Diamonds and Deceptions
Autor
Marie Ferrarella
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16
HarlequinChapter One
“Ow.”
The exclamation of pain, entirely involuntary, was followed by a darker curse. The edge of his razor, on its final pass over the sensitive area of his throat, had nicked him. A small, red blotch appeared.
He had to be more careful, he admonished himself.
Swallowing another curse, he splashed water over the nick, then waited for the wound to dry.
His hands braced on either side of the small, utilitarian bathroom sink, Mark Banning stared into the small, oval mirror that hung directly above it. The glass was still slightly hazy from the shower he’d just taken, but not hazy enough to obliterate the scar that his eyes instantly gravitated toward. The scar that was his anchor to his own reality.
It vaguely occurred to Mark that he’d had the scar for five years now. Five years as of last month. Oh, there were plenty of plastic surgeons around who could readily relieve him of that, who could smooth and tug and resurface the area just below his right eye until their pockets were full and the scar was all but a jagged memory. Nick had even gone so far as to give him several brochures that he’d gathered from a few of the various plastic surgeons who made San Francisco their home.
Mark wasn’t even sure if he’d thanked his younger brother for his concern. Probably not. A great deal that went between them went unspoken.
In any case, it was a futile exercise on Nick’s part. He didn’t want to get rid of the scar. The ugly welt set him apart. It kept the world at arm’s length and from growing too friendly. From trying to draw him into a realm where he knew he had no business being. A realm that, if he even ventured into, held only disappointment for him at the end.
Besides, the scar was a symbol of more than just the knife fight he’d been involved in back in New York. It stood for all the scars that he’d sustained within. The scars that no amount of surgery could ever remove or cover up.
The last blow had been the final one. When he’d come home to find that Dana, in a fit of overwhelming depression, had taken her own life, he knew that he was not one of those people destined for happiness. Holding his wife’s nude, lifeless body in his arms, willing her back into an existence that Dana had found fruitless and pointless despite all the love he’d tried to show her, he’d felt his own tenuous grasp on happiness irretrievably slipping from his fingers.
Shutting off the water, Mark continued to stare at the scar, at the face of the man who had become little more than an empty shell.
He’d had a hell of a life up to the day it had finally dawned on him that he wasn’t meant to be happy, to ever be happy. One of the other guys on the force had kidded him the day he’d made detective, saying that seeing his own parents gunned down in front of him at a downtown restaurant when he was little more than ten years old gave him something in common with Batman. Or at least his alter ego Bruce Wayne. And maybe it did.
It’d stolen his childhood away from him, made him old and somber before his time. Filled him with a sense of responsibility that should have, by all rights, come to him years later. But he was the older one, never mind that it was just by a year. His brother, Nick, needed someone to have faith in, even as they were separated, time and again, and sent to different foster homes.
So he had to be strong even when there was no strength left inside.
And throughout it all, he’d always managed to keep track of Nick, never losing sight of his brother no matter what. There were times that Nick had been his sole focus in life, the only reason he kept on going. The reason he made something of himself. Because Nick needed him. In a way, Nick had been his salvation, just as he had been Nick’s.
And then things had changed. For the better, he’d thought. And for a precious time, it had been.
While he was still in college, he’d met Dana Dean. Beautiful, adventurous, ambitious, wonderful Dana, who actually made him believe that there really was such a thing as happiness in the world and that maybe, just maybe, he was as entitled to it as the next person.
So he’d married her.
That’s what you did when you thought you’d found your soul mate, your main reason for living. Married her and moved, with Nick in tow, to New York because Dana had dreams, huge, boundless dreams of seeing her name up in lights. Of someday—and soon—being the biggest star on Broadway.
That was when the doubts began to appear. They hovered about like giant enemy fighterjets, searching for a place to land. Doubts that everything would work itself out after all.
Dana irrationally insisted that the process from aspiring actress to world-famous icon was going to be a short one, at least for her. She believed in overnight successes. When she was handed rejections instead of accolades, she began to withdraw into herself. Time and again she would come home and alternately rant and sob over her lack of achievement, her lack of progress. The light that had drawn him to her was very quickly extinguished no matter how hard he tried to keep it going, no matter how much support he gave her.
When she quit the part-time job she was holding down, he took on more shifts, determined that money worries were not to be added to Dana’s burdens. He wanted her free to pursue her goals.
