The Second Lie (Immortal Vikings Book 2) (27 page)

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“The flowering currants work well, don’t they?” Christina’s assistant Marisol stepped back from the tin bucket filled with pink-flowered branches. The blooms Marisol had found growing wild in an alley and arranged on the lid of a surplus oak barrel expressed the Western vibe of Christina’s store and café, but more importantly, they filled a space where she no longer had enough fifty-dollar bottles to create a display.

“Thanks for thinking of them.” Christina hoped her only employee knew how much she valued her. Marisol had run the store while Christina was missing, then kept it running while she recovered. Two weeks after Christina’s return from England, they were again working side by side at the Double M. “You have a good eye for design.”

Not only had Marisol brought in armfuls of gorgeous spring branches, she’d also cut small thistles to create vignettes of spiky pink ball-shaped flowers for each of the half-dozen metal tables clustered near the windows. Christina absorbed the wrought iron and wood décor, the battered leather couch and the old farm tools turned into light fixtures. Morrison and Mancini was the collection fulfillment part of her business, while the retail store and café used the name Double M. The café’s logo resembled an MM brand etched in black and gold on the windows. Whether she kept this place solvent or not, and the latter was looking more likely each day, she’d always be proud of the work it represented. The Double M looked good, really good, and she had created it.

She reached to tuck her hair behind her ear, a motion she’d always used to occupy her hands, but the newly shorn strands resisted any style other than tousled. The radical pixie cut was the first change she’d made after returning to California. Given the uncertain state of her business, more changes were coming.

Every time Christina looked out the window, part of her expected to see a blond man with a lopsided grin and blue eyes. As soon as Ivar’s private plane had landed in the United States and Galan had been whisked away, Theresa had called to say Stig and Wulf had been rescued by British Coastguard.

In theory, Geoffrey Morrison could arrive at his own shop anytime he chose. The tears that threatened her vision confirmed that she had no clue what she wanted Stig to do. The only way she knew to stop staring out the store’s front window was to curl back in her bed, but when she hid at home, inevitably she remembered her insistence that he kill off Geoffrey Morrison. Work, even rearranging bottles for customers who weren’t arriving, was better than blaming herself for his absence.

“I’ll get the broom and dustpan.” Marisol headed for the storage closet, anxious to sweep up the petals that had floated to the ground, in order to stay busy.

Her employee must sense that much more than business problems had happened on Christina’s overseas trip, but she respected her boss’s privacy. No questions about the bruises that had taken a week to heal. No questions about Mr. Morrison, even though Marisol presumably wondered why she’d never met him before his name and photo appeared on the news. No questions, in fact, about anything, because they were both dancing around so many unspoken topics.

Marisol could count the lack of inventory deliveries or regular customers as easily as Christina could. She, even more than Christina, knew how the Napa wine community had buzzed over the reported kidnapping from Bodeby’s. No one in this town had missed the subsequent cancellation of the prominent London auction and the questions Bodeby’s had raised about the authenticity of several bottles.

As a result, Christina hadn’t sold two dozen bottles in the two weeks since she’d returned from England. She hadn’t received one request to provide wine for a catered event, when she’d usually been booked to choose and supply wine for five events a week from spring until summer. Her contacts didn’t answer her business calls. New stock had to be purchased at wholesale because the local wineries had stopped her direct access to special cases.

Morrison and Mancini was finished, even though Christina was richer than her wildest dreams. She had five million dollars in a Luxembourg bank, but the Double M was on life support. When she’d struck the deal for half of Stig’s payment from Ivar, she’d pictured a down payment on a vineyard of her own, space to make the winery of her dreams into reality. The first time she’d typed the Luxembourg account numbers and access codes to check all those little zeroes, she had whooped to her empty apartment. At night she watched the zeroes tick over into other numbers when daily interest accrued, not knowing what the hell else to do with an overseas bank account.

“Maybe we should move the couch off the wall to create a new flow through the space?” Marisol offered a suggestion that would disguise the changes that couldn’t be hidden, only delayed.

