Mittman, Stephanie (39 page)

No
ghosts stood on its ridge. No child clung to its ornamental rail.

There
were only flowers there, turning their faces to the sun.

***

Ash
hadn't come to luncheon or dinner, and Kathryn finally demanded to know what
had caused this latest rift. Charlotte watched as Cabot tried to brush off the
whole thing as typical of Ash's overreaction to something that was completely
insignificant. Like twenty-two years of guilt.

If
Cabot fooled Kathryn, it was only because she was begging him to whip the devil
around the stump and he was more than willing to oblige. Kathryn, even as she
appeared to accept Cabot's words, still insisted on sending Maria to make sure
that Ash was all right. And she appeared less than content with Maria's report
that her younger son was huddled with Moss Johnson in the carriage house poring
through stacks of paper.

Kathryn
told Maria to take off her wet coat and apologized for having sent her out on a
wild goose chase in the rain. When the girl was gone, she turned to Cabot.
"What do you suppose they could be working on?"

Cabot
was quick to answer that between them they hadn't as much sense as a box of
rocks, and added that whatever they came up with couldn't be worth more than a
hill of beans.

Maria,
her hair still damp, rushed to offer Charlotte more peas, managing, as she did
so, to drop a note in her lap.
Ask Cabot about the progress on the coffee
beans,
it said.

"Speaking
of beans," Charlotte said as innocently as she could, "did your man
ever find out anything further on Sam Greenbough's sale of those coffee
beans?" Of course the note made no mention of love. Wasn't that what
they'd agreed? And wasn't Ash just honoring her request? she thought as she
balled up the note, covering the noise by rubbing her fork against her plate.

"My
man,
as you call him," Cabot said carefully, "found that the
beans were sold in Sacramento for ten times what Greenbough told Ash. He didn't
cover his tracks as well as he thought, apparently."

"Well,
some people are better than others at hiding things," Charlotte said with
equal care. "For years."

"People
in glass houses...,
Charlotte,"
he started for her, but she wasn't playing.

"I
think it would be a sin if someone did something and let someone else take the
blame," she said instead.

"You
mean Sam Greenbough?" Kathryn asked. She was aligning her silverware with
meticulous care.

"I
mean that a man who doesn't own up to something for which he is responsible
isn't much of a man," Charlotte said, baiting her husband.

"What's
good for the goose...
"
he started.

"Are
you accusing me of something?" Charlotte asked. Let him spit it out,
dammit! Nothing happened in Whittier Court that he didn't know, after all.

"No."
He said it firmly, simply, with finality.

Kathryn
broke the ensuing silence finally. "Things look very bad for Ash, don't
they?"

Cabot
nodded. "They do indeed. This may be one fire I can't pull his chestnuts
out from."

***

She'd
worked with Cabot until ten, the strain between them palpable as they went over
Ash's case from every angle they could think of. They had Greenbough where they
wanted him, right in the hot seat. Apparently Sam was convinced that his wife
and Ash were involved and that he was "owed" as a result. He'd just
been helping himself to his due. Even if it was true, which Ash had assured
them it wasn't, and which she, as opposed to Cabot, believed, it gave Sam a
motive for setting up Ash.

And
then there were the suppliers who were benefiting from the shortages the fire
created. She'd outlined them all for Cabot and he'd nodded, so she assumed that
they, too, could help, even if Cabot wouldn't say as much.

Provided
the police didn't try to pin the second fire on him, Ash had a chance, small,
but real, of clearing his name, though she knew he wanted more. Didn't they all
want to know who really did it now that Selma had been hurt? Of course, the
rest of them weren't facing the blame.

The
big hole in their case was that even though Cabot's man had checked out every
brothel within a carriage ride of the bay, he'd turned up no one who remembered
seeing Ash Whittier that night. Many of them, though, swore they knew him on
sight, Cabot was quick enough to tell her, as if to say he'd told her just what
kind of man his brother was.

He
was the kind of man who'd let a one-eared rabbit share his sleeping quarters,
while Cabot would banish it to unseen realms. The kind of man who would bring
her gifts and pay her compliments and hope she was happy and do what he could
to make her so. She had already learned what kind of man Ashford Whittier was,
and it made her all that much more desperate to find a way to prove him
innocent.

When
she'd tried once again to broach the subject of herself and Ash, Cabot had
thrown up his hands and admitted that they weren't getting anywhere. He'd told
her she was tired and sent her off to bed like an errant child who had tricked
him into letting her stay up late by inventing a problem where there had been
none before. In the way he always did with her, with silence, with deaf ears,
with unseeing eyes, he also made it abundantly clear that he did not wish to
discuss or hear about her relationship with his brother.

And
so she'd brought her notes with her to her bedroom to try yet another way to
see what it was that they had missed that would prove to the world what she
already knew about the gentle man who left a flower on her chair each morning,
who put one of Mrs. Mason's cookies by her bed each night. But sitting by the
window and watching the candles flicker in the carriage house hadn't brought
any of the answers she needed.

She
waited for Cabot and Arthur's voices to fade, heard the servant bid his master
good-night, and listened for the door next to hers shut tight. If he called out
to her tonight, asked her into his room, she would simply ignore him. Pretend
she was asleep. Wish she were dead.

The
rap was faint at first, dismissible. Coward that she was, she climbed into her
bed and hid from it. A stronger tap sent her head beneath the pillow.

Faint
though it was, she could still hear his voice calling her name.

"Yes?"
she said finally, sitting up on her bed and hugging her pillow against her
chest. "Did you need me, Cabot?"

"I
just wanted to tell you not to worry," he shouted through the wall.
"Get a good night's rest and we'll tackle the problem in the
morning."

