Winter Winds (7 page)

Trev laughed. “I’d say that last is a very good sign.”

Phil grinned back. “That’s why I’m out here in the hall. ‘Go away, Phil. I want to talk to her by herself.’ ”

Trev nodded. He’d always enjoyed watching the love between Pop and Honey. She was his second wife, his first having died from uterine cancer. Pop was fifty-two and Honey forty-eight when they married. They had five years together before Trev, Phil, and Dori arrived, putting Pop through a second stint at parenting and Honey a first. Their affection for each other filled their home and had given the young orphaned Trev the family every kid needed. “How’s Honey taking it?”

“She’s doing fine. She’s a strong lady. She’s down in the cafeteria getting coffee and something to eat. We had to practically throw her out of the room.”

Trev’s gut clenched. “If Honey’s in the cafeteria, who’s in with Pop?”

“Brace yourself, little brother.”

“Dori?” Trev tried to be casual, but he feared he was failing miserably.

Phil nodded. “Dori. I called her last night. She flew in on the red-eye. I picked her up at the airport.” He slanted a glance at Trev. “She looks great, by the way. Prettier than ever.”

Trev wondered how that could possibly be true. She’d always been beautiful to him.

“Look,” Phil said. “Do you know what happened that made her bolt? I’ve never pushed for somebody to tell me what happened, but I’ve always wondered.”

Trev had to grin. Phil had pushed and pushed for information, not that he’d gotten any from Trev.

Phil looked at the door to Pop’s room. “I always figured it must be something Pop did, and I’d probably be happier not knowing.”

“Pop?” Trev couldn’t hide his surprise.

Phil nodded. “He can be awfully heavy-handed sometimes, and she could be easily hurt.”

“Pop didn’t do anything.” Of that Trev was certain, even if he wasn’t certain about much else.

“You sure?” Phil looked amazed.

“Absolutely.”

“Well, I certainly didn’t do anything, and Honey couldn’t hurt anyone if she tried.” Phil narrowed his eyes at Trev “That leaves you.” His voice grew hard. “Just what did you do to her?”

Trev gave a sad half smile. “I married her.”

J
OANNE
P
ILOTTI STARED
at the contents of the black suitcase in confusion. Paperbacks. Millions of them, or so it seemed. What was this, a bookstore on wheels?

She pulled the books out and stacked them neatly on the table beside her. Eight of them with titles like
Don’t Look Behind You
and
You Can’t Run Too Fast
and
Shadows at Stillburn Keep
. All the covers had women running, and they all ran looking over their shoulders. Some ran from a mysterious shadow or dark woods. Some ran toward an old mansion and some an old castle, all with one light lit in the attic window or in the top of a castle tower.

Joanne snorted. Give her a good horror film any day. Besides, if she was going to read, which she wasn’t if she could help it, she’d try Stephen King. Fortunately, she hadn’t had to read anything since the last book cover she read for a book report back just before she quit school in tenth grade. That was three whole years ago.

Still, it was very clever of whoever sent the suitcase. If some security guy checked like they did sometimes these days, he’d think she was some smart lady who liked to read. A lot. They’d never think courier. Never in a million years.

“Want to earn some big money?” Vinnie’d asked when he came to her house a week ago.

“Big money? Sure. Who doesn’t?” she said, but she wasn’t completely dumb. It was a rough world, and a girl couldn’t be too careful. “What do I have to do?”

“Pick up a suitcase.”

She stared at him as he reached in her refrigerator and got out the first of many beers. She kept it stocked for him. “Just get a suitcase? That’s all?”

Vinnie nodded as he tore the tab from the can and sucked out the contents.

Joanne eyed him, trying to see the catch. There had to be one somewhere. She had never been one of those pampered princesses like some of the girls she had gone to school with, the ones who got everything they wanted, the ones who somehow attracted all the breaks. Not her. She attracted all the hard knocks.

Of course with Vinnie’s new job, they were hoping things would be different. Maybe sometime soon they could even get married, not that Vinnie had actually asked her. Still, she was hopeful.

And suspicious about the suitcase gig. “Why aren’t they sending you to get the suitcase?”

He let out a loud, “Ahh!” of satisfaction as he crumbled the beer can in his hand. A loud belch followed.

