Dixie Browning – The Virgin And The Vengeful Groom (страница 3)

She’d been struggling to load the boxes on a dolly to get them to her car when she’d sensed someone behind her. Braced instinctively for trouble, she heard the man say, “Hey, aren’t you Lily O’Malley? My wife reads everything you write. I thought I recognized you from your picture inside the back cover.”

She eyed him warily. He was wearing an Atlanta Braves cap. The press pass clipped to his pocket looked legitimate, but with what had been happening to her this past week—the phone calls and the awful things she’d found in her underwear drawer—she didn’t dare take chances. If this guy turned out to be her stalker, she would just as soon confront him here in a public place, where one loud scream would bring help.

On the other hand, if he really was a reporter, she would rather not be discovered wearing her oldest grungies. Hardly the image her publisher liked her to present.

Never show fear, she reminded herself. Cardinal rule. “And you are?” she demanded in her most imperious tone.

“Bill DeSalvo, Virginian Pilot. Whatcha got here, books?”

He looked harmless, but then, so had Ted Bundy. “Nothing at all valuable—mostly old papers. Actually, I’m really not sure yet.”

“Bought yourself a pig in a poke, huh?”

“You have a way with words,” she said dryly. After hearing his voice, she was pretty sure he was not the one. In fact, he was a fellow writer. So she ventured a smile, but a quick one. Not a particularly warm one.

“Let me give you a hand with that stuff.” By the time he’d helped her lift the last box and squeeze it into her open sports car, she had gleaned quite a bit of information. She knew, for instance, that his wife read a chapter over her breakfast every morning and three chapters before she fell asleep each night, which didn’t say a whole lot for their marriage.

DeSalvo learned that the boxes contained old logbooks, a few moldy novels and the journals of a woman who seemed to have spent some time at sea. He also learned that Lily’s latest title, Blood Will Tell, was due to hit the stands within days and that she would be appearing at a local bookstore. And yes, of course she’d be delighted to sign a book for his wife.

Asked where she got her ideas, she nodded to the boxes. “Who knows? I might have just bought six boxes of ideas.”

The young man jotted down a few notes. “You mean you do this kind of thing all the time, looking for inspiration?”

By then Lily had learned that DeSalvo was brand-new at his job, and that running into a celebrity was a big break. Flattered in spite of herself, she told him about the time she’d paid eighty-five dollars for the diary of a nineteenth-century prostitute only to find that it was a combination account book and recipe book. “All I learned was that bay leaves keep weevils out of cornmeal and that the diarist earned a grand total of two dollars a night, six nights a week and paid someone named Leandra ten dollars a month.”

“For what, bed, board and clean sheets?”

“Probably.”

It was then that she’d noticed the photographer he’d waved over. “D’you mind?” the young journalist asked, and she brushed back her hair and tried to look as glamorous as possible, wearing the ancient white shirt and baggy slacks she’d put on to deal with the accumulation of books Doris kept threatening to burn.

And now here she was, piling up still more stuff to trip over. Pack rats didn’t need housekeepers, they needed warehouses and bulldozers.

“Hope you find something in there worth all the trouble,” the young reporter had said when she’d climbed behind the wheel.

“Or at any rate something more intriguing than budgets and household hints,” she returned, laughing. This time the flash caught her with her mouth open and her hair blowing across her face. Oh, well. Any publicity was supposed to be better than none at all. “There’s bound to be something here. A bit of mystery, a bit of romance—who knows what I’ll find?”

She waved and backed out of the parking slot, muttering under her breath, “Just don’t you dare refer to my books as bodice rippers.”

“The hell you say!” Curt’s feet hit the deck with a jarring force that caused him to wince, swear and catch his breath. He had read and reread the piece in the Pilot. It was the picture of a laughing woman that had first caught his attention. Something about the way her windblown hair swirled around a face that was more intriguing than pretty—the way her shirt was lovingly plastered over small, high breasts. It was only when he’d read through the two short columns the second time that something struck a nerve. Storage unit? Six boxes? Papers, ledgers, journals and a few musty old novels?

“When asked where she got her ideas, the novelist replied that ideas were everywhere. ‘Glimpses of strangers. Snatches of overheard conversation. A few lines in a newspaper. Ideas are never the problem, what’s hard to find is the time to do them all justice.”’

Ideas, hell, the woman was a common thief! Unless he was very much mistaken, those boxes piled in the back seat of her toy car were his own personal property!

Not that he was into material possessions, other than his dive gear and his wheels. Naturally, those were top of the line. If creature comforts had been a priority, he would never have holed up in a place like Powers Point. He was into solitude. Solitude, singlehood and simplified living.

But dammit, what was his was his! Just because he happened to miss a couple of rent payments on a dinky little storage locker, that didn’t give those jerks the right to auction his stuff off to the highest bidder. It wasn’t as if he’d had nothing better to do than keep up with such trivial details. He’d gone all the way to hell and back serving the interests of his country. Fighting terrorists, arms dealers and drug dealers, who were more and more often turning out to be one and the same, hardly fell into the category of a nine-to-five job.

He didn’t care what was in those boxes, his father had wanted him to have them, and he was damned well going to have them, and Miss Lily O’Malley could get her ideas from the city landfill as far as he was concerned.

It took three days to locate the woman. The drive to Norfolk took longer than it should because he’d had to get out every fifty miles or so to work the kinks out of his carcass. First thing he did was find a motel, check in and stand under a hot shower until his eyelids began to droop. After that he dried off and ordered in a pizza. He fell asleep with a half-eaten pizza before him and an open phone book, roused just enough to fall into bed and slept for ten hours.

Most of the next day was spent in tracking down a woman who obviously didn’t want to be found. The phone company was no help at all. Gave him a hard time, in fact. When he’d pressed he’d been told that the woman had been having trouble with crank calls and that he could talk to the police if he insisted. He’d declined the offer.

Next he tried the storage company, but the birdbrain in the office spouted the company line. Skip three months and you’re dead meat. Company policy.

He refrained from telling her what she could do with her company policy and tackled the newspaper office, with no better luck. City directory? Sorry. He was an officer in the United States Navy? Big deal. They had naval officers running out their ears here in the Norfolk area.

Curt still had a few sources of information not available to the general public, but as national security was not at issue, he wasn’t about to pull rank over a bunch of old papers and the works of some nineteenth-century hack writer.

It was at a public library that he finally got his first lead. Lily O’Malley would be appearing at a local bookstore to sign copies of her newest book between the hours of twelve and two the next afternoon.

Bingo.

Thanks to a friendly, informative librarian, he also learned that the lady had earned herself a nice collection of awards and was on the way to building a reputation writing something called romantic suspense. What he couldn’t figure out was why a successful contemporary writer would fork over even a few bucks for the scribblings of an obscure nineteenth-century spinster who, according to what little family legend he could recall, had made a career of distorting the truth.

At the bookstore he spent ten minutes checking out the site, pretending an interest in astrology while he watched a table being set up, complete with lace cover, flowers, posters and a stack of books a foot high and five feet long. If they were expecting to sell that many copies, he’d better move the hell out of the way or get crushed in the stampede.

Nobody stared at the shiny new skin on the side of his neck, or if they did, they were discreet about it. He’d worn khakis and a black T-shirt, something to blend in with the Saturday-afternoon crowd. His hair had grown shaggy since he’d left the hospital. The gray seemed more pronounced, but all in all, there was nothing about him that should spook a lady writer.

After rethinking his initial plan to confront and demand, he opted for diplomacy. A brief, polite explanation, followed by an offer to repay whatever she’d laid out, after which he would collect his property and leave.