Stay (Dunham series #2) (24 page)

Females.

“Taight!” he bellowed across the lot and Sebastian
turned. Eric took a step toward Sebastian, then another and
another, faster—

—until he stopped short when Sebastian yanked a
baseball bat out of his car and gripped it in both hands, cocked to
hit a grand slam.

“Don’t even think about it, little boy,” Sebastian
snarled. “I’ll bash your fucking head in if you come after me with
those killer fists of yours. I told you we’d have a beer and talk
it out. I’m
damn
sure not going to deal with your jealousy
eight years after the fact, when I got a wife and three kids.”

“Tequila,” Eric growled, his eyes narrowed.

Sebastian lowered the bat slowly and watched him
warily. “All right,” he drawled. “If you really need your ten paces
at dawn, I guess tequila’s as good a weapon as anything.”

They grabbed chairs at the bar and Eric ordered four
double shots. He downed his two immediately and watched with great
pleasure while Sebastian stared at his warily for a moment.

“I’m not a hard drinker,” Sebastian muttered, and
sipped
his first shot. Eric smirked, already knowing how
this would end.

The conversation never actually rolled around to
Vanessa, since Eric kept the liquor coming and Sebastian couldn’t
hold it worth shit.

“Yer a pussy,” Eric slurred at some point after his
thirteenth shot.

“Yesh,” Sebastian slurred in return, still on his
seventh. “Yesh, I yam. An’ yer a fuckin’ idiot.” Thus saying,
Sebastian promptly passed out on the bar. Eric paid the tab, wrote
Bryce Kenard’s number on a napkin for the bartender, then managed
to walk a straight line out the door and get in a cab without
hitting his head.

“So what are you going to do now, Mr. Cipriani?” one
of the county employees yelled up the stairs at him, pulling Eric’s
pounding head out of last night and into this morning.

“Going on vacation!” he yelled back, splitting his
head in four more parts. The gales of laughter from everywhere in
the courthouse drifting upstairs were worth the pain, though, and
he grinned.

Glenn walked in Eric’s office that afternoon and
plopped himself in front of Eric’s desk, making himself at
home.

“You’re early, Glenn,” Eric intoned absently, buried
in a case file.

“I know who proved you innocent.”

“Sure you do.”

“Vanessa Whittaker.”

Once again, Eric had to call on his years of karate
training not to react to that in any way. “Go back to your morgue,
Glenn.”

“What I don’t know,” he went on as if Eric hadn’t
spoken, “is why,
last
year, she was so chilly to you and
then
this
year, she was slightly less chilly. You know, when
you brought her and your namesake back to her motel, and you groped
her ass on the balcony for anyone to see.”

Eric’s head snapped up and he glared at Glenn from
under his brow, furious. It was one thing to contemplate breaking
Sebastian’s head open; he and Eric were the same size. Glenn
wouldn’t stand a chance, but oh, did Eric want to reach over his
desk—

“Glenn,” Eric growled.

Glenn smirked. “Old man Whittaker’s wake. Quote, ‘I
chose Eric over you when I was twelve years old.’ Remember
that?”

Shit.

“Annie left you right after Vanessa showed up last
year,” he continued. “Vanessa shows up this year and all hell
breaks loose, but then it ends up with you and her going at it in
public.”

It was with great effort that Eric kept his voice
even. “Vanessa was nice to you,” he said, low. “Invited you to
Whittaker House. You took her up on that.”

Glenn stared at Eric, then at the edge of Eric’s
desk.

“You got a series of articles out of her and you
sold out of every one of those papers. Had everybody in Chouteau
City begging for more. Your little fledgling blog is doing just
fine, thanks to your apparently endless supply of articles on her.
You should be able to close the paper for good and switch to
full-time blogging for your income in, what? A year? Two
years?”

His mouth tightened.

“So fuck
her
, right? You got what you wanted
out of her, and who the hell cares anyway because you’re here and
she’s there and whatever the hell— She’s an adult, right? It
doesn’t matter that her name was redacted from the trial
transcripts because it was fifteen years ago and who cares, right?
And so what if she was nice to you. It must have been an act
anyway, because nobody else likes you.”

