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Payback. Jasmine Cresswell
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Kate switched her thoughts back to her mother, which was a lot more agreeable than thinking about Luke. In the six months since her father had died, her lifelong admiration for her mother had blossomed into full-blown hero worship. She had learned how much more there was to Avery than a kind heart, a pretty face and a knack for selecting attractive clothes. She watched the bravery with which her mother set about rebuilding a life that had been shattered not only emotionally and socially but also financially, and she was torn between pride and an odd sense of role-reversal protectiveness.
Today, as she looked around the little house that her mother had just begun to restore, Kate’s admiration was tinged by a dose of worry. The house was structurally sound, but it had been owned by an elderly couple for fifty years, and routine upkeep had clearly defeated them over the past decade. Avery had acquired the house for a rock-bottom price, despite the excellent location. Still, ten days of hard work had barely made a dent in what needed to be done.
The kitchen had the very latest in modern conveniences, circa 1973. The shag carpet looked as if it might date from approximately the same era, and the drapes seemed to be held together by twenty years of solidified grime. Last weekend they’d managed to clean the master bedroom and bathroom and get both rooms painted. On Monday, a new bed had been delivered, so Avery now had somewhere other than Kate’s small row house where she could take showers and sleep. The rest of the place, however, was still a complete disaster.
Carrying a pail of steaming water, her mother returned from the kitchen just as Kate poked gingerly at an unidentified gray object on the decrepit living room sofa. “I think it was a cushion,” Avery said.
“I’ll take your word for it.” Katie shoved the putative pillow into a giant plastic garbage bag, already half full of similar unidentified objects. The house should have been cleared out by the sellers, but pursuing them out of state to their retirement villa was more hassle than doing the cleanup themselves. “How much money have you set aside for hauling trash, Mom?”
“Sorry? What was that?” Avery set the pail by the fireplace and pulled on rubber gloves.
“I wondered if you’d budgeted enough money for hauling trash,” Kate repeated.
“Oh, yes, I’m sure I have. I got several quotes, you know. It’s less expensive than you’d expect. Or less expensive than I expected, anyway.” Avery looked vaguely around the room, as if waiting for hard copy of the quotes to leap into her hand. “The men I contracted with are scheduled to come on Friday, and they’ve agreed to rip up the carpet, too.”
“Good.” Kate reviewed her mental checklist. “The hardwood gets refinished next week, right?”
“Hardwood?” Avery looked vague again. “Oh, yes, the floors. That’s right. They’ll take a day to sand everything down and then another day to apply the coating. They promised to be done by the middle of next week, so I decided to hold off on getting any more of my new furniture delivered until then. Thank goodness, everything I ordered seems to have arrived from the manufacturers.”
“Sounds like you have a plan. You seem preoccupied today, Mom. What’s up?” Kate gingerly pulled out the sofa, afraid of what she might discover between the furniture and the wall. Dust bunnies frolicked in abundance, but there were no live critters, thank God.
“I am a little distracted, I suppose. I’ve…had some surprising news.” The tension in her mother’s voice was palpable. Belatedly, Kate realized that Avery had been on edge the entire afternoon. She would have noticed earlier if they hadn’t mostly been working in separate rooms.
“Surprising good news?” she asked, straightening. Searching her mother’s face, she shook her head. “No, it’s bad news, isn’t it?”
“I’m not sure.” Avery’s laugh was harsh, an astonishing fact in and of itself. Kate was even more astonished when her mother covered her face with her grimy hands and burst into tears. “Oh, God, how can I possibly say I’m not sure? I loved him! I did. Once upon a time I loved him. So what’s the matter with me?”
Loved who? Kate put her arm around her mother’s slender shoulders. “I could answer that better if you’d give me some clue as to what we’re talking about.”
Avery wiped her tears with the backs of her hands, leaving a streak of dirt. Not only that, she didn’t immediately find a pure white tissue and remove the smudge. Kate wouldn’t have been shocked if the world had shuddered to an immediate halt at such a betrayal of the accepted order.
“I saw Luke Savarini today,” Avery said.
The name struck Kate like a blow. She stepped back, hoping her smile looked more natural than it felt. “Well, that would certainly be enough to reduce me to tears. I can’t imagine why he made you cry, though. He’s quite civilized in company.”
Kate’s feeble attempt at humor flew right past her mother. Avery drew in a short, shaky breath. “Luke was in Washington, D.C., with his sister a couple of weeks ago. They were eating dinner in a restaurant there. Luke says he saw…your father…eating dinner there, too. Right in the restaurant. In D.C. Well, a suburb, actually. But basically in the D.C. area.”
Kate knew she couldn’t have heard right. “Wait. I’m confused. Luke was in Washington, D.C., with one of his sisters and he claimed that he saw my father? He saw Ron Raven?”
“So he says. He seems remarkably sure of his facts.”
“Did he speak to my father?” Kate realized she was shaking. Despite that, her voice sounded oddly controlled.
“No.”
“Why not? Didn’t it occur to him that it might be helpful to find out what the hell my father was doing alive in Washington, D.C., when everyone thinks he’s dead in Miami?” She was still shaking and it was a lot easier to be sarcastic than to work out what she was actually feeling.
“It seems that your father…that Ron ran away as soon as he realized that Luke had recognized him. Luke tried to catch up with him, but he couldn’t. Apparently, there was a woman with him.”
Kate’s brow wrinkled. “With Luke?”
“No, sorry. I’m not being entirely coherent, am I? Your father was with another woman. Quite a young woman. Luke thought she might be in her thirties. Early forties at most. But he definitely said that your father recognized him.”
She was going to kill Luke, Kate decided. She was going to find some long, slow, agonizing way of causing his death and then she was going to stand over him and watch it happen. In fact, she wouldn’t just stand passively and watch. She’d dance a celebratory jig as the lifeblood oozed out of him. For what conceivable reason had the stupid man found it necessary to share his delusions about seeing Ron Raven? Her father was dead, murdered in a Miami hotel room along with his companion, a still-unidentified woman. Luke must know how badly Avery had suffered from the media frenzy provoked by reports of Ron’s bigamy, not to mention the sinister security video of the body bags being wheeled onto the yacht, presumably by the murderer himself. Why would Luke choose to open a wound that had been closed only with great courage and slow, painful effort on her mother’s part?
“Obviously Luke was mistaken.” Kate managed by some miracle to keep the rage out of her voice. Luke had no idea how lucky he was not to be anywhere within striking range of her supersharp chef’s knives or he’d be singing soprano from now on. “Heavens, Mom, you’re not paying any attention to his nonsense, are you? He must have sniffed a few too many of his own cognac fumes.”
“Is that what you think? That Luke was imagining things?”
“Yes, that’s what I think! Of course it is.” Contemplating the alternative possibility that her father might be alive and deliberately hiding from his wives and children