Million Dollar Road (21 page)

Consuelo handed Liz the remote. “Miz Costello?” she said. “I a-finding this, too.” The maid was holding Con's cell phone, of all things.

It must have fallen out of his pocket and gotten stuck down between the chair and the cushion, Lizzie realized as she took the cell phone. Won't he be pissed off when he can't find it? With an amused shrug, she was ready to put the phone on the coffee table and tuck into her breakfast, until she noticed the red message light blinking its slow rhythm.

Con had voice mail.

Meanwhile, moving slowly as though her knees hurt, Consuelo scrubbed at the wet spot on the Sarouk with the paper towels. Finished, she struggled back to her feet.

“Is okay, Miz Costello? You need more es-something?”

“What? No,” Liz replied, barely hearing the maid's question. She was still looking at the pulsing message light, wondering about that voice mail. Consuelo, appearing relieved, bustled out of the den with the damp paper towels clutched in her hand, hurrying back to the kitchen as though the border patrol was after her.

Who had called Con in the middle of the night? Lizzie wondered. The phone had been in the chair cushion until three minutes ago and would've been so muffled that Con couldn't have heard it ring. Liz held the phone in her palm, watching its slow red blink, the thunderhead of her suspicions growing higher and darker the longer she looked at it. Unnoticed, Lima Bean jumped from the sofa to the ottoman onto the coffee table. He began eating the neglected eggs and bacon off her plate with great enthusiasm.

Golden-brown eyes narrow, full lips compressed in a hard line, Liz pressed the voice mail button and held the phone to her ear.

“She's over there!” Con shouted.

The day was overcast again, layered with high, scudding gray clouds. The steady breeze blowing out of the east would carry the ripe smell of the barns for miles. When the wind gusted, the two men rowing the flat-bottomed skiff struggled to oar it across the width of the retention pond where, in the middle of the brown, rippling water, Snowball's white length was just visible beneath the surface, a specter of an alligator.

Con stood on the dam with his hands on his hips, watching in frustration as Snowball once again dived deeper and vanished from view.

“Son-of-a-
bitch,
” he muttered under his breath. Below his feet at the water's edge, two dead chickens floated next to a piece of trash—a plastic bag that had once held cookies. Con nudged it with the toe of his alligator loafer. Roger was adamant about keeping the farm free from any kind of litter. Once they finally caught Snowball, he'd have to speak with the grounds-maintenance guys, the Sykes twins, about this sloppiness.

The waterlogged, feathered corpses were today's bait, but the truant gator had ignored the chickens with an almost eerie canniness, just as she had yesterday's chickens. The Sykes brothers had had no luck this morning either. When Snowball came up for air, she'd hang motionless in the water while they strenuously rowed in her direction, only to sink out of sight and resurface on the other side of the pond.

It was as though the gator was
taunting
him, Con thought, but that was ridiculous, wasn't it? She was just a big-ass lizard, for God's sake.

“A hundred bucks to you guys if you catch her!” He was reduced to offering a reward for Snowball's capture. The nuisance hunter had finally returned Con's calls, but wasn't going to come out since he was laid up with a bad case of gout and wasn't going anywhere soon.

What awaited Con back in his office was no better—a recent stop order from the EPA that was disturbingly confrontational in its tone, a new lawsuit from yet another environmental defense organization, and a long list of phone calls, none of them boding well. There were his bills to pay, too, Emma's alimony chief among them.

With a stab to his conscience, Con's thoughts turned to Emma and that Thursday night last week when he'd gone out there to break the news that Liz was pregnant. He ought to try to call Emma soon, but was pretty sure she wouldn't be ready to hear from him yet. Con winced, remembering the solid slap she'd laid on his face. Okay, so Emma was upset, so maybe they shouldn't have slept together, but it wasn't as though they didn't still
love
each other. It had been a mistake in judgment, but that was a horse that, like Snowball, had bolted from the barn and was long gone.

And to add to his aggravation, Con had managed to forget his cell phone today, too. In his hurry to get to work to get the Snowball mess under control before Roger showed up for lunch, he'd uncharacteristically walked out of the house without it this morning and would have to retrieve his phone when he went back home this afternoon to check on Lizzie. Now there was a chore he was coming to dread, for Liz was demanding and difficult with her lack of mobility and the pregnancy. Con hoped her ill temper wasn't a harbinger of the next eight months because if this was how she dealt with being pregnant, how bad would life be when the baby came? Life, he felt certain, was going to change and probably not for the better. At forty-three, he was going to be a dad whether he wanted to or not. Con had done the math: he'd be all of sixty-five when the kid graduated from college.

It was a not-so-great thought, being the old man at the T-ball games, back-to-school nights, and sleepovers. In years past, he'd assumed he was going to get around to wanting children someday—not more than one or two, though. Being one of eleven kids had shaped Con in more ways than he wanted to think about: the constant poverty, his parents' exhausted distraction making it impossible for him to stand out anywhere except at school, never having anything he could really call his own. He'd even shared a bed with his brother until he was thirteen and Bobby went offshore to work on the rigs.

One kid would have been plenty, but after Emma had lost the baby Con had begun to secretly wonder if the years of caring for a child were worth it. He asked himself if there'd still be enough attention left over for
him
if she'd carried her baby to term. At that time in Con's life, he'd thought becoming a father meant turning into a dour, silent man like his overworked and distant dad, a city worker who filled potholes all day and drank Irish whiskey all night. With a role model like that, how would
he
handle being a parent? Could he? Did he even want to?

