True Blend (5 page)

“Can someone please take me home?”

*  *  *

George is fully aware that as a self-employed tile man, Nate sometimes accepts supplies of custom tile at his home, storing them in his cellar for a later installation in an exclusive foyer or state-of-the-art kitchen. So a van backed up to his garage is a common sight. Elliott safely meets them there as planned and once the packages on the van are moved to Nate’s garage and basement, they stand just outside and arrange to get together again later to handle the money’s distribution. But for now, everything is about returning to routine.

“What about the girl?” George asks from the rear seat of the van, where he’s watched and waited the entire time with the child. Where his heart hasn’t stopped racing and he’s finding it hard to breathe. Her silence worries him. Mopping the perspiration off his still-concealed face, he approaches Reid who just got on the van and sits in the driver seat, waiting to leave with Elliott. “We’ve got to get her back. Cripe, there’ll be a dragnet looking for her.”

“It’s all under control,” Reid answers. His tone has changed, as though he knows now. George won’t tolerate any threats. “You two just get yourselves to that casino so you won’t be missed by your friends. Go inside here first and clean up. You’re a wreck, Carbone.”

It feels like physical exertion, the way George must force his thoughts to think one step ahead of Reid. “But how are we returning the girl? I’m not going anywhere unless she’s safe.”

“Listen, I can assure you that child will be well taken care of. Actually, her safety is paramount to keeping things running smoothly until she’s returned. But we need you to spend a few hours gambling, having your face seen and building a credible alibi at the casino before that return can happen.”

“What? And leave her alone with you? Where are you taking her?”

“Jesus, I can’t tell you that, okay? The less you know, the better. All I can tell you is that she’s safe. Don’t you understand? I’m assuring you she’ll be fine, that we only needed her to buy us the time. So the sooner you get going, the sooner we can release her.”

George glances out at Nate and Elliott talking in the driveway, then steps behind Reid. “And exactly how is she getting back to her mother?”

When Reid looks up to the rearview mirror, George’s eyes lock onto the reflection. “Relax, Carbone. I told you,
you’re
the one who will deliver her later. We can’t trust a stranger to do it, it’s too risky. You’ll be minding your own business running ordinary errands and shit will happen. We’ll get the girl to you, nice friendly George Carbone who runs that happening delicatessen downtown. Everybody likes George, right? Who’d suspect anything?”

“It’s all right, George,” Elliott says, coming up behind him from the van’s rear doors.

George turns back to Elliott. Can he trust him? And does he have to go along with more orders to protect the girl? When does that all end?

“I’ll keep this guy in line,” Elliott says. “The girl will be fine. The sooner we get her back, the better. Just get going with your brother and build that alibi so this isn’t all pinned on you.”

They’re all standing at the edge of something, but George doesn’t know what that edge is yet, or exactly where it is, so he can’t cross anyone. He turns away again and pulls the hosiery completely off his head, pushing his hand back through his wet hair. It’s not good, what this is doing to the child and her mother. “Just how am I supposed to return her after all that’s gone down?”

“Hey,” Reid says. “She hasn’t seen your face. And you’ll be freshly showered after a day at the slots, wearing clean clothes, acting concerned and all. She’s what? Three, maybe? She’ll never recognize you. Your brother will give you instructions on the way back from the casino. He knows what to do. And once the media catches wind of your part in the rescue, you’ll be a God damn hero.”

Reid’s narrow eyes, the shadowed chin, a recent haircut, the composed demeanor, all of it becomes clear memory to George as he studies him. “So help me,” he finally insists. “If any harm comes to her, if I suspect anything when I see her again, and I
will
see her again, you’ll be all done. I’ll use every cent I earned today to hunt you down.” He puts a finger beneath Reid’s chin and tips his face up until Reid slaps it away. “All this money will be for nothing,” George continues, “because I’ll put you through the meat grinder at my shop, piece by piece, if you so much as touch her.”

Nate steps onto the van in time to hear the threat. He’d already removed the hosiery from his head and cleaned up his face. “Come on, guy,” he says, grabbing George by the arm. “Let’s cool off.”

