The Treasure Box (13 page)

“Well, you here now—that is what matters.” Benedetti's eyes sought out Cathleen, and he put a hand over his heart. “Your wife, Rachel, yes?
Bella, bella
.” He captured Cathleen's fingers and planted a kiss on the back of her hand.

“This is Cathleen,” Derrick corrected.

“Not Rachel?” Benedetti frowned, obviously confused.

“There must have been some—some miscommunication.”

Benedetti's expression cleared. “You look for job, no?”

Derrick nodded. “I was told, Mr. Benedetti, that—”

“No, no! You must call me Angelo.” He poked Derrick in the chest. “Any friend of Mario's is my friend, too.”

“All right, ah, Angelo. About the job—”

But Angelo wasn't listening. “We go inside, yes? You like chicken? I cook you a Chicken Marsala like heaven itself—on the house. And
vino.
” He gave a broad wink. “For Angelo, there is no Prohibition,
capisca?
” He held out his arm to Cathleen. “Come, come. We eat; we get acquainted; we open a bottle of Chianti. Like friends. Later we talk about work.”

He opened the door with a grand flourish. As they stepped past him into the restaurant, Cathleen leaned close to Derrick.

“Appropriate name, Angelo,” she whispered. “The man is an absolute angel.”

The scene in front of Benedetti's restaurant dissolved and the starry night sky reappeared on the monitor. Vita leaned back in her chair and let out a pent-up breath. “Why do the wicked prosper?” she muttered. Cathleen and Derrick deserved to be poor and miserable, not to have some “guardian angel” come to their rescue.

But that brand of justice only happened in maudlin movies.

In the real world, it seemed, saints were vilified and sinners came out victorious. Villains landed on their feet while their victims lay broken and bleeding in the gutter.

Still, it would be nice if just once scoundrels like Derrick and Cathleen got paid back in kind. To be thoroughly wretched in their new paradise, or be thrown out of the garden altogether.

Vita herself would volunteer to stand at the gates with a flaming sword.

Rachel stood at the open door of the dress shop and stared out across the street into the gathering dusk. Behind her, she could hear the rhythmic pace of Elisabeth Tyner's new electric sewing machine as it hummed a counterpoint to the splashing of the fountain in the center of the village green. From her vantage point in the doorway, she could just make out a couple walking hand in hand toward the bench at the base of the fountain. A handsome, sandy-haired man and a woman with blonde curls.

Like Derrick and Cathleen.

“I will never forgive them,” she murmured under her breath.

“Never.” Taking the money was bad enough, but to steal Sophie's Treasure Box—that was an offense for which there could be no absolution. If she ever got to America, and if by some miracle she managed to find the two of them, she'd make them suffer. Precisely how, she didn't know—at least not yet. She would have to work out that part as she went along.

Mrs. Tyner's voice called to her from the back of the shop.

“Rachel, dear, I believe it's time to close up. Do come have a cup of tea with me before you leave.”

Rachel shut the door and pulled down the shade, then locked the day's proceeds in the safe underneath the counter.

“Kettle's boiling!”

Rachel went into the back and stood shifting from one foot to another.

“For heaven's sake, sit down, dear.” Mrs. Tyner smiled at her.

“There's no reason for you to be nervous around me.”

“Yes ma'am.” Rachel sat. “I want to thank you, Mrs. Tyner, for taking me on to work here. You've been so generous with me, paying me so well and teaching me to do tailoring. Mam calls you my guardian angel.”

“Guardian angel?” Elisabeth Tyner laughed. “Hardly. But I am happy to see you doing so well.”

Rachel nodded. It wouldn't do to tell her employer how she still had difficulty braving the curious stares and whispers of the villagers. As yet no one had been rude to her face, but she found it a challenge to ignore them and go on about her business.

Still, enduring such pain did have its redemptions. Rachel had learned an important lesson—that opening yourself to love and hope only opened you to heartache as well. A year ago—even a few months ago—she would have scoffed at this truth as pure cynicism, the pessimistic disbelief of a suspicious mind. But now she knew better. A hard shell, that's what life demanded. Stone walls around your heart, and stout bolts on the doors to your soul.

