True Blend (13 page)

“Thank you,” Amy whispers before taking Grace’s hand and leading them to the hansom cabs circling The Green. When Grace reaches out to touch one of the horses, George lifts her up onto his shoulders to give her a good view of the animals. He holds her ankles as she leans close to touch the fur, laughing when a horse’s skin quivers beneath her tentative touch.

“Which one do you like best?” he asks Grace, and she points to a jet-black horse pulling a white carriage with red leather seats. So he pays for a double ride around the festivities, lifts Grace off his shoulders and sits her on the seat, Bear in her lap. He and Amy sit across from her beneath the carriage canopy, out of the sun and away from the crowds.

“How are you doing with all this?” he asks Amy.

“We’re having a great time. It actually feels good to be out for a change.”

George sits back beside her. Sawhorses barricade car traffic from the streets surrounding The Green, leaving only the horses and buggies making their rounds. Big carriage wheels turn on the gritty pavement and the horse hooves clop in a slow, easy rhythm. Many of the surrounding colonial homes are registered with the Historical Society. Widows’ walks top some roofs closer to the cove. George pictures captains’ wives keeping a lookout for their husbands’ ships returning from sea trade back in the eighteenth century. Tall oaks looking to be as old as the homes, their towering limbs stretching far over the street, throw large pools of shade below.

All the while he never stops being aware of Amy beside him, their bodies shifting slightly with the carriage ride. After the first trip around The Green, the swaying motion lulls Grace. Amy reaches across to lift her and Bear onto the seat beside her, and Grace sleeps curled in the corner. If only he could reassure Amy, if he could tell her that her daughter was fed that day, and had a blanket. Elliott told Nate she watched a cartoon movie and napped. She played and talked with Angel. Any guns were put away once their purpose was met in obtaining the truck.

But he can only pick up the pieces from here. The carriage veers onto Main Street and heads toward the cove, passing a large old barn and historic homes gracing the entranceway to the serene inlet off the Connecticut River. Clusters of wildflowers grow from gaps in a colonial-era stone wall fencing off surrounding woods; old maple trees shade weathered picnic tables; sailboats drift on the calm, silver water, their sails sun-bleached white. The carriage wheels crunch over the stones in the packed dirt parking area.

“Is he supposed to drive down here?” Amy asks.

“Only under special circumstances.”

“And I’m guessing you convinced him this was special?”

“Yes, I did. There’s something soothing about the water. An old beach friend once told me it cures what ails you.”

Amy looks out at the little harbor. “I haven’t been here in a while,” she says as the carriage slows. “Grace and I like to have a picnic lunch under the trees and feed the ducks.”

Their driver pulls up on the reins, sets the brake and steps off the carriage. “Okay, folks. You’ve got a few minutes.”

The horse shifts its weight while the driver stays close by, skimming a few stones on the water. A brown timber barn, the old Christmas Barn gift shop, stands on a gentle hill beyond the cove’s far shore. Someone hung a large flag covered with painted strawberries over its doorway for the festival. The water stretches before them reflecting the blue sky on its surface, its ripples catching sparkles from the high afternoon sun.

“Why can’t it just be this?” Amy asks.

The scent of flowers and dew and spring fill the air. Grace sleeps deeply in the sweet warmth, beneath the shade of the carriage’s white walls. And so George wonders what more Amy is seeing, or feeling. “What do you mean?” he asks.

“This spring day … It’s beautiful. But so was that day at the bank,” she continues softly. “So peacefulness is deceptive. The sun and sky looked just like this. Everything seemed perfect, but it wasn’t.”

“Well today it is. It really is, Amy,” George assures her. “I know it’s hard for you to trust it, but it’s all how you choose to see it.” His arm reaches around her shoulder and she closes her eyes with his touch. “Don’t block it out,” he says. “Look at me.”

Amy does, then looks away, out at the lapping water. They sit silently and it only makes him more aware of her, of her breathing, of her anxiety, of the strawberry sweatshirt draped over her back, of why he’s a part of her life, of the moment their hands met in a bank parking lot. The lengthening silence intensifies every truth in his mind and so he tries to change it. His fingers graze her cheek, turning her face back to him. “You can find the good. You have so much already, but can’t see it clearly right now.”

