The Pandora Box (3 page)

And maybe Dee just wouldn’t take no for an answer. She’d pack some things and show up on Marion’s doorstep tomorrow morning ready for a drive to the coast.

By the time she pulled into the narrow garage next to her condo, she had made up her mind. She went in through the back entrance as the garage door was closing behind her and was met by the soothing strains of a Mozart concerto. The kitchen lights and stereo were hooked up to a switch that coincided with her garage door opener. Having been raised in a constant crowd of people, she found it so much more pleasant to come home to lights and music rather than dark emptiness. One had to make the best of living alone.

Kicking off the fancy heels she had bought expressly for visiting days at Wyngate (if one was going to play the role of a charity-minded member of the upper class, they should at least dress the part), she breezed through the kitchen and automatically turned the burner on under a shiny copper teakettle as she passed it. Then she went straight for the hall closet on the other side of the living room to get a duffel bag off the top shelf. Too high to reach without standing on a chair, though. So back she went to drag one over from the dining area.

All before she noticed the man in the room.

“Hello, Dee,” he said sheepishly from the doorway of her study. “I’m afraid you caught me snooping.”

“Why—Scotty! What on earth?”

Her friend and co-worker who seldom had a black curl out of place (or came to work in anything less than some expensive name-brand suit) looked unusually rumpled at the moment. No tie or jacket. His yellow shirt was unbuttoned at the collar and the sleeves rolled up. He avoided her accusing glare and sat down heavily on her suede couch.

“Well? This better be good!” She watched him take a folded handkerchief from his pocket and dab at a few beads of sweat on his forehead.

“It isn’t.” He still didn’t look at her. “I know you’ve been onto something bigger than Peterson’s legendary fortune, that’s all. I wanted to find out what.” He returned the handkerchief to his pocket. “Simple as that.”

“So why couldn’t you just ask me?” Dee moved over to the stereo and turned it down.

He sat forward to pick up a copy of National Geographic that was lying on the coffee table in front of him and then thumped it down again. “I put you onto the biggest scoop of the year and you don’t even confide in me! Why can’t you confide in me?”

“Confide in you…on the basis of what? You can’t confide in someone who has no scruples about doing something illegal just to get information from people. You broke and entered, for heaven’s sake! Of all the unethical—”

“Well, it’s hardly breaking and entering when someone gives you their key.” The look he turned on her then reminded her of a whining child, accentuated by the too perfect black curls above luminous eyes and the boyishly smooth skin. “I thought we had an understanding.”

“What, because I let you stay here when you were having your house painted while I was on vacation last summer? I was just being polite.” She would have laughed at the absurdity except that he looked dead serious. “I distinctly remember you giving the key back.”

“I got a duplicate.”

Dee felt a flush of anger at the admission and turned away to keep it to herself.

“Ahhh,” he crooned. “Tchaikovsky on a Friday afternoon. How appropriate.”

“It isn’t Tchaikovsky. That was a sneaking, disrespectful thing to do, Scotty—I won’t have it! And I want my key back.”

“I don’t blame you.” He reached into his pocket and tossed it onto the coffee table. “I’m ashamed of myself, and I apologize.”

The teakettle began to whistle, and as she started toward the kitchen, Dee could feel his eyes following. “You’re just sorry I came back early and found you here.” She shuffled through a basket of tea bags and dropped one into a cup without bothering to read what kind it was. “You want to know why I came back early, Scott?”

“A minute ago it was Scotty. I already told you I was ashamed of myself. Doesn’t that merit me at least a little of that soul-cleansing forgiveness you dole out to everyone else?” Now his tone was sarcastic. “We all go a little crazy over the yearly office competitions. You won it two years in a row. Maybe I want another turn at one of those travel cruises they hand out.”

