High Plains Hearts (38 page)

“No, I don’t mind at all, but I have to admit this is all a bit overwhelming.” Marnie looked at the array of food on the table.

Ric whistled from the doorway. “Where did all this come from?” He picked up a cinnamon roll and bit into it. “Mmmm. This is wonderful! Where on earth did you get rolls like these?”

“From my oven,” Lily said proudly. “I made them myself this morning.”

Ric’s look questioned her, and she nodded.

“I feel 100 percent better, but I suppose I should after finally getting some sleep!” she bubbled happily. “I got up early and decided to bake some rolls, and, well, the whole thing just mushroomed. I guess I was hungry!”

They all sat down at the table, and after Ric offered a blessing, they dug in. When they’d eaten their fill and packed the leftovers into the basket, Marnie poured them each a cup of fresh coffee, and they sat in companionable silence.

Finally Lily spoke. “I’ve decided what to do,” she announced.

“What?” Ric and Marnie chorused.

“I’m not going to let myself be held prisoner to Newton’s unethical behavior and my own doubt. I’m moving forward on this.”

“Hooray!” Marnie shouted. “It’s about time to take some action.”

“I’ve been giving advice,” Lily continued, “and all the time I should have been listening to myself. Let go of the past and move forward. The past, when it’s kept in the dark, is more troublesome than it is when it’s let out into the open.”

“I see what you mean,” Ric said, and Marnie nodded in agreement. “It makes perfect sense.”

“I’m not going to let the past mess up my present and ruin my future. It’s the past, and I’m going to keep it there.”

“How?” Ric’s single-word question dropped in the air like a bomb, but she had an answer.

“I’m going back to Bismarck,” Lily declared. “I’m going to see Mr. Palmer or whoever it is that I need to talk to, and I’m going to tell him everything I know about the Nanny Group and Douglas Newton and the vouchers, even the typewriter. Everything.”

Her stomach turned once at the thought of what she was saying. Did she have the nerve to follow through on it? Was there any chance that doing this would bring Newton back into her life in an awful way?

“I have to do it,” she explained, “because of Todd. He deserves a mother who isn’t hiding from the past, especially something like this. I finally truly faced it last night. Folks, I didn’t do anything wrong. Not at all. Newton is the snake in the grass. It is all his fault. Every bit of it.”

“I knew that.” Marnie, her staunch supporter, straightened her back angrily.

“But I didn’t,” Lily said. “I mean, in an abstract way I did, but I hadn’t internalized it and made sense of it. And I had to do that in order for it to mean anything to me.”

“How do you want to do this?” Ric asked. “And when do you want to do this?”

“Let’s start now.”

Lily walked over to the phone and stood there, feeling for all the world like a crusader for justice and truth. The only thing she lacked was a cape.

And the phone number.

Fifteen minutes later, the phone number had been located, and both Ric and Lily had spoken to Mr. Palmer and set up an appointment for Friday.

Ric was already feeling a lightness of spirit. This was definitely a step in the right direction.

“This will work out well,” Lily said. “I can pick Todd up on the way home, too.”

“It’ll be good to have him back,” Marnie said. “It’s a bit too quiet around here without that little guy.”

“Absolutely,” Ric agreed. “I’ve missed having cherry bubbles with him.”

Marnie tilted her head questioningly. “Cherry bubbles? What is Eileen serving in there?”

“ ‘Cherry bubbles’ is Todd’s version of ‘cherry cobbler,’ ” Ric explained. “I have to confess that I can’t think of it without seeing bubbles—and I’ve never seen a cobbler in there, so his name for it makes complete sense.”

Lily nodded. “I can’t wait to see him again. I’ll probably make a total fool out of myself and embarrass him.”

She turned to Ric. “Speaking of embarrassing people, I should warn you about my mother. She’ll take your very presence in the same car as an overt avowal of a serious relationship.”

He laughed, hoping that its lightness hid the little flip his stomach did at \the thought of such a thing. “Really?”

She winked at him. “Really. You should have seen her when I rode up one time in a taxi. I think she still sends that poor driver a Christmas card, just in case….”

“I’ll keep that in mind in case she asks for my address,” he responded. His eyes twinkled as he leaned over and said in a stage whisper, “Maybe I’ll even give it to her.”

“Don’t you dare!” Lily shot back. “She’ll have a heart attack first, and then she’ll start calling reception halls from the ambulance.”

“Cute, cute, cute,” Marnie said, her voice showing her obvious satisfaction. “You two are absolutely darling together, did you know that?”

Lily whirled around. “Are you in cahoots with my mother?” she asked.

Marnie grinned. “She pays me big bucks for what I do, you know. I’m no amateur at this matchmaking business. I take pride in what I do.”

Ric shook his head as Lily blushed. “Marnie, don’t you have a letter to type or a song to practice or some pencils to sharpen?”

“Yes, boss,” Marnie said with a twinkle in her eyes. “You want to be left alone. I get it.”

Lily laughed as Marnie left.

It was so good to see Lily happy once more.

Ric broke the spell by pulling out a pad of paper. “We should start making notes so that by the time you sit down in front of Mr. Palmer, you’ll have it all prepared. We’ll make sure there won’t be any questions that take you by surprise. Let’s start with making a timeline. I think that’s the most important, don’t you?”

“I sure do, which is why I already started one.” She opened her bag. “But two heads are better than one, so let’s work on it together.”

They focused on getting it done in detail that week, and every night they worked more on it, with Lily trying to add as much detail as she could remember.

