Her Bodyguard

CHAPTER FIVE

“Now, TAKE A DEEP BREATH,” Lara laughingly advised, as she paused, hand on a doorknob. Despite the nightmares Trace had mentioned, she seemed in fine spirits this morning. Trace and Gillian had collected her from her bedroom suite, where she had taken a late breakfast. She’d led them on a leisurely tour of the public areas of the house, the high point of which, to Gillian, had been an exercise room, complete with lap pool, in the basement that she might use whenever she pleased. The conclusion of the orientation was Gillian’s new office, located upstairs in the same wing as Lara’s suite, all the way at its western end. “And remember,” Lara continued as she opened the door, “it isn’t as bad as it looks.”

“It’s worse,” Trace lazily assured her. Apparently having nothing better to do, he’d tagged along on the tour and Gillian wasn’t sure if she was grateful or annoyed. On the one hand, his presence diluted the intensity of her first extended interaction with her mother, so that she wasn’t constantly “onstage,” having to pick and choose her words every minute. But on the other hand, his presence prevented her from connecting with Lara on a more intimate level.

“Hush,” Lara commanded as she opened the door.

“If this is bad,” Gillian murmured, following her into the office, “I don’t know if I could stand good. It just might kill me!” The large room ended in a gigantic, three-sided bay window, with tiny stained-glass diamond panes trimming its upper reaches; at eye level, half-moon expanses of plate glass framed the outrageously splendid view. A long cushioned seat was built in below each facet of the window; a coffee table was placed in the alcove thus created. Gillian could see the tops of the rosebushes that edged Cliff Walk peeking above the estate walls, then 180 degrees of ocean glittering in the noonday sun.

“It is gorgeous, isn’t it?” Lara agreed. “This used to be Richard‘s—my husband’s—office. I never did understand how he could write here. But then, he used to sit with his back to the view.” Her smile wavered for a moment. She swallowed, tipped her head in a movement that seemed to say, Oh, well, and continued. “It was Joya—my stepdaughter—who turned the desk to face the windows last year when she took over.”

Her stepdaughter! Somehow Gillian had thought, if she hadn’t been told by now, that Lara had no children.

“Up until last year, I’d had the same assistant for nine years. But when Beckie left to be married, Joya asked for the job...” Lara went on, glancing around the room with a faint frown.

“And you can see what a good job she’s been doing,” said Trace, nodding at the boxes lined along one wall.

A dozen boxes at least, Gillian estimated, filled with—“Yikes! Is that all—”

“Fan mail,” Lara said with a look of comic guilt. “Still want the job?”

“Well, yes.” More than ever. Lara wasn’t like anything she’d expected. There was some mystery here that needed unraveling. “Who’s afraid of a little fan mail?” And now was probably not the time to admit that she had suffered all her life from mild—okay, moderate—dyslexia. Reading required intense concentration and exacted fierce headaches. “Am I looking at a week’s worth of mail or—”

“Oh, just today’s,” Trace assured her blandly.

Lara elbowed him in the ribs. “Sit down and hush up before you scare Gillian off the job, you brute!”

“Your wish, oh heart, is my...” Trace retired obediently to a window seat. He selected a catalog from a pile arranged on the coffee table, opened it, and seemed instantly absorbed.

Lara turned back to Gillian with a smile. “It’s six months’ or more accumulation. Joya fell behind some time before last Christmas and the poor darling never caught up again.”

“Though she tried valiantly,” Trace murmured without looking up. He turned a page.

“She was only working part-time,” Lara defended her stepdaughter. “She and Toby—her brother—were attending college here in town, at Salve Regina...”

A brother, as well! Gillian’s stepbrother, also, or was Toby Lara and Richard Corday’s son? Which would mean that he was Gillian’s half brother. She found herself hoping keenly for the second alternative. Her own adoptive brother had been plucked from her daily life with her parents’ divorce. She would have liked a full-time sibling or two.

“What with her midterms and a paper she had to write...” murmured Lara, still defending the absent Joya. Trace rustled his catalog too loudly. Lara shrugged. “Anyway, all these letters need answering. So here’s how you go about it.”

