Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
J enny and Hemingway burned the midnight oil searching the internet for clues about Svetlana Markova. Although the internet was rich with cat photos and what people had for lunch, data about foreign visitors from the 1950s was almost completely absent. They quickly concluded that genealogy databases were their best bet for catching sight of the enigmatic Svetlana Markova. A quick search of the free online databases led nowhere except dead ends, but they were novices at understanding complicated genealogy archives and weren’t ready to admit defeat.
“People who belong to genealogy clubs are a friendly bunch,” Jenny said. “What if we put out a public call for help locating Svetlana Markova?”
It proved easy enough to do. It only took Jenny a few minutes to create an anonymous profile at FamilyOrigin, the biggest online genealogy website. The site had a place to post questions and tap the collective wisdom of a huge brigade of amateur genealogists.
She typed in Svetlana’s name, an approximate year of birth, and her likely birthplace somewhere in the Soviet Union. It was almost midnight. The glow from the large computer monitor provided the only illumination as she and Hemingway stared at the information she’d just keyed in about Svetlana.
“Do we dare?” she asked Hemingway, her finger hovering over the enter key. Once she posted this question, Svetlana’s name would be out in the world and it might help them get more information, but it was just as likely to poke a sleeping dragon . . . a sleeping dragon who wanted the return of a missing Fabergé egg.
“We need to know more about her,” Hemingway said. He leaned across the keyboard and tapped the enter key.
It was done. Now all they could do was wait.
Over the next two days Jenny fielded eight responses on the genealogy website. Her heartrate galloped each time she clicked on a new message, but so far, they’d come up empty. All eight helpful genealogy buffs asked for additional information such as Svetlana’s church affiliation, the name of her parents, and other questions Jenny had no hope of knowing. After the initial flurry of replies to her query, the responses trickled to a halt.
On Thursday morning she set off to inspect the grove for pests. It was an ordinary day until she spotted an alligator killing one of Hemingway’s chickens.
Again . It was only a six-footer, but alligators lost their fear of humans when they were getting fed. This was the third time it had nabbed one of Hemingway’s chickens, so Jenny got a rifle and took care of business. It wouldn’t be safe to bring Sam to the grove for weekend visits if there was an alligator that had lost its fear of people.
The freshly killed alligator was at the base of a huge cypress tree, where the knobby roots would make it impossible to bury. She swallowed her distaste and dragged it to a sandy patch an acre away for burial. She’d only dug a few feet when water began pooling in the bottom of the hole. The high water table that made Florida so good for growing oranges also made it hard to bury things.
Could that be why Svetlana’s body ended up in the cypress tree?
Jenny jabbed the point of the shovel into the dirt and eyed the gap in the line of cypress trees where the old cypress once stood. The entire grove had a high water table. It was why their house couldn’t have a basement and why the fallout shelter stank so bad. Digging a hole deep enough for a human body would be almost impossible. Stashing a body in the hollow of a cypress tree suddenly made sense.
She yanked the shovel out and began digging again, flinging another load of sodden mud out of the hole, and wondered how her grandfather handled the water problem when he dug the fallout shelter. He had been so clever, but crazy, too. He wasted most of his adult life preparing for a war that never happened. From a distance of three generations, it was easy to poke fun at Cold War paranoia and “the red menace.” The duck-and-cover videos with old-timey narration instructing school children to hide under their desks to protect them from a nuclear bomb seemed so quaintly foolish.
And yet, the four Romanov daughters, dressed in their white gowns and dainty gloves, probably wouldn’t think it quaintly foolish. They experienced the fury of the red menace up close.
The slamming of a car door made her jump, and her heart almost stopped at the sight of Wyatt’s truck parked at the end of the field.
What a disaster. She and Wyatt had been getting along so well, but a dead alligator lay a few yards away and it wasn’t hunting season. As the chief law enforcement officer in the county, Wyatt was the guy who enforced hunting laws. He was in uniform, too.
She glanced behind her, relieved to see the gator carcass completely hidden by palmetto fronds, but flies were starting to gather and it didn’t smell too sweet.
A hint of a smile lifted the corner of his mouth as Wyatt headed toward her. “What are you up to this afternoon?” he asked, glancing at the hole with curiosity.
She fidgeted. “Oh, just digging a hole. Seeing how deep I can get before I hit water.”
“Thinking of putting in another well?” He started walking around the area, as though assessing it for the viability of a new well. Skepticism was written on his face, and Jenny needed to stop him from looking around.
“Did you have any luck getting more information on Svetlana?”
“I did,” he said, still scanning the area. “According to her visa application, she was the Soviet representative to the World Famine Commission from 1946 to 1952. She disappeared in 1952. That’s all I could find.”
Wyatt glanced behind her again, where the buzz of flies was getting louder. “I think there might be a dead animal back there.”
“Don’t worry about it. Vultures will clean up anything too awful. Let’s go back to the house and discuss what to do next.”
