True Blend (8 page)

“Tile, George. Calm down.” Nate pulls a box cutter from his belt and slits open the carton. He perspires even though it is cool; his voice drops even though they are alone.

George doesn’t want their voices to drop. He doesn’t want secrets. He just wants his footloose brother back in his own staid, workaholic life. “The hell with the tiles. We need to talk, Nate. I can’t take this and we have to figure out how we’re getting out of it.”

“Don’t worry,” Nate tells him. “This is all part of the plan. Once your walls are redone, the safe will be invisible to the human eye.”

“Safe? That’s the plan to get out of this?”

Nate nods. “We’re going about our normal lives, remember? You wanted to redo your kitchen wall and I’m taking care of it. Like we planned.” He sips his coffee and eyes George’s jeans and polo shirt. “Where’s your work clothes? Don’t you have to open up?”

“Dean’s taking care of it. I’m not going in today.”

“Why not?”

“You see those vans out there? I’m not about to deal with the media all day. That is definitely not normal, and don’t you tell me it is.”

“It is for you,” Nate insists. “Now that you’re a God damn hero. Didn’t you read the paper? Heroes talk to reporters, build up the story, pump themselves up.”

“I read it, all right.” The paper ran a studio portrait of Amy Trewist and her daughter. She wore a simple sheath, her sandy blonde hair falling to her shoulders, her jewelry minimal. Glaringly apparent was the lack of a man. “Do you realize who you messed with yesterday?”

“We didn’t mess with anybody. No one got hurt.”

“Jesus, Nate, not that you can see, anyway. Didn’t you read the articles? That lady is thirty-three and a widow already. She suffered enough without you screwing with her.”

“Hey, she got her kid back. She’ll recover.” Nate returns the box cutter to his tool belt and pulls a heavy hammer from the beat up toolbox. He straightens his six-foot-one frame and taps the hammer head in his other hand. His eyes squint as he studies George. “Don’t you start worrying about that dame now. Just get to work. Give the press the pictures and interviews they want and they’ll get bored in no time. Your fifteen minutes of being a hero will be history in a week.” He pulls out his measuring tape and checks a few numbers along the wall.

“Wait a minute, Nate. Screw those damn tiles.” He grabs the tape from his brother’s hand. “Listen, we have to turn ourselves in. We’ll say we were threatened, something, I don’t know.”

“No. You listen.” Nate grabs the measuring tape back. “This tile work’s going to be fancy shit. I know you only wanted a backsplash, but this wall has to be extended. I need space behind it, you know what I mean?” He surmises the kitchen carefully. “We tallied it last night while you were bringing the girl back. Your wall will be worth close to a million. That’s your cut.”

It’s the way Nate says it, his words coming as plainly as if he is talking measurements, fifteen and three-quarter inches by one million, that makes George pour his coffee down the drain. He can’t drink, can’t eat and he fought dry heaves once already. He can kick Nate out. Set his toolbox outside the door in the rain and lock the deadbolt. But yesterday is far from over. Until he figures something out, his brother will build a custom, hidden safe in his kitchen wall. And George has no doubt. The safe will be indecipherable from the tile under the influence of his skilled hands.

*  *  *

Amy no longer takes anyone at face value. When Hayes stops by her house on Thursday morning, she can plainly see that he is about fifty years old with very short light brown hair and a calm expression. But she knows there is more, unseen. There’s a handgun on his body, strapped somewhere beneath his jacket. She works with him to quietly press Grace for simple details about her captors, but their attention distresses her. She gets even more quiet, sucking her thumb and withdrawing, not looking at either of them. So when Ellen puts on Grace’s purple galoshes and takes her outside to splish-splash in puddles, Hayes turns to Amy. He asks her to describe the weapons that had been involved in the crime. Maybe they can be traced.

“Black as hell,” Amy says, glancing out the kitchen window at her daughter walking in the light rain, before turning back to the detective. “The man holding Grace, his weapon seemed larger than the other’s. Than the man who took her shoe.”

Hayes tells her that the brain catalogues visions that, without prodding, the conscience remains unaware of. So he prods, and prods, asking for wording or insignias she might have seen, the finish of the grips, the presence of safety levers or any magazine protrusion. “The length of the barrels. Could you describe either one?” he asks.

