Agent Bride (10 page)

“Are you willing to hurt him to do that?”

“I... No. No, I’m not.”

“Then I don’t think so. It would take some persuasion. Our best bet is to go to Moldaire College. It’s just a little east of Kansas City. That’s a ninety-minute drive from here. We could check it out. There are also four bridal stores in the area.”

“Let’s go,” she said.

They got back on the Interstate and it was smooth sailing. They didn’t talk. Yet the silence was comfortable. She closed her eyes. The next thing she knew he was gently shaking her shoulder. The vehicle was stopped.

“We’re here.”

She blinked. “I don’t know why I can’t stay awake.”

“Well, there’s probably a good reason. Earlier you said that you woke up in the trunk feeling sick. You do realize that you were probably drugged. That takes a toll on the body if it happened repeatedly.”

She swallowed hard. “I thought of that,” she said. “That first night in the hotel, in the shower, I... I looked for...signs to see if I’d been raped.”

The car started to roll and he slammed his foot on the brake and shoved it into Park. “I should have taken you to the damn hospital,” he said, clearly angry with himself.

She reached out and touched his arm. “I wasn’t. I know I can’t be sure but I really don’t think anything like that happened.”

“I want to kill them all for making you even have any doubt.”

If she hadn’t already started to love Cal Hollister, that would have been the push that sent her tumbling down the slide. “Thank you,” she said.

He still looked so troubled. “Where to now?” she asked, hoping to get him refocused.

He looked around. They were in a parking lot, surrounded by stone buildings of varying heights but none over four stories. The buildings were solid structures with heavy, arched windows and big doorways. These were buildings that had been here for a long time, probably a hundred years.

“I don’t know much about Moldaire,” he said. “It’s private and very expensive. It was way out of my price range when I was looking at colleges. It’s not Ivy League but probably somewhere in the second tier of that group.”

“How big?”

“Maybe six to eight thousand students. Liberal arts focus if I remember correctly.”

She looked around. There were huge trees, bare of leaves, beautiful with fresh snow clinging to their branches. There were heavily bundled-up students walking fast, their heads down to avoid the cold.

“See anything that rings a bell?” he asked.

There was something but she couldn’t put her finger on it. “You said that Pietro was a chef here at the student union. Let’s go have lunch there.”

“You didn’t answer me when I asked if anything rang a bell. Talk to me.”

“I have been here before,” she said slowly. “I’m not sure when or why but this place is familiar to me. And I think I was here recently.”

“Okay. That’s exactly why we’re not going to the student union. Too big, too many potential casualties if something goes wrong.”

“But—”

He shook his head. “We’ll drive around the campus. Give you a couple more vantage points. That’s the best I’m willing to do today. Maybe this will be enough to trip that little wire in your brain and everything will be clear as mud tomorrow.”

“I hope so,” she said.

He stopped at four more places around the picturesque campus. Once near the dorms, once by the science building, once down the street from the administration building and once near the student union, which was one of the larger buildings. There was a sign advertising the restaurant inside and a telephone number to contact if someone was interested in renting a room in the Union Hotel, which by the looks of the building were probably the upper floors. Nothing felt more or less familiar. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“No problem.”

He didn’t even sound disappointed and she wanted to cry. After the encounter with Pietro, she’d had her hopes pinned on this. “We’re running out of clues.”

“That’s the glass half-empty. You might say we’re narrowing the possibilities. Half-full.”

“Does my glass have alcohol in it?”

“A truly excellent scotch.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t think I drink scotch.”

“Ah, but I do.” He picked up his cell phone. Pushed a few buttons. “Let’s go dress shopping.”

“Four words I never expected to hear Cal Hollister say,” she muttered. “Maybe you’ve already been drinking.”

He smiled. “Maybe I love shopping.”

“And maybe I love cleaning fish.” She paused for effect. “I think we’re both lying.”

It was a crazy little conversation to be having on a cold day in the middle of the nowhere but it had accomplished exactly what she suspected Cal had intended. There was no time for a pity party. She needed to keep moving forward. The answers were somewhere. She just needed to turn over the right rock.

