Taken In (22 page)

Tori had just emerged aboveground at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street when her phone started ringing, a cruel reminder that the alone time her friends had insisted she take was only good for as long as people allowed her to be alone.

The ringing continued as she crossed the street and followed a stretch of sidewalk that was becoming all too familiar in much the same way the Big Apple as a whole was becoming much too familiar.

She missed Milo.

She missed her job.

She missed her bed.

She missed her cottage.

She missed Georgina and Melissa.

Yet now, thanks to her three distinct strikeouts earlier in the day, the prospect of going home was farther away than ever.

The phone silenced, only to begin ringing again.

One ring.

Two ring.

Three rings.

Midway through the fourth ring, she gave in to its intrusiveness, if for no other reason than to make it stop once and for all.

“Hello?”

“Hey, sugar, it’s me.”

She managed a small smile in spite of her foul mood. “I’m on my way.”

“Hallelujah!”

“I don’t know why you’re Hallelujah-ing. This is a colossal waste of time and we both know it.”

“You’ll have a reprieve from the ongoing war between Rose and Leona, right?”

“Theirs would be preferable to the one going on in my own head,” she mumbled between footfalls.

“You’re enjoying the quiet calm that is New York City in the early evening at this exact moment, are you not?”

“I’m not. I’m on the phone . . . with you.”

“You’ll be surrounded by books and booklovers once you finally get here, yes?”

“I suppose.”

“And, sugar, you’ll be with me, Charles—your personal ray of sunshine during your darkest hours.”

Her laugh lasted all of about five seconds. “I don’t know why I let everyone talk me into going to this dumb book club. It doesn’t matter if Barbara “Steely Eye” Letts was spying on John and Dixie from behind a potted plant or sitting at the table
with
them—she doesn’t match the description of the person pounding on his door and threatening to rip him limb from limb the previous night.”

“So? She didn’t match the description the entire time she was on the list yet you kept her there.”

“That’s because she was at the Waldorf that morning . . . and near the crime scene that afternoon . . . and you were able to place her as one of John’s cons . . . and she had the opportunity in the bathroom that morning to slip the piece of ripped scarf into Dixie’s purse.”

“And none of that holds anymore?”

She stopped several feet shy of the next corner and pressed her back to the concrete wall that separated the sidewalk from the park. “I—I guess it still does . . .”

“Of course it does, Victoria. John Dreyer conned a lot of women. That means he earned himself a lot of enemies along the way. There’s no reason the one who pounded on his door the night before has to be the one who pushed him to his death the next day.”

Charles was right.

Ms. Steely Eye had made her way onto the top of Tori’s personal suspect list for a reason. It was time to stay the course, not abandon ship.

She crossed the street at the light and turned right and then left, the McCormick’s sign midway up the block returning the brief smile from earlier to her lips. “Okay, I’m coming up on the store right now. I’ll see you in a few.”

*   *   *

Tori settled into a folding chair just over Steely Eye’s left shoulder and took a moment to really breathe.

So much of the past few hours had been about keeping up an encouraging pretense for her friends while simultaneously trying to hold back any sign of the panic that was threatening to paralyze her every thought. But now that she was there, away from her friends and barely more than an arm’s length away from her lone remaining suspect, she needed to be sharp. Ready.

Charles’s Academy Award–worthy greeting when she’d walked through the door had been a big help in clearing her head, of course, but now that the book club was moments away from starting, he seemed preoccupied.

Charles is fine . . . focus on Steely Eye. She’s Dixie’s ticket to freedom . . .

“She better be,” she mumbled.

Ms. Steely Eye glanced in Tori’s direction but turned away as Vanny joined the group. “So what did everyone think? Is it truly possible to find love after sixty-five?”

A wisp of a woman with white, cottony hair two seats down from Tori nodded emphatically. “Of course it’s possible. You read all the little pieces, those women were just like all of us or”—the woman winked at Tori and Vanny—“the majority of us anyway. They, too, had been resigned to the fact that they were going to live out the rest of their life alone, just like I was before reading this.”

“You really think this book changed your outlook?” Vanny posed.

“I finished the book four days ago. Three days ago, I joined an over-sixty-five exercise group that meets three mornings a week for a nice, long walk in the park. There’s at least a half-dozen men in there who are single, just like me. They’re out there, they really are.”

“Oh, they’re out there, all right.”

Tori heard the edge in Ms. Steely Eye’s voice and slid forward on her chair as Vanny turned her focus in the same direction. “You say that with a good deal more skepticism, Barbara. Do you disagree with Mr. Rollins’s book?”

“Disagree?”

She caught Charles’s raised eyebrow behind the counter and knew the woman’s bristling response wasn’t in her imagination. Ms. Steely Eye was agitated, though at what exactly, Tori couldn’t quite be sure.

“No, I suppose there are women who manage to find good men. The personal stories sprinkled throughout the book that Mavis just mentioned prove that. But let’s not forget the other stories, too.”

Tori looked down at Rose’s copy of the book and then back up at Ms. Steely Eye. “Other stories? What other stories?”

Ms. Steely Eye became Ms. Exasperated Eye. “Did you read the book, young lady?”

Her face warmed at the answer she was forced to give. “I read most of it.”

Ms. Exasperated Eye became Ms. Rolled Eye.

Vanny waited for Barbara’s inaudible mutterings to stop before addressing Tori with an encouraging smile. “That’s okay, it happens to all of us at some point or another. How far did you get?”

She located the end of her bookmark and then opened the book to its marked page. “I had to stop two chapters shy of the end.”

Ms. Rolled Eye reclaimed her title of Ms. Steely Eye. “Then you read the stories I was referencing. The ones from the viewpoint of a real live, silver-haired con man.”