George wrenches out of Nate’s hold and looks at the girl in the back of the van. Elliott is crouched near her, opening a box brought in from the car he’d driven from the bank. A tiny kitten pokes its head through the flap and looks out wide-eyed. George shoves the hosiery from his face into his windbreaker pocket, then scoops up Reid’s forty-five from the passenger seat. His only intent through all of this has been to return the girl safely. He’s not too certain about much of this day, but is certain that one less weapon in her presence will help. He notices how easily he picked up the gun now. So that’s certain, too, how he’s already changed.

Four

HOURS LATER, CASINO LIGHTS AGGRAVATE George’s headache. He leaves the others at the slot machines and goes to the race room, watching thoroughbreds run on the fifty-foot projection screen. Eventually his brother shows up there. Nate walks with a swagger suited to his fitted bomber jacket, jeans, sunglasses clipped to his shirtfront, and, George figures, to his new bankroll. He sinks into the chair beside him.

“Steve and Craig are at the tables. Let’s play a hand of cards. Normal, you know?”

George knows; he gets it already. Normal means playing a few hands with their weekly poker night partners. But is it normal to not concentrate? He can’t finish one complete thought; he can’t get the girl out of his head.

“The eye in the sky’s got to see us,” Nate tells him.

“The what?”

Nate leans close. “Ceiling surveillance cameras. They’re at all the tables. Come on, we’ve got to get filmed. It’s our alibi.”

Every angle’s covered. Every defense considered. George goes along with the plan for a while longer, until his vision fails. No one knows it but him, the way it becomes impossible to read the dice or play a decent card hand. Under the threat of his own screw-ups drawing attention, he heads for the bar in a dark lounge.

“Jack and Coke,” he tells the bartender.

In minutes, Nate slips into the chair beside him again. “It might help your alibi if you strike up a conversation with a woman, look friendly. Be seen, you know?”

Nothing will erase the image of the only woman on his mind. An afternoon is time enough to leave her child and a kitten in the care of Reid and Elliott. In one long swallow, he finishes his drink and turns to Nate.

“Either you’re driving me back right now or I’ll find my own way. We’ve got to get that girl to her mother.”

Nate turns around and leans his back against the bar. “No. What we’ve got to do is act like we’ve got nowhere to go. You’re taking a day off, remember?”

A news report on the television behind the bar interrupts them. They look up at the mounted set. “The sleepy town of Addison, Connecticut was rocked this morning by its worst crime in decades. Police are on the hunt for four men who orchestrated an armored truck heist from a local bank parking lot. Two armored truck employees were overpowered at gunpoint, while a child kidnap victim was taken hostage to secure the vehicle.” The news reporter goes on to talk briefly with the bank manager while the camera pans first the community of well-kept homes, manicured lawns and parks, then the bank parking lot still roped off with yellow crime tape. “The suspects fled the bank location in the armored truck, which has since been located. This is a very active investigation, with Addison detectives still on the scene piecing together details, but two-year-old Grace Trewist has yet to be found,” the reporter concludes. A recent photograph of the child fills the screen. “Her mother, Amy Trewist, has not come forward to speak, and the suspects are still at large and considered armed and dangerous.”

George stands. Grace Trewist’s mother is not physically able to speak publicly. They had seen to that when they disabled her in a few brief minutes. Completely undid her. He wrenches his brother from his seat and gives him a restrained shove, one that draws no notice from the staff, toward the Exit door.

*  *  *

At least one police officer waits in her kitchen; another two walk the perimeter of the farmhouse. Roadblocks keep the media off her street and Detective Hayes assures Amy they are following all leads to locate Grace. Everything takes time. But she can no longer watch the silent telephone, willing the kidnappers to call, cursing them in one breath, bargaining with the heavens in the next. She can no longer listen to updates from Hayes. The armored truck had been found abandoned at another bank, but with the public being unaware of the crime for the first critical hour, no one paid attention to its occupants. No clues are uncovered. The gunmen have tied every loose thread.

So she changes into blue jeans, a white oxford shirt and leather sandals, pulls her hair back in a low clip and goes out to her gown room where she always finds a certain peace. A stone rabbit doorstop holds the green wooden door open and sunlight warms the stone floor. The room had been tacked onto the rear of the farmhouse over the stone patio and was originally used as a garden room. But when she and Mark renovated, they transformed it into her bridal storage room. Tulle veils and satin sashes hang from vintage garden tool racks; beaded necklaces drape from a rustic rake head mounted on the wall; white gloves and an old bird’s nest refurbished with lace scraps fill an antique birdbath; a small selection of secondhand gowns hangs on a metal rolling rack, waiting to be moved to her vintage bridal shop, Wedding Wishes, in town.

