Protect Me, Love Part 12

"Speaking of people who are close to dying. I'm supposed to have been dead for going on nine years now." "

Delia was still having difficulty figuring out what was going on. "But you were in the helicopter with my father."

"Obviously, I wasn't."

"They found your body in the wreckage."

"They found a body. Same height, approximately the same build and age. Easy enough to find on the same streets I was wandering before your dear daddy decided to rescue me."

More memories slid into place. There'd been rumors all those years ago about Edward Lester's much younger bride. Delia hadn't paid much attention. She'd only cared that her father was happy, and devoting himself to Ca.s.sandra seemed to make him so.

"You probably heard Tobias and Penelope talking about me," this new version of Ca.s.sandra went on. Her voice was full and confident, even commanding, nothing like the timid young thing Delia remembered. "The Wrens didn't approve of me They thought I was only out for what I could get. They were right, of course."

Delia fought to think her way through the confusion.

"It was a fair trade actually," Ca.s.sandra said. "Your father got a protege to mold into his version of the per-feet woman. There was no chance of his ever being able to do that with his darling daughter. You were too headstrong. I, on the other hand, was more than willing to be molded. I was n.o.body going nowhere when he came along. He taught me everything I needed to know to become somebody. How to dress, what to read, what to like, even what to think."

A corner of the picture began to come clearer for Delia. The portraits on that living room wall this morning. The study that looked so much like her father's.

"That's your apartment up on Riverside Drive, isn't it?" she said.

"Good for you. You're starting to put it together."

More of the picture grew clear for Delia, none of it too savory.

"Did you kill Penelope Wren?" Delia asked. "Good for you again." Ca.s.sandra poked Delia in the chest with the barrel of the gun she was holding. "I took care of them all, or to be precise, I had Max do it. You've met Max, haven't you? We've been together from way back in my street days. We're quite a team. I do most of his talking for him. He does all of my dirty work for me."

"What do you mean, you took care of them all?" Delia asked as the horror of what the answer might be crept into her bones.

"I had Max kill everybody I needed to be rid of," Ca.s.sandra said. If her voice hadn't been so cold, she might have sounded gleeful. "Penelope and Tobias, Morty Lancer and, of course, your father."

Delia sobbed once then lunged forward, grabbing Ca.s.sandra who hopped out of the way and toppled down. She must have tripped over something under the snow. Delia was on top of her in an instant.

"You killed my father," Delia cried. "You killed my father."

Her heart was breaking and exploding with rage, both at the same moment. She pounded her fists into Ca.s.sandra wherever contact could be made. Delia was oblivious of the gun. All she could think of was that her world had been destroyed, and her precious father along with it, because of this woman. Delia couldn't keep herself from giving back some of that pain now. One of them probably would have ended up dead or at least unconscious if Max hadn't dragged Delia away and tossed her into the snow next to Nick, who groaned and stirred then was still again. What could he do anyway?

Max stood over them with a gun and the flashlight. Ca.s.sandra picked herself up and brushed the snow off her coat. Then she was standing there pointing a gun at Nick and Delia, too.

"Why?" Delia asked. "Why have you done all of this?"

Ca.s.sandra laughed. "The money, of course. But you wouldn't understand that, would you? A pampered lit-He rich girl like you wouldn't have any idea what it's like to have nothing or how far a person might go to change that."

Delia could hear the hatred behind Ca.s.sandra's taunting. Had she been this way before, when they'd lived in the same house back in Colorado? Delia wished she'd paid more than pa.s.sing attention to her stepmother back then.

"How did you find me?" Delia asked.

"That precious ring of yours. Your daddy told me the whole touching story of your mother giving it to you on her deathbed. Your daddy told me everything, even that silly name he called you. Topsy. Isn't that just too, too dear?"

There was envy behind Ca.s.sandra's sneer, along with the hatred, powerful enough emotions to fuel her murderous rage. Delia could see that now.

"I'm surprised that my father shared those things with you," she said.

"I could make your daddy tell me anything. The only one easier to get to than him was Morty Lancer. Of course, he wanted his cut of-the money, too. That's how I got him to rig the will. He was siphoning off his own cut in the meantime, but I knew that and he knew I knew it."

"Did Morty know you weren't in the crash?"

"He wasn't smart enough to figure that out, any more than he was smart enough to steal small. That's why I had to get rid of him finally. He was a greedy little man. Of course, I was too smart for him. Even before your darling daddy died, I'd diverted lots f money and securities into the trust fund accounts with a holding company in control. I controlled the holding company under what I'd already set up to be my new name and ident.i.ty. Then he got greedy. Unfortunately we couldn't get straight to the money even with Morty pulling the strings. We had to go the trust fund route to not be caught. You were too much of an airhead to pay attention to what was going on, your brother was too crazy to care, and Morty was the sole trustee. It was a perfect setup till good old Morty pushed his pilfering too far. If I hadn't stopped him, he'd have bled those trust funds dry. He'd already made a dent in Samuel's."

"Samuel." Delia had been half reclining in the snow with her arm raised to keep the large flakes of snow out of her face. She shot up now into a crouch that brought Max's gun directly to the side of her head. "What have you done to Samuel? Did you kill him, too?"

Ca.s.sandra laughed again, even more cruelly. "Why would I need to do that? He's too harmless to bother with. Besides, he's been useful to me. I did have him moved to another inst.i.tution, just in case you ever decided to go after him and started checking his finances too closely. Of course, you never did."

Delia felt a twinge of guilt more chilling than the wet gradually seeping through her jeans.