She became angrier and more depressed. He thought it was all part of the process. Actors were supposed to be a moody lot, there were all those untapped emotions running through them. In his heart, he’d felt sure that once things began going her way, she’d snap out of it and become the Dana he’d fallen in love with. The Dana he still loved with all his heart.
Some detective he was.
He never saw it coming.
Never had a clue that Dana had become so enormously despondent that she could actually end her own life, end it while he was part of her life. He dealt with the rawer side of life every day, but it had never dawned on him that Dana could be sucked down to those kinds of dark depths.
He’d learned. Learned that having him there, loving her, wasn’t enough for Dana. That he wasn’t enough. It was something he wasn’t about to get over.
Ever.
Because when he came home after working a longer shift than usual and found her in the tub, her wrists slashed, the water a cold, red, transparent shroud around her body, he blamed himself. Blamed himself for working an extra shift and not finding her in time. If he had seen the signs, he could have saved her. If he had come home at his usual time, he could have saved her.
If.
If.
If.
After a while, there were no more ifs, there was only blame. It began to feel as if Death followed him wherever he went. At least, the death of those he loved. So he decided not to love anymore. There was only Nick left in his world to remind him that he had once been something other than the walking wounded.
He’d wanted to kill himself then. Nick had seen him through the first night and several of the ones that followed, acting as his anchor. Keeping him in this world instead of letting him follow Dana and his parents into the next.
So, unable to take his own life, he’d tried the next best thing. He tried to lose himself in his work.
The mouth on the face in the mirror curved ever so slightly. No, that wasn’t strictly true. He didn’t try to lose himself in his work, he’d tried to find a way to have his work conduct the execution he couldn’t, in all good conscience, carry out himself. If he couldn’t hold the gun barrel to his head and pull the trigger himself, then he’d volunteer for the roughest assignments, forge recklessly ahead when common sense had others hanging back. And he did.
He felt he had nothing to lose.
But he was wrong.
He still had Nick to lose. And in the end, he supposed, in an offbeat way, Nick once again wound up being his salvation, saving him from self-extermination or death in the line of duty.
But not before the knife fight in the alley almost became the answer to his unspoken prayers. Foiling a robbery, he’d run after the so-called suspect, only to have the latter ambush him in the alley with a hunting knife. He’d had only his wits, his hands and a discarded trash lid to fight back with. When the suspect had drawn blood, his innate will to live had mysteriously kicked in, making him fight back.
It was a fight he nearly lost. It left him with the jagged scar and had almost ended his life. Twice he’d closed his eyes in that hospital bed and hoped that he’d die.
It was Nick, showing up at the hospital E.R., Nick, who looked at him with such sadness in his eyes, who had managed to catch his soul before it spiraled down, to be sucked into an endless black hole. Nick, who begged him to get well.
So he got better, at least physically. And when he was well enough, he quit the force, took Nick and himself and moved as far away from New York, from the constant reminder of who and what he had lost, as he could. He’d picked San Francisco because the city was anonymous enough for him to get lost in.
It was on the impersonal streets of San Francisco that Mark finally began to pick up the strands of his life, moving forward because he had no other choice. Death was no longer an option.
But neither was living, not really. He made his way as a private investigator, observing others, watching others have lives while he had an existence, nothing more. But then, he figured he wasn’t entitled to anything more.
Eventually, over the course of the last five years, he built a reputation. Now, at thirty, he was sought after, able to pick and choose his assignments. He needed little money, just enough to pay the rent, nothing more. Personal indulgences didn’t factor into anything, and Nick was independent, pursuing his own career on the San Francisco police force.
Mark was on a case now, one he’d taken on as a personal favor to Nick, actually. Nick’s best friend on the force, Tyler Carlton, needed help locating a man by the name of Derek Ross. It seemed that the forty-seven-year-old man was Tyler’s long-lost uncle.
The trail was twenty-five years cold, but if Derek was still alive, Mark had no doubt that he would be able to pick it up, be able to find Derek and bring him safely back to the man who had hired him. Tyler was rather vague about certain details, but from what he could piece together, Derek Ross held the key to the secrets Tyler needed to be made privy to.
Secrets that could well bring down Parks Mining and Exploration, currently one of the largest, most powerful gem empires in the country.