Warily
her body came back to itself—her shoulders let go of her ears, her toes
uncurled, her heart returned to beating. And with all of that came a calm she
couldn't remember feeling in all of her adult life.

Cabot
wouldn't ask to touch her again. She was sure of it.

"Charlotte?
This
is
what you want, isn't it?" he asked in the silence she had
left to him.

"Yes,"
she called back to him. "Thank you, Cabot."

Relief
flowed through the wall, and she wondered which of them felt it more.

"Good
night, then," he said more softly.

"Good
night," she agreed, pushing her bare feet into the slippers by her bed and
reaching for her robe before she quietly pried open her door and ventured out
into the dark hall.

***

"What
about some target other than us?" Ash asked Moss, grasping at straws that
turned to dust in his hand. "Maybe someone whose business would be hurt
when they didn't get their stock. If we presume for a minute that the target
wasn't me, or G and W—"

The
carriage house door opened a crack, and he signaled for Moss to be silent.
While Cabot's chair could never make it to the outbuilding through the mud, one
couldn't be too careful. He was not about to put his fate into his brother's
hands again.

A
tiny head peeked around the door. "Davis?" he asked. Would Cabot have
sent Davis to spy on them? Davis was surely bright and would do anything for
Cabot, still...

"Ash?"
Even with a quiver in it her voice was unmistakable.

"Charlotte?
What are you doing out here in the middle of the night?" he asked, as if
he hadn't had on his mind the thought that maybe, just maybe, she'd come to him
again, despite everything. "Moss is here," he warned.

"Are
you working on your case?" she asked softly, stepping out into the light
to glow there like some angel. "Can I help?"

"Come
and sit down," he said, pulling himself from the stupor her presence
always seemed to put him in. "Moss, give her a blanket. It's damn... I
mean it's a little cold out here."

"Mmm,"
she agreed with that Cheshire-cat smile he found so irresistible.
"Damn
cold."

He
could have sent Moss home, but he wasn't looking for one night with Charlotte.
He was looking for a lifetime together, and if he had to sacrifice tonight,
well, so be it.

"I'm
thinking that we could be looking at this all wrong," he told her over his
shoulder, figuring it would be better not to look temptation in the face—not
when it had lips like that and when the top two buttons of her nightgown seemed
to be—he caught his mind on a hook and reeled it back in. "What if they
were actually trying to ruin someone else's business with the fires—or even
just the first fire—and were using the second fire as a cover-up?"

It
was a thin rope to hang on to, more like a slender thread, but it was a
direction to work in, and Lord knew he needed some hope, no matter how slim.

"Have
you gone over the inventory that was lost?" she asked, pulling her chair
up behind his and Moss's so that she could look over their shoulders at the
lists they were making. Beside each name was a symbol Moss would recognize, and
then a drawing of what it was they'd imported for that particular company.
There were bottles, kegs, piles of rice, trees... or maybe those were
pineapples. "I was thinking—did you lease any of the space to anyone else?
Or maybe were you holding any merchandise for anyone? I think it's not very
likely that those poor people who died were the target, do you? What
about—"

"Whoa,"
he said. "If you're going to ask such good questions, you better be
willing to wait for some answers."

"It's
about time you took some interest in your defense," she said, getting up
onto her knees and leaning against him to reach a pad and pencil.

He
turned, and her face was inches from his own, lit by the lamp to an
enthusiastic glow that could warm all of Oakland even on a night like this.
"Oh, Charlie my love. We're gonna win this case. We've got to. I've too
much riding on it now. And so do you."

Each
prospect he and Moss offered seemed more farfetched than the last, but she
didn't rule any of them out and offered one or two of her own.
Could someone
have been after Greenbough? How about those crazy temperance zealots? Could
they have been after the Cuervo?

Moss
was snoring lightly by around midnight, and noisily by one. At two Ash roused
him and sent him on home, lists of possibilities for him to investigate stuffed
in every one of his pockets. And then he turned around to watch Charlotte,
hunched by the lamp, still scribbling, stopping for a moment to arch her back
and stretch out her shoulders and arms.

If
there was a more beautiful woman on the entire planet, Ash had never seen her,
and he'd looked awfully hard, back in his old days, before this morning in
Cabot's office when the world had righted itself and his demons had been washed
away.

He
didn't even hate his brother anymore, though he'd only trust the man as far as
he could walk. If history meant anything, Cabot had a strong sense of
self-preservation, and Ash didn't doubt that it probably extended to Charlotte
as well. Charlie Russe could drive a man to steal, to cheat. It was what she
had Ash doing, after all, lying to his brother, stealing the man's wife. It was
what she had Cabot doing, lying to himself, cheating his wife out of love
itself.

And
his Charlie—caught in the middle by none of her own doing.

"Tired?"
he asked, coming up behind her and rubbing her neck. "Should I walk you
back to the house?"

She
shook her head and put her pen down. Her first finger and her thumb were nearly
black with ink, and she rubbed at them with her other hand.

"Then
what is it you want, Charlie Russe?" he asked her, planting a kiss atop
her head. While he had loved that chestnut mane, had wanted her from the moment
he'd run his fingers through it, he hoped she'd never let it grow out again—so
incredibly intimate was it to touch, and kiss, and nuzzle the short little
locks. "Why are you still here?"

She
twisted around on her chair awkwardly, her body obviously cramped from sitting
on her knees all these hours, and turned her little face up to him. "I
want to spend as much time as I can with you now," she admitted, her lip
trembling as she fought off tears. "I'm so scared that you could get
convicted. Ash, I won't be able to live with it. If you have to go to
prison..."