“Maybe we should go have lunch.”
Always eat first.
Stig almost seemed to speak out loud, his words sounded so clearly in her mind.
Deprivation leads to regret.
She didn’t want to think about him or any of his advice, since the man who knew enough to use the Double M’s address on his fake driver’s license presumably also knew her phone number, although she didn’t know his. Theresa had told her he was healing slowly from the Komodo’s bite, and that had carried her for the first week of silence, but two weeks without contact was a message every woman knew how to interpret—
he’s not that into you
—even if she couldn’t help thinking about him twenty times a day. “My treat. My personal credit card won’t be declined yet.” She needed cash flow.

The more expensive a thing is, the bigger trail it leaves.
An account the size of the one in Luxembourg would leave a swath as wide as the Sacramento Delta if she tried to use it. Internet research had convinced her that the Internal Revenue Service and the potential for money-laundering charges made her immigration problems look easy in comparison. Even if Stig didn’t want her anymore, unfortunately she needed his advice.

“Italian or burgers?” Christina asked as she flipped the Open sign to Closed, set the movable clock hands to show she’d be back in two hours and locked the door. “It’s a beautiful day to sit outside. What do you think?”

They settled on the sunny patio at Marisol’s favorite microbrewery. Frothy golden pints and sunglasses proclaimed them as two women with no afternoon commitments, rather than boss and employee. The hand-cut fries were possibly better than the ones she’d eaten in Belgium—
with Stig
—but the beer wasn’t quite as flavorful.

She forced her thoughts to leave the absent Viking by asking about Marisol’s mother. They didn’t talk business until after the thick angus burgers were reduced to drips on their plates. Another beer might make the discussion with her employee easier, or it might loosen her control until she became a needy woman crying about a lousy man who didn’t call, so Christina stared at the half inch of flat liquid remaining in her glass and declined a second round.

A change in Christina’s expression must have alerted Marisol that the next topic wasn’t going to be how to dance in wedge-heeled sandals, because the other woman looked at her lap.

“Have you started to polish your resume?” Christina asked softly. “You really should. I’ll review it for you, if you like.”

“No.” Marisol’s voice was tiny. “I love working at the Double M.”

“And I love having you. You’re a wonderful employee. And a great friend. But...”

Their conversation had been quiet, and chatter from other tables had grown louder as people ordered more rounds to enjoy in the warm afternoon sun. The voices of two women at a table behind Marisol carried well enough that it was impossible to ignore the spots where the other women’s conversation fell into lulls in their own.

“You know they must have slept together. Why else would she be involved in a scam like that? Her family’s loaded.”

Christina raised her hand to her temple but had to stroke the short strands flat since there was nothing to be tucked behind her ear. The two women couldn’t be gossiping about her, but her brain seemed to decide it was important to hear what was said next, because it erased all her other thoughts.

“Don’t you know?”

“What?” It wasn’t the rising tone of a genuine question, more the hushed sound of curiosity.

“She’s not really a Mancini.” All chance that the conversation was not about her vanished, along with the warm afterglow of sun and beer. “Her mother was the housekeeper. Frank Mancini was actually her stepfather.” There was a dramatic pause. The woman was good at enrapturing her audience. “I heard he forgot to make a will and she didn’t get a dollar. Everything went to her little brother, but Robert Mancini controls it.”

“Ohhhh.” There was a wealth of meaning in the three-beat stretch of that word.

Immobilized by the casual discussion of her private family life, Christina was grateful Marisol raised her hand and waved for the server.

“You moved here after all that, but it was a big, and I mean B-I-G—” her mother and Frank’s marriage wasn’t so scandalous that it deserved all capitals, “—deal. Robert wouldn’t attend the wedding, and he was on the parish vestry committee, so they decided to have it at the Mexican-Catholic church, not the Italian-Catholic one.”

“I had no idea.”

