Hit and Run (7 page)

‘Wow,' AnnaLise said. ‘This Sugar's certainly aged well.'

Joy's eyes narrowed. ‘What do you mean by that?'

‘You, yourself, said she hadn't changed,' AnnaLise protested. ‘And from what you said earlier, she was at White Tail in the mid-nineties. That—'

‘Would have been right around when Hart and I were married,' Joy finished for her. ‘You're absolutely correct. Turns out that Sugar and I were “overlapping” – so to speak – right in this very house.'

A gust of wind blew water from the fountain toward the group below. Sugar squealed.

‘You mean she and Dickens were doing—'

‘Each other? Yes. And in my bed. Or
our
bed, as Dickens' reminded me. Which apparently gave him the right to have sleep-overs when I was away. He'd sneak her in so the staff couldn't tell me. The man was obsessed with her.'

‘And blind to boot,' Bacchus added, seeming to want to make up for his earlier comment.

‘Obviously,' AnnaLise contributed staunchly. ‘And it cost him his marriage to Joy.'

But Hart wife number three was squinting down at the duo. ‘Boozer, how old's the daughter?'

‘Lacey? Fifteen.'

AnnaLise looked back and forth at the females below. ‘But Dickens had his vasectomy in the mid-eighties, not too long after
I
was born. Lacey can't possibly be his daughter.' The journalist had a thought. ‘Unless he had the operation reversed?'

Joy was shaking her head. ‘No way. But don't worry. You won't need to share your fortune with this one, at least—'

AnnaLise interrupted. ‘I keep telling you, I don't
want
—'

This time Joy got her back up. ‘I know, I know. The oh-so-independent bastard daughter doesn't want Hart's money. But like I said before, you deserve it. Right, Boozer?'

‘She's right, AnnaLise,' Bacchus weighed in. ‘Your mother never told anybody about you, never asked the boss for so much as a dime. But given the uncertain future you've come home to, you need to take what the boss intends to give you. For Lorraine, if not for yourself.'

AnnaLise didn't try to argue the point. ‘Yes, sir.'

‘Good.' Bacchus turned back to Joy. ‘Now, you were saying to AnnaLise about Sugar?'

Joy had an I-told-you-so grin on her face. ‘I was just speculating on Lacey's age, because to my eye she looks just like her mother did then.'

‘When she broke up your marriage?' asked the reporter reflexively.

‘I broke up my marriage,' Joy said flatly, ‘when I found out.'

‘About Sugar?'

‘About Sugar's age.'

‘Which was?'

‘Fifteen.' Joy grinned with glee. ‘Exactly the same age as Boozer's telling us her own daughter is right now.'

W
ell, thought AnnaLise. I guess that answers the question of what Joy Tamarack ‘had' on Dickens Hart at the time of their divorce. Not to mention how well Sugar Capri had ‘aged.' If she had been fifteen at Lacey's conception and mostly
likely sixteen by the time her now fifteen-year-old daughter was born nine months later, that meant Sugar could be no older than thirty-one. Just three years older than AnnaLise herself.

The journalist gave an involuntary shudder. A gap approaching four decades between consenting adults was creepy enough, but fifteen and fifty-something? ‘Wasn't the age of consent in North Carolina at least sixteen then?'

Boozer Bacchus hesitated, then nodded his head just once. ‘I told the boss he was in for it if anybody found out.'

‘What about Sugar's parents?'

‘They'd decided she was no good a while before Mr Hart ever met her.'

‘“A while before”?' AnnaLise was astounded. ‘The girl was just fifteen years old, for God's sake!'

Joy waved her down. ‘I've been through all this, AnnaLise. I was married to the man at the time and, believe me, if I could have thrown him to the dogs I would have. But no one else – not Sugar, nor her parents – wanted to accuse Hart of anything.'

‘Do you think he paid them off?' AnnaLise was hanging over the railing herself now, trying to get a better look at the twosome below.

‘The parents? I'd put money on it,' Dickens Hart's ex-wife said, but his right-hand man's face stayed blank.

‘So, did Dickens know at the time, Boozer?' AnnaLise pressed.

‘How young Sugar was?' Bacchus was shaking his head. ‘Hell, no. The boss always had trouble keeping it in his pants, but there's no way he was looking for
that
kind of trouble. She wouldn't have been working at White Tail in the first place, except that Sugar lied about her age.'