She still doesn’t talk, but this time, she doesn’t look away. This time, they closely watch each other until his fingers light on her cheek and he leans closer, pressing his lips to hers. Just for a moment, just lightly. Just until he realizes that if he’s being watched, this kiss brings the crime to an entirely new territory. One that Reid, Elliott and his brother will never accept. And so he closes his eyes, raises his other hand to Amy’s face and cups it as his kiss deepens for only a moment longer, long enough to feel her hair against his hands, long enough to feel her breath catch as she kisses him back, long enough for his inhale to be regretful when he pulls away, his hands still holding her face as she whispers his name. She takes one of those hands and sits back watching him until the horse nickers and stamps its foot, the driver turning back to them then.

*  *  *

They eat sweet sausage sandwiches and pink cotton candy, listen to a local swing band and ride the carousel. Later they run into Celia and her husband Ben, so Amy introduces them over strawberry shortcake and coffee together, with Ben and George talking up the latest baseball stats. George doesn’t take her and Grace home until Amy uses all the stimulation she can from the festival, keeping her daughter awake and alert until the end of the day. She fears that Grace’s new tendency to sleep stems from her inability to process the crime. Dr. Brina’s comment has stuck. Grace hasn’t cried at all, hasn’t screamed or even had a temper tantrum. Is it all bottled up inside her little body, tiring her?

Relieved to finally be back in her farmhouse, Amy puts Grace to bed before sitting on the living room sofa and pouring two iced teas. George’s voice comes to her from the kitchen, where he checks in with Dean on her telephone. She sips her drink and walks to the front windows, looking out at the evening. A violet horizon hangs over the western sky, beyond the old farm at the end of the street.

“I need to tie up three roasts tomorrow?” George asks. “Okay, I’ll stop in tonight and pull them from the freezer.”

The resonance of his voice reaches her. She listens closely and finds comfort in its sound. Maybe it is because of the perfect day he arranged. Or maybe it is the sunset and the coming summer with its possibilities.

“How about the flank steaks? Did the sale move those?”

Amy touches the cold glass to her cheek, listening, feeling the very idea of him. She hears his intonations with crystal clarity, imagining that this must be what is meant by a blind person’s acute hearing compensating for their loss of vision. His solitary voice, and the assurance of it, has grown familiar now.

“No wonder. It’s a good barbecue weekend.”

There are quiet pauses when he listens to Dean. She thinks of his kiss at the cove, and listening to his voice feels intimate now.

“Cripe, not again,” George says from the kitchen. “Damn it, that machine’s got to go.”

And just like that, every heightened sense stands on red alert. Setting her glass down on the table, she hugs her arms around her waist and reminds herself what she has come to realize through all this.

Nothing is what it seems. Nothing. It is
George
standing in the kitchen, George Carbone,
not
one of the kidnappers. She stays at the window and listens to hear his voice again, to hear George. Not the man she had confronted in the parking lot.

“Amy? Is something wrong?” George slowly turns her away from the window.

She hesitates, shaking her head. “It’s nothing, really.”

“What do you mean? You seem upset.”

She reaches the back of her hand to his face, to know it’s him, and he folds his hand over it. “I guess I’m still having a hard time with this.”

“With this.” After a pause, he asks, “With us?”

“No.”

“Okay.” He gently releases her hand and walks to the sofa, watching her.

“I heard you talking,” she admits.

“To Dean?”

“Yes.” She turns to the window again, her arms still folded around her. “It’s silly, really. It’s something you said.”

“Me?”

She glances at him as he lifts his iced tea. He looks tired. Warm June air brings out a wave in his dark hair while the dim lighting shadows his face. “George,” she says as she moves to the sofa. She sits beside him, remembering that she’s sitting safe in her own home, on her acre of land with a new tire swing hung outside waiting for beautiful moments with her daughter. It isn’t fair to think of George, the kind man for whom she finds herself caring, in the same thought as the man who struggled for Grace’s shoe. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Just tell me what’s bothering you.”

Amy stares at him. “Cripe.”