Twenty-two years in this community, but some bitch who ordered crappy chardonnay at a microbrewery and sent back a salad when the dressing wasn’t on the side wouldn’t forget the way her family started. What did a person have to do to belong? She could sit on this patio in the sun like any other woman enjoying the afternoon, and yet she wasn’t like them, not deep where it mattered, or at least not in their eyes.

Because she wasn’t
really
a Mancini. Big Frank hadn’t adopted her before her mother got sick, although he’d talked about it, and then they were always in and out of the hospital and trying to make normal memories, and more paperwork had been the last thing any of them thought about. Uncle Robert—why she gave him a family link in her mind, she didn’t know—had laughed over his brother’s mistake in the one face-to-face meeting they’d had during probate. Her brother at least received half the winery, but the only thing she was entitled to was the opportunity to raise Manny.

One thing stopped her from walking over to their table and dropping her business card in the center and offering a free tasting at the Double M. She’d love to see their eyebrows try to rise in their chemically immobilized wrinkle-free foreheads, but the thing that let her step-uncle get away with forcing her and Manny to allow him to run the whole winery, the thing that always stood between her and her future, that one thing that always stopped people like her from having a say, hadn’t changed.

Papers. The little blue folder with the gold seal of the United States of America. Worse than not being a Mancini was not being an American. She closed her eyes, grateful for the dark glasses so Marisol couldn’t see her tears.

Her friend stood. “Come on. We should get back to the store. Let’s pay on our way out.”

She stumbled after Marisol.

* * *

Marisol’s kindness carried Christina through the rest of the business day, although since lunch her sense of the inevitable had overwhelmed her almost to inertia. She understood the bleak emptiness in her chest stemmed from post-traumatic stress, a nickel-diagnosis she could make for herself, but that didn’t make it easier to puncture the dark circling thought balloons that warned her not only had she lost everything she’d ever worked for, she’d been abandoned by the first man who’d really understood her.

By six o’clock, the shadows of the crape myrtles reached almost to the line down the middle of the street as she walked to her apartment. She chose the sunny side of the sidewalk, but the swaying outlines chased her toward the door of her building.

No tears until she was in the privacy of her home, she vowed while she checked her mailbox. Two bills, nothing else. Nothing personal like a note or a letter.

As if Stig would commit himself to writing.

When she reached the second-floor landing, an odd smell permeated the stairwell, strong and chemical, like undiluted floor cleaner.

Nothing unusual was supposed to happen in this brick three-story bubble of sanity. She counted on her routine to keep the monsters corked in their bottle at the back of her mind. If she wanted to sleep for a few hours at night or pretend she was a normal person, not someone who’d been locked in an animal cage, her routine needed to stay predictable.

She slipped her keys between her fingers, letting the metal tips protrude from her fist. She tried to see higher. “Hello?”

She waited on the landing, keys raised in front of her body, until her arm shook with the stress of being elevated in one position for too long. No one was upstairs. She crept up two steps, then three, and eventually turned the corner.

The thing waiting for her wasn’t a person.

A painting leaned against the door to her apartment. The warm colors pulled more light into her end of the hall than the afternoon rays through the far window provided. As she ascended the last few stairs, she realized the canvas was waist-high and about six feet wide, large enough to dominate an entire wall and the most beautiful damn thing she’d ever seen outside a museum, as beautiful as any of the paintings in Stig’s underground vault.

The lush portrayal of three field workers among grapevines was his work. She didn’t need an art history degree to know that the three figures, one of them a woman with dark hair held back by a blue kerchief, echoed a Biblical scene. A single strong beam of light in the painting came from the setting sun in the upper left of the canvas. It cast the workers’ shadows toward the right corner, where the viewer was positioned, and created an area of highlights amid mysterious shadows, like the Caravaggio paintings he’d shown her under London. She’d researched Caravaggio last week on the internet, studied each image and spotted Stig’s and Ivar’s features in different paintings. His art had opened a window into who he’d been five hundred years ago. She could see the crazy boredom and confusion that led him into wasting his talent and opportunities crying from each of his Caravaggio paintings, the hands held out to the viewer, the old saints at peace and the young ones tortured. Yes, he was an amazing artist.