Mrs. Tyner might be a gracious, generous lady, but Mam was wrong. There were no guardian angels in this life. No heavenly protectors, no divine eye watching, no invisible hand leading.

Nobody else would look out for Rachel Woodlea, so she would look out for herself.

13
ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE

V
ita watched as for the second time that morning, Cathleen made a frantic dash for the bathroom.

She knelt on the cold tile, her stomach churning, until the waves of nausea subsided. At last she got up, bathed her face with cool water, and returned to the kitchen.

“Good thing we have an indoor privy,” Derrick grunted from behind his newspaper. “What's the matter with you, anyway?”

“I—I don't know.” Cathleen sank into the chair opposite him.

“My stomach's just upset, that's all. It'll pass.”

He pulled his pocket watch from his vest, clicked open the case, and squinted at the dial. “I have to be at work in ten minutes.”

“I'm all right—you go on.”

“Don't forget we're invited to dinner downstairs at eight,” he reminded her as he retrieved his suit jacket from the coat tree next to the door. “You can wear that blue dress—and do something with your hair, will you?”

She ran a hand through her disheveled curls. “The very mention of that blue dress makes me want to throw up again,” she said. “I'm sick to death of it—I've been wearing it for three solid months, every time I need to dress up the least little bit.”

“So wear something else.”

“I have nothing else, Derrick. Nothing suitable for dinner with your bosses. And I've seen the way their wives look at me. I'm quite sure they gossip behind my back about how pathetically unfashionable I am.” She turned her most entreating smile on him.

“I was wondering if I might not go shopping for a new frock.”

He waved away her concerns. “The blue one will do just fine.

Put that lace collar on it or something—you know, the handmade one you
brought with you
from home.”

Cathleen repressed a caustic reply. Derrick never missed an opportunity to remind her, however subtly, that she was a thief, in possession of her sister's stolen goods—including the lace collar Mam had made for Rachel's birthday.

She sank onto the moth-eaten sofa and looked around the room. “Don't you ever get tired of living this way?” she asked.

“This place is so
dismal
.”

Derrick frowned. “You should be grateful. If Angelo Benedetti didn't own the entire building, we might still be in that horrible flat we rented when we first arrived. As it is, we're saving money, and we're right above the restaurant, where I can keep an eye on things when Angelo's not around.”

“I suppose,” Cathleen conceded. “But how do we ever plan to improve ourselves? When you accepted this job, I hardly thought you'd be employed as an errand boy.”

Derrick folded the newspaper and slapped it down on the table. “Not errand boy.
Courier
. I deliver papers and contracts to Angelo's business partners. It's important work. And Angelo is already talking about moving me up in the business.”

“We've nowhere to go
but
up,” she muttered. “Have you seen the rats and smelled the rotting garbage in the alley below our bedroom window?”

He stood up and donned his suit coat, then stalked to the door and opened it. “When you start bringing in money, you'll have earned the right to criticize,” he said. “In the meantime, I suggest you keep your mouth shut.” He slammed the door behind him, and as she heard his boots clattering down the stairs, she realized he hadn't even kissed her good-bye.

When Derrick was gone, Cathleen washed up the breakfast dishes, cleaned up the kitchen, and picked up the newspaper and odd articles of clothing he had left scattered about. She had just begun to tidy the parlor when a thought struck her. “A blanket!” she murmured to herself. “I could tuck a colorful blanket—the bright blue one, perhaps—over the sofa. It would certainly cheer the place up a bit.”

She went to the closet in the bedroom, where the blanket was stored for the summer on a high shelf. She could reach it, if she stretched—just the nearest corner.

The blanket slid off the shelf and into her arms, but when it came, it dragged something else along with it. Something that glanced off her head and dropped to the floor of the closet. She laid the blanket aside and looked down. A boot—one of a pair, Derrick's second-best boots, to be precise. But what were boots doing on the highest shelf, under the blanket?