"How did you manage moving him? Don't papers have to be signed?"

"A lawyer, silly girl. It's always possible to find a crooked one of those. This time I was smart enough to buy one smarter than Morty Lancer. His partner, in fact, a natural to take over the Lester estate work. He thinks I'm a distant relative of your father's just as Morty did. But then, neither of them ever questioned my story very closely. Morty was too busy grabbing up the money I let him embezzle, and his partner has enough brains to know he should keep his mouth shut. Anyway, everything's run like clockwork since Morty died. Morty was a loose end, so I snipped him off. Putting" him in your bed just tied things up, nice and neat. I like things neat. Then you took off and spoiled everything. But I had a feeling you'd show up again someday.

"Then the other day, there you were, big as life in Saks Fifth Avenue of all places, fight across the counter from me. I'd call it fate. I'd told myself I'd run into you someday and get rid of you like all the rest. You might never figure out what was going on, but maybe you would. That's a chance I wouldn't want to take. So, fate brought you to me, fate and a little luck, good luck for me, bad for you, just like what's going to happen to you and Avery now."

Ca.s.sandra stepped back. Unfortunately she didn't trip this time.

"Time to get on with it," she said. "Right, Max? Now that I've made sure the poor little rich girl knows how the kid from the gutter outsmarted the whole fester clan and ended up on Easy Street."

Nick stirred again next to Delia, then rolled over. She reached for his arm.

"How sweet," Ca.s.sandra said, "and better for Max, too. He likes to have his victims see what they've got coming to them."

Max's eyes glinted, more insane than ever in the beam from the flashlight, but that wasn't what had Delia's attention at the moment. Forms were moving out of the darkness behind Ca.s.sandra and Max, advancing toward them without sound through the m.u.f.fling snow. At first Delia thought Ca.s.sandra might have enlisted more henchmen, but that didn't make sense. Why would she need anybody besides herself and Max and their minimum of two firearms?

These new arrivals were decidedly bedraggled. Delia could see that more and more clearly as they entered the peripheral glow of the flashlight. Suddenly, Delia remembered where she was. This abandoned rail yard was exactly the kind of place that attracted the homeless, both good and bad, as a squatting ground. Delia's stomach clenched'. It looked like she and Nick had more than just Ca.s.sandra and her crazy sidekick to contend with.

Delia watched the leader of the ragged band move into view behind Max and coiled herself to spring to the attack, as she was certain Nick must also be doing next to her. Then she saw the leader's face glaring purposefully from beneath aS anta Claus hat fringed in wild, frizzy gray hair.

Jaycee! Delia wanted to cry out.

But there were no greetings in that abandoned rail yard, not until the sounds of scuffling died down and Max and Ca.s.sandra had been disarmed by the Hester Street gang with Nick joining in. Then Jaycee came forward wearing her crooked grin and reached hex hand out toward Delia.

"Merry Christmas, sugar," Jaycee said.

Jaycee had predicted two gifts for Delia that Christmas Eve. The first, from Jaycee herself, was deliverance from becoming yet another of Ca.s.sandra's victims. Jaycee had used what Delia had taught her to read that Christmas card over her shoulder back at the settlement house. Jaycee guessed there was big trouble in store when she saw the look on Nick's face as he scurried out of there after Delia. Jaycee went into action then, mobilizing everybody at the center, commandeering one of the trucks waiting to be loaded with Christmas dinners for needy families.

The rest was historya"the end of the story for Ca.s.sandra and Max, the beginning for Delia and Nick who spent the next several hours on that same truck helping deliver those dinners and belting out carols at the top of their lungs till they were hoa.r.s.e from song and laughter. There'd be time to clear everything up with the police later on. Until then, this was the first Christmas of their new life together, and neither of them intended to miss a single, blessed, beautiful minute of it.

"The second gift Jaycee promised," Delia whispered as she and Nick tumbled up to her apartment door, arms around each other and near exhaustion. "What are you talking about?" Nick asked.

Delia pointed to the package leaning against the door.

"I have a feeling this is the gift from heaven in Jaycee vision."

Nick laughed, and it was the happiest sound she'd ever heard. "Then you'd better open it," he said, and bent to kiss her, sweet as Christmas candy, full on the lips.

Delia kissed him back and held him very tight for a moment.

"Let's go inside first," she said.

Christmas morning was dawning behind the blinds in Delia's living room. She hurried to the window and pulled the cord to let that light into the room.

"No need to hide anymore," she said. "That's all over ." "

"Yes, it is," Nick answered, taking her coat.

She smiled and sighed, as if his agreement made the words suddenly true and put the years of fear and subterfuge behind her for certain and for good. She sat down on the floor next to the blue spruce and unwrapped the brown paper from the package she'd discovered outside her door. She recognized what she found inside the moment she saw it, and a gasp escaped her lips as she choked back her tears. Ca.s.sandra had mentioned leaving Delia a second, even more enticing invitation to the rail yard, in case she didn't get the one at Hester Street. Here it was, the linen-covered book Delia remembered so well.

"What is it?" Nick asked.

"My father's journal," she said.

She ran her fingers over the faded cover. She would save the reading of it for later on. She understood that what her father had written here would restore him to her in a way nothing else could have done. This book was exactly what Jaycee had predicted.

"A gift from heaven," Dcha murmured again. Nick knelt beside her, and she lifted her face to his as they wound their arms around each other. "You're a gift from heaven," he said.

"Merry Christmas, my love," Delia whispered in response as she gazed at the spun gla.s.s angel sparkling from a blue spruce branch and held Nick tight.