Bacchus took one look at the women's faces and held up a hand, palm out like a crossing-guard's stop sign. ‘Now, I don't mean to go blaming the victim. Sugar probably had her own reasons for lying, probably starting with needing to support herself, what with her parents no longer interested. I'm just saying …'

‘… that there were mitigating circumstances,' Joy finished for him, her expression bordering on dangerous. ‘The poor,
poor
boy was duped. Not only did Sugar fib about her age, but Hart also was struck by selective amnesia and forgot he was married.'

Before Bacchus could defend his boss, if he were so inclined, an announcement boomed up from below.

‘Everyone's to go in,' Bacchus explained, stepping back through the doorway to the bedroom. ‘Mr Hart plans to make his grand entrance in the Lake Room.'

‘The Lake Room?' AnnaLise asked as she and Joy followed him in.

‘At the rear of the house between the kitchen and movie theater,' Bacchus supplied, seeming happy to be on safer conversational ground. ‘The one with the wall of windows facing west toward the lake?'

Of course. The enormous room downstairs that was already set up for the party. AnnaLise tried to re-tent the welcome letter on the table where she'd found it, but it kept slipping off the highly buffed surface.

‘Don't bother,' Joy said, passing into the corridor before pivoting to point at a small sign on the wall next to the door. ‘This is your room, see?'

Sure enough, the card read ‘AnnaLise Griggs' in the same meticulous script used to letter the welcome card.

‘I had name badges printed, too,' beamed Boozer proudly. ‘So everybody'll get to know each other.'

‘That's … nice,' said AnnaLise, not really knowing what else to say.

‘I'm just the next door down the hall,' Joy said, reaching back to pat her friend's arm. ‘In case you need someone to talk you down.'

As Joy descended the stairs, a valet squeezed by going the other way.

‘I think that's mine,' AnnaLise said, reaching for the blue suitcase dangling from one hand of the young man who had greeted them when they'd arrived.

‘The boy'll take care of that,' Bacchus told AnnaLise. Then, to the valet: ‘Clothes hung up and in the dresser, suitcase in that closet in the corner. Understand?'

‘Yes, sir.' The kid practically saluted. ‘Do you know where this …' He held out Phyllis Balisteri's carpet bag.

AnnaLise reflexively backed up a step, her hand covering her nose. ‘That belongs to Mama,' she said, muffled, ‘and that last one is Daisy's.'

‘Lorraine and Phyllis will be sharing this room,' Bacchus said, opening the door across from AnnaLise's to reveal another beautiful room – this one with two queen-sized beds and a view of the lake. Like AnnaLise's, the table by the door held a vase of roses, but these were red rather than pink. ‘You might want to put that carpet bag on the balcony after you empty it, just to air it out a bit.'

‘I'm sure Mama would appreciate it,' AnnaLise said.

‘And your mother, I reckon, even more so.' Bacchus' brow was furrowed as he watched the young valet follow orders. ‘I told Dickens that Lorraine, of all the people invited besides you, deserved a room to herself.'

‘My fault, I'm afraid,' AnnaLise said as voices filled the space below. ‘I invited Mama along and even Hart's Head has only so many bedrooms.'

‘Don't be thinking Phyllis was the straw on the camel's back. That was our Sugar.'

Bacchus started toward the stairs, but AnnaLise held back, tugging on his sleeve to stay outside the door as the valet finished unpacking Mama's carpet bag. ‘I didn't
think
Sugar was on the list I gave you.'

‘No, she surely wasn't. Not that I would have invited her even if you wrote her name a foot high. But the boss saw it differently.'

‘So
Dickens
invited her?' AnnaLise asked, admittedly a little miffed that in addition to the so-called ‘baby-mamas' he'd bid her to find, the man had acted independently on his desire to see ‘old flames' beyond the ones – like Shirley and Joy – he'd managed to extinguish by marrying. ‘Why would he do that?'

Unnecessarily, Bacchus straightened the placard identifying the room as that of ‘Lorraine Kuchenbacher Griggs and Phyllis Balisteri.'

‘Like you said, it might be that Mr Hart's making amends. Maybe to a wider circle than just the mothers of his blood-children.'

AnnaLise heard something in Bacchus' tone. ‘But you don't think so.'