She selected a letter from the last box in line along the wall, opened it and pulled out a printed get-well card featuring a doleful rabbit on crutches, his ears bent, his head bandaged. She laughed to herself and held it out to Gillian. “They’re filming the fall season’s episodes of Searching for Sarah already. Since I won’t be returning for another six months or so, the scriptwriters have written me out of the story. They’ve decided that I had a dreadful accident while skiing in Switzerland, and no one knows if I’ll ever walk again—art imitating life, but not too closely, thank God.”

She lifted the card from Gillian’s fingers. “Anyway, somehow Soap Opera Digest got wind of that plot twist and ran it as their lead story last month. Ever since it came out, half my mail is get-well cards and the other half is outraged complaints.”

Either way, Gillian’s job was to respond. Lara switched on the computer on the desk and showed her the various form letters. As time and inspiration permitted, she should add a sentence or two to customize the form letter, thus making the fan feel she was receiving a personal response. “I wish there were time to send each of them an answer from scratch, but there just isn’t. Still I’m really grateful for their concern. For their...loyalty. Some of them have been writing me for years. Which reminds me—”

Lara showed Gillian how to check to see if the fan was new—in which case the name was to be added to a database Lara maintained, along with a code that showed which form letter she’d received—or if the fan was an old one, then Gillian should review the file to make sure a repeat response didn’t get sent.

Autographed photos of Lara were stored in this drawer, prestamped envelopes in that. “And that’s about it for the fan mail,” Lara said at last. “Except for the...special cases.”

“The reality impaired,” Trace murmured.

Lara rounded on him fiercely. “They’re not all—”

“There?” he supplied gently. “Any woman who thinks she might be Sarah? A fictional long-lost daughter of a fictional Dr. Daley, star of a prime-time soap opera? Anyone who believes that isn’t playing with a full deck, Lara.”

Gillian had wondered herself, of course. Dr. Laura Daley was fiction. Lara’s maiden name was Laura Bailey. Both women, the fictional one and the factual, had sold their babies—one for the money to go to med school, the other for a red sports car. And it was Lara’s own husband who’d created the Dr. Daley character. Why? The story was just too juicy to pass up? But how could Lara have allowed Corday to use her own life as fodder for a soap opera?

On the other hand, people did it all the time, selling their real-life tragedies or scandals to TV, to be dramatized as a movie of the week. So why couldn’t Lara sell her own story—sell me—all over again?

“They’re a little confused,” Lara admitted, regaining her good temper. “So we try to straighten them out gently, pointing out that Searching for Sarah isn’t based on reality.”

Except that it is. Almost. Gillian found herself nodding to hide her confusion.

“I have a form letter for the special cases,” Lara went on, “but those I handle personally. If you run across any letter where the fan thinks she might be Sarah, you bring that right to me and I’ll deal with it, okay?”

Straightening them out gently, she’d said. Except that when Gillian had written Lara a year ago to say that maybe, just maybe, she might be Lara’s birth daughter, Sarah Scott, Lara’s response had been ferocious, not gentle: If I didn’t want you when you were born, why would I want you now?

“Laaaara. Lara-darling?” The owner of that caroling soprano paused in the office doorway. Gillian recognized the blonde in the Range Rover, who had coolly nodded her through the gates on the day of her interview. This morning she radiated warmth. “Oh, there you are, darling!” Her blue eyes switched to Gillian and widened. “And you must be my poor, poor replacement!”

“Gillian, this is my daughter Joya,” Lara said, and completed the introductions while the girl glided across the hardwood floors to offer her hand. Her palm was marshmallow soft, her grip fashionably limp; her inch-long mauve fingernails made shaking hands a bit of a hazard. Gillian could see why she’d gotten behind in her paperwork.

“Did you need something, sweetie?” Lara asked.