Behind closed eyes, Amy pictures the man holding Grace beneath one arm, and holding a weapon in his other hand, keeping it pressed almost unnoticed along his leg. She hesitantly motions the length with her two hands.

“Maybe a four-inch barrel,” the detective notes. “Did it look narrow? Wide?”

“Wide. Like there were two barrels together.” She points to a picture from a selection he brought along, indicating traditional double action frames, and winces at the array of weaponry. “There are so many,” Amy says, startled when Angel jumps from a kitchen chair up onto the table, stepping lightly across the images.

“Is that the cat from the kidnappers?” Detective Hayes asks.

“Yes. Angel.” Amy scoops up the black and white kitten, and what she thinks is this: A couple pounds of soft, warm fur; a couple pounds of a cold, black gun. She shifts the cat’s weight in her hand before setting her on the floor. “Too bad she can’t talk. Imagine what she saw that day?”

“No kidding.” Hayes turns back to the weapons and from what he repeats into a digital recorder, the guns involved seem to be a forty-five and a nine-millimeter.

If it weren’t for the firearms violently imposed upon her life, she would still be happily ignorant to the ways of these weapons. She would be at work at her vintage bridal shop, scouting the Internet and flea markets for lace gowns with sweetheart necklines, for a white moiré silk, high-waisted dress a customer requested, for the elbow-length satin gloves she needed to pair with a 1950s sleeveless gown.

Instead she doesn’t leave her home. Surrounded by an acre of tended land that the original farmer never relinquished to developers, the lawn and trees become her cocoon. The investigators, like Hayes, come to her, and Celia and Ellen run her errands around town. After walking blindly into Addison’s worst crime ever, she doesn’t trust herself to venture further than her own backyard and so it is with resistance that she finds herself in her shop later Thursday.

“I heard you again last night,” Ellen says as she hangs a cupcake dress with a full skirt of lace and tulle, trimmed in ruffles, on a black dress form. “It’s just like after Mark died. You’re up half the night, Amy.”

Amy sits on the gold settee, her hand skimming the brocade floral pattern. “Well of course I’m up. I can’t stop seeing Grace being grabbed from my hands. Then I see that man’s face, the one who took her shoe. He came so close to me. When I shut my eyes, he’s right there. When I dream, he’s there. So no, I can’t sleep.”

“It’s not just sleep. You’re not eating. You’ve been disorganized all week.” Ellen lifts and drops the gown skirt, fluffing the ruffles. “You’d never even have come here today if I didn’t put the gowns in your car and buckle Grace in the back seat. And you
love
fussing with the gowns.”

Amy does. Her vintage bridal shop is all part of capturing her family history, a part of four generations of women woven together. A part of the art of her grandmother’s intricate hand-stitched lace doilies and veils and table runners and even bracelets. A part of the sweet memories stopping at tag sales with her mother years ago, lifting lace treasures from old trunks or a chest of drawers. A part of the magic stories her mother spun about the lace. A part of standing together in the sunlight, her mother’s hands lifting lace like butterfly wings for Amy to see, dust rising like fairy tale stardust. She feels a bit of that enchanted stardust in each lace gown she chooses and loves that she can share it with her own daughter now, too.

“You can’t take another year to recover,” Ellen is saying. When she lifts the gown skirt one more time, Angel scoots beneath it. “Be quick, for Grace’s sake.” Grace moves beside her, laughing at the little kitten’s paw shooting out from beneath the gown, tapping at her foot. “I’ll have to be getting back home to Dad eventually.”

So there it is. Her father already returned to New Hampshire, to his waiting job on the force there. One day soon, her mother will leave her three hundred miles behind, too. Even though the police still check on her safety, she dreads being on her own again. Going out in public. Entering stores, walking through parking lots. Being responsible for herself and her daughter. Needing eyes on the back of her head.

“Maybe if you start dealing with people again, a little bit at a time.”

“I don’t trust people, Mom. I don’t know how to anymore.” She gets up off the settee and walks over to the counter, adjusting the bracelets on the jewelry holder there. The rain had stopped, and their gemstones and gold chains glimmer in the late afternoon sunlight shining through the front display window. All the while, her ears are tuned to Grace, waiting to hear words she might say.

“What about that George fellow? That would be a good way for you to get out a bit.”

