Janelle Taylor (9 page)

“You think they might come looking for him?”

“Phoebe must have thought so. Why else would she have left him here? She must have thought nobody would think to look for him here with you.”

“It’s true,” Jordan agreed. “We haven’t been close in years. I mean, we haven’t seen each other much, but I still always felt close to her in my heart, and Phoebe must have felt the same way.” Her voice broke. Beau squeezed her hand.

“So even after all these years, she trusted you,” he said quietly.

“She knew she could trust me. That I would do anything for her. I promised I would keep Spencer safe.”

“Until we know more about what happened, Jordan, I think keeping Spencer safe means staying quiet about the whole thing. Nobody should know that he’s here.”

“You
know,” she said simply, and the expression on his face told her that he knew what she was getting at without the need for further discussion.

“You can trust me, Jordan,” he promised. “You and I might not have known each other for years the way you and Phoebe did, but you have my word that I won’t tell a soul about this little boy.”

Again, she quelled the urge to reach out to her usual support system—Phoebe, or her parents. They were the ones who had gotten her through her shattered wedding day when Kevin jilted her.

This time, she had nowhere to turn. This time, she had nobody.

Nobody but the man in front of her.

“I need more than your word, Beau,” she heard herself say. The next words spilled recklessly from her, raw and honest. “I need your help.”

As he drove away from Jordan’s town house an hour later, Beau saw on the dashboard clock that it was nearly midnight. He fought back a twinge of guilt, telling himself that he couldn’t have stayed any longer. She and Spencer would be all right—at least, for tonight.

Tomorrow he would go back.

He had promised her that.

Jordan’s asking for his help had caught him off guard. Struck by her blatant plea and her desperate vulnerability, he had of course said yes, not knowing or caring what, exactly, she needed from him.

“Can you come back tomorrow?” she had asked him. “Please … I can’t leave the house with him, and I’m afraid to be here alone with him.”

He had nodded. He was afraid for her, too. So afraid that he’d volunteered to spend the night on her couch. She had turned that down. He was secretly relieved. After all that had transpired, he needed to get away, if only to clear his head.

This was big. This was huge. A child had been orphaned, and now his life might be at stake. Keeping Spencer safe and caring for him in this traumatic time
was an overwhelming responsibility for one shellshocked woman.

“I’ll come back tomorrow,” he had promised Jordan.

“Thanks. You’re the only one who knows—the only one I can talk to about this. I need to figure out what to do—and I’m probably going to need some advice.”

Advice? From him? He had no idea where to start, beyond telling her not to go to the authorities.

They agreed that they would talk more in the morning. He hoped his head would be clearer then.

Beau was yawning by the time he reached home. But when he climbed into bed, exhausted, the tension refused to leave his body.

He couldn’t stop thinking about the child who had lost his parents, and about Jordan Curry’s dilemma.

At one point he even sat up in the darkened room, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, instinctively needing to get back into his car and return to her town house.

All that stopped him was the realization that a knock on the door in the wee hours would scare the hell out of Jordan after what she had been through. With any luck, she was sleeping, and he should be, too.

Tomorrow was going to be a tough day.

As night marched toward dawn, Beau tossed restlessly on the pillow, working through details in his mind. He would have to go to the office first thing to take care of a few details, such as Andrea MacDuff’s plans. As for Tuesday … perhaps his long-awaited vacation would have to be put off a while longer. He wasn’t sure that he could leave now. He couldn’t abandon Jordan and Spencer if she needed him here.

Beau was drawn to both woman and child in the most primal way, realizing, in the last fuzzy moments before
sleep overtook him at last, that he had designated himself their protector long before he had shown up on the doorstep tonight

With trembling fingers, Jordan dialed the longdistance telephone number.

It had been surprisingly easy to get it. She simply dialed Information, gave the operator the name and city she needed, and
voila
—she no longer had to cope with this mess alone.

The phone rang several times on the other end.

It was what she expected.

After all, it was long past midnight.

Finally, a sleepy voice answered with a mumbled, fearful “Hello?”