She retrieved it and turned it upside down. A thick roll of bank notes fell into her palm.

Cathleen stared at the money.

“Someone's been keeping secrets,” she whispered to herself.

“Well, Derrick, dear, I think it's time for a new dress.” She smiled.

“Something smart and festive, I think. In a bright ruby red.”

It was nearly noon, but Rachel had other things on her mind besides a midday meal. She left the dress shop and strode across the central green toward the road that led from the edge of town to the river.

“A plan,” she muttered under her breath. “I need to come up with a plan.”

In the distance, she could hear the rippling sound of the river as it cascaded over boulders and wound its way downstream. The river had brought her both sadness and succor over the years. It had taken Sophie from her, but it had also become her sanctuary, her thinking place. And she needed to think.

She had to get the Treasure Box back. This had become her mission in life, her obsession. To find Cathleen and make her pay for what she had done. Whether vindication would bring any kind of inner satisfaction, Rachel had no idea. It was simply the only option open to her.

Along the road, a myriad of summer flowers bloomed— yellow primroses and lady's slippers and bright thistles in the sun-washed ditches, nodding wild violets and lush ferns in the shade at the base of the trees. Rachel had always considered the village of her birth, with its sedate streets and surrounding woods, as quite the loveliest place on earth. A paradise. Every sunset brought a benediction, every sunrise the blessing of another day in Eden.

But no longer. Instead of stopping to touch the shy primroses at the edge of the road and watch the powdery gold at their center rub off on her fingers, she trampled them underfoot. She saw the sunset and the flowers and the lights on the water, but the connection between her eyes and her soul had been severed. The presence had left the garden. The voice of blessing had gone silent.

Rachel reached the bank and gazed unseeing out over the river. If she could just hold on another few months, she would have enough money saved to make the crossing. She no longer believed what Derrick had told her about America being a garden of delights, but it hardly mattered. For Rachel, there was no paradise.

Not here.

Not anywhere.

14
A DAY OF NEW BEGINNINGS

R
ed. Everything was red. Like a thousand sledgehammers tablecloth. A drift of sheer fabric, like the skirt of a dress made for dancing. Falling petals from a rose. A cardinal in the snow. Autumn leaves swirling on the wind, scarlet against a stark blue sky. A crimson sun sizzling into oblivion on the arc of a blood-red sea. Fireworks exploding against a black velvet sky.

Even before she awoke, Vita knew it was a dream. A crazy, mixed-up dream, full of nonsense images brought on by too much garlic in the spaghetti sauce—or, in old Ebenezer's words, “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, the fragment of an underdone potato.”

She opened her eyes. Even the real world—her world—was washed in a translucent red, as if someone had photographed the room with a filter over the lens. The sun was just rising, and the lace curtains stirred on a breeze coming through the half-open window. A beautiful morning. One of those glorious, bracing spring days shot through with possibilities that even Vita Kirk could not ignore.

She stretched and smiled and finally abandoned the comfortable warmth of the bed. Raising the window higher, she leaned forward and inhaled the invigorating air. A remnant of Browning came back to her from a nineteenth-century poetry class ages ago:
God's in his heaven—All's right with the world.

As uncertain as Vita might be that God was in heaven—or anywhere else, for that matter—she couldn't help agreeing that everything did seem right with the world this perfect day. Birds singing. The crisp green scent of grass on the air, and petals from ornamental fruit trees drifting like pink and white snowflakes across the lawn. A day of new beginnings.

A day when nothing could possibly go wrong.

Something was wrong.

Rachel pushed open the door and entered the dress shop.

Usually the shop was filled with the ever-present noise of the sewing machine, beating out its familiar rhythms. But today, only silence.

“Hello?” she called. “Mrs. Tyner?”

“In the back!” a voice answered from behind the drape that separated the workroom from the front of the shop. “I'm making tea—come and join me.”

Rachel entered the back room and let the curtain fall shut behind her. Elisabeth Tyner stood with her gray head bent over the small two-burner hot plate, waiting for the kettle to boil.