“You aren’t setting me up to carry on a bomb to blow up the plane, are you?” She looked at him with sudden fear. “ ’Cause I don’t want to get blown up.”

Vinnie looked at her like she had just crawled out from under a rock. “Geez, Joanne, where do you get your crazy ideas? The idea of a courier is for the courier to deliver something safely.”

“Yeah, well,” she said defensively, “I just gotta be sure. So, why aren’t you taking the job?”

“Well, you see,” he began, and Joanne went on high alert.
Well, you see
was a warning. He always gave himself away when he was trying to weasel out of something.

“It’s like this.” He grabbed his second beer. “Mr. J is looking for a woman to be the courier, and he asked me if I knew anyone I could trust.”

Mr. J. Neal Jankowski. Now there was a name that made all
Atlantic City quake, Vinnie told her, and Vinnie knew what he was talking about. After all, Mr. J was Vinnie’s new boss.

“He’s already asking your advice?” She felt so proud. Maybe she had been wrong about the
well, you see
.

Vinnie nodded, trying to make believe he didn’t feel proud too. “So, you interested?”

She nodded. “Yeah. How much money, where do I get the suitcase, and where do I got to deliver it?”

“One thousand dollars, Chicago, and to me right here in Seaside,” Vinnie told her.

At first all she heard was the one thousand, and she could hardly breathe at the thought. How many tables did she have to wait on in that little bitty restaurant before she had a thou free and clear? She giggled. She could already imagine all the new clothes she’d buy with her payment, and not from Wal-Mart, oh, no. This time she was going to Sears or Penney’s to get really good stuff, maybe even stuff made in the USA.

Then she heard the rest of the deal. “What? I gotta go to Chicago?”

Vinnie was halfway through can number two.

“Sure.” “And just how do I get there?”

“You fly.”

She stared at him in disbelief as she started to hyperventilate. “No way I can’t! You know I can’t. Planes crash and all the people die! In little pieces!”

Vinnie shook his head in exasperation. “Jo, what do you care about little pieces? I mean, dead is dead.”

Gasping for air, she began pacing, wiping her sweaty palms over and over against her jeans. “I care, especially if it’s me!”

Vinnie stepped in front of her and stuck his face in hers. “You’re going to Chicago. I told Mr. J you would.”

His voice was soft and lethal, and she closed her eyes against it. “I can’t,” she whimpered. Not even for gorgeous new clothes. Not even for Vinnie.

“You don’t have no choice, Jo.” Vinnie grabbed her hair and forced her to look at him. “Mr. J is counting on me.” He gave an extra tug and she winced at the pain. “And you.”

So she’d flown to Chicago yesterday, so zoned out on tranqs that she barely noticed the takeoff, the flight, or the landing. It was all she could do to get out of her seat and walk off the plane, dragging her big purse with her clean underwear in it behind her. Her thighs were all black and blue from where she kept bumping into the seats, and she literally bounced off the walls of the Jetway but she didn’t care. She was on the ground again!

She finally found her way to the transportation stand and climbed in a cab.

“Where to, lady?” the cabbie asked.

“Chicago,” she said.

He turned around and stared at her. “Can we be a bit more specific?”

For a minute Joanne didn’t know what to say. Then she remembered the piece of paper in her pocket. Vinnie had stuck it there. “Give this to the cab driver. He’ll take you here.”

And he did, right up to the door of the Holiday Inn O’Hare. She dragged herself out of the cab and slapped one of the five twenties Vinnie had given her into his hand. “Thank you, and keep the change.”

He blinked, then looked at her with a wide grin. With a wave, he was gone.

She felt like a high roller with two queen-size beds and a gleaming bathroom with enough towels for a small army. There was a big TV with a remote, and by playing with the buttons, she found she could get all kinds of movies right here in the room. She decided to watch every single one to keep the fear of tomorrow’s return flight at bay.

When the third movie ended, she thought about going out to eat all by herself. Nasty. Everybody would think she was some ugly person that no one liked. Then her eye fell on an ad for pizza delivered right to your room. She watched the next three movies as she chomped her way through a large pizza with everything including anchovies, which she could never get at home because Vinnie hated them. She fell asleep happy.