‘What I think is the boss does believe that.' As the valet crossed to AnnaLise's room with the final bag, Boozer stepped into Daisy and Phyllis' suite and surveyed it, pausing to pluck a petal from one of the roses that was apparently not up to snuff. ‘But I do admit some wonder that he's still …'

‘… sweet on Sugar?'

An embarrassed grin as Bacchus glanced around for a waste basket before settling for stuffing the petal in his pocket. ‘More like … intrigued?'

‘By the underaged one who got away?' AnnaLise shivered and moved into the hallway. ‘Boozer, that's sick.'

Bacchus closed the bedroom door behind them. ‘Sure would be, and, hear me now, I'm not saying that it's true.'

As Bacchus started down, AnnaLise hesitated on the catwalk. The new arrivals had filtered through beneath to enter the big room facing the lake. The magnificent water view of less than an hour ago was losing definition in the dusk, while, across the water, Bradenham's flickering lights served as a reminder of Bobby's own family reunion.

Smaller, perhaps, but AnnaLise was betting it was every bit as uncomfortable as the one at Hart's Head. If, hopefully for Bobby, a tad less pretentious.

On a level with AnnaLise's nose, an enormous crystal chandelier had sprung to life, illuminating the scene below. Joy was already at the buffet, while a smiling Daisy left Sugar and Lacey Capri to move toward Rose Boccaccio. Rose's son Eddie was crossing the room from the bar to the window wall, offering drinks in old-fashioned glasses from a tray theatrically, if imprudently, center-balanced on his left palm. He seemed to be introducing guests to each other as he went, like he'd already been crowned the golden child.

Or, more accurately, middle-aged man.

‘It's just that I've known the boss for a long time.' Bacchus had stopped on the second step down the huge staircase. ‘And he's given me a good sense for who's his type and … well, Sugar's it. And she's …'

As Bacchus continued to descend, AnnaLise lost his voice in the babbling of the assembly below, though with each step she was still thinking about her birth father's ‘type.'

And that's when it struck her. Every woman visible below – Daisy, Joy, Rose, Lucinda, Shirley, Sugar, and even Lacey – was petite. And other than Rose, who had let her hair go white, all were various shades of blonde, too. AnnaLise was willing to bet, once she got down there to meet them face-to-face, she'd find the female guests were also blue-eyed, like Daisy and Joy.

All of which just made Boozer Bacchus right: Dickens Hart had a preferred, even exclusive ‘type,' one he'd chosen as a randy young male. So much so that, if you squinted, all the invited women could be just one, caught freeze-framed during each decade of his rutting life.

And then, surprisingly unaccompanied by signature music or spotlight, the man himself appeared in front of the fireplace. He scanned the crowd while absently settling his champagne flute on the rustic mantle beside him.

‘That's not going to stay!' AnnaLise called down as the base of the crystal teetered on the uneven barnwood.

Before she could yell a more urgent warning, a thud punctuated by ‘Shit!' drew her attention toward the floor-to-ceiling windows, where Eddie Boccaccio was struggling to control the drink tray. A
ping
from the vicinity of the fireplace confirmed the demise of Dickens Hart's own crystal flute, even as AnnaLise watched its sturdier brethren slide off Eddie's tray to smash on the tile floor. Beyond Boccaccio, the window appeared to shimmer of its own volition, independent of the sunset it framed.

The trick of light must have distracted the show-off, AnnaLise thought, or— ‘The window!' she screamed. ‘Get away from—'

At the sound of her voice, Eddie dove for the floor as the rest of the guests pivoted to look up at her. The gigantic pane behind them seemed to distort, roiling like an angry sea once, then twice, before it finally crumbled from the top down like a glass tsunami shattering on the beach.

A
nnaLise ran down the steps, wine splashing out of her glass.

‘Ohmigod!' a voice was saying while the journalist rounded the newel post and exploded into the Lake Room. Lacey Capri was at the now non-existent window, pointing at the receding silhouette of a winged creature over the lake. Having probably knocked itself senseless by running into the window, it was gaining altitude, albeit unsteadily. ‘Did you see the size of that bird?'

‘Our resident Great Horned Owl, my dear. I'm afraid it's tried to … crash our party.' Smiling at his joke, Dickens Hart crossed the room to help up Eddie Boccaccio. ‘Are you all right, son?'