It didn’t sound familiar. For a second, she feared she had the wrong number. But she reminded herself that it had been years since she had spoken to him.

She cleared her throat. “Is this Curt?”

“Yes?”

There was a clicking sound on the line.

Had he hung up?

“Curt?” she said again.

“Yes?” he sounded impatient now.

“It’s Jordan Curry.”

Silence.

“Phoebe’s friend,” she clarified, just as he said, with sudden recollection,
“Jordan!”

She paused.

She heard another clicking sound on the line. He must be fumbling with the receiver.

“I heard about Phoebe,” she said, and then her voice broke.

“I know. It’s a nightmare.” His voice was hoarse, weary, as though he had been through all this before.

“Who could have done this to her and Reno, Curt?” Jordan asked.

“To all three of them,” he said. “It was all three of them. They haven’t found Spencer’s body yet, but—”

“Curt, that’s why I’m—”

She broke off, realizing she had just heard another click.

That was when it hit her. The phone line. It might be tapped.

Why the hell had she called? She shouldn’t have. She hadn’t intended to. But the anguish and worry had gotten to her after Beau left her alone. She wasn’t thinking straight when she dialed Curt’s number.

“Did you hear that click?” she asked Curt warily.

“It’s just my phone. It’s been doing that all day. We’ve had electrical storms in all this heat, and it screws up the lines.” He sighed, sounding exhausted.

“I’m so sorry I woke you,” Jordan said. “I just … I’m feeling so alone, and I didn’t know who to turn to. My parents are traveling, and my brother is stationed overseas, and … there’s just no one to talk to about this.”

No one except a man I barely know.

But even Beau was gone now, leaving her alone with her grief and her fear.

“It’s okay,” Curt said. “I was going to track you down and tell you tomorrow anyway. How did you find out?”

“It was in the paper.”

“Down there?”

“It was an AP story,” she said over another click on the line.

“I guess it would be. Reno is pretty high profile.”

“Do the police have any suspects?”

“Not really. I think they’re assuming it was somebody with ties to one of Reno’s cases. I told him he should be more careful with who he represented. I always worried about the lowlifes he was tangled up with. Apparently, he wasn’t. And now look,” Curt said bitterly.

“Are there funeral plans yet?” she asked.

“Not yet. Not till they find Spencer.” He cleared his throat, and she could tell he was trying not to let emotion fog his voice.

She longed to tell Curt that his nephew was alive, and safe here with her.

But something wouldn’t let her.

What if the clicks weren’t from the thunderstorms after all? What if they meant the line had been tapped? Hadn’t she read somewhere that if there was a bug on the line, the caller would hear some kind of click or tone?

Common sense told her that her imagination was getting the best of her. But she didn’t dare take a chance. At least, not yet. Not tonight. Not when the pain and fear were still raw and her thoughts were hopelessly scrambled.

“I’ll let you get back to sleep,” she said.

“Fine. I’ll call you as soon as arrangements are made for some kind of service. Are you still living in Georgetown? Is your number listed?”

“It’s listed,” she said heavily, wishing for all the world that it wasn’t.

It had been so easy for her to get Curt’s telephone number through directory assistance. She probably could have gotten it over the Internet as well.

If anybody was listening in …

Well, she had said her name when Curt first picked
up the phone. Anyone could use it to get her number and her address.

You’re just paranoid,
she told herself as she hung up.

Of course Curt’s telephone wasn’t tapped. This wasn’t an episode of one of those detective television dramas her father used to love to watch.

This was real life.

Her best friend was dead.

Tears overtook Jordan once again as she flung the cordless phone across the room.

The gourmet coffee Jordan bought yesterday at the supermarket had come in handy. It wasn’t even nine o’clock Monday morning yet, and she was on her third strong pot of the brew.

Maybe it was the caffeine, or maybe it was shock and grief, but she still wasn’t feeling the effects of her utterly sleepless night. She felt wide awake, and fully aware of the grim day that lay ahead. There was nothing to do but face it head-on.