He’d been on Derek’s trail for the past two weeks and there wasn’t the slightest doubt in Mark’s mind that he could find the man, because there was nothing else he had to do, nothing else in his life to draw his attention away. Nick was a grown man, leading his own life, and he—he was just marking time.
The ironic term almost made him smile.
Almost.
With a sigh he straightened up and took a towel from the rack to dry his face. There was no telltale smear. The blood had dried.
Mark walked out of the tiny bathroom. It was almost six in the morning. He had a fresh lead to follow. And a man to find.
The shivers were still zipping along up and down her spine, even though the reading was now half an hour in the past.
She loved good poetry, she always had. Loved the sound of it, the endless meanings behind it, the layers that begged to be peeled away, a little at a time, like a big, silver-foil-wrapped Christmas present that promised something wonderful once the wrapping paper was finally dispensed with.
Poetry nurtured the spirit, enriched the soul.
At twenty-three, Brooke Moss was still young enough to dream, to believe in white knights and happily-ever-after endings that metamorphosed into new beginnings filled with promise and wonder.
She hugged the books she’d picked up so far to her soft breast, knowing that her friends sometimes called her naive behind her back. And maybe she was, but she enjoyed being naive if that meant believing in all the things that life had to offer and believing that life was, in the end, good.
Her philosophy hadn’t evolved because she was a child of privilege. Quite the opposite was true. She worked in her father’s bookstore, a quaint little San Francisco shop that went by the name of Buy the Book and specialized in not just current books, but rare first editions, as well. Over the past few months she had found herself taking on more and more of the burdens of running the business. During that time she watched with a saddened heart as her father slowly faded before her eyes.
Derek Moss had never been what she would have called a vital man, but ever since he’d returned from the funeral, that funeral he’d attended for a woman she had no recollection of ever having met or even hearing about, it seemed to Brooke that her father was losing his hold on life.
He should have been here, to preside over the reading. Instead he was home. She stifled a sigh.
Setting the first stack of books down, she went back to pick up more. They’d been left on the seats of the forty or so folding chairs she and her father had put out earlier. She was going to have to clear those away, too, she thought. Otherwise the customers who came in to morrow would find themselves sashaying in between rows of metal chairs as they tried to find books.
Maybe she should talk to her father about hiring part-time help. There’d be no need if he took an active interest in the shop again, but that didn’t look as if it was in the cards. At least, not anytime soon.
She had to find a way to make him come around again, she told herself as she deposited a second pile next to the first on the side of the table.
They’d had a poetry reading at the bookstore tonight. It was a biweekly tradition her father had instituted years ago. Sometimes more frequently if a famous writer was passing through and they managed to prevail upon him or her for a reading. Then advertising would go into high gear and she’d cover the local stores around their shop, as well as all the ones where they lived in Mill Valley with flyers announcing the event. They always had a healthy turnout.
Readings brought in the diehard fans of whoever they chose for the reading, not to mention the curious and those who were seeking something novel to do. Brooke smiled to herself. No pun intended.
Books had always been her life—books and daydreams. And her father, she silently added on. Her father had been her first hero, her first knight in shining armor. It killed her to see him like this.
The moment she’d become aware of his waning interest, she’d tried to get him involved in the store again, in making the decisions. But even the simplest of questions, such as who they should have for their next reading, had gotten nothing but the vaguest of responses from him, coupled with an empty stare, as if he was looking right through her.
He’d shrugged his thin shoulders when she’d asked and said, “Whoever you want, honey,” before turning back to the window.
Since he’d returned from the funeral, he’d spent endless hours just staring through the window, completely lost in thought. Certainly lost to her.
Who was that woman? she wondered. What had she meant to him?
He hadn’t wanted her to go to the funeral with him, almost hadn’t allowed her to know that he was going himself. But she’d wheedled the information out of him, saying she needed to know where to reach him in case there was something about the shop she needed to ask. He’d told her that she was capable of running the store completely without him.
His willingness to relinquish all claim had been her first sign that something was wrong. The shop had always been as much his child as she was.
Just thinking about it now aroused the fear she’d been struggling to bank down. Because her mother had died of leukemia shortly after she was born, Derek Moss was the only parent she had, the only one she’d ever known. And maybe it was childish and selfish of her, but she wasn’t ready to let him go. She needed him and loved him and wanted him to be happy.
