had on her lap and fished something out. "Well—here," she said, holding a fist toward Quinn. He extended his hand and she opened hers, dropping a heavy class ring into his outstretched palm. "Look at the initials."

O.R.B.
All that was missing was the
Jr.,
which
Rand
had always despised.
Quinn tried to seem sage. "Yep. The senior ring," he said, turning its faceted burgundy stone this way and that to catch the candle's light. Quinn had thrown his own ring away in disgust many years ago. "Probably only two men in town have those initials, and I guess the date tells us which of them lost this."

"Lost it!" She snorted and said, "
Rand
gave it to Alison just before she was murdered. It was instead of an engagement ring. She told me so herself."

They were first cousins. Not second, not third. First. The ring was a token of his promise to take care of her, no more than that.

But that wasn't what Quinn said to
Myra
. "I'd heard rumors around town about the two of them," he admitted, feeling a sick obligation to let her run. "How did you come by this, anyway?"

Quinn tried not to sound accusing; the last thing he wanted was to imply that he thought she was a thief.

"Well,
obviously
she couldn't wear his ring out in the open," said
Myra
, a little testily, "so she wore it on a chain around her neck, under her sweaters and things. She was afraid if she took it off and left it in her purse, her father might go rummaging around and find it. He didn't want her seeing boys; he was always looking for evidence of it. You remember that, don't you, Quinn? How Alison never got to date?"