After hanging up with Curt, she had spent most of the night crying and combing the newspapers, and then the Internet and the television news, for any information about the double slaying in Philadelphia.

There was nothing about Phoebe and Reno on CNN or MSNBC’s news broadcasts. She gave up on
the
Internet, which was running sluggishly—when she did manage to check its search engines, they yielded nothing
but links to Reno, Nevada, and the television show Friends, with its character named Phoebe.

However, Jordan did find the newspaper article Beau had mentioned, accompanied by a grainy photo of Phoebe and Reno. According to the caption beneath, it had been taken a year ago at a charity event.

She could see how the photo evidence had tipped off Beau that Spencer belonged to the Averills. The child was a perfect combination of his fair, pretty mother and his darkly handsome father.

Jordan had always suspected that Phoebe was drawn to Reno Averill solely for his dark good looks. There didn’t seem to be much more to the man, besides his money—and Phoebe wasn’t the gold-digging type.

Reno was a criminal defense attorney and the sole living heir in a well-to-do Main Line family. Both his parents had died by the time he married Phoebe, and he was an only child. That, Phoebe had explained to Jordan, was why they had opted to elope rather than have a lavish wedding. After all, Phoebe’s mother had passed away years before, when they were teenagers, and her blue-collar father couldn’t afford a big wedding.

Still, Jordan was stung that Phoebe hadn’t told her that marriage was imminent. Jordan didn’t know Phoebe was getting married until she had returned from her Caribbean honeymoon. Looking back, Jordan realized that it was the first sign that their friendship had taken a different turn.

Jordan supposed she was as much to blame as Phoebe was for letting distance come between them over these past few years. It was easier to get caught up in the details of her own life and business than to maintain on a daily—or even weekly—basis a friendship that was based on little in common at this point. Phoebe had
her large home in the Philadelphia suburbs, her charity work, her child …

And her husband. A husband who, Jordan suspected, as had Curt, had somehow gotten entangled in some kind of underhanded business that had led to his own and Phoebe’s deaths.

The newspaper articles tactfully referred to Reno as a respected, if controversial, lawyer. He had defended notoriously heinous killers, and he had gotten more than one cold-blooded murderer acquitted on legal technicalities. Jordan often wondered how he could live with himself, knowing that he had put dangerous criminals back on the street. She had wondered how Phoebe could live with him.

Now, she wondered if Reno had indeed crossed paths with somebody bent on vengeance against the lawyer and his family.

Her anger and frustration over Phoebe’s death mingled with profound sorrow. She cried not just for herself and her own loss, but for Spencer’s. What was going to happen to him now? When the whole mess was sorted out and Jordan was able to come forward with Spencer, some decisions would have to be made about his future.

Jordan wondered whether Reno and Phoebe had wills. Probably. After all, Reno was a lawyer. They must have arranged for legal guardianship of Spencer in
the
event of their deaths, and Jordan had no doubt that she wasn’t named in their instructions. Reno had never given her the time of day. Surely he wouldn’t have agreed to bestow custody of his only child on his wife’s single childhood pal, even if she was Spencer’s god-mother.

Not that he knew about that. Phoebe, who was raised Catholic, had brought her infant to their hometown
church to be baptized on a rare occasion when she came home, unaccompanied by Reno, to visit her father. She explained to Jordan that Reno didn’t practice any religion and didn’t believe in choosing one for a newborn child. He said that if Spencer grew up and decided to become a Catholic, that was fine, but he didn’t want to christen him one.

Apparently, Phoebe couldn’t shake the religion that had been ingrained in her by her staunchly religious mother, who died young of cancer and had clung fiercely to her faith, especially in the end. Jordan was with Phoebe at her mother’s bedside when last rites were administered; she saw how comforting the ritual was for the dying woman. The image of her mother receiving the last blessed sacrament must have stayed with Phoebe through the years, so that she couldn’t allow her young son to be deprived of the first blessed sacrament.