Chapter Twelve

Jo-Jo’s Bridal Boutique was in a strip mall, in between a dry cleaner’s and a nail salon. They parked in front and watched for a few minutes. Two women, probably a daughter with her mother, came out of the shop carrying a garment bag. No one went in.

“We should be prepared for the possibility that your picture was flashed around here. If G showed your picture to Lena and Pietro, there’s a possibility of that. Sort of a
see my beautiful bride, now give me the perfect dress for her
kind of moment.”

“How do we play this?”

“As close to the truth as possible. Our goal is to get information on G and the rest of the Mercedes Men. How about we tell them that you recently got married after your fiancé surprised you with a wedding dress but now you’re attempting to resell the dress and you have a buyer who won’t pay the price you’re asking unless she sees an original invoice?”

“They might not be inclined to want to be helpful. After all, every resold dress is one less new dress they might sell.”

“You’ll pull it off,” he said confidently. He opened his door. “Let’s do this.”

The store was small and stuffed with mostly white and ivory bridal gowns. On the far wall was an assortment of colored dresses suitable for bridesmaids.

There was one store clerk, a middle-aged woman with her glasses on the far end of her nose. When she greeted them, she looked over the top of her glasses. “Good afternoon. My name is Ann. What can I help you with?”

“Hi. My name is Mary and this is my stepbrother, Tom. I recently got married. My fiancé surprised me with this gorgeous dress.” She held out Cal’s phone so that the woman could see the picture of the dress and the close-up of the label. “I think he bought it here. It was so sweet. And now I feel terrible but I don’t want him to know about some of my credit card bills. I need to get them paid off before the next statement comes. I’m hoping to resell my dress and I’ve got a buyer but she won’t pay the price I’m asking unless she sees the original receipt. I can’t ask my husband,” she finished.

Ann pushed her glasses up and took another long look at the picture. Then she walked over to one of the racks and flipped through the long dresses. Finally, she turned. “I wish I could help. We sell that designer but not that particular dress. I don’t think he bought it here.”

She bit back her disappointment. “Oh, I’m so sorry to have bothered you, then. You don’t happen to have any idea where he might have gotten it?”

“You might try the Dream a Little Dream on Cleveland Avenue. They’re our biggest competitor.”

She recognized the store name from the list she and Cal had created. “Thank you so much,” she said.

She and Cal walked back to the SUV. He started the car and pulled out of the parking lot. “Nicely done. You took my story and made it better.”

It had been effortless and it made her think that she was accustomed to doing things like this. “I think I must be an accountant. Lying doesn’t seem to bother me.”

He laughed. “Figures lie and liars figure.”

She looked at his phone. “How far away is Cleveland Avenue?”

“We’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

They had to wait for a train so it took them seventeen minutes. The two-story store was on the corner of a busy intersection. The area was more commercial and more upscale. There was an art studio next door and a big bank across the street.

They parked and went inside. There were several salesclerks, all helping customers. She and Cal pretended to look around until another salesclerk walked out of the back room.

“Can I help you?” the girl asked. She was young, maybe not even twenty, and she wore a very short skirt.

“I’m Mary and this is my stepbrother, Tom,” she said, launching into her story. When she got to the part about the credit card debt, the salesclerk nodded, as if she understood that particular predicament.

“I was here that day,” the salesclerk said. “I wasn’t waiting on your fiancé but I did see your picture. He was showing it to everyone.”

Just like Cal had thought. “It’s embarrassing,” she said, rolling her eyes.

The girl laughed. “We all thought it was cute but we weren’t sure when he said he was going to surprise you with the dress. Most of our brides like to pick out their own dresses. I know I’d want to.”

“It was a lovely gown.” She gritted her teeth.

“One of my favorites. And that’s saying something since we have over 200 different styles. You must have had a real spur-of-the-moment wedding.”

“Because....” She let her voice trail off.

