One Fool At Least (13 page)

“He had Madeline kidnapped. Jim and Randy as much as told her so.”

“That may or may not be true,” he began, with a glance back at the house. “But you can’t think he killed a man.”

Ardmore thought it, though, I sensed it. We had confronted a father who feared for his son, and a son who feared for his father, despite their differences.

“I think it, and I’m going to prove it, so that I can look my wife in the eye and say I earned her some justice,” Jack practically spat at him, opening my door.

I climbed meekly in. Ardmore winked at me when I looked out the window. God, was this guy for real? There was nothing amusing about the scene we were living.

Jack said something else to him in a low tone, something I didn’t catch. Ardmore nodded, his eyes squinted against the sun. He took one last look at me and waved, then spun around and loped back toward the house.

“What did you say to him?” I asked, after Jack slammed into his side of the car.

His face was grim as he buckled in. “I said stay the hell away from my wife.”

That one silenced me for a while. “I’ve never seen you like this,” I said finally.

“I’ve never felt like this.” Jack turned the car around and then glared at the winding driveway, concentrating on its twists and turns.

“You kept calling me your wife. It was very sexy.”

He looked at me briefly, then looked back at the road. Unlike Ardmore, Jack wasn’t smiling at all today. “Why are you angry with me?” I asked.

His face softened. “I’m not. I’m not.”

“Hey, Jack? When you think someone’s a murderer, it’s best not to tell him you think that. Or to say that you plan to prove it and such.”

Jack sighed noisily. “I know. That was stupid. This whole thing, it just makes me feel so damn frustrated. I’ve never wanted to kill so many people. I’ve never wanted to kill anyone.”

“Make love, not war,” I said lightly.

A corner of his mouth lifted. “I want to make love
and
war.”

He turned out of Wilde’s gate and back onto the main road. We drove for a time in silence, brooding over our separate thoughts. I tried out my theory on Jack, that the father and son each suspected the other.

Jack nodded. “It could be. Wilde was acting strange, but not exactly guilty. More worried. Maybe you’re right, Maddy.”

“But if it’s true, they may well cancel each other out. If Ardmore’s worried about dad, that means Ardmore didn’t do it. And vice versa.”

Jack didn’t like that. Jack was looking forward to damning Damian Wilde, and I saw it on his face. I needed to distract him, to draw out the Jack I knew in Webley. Back home Jack. “I want a kiss,” I said.

He turned toward me with a wry smile. “Right now?”

“Yeah,” I said.

We had reached the main road and a solitary stoplight at a four way intersection. Jack put the car in park. “You look very pretty today,” he said, sliding his hands behind my neck.

“It’s the crutches,” I said, and his mouth pressed against mine. When I pulled away to take a breath, his face had almost returned to normal. I hugged him, and over his shoulder I saw a car speed by in the wrong lane. The driver looked intent, urgent.

“Jack,” I said. “That’s Ardmore.”

Jack’s head whipped left to look out the dashboard window. “Damn it,” he said.

His eyes were beseeching me, and his jaw was back out.

“Go ahead and follow him,” I said.

He dove back into his seat, threw the gear shift into drive, and the chase began.

Ardmore wasn’t hard
to catch, not with this new Jack at the wheel. I was starting to fear for all the other fragile bones in my body as Jack stomped on the accelerator, but we spied Ardmore soon enough at a red light closer to downtown Grand Blue. He had to slow down there, and he didn’t seem to realize that we were following him. He drove straight to Flanagan’s, which had a sign in the window reading, “We’re back open!” That seemed rather tactless to me, but I supposed business was business.

Ardmore parked his car and hustled in; Jack parked ours and turned to me. “Ready for some lunch?” he asked.

We were seated in the restaurant section, after Jack determined that Ardmore was nowhere in the bar. We assumed he must be in the “back room” that Slider had spoken of. Jack kept his eyes on the door of the bar, torn between his devotion to me and his desire to get revenge, to somehow make things right. I knew exactly how he felt, because despite my trauma, I couldn’t exorcise my curiosity about the whole matter, and I, too, wanted to see it resolved while we were here. Besides, for once Jack and I were on the same page; he wasn’t constantly begging me to stop investigating, because it was he who smelled blood now, he who had the eye of the hunter.

That eye perused the menu briefly, then handed it to the waiter, a young man who wore a black T-shirt and jeans, with a white apron tied around his waist. “What would you all like today?” he asked pleasantly.

“I’d like a grilled cheese,” I said. “And I’d like to express my condolences about the late Mr. Flanagan. Did you know him?”

The young man nodded grimly. “Finn was my brother.” It was the exact wording Slider had used the night before. I wondered if this young man knew about Slider. “This is a family business. It is now, that is. It was Finn’s, but he left it to the family, which is me. I’m Aidan. Our sister Colleen works here now, too.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said again.

He nodded, looking past me out the window. “It was a shock. A great shock. Finn was the oldest, and we looked up to him.” He smiled at me. His eyes were brown and warm. A woman brushed past with an order of drinks on a tray. She was dark-haired and pretty in a very thin way. “That’s Colleen,” he said. “She’s the one who looks the most like Finn.”

“But I thought—” Jack said.

I gave him a look, and he stopped. Could it be possible that Finn’s siblings didn’t know he was adopted?

“What was that?” asked Aidan Flanagan.

“Oh, nothing,” I said for Jack. “My husband is just hungry. We’re sorry to keep you; I know you must be busy.”

Aidan nodded, jotted down Jack’s order of a hamburger and a beer, and disappeared, looking not at all put out by my personal questions. He probably got a lot of them.

“Sorry,” Jack said. “That was the second dumb thing I did. I guess this detective stuff is not as easy as it looks.”

I brought my attention back to the table and observed Jack with affection. He hadn’t shaved, and the shadow on his cheeks added to his new persona, the tough character. It was attractive, I had to admit. You never want to see violence, of course, but it’s flattering to know that someone will punch someone else right in the face for you.

Aidan brought our drinks; Jack had ordered wine, and I a Diet Coke. I clinked my glass against his and said, “Happy Honeymoon.” He took a sip, smiling wryly.

“This isn’t what I wanted for you, Madeline.”

“I got what I wanted.”

The look that passed between us could have melted the snow off the tips of those ubiquitous mountains, now once again visible on the horizon. I finally broke eye contact, almost embarrassed and more than excited. “Wow,” I said. “That was better than chocolate.”

“Yeah.” Jack smiled rather smugly.

We sat for a moment, listening to the chatter of other diners, the clinking of knives and forks.

“The brother doesn’t know,” Jack said.

“Right.”

“That’s potential for conflict right there. Slider is family. That entitles him to a piece of the bar. He could go to court.”

“And yet Finn could have specified Slider in his will.”

Jack took a sip of wine. “I’m guessing Finn wasn’t planning to die at the age of—what—forty?”

“How sad.”

“So I’m guessing the sister, Colleen, doesn’t know either.”

“And yet—what if they did? What if they wanted to keep Finn from changing a will that included Slider? I wonder how much money the bar makes.”

Jack looked around. It was a nice place, with a certain rustic elegance, and there were few empty tables. “I’m guessing it makes a lot. Not to mention we don’t know what Finn already had in his bank account. If he was up to something that even interested Wilde, he may have made some significant money already.”

“How could we find that out?” I asked.

Jack smiled into his glass. “We’ll find a way.”

“Hey, you’re really taking to this whole investigative thing, aren’t you?” I smiled at him. A few moments later Aidan Flanagan appeared with our lunches. We thanked him and he moved off to another table.

The moment I bit into my grilled cheese I heard a sound like glass breaking; I stiffened, chewing slowly, looking around the room to see if other people had heard it. Jack certainly had, and the hand holding his beer paused midway to his mouth.

The next thing we knew, Ardmore came barreling out of the back room; he spoke briefly to Aidan’s sister, who went running to the house phone. She said something in her brother’s ear and he trotted out of sight. Ardmore spied us and charged to our table.

“Madeline, Jack! Did you see anyone go by out there?” He was glaring out at the view from our window seat; the mysterious back room would have basically the same vista. We looked out into the street: a woman walked past with a baby carriage and two youths went by on scooters. A police car was slowing down in front of the bar.

Jack stared at Ardmore, his fork still frozen in midair, and said, “No. What the hell happened?”

“I was looking around back there and someone took a shot at me. Through the window. I didn’t see a soul. What did you see?” he asked again, his eyes on me.