“You know,” she said as they got ready to leave Wildwood to drive to Bismarck, “the weirdest thing has happened. The more I’ve dug around in those memories, the less power they have over me. It’s like bringing them into the sunshine of truth has chased away the shades of the lies.”

“You’ll do great. You’re not nervous, are you?” He resisted the urge to pat her hand.

“I’m not, but tell me honestly. I don’t look, well, too patriotic, do I?”

He laughed. “Patriotic? Oh, because you’re wearing red, white, and blue. No, I think you’re okay. I don’t have any strong feelings to salute you and say the Pledge of Allegiance, if that’s what you mean.”

“A sailor. I look like a sailor.” She pointed to her blue suit with the red and white accents critically. “Do you have the urge to say, ‘Ahoy, mateys!’?”

Ric shook his head. “Not even that.”

“Whew. Well, I chose the suit because I can wear my red shoes with it.” She smiled down at her bright red shoes.

“I see,” Ric said, although he didn’t. “Red shoes.”

“My mother always said you couldn’t be down when you were wearing red shoes.”

“Is that true? I’ve never worn red shoes, at least not in recent memory, so I don’t know.” He grinned.

“It seems to work. But it doesn’t do a thing for nerves.”

“Nonsense. You’ll be great. You’re prepared, you’re confident—”

She snorted inelegantly.

“And you’re telling the truth about Newton and the Nanny Group,” he finished.

“I know that. You believe that. How am I going to get him to take my word on it?”

“He won’t, not at first,” Ric said thoughtfully. “But at least he’ll look into it, and you’ll have moved some of the pressure off you and onto the spot where it should be, right over Douglas Newton.”

“That’s true,” she commented.

“And just from talking to Mr. Palmer, he doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who’s going to overlook the fact that besides embezzling the money, Newton set up a perfectly innocent person to take the blame. No, Mr. Palmer will have something to say about the punishment for that, too, I imagine.”

“If there is punishment,” she added darkly. “You don’t know Douglas. He has a way of getting around almost everything.”

“There will be punishment, I’m pretty sure of that. Embezzling is a serious crime, but embezzling from a nonprofit organization is smarmy, and I’m sure they won’t let it pass.”

“But they have to catch him first,” she objected.

“They will. He’s changed too much of the truth, and I’ll wager that somewhere along the line he’s goofed up, some
i
he didn’t dot, some
t
he neglected to cross. You can’t cast suspicion without ending up in the shade yourself.”

“Maybe,” Lily said. “It’s almost too much to hope for.”

“Nothing is too much to hope for,” Ric said. “Nothing.”

It seemed to Lily that all too quickly they were being ushered into Mr. Palmer’s office. Ric grabbed her hand and squeezed it. She squeezed back. They were going in.

The room was small, but the side that faced the street was mostly glass, so the sunshine streamed in. To Lily, it seemed like a good sign.

Mr. Palmer introduced himself to them. He was a short, balding man with expressive dark eyes that gleamed from behind wire-rimmed glasses.

“Sit down, please,” Mr. Palmer said. “Would you like some coffee?”

“No thank you,” they chimed together, and then all three laughed. It was a great way to break the ice, and when Mr. Palmer moved a thick file to the center of his desk, Lily was surprised at how calm she actually felt about it.

“You understand that some discrepancies have been discovered in the record keeping at the Nanny Group?” he asked.

Lily nodded.

“Do you know anything about it?”

A week ago she wouldn’t have known how to answer that question. But thanks to Ric’s coaching and guidance, she provided Mr. Palmer with a coherent answer.

Her words must have impressed him because throughout their discussion, he took copious notes, pausing occasionally to check a fact or an item in the file.

He withdrew a piece of paper from it and passed it to her. “Do you recognize this?”

“Yes. It’s one of the vouchers the Nanny Group used to pay the day care providers.”

“Are these your initials?”

“They are my initials, but I did not write them,” she answered.

“How do you know?” he persisted.

“I worked closely with the people in this program. I had benefited myself from a similar program when I was in college and a new widow with a young child. I took a personal interest in each of the clients I worked with. And I can assure you that I never met Tammy Novak, the alleged babysitter.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Aside from the fact that, as I said before, I worked closely with my clientele and took great interest in them, I also remember or at least recognize their names. This name would particularly ring a bell.”

“And why is that?”

“I never wrote checks to shortened names. For example, Ric here would have had his checks issued to Richard Jensen. I felt it impressed upon the young women the seriousness of what we were all doing. With someone named Tammy, I would have asked if that was her given name or a nickname. May I have a piece of paper?”

Mr. Palmer looked puzzled but passed her a page from his notepad.

She wrote
Tamara
on it. “This is often the given name for Tammy. I find it a pretty name, but I have no idea how to pronounce it. I would have asked. To this date, I still don’t know if the accent is on the first or second syllable.”

“That hardly constitutes proof, Ms. Chamberlain,” Mr. Palmer objected.

“No, it doesn’t,” she agreed. “But it does allow me to say with certainty that I did not have a client named Tammy Novak.”

“We are going to subpoena your bank records,” he said. “It’s something we have to do to check the amounts of the transactions to see if something unusual is there.”

“I have nothing to hide.”

“We’ll also check into Newton’s accounts and the account that the Nanny Group had at State Federal,” he added.

“State Federal?” Lily shook her head. “Not unless they’ve changed banks. Or closed an account or two.”