Jenny tried to coax him away from the palmettos, but he angled around her and took a few steps closer.
Then he cursed and reared back, grabbing her arm. “Get out of here, Jenny! There’s an alligator over there.”
She cleared her throat. “Really?”
“Yeah, really. Hurry up.” He started tugging her toward the house, but then he froze and looked back toward the hole she had been digging.
“It’s dead, isn’t it.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Well, you were the one who saw it. Did it look dead to you?”
He grabbed her shovel and crept back into the scrub, a hand on his service weapon. He peered through the palmettos for several moments, then extended the shovel to push the fronds aside before turning away in disgust. “Jenny, please tell me you didn’t shoot an alligator.”
“Did you actually see a bullet hole?”
“Two of them,” he snapped. He threw the shovel down to prop his hands on his hips. “You know shooting alligators out of season is against the law. You still have a few more months on your probation, and if you get caught violating, you’ll have a felony conviction slung around your neck for the rest of your life.”
She didn’t realize Wyatt knew about her mortifying gun conviction from shooting in the air when a trespasser wouldn’t leave the grove. She didn’t want to discuss it, but at least she had a good excuse for what she did today.
“Your colleagues at the county government weren’t any help when I called to report a nuisance gator, so I handled the problem on my own.”
The smell from the alligator was getting worse and the longer it remained exposed to the heat, the nastier it would be. She picked up the shovel and walked back to the hole. “Want to help me bury it?”
“No, I don’t want to help you bury it,” he snapped. “Shooting alligators out of season is illegal and you should have thought of that before you shot a protected animal.”
He kept his back turned on her as she dug in silence. He probably didn’t want to soil his eyes by looking at anything that whiffed of illegality, but Jenny could never afford to be so puritanical. Alligators swarmed all over the state because city dwellers thought they were quaint and only allowed two months of hunting a year.
After a few minutes of stony silence, Wyatt broke the standoff. “Who at the county government wouldn’t help you?” he asked quietly. He still kept his back to her, but his voice had gentled.
“I reported it to Sheriff Eckert. He said six-footers weren’t considered a nuisance.”
“And you felt otherwise?”
“It’s killed three of Hemingway’s chickens.”
Wyatt turned toward her, the ire draining from him. “That makes it a nuisance,” he said. “Speaking of Hemingway, why isn’t he out here helping you?”
She hoisted another load of sloppy mud out of the hole. Hemingway had gone AWOL again, which he often did when he wasn’t in the mood to work.
“Gone fishing,” she said simply. “I’m on my own today. Unless you want to help, of course.”
“Forget it, Jenny. I might be willing to look the other way, but I’m not going to lift a finger to help.”
She hid a smile as she kept digging. “Okay, Mr. Law and Order.” She actually liked that he was a rule-follower. In a world of uncertainty, Wyatt Rossiter was as good as they came.
Wyatt made himself at home in the kitchen while Jenny took a quick shower after burying the alligator. He braced both hands on the farmhouse sink while gazing outside to the fields beyond. Didn’t Jenny understand the danger she’d put herself in by using a gun to kill an alligator? She escaped a felony charge two years ago by the skin of her teeth, and if she got a second violation, he wouldn’t be able to save her this time.
Ten minutes later Jenny came springing down the staircase. Dressed in faded jeans and a white tank top without a speck of makeup, she looked fresh, wholesome, and exactly what he’d always wanted in a woman. Her cornsilk hair was twisted up into a knot, held only by a pencil stuck into it. It would be so easy to pluck the pencil out and admire the waterfall of hair pooling around her shoulders. He had to cross his arms to block the temptation.
She hopped onto the sofa and hugged her knees to her chest. “Tell me more about your election,” she prompted, her face alive with curiosity. “Do you get nervous before any of those interviews you do? Because if you do, it doesn’t show. I get so proud every time I see you on TV.”
“First I want to talk about the gun,” he said. “Shooting an alligator out of season could land you in a world of hurt if the district attorney learns you did it while you’re still on probation.”
She cocked her head. “How do you know so much about that gun charge, anyway?”
He looked away and shrugged. “It’s a matter of public record.” He wasn’t about to add that he had to call in a lot of favors to get the district attorney to back off from proceeding to a messy public trial. With Jack dead, Jenny was the only Summerlin left for the town to hate, and prosecuting her for a gun charge would bring the D.A. a lot of free publicity.
“Don’t worry,” Jenny said lightly. “My probation is almost over.”
He took a seat on the coffee table, leaning forward to look directly into her eyes. He didn’t want to alarm her, but she needed to understand how serious this was. “Jenny, if you get caught again, it will be a second conviction, and things won’t go so easy on you.”
The nonchalant expression on her face vanished. Her eyes darted around as she processed her thoughts. “Did you . . . were you the one who got the D.A. to back down?”
