The Stranger

Out of nowhere, a new suspicion skittered across her mind. Her blackmailer with the metallic voice couldn’t have been Dan, could it? When they’d been married, Dan had never had enough money. And he had always resented the way her family spoiled Mindy. He’d called her “the little princess.”

And, since he was one of the Heyday Eight’s customers, he might have known about Mindy’s involvement.

But this was ridiculous. Dan was definitely a jerk, but he wasn’t a blackmailer. She was just getting paranoid. She’d noticed it the very first day. Every male customer—or female customer, for that matter, if she had a deep voice—made her nervous. Everyone from the postman to the sales reps, from the mayor to the cop who patrolled Hippodrome Circle looked suspicious.

Was it you, she’d ask mentally? Or you? Or you?

“Mallory, stop daydreaming and get me a copy of The Great Gatsby.” Aurora York was suddenly standing in front of the counter, the blue feather on her pill-box hat trembling, which always meant Aurora was in a temper. “I need to show that fool Verna Myers something.”

Mallory smiled at her favorite customer, glad to have something fun to take her mind off the annoyances of the day. And any meeting of Aurora’s book club, Bookish Old Broads Incorporated, or Bobbies, as they called themselves, was bound to be fun.

The group met here every Thursday at six, for cookies and coffee and spirited debate. Last Thursday, Verna Myers, who worshipped at F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literary feet, had been so enraged when Aurora criticized Tender is the Night that she had stood up, sputtering indignantly, and yanked the feather right out of Aurora’s hat.

A hush had fallen over the entire bookstore. No one, but no one, touched Aurora’s feathers. Wally said later that he’d been expecting a catfight. But Aurora was a lady. Instead of scratching Verna’s eyes out, she had merely taken her copy of Tender is the Night, torn out a page from the middle, and used it to wipe the cookie crumbs from her mouth.

Frankly, Mallory had been surprised to see Verna show up again this week. But Verna probably enjoyed the rows as much as Aurora did. And, since the wealthy old ladies always paid for anything they ruined, it was lucrative for Mallory, so everybody came out a winner.

“Gatsby? I’ll go look,” Mallory said obediently. No one who knew Aurora really minded her bossy tone. Underneath the haughty Queen Victoria exterior beat one of the kindest hearts in Heyday.

But wouldn’t you know it? She was completely out of Gatsby. The high-school seniors were writing research papers on Fitzgerald this year, and they’d all come rushing in at the last minute and picked her shelves clean.

She had her own copy upstairs. Rather than disappoint Aurora, Mallory decided to go get it.

“Wally, will you watch the register for a minute?”

Wally, who was shelving CDs, his favorite task, frowned. He was an artist—a budding film director, at least in his own mind—and he thought handling money was crass. But he was deeply in hock to the photography store down the street, so he didn’t dare annoy the one employer in town who would put up with his attitudes, not to mention his multicolored hair.

“Sure,” he mumbled, and began to shuffle in her direction.

Mallory’s shop was actually two storefronts combined into one large bookstore on the bottom. On the upper floor, though, the building was divided into two snug but charming apartments with porches overlooking the tree-lined, curving Hippodrome Circle. Mallory lived in one. The other had been empty ever since Christmas, when her neighbor, a local chef, had taken a job at a fancy restaurant in Richmond. She still missed the great aromas that had always seeped from his apartment to hers.

Both apartments were accessed by the same outside staircase, so Mallory exited the bookstore, drank in a little of the sparkling Virginia spring air, and then climbed up to see if she could hunt down Gatsby in the jungle of books in her living room.

She kept admirable order downstairs—customers had to be able to find books before they could buy them. But up here, where she stored everything that wouldn’t fit in the shop, as well as her own ever-growing collection of books, the situation was a mess.

Gatsby…Gatsby… When had she last read Gatsby? Probably around the holidays…which meant it would be beneath the “summer reading list” books that had just been delivered, but not so far down as the “back to school” books from last fall.

It took forever, so she wasn’t surprised when she heard footsteps on the outside staircase. Wally, undoubtedly panicked by being stranded with the Bobbies, must have left the register untended—the ultimate no-no—and come up here to drag her back downstairs.