She returned to the kitchen doorway and stared at him. “I thought you didn’t like boats,” she said carefully. “Besides, you tossed me Wyngate because…how did you put it? You were too busy with that high-profile criminal trial to take time for any “local human interest” story. Or did you expect me to do all the footwork, so you could—”

“I couldn’t get close enough to that old man to do any footwork!” he snapped suddenly. “Did he tell you anything or didn’t he? He’s fallen under that spell of yours, I know that much. What are you waiting for? Just ask him to—”

“He died a couple hours ago, Scott. And let me tell you something, I—”

For the briefest moment he looked utterly stricken. But he recovered so quick, Dee thought she must have misread the response.

“Do you know what that means? These are dangerous people you’re fooling with! You can’t waltz in and take down the whole lot of them with one old man’s confession and a desperate prayer!”

“Scott Evans, you’ve been reading my files!”

“It was an act, don’t you see that? He was desperate, and the coward was trying to use you to get him out of that asylum.”

“It is not cowardly to want out of a desperate situation. Just wait till it happens to you someday.”

“I don’t let things like that happen to me. I look out for myself.”

“Nobody can take care of themselves all the time, that’s the point.”

“You can if you look far enough ahead. And what I see ahead now…” He rose to pace the floor. “Is you’ve got to kill that story.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Yes, you can. It’s too risky to turn any of that stuff in.”

“I already did.”

He stopped suddenly, swore, and turned around to glare at her. “Why couldn’t you just mind your own business and stick with the missing fortune angle?”

“Maybe because I was raised to speak up whenever I see things going on that aren’t right. We’re reporters, Scott, remember? And, like you’ve been telling me for the last five years, investigation is part of the job.”

“You were supposed to investigate diamonds! Not some farfetched allegations of a smuggling ring for donor organs!”

“They aren’t farfetched.”

“Your only way out now, is to say it was just some old man’s demented delusion. Better yet, don’t say anything. When did you turn it in?”

“This afternoon before I left the office. Devlin hasn’t read it yet, or I’d have heard from him by now.”

“Maybe there’s still time to go get it back, then.”

“I doubt it.” Dee didn’t mention she had already told everything to the police. “Devlin said he was going to run the first segment Friday and the other two the following weekends.”

“Well, if he does, you’ve killed us both!”

“What?” She closed her eyes and shook her head at this new absurdity.

“I hate it when you do that.” It was a chilling tone, and in all the years they had worked together, she had never heard him talk like that.

“Then you mind your business for a change. Nobody knows you gave me the lead, I didn’t mention it to anybody. If there’s trouble, it’ll be my trouble. This is the first significant story I’ve covered since I came to the
Columbia Herald
! I can’t kill it. It’s too important. A lot more important than just entertaining the public with a speculative account of where some lonely old man hid some jewels.”

“Not just jewels. Stolen off some Russian royalty and they’re worth millions now. Anyone who could legally claim them is dead.” He returned to the couch and picked up the suit jacket he must have folded neatly and laid over the arm earlier.

Dee watched him put it on. “A man’s entitled to do what he wants with what belongs to him, Scott. No matter how old he is or where it is in the world.”

“Is that what he told you? That they belonged to him? You probably fell for that ‘get me out of here and I’ll share it with you’ stuff, too.”

“Obviously not, or I wouldn’t have turned the story in.”

Scott walked to the door. “In my opinion?” He opened it and turned back to her for a moment. “That’s exactly what the self-righteous, uncompromising, D.J. Parker would do.” He started across the porch.

In my opinion. She had already heard that phrase once today. “Don’t you dare try to talk Devlin out of this!” she warned. “Do you hear me, Scott? Because you don’t know half what I’d do if—”

“Yeah, my mistake was in only knowing half.” He crossed her short stretch of lawn. His car was parked nearly a block away. “Last thing I need to worry about, right now, is you sticking my neck out for me.”

“You should be worried, breaking into people’s houses!” She stepped onto the porch in her bare feet and yelled to his retreating back. “Which I will tell somebody about if you lay so much as a finger on that story!”