Confusion pulled Tori’s focus back to the book and the final chapter she’d read before giving in to sleep. “Those were just conjecture on the part of the author . . . to illustrate the kind of men who might see fit to prey on a lonely soul.”

Ms. Steely Eye released a disgusted sigh. “Readers today disgust me. If it’s not something they can watch on a movie screen or get a synopsis of from Ledge Notes, they just can’t follow what’s going on.”

All her life, Tori had prided herself on being fairly even-tempered. Did she get scared? Certainly. Did she get frustrated? More times than she cared to count. Did she imagine clever retorts she wished she’d uttered at appropriate times in life? All the time. But until that moment, the sharp-tongued ones had always been confined to her imagination.

“Barbara, right?” Without waiting for a confirmation head nod from Ms. Steely Eye, she took the one offered by Vanny and a sheepish Charles and unleashed every ounce of frustration she’d been harboring since Dixie was led from her room by Officer Pollop. “Say the name of virtually any author you’ve ever read and I’ll tell you the names of their books. Utter the name of a favorite character and I’m fairly certain I can tell you not only the book that made them famous but also the author who brought him or her to life.

“And while I can tell you which ones were made into movies, my knowledge comes from my lifelong love of books and my chosen career as a
librarian
.”

The silence that met her first-ever tirade was quickly drowned out by the pounding in her ears and the mental chastising in her head.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get so . . . so—”

Ms. Steely Eye became Ms. Misty Eye and then Ms. Closed Eye, before returning to Ms. Steely Eye with a lot less steel. “No, I’m the one who’s sorry. I shouldn’t have said what I did. I guess I’m just so disgusted by this.” Barbara waved Gavin’s book in the air then slammed it onto the empty chair to her left. “What a fool I was to pay twenty-eight ninety-five to the same person who stands to earn millions off my foolishness!”

“We don’t want you to be unhappy with your book, Barbara, you know that.” Vanny rose from her chair and walked toward the book, stopping shy of her intended destination with the help of Barbara’s hand.

“No. I bought the book because I was curious, just like everyone else. The foolishness I’m speaking about was falling for the trap Mr. Rollins set in order to write the damn thing in the first place.”

Tori looked to Charles for any sort of indication he was following what was going on, but the confusion on his face told her otherwise. “Gavin Rollins set a trap for you?”

Barbara closed her eyes again, this time leaving them closed as she began to speak words that sounded vaguely familiar. “‘You caught me today. Caught me red-handed as we walked past your apartment. At first I tried to play it off, to introduce you to my latest target in such a way neither of you would be the wiser, but it didn’t work. I’d like to say the near eardrum-shattering tirade that ensued taught me a valuable lesson, but it didn’t. I am a con man and lonely, rich women are my con.’”

“Wait. That’s one of the scenarios Gavin talked about in the book.” Tori flipped to the correct page, compared Barbara’s words with those on the page, and then looked up to find Barbara’s eyes still closed.

“It wasn’t a scenario, it was a firsthand account, just like the ones earlier in the book from women who found love after sixty-five.”

“But those ones from the women were italicized . . .” She held the book into the path of the overhead light only to discover yet another pitfall of reading until six thirty in the morning.

“And so were the ones from John.”

She heard Charles’s gasp, knew it was an echo of her own. “John? As in John Dreyer?”

Barbara opened her eyes to release a single tear from each one. “He was writing about me in the entry I just recited.”

She tried to make sense of what she was hearing, but it was too much. It simply didn’t fit. To prove it, she flipped to the copyright page that listed the current year. “But Barbara, if the book was released last month, it was in production for at least a year and took at least a year before that in order to be written.”

“I met John two years ago this past January. Trust me . . . it’s me.”

She shot a questioning look in Charles’s direction. “Two years?”

“What can I say?” Charles shrugged. “I’m good with faces . . .”

She swallowed over the lump in her throat and the realization that she didn’t want John’s killer to be Ms. Steely Eye anymore. The woman had been hurt and humiliated enough.

Still, she had to know.

“Did—did you push him off that balcony, Barbara?”

This time Charles’s gasp was echoed by Barbara instead of Tori. “Good God, no! Why would I do that? I needed him . . . I needed him as proof that Gavin Rollins is making a sport out of humiliating older women and then turning around and making millions off countless others just like them!”

“But I saw you that morning. You were at the Waldorf spying on my friend who was having breakfast with John. Then I saw you again, later that afternoon, by John’s apartment.”

“I was gathering proof. I was going to take my pictures and my suspicions to the newspapers and the news stations and watch that man’s career explode in front of his face.” Barbara tried to steady her breathing, but to no avail. “I wanted John’s help, and after seeing the way he was with your friend, I thought maybe he’d see my proposal as a chance to get out . . . to change his ways before he ended up all alone just like the women he was being paid to con. But—”

Tori knew Barbara was still speaking, even knew it was probably something she should be listening to, but it was hard to hear over the clanging in her head.

Being paid to con . . .

Being paid to con . . .

John wasn’t making his money from the women he met on the Internet. Not the bulk of it anyway.

Sure, maybe he stuck around long enough to get a few nice gifts and eat in a few fancy restaurants, but the bulk of his money came in the form of a steady paycheck. For services rendered.

“Victoria, did you hear what she just said?”

At the sound of her name, she turned toward Charles, only to have her eyes guided back toward Barbara by his index finger.

“No. What did I miss?”

“Barbara left the bathroom before Dixie did that morning. She used those moments alone with John to tell him what she was going to do. He told her not to bother, that she didn’t need to tell the world she’d been conned. He said he’d e-mailed Gavin the night before telling him it was time to stop. He was tired of hurting women. He said it had started out as a game years ago but became something far too big when he met Gavin. He told him it had to stop or he’d have to come clean—for both of them.”