Secrets Of Bella Terra (17 page)

Madelyn didn’t answer; apparently she could spot a rhetorical question when she heard one.

“If you’ll come up the steps, I’ll shift the bags at the back to the front. You lower them to the ground. If we don’t find the right bag there—”

“God couldn’t be so cruel,” Madelyn said fervently.

“—I’ll start on the second layer.” Swinging her leg over the edge, Brooke climbed in. Like rolling seas of garbage, the slick bags shifted under her weight. She balanced and finally bent to the first twist tie. She tugged at the bulging plastic bag.

The bottom broke.

Trash spilled everywhere.

The flies circled gleefully.

Brooke stood there, holding an empty white plastic bag aloft like some mockery of the Statue of Liberty. “Crap!”

“Among other things.” Madelyn prepared to step in and help.

Then . . . then a glint of gold caught Brooke’s eye. Dropping the bag, she gave a crow of delight, leaned over, grabbed for it. Her gloved fingers sank into something rotten, slimy, disgusting. Still holding on to the ring—it was a ring, wasn’t it?—she stumbled backward.

Several things happened at once.

Her foot sank into something squishy and released a smell like rotting sewage.

She realized the glittering thing was attached to a chain, that chain was attached to a neck, that neck was attached to a head, a corpse’s head, round and rotten.

Lifted by her grip on the chain, the body rose out of the loose garbage, its skin sagging, its face covered with soil, eaten by worms, swarming with flies.

Brooke stared into the eye sockets, into one man’s lifeless eyeballs.

Madelyn screamed.

The chain broke.

Still clutching the gold, Brooke fell backward onto a trash bag.

The body sank down.

In horror, in panic, she scrambled up and over the edge of the Dumpster.

She fell. Hit the hot asphalt. Knocked the air out of her lungs. As soon as she regained her breath, she began screaming again—when had she started?—while Madelyn knelt beside her, babbling questions about
was she all right?

Then, before Brooke could comprehend, Madelyn got up and ran away.

Brooke didn’t blame her. Brooke’s foot was covered with . . .
Oh, God. Oh, God. OhGodohGod.

Her hand, too. Sure. She had on a glove. Who cared? This was . . . She couldn’t stop shuddering. Dropping the chain, she ripped the glove off and threw it toward the Dumpster. Some of the flies followed as if it were bait, but most of them . . . most of them hovered around Brooke, and when she looked down at herself, she rolled onto her hands and knees and vomited.

Then Madelyn was back, lugging a housekeeping bucket. Taking Brooke’s hand, she plunged it into the soapy water and scrubbed at it with her own. “We’ll get it off you, Miss Petersson,” she said. “We’ll get you clean.”

Out of control with anguish and revulsion, Brooke said, “My foot’s worse. And my pants.”

Madelyn helped her up.

Brooke plunged her foot into the water.

Madelyn reached in and unlaced her shoe and tugged it off, then peeled away Brooke’s sock. As the water turned a slimy brownish black, Brooke unfastened her pants, peeled them off, and threw them toward the Dumpster, too.

Madelyn scrubbed at Brooke’s foot with her bare hands.

“Thank you,” Brooke found herself saying over and over. “Thank you. I couldn’t do this by myself.”

“I owe you,” Madelyn said fiercely. “You’ve done for me, and I owe you. Sit down there on the bench and I’ll get you clean water.”

“All right.” Brooke sank down on the bench. The plastic was hot under her panties, but she didn’t care. She was cold. Bone cold.

Because when she dropped the chain and cross, she had recognized them. She knew what they meant.

She knew who was in that Dumpster.

A
ll her life, regardless of the circumstances, Sarah had tried to maintain a cheerful nature.

But she did not like rehab.

Every day it was the same thing.

First thing in the morning, she visited the psychologist, a young lady from Boston, who always gave her three words to remember for later. Then the young lady asked Sarah questions: her name, the date, her address, the names of her relatives. At the end of the session, she asked Sarah to repeat the three words back.

Every day Sarah did as required. Sure, the routine was silly and boring, and it made Sarah impatient, but she was eighty and she’d been hit on the head. So she answered and remembered because she understood the reasons behind it.