“Because hardly anyone wants to buy a gown right off the floor,” the salesclerk said. “They want to order a new gown, one that hasn’t been tried on by other customers. But when we told your fiancé that was how it generally worked, he said that he had to have the one off the rack.”

“It was really sweet of him to take care of it. That’s why I feel awful now. But do you think you’d have the original invoice? Maybe if I could just take a quick cell phone picture of it so that I could send it to the buyer.”

The girl scratched her head. “We might have it back in the office.” She glanced around the store. “I guess everyone else has been waited on.”

“I know that I’m taking you off the sales floor and you probably work on commission. I’ll make it worth your while.” It was just one more thing to add to the list of items that she needed to repay.

“I appreciate that,” said the salesclerk. “I’ll just be a few minutes.”

Without having to ask him, Cal stuffed a fifty-dollar bill into her hand before moving toward the front of the store and taking a spot near the cash register, where he could keep watch on both the store and the parking lot.

She wandered around the store, casually looking at the various dresses. She was on her second cursory lap when she saw a dress that made her stop. It was ivory. A smooth satin. Off the shoulders and fitted through the hips, it gently flared at the knees with a swirl of the skirt. Stunning. There was no other word.

She couldn’t help herself. She lifted the hanger off the rack, walked over to the mirror and held the dress up to her body.

An older woman, knitting while she waited, looked up. “That’s lovely dear. My granddaughter should look at that one.”

She smiled and took another quick glance in the mirror. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Cal was watching her. Embarrassed, she hurriedly stuffed the dress back onto the crowded rack.

It took the salesclerk another five minutes. Finally she came out of the back room holding an invoice. “Found it,” she said. The girl held out a yellow five-by-eight receipt, the kind that gets torn off a book of receipts.

She reached for it and willed her hands not to shake. She realized that Cal had very quickly and quietly come to stand next to her.

Next to customer name, some earnest salesclerk had written Golya Paladis. Next to address was written Moldaire College. The dress had cost fourteen hundred dollars.

“That’s odd,” said the salesclerk.

“What?” she asked. Her head was whirling.
Golya Paladis
. Did the name mean anything to her?

“We’re supposed to get an address and a contact number,” the girl said. “But maybe because we weren’t ordering the dress that wasn’t necessary.”

She pointed to a small circle with an
X
inside. “What does this mean?”

The salesclerk smiled. “That he paid cash. The very best kind of sale.”

She pulled out Cal’s cell phone. “May I?” she said at the same time she discreetly pushed the fifty-dollar bill in the salesclerk’s direction.

“I don’t see why not. It’s your dress,” the girl said.

She took the picture, thanked the girl again, and she and Cal left the store. Back in the SUV, neither of them said anything for a minute.

“Golya Paladis,” Cal said. “When we called him G, we were right all along.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Mean anything to you?” Cal asked.

“Not at the moment,” she said. “Maybe you could kick me in the head, knock everything loose and that would all change.”

“That’ll be our backup plan. Let’s see if we can find out a little more about him.” He started punching info into his smartphone. After a few minutes, he frowned and shook his head. “I don’t like this.”

“Now what?” she asked.

“There’s nothing. And I have access to some sites that not everyone would have because of my work as an independent contractor and even those are coming up empty.”

“It’s an alias.”

“Probably. But Golya—”

“Let’s just keep calling him G. I don’t really want to think of him as a real person. He’s shallow, worthy of only an initial.”

“Okay. G bought the dress on Sunday. Two days before the wedding. That was the same day that Lena at the diner said that he contacted Pietro. Remember that she said Pietro was upset and she assumed it was because he had very little notice to get food ready for the reception.”

“So I somehow fell into his hands before that.”

“Yes. And I don’t think too far in advance of that. He seemed to be moving fairly quickly, like his plan was coming together very fast. I think it’s possible that you fell into his hands, that perhaps marrying you was an impulse that wasn’t well thought out. Like you said earlier, what would have made him think that he could keep you once you were no longer drugged?”