The girl turned a dazzling smile upon her. “Just your car for a little bitty while? Stupid Toby took the Range Rover back to the dealer. He says it’s lost its new-car smell and the dealer should have some sort of spray to make it smell new again. I mean, I ask you, so it smells like it’s three months old instead of three days? Who cares? Anyway, I told Duffy and Pooh I’d meet them for lunch out at Bailey’s Beach, so could I pretty, pretty please take your—”

“No,” said Trace from the window seat. “I may need it.”

Sunshine gave way to storm clouds in the blink of an eye, as Joya whirled to face him. “Well, too bad! I asked first!” She glanced over her shoulder at Lara. “Didn’t I, darling?”

Lara bit her lip, glancing from one to the other. Trace shook his head slowly and Joya caught the movement from the corner of her eye. Her head snapped around.

“You stay out of this, Trace! It’s none of your business.”

“We could drive you, I suppose,” Lara said. She put a soothing hand on the girl’s arm.

Joya shook it off and backed away. “I don’t want to be driven to lunch like a snot-nosed child. I—”

“Then stop acting like one,” suggested Trace.

Joya stamped her foot. “You shut up!”

Gillian drifted back a step...another, then turned. If there had been some way to creep out of the room she’d have taken it gladly. Next best option was to act as though this ugly little scene wasn’t happening, go about her business. She stooped by the last box in line and examined its contents.

Behind her, Trace’s voice overrode Lara’s placating murmur. “If these so-called friends of yours can’t be bothered to drive a mile out of their way to pick you up, then call a taxi. You can afford it.”

“Trace—” Lara interposed on a note of pleading.

“At least I pay my own way here,” Joya declared in a vicious singsong, advancing on him. She snatched up the catalog he’d set aside, flipped its pages at random. “Unlike some of us who just lounge around, preening and flexing—”

Trace laughed aloud. Gillian chose a letter from the box at random. This one was a manila envelope and seemed to contain something thicker than a letter. A gift from an admiring fan? She could ask Lara to show her what to do in cases like that. Lara looked as if she’d welcome a distraction, but Gillian hadn’t the nerve. Joya was standing over Trace, her hands clenched as though she wanted to smash his upturned, gently smiling face but didn’t dare. Frustrated as the girl appeared, she might lash out at the next person who spoke or moved.

“Flexing and preening and sucking up to older women. Getting Lara to buy you goodies: What are you shopping for this time, Trace, another set of custom golf clubs? Or were you a very good boy last night? You deserve a gold Rolex this morning?”

“Joya, that’s enough!” Lara said sharply.

Gillian stood, opened the envelope. Any distraction was better than this.

“Enough? It’s not half enough,” Joya snarled. “It’s time somebody said something! If Daddy could see this—this big lapdog who’s taken his place. I bet he’s spinning in his grave! Spinning and puking!”

The package held something wrapped in several folds of a plastic bag. Pulling it out and unwrapping it, Gillian drifted to Lara’s side. From the bag she removed a mottled white-and-brown card, folded loosely around some oblong object. “Mrs. Corday, excuse me, but this letter contained some—”

“If you don’t mind, honey,” Joya snapped, “you can wait your turn! I’m—”

“Stop!” called Trace, lunging to his feet and swinging Joya out of his way—just as Gillian shook the item free of the card and into her hand.

Her gasp feathered out, loud in the sudden silence.

White fur...the hardness of bone beneath... the stench of rotten meat. Trace caught her wrist and turned it, flipping the object off her palm and onto the desktop.

“Oh, gross!” cried Joya.

“Oh,” said Lara, as she sank onto the office chair.

LARA’S “GIFT” WAS THE FOOT of some small animal. Rabbit’s foot, Gillian thought with revulsion. But not a commercial, sanitized rabbit’s foot you could buy on a key chain. Horrible as she thought those were, this was much worse. A homemade job, it looked like, with dark stains on the soft fur.

She became aware that Trace still held her wrist. Warm and oddly comforting, his fingers curled around her. She could feel her own pulse, slamming against the base of his thumb. And his slower, heavier beat, like an answer you could depend on.

“You’re not going to faint on me, are you?” he asked absently, looking up from the rabbit’s foot into her eyes.