4

Drawn Away

“It is only after one is in trouble that one realizes how little sympathy and kindness there are in the world.” ~ Nellie Bly

Dee stayed on the porch until Scott was out of sight. The nerve of him going through her private files! The duplicate key had to have been made last summer. Months before he even told her about Peterson’s diamonds.

And what about this uncharacteristic fear at toppling the Wyngate Hospital corruption? Why, he was always digging up dirt on some public official down at the courthouse or delving into cold cases. A story like this should have been right up his alley. The kind they handed out Pulitzers for. They were constantly bantering about chasing that elusive prize. It had become a well-known competition between them down at the office. So even if it was Peterson’s diamonds he was really interested in, why should he care that she had taken on the Wyngate Hospital scandal instead?

Stories where corruption was exposed to the public in a local region could spark changes nationwide. Isn’t that what Nellie Bly had done on her historic infiltration of Blackwell Island? Why, infiltration and exposure was her regular mode of operation. It’s what got the most accurate (not to mention dramatic) results. The very thing that had first drawn Dee to investigative reporting in the first place. And while times and technology had changed since Nellie’s time, human interest had not. Done well, a fantastic infiltration and discovery story could still garner interest and effect changes today.

The very reason why she had jumped at the opportunity when Nelson Peterson reached out to her for help after personally experiencing the horrific illegal things that were going on at that mental hospital. Dee knew what she had to do the very moment he told her about it. This went far beyond investigative reporting. It had become a matter of her own personal integrity... Her editor, Ronald Devlin, had made the same choice for the same reasons and had even gone one step further by initiating the police investigation they were both cooperating with.

But what about Scott Evans?

He couldn’t have known any of that information before reading her files today. Not without bumping into it the same way she had. By befriending Peterson, himself. Or at least someone like him. And in order to do that, he would have to be...friendly. Scott Evans might be Devlin’s star reporter, but he was not much of a friendly person. No, that wasn’t exactly true. He did have a way of making people laugh by poking fun at his own oddities. Like insisting he was allergic to paint fumes, and, on his salary, it would practically break him to have to stay in a hotel for two weeks.

Now, Dee wondered if he really did have his house painted, last summer. He had organized a charity booth for wounded war veterans at the Fourth of July picnic once, too. It was entirely manned by beautiful young girls handing out chocolate kisses, but it had brought in some substantial donations. People skills of a sort, but not really the friendly kind.

What did she actually know about Scott Evans?

Except that he had been in the newspaper business a long time, looked twenty-something instead of forty, and had contacts in every dark hole of the city. He told her he heard about Peterson’s diamonds after dating one of the nurses who worked over at Wyngate. Probably somebody like that Jennifer, who had given her Peterson’s note today. His last note.

Hadn’t Scott admitted he already tried talking to the old man but never got anywhere?

She wasn’t surprised. Peterson was way too sharp for that. A master manipulator he could have anyone who struck up a conversation with him either bristling or cooing within minutes. An expert in human nature. Proven by the way he had so ingeniously set up the list system. He did not have a weakness for expensive whiskey and cigars. Those items were strategically placed on the lists to hide the things he was really bringing into the institution: all the items needed for his coming “great escape.”

And while most members of the staff would never help him with that, there were more than a few who had no scruples about covering up, or even smuggling in, a few forbidden pleasures. No one knew what he was really up to.

No one but Dee.

Suddenly, she wondered just how much of her research notes Scott had actually read. Why...they were her personal notes, tucked away safely in her own home, and she had written down everything! Dee stepped back inside and leaned against the closed door in a moment of utter dread.

“Lord, what am I missing here?” she whispered. “How am I supposed to tell if this opportunity is a gift from you or some kind of trap from the devil?” Then, a terrible thought occurred to her. “Oh, my— How far into the files did he get? Enough to find out where the key to the deposit box is?”

It was at the very moment she spoke those words out loud that she was struck by such a sudden sense of urgency, she could hardly stand it. Next thing she knew, she was rushing around as if a fire alarm had gone off. No way could she wait till tomorrow to make that drive! Why, if he knew about that box, he might even...