His nostrils flared. “All right. You made your
point.”

“I’m asking you, as a favor to this office, not to
publish her name.”

“I’m not stupid, Eric. This is about you and your
campaign. You know how that’s going to get spun if it comes
out.”

Eric stared at Glenn, stunned. “I—” But what could
he say? He’d never thought about it that way.

“Lord, it didn’t even occur to you, did it?” Glenn
breathed, clearly as surprised as Eric. “All right. Look.
Whatever’s in the past, I’ll keep in the past, I give you my word
on that. But if you and her start up . . . I’ll report that.
Whoever you date is newsworthy, and I’m not going to pass it by on
the off chance somebody makes the connection from what I
write.”

“Oh, so you’re going to turn the
Recorder
into a gossip rag?”

“No,” he snapped. “I’m going to report the news.
Think about it for a while, Eric. She was Ford’s mistress.
Esquire
.
Maxim
. That would take a good chunk of the
conservative vote away from you. At least Stacy Afton’s got her old
man behind her.”

“Literally,” Eric growled.

“I’m not printing
that
without proof.”

“You know what, Glenn?” Eric said. “I’m going to do
what I damn well please and to hell with you and your advice.”

“So you are going to pursue her.”

“None of your business. Get out.”

Glenn arose and went to the door, but turned. “It
wasn’t advice, Eric,” he said soberly. “Just giving you the facts
of life. If you want that job, attorney general, governor,
president, whatever, your life won’t be yours anymore. People will
make up what they can’t find.”

“I know. I’ve been dealing with you for the last
seven years.”

“I’m not your enemy, Eric, and I told you before: I
never made up anything about Knox or you or anybody else. I just
reported what was there. If you had asked for my advice, I would
have told you to be careful. That’s all.”

* * * * *

22: Come Into My Parlor

It took Eric more than four weeks of bribery,
cajoling, extortion, threatening, begging, and blackmail to get his
trial and class schedules squared away enough that he could go to
Mansfield to see Vanessa for a week, though he did call her first
to find out when it would be best.

He couldn’t afford to surprise her so much that
she’d turn him away after he’d gone to so much trouble.

Which is why this relationship won’t work. You’ll
have to do this every single time you want to go see her.

And she’d have to do the same if she were to visit
him, plus she’d have a bored thirteen-year-old boy on her hands.
Bored thirteen-year-old boys were a scourge on society and he
didn’t care how smart and responsible they were.

Eric emailed Vanessa every day, but she very rarely
returned his messages; when she did, they tended to be quite short.
He called every evening, and though she usually couldn’t talk long,
he needed to hear that soft husky voice, even if only for a few
seconds.

Eric, you realize that just because you’ll be on
vacation, I won’t be, right? Whittaker House is overflowing, and
that’s not including Friday and Saturday night dinner. I have to
work and my days are eighteen hours or more. I’ll do my best to
minimize that while you’re here, but I won’t be able to entertain
you. I don’t want to give you a false impression.

No, I understand. It’s okay, Vanessa. I want to
watch you in your environment, see what you do.

He drove through Mansfield, Missouri at eleven on a
Friday morning in late May, looking at it with small-town eyes and
saw that it wasn’t much different from Chouteau City, except a lot
smaller. He turned around when he realized he was going the wrong
way, then followed the signs to Ava.

When he finally came upon Whittaker House, he slowed
and stopped in awe because the website pictures didn’t begin to
touch on its grandeur.

On ample acreage, it was like every description of
Zion he’d ever heard at BYU. It was more beautiful than Temple
Square in Salt Lake and much more grand. He’d never seen anything
so lush, so . . . perfect. In the middle of it all reigned the most
glorious example of a stripped-down gothic revival mansion he’d
ever seen. At four stories with three steeply pitched gables—one of
which rose far above the roof line—it was enormous. It was antique
brick, a light terra cotta, with simple white trim and curved-top
shutters that matched the Palladian windows. A deep veranda wrapped
all the way around it. It had little extraneous ornamentation along
its gables and eaves. The veranda eaves and ceiling dripped baskets
of colorful flowers.