Of course he was the one who got the D.A. to back down . “He was being irrational. Tempers were still hot after what happened, and I merely pointed out that it was your first offense and you shouldn’t be punished for what Jack did.”
She hugged her knees tighter and kept staring at him. “Last year someone put a note in my box warning that my property taxes were late. Did you have anything to do with that?”
He couldn’t in good conscience deny it. He dropped that note in her mailbox in the middle of the night so she wouldn’t spot him, then checked the county records a week later to be sure she carried through and paid her taxes.
“I knew it was a tough time for you, so I sent a reminder. It was what anyone would do.”
She unfolded her legs and leaned forward, setting a hand on his knee. “Don’t belittle this,” she said. “I could have lost the grove if you hadn’t done that.”
“You were grieving.”
“So were you.”
True, but keeping a watchful eye over Jenny gave him a sense of purpose. A reason to shake off the grief and protect the woman he loved. Watching over her from afar hadn’t been without pain. Each time he inserted himself back into Summerlin Groves it was like ripping a bandage off a still-tender wound, awakening a rush of regret and longing for what might have been.
She got off the couch and started to pace. “Kent McAllister,” she said, nervous tension coiled in her voice. “He threatened to sue for a restraining order if I kept trying to see Sam. And then last February he did an about-face when I didn’t even ask.”
He nodded. “You once told me how adrift you felt after your grandfather died and there wasn’t anyone from an older generation to lean on. I relayed that to the McAllisters, and they were smart enough to understand.”
Her eyes softened into two huge pools of feeling as she gazed at him. It was the way Jenny used to look at him and it tugged at every primitive instinct he kept tightly under control.
“What else did you do?” she asked. “Did you have the county fix those potholes outside the gate?”
He closed the distance between them, standing close enough to breathe the lemony scent of her soap. “Everyone hates potholes,” he whispered.
He traced a thumb along the sides of her face, and she didn’t pull away. Temptation won and he reached for the pencil anchoring her hair and tossed it aside. It clattered on the floor and then her silken waves tumbled over his fingers. At last . At last he could sink his fingers into this glorious mess of beautiful hair. It was what he’d fantasized about doing every single time he’d seen her in the past two years. He tilted her face up, holding his breath as he gave her a gentle, sweet, nibbling kiss.
They were tentative at first, then he delved deeper and kissed her with everything he had in him. Jenny fit against him like a puzzle piece and his arms clamped around her.
She drew back, a little breathless. “I was so blind,” she said. “All along it felt like I had a guardian angel. How could I have been so stupid?—”
“Shh,” he said, putting a finger on her mouth. Why should she have known? For over a year he crossed to the other side of the street whenever he saw her. He’d been too ashamed to speak to her, too weak to confront their demons. “Shh,” he murmured again, then leaned down to continue kissing her.
It was a dangerous kiss. Starting things up again could break Jenny’s heart or send his mother’s fragile recovery spinning out of control. He kissed Jenny’s forehead, her temples, the side of her neck . . . then he simply hugged her tight, staring out the window to see thousands of orange saplings blanketing the fields.
He would go insane if he had to live out here in the middle of nowhere. “Jenny . . . could you ever leave the grove?”
Her answer came so fast it was painful to hear. “No, I’ll never leave. This is where I belong.”
He disentangled from her and walked over to plop down on the sofa. For no apparent reason, every muscle in his body felt immensely heavy. Jenny’s glance was pained as she joined him, curling up on the opposite end of the sofa and looking at him with confusion.
“That’s not a surprise for you, is it?”
“Not really,” he admitted. “I’m almost certain to lose the election next month, but even so, I won’t be staying here much longer. Once my mother is on an even keel, I’ll be moving on.”
She flinched a little. “Where will you go?”
“To the bottom of my soul I wish I could move to Tallahassee and be the next Commissioner of Agriculture. My chances of that happening are miniscule, but I could still take the job in Morocco. Or Alaska. They always need people who understand environmental law up there. All my life I’ve wanted to strike out for the horizon. To test my wits against a new challenge.”
“Would the job in Tallahassee do that?”
He gulped back a spurt of laughter and gazed up at the ceiling, a world of possibility opening before him. “A term in the Capitol with a hundred-million-dollar budget? The power to help shape ag and fishing and ranching all across the state? Jenny, I would give anything for it.”
“ Oh, Wyatt ,” she said on a breath filled with longing. “That’s the first time I’ve seen you really smile in two years. Just for a moment I saw the old Wyatt again.”
He sobered. Had he really been that miserable these past two years? The world was ablaze with good things, but he’d been letting the bad blot out the sun. It was easier to be optimistic when Jenny was with him.
“It’s probably stupid to keep hoping I can win,” he admitted, “but I can’t stop dreaming about having that job. In a way it feels like my entire life has been in preparation for it. Working on a ranch as a teenager and helping my parents at the store. Getting my law degree, doing environmental stuff for the army . . . