The Devil and Ms. Moody (21 page)

“I may not be able to cover the taxes, Mom,” Edwina persisted, gentling her voice. “If I can’t, we’ll have to move.”

“Move?” Katherine looked horrified. “We’ve been here for over twenty years!”

Edwina went to her mother and knelt by the chair. “Then maybe it’s time to move on. A change might do all of us good.”

“What’s come over you, Edwina? I won’t be uprooted this way, driven from my home. You’ll have to do something.”

Edwina could feel her mother’s panic, but she felt helpless to assuage it. Somehow Katherine had to come to grips with the reality of their situation. “I’m the only one working, Mom. Beth’s in school, and you’re not well. We have to live within our means.”

Edwina reached for her mother’s hand, but Katherine waved her away and pushed out of the chair. “I can’t believe you’re saying these things. You were born and raised in this house, Edwina.” She broke off abruptly, fighting back tears, then turned and hurried toward the door.

Something gave away inside Edwina as she watched her mother’s unsteady flight. “Mom,
please
—” she said. She caught back the floodtide of emotion inside her for a second before it all came surging out, things she’d wanted to say for so long.

“You’ve got to pull yourself together, Mom. You can’t languish this way! Dad’s gone. He’s not coming back.”

The sight of her mother’s stricken expression was more than Edwina could deal with. She wrenched around and stared out her bedroom window at the sunstruck afternoon. “Life goes on,” she said, her heart heavy.

There was no avoiding Katherine’s trembling astonishment as she left the room. Edwina heard every choked sound. In the silence afterward she was sure she’d destroyed what little emotional resilience her mother had left.
There will be a crisis now,
she thought.
A terrible crisis.

The ensuing days brought Edwina everything she’d predicted, and more. Katherine vanished into her room, refusing to speak to anyone, even Beth. The family doctor was summoned, and after a cursory checkup he pronounced Katherine physically sound but emotionally exhausted. Doom and gloom prevailed, with Beth mumbling incessantly about Edwina’s “killing” their mother, and Edwina wishing she could take back the things she’d said. Perhaps Katherine had needed to hear them, but not that way, she realized, not so abruptly.

Edwina might have liked to escape in her work, but things weren’t much better on the job. The attorneys for the Benjamin Braxton estate were disputing her fee, and nothing, not even her boss’s impassioned arguments on her behalf, could sway them. What they wanted to give her—a flat fee for her services rather than a percentage of the estate—wouldn’t begin to pay off the lien.

At least she could take comfort in Ned Dillinger’s pride in her performance. Her boss was impressed that she’d not only found Holt but had intercepted a drug deal at the same time. In a show of support, he offered to send her back out on another assignment immediately, but Edwina wasn’t ready for the rigors of a new case. She had a heartful of unfinished business to resolve. “I have some ghosts to bury, Ned,” she told him, asking for a week of personal leave. He granted her request without hesitation.

Edwina’s unfinished business was the memory of Diablo’s cruelty. His behavior in the motel haunted her. It came back to her in stark flashes that she knew would never be exorcised until she understood what had driven him to it. A deep background check hadn’t been necessary in order to locate Chris Holt, but it was Edwina’s only recourse now. She knew of no other way to reconstruct his past and unlock the mysteries.

It took the majority of the week and innumerable dead ends before Edwina uncovered a history so dark and disturbing, she didn’t want to believe it. Her main source was a society reporter who’d written a series on the Holt-Braxton marriage thirty-odd years before. Edwina found the sixty-two-year-old journalist living in a retirement home in Hartford, and the woman’s revelations were shockingly straightforward.

“Somebody squashed the real story,” the reporter admitted with evident relish, “squashed it but good. It was years later before even
I
learned the truth, and I followed that family closely. The Holt couple didn’t die in a car wreck. Wiley Holt ran his wife down one night in a drunken rage. Seems she was trying to stop him from going out carousing, and it turned into something ugly. Afterward, he crashed the car into a tree and killed himself. Could have been grief, I suppose, or the alcohol.”

Edwina quelled the revulsion she felt. “They had a child,” she said, meaning Chris Holt. “What happened to him?”