The roof was clad in square glossy black shingles
with a strange geometric pattern. They didn’t look like asphalt,
ceramic, or wood, but Eric couldn’t figure out just what they
were.

The lawn was immense, with a large, flower-bounded
boulder toward the front, modestly carved with “Whittaker House”
and its street number on both sides. There were sheep grazing on
pickets!

Eric drove up the long cobblestone horseshoe drive,
down and around to a precisely landscaped parking lot. Planters
filled with flowers between pairs of parking spaces and
different-colored cobblestones marked each space. Strategically
planted apple trees had made the whole thing disappear from the
highway.

“She hid a parking lot in plain sight,” he
marveled.

Another car zipped by on another well-hidden drive
right in front of him, headed south to what appeared to be a long,
low stable off in the distance, but knew it had to be valet parking
once he saw a young man jogging back to the mansion.

Eric got out and stood by his car. He looked across
the highway to a collection of gothic revival shops the same brick
as the mansion, roofed in the same material, all meticulously
landscaped and arranged around a half-moon-shaped courtyard.
Fishing gear and custom fly-tying. Needlecrafts. Clothing boutique
of a local designer-tailor. Salon and spa. Gourmet grocer,
featuring locally made foods. Hunting outfitter. Stationery.

He turned toward the mansion and walked around the
grounds a bit. Cottages, smaller versions of the stores across the
highway, sat scattered behind the mansion, spread out in an
asymmetrical fan shape amongst a park-like lawn with flowers and
trees, benches and a playground just north of the garage. Various
narrow cobblestone pathways led to the cottages.

Two outbuildings to the northwest sat at the edge of
an apple orchard and were much bigger than the rest, but so far
away they almost faded into the lawn and trees.

All of the cottages, the valet garage, and the two
outbuildings were clad in the same brick as the mansion and shops,
and all of them had that strange roof pattern. Each cottage had
some unique feature, with no more than two of the little buildings
alike. Some were two-story and some one. Each had unique eave
detailing, as a proper gothic revival should, and none of the
cottage eaves were as barren as the mansion’s eaves. Each cottage
had a large railed porch with rocking chairs or a porch swing, and
each cottage’s foundation was swathed in flowers.

He climbed the side stairs of the mansion and
wandered around the veranda, looking for wherever the kitchen might
be. He saw quite a few guests strolling, rocking in chairs and
drinking various concoctions, the most frequent of which seemed to
be mint julep, iced sweet tea, and lemonade. The guests read,
knitted, dozed, wrote, sewed, and the like.

It seemed there were at least two casually dressed
waiters on staff at this time of day catering to the needs of those
who wished to while away their time without the distraction of cell
phones, laptops, PDAs, and other gadgetry.

One very familiar sight—two Mormon missionaries clad
in cheap suits and driving a generic car—whizzed down the driveway
and turned out onto the highway, headed toward Ava.

Through the floor-to-ceiling French doors spaced
equally along this wall of the mansion, he could see an immense
dining room that seemed as cozy as a small parlor, with a grand
staircase blocking the view to the other half of the mansion.
Intrigued, he decided to forego the kitchen for the time being and
go around to the front entrance. The grand front door was made of
heavy walnut casements surrounding elaborate beveled glass
windows.

Ah, Vanessa. Impeccable taste, brought to you by the
same man who taught me what a handkerchief was for.

He walked in onto wide-planked walnut floors, a
shallow alcove on his left (it took him a minute to realize it was
an elevator), and a welcome desk to his right.

Deep into the main floor in front of him was that
massive walnut staircase—bigger and more ornate than the one in the
Chouteau County courthouse—twelve feet wide, rising twenty feet to
the next level, bisected by a landing. To the left of the staircase
was a dining room. To the right of the staircase was an enormous
room littered with comfortable couches, club chairs, coffee tables,
end tables, and plenty of lamps. Its far wall was lined with
shelves and shelves of books to the ceiling, halved horizontally by
a relatively shallow wrought-iron balcony from the front wall to
the back, to enable people to access the ceiling-high library via a
compact switchback wrought-iron staircase.