She grabbed Gatsby, knocking over three Pilchers and a du Maurier in the process, and hurried to the door. “Darn it, Wally, I’m coming,” she called. “Now get back down there before someone robs us blind.”

But it wasn’t Wally.

The lovely spring sunlight, so bright in her many-windowed living room, didn’t quite penetrate this narrow hallway that ran behind both apartments. She blinked as her pupils tried to adjust, but she couldn’t make out the person’s face.

His back was to the open stairway door, and the sun haloed around him, leaving just a black silhouette, like a moving shadow. Still, she saw that he was tall, much taller than Wally. More substantial. Wally had a boy’s shoulders. This squared-off breadth belonged to a man.

With no warning, fear tingled across her scalp, and she instinctively took a step backward, toward the shelter of her own doorway. This was Heyday, where dim corridors rarely posed a threat to anyone, and she was no coward, but ever since that call…

Things had changed.

Once again she asked herself…could this be the man, the faceless blackmailer with a distorted metallic voice?

But then the man spoke and the fear disappeared, replaced by a sudden, flaring fury.

He said just one word. Just her name.

“Mallory.” The word was uttered softly, almost apologetically, as if he knew how she would hate seeing him and wished he could spare her the pain.

“Mallory,” he said again.

No, this wasn’t the blackmailer—it was someone she despised even more.

At least the blackmailer was ashamed enough to hide his true identity. This was someone who made money by exploiting other people’s misery, but did it right out in the open, as if it were something to be proud of. The blackmailer at least announced right up front that he was just trying to weasel something out of you. This man masqueraded as a friend, drank your coffee and pretended to care about your problems.

And then, like a kick to the gut, he betrayed you.

This was Tyler Balfour.

CHAPTER FOUR

WOW. TYLER PAUSED in the half-open doorway. Three years hadn’t softened Mallory Rackham’s heart much, had they?

The hall in front of him was dim, but the afternoon light behind him streamed in over his shoulders in two bright bands, one of which caught Mallory’s face and illuminated it. The venom with which she eyed him now was just as potent and undiluted as it had been the day she read his first story about the Heyday Eight and saw her husband’s name.

At least she wasn’t holding a plate of greasy French fries this time. He glanced at the book in her hand. A small paperback. Good. He probably wouldn’t even bruise if she decided to chuck it at him.

He guessed he had at least a few seconds before that happened. For the moment she seemed paralyzed with shock and the slow awakening of long-buried anger. So he slung his suit bag over his shoulder and moved carefully toward the apartment that would be his temporary lodgings, all the while fingering his keys, trying to locate the right one.

When he reached the door, which was only about four feet from her own, she finally spoke. “What the hell are you doing here, Tyler?”

Okay, that was a start. She had used profanity, which he knew she rarely did, and her voice was pointed and frosty, like a dagger of ice, but at least she hadn’t tossed the book. And she’d used his first name.

About a six, he figured, on the hostility scale. Nothing he couldn’t handle. He’d once investigated a senator who’d been taking bribes, and though that guy had been hostile enough to consult a hit man, Tyler had still managed to get the story.

He’d get this one, too, including her part of it. He couldn’t leave her out, even if he wanted to. She’d owned the café. She’d been married to one of the johns. Her little sister had gone to school with the Eight. He needed her in the book, and he’d get her.

At first, Tyler had wondered if moving into the apartment next to her was the best plan. He’d been afraid she might feel crowded. But now he saw that his instincts had been right. He was going to need the proximity, the frequent meetings, to break down long-entrenched barriers like these.

“Well?” She was gripping her book so tightly the pages curled into a circle. “Tell me. Why are you back?”

“I’m going to be staying here for a while.” He held up his key. “I inherited the building, as I’m sure you’ve heard.”

“Yes.” She still clenched her jaw, which distorted her normally musical voice. “But I also heard you were trying to sell it.”

He smiled. “Did you want to make me an offer?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I just want to know why you’re back in Heyday. God. Haven’t you done enough damage already?”

“Damage?” He looked her straight in the eye. “Are you sure you don’t have me confused with someone else?”