“Who?” She looks over at her mother.

“George. George Carbone. You were going to thank him for bringing Grace home safely.”

Amy looked at his photographs in the paper all week, studying the face, the strong chin, the dark eyes. Yet he looked tense, or worried. Something. She cut out one picture and leaves it on her dresser mirror, thankful for his anonymous presence in their lives. But she hadn’t reached out to him.

“You said you’re afraid to trust anyone after this crazy ordeal,” Ellen is saying as she wraps a fine-gauge crocheted bridal shawl around Grace’s tiny shoulders. “Look how pretty! Do you want to see in the mirror?” Grace nods silently, and Ellen walks her to the full-length mirror. “But if there was ever someone you could trust,” she says over her shoulder, “I think he would be the man.”

Grace twirls around, holding the shawl in place, its tassels swinging. And Amy sees. Her mother has done it again, spinning magic with lace and beauty and gentleness, this time with Grace. Her daughter runs across the room laughing, calling Angel’s name with the little kitten close on her tail, patting at the shawl tassels dragging behind her.

*  *  *

A lone piano captivates Amy with a single bar of music, followed by a familiar voice picking up the melody. Early Friday morning, she quietly closes the door behind her, listening to Sinatra. Looking around, words escape her. Dingy images of a butcher shop filled her mind during the car ride, which is why she left Grace at home with her mother. She pictured walking into a large, cold room lined with blood-smeared meat cases and industrial carving equipment. There would be men yelling over the sound of a meat grinder and bone saw, men wearing bloodied white aprons. A butcher shop.

Instead, gleaming glass meat cases meticulously display prime cuts of veal, beef and pork. Shelves of marinating sauces and spices line the walls, along with a recipe rack. Fresh seafood fills another glass case with catfish, swordfish, clams. Cheese and breads spill from a side shelf, and in a dinner-to-go case, seafood cakes and tuna kabobs with fresh vegetables entice the eye. Small round tables are clustered in the corner, a place to sit and have a sandwich, though all are empty at the moment. In fact, she is the only customer this early in the morning.

His back faces her, the broad shoulders pressed against a crisp white long sleeve shirt turned back at the cuffs, over which is tied a jet black apron. Those are the shoulders that lifted her child to safety. He’s taller than she had imagined. And there is a slight movement; he seems lost in thought while working a substantial slicing knife. Reaching for the bell that hadn’t rung when she slowly, carefully closed the door behind her, not that he would have heard it over the stereo, she reaches up and gives it a good jingle.

“Be right with you,” he calls over his shoulder. He looks back again before walking over to the counter. “Hi there, what can I get you?”

“Mr. Carbone?” Amy asks.

He stares at her for a long moment, then squints briefly. “I know you.” He steps closer, concerned. “Mrs. Trewist, right?”

“Amy. Please.” She reaches out to shake his hand.

He holds his hands up, palms out. “Give me a second. Why don’t you grab a seat over there while I wash up a little.”

She glances over at the empty tables and hesitates, stepping back. “As long as I’m not keeping you?”

“Not at all.” His gaze stays so steady on her, she glances toward the door, then walks to a table and sits down.

Oh, she had a picture conjured up just to her liking, one simple enough to make her life easy, one that let her quickly stop in at a butcher shop, issue her gratitude and escape amidst the mess and noise of meat cutting. George would be an ungainly, lumbering butcher, awkwardly accepting her thanks, guardedly declining her dinner invitation as he wiped his hands on a soiled, white apron.

“Welcome to the real world,” she whispers, listening to the running tap water from the back. She searches for a mint in her bag.

“Can I bring you a coffee?” George calls out.

“That would be nice, thanks.” Amy centers the napkin dispenser, brushes a crumb from the tabletop and straightens the opposite chair. Her hope of a quick and easy introduction fades when she notices the water stops running, Sinatra’s volume has been lowered and the smell of fresh-brewed coffee fills the shop. She hasn’t conversed socially, alone, with a man, since her husband died. Will this George see her vulnerability? Will he reach out and offer comfort? Or will he sense her newfound mistrust of people and think her visit is merely obligatory? She aches suddenly for the familiarity of her old marriage, for the easiness of the past. One damn day has taken her life and tipped it on edge.