I had choked down my food, and now I wiped at my mouth with a napkin. “What were you looking for, Ardmore?”

“Just some paperwork. My dad thought he left it here. Now that they’re back open, I thought I’d ask if I could—”

A giant drop of blood fell on our table, and we all looked at it, surprised. I wasn’t quick in determining its source, and neither was Ardmore.

Finally Jack, with a roll of his eyes, said, “You’ve been shot.”

At first I thought he was talking to me, and I thought,
not again
. Then I noticed Ardmore. The sleeve of his T-shirt was torn, and blood dripped all the way down to his knuckles from a large wound in the flesh of his right upper arm. Ardmore turned his head and studied the wound. “Yeah, I felt something at the time. I guess I got so pumped up about who did it I forgot—shit!”

He stood there, glaring and thinking and bleeding.

With a muttered oath Jack stood up and examined the injury. “It’s deep,” he said. “But I think the bullet passed through. See, Madeline?”

He was trying to show me something through the gore. “I trust you,” I said.

He grabbed his napkin and wound it around Ardmore’s arm.

I was reminded of something I’d seen on the Nature Channel, when scientists were relocating grizzly bears from somewhere to somewhere else; I hadn’t been paying much attention; it was Jack’s show. One of the bears had to be shot with three tranquilizers, and it stamped along on its hind feet like an angry, hairy man until it finally fell with a thud into the dirt.

Now giant Ardmore was watching Jack bind his wound and mumbling “This changes things; this changes things.”

Colleen Flanagan came over, looking pale. “God, first my brother, and now this!” she said.

“Call an ambulance, if you haven’t already,” Jack said quietly.

She ran back to her phone, flapping her hands in the air as if to wave off bad juju. The customers all stared openly, murmuring amongst themselves.

Ardmore suddenly focused on me. “Listen, I thought I might know what was going on, but I don’t. And I’m thinking now that you might really be in danger.” He turned to Jack. “Maybe your whole family.”

Jack was still trying to tie the napkin into a bandage, and he pulled a bit too tightly. I saw Ardmore flinch. “What the hell do you know about any danger to my family?” asked Jack. “And what do you know about Madeline’s kidnapping?”

Ardmore pushed me over in my side of the booth and sat down, looking ready to confide. I met Jack’s eyes in disbelief. “Listen, maybe my dad was involved, I don’t know. But if he was, you’ll never pin it on him, and I’d have to say you’re wasting your time. But I’ll tell you this. My dad didn’t kill Finn Flanagan. He’d never kill Finn because—”

He paused, then shook his head. “Look, I can’t go into everything, okay? My dad is a good guy. Getting rich changed him a little, but he’s good at heart. He feels bad about what happened to you, and he feels terrible about what happened to Finn. He’d been spending a lot of time with Finn, getting to know him.”

“Why?” Jack asked.

Ardmore sighed. “He’d heard Finn didn’t have the best reputation. That he wasn’t always above-board with his finances, and that he was too irresponsible with the ladies.”

“So?” asked Jack, frankly disbelieving.

“Well, so he cared about Finn. He was trying to set him straight.”

“Why?” asked Jack, folding his arms across his chest.

Ardmore said nothing. He glanced at the growing bloodstain on the napkin around his arm.

I tapped him on his hand. “You know, I think your father suspects you of killing Finn.”

“He might,” Ardmore said, nodding.

“Why?” asked Jack, sounding like a broken record.

Ardmore shrugged. “My dad thought there was a whole Cain and Abel thing going on,” he said. “At least, he did that night.”

Jack sighed. He was tired of asking why.

“Ardmore,” I said. “Someone shot you! Who do you think it was? Why would someone want to hurt you? What are you hiding? And why does your dad think you would kill Finn?”

Ardmore nodded again, stretching out his legs under the table and cracking his knuckles. The blood on his hand was starting to dry. “There’s something that’s going to come out soon, when this whole thing breaks open. So I guess it’s okay to tell you.”

Jack looked at his watch. I smothered a laugh. It was surreal, sitting here with Ardmore and his bullet wound. “The fact is, I thought my dad was up to something with Finn. He’d been meeting with him a lot, and normally I butt out of his business, but…. Anyway, I confronted them both. This was the night Finn died. It turns out my dad wasn’t plotting anything. He was just trying to get to know Finn, forty years too late.”