The light in the hallway wasn’t great, but he could tell she flushed. Deep inside, she must know he was right. She must know that Tyler hadn’t caused her husband’s infidelity. He’d just exposed it.

But clearly she wasn’t planning to admit it.

“Don’t pull that crusading white knight routine with me,” she said, her voice a shade too loud in the empty hall. “You didn’t write your series to rescue the sad little girls of the Heyday Eight. You wrote it to make yourself famous. And you have absolutely no idea what kind of wreckage you left behind. You were too busy scurrying out of town to collect your Pulitzer.”

Man, she really was furious. Tension crackled off her like electricity. He wondered what fed it, kept it throbbing and vital all these years. Surely she wasn’t still breaking her heart over that no-good bastard ex-husband of hers.

The guy hadn’t ever deserved her, but Tyler was well aware that love was illogical and unpredictable.

Which was why he always steered his own life a hundred miles in the other direction.

“I know you got divorced,” he said. “And I know that, however embarrassing it must have been to discover he’d cheated on you, you’re smart enough to realize you’re better off without that scum bucket.”

She didn’t respond at first, though her flush deepened. Maybe the word had been too harsh. But Dan Platt was a scum bucket. What kind of sleazy moron paid for kinky thrills with a silly teenage hooker while a woman like Mallory waited for him at home?

Mallory was one of the few natural beauties Tyler had ever known. Even better, she was—or had been—lighthearted and full of life. She had smiled a lot, and laughed a lot, and let her short blond hair tumble all over itself in a way that was somehow ten times sexier than anything he’d seen at a White House ball or a Kennedy Center gala.

Some of that vibrant energy had been dampened, he saw now. It wasn’t that she looked older, for the three years had hardly touched her in that way. The difference was more subtle. She looked subdued, as if her colors had faded. This face was still lovely, but it had new shadows.

He felt an odd prick of guilt, knowing that his series had helped to put some of those shadows there.

Finally she found her voice. “I am not going to discuss Dan with you. But if you think my divorce was the worst thing that happened around here in the wake of the great Tyler Balfour, you’re very wrong.”

He gave her a half smile. “You underestimate me, Mallory,” he said. “I’m a journalist. I know all about the developments of the past few years. I know that eighty students pulled out, and the college almost closed. I know there were six divorces, including yours, one suicide attempt, one illegitimate baby and two county commissioners ousted in the next election.”

He paused, in case she wanted to break in, but she didn’t speak. She just looked at him, as if she were hypnotized by his litany of misery.

“I know that Sander Jacobson’s loony wife set fire to the Ringmaster Café, illogically blaming your family for her husband’s sins. And I know that, after the fire, your mother had a stroke. A stroke from which she hasn’t yet recovered.”

Again he paused.

Mallory’s eyes were bright, but her chin was high. “Is that all?”

He thought about Dilday Merle and the mysterious blackmailer. But he wasn’t free to talk about that. “Seems like enough, doesn’t it?”

Was it his imagination, or did she seem relieved? She certainly took a deep breath, and when she spoke, her voice was steadier.

“Impressive,” she said. “I knew you spied on us when you were in Heyday. I had no idea you had continued to do so from Washington, D.C.”

“I just followed the story. I follow all my stories. And this one is particularly important to me.”

She laughed harshly. “Why? I hope you aren’t going to say it’s because of me, because we were ‘friends.’ I quit believing in that fairy tale three years ago. Although I have to admit you had me fooled pretty thoroughly for a while there.”

Again that slight sting of conscience. Had he gone too far back then, while he was digging for the story he suspected was buried in her innocent little café? Had he played the role of friend and confidant so convincingly that he had actually hurt her?

He hadn’t meant to. Ordinarily he knew just where the ethical lines were drawn. Sometimes, though, he had forgotten it was a role. Sometimes, while he sat at the counter late at night and ate her amazing blueberry pie, he had forgotten that he was a reporter. Sometimes, when she had hinted at how unhappy her home life was, he had been forced to fight the urge to take her hand across the counter.

Sometimes he had almost forgotten to take notes.

Almost.

But he’d done plenty of soul-searching back when it happened. And he’d decided that, though he might have touched the line with his toe once or twice, he hadn’t ever actually crossed it.

He wasn’t going to cross it now, either. Even if it made the reporting more difficult, he was going to play it straight with her this time.

“No, it’s not because of you,” he said. “It’s because I’m writing a book about the Heyday Eight. For that, I’m going to need all the information I can get.”

“You’re writing a—” She swallowed, and, as if her fingers had gone limp, the book dropped to the wooden floor. She didn’t seem aware that she no longer held it. “A book? About those poor girls? Why?”

He retrieved the mangled paperback, which he saw was a copy of The Great Gatsby. “It’s what I do, Mallory,” he said quietly. “I’m a writer.”

She looked at him. She opened her mouth, as if she were about to say something. And then, without another word, without even taking her book from his hand, she moved past him and went out the side door. He heard her footsteps disappearing fast along the stairs.

Well, hell. What exactly was that all about?

He’d known that seeing her again would be awkward. He’d expected her to be angry that he was going to tear up her town again when the book came out.

And she had been angry, damn angry, at first. But then, after he mentioned the book…

He stared at the empty rectangle of light for a long moment, trying to sort through the signals his instincts were sending him. He had talked to a lot of people about a lot of difficult things, and he had learned to read them pretty well.

Unless he had completely lost his touch, Mallory Rackham wasn’t merely angry anymore.

She was flat-out scared.

A WEEK LATER, Mallory was on her way to the Windjammer Golf and Country Club. She was going too fast, and her thoughts were so agitated she almost drove her Volkswagen into the faux-marble haunches of one of the zebra statues that stood guard over the winding, green-bordered entry.

A caddy working the seventh hole glared at her, shocked that anyone would disrupt the pastoral harmony of this elite club.

But Mallory didn’t care. She almost wished she had hit them. Those zebra statues were stupid.

Not as stupid, however, as she was.

Yessir, Mallory Rackham took the blue ribbon in Abject Stupidity.

She shook her head, muttering to herself as she guided the car more carefully up toward the clubhouse. What fantasy world had she been living in? Had she really believed the blackmailer would just send her a nice thank-you note for the thousand-dollar payment and then scratch her off his list? Hadn’t she ever read a detective novel, or watched a crime show on TV? Heck, a five-year-old could probably tell you that, once you paid a blackmailer, he’d just keep coming back for more.

But not Mallory. Idiot that she was, she’d actually been stunned to hear the man’s electronic voice on her telephone again this afternoon.

He’d told her he wanted another thousand dollars. Only two weeks after the first payment.

When she’d asked him where he thought a small-town, small-business owner was going to get that kind of money, he had laughed—that horrible, tinny laugh she remembered so well.

Maybe, he’d said, she should consider taking up where Mindy had left off. Mallory might not be a teenager anymore, but she was still a good-looking woman. Did she know how to handle a whip?

Without thinking, Mallory had slammed down the phone, too furious to calculate the wisdom of such a move. But almost instantly she regretted it. During the long two or three minutes she’d waited to see if he’d call back, she was racked with fear that he might not, that the next call he made might be to Freddy Earnshaw.

Or what if he’d heard that Tyler Balfour was writing a book? How much, she wondered, would Tyler pay for juicy information like this?

Finally, the phone had run again. She picked it up, her fingers trembling. The metallic voice was colder and harder than ever. That little insult had cost her, he’d said slowly. Double the pain. This time he wanted two thousand dollars. Tomorrow.

But she didn’t have two thousand dollars. And, because she was a shortsighted fool, she hadn’t made any provisions for getting it. She could have taken another loan on the business, maybe, if she could persuade Doug Metzler at the bank to stretch the income/debt ratios a little. Or she could have accepted one of the offers for credit cards that clogged her mailbox daily. She could have sold some of her own collection of antique books—well, all her collection, probably.

But the point was, if she hadn’t been such an idiot, she could have done something.

Instead, she was going to have to get desperate. She was going to have to borrow the money from Roddy.