“The boy had only one living relative that anyone knew of—Gillian’s brother, Benjamin Braxton the fourth. Braxton packed the kid off to boarding school first thing. Probably didn’t know what else to do with him. Cute little guy, he was. About four or five when it happened. Freckle-faced and skinny.”

By the time Edwina left that afternoon, she was badly shaken. The woman had painted an alarming picture of Chris Holt’s childhood. He’d grown up in boarding schools, the victim of a silent, insidious abuse and neglect. His uncle had provided him with all the material advantages but nothing remotely resembling the love and nurturing a child needed to thrive.

Fortunately the reporter had been able to provide Edwina with a name that had eluded Edwina in her original search for Holt—the woman who’d been the housekeeper the night Chris Holt disappeared at nineteen. The woman proved easy to find but difficult to interview. She was concerned about jeopardizing her current position with a prominent Ridgefield family.

“They had a terrible fight that night,” she admitted to Edwina after much prodding. “The young man, Mr. Holt, said he was quitting school—Harvard, I think it was—and Mr. Braxton exploded. He called the boy terrible names, said he was scum, just like his father. Before it was over, he’d told the boy everything—how his father had cheated and gambled and drank, how Wiley Holt had run down his own wife and then killed himself.”

“The boy didn’t know?” Edwina asked.

“No one knew. Braxton had fixed it with the police, I guess.”

“What did Holt do then?”

“He flew out of there in a rage. The old man tried to stop him. He told the boy he had a bad heart. He said they’d lose the family business if the boy didn’t finish school and take over.”

“And what did Holt do?”

“He told Mr. Morgan to ‘rot in hell.’ ” She tapped her lips nervously. “Those were his exact words, I remember. He said the old man had taken the only thing he had, his memories.” She shook her head sadly. “I felt bad for the young man. He left that night and never came back.”

Suddenly Edwina understood the depth of Diablo’s conflict. It wasn’t just anger that drove him; it was guilt. He might even have felt some responsibility for his uncle’s death when she told him about it. She’d probed a festering wound. Unknowingly, but that hadn’t made it any less painful.

She thanked the woman quickly and left, her head whirling with the implications of what she’d learned. The need to see Diablo again rose in her swiftly. Going to him seemed as natural as breathing. Now that she understood the conflicts that were driving him, she could help him resolve them. Wasn’t that what you did when someone you loved was in trouble?

A nervous smiled surfaced as she played back her own thoughts.
Loved?
That was an interesting choice of words.

By the time Edwina pulled into her driveway in Norwalk thirty minutes later, she had talked herself out of anything so rash as catching a plane to California. Even if she could help Diablo, even if she
did
love him, he’d given her no indication that he shared those feelings. Quite the opposite. What he had given her was the bum’s rush. He’d as much as said he never wanted to see her again.

“Temporary insanity.” She voiced the sobering phrase again as she cut the car’s engine and let herself out. She’d been responding instinctively to the pain of his childhood. She’d let down her guard for a second, and all the feelings had come rushing back. Get a grip, Edwina, she thought,
please.

Despair weighted her steps as she stopped by the mailbox on her way into the house and picked up the usual bills, a catalog or two, a stack of junk mail. She dropped the pile on the kitchen counter as she entered, determined to go through the motions of her daily routine. A quick inspection of the refrigerator revealed a jar of green olives, some leftover pepperoni pizza, and a half-gallon of chocolate milk. It figured, she thought. Beth had supermarket duty that week.

“Eddie?” Edwina was on her way up to her room when she heard her mother’s voice.

“Come here, will you?” Katherine called. “I’m in the living room.”

Edwina hesitated on the stairs, not sure whether to be pleased or apprehensive. Her mother hadn’t stepped out of her bedroom in days. Katherine’s reappearances usually signaled that the crisis was past, but Edwina didn’t know what to expect in this case. Especially since she was no longer playing the role of protector.

She came upon Katherine reading the newspaper in the alcove’s sunny window seat. The room smelled faintly of lavender, and her mother was dressed in a green corduroy skirt and cotton-knit sweater. It was a scene very much like something out of Edwina’s childhood. Among her mistier and more pleasant memories, Edwina remembered the many times she’d found her mother hidden away in the alcove reading the Sunday papers. Edwina would curl up next to her and listen in ecstasy while Katherine read the comic strips aloud—
Peanuts, Pogo,
and
Brenda Starr.
Those were the warm years, Edwina thought.