She was not quite so complacent about the physical rehab. The things they made her do hurt. More than once they made her cry.

More important—as she healed, she grew homesick. She wanted to sit on her porch. She wanted to look out over Bella Valley. She wanted to watch the vines and the orchards grow verdant in the heat. Most of all, she wanted to be alone, to never listen to a television blaring some stupid reality show or hear another person’s voice.

She wanted silence. She wanted peace. She wanted her own house and her own bed.

Not too much longer, the health care professionals promised her. Once she could walk two lengths of the hospital corridor with her walker, they would send her home.

She didn’t need a walker, she told them. She could walk just fine.

But what with the concussion and the broken arm, they wanted her steady on her feet. They didn’t want her to fall and hit her head again.

So everyone agreed on that one thing.

She wouldn’t go home alone—she was to have a nurse, Olivia.

As Sarah made her way down the corridor toward the patients’ lounge, Olivia walked beside her.

Sarah liked Olivia. Olivia was young and pretty, wide-eyed and interested. In fact, Olivia reminded Sarah of her younger self.

And although Sarah couldn’t see her, she knew Bao observed from the nurses’ station.

When Sarah first met her, she thought Bao was a caregiver of some kind. Then, as Olivia took over, Sarah realized that Bao worked for Rafe. Sarah was no fool. Bao must be her bodyguard. So Bao would go home with Sarah, too.

That was all right. Sarah was resigned to having protection. The attack on her had scared the whole family. Her, too. She didn’t like being frightened to be completely alone . . . yet she was.

Sarah concentrated on moving the walker in a straight line, not easy when one arm was in a cast. The wheels creaked. The farther she went, the more the end of the corridor seemed to move away. Sarah was so involved in getting to the lounge, she didn’t notice the man who stepped in front of her.

“Sarah!” he said.

She recognized that voice. She looked up hard and fast.

Joseph Bianchin stood there, Old World Italian, handsome even at eighty-one. He had a full head of white, curly hair, thin lips, and strong white teeth. His bright brown eyes sparkled with pleasure.

The pleasure of seeing her?

She knew better. What did he want? “Joseph, I never expected to see you here.”

“Nor I you.” He reached for her hand.

“I can’t shake hands. With the cast on my arm, it’s all I can do to use the walker.” She took care to sound politely apologetic. Actually, for the first time, she had found a reason to be glad for the broken bones.

“Let’s sit down and talk,” he said, all geniality and deception, and indicated the plastic chairs that lined the long, sterile corridor. “After all, such old friends deserve a few moments alone.”

Sarah glanced at Olivia.

How odd. The young nurse stared at Joseph as if she had never seen a man of his stature, as if he were the reincarnation of a god.

Sarah glanced at Bao.

The Vietnamese girl was beaming. Why not? Since she’d come to help Sarah, Sarah had received visits from her grandsons and from Brooke, and from her girlfriends in her bridge group, and calls from her sisters-in-law. But no men had come a-courting, certainly not an eighty-one-year-old with a military bearing and a charming nature.

Joseph used the charm as a mask, but how was Bao to know that?

The girls hung back to give them privacy, and although Sarah felt the chill of his presence, she knew herself to be safe.

Surrounded by patients and nurses, and in the bright light of day, Joseph would take care to conceal his true nature—but Sarah never doubted that he was here for a reason.

She made her way to one of the chairs, and with excessive precision—it would not do to show any weakness to him—she seated herself. “What brought you to the rehab wing of our hospital?”

“I had a knee replacement last year. That’s the reason I carry this.” After sitting down, he lifted a walking cane, fitted with a cold-eyed, sharp-beaked rosewood eagle for a handle and carved with savagely painted faces up and down the shaft.

“How very appropriate,” she murmured.

He continued. “Every six months I come in for a tune-up.” His tone changed, became less gracious and more contemptuous. “Of course, I had my work done in San Francisco. The doctors there are so much more skilled than those here in Bella Terra.”

Sarah saw heads turn up and down the corridor. “Say that a little louder, Joseph. Not all the caregivers heard you.”

His eyes narrowed, and he looked suddenly like the cruel eagle on his cane. “Do you really imagine I care what these people think?”