Not that Roddy cared. Roddy had been born middle-class, with a curious mind that got him into a ton of trouble as a child but had made him several million dollars as an adult. Roddy was always inventing things—things that weren’t necessarily sensible enough to make it to the market, but which were just interesting enough to bring in huge option purchases from big businesses.

His latest idea had been a “flip-flop clip,” which kept the cuff of your slacks from tucking under when you wore sandals. Even his best friend, Kieran McClintock, had laughed at that one, but when a major beachwear company had paid him a hundred thousand dollars for it, Roddy had thrown a bikini-beach party at the country club and invited the entire town of Heyday.

So, after running around mentally like a rat in a maze for a couple of hours, she’d finally called Roddy on his cell, taken a deep breath, and asked if she could borrow two thousand dollars. Today.

“Okay,” he said in his typical laid-back style. He was the only man she’d ever known who wouldn’t ask why. “Want to come get it now? I’d come there, but I can’t leave for another hour or two.”

She knew where he was, of course. He was always at the country club’s bar, the Gilly Wagon, after four o’clock, when he finished his last hole of golf for the day. He played poker, flirted with the married women, watched CNN and drank ginger ale for at least three hours every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Friday and Saturdays he switched to beer and single women.

And no one could tell him to leave. He’d single-handedly built the Gilly Wagon with the proceeds from his crazy idea for fake fingernails made of candy.

“You’ve got that much money on you?”

He chuckled. “Well, you know. In case I have to flee the country unexpectedly, that kind of thing. Come on over.”

“I guess I could,” she’d said. Wally could close up. “But, are you alone?”

“No. But I am amazingly discreet. Never fear, Mallory dear. The hand is quicker than the eye.”

And so here she was, parking the car at the country club and heading into the Gilly Wagon, which at this hour would, she hoped, be mostly empty.

It was. Other than a foursome in the corner arguing about how many strokes it had taken one of them at the ninth hole, Roddy and Kieran were the only ones there.

She said hi to the bartender, who doubled as the waiter and was hurrying over to seat her. She waved him off, pointing toward Roddy. The man nodded gratefully and went back behind the bar to finish washing the glasses for the coming rush.

“Hi, guys,” she said as she approached the table. Kieran, that handsome, golden-haired sweetie, half rose immediately and gave her a kiss.

She hugged him briefly. “Where’s Claire?”

Kieran chuckled. “She said she’d rather stick bamboo shoots under her fingernails than be a part of this little adventure of Roddy’s. But I assume she’s not actually doing that. She’s probably rolling Stephanie around the park, trying to get her to go to sleep.”

“Roddy’s little adventure?” Mallory turned to Roddy with a smile, noticing that he hadn’t bothered to rise, leaving the graceful manners to Kieran.

Roddy Hartland was nowhere nearly as classically handsome as the McClintocks, with his freckles and his unruly brown curls, but he was pretty darn sexy, once you saw the intelligent laughter in his eyes and the easy tolerance in his smile. And he had a wonderful, strong body.

Mallory and Roddy dated each other more often than either of them dated anyone else, but they both understood it would never come to anything. Though no words had ever been spoken on the subject, she knew that he’d always been half in love with Mindy. Sadly, the ten-year age difference had proved fatal. Roddy wasn’t willing to declare himself and risk rejection. Mindy, young and self-absorbed, had never even guessed.

“What trouble are you trying to stir up today?”

Roddy blinked innocently. “Trouble? Gosh, you say that like I do it all the time.”

“That’s because you do,” Kieran put in, his mouth full of ice. He held out his empty drink. The bartender nodded and turned to retrieve the bottle of imported single malt Scotch whiskey they kept on hand solely for the McClintocks, who might not be the only ones in Heyday who could appreciate it, but were just about the only ones who could afford it.

Kieran turned his gorgeous blue eyes toward Mallory. “Don’t tell Claire I was drinking. But this is one stunt I just can’t pull sober.”

“You’re not pulling it, you coward.” Roddy shook his head. “I am.”

Mallory growled. “Will someone please tell me what’s going on?”

Kieran waved the question to Roddy, who grinned happily and sucked down some ginger ale, clearly just to prolong the suspense.

“Roddy Hartland…”

“Okay, okay. So you know Doug Metzler, right?”