Happiness was everyone’s birthright. Brooke sincerely believed that and she meant to make a believer out of her father.
God knew he’d had little to be happy about over these years. The man had done nothing but work and devote himself to her over the past twenty-three years, and now he was drawing away from even that.
Brooke thought back to the funeral. The changes had gone into high gear then. Had the woman been someone he’d once known, before her mother? Someone he’d once loved? Was that why he seemed so deeply affected, like a man who saw the best that life had to offer behind him instead of in front of him?
She’d be the first to admit that her father had no social life. To her recollection, he had never dated, never even seen women in any other capacity than as a bookstore owner.
What he needed, she decided firmly, was a life. And somehow, it was up to her to give him one.
Somehow.
Maybe that nice Mrs. Sammet, she thought suddenly. The woman came to most of the readings, and she knew that her father was just as much an attraction for the widow as anyone they invited into the store to give a reading.
Maybe she should extend an invitation to Mrs. Sammet to come to dinner….
Brooke set the last pile of books down on the desk, her eyes suddenly drawn to the corner of an envelope that was hiding beneath the blotter. Pulling it out, she saw that it was addressed to her father. There were several forwarding addresses stamped on it.
It was also opened. Had he put it here intentionally, or had it just slipped his mind? Lately he’d allowed things to slip away from him. He’d forgotten to pay the rent on the shop, and there was that shipment of books whose billing had somehow gotten mixed up in the recycled newspapers….
She frowned, taking the letter out of the envelope. She’d made the transition into her father’s keeper without knowing it.
Temporary, she promised herself, it was only temporary.
As Brooke read, her frown deepened. The letter was from a Tyler Carlton. She gathered by reading it that the man didn’t know her father, but was asking him to come forward about something. Some sort of secret that would bring Walter Parks to his knees.
She was familiar with the name. Walter Parks was a gem czar. It was his diamonds that graced the hands of half the engaged women in the country. Who was this Tyler and what did he want with her father, anyway? Was this the reason her father had become so reticent, so removed?
She flipped the envelope, looking at the address again. That was when she realized that the letter had come here by mistake. It was addressed to a Derek Ross, not Moss. This Tyler Carlton had to have confused her father with someone else whose name was almost the same.
Still, maybe reading this letter had upset her father for some reason, triggered something in his mind.
She had no answers, but she knew that if she left this lying around, her father would see it again and maybe it would send him deeper into his depression. She folded it and slipped it into her pocket. Maybe hiding it wouldn’t accomplish anything, but there was that old saying—out of sight, out of mind, and right now she was desperate to try anything to jar her father out of his mental malaise. At least it was worth a try.
Brooke stopped, listening. Was there someone still in the store?
There it was again, a noise at the far end of the store, she was sure of it. She heard it above the wheezing air-conditioning system they had. It needed to be fixed. Something else to look into, she told herself, tacking the task onto the endless list in her head.
Brooke raised her voice. “I’m sorry, the store’s closing. It’s closed, really,” she amended.
The reading had ended at nine and the hangers-on had lingered for another half hour, asking Jericho Hazley questions about his motivation, his vision and, very possibly, his exercise regimen, the one that left his frame filled out with delicious muscles that were not the usual part and parcel of a dramatic poet. But even the hangers-on had all cleared out ten minutes ago.
Or so she thought.
Maybe this was some kind of groupie, hoping to get Jericho’s personal address or his phone number. They were going to be sorely disappointed if that was the case. She firmly believed that private meant private.
Brooke made her way to the rear of the shop. Maybe her father had decided to come down after all. Maybe he’d changed his mind about going to bed, she thought, hurrying around a row of folding chairs. Usually her father never went to bed before eleven, but lately that had changed, too, another sign that things were very, very wrong.
“Dad, is that you?”
Circumventing another row of chairs, she came around the corner of the last row of books, the ones reserved for romances, both the tried-and-true and the new, and came to an abrupt halt.
Her gasp hung in the air as she all but walked into a tall, dark-haired stranger standing by the window. Her heart pounded with surprise as her eyes locked on the angry scar that was just below his right eye. A second gasp followed the first.
For one terrifying moment, although he was handsome, the man looked like someone out of Dickens’s Great Expectations.
She was acutely aware that they were the only two people in the whole store.
It was times like this she wished for a dog. Or, at the very least, an attack cat.