“Maybe he’d been stalking me. He had a picture of me. I remember the picture. I remember sitting at the bar at The Blue Mango. I was having fun. It had to be before G. But maybe he was there. Watching.”

She couldn’t control the involuntary shudder.

“Doesn’t matter how he got it. It’s helped us. People remember you and they trust our story,” he added with his usual optimism.

“Half-full?” she said.

“Always.” He pulled out of the lot. “What do you want to do? We could go home or we could try The Blue Mango. Your decision.”

She was exhausted. As Cal had suggested, she suspected that she was still feeling the effects of the drugs in her system. Plus it had already been a day of ups and downs, starting with the visit to Pietro’s, the trip to Moldaire that had left her unsettled but no wiser and now this, a success to find out the full name of one of the Mercedes Men, only to discover that he didn’t really exist.

She had to keep going. “The Blue Mango.”

It took them forty minutes to find the place. It was in a section of Kansas City that had become gentrified within the past twenty years and cute little businesses were springing up in the hundred-year-old shopping district. The Blue Mango was on the corner, a two-story brick building that appeared to be an apartment on top, restaurant/bar on the bottom.

There were no lights on in the building and many empty parking places nearby.

She looked at her watch. It was just before four. “It says on the website that they’re open for lunch and dinner. It doesn’t say anything about them closing in between.”

“There’s a note on the front door,” Cal said. “Wait here while I go read it.”

He was back in the SUV in less than a minute. “It’s handwritten, apologizing for being unexpectedly closed today. They will reopen tomorrow at normal time.”

She rubbed her head. “Do you think that their being closed has anything to do with me?”

“I don’t know. It’s a nice place. Doesn’t look like the type that posts a handwritten note on the door.”

“I’m going to call them,” she said. “It doesn’t look like anyone is inside but maybe the number is to someone’s cell phone. Maybe we can get some information.” She needed to keep pushing. She felt it.

He handed her his phone. She found the website and dialed the number. It rang and rang. Finally, she hung up.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Let’s go home,” he said. They were sixty miles down the road when he turned to her. “I’m going to get gas. I think you better get out of view. There’s no telling how many resources they have and how many places they’re watching. Once I fill the tank, I’ll go into the grocery mart inside. I can probably get milk, bread and eggs. The basics.”

She understood what he wasn’t saying. There were probably a number of grocery stores in the small towns surrounding the Interstate but he wasn’t taking a chance that the Mercedes Men hadn’t effectively spread the word in the small communities to look for someone like her. “I should cut my hair. Dye it blond.”

He shook his head. “Not yet,” he said, his eyes amused. “I like your hair. It feels like silk.”

That was nice. A little flustered, she hurried to unbuckle her seat belt and get on the floor so that her head would not show above the windows.

She felt him slow, then turn, then slow some more. She sensed that he was probably driving around the gas station before pulling into one of the bays. “How’s it look?” she said.

“Nothing unusual,” he said. He stopped the car, got out, and soon she could hear the sounds of fuel pouring into the vehicle. She would need to add gas to the list of items to reimburse him for.

The mileage reimbursement rate was 57.5 cents a mile.

She jerked up, almost forgetting that she was supposed to hide. She could remember having a conversation about the mileage rate recently. She’d been laughing. She could see herself. Sitting in a chair, in front of a plain table, a laptop computer in front of her. She was pointing at a screen. “Just use the form,” she said. “It’s online.”

She’d been talking to someone. With someone.

Who?

She heard the door open and barely stifled her squeak. Cal swung into the seat. He put the sack of groceries he was carrying on the floor of the backseat. “Everything okay?” he asked, already pulling away.

She waited until he told her she could safely get up before telling him everything. When she finished, she added, “I was kidding before but maybe I really am an accountant.”

“You’ll be handy to have around at tax time,” he said easily. “Tell me about the chair.”

The chair. He wanted to hear about the chair. But she realized that he was asking about exactly what she’d been trying to work through in her head—the details.

“Blond wood. With arms. Padded seat. Some kind of mauve print.”