“No, I don’t imagine that at all.” Did he really imagine that when the time came for them to subject him to an examination, he wouldn’t be poked and prodded a little more vigorously than necessary?

“That’s always been the problem with you, Sarah. You court other people’s good opinions regardless of whether those people are important.”

“All people are important in their own way.”

“In their own minds, more like.” He snorted. “You should have accepted my marriage proposal. You should have wed me. I would have raised you above your common station.”

“I would have hated that,” she said mildly. She would have hated him, she meant.

He comprehended, and his face grew cold and still. “I’m healthier than Anthony, stronger—still alive when he’s been in the grave for more than ten years. If you had married me, you wouldn’t have to spend your twilight years alone.”

“As you are doing?” She could be cruel, too.

“Once you refused my suit, no other woman would do.”

“Once you wreaked your havoc, no other woman would have you.”

“That is not true. Once I made my money, women flocked to me.”

He wasn’t bragging, she knew. He had had his women. And if she had wedded him, he would still have indulged. “You should have married one of them.”

“I didn’t want them. I only wanted you. I would have given you more than one son.”

She told the story everyone believed to be the truth. “I couldn’t have more than one son.”

“I don’t believe you. After Anthony suffered that bout of typhus, he couldn’t give you more sons. Or daughters.” He leaned forward, locked gazes with her. “Think how happy you would have been with a dozen children to call your own.”

How skillful Joseph was—had always been—at placing the knife in her heart. Yet she had her weapons, too, although usually she was loath to use them. “It was not the typhus that destroyed Anthony’s health, Joseph. You know that. The placement of that gunshot was no accident.”

“If you’d married me, no one would have been hurt.” Being Joseph, he truly believed himself blameless.

“If I’d married you, my children would have been your children. I never wished to bring monsters into the world.”

His teeth snapped together.

For the first time, Olivia looked with concern between her patient and the visitor. Bao noticed something was wrong, too, and started toward them.

“My monsters, as you call them, would have protected you from attack.” Again Joseph used his knowledge of Sarah, of her life, of her loves to wound her. “Your son and your grandsons failed miserably in that regard.”

Sarah was tired of dancing around the truth, of retreating as Joseph attacked. Now she leaned toward him and asked fiercely, “How is it possible that a man who professes to love me should send someone to attack me?”

“I didn’t send someone to attack you.”

“You sent someone to rob me and in the process I was hurt. What’s the difference, Joseph?” Sarah lifted her cast. “This is your fault.”

He lowered his voice. “I sent someone to retrieve what is mine. It is a matter of honor.”

“Honor? No.” Sarah waved Bao away. “With you, it’s the same thing it always is—a matter of money. Somehow, some way, you intend to make a profit.”

He gave up all pretense of friendliness. “Perhaps you’re right. In that case, you’d be wise to give up that which I desire.”

“Why do you want it?”

“You know why.” But his gaze fell away from hers.

“Why now?” That was the real question. What had started this battle again now?

Bao and Olivia huddled together, talking rapidly, unsure whether to defy Sarah and come to her rescue or let this sharp and unexpected quarrel continue.

Sarah continued speaking to Joseph. “It was not given to you. It was never meant to be yours. It is not your birthright.”

He clenched his bony, gnarled hand into a fist in his lap. “It should have been!”

Sarah had thought this battle had died with Anthony. Now she saw that Joseph would commit any atrocity to get his way. Only one thing would stop him—and she knew that thing was impossible. “Believe me or not. I don’t know where it is.”

Throwing back his head, Joseph laughed aloud, and the sound was not that of the noble eagle, but the croaking of the raven. “No. No. I don’t believe that at all.” Catching her hand, he squeezed her fingers until her knuckles ached. “Give it up! This is a battle between the Bianchins and the Di Lucas. The blood that flows in your veins is not Di Luca blood. Fight, and you’ll find me an inimitable enemy.”

“I can’t give you what I don’t have.” She took a breath. “But regardless, I would not surrender an ounce of what is Anthony’s inheritance.”

The two of them stared at each other, hostility crackling between them.

He began to bend her fingers back, his intent clear. If he couldn’t force her to his will, he would break her another way.