“Of course not,” she said, though she did feel—detached. Floating a few inches off the floor. As if she could tip forward and fall into his deep hazel eyes—pools of slate green spangled with gold and gray. Aware, also, that even if her knees did buckle, he was strong enough to hold her upright.

“Of course you’re not,” he murmured on an odd note, something almost with an edge to it. “And what have you got there?” He reached and caught her other wrist and lifted it, scowled at the bloodstained card she still clutched. “Drop it.”

The wrapper fell to the desk and he released her at last. She stood, rubbing her wrists. Trace used the eraser ends of two pencils off the desk to push open the curled card and pin it flat to the blotter. Lara wheeled her chair up beside her to watch. Joya also crowded closer.

On the inner surface of the bloody card were printed the words:

Lara-mommy! I saw this and thought of YOU. You could use some luck—maybe more than you know? See you SOOOOOOON. Your loving SARAH XXX.

“Gross!” Joya repeated. She sounded more excited than repelled.

“I’m sorry,” Gillian said, glancing at Lara’s troubled face.

“Why?” Trace snapped.

“What?” Swinging to face him, she found his eyes had gone darker, the pupils expanding like those of a cat when it sees a bird.

“Why are you sorry?” he demanded softly.

Bewildered by his intensity, she shrugged. “Of all the letters I had to choose...”

A two-heartbeat pause, then Trace looked down again. “Most unfortunate,” he agreed smoothly.

“I’ll say!” Joya sniggered. “First day on the job and the girl hits a home run! Way to go, Gillie.”

“It’s hardly Gillian’s fault,” Lara protested. “Not her fault at all! If anyone ought to apologize, Gillian, it’s me. I should have warned you. Once in a blue moon you’ll get a fan who’s a little...”

“Or a lot,” Trace observed wryly. He was using his two pencils now to maneuver the manila envelope across the desk to his side.

“Oh, pick it up, for Pete’s sake!” Joya reached for it. “Ow!” she yelped as he rapped her knuckles with the eraser end of a pencil. “Did you see that?” she demanded of Lara. “I’m supposed to put up with this crap?”

“Fingerprints, darling,” Trace murmured, bending to study the envelope. When he straightened again, there was a stillness about him that hadn’t been there before. “This envelope came from which box, Gillian?”

“Th-the one on the end.” Whatever Joya might think, this man was nobody’s lapdog. Gillian had met rottweilers with kinder eyes. “Why?”

“This is today’s mail. Postmarked Saturday in Boston. So today, Monday, is the first day it could have been delivered. So who brought it up to the house?” His eyes swung to Joya.

She squirmed, shrugged, looked up at him with an odd defiance. “Okay, so I did, so what? When Toby and I came in from breakfast, it was there in the mailbox, so I brought it up—brought it here to the office. So what?”

“I believe we had an understanding, Joya. I bring up the mail.”

“You think that’s all it takes to earn your keep around here?” she jeered, backing away from him toward the door.

“Joya!” Lara protested.

“Oh, spare me. I don’t want to hear it, okay? I’m late for lunch. Gillie, call me a cab and tell it to meet me at the front gates.” Joya stalked out of the room without a backward glance.

CHAPTER SIX

AT SEVEN-THIRTY IN THE evening, a rosy light still lingered in the western sky. Standing at his office window, Trace could see, beyond a hedge of lilacs, a shadowed stretch of the service driveway. “Come on, Gillian.” She’d told Lara that she taught an eight o’clock class at the Y Monday nights. Women’s weights, she’d said. “Get a move on.” She’d have to leave the carriage house any minute now to make it on time. And he couldn’t move till she did.

Just one more roadblock in a day filled with frustrations.

After that ugliness in the office, Lara had gone straight to bed. She’d claimed a raging headache and Trace didn’t doubt it. Since her fall she was subject to those, and stress looked to be a trigger. But it wasn’t just pain troubling her, he’d thought, when he brought her her lunch on a tray.

The lady was blue, it struck him, in spite of her brave front. Not frightened, which seemed the more reasonable response to such a blatant threat, but deeply depressed. And not willing to talk about it—at least not with him. Not till he’d apologized for thwarting Joya.