A long moment comes between them, as though he is waiting for more. “I don’t get it,” he finally responds.

“Cripe. You said it on the phone. And one of the kidnappers said that same word to me.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I was talking with Dean about an old meat grinder. It’s on the fritz.”

Angel scampers across the living room floor, a scrap of fur alive with energy. “Apparently the kidnapper said it in front of Grace, too,” Amy tells him. “I hear her say it sometimes.”

“Grace says it?”

She nods and takes his hands in hers, running her thumb over his calloused skin. “It’s okay. You didn’t know.”

“Are you sure that’s the word?”

“I remember everything he said, George. I’ve heard it a thousand times in my head since then. But it’s how he said it, like he was trying to help me.
Cripe, just give them the hour
. As though that’s all it would take and then everything would be over.” She closes her eyes and feels her knees scraped raw, feels that day. “I don’t know if giving them the hour was a bargain with the devil or with God, but sometimes, like right now, there are moments when it feels like the bargain will never end.”

Twelve

DETECTIVE HAYES TRIES TO LINK the pieces. Somewhere, beneath a clip or in a handwritten margin note or in the shadow of a photograph, an implication waits to spring out at him. When Officer Pine leans against the door jamb to the closet-sized office, Hayes looks up from the folders, papers, photographs and scribbled notes, clipped and labeled and filed and stapled in neat piles.

“What do you have?” Pine asks.

“One of two things.”

“Number one?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Right. A crime transpired in mere minutes in an empty parking lot. There are no witnesses other than the victims. I have a stolen armored truck loaded with four million dollars because the banks were stacking the vaults that day. The truck proceeded on its merry way to its next scheduled stop so as not to attract any attention. Successfully, too, I might add. Currently being rechecked for prints and any hair, fabric threads, fingernails. Anything. I have four perpetrators, faces brilliantly concealed, though all appeared to be Caucasian, as best as can be deciphered, maybe thirty to fifty in age.”

“Well now. That narrows things down.”

“The weapons are a real help, too,” Hayes adds. “Forty-fives and nine-millimeters. As common as peppermint gum. And I have an unaccounted-for block of time between the robbery and the return of the kid. No clues, no witnesses, no evidence. They just vanished. And don’t forget the victims. Two armed truck employees, the driver and the hopper, dismantled in less than sixty seconds. Not enough time to garner details. I have a distraught young mother, widowed, with unclear memory except for flashbacks. I have a butcher who stumbled upon the kid in a shady parking lot at dusk. Minimal to zilch visibility. Oh. And I have a two-and-a-half-year-old child hostage who has stopped talking.”

“Okay. Nothing. What’s the second possibility?”

“Perfection. They pulled off the perfect crime. A heist in an empty parking lot with no witnesses, knowledge of the armored truck schedule that buys them time, perfect masks, typical clothes every other guy out there is walking around in, a stricken widow, a hostage drop in the worst light of day, and oh yeah, my best witness can’t talk.”

“Don’t forget the cat.”

“Right. Which the humane society and local shelters have no record of.”

“So how’s it perfection?”

“It’s the domino effect,” Hayes explains. “Every vague, indistinct fact, from the use of a child to the lighting of the day, was intentional, falling right into place and bumping the creeps to their destination, probably on a tropical island right about now. I’m sure there are dominoes that I’m not seeing, but the ones that I do see flipped down and around, up and down like magic, every single one moving the crime unimpeded along its path.”

“I guess we need to find more dominoes.”

“Yeah.” Hayes turns to glance out the window behind him when a motorcycle thunders past outside. “One that twisted a little when it fell.”

Amy gathers her purse, stands and straightens her skirt. She’s heard enough. She stopped in at the police department on a whim, hoping to inquire about any progress in the investigation since she’d been fingerprinted over a week ago. When the receptionist sat her in this empty office adjoining Hayes’ until he was free, Amy had no idea she would hear the full truth laid out. When the motorcycle blows past, she takes a resigned breath, walks out of the office, down the hallway, and out the Exit door without saying a word to Hayes. There would be no point in hearing the stacks of paper rifled through again, no point in photographs being unclipped from forms, no point in hearing another version of the same explanation that they’ve got nothing.