Today, though, the suggestion of dreams and happiness and love all seems illusory. Amy sits on the stool at her worktable covered with fabric remnants and a sewing machine. Outside, the green lawn slopes away from the doorway. Grace ran on that grass yesterday. If Amy looks hard enough, she can see that image. Not the image the throb of her bandaged hand brings to mind. No. Maple tree branches spread low in the yard and she decides she will hang the old-fashioned tire swing for Grace. Her husband brought the tire home last summer, but they never set it up. He had died two weeks later.

She stands and surveys the distant maple tree. Its strong branches will support her tire swing. “She’s alive. She’s breathing,” Amy insists. Antique beaded handbags, gold and silver and cream, hang from a sunlit garden rack, the beads sparkling. She pulls a fox fur wrap from a low shelf below them. Everything about it is soft, from the pale silver fur to the silk lining. When Grace held it yesterday, her eyes dropped closed as she curled up with it. Amy puts the wrap to her face, a deep breath filling her lungs in an effort to inhale the same aged scent her daughter did. Some innate connection might help her through this. But the only connection she summons is a man’s hand clasping hers in a silent struggle for the shoe. Shaking off the bristly sensation on her hand, she shoves the fur stole on a shelf and knocks an old mason jar filled with crystal beads to the floor. Its broken shards and beads glisten in the sunlight. “Oh, look what Mommy did,” she says through tears, as though Grace is with her. Believing things, willing fate, it has to work, somehow. “Mommy made a mess now, didn’t she?” she asks, bent over with a dustpan.

In this room filled with old wedding gowns, with aged lace and cream satin pulled from cedar chests, the vintage gowns hover like spirits, each one on the rack rustling a little, sending out some ethereal strength. Weddings are all about promise; the women who wore these gowns made vows. And he promised her, he
did
, Grace would be back after one hour. Her eyes scan the room before she runs outside to the tool shed. Flinging those doors open, sunlight floods the dark, musty space. Cobwebs and dust particles hang from the beams. She searches the wood shelves for a length of heavy rope and the old tire propped along the wall. Hefting her arm through the tire, she lugs that and the rope out to the maple tree.

“Mrs. Trewist,” she hears as she stands beneath the branches. No one will stop her from hanging the tire. Grace wanted to swing. Today.
Swing, Mommy!
No one will bring bad news, not even the officer’s deep approaching voice. Grace will come back. They’ll spend the summer together here, swinging
every
day; Grace will play with old veils and sashes from the gown room; they’ll walk and listen to birdsong. Every day. She drops the tire and tries to untangle the rope.

“Mrs. Trewist.” A gentle grip takes her arm and turns her.

“No.” Her desperate hands fumble with the rope and she’s suddenly fumbling with her purse in the bank parking lot, frantic to find her keys. “I couldn’t find them in time,” she says as she looks up to a police officer’s face. “They’d already left,” she adds, holding back a sob.

“Mrs. Trewist. I understand. But there’s someone here, a Celia Gray. She wants to see you,” he says, then moves aside so that she can see Celia standing further behind, waiting.

Celia rushes closer and opens her arms to Amy. “Oh Amy, I just heard. How are you holding up?”

Amy lets her best friend hug her for a long moment before answering. “I’m not, Cee,” she says softly, a length of rope hanging from her bandaged hand.

“Are your mom and dad coming?”

Amy nods, picturing the more than two-hour drive along desolate stretches of wooded highway from New Hampshire. Have they left yet? They had to pack a bag and close up their house. Will they stop in Massachusetts at a roadside diner for a quick rest stop? Time is endless now, every wait, eternal.

“Come on, let me make you a cup of tea inside, okay? I’ll stay with you.”

It feels good to give herself over to Celia’s tending, the same way she wants to tend Grace. But the good feeling doesn’t last because she can’t help that she is unraveling. She’s some ball of yarn and the kidnappers run with the leading strand. Leaving the rope and tire behind, the police officer escorts them through the backyard to the kitchen doorway at the rear of her house.