As things turned out, Emma's barrenness rendered these questions moot, but now here they were again, only with Lizzie this time. Con had needed the kind of devotion Emma had brought to their marriage. He'd had no doubt she'd have been equally devoted to their child (if not more so; that had been a worrisome notion), but he had a hard time seeing Liz in the role of madonna. Hell, babies needed a lot of attention and Con was suffering from a lack of the attention he craved
now
. What if his child likewise languished, getting only the professional ministrations of a series of babysitters and nannies?

Con didn't know what to think anymore, although it appeared he was going to have eight months to figure it out. Then, ready or not, there was going to be a baby.

But despite this heavy weather, there was the increasing pleasure of seeing Lireinne every day. She'd fast become the sole grace note in the midst of his recent troubles. Brightly efficient and organized, she was lovely, lovely, lovely. To Con's delight, this morning she'd turned up for work in a pair of pants that hugged her slim hips as though they'd been tailored for her, wearing that great V-neck sweater, the one that showed just a tantalizing hint of her perfect breasts. Lireinne even smelled fragrant as rain-washed lilies: a faint, subtle perfume that soothed the tense air back in the office where all the hell waited for him.

Little by little, with infinite patience, Con had initiated a slow dance of intimacy with his assistant—the seemingly casual touches, the lingering eye contact, the careful questions that showed he was interested in her personal life. He was virtually certain that all this Obi-Wan effort was paying off, although she was more difficult to read than he'd thought at first. Perhaps it was because she was so young, Con mused. Well, he'd prepared himself to be more patient than usual with this one. Lireinne was going to be more than worth it.

The wind picked up. “Hey, you guys,” Con shouted to the men in the skiff, disgusted at this fruitless expense of time and manpower. “Let it go. Bring the boat in and get back to work.”

He was turning away to head up to the office when he saw Lireinne coming down the hill from the house. Skirting the group of three male peacocks that had gathered to watch the alligator-roundup activity, she walked to the pond. Con waited for her on the dam, unwilling to go back to his office now that she was out here with him. His discouraged, darkly questioning mood lifted at the sight of that graceful swaying walk, the long, glossy black hair blowing in the wind, even as he realized she wouldn't have come out here unless there was some piece of new and doubtless problematic business.

“Mr. Con?” Lireinne raised her voice as she approached. “Mr. Hannigan just called. He said he needed to talk with you as soon as possible.” She was frowning when she joined him on the dam. “I told him you were trying to catch Snowball, but he said . . .” Her voice trailed away as she gazed across the surface of the pond, her green eyes searching.

Con could only imagine what Roger had said. In addition to his agitation over his pet Snowball's escape, the hefty campaign donations were proving to have no discernible effect on the EPA matter. Hannigan was as outraged as any man who had thought he'd bought a whore only to discover that in reality she was a Presbyterian soccer mom. It wasn't a conversation he was looking forward to having with ol' Rog, especially since Con had promised that the sizable baksheesh was going to turn the tide of their discharge issues once and for all—and that Snowball would be returned to her tank by day's end.

Nonetheless, Con smiled at Lireinne, focusing all the flatteringly seductive power of his attention upon her. “Thanks, I'll call as soon as we get back to the house.” He wrapped his fingers around her fine-boned wrist and squeezed it lightly, letting go with reluctance. “I appreciate you coming out here to tell me.” Lireinne smiled a nervous, tight smile. Con wondered if she was afraid of the loose gator.

“It's my job, Mr. Con.” Her gaze swept the brown, wind-ruffled expanse again, but then she dropped her eyes and quickly bent to pick up the plastic cookie bag in the mud. Crumpling it into a tight, crackling ball, she said, “No luck, huh?” Since yesterday morning when she'd learned of the white alligator's escape, Lireinne had been unusually anxious about the progress toward her capture. In the office she'd turned to the window often, watching the men on the pond, her slender back rigid, her arms folded close to her chest.

“I hope they catch her soon. This is
awful,
” Lireinne said. She paused. “Especially now, when there's so much else going on, I mean.”

Ah, that's got to be it, Con thought with satisfaction. She knows I've got a ton of crap on my plate already and wants this to get resolved as soon as possible. Lireinne's really coming around. That's my girl. “We'll get her,” he said. “Don't worry.”

Cheered, he was beginning to fill Lireinne in on the morning's gator-hunting expedition, intending to frame the whole infuriating exercise as merely an amusing adventure, when the back door to the office flew open. It slammed the side of the house with an explosive bang that carried all the way down the hill. The three peacocks scattered across the grass crying jungle screeches of alarm, dragging their brilliant, impossible tails behind them in eyed bundles of shimmering greens and blues.

Now two women hurried down the hill to the pond. The one in the lead was Lizzie, Con realized in surprise. Her crutches stabbing the soft ground in wild swings, she was followed at a distance by a heavy-set, brown-skinned woman in a black maid's uniform—Consuelo—who was holding what looked like Liz's new puppy under her arm. The maid was scrambling to keep up with his wife's relentless march.

Lireinne forgotten, Con called to his wife. “Liz! What are you doing here? This is no place for you, not in your condition!” Struck with a sense of uneasy foreboding at his wife's unusual visit, Con wasn't anxious to meet her, but that didn't matter because Lizzie wasn't stopping. Somehow she'd made it down the uneven slope in no time and was hustling across the dam. Consuelo stopped some fifteen yards back, prudently remaining at the edge of the pond with the dog while her mistress barreled onward.

The closer Lizzie got, the madder she looked.

“What is it, babe?” Con asked, his apprehension sharp. “And why'd you bring the dog?”