But Trace had no intention of apologizing to the silly brat. He’d explained to Lara that he didn’t want her car out on the street unsupervised, where it might be sabotaged. But he couldn’t say that to Joya, since she and Toby lived in a state of blissful ignorance, unaware that Lara was being stalked. Or that their stepmother’s “accident” on Cliff Walk was no accident. Only the chief of Newport police and his top detective, Jeremy Benton, were privy to that secret. Lara had wanted to avoid publicity. And Trace felt he had a better chance of nailing her assailant if no hue and cry was raised.

Since the last few minutes, even hours, before a traumatic head injury were often wiped from the victim’s memory, whoever had pushed Lara off the cliff had good reason to hope she’d forgotten the assault. Let him or her think so, Trace had urged. The better to catch you, you freak!

For the same reason, he lived at Woodwind under cover, with no one but Lara and his police contacts knowing his true role in the household. Because he didn’t want to deter a threat—postpone Lara’s troubles till he’d gone. He wanted to lull the stalker, lure him or her into his reach. Look, here’s poor little Lara, protected by no one but her bumbling gigolo. Come and get her!

Or be gotten.

TRACE STRAIGHTENED as headlights blossomed beyond the lilac leaves, then wheeled downhill toward the gates. Gillian’s little Toyota. He breathed a sigh of relief. Action at last.

He left the mansion by the kitchen door, checking that it locked behind him. Barbara Heath, Lara’s longtime cook and housekeeper, and Maureen, the upstairs maid, had both retired to their third-floor apartments. As had Harriet, Woodwind’s perpetual houseguest. The resident layabouts, Toby and Joya, were out for the evening. If they followed their usual pattern, they wouldn’t return till the bars closed at one o’clock. Or later, if they found an after-hours party.

And his client was locked in her impregnable suite with his locket buzzer around her neck. He didn’t like to leave her, but it was Lara’s choice to hire only one bodyguard. There was only so much he could do.

Nail Sarah XXX and he could stop worrying.

Trace circled the noisy gravel of the courtyard, then approached the carriage house through a flower bed on the downhill side. The copy of the key he’d made two days before—without telling Lara—fit sweetly into the lock and turned. At the top of the stairs, he glanced at his watch—7:55 p.m. He’d give himself till 9:00 to toss the place. It took longer when you meant to leave no signs of a search.

Inside, he paused, listening to the silence. Smelling it. Already the air carried a suggestion of Gillian. Lemons? New-mown hay? The same sunny, subtle perfume that clung to her tawny hair. He’d noticed it that first time he held her. Must be imagining it now, surely.

He padded into the room. After he’d disposed of Sarah XXX’s latest offering, Gillian had spent the rest of the morning working on the fan mail. In the afternoon she’d retreated to her apartment. To unpack and settle in, she’d said. Noting a vase of wild roses on the table in the window nook, Trace smiled in spite of himself. Whatever else she might be, she was all girl.

His smile faded. Whatever else she might be. He didn’t want Gillian to be his psycho. Found it almost impossible to imagine she could be. But if she was? Then the odds are very good that the lady owns an orange University of Miami sweatshirt, he reminded himself. Find that, and his search was over. Trace headed for the closet in the bedroom.

“GOT A NOTE TO YOU FROM your class,” said the front-desk attendant at the Y. “One of them called it in.”

Gillian unfolded it on her way up to the locker room:

Gillian, we forgot to tell you that it’s Jennifer’s BIG FORTY tonight. She opted for champagne instead of tummy crunches, so we’re carousing at Yesterday’s. Join us, why don’t you, and bring the rest of the class. The Rat Pack.

Gillian laughed and shoved on into the dressing room. The Rat Pack were five women friends who’d signed up together for her weight class. A good time was always their first priority; shaping their figures with small free weights ran a distinct second. With those five truant, she’d have only two students tonight.

She’d changed to her exercise togs before leaving the carriage house, but she stopped by her locker to drop off her thigh-length cotton sweater. “Well, blast!”