As it was, she had become so used to seeing her mother in a robe or a housedress, she hardly knew what to say. Katherine actually had a hint of color in her cheeks.

“Are you feeling better?” Edwina asked cautiously.

“Yes, dear, I am.” Katherine’s voice was shaky, but her smile was strong as she handed Edwina a section of the paper. “I thought you might want to see this. It concerns you.”

Edwina shook the paper straight and glanced at the article. The first thing that struck her was the headline: “Biker Busted on Drug Charge.” The byline was Christopher Holt,
L.A. Times.

“Christopher Holt?” Edwina’s heart raced ahead of her eyes as she skimmed down the column and came upon her own name: “Edwina Moody, an investigator from the East Coast, shadowed the suspicious pair and witnessed the drug transaction. Described as both shrewd and beautiful by an unidentified Warlord gang member, Ms. Moody was also instrumental in apprehending one of the suspects as he tried to flee the scene.”

Edwina stopped reading and released a shaking breath. The paper rattled in her hands. “At least he’s accurate,” she said, trying to cover her feelings with sarcasm. “The beautiful part, I mean.”

“He’s quite a good writer,” Katherine agreed.

Edwina started again, read the entire piece hungrily, and then turned to the article next to it: “Warlords Clean Up Act With Charity Run.” The short article described a fundraiser in which the motorcycle gang rode en masse to a children’s hospital in Los Angeles to donate toys. There was even a picture of Killer and Food Chain. In the background, Edwina could see Squire, Carmen, and several other gang members she recognized.

Edwina’s smile tilted sadly as she stared at the familiar faces. It was odd. She’d been with them only a short time, certainly not long enough to think of them as family or even close friends, and yet a wave of loneliness passed through her. She missed them all. She missed
him.

She looked up and saw Katherine s eyes on her.

“Did you care about him a great deed?” her mother asked.

Edwina folded the paper in her hands and nodded, too emotional at that moment to trust her own voice.

A quiet fell around them then, as though neither woman knew quite what to say. Katherine finally broke it. “I’ve been thinking about what you said, Eddie. That business about not languishing ... and I suspect you’re right.” She plucked a thread from her skirt. “I have been carrying on these past few years, haven’t I? Rather like Camille ...”

Edwina dropped to her knees beside Katherine. “Mother, I’m sorry about what happened.”

“No, it’s all right. It really is. I don’t imagine I left you much choice.”

Edwina caught her mother’s hand and squeezed it quickly, a brief and telling awkwardness that ended as the back door slammed shut. Footsteps clattered through the kitchen. The refrigerator door was opened and flung shut. In the next seconds Edwina could hear Beth riffling through the mail. And then a scream rocked the house.

“Look at this!” Beth burst into the room, waving an opened envelope in one hand and clutching a banana in the other. “It’s a check, Ed.”

“Beth, that’s my mail!” Edwina snatched the envelope from Beth’s hand, glanced at its return address, and pulled out a check from the Dillinger Agency. It was signed by her boss.

She stared at the zeros with mounting disbelief as Katherine and Beth joined her. The estate attorneys must have come through, Edwina realized, stunned. The check was for the full percentage. It would cover the lien and then some. It might even get Beth started in college and set up a nest egg for Katherine.

Dumbstruck, the three women looked at one another.

Edwina let out a muffled gasp of joy. Beth belted out a “Wow!” And then, like a trio of jubilant teenagers, they all joined hands and screamed.

Moments later they were in the kitchen, toasting their future with chocolate milk. “How about it?” Beth cried. “Do I get to go to the Cosmic Zombies concert now, or what?” Edwina only laughed, but Katherine looked a little overcome by all the excitement.

“Mother”—Edwina automatically assumed the parental role—“maybe you should go up and rest.”

“Not on your life.” Katherine ticked a finger at both of her girls. “I’ve been resting for years. I want to knock myself out.” She gave Edwina a quick tremulous smile and mouthed the words “thank you.”

Edwina nodded, her laughter mingling with the sudden heat of tears. She wanted to hug her mother, but she was afraid it might be more than either of them could handle at the moment. She gave Katherine a thumbs-up instead.