Now she was happy again, back home in Seaside in her little third-floor apartment, checking out the suitcase before Vinnie
came for it. She wanted to see what was in it. Nosy her mother always called her. Personally, Jo liked the word
curious
better.

Under the books were women’s clothes—sweaters and sweatshirts, jeans, slacks, a denim skirt, tops in lots of different colors, pajamas, and at the bottom some very pretty underwear, very pretty indeed. Too bad it wasn’t her size. Last came two pairs of shoes with deodorant tucked in one of the shoes, a bottle of perfume in another. Clever.

Slipped in among the clothes were several pretty things. She liked the glass ball with lots of different colors swirled through it. She didn’t know what you did with it, but it would look pretty sitting on a table or something. She put it on her end table under the light. It sort of glowed, and she loved it.

The silver and gold picture frame was just the right size for the picture of her and Vinnie taken at the beach last summer. He looked so handsome with his curly black hair and great tan. She didn’t look too bad either in her red and white bikini. Since she never went into the ocean, her hair was just right, and her nose wasn’t even red from the sun.

There were a couple of neckties in the suitcase too. One had pill bottles all over it, spilling colorful pills onto a bright red background. Who would ever wear an ugly thing like that? The other had books and more books in lots of colors on a bright blue background. Well, maybe a teacher might wear that. She tossed them in the general direction of the wastebasket.

The door opened and Vinnie came in with a six-pack in his hand.

“Hey, what are you doing?” he yelled, dropping the beer and rushing to her.

She blinked, scared. “J-just looking. I didn’t hurt nothing! Honest!”

Vinnie fell to his knees and flipped up the lining at the bottom of the empty suitcase. He stared, not moving for a minute, then turned to her, his face white with horror. “What did you do with them?”

“I didn’t do nothing with nothing.” She backed behind the stuffed chair. “Unless you mean that glass thing.” She pointed a shaking finger at the table.

“You dumb—I should never have trusted you!” Vinnie grabbed the glass ball and threw it as hard as he could against the wall. It didn’t break, but the wall did.

And she knew she was in very big trouble.

Y
OU WHAT
?”

Trev would have laughed at Phil’s horrified expression if the subject weren’t so painful. “I married her,” he repeated.

Phil was outraged. “But she’s our sister!”

Trev shook his head. “She’s not.”

Some of Phil’s anger dropped away. “Or as good as.”

“Yours maybe.” Trev thought of Dori’s vibrant, laughing face. He thought of the wrenching pain of her long absence. “Not mine.”

Phil ran his hand through his hair. “I can’t believe you fell in love with her
that
way.”

“Big-time, big brother. Big-time.”

Phil still looked poleaxed. “Why did I never know this?”

Trev shrugged. “You’re not very observant?”

“Don’t give me that. I’m as observant as the next man.”

Trev didn’t say anything. What was there to say when you had kept your feelings under tight rein for years, then let them loose in one glorious weekend, only to have the sweet, fizzing wine of love turn sour before its time?

“When?” Phil demanded.

“When what? When did I fall in love with her, or when did I marry her?”

“Both.”

Trev looked at his disgruntled brother. “I realized I loved her when I was about fifteen.”

Phil shuddered. “This creeps me out.”

Trev leaned against the wall and crossed one foot over the other. “Yeah, I guess it does sound weird.”

Suddenly Phil’s fists balled, and he leaned in Trev’s face. “Did you ever take advantage of her? Is that why she left?”

Trev held up a hand in the sign of peace. “Easy, Phil. Relax. I never took advantage of her in any way. I might not have been a Christian back then, but I’d like to think that I still had some integrity. After all, Pop raised me.”

“So when did you marry her?”

“The weekend before she disappeared.”

“That was six years ago!”

“Close your mouth, Phil. Flies will get in.”

Phil frowned. “You’re nuts.”

“I know. Was, am, and always will be nuts about her.”

“Then why in the world do you live in New Jersey and she lives in California?”

“That’s the big question, Phil. And I don’t know the answer.”

“You mean she’s never told you why she walked? Come on, Trev. You’re not dumb. You must know what you did.”

Trev pushed himself off the wall and began to pace. “She told me I broke my vows to her.”