The baptism was an impromptu thing, or so it seemed to Jordan. Glad to spend some time alone with her friend and the baby, she thought they were on their way to lunch when Phoebe informed her they were meeting Father Ralph at Saint Christopher’s Church. The kindly old priest, who knew Jordan and Phoebe from their catechism days, willingly baptized Spencer as Jordan cradled him protectively in her arms, touched that Phoebe had chosen her for the honor of being his godmother.

Never mind that the ceremony was conducted in secrecy or that the baby was clad in a blue seersucker romper rather than an antique lace gown. What mattered to Jordan was that Phoebe had shown her she still mattered. Reno might have come between them, but Phoebe still cared. Enough to entrust Jordan with her
child’s spiritual well-being—and now, with his physical well-being.

Yet Jordan knew that just as Reno would never have consented to the christening, he would never have agreed that Jordan should take custody of his son in the event something happened to him and Phoebe. They had probably chosen some suitable couple from their Main Line social circle as Spencer’s guardians.

Or maybe even Curt. As she recalled, he was married with nearly grown children, was in his late forties, and was a successful business owner in Pittsburgh. Maybe he would get custody of Spencer.

Jordan’s thoughts kept wandering back to Curt, alternating between regret that she had called him, and regret that she hadn’t said more. He was clearly distraught over the news of his sister’s and brother-in-law’s deaths. He was speculating, as the authorities were, that his nephew’s body was missing in the waters of the Delaware River.

I should call him back,
Jordan thought.
He deserves to know Spencer is alive.

But Phoebe had said to tell no one. And last night, Beau had said the same thing.

I can trust Curt, though. After all, here I am trusting a man I barely know. A man who never even met Phoebe.

But she’d had no choice. Beau had stumbled into the middle of this crazy scenario.

If she called Curt back now, she would again be violating not just Beau’s advice, but her own promise to Phoebe—a promise she meant to keep despite her friend’s death.

Jordan was sitting at the kitchen table, wiping fresh tears from her eyes and morosely stirring milk into yet
another steaming cup of coffee, when she heard footsteps on the stairs.

Uh-oh.

Spencer was awake.

She had been dreading this moment all night. She had no intention of telling him yet about his parents, but she was afraid that he would take one look at her and
know.

The little boy came into the kitchen still dressed in his pajamas with the baseball pattern, rubbing sleep from his eyes. Jordan’s heart broke the moment she saw him.

“Hey, how’d you sleep?” she managed to ask, her voice sounding almost normal to her startled ears.

“Okay.”

“Do you want some cereal? You’ve got a lot to choose from,” she pointed out, remembering yesterday’s shopping spree. “There’s Trix, and Count Chocula, and Colonel Crunch…”

“It’s Cap’n Crunch,” he corrected around a yawn. “I’ll have that.”

“Coming right up.” She went to the cupboard to get the cereal. She had never been allowed to eat sweetened cereal as a child. Her mother had said it would rot her teeth, and Jordan had never been big on breakfast, anyway.

Now, as she poured a bowl for Spencer, she absently munched a few pieces of Cap’n Crunch. Then, without thinking, she prepared a bowl for herself, too, and sat down on the stool beside his.

“How come you’re eating that?” Spencer asked, his spoon poised over his own cereal.

“Because I’m hungry,” she lied.

She wasn’t hungry. Her stomach had been queasy
ever since last night. But she needed something to do. Somewhere to focus other than on the orphaned, unwitting little boy beside her.

“I thought you only ate healthy stuff,” he said.

“Not always.”

“But I only see you eat green stuff, and meat, and coffee.”

“I ate candy at the movies with you yesterday,” she reminded him.

“Oh, yeah.” He was looking at her with new respect. As if maybe there was hope for her after all.

They munched in silence. Jordan forced herself to swallow around the wave of grief that was threatening to gag her again. Suddenly, she was exhausted. All she wanted to do was go upstairs, crawl into her bed, and weep for her lost friend.

Instead, she had to sit here with this little boy who missed his mommy and had no idea that he was never going to see her again.

“Is Beau taking me to the zoo today?” she heard Spencer ask. His tone wasn’t very hopeful.

“Actually, he’s coming over here today,” Jordan said carefully. “I don’t know about the zoo.”

Spencer’s face lit up. “He’s coming over? Really? When?”

“Soon, I think.”

Seeing the spark of enthusiasm that had darted into Spencer’s brown eyes, Jordan could relate. She wished he would hurry up and get here. The mere promise of his presence at some point today had made the unbearable almost bearable.

She wondered how she would have gotten through last night without Beau.

Strange how somebody she had known for so short
a time could somehow be intrinsic to this most intimate, dramatic tragedy in her life.

Jordan tried telling herself that it wasn’t just Beau, that anyone who happened to come along at the inopportune—or opportune—moment would have made this kind of impact. She tried to believe that Spencer would have latched on to any man who stepped in and happened to know that kids prefer grape jelly to vegetables.

No, she told herself firmly, there was nothing special about Beau himself, or her sudden and intense link to the man.

Spencer was smiling, she realized as he crunched into another mouthful of cereal. Jordan wondered how much longer she could keep the truth from him. She knew he couldn’t read yet, but she had hidden the newspaper article beneath her mattress upstairs, lest he glimpse his parents’ photo and start asking questions.

If the murder of a Philadelphia attorney and his wife had made the national news on a slow news day, there was no telling what the media would do with the missing-child angle. If the case heated up and attention focused on the fact that Spencer might not have been on the boat with his parents, the police—and the killer, she realized with a chill—wouldn’t be the only ones on the lookout for the little boy.

“What’s wrong, Jordan?’

“Hmm?” She realized that Spencer was watching her with a worried expression that must mirror her own. “Nothing’s wrong, sweetie. Finish your cereal and then you can watch TV for a little while.”

“Can I watch the Disney Channel?
Out of the Box
might be on.”

“Sure,” she said reluctantly, realizing that she should
be keeping him away from television as well as newspapers. Not that there was any chance of a news story about his parents on the Disney Channel, but what if he got hold of the remote control and changed the station in a commercial? What if he stumbled across the horrifying truth before she broke it to him?

She would just have to keep him in her sight every minute. Which was exactly what she had planned to do, anyway. If whoever had murdered Phoebe and Reno was out there looking for Spencer, they’d only get to him over Jordan’s dead body.

Spencer was crying when Beau arrived at Jordan’s apartment just before noon.

All the way over here, his mind had whirled with details he’d left untended at his office. The work-related worries evaporated, and his heart sank when he saw the little boy’s tear-stained face peering around the doorway from the living room as Jordan opened the door wide to let Beau in.

“Hey, fella, what’s wrong?” he asked, stepping into the dim air-conditioned foyer and casting a worried glance at Jordan. Had she told the child about his parents’ deaths?

“She said we can’t go to the zoo,” Spencer sobbed.

Relief seeped into Beau as he tried to look suitably concerned. “ She did? Well, there must be a good reason for that.”

“There
is
a good reason,” Jordan said, closing the front door again and prudently locking the dead bolt and sliding the chain into its slot.

The telltale lines and shadows around her eyes betrayed what must have been a difficult night. She
looked exhausted. Her dark hair was carelessly caught up in a high, off-centered ponytail. She wore a rumpled-looking blue T-shirt and cutoffs. Her feet were bare.

She looks like a little girl,
Beau thought, forcing his attention away from her, knowing that if he didn’t, he might find himself reaching out to brush the strands of loose hair back from her face, the way he used to do with Jeanette.

“So what if it’s too hot out?” Spencer retorted. “That’s not a good reason. That’s a stupid reason! And she’s stupid!”

“Hey, take it easy, Spence,” Beau said, seeing the wounded look on Jordan’s face. “Jordan’s right. It’s much too hot to go to the zoo. The sun is beating down and it’s so humid it’s hard to breathe out there.” He wiped a trickle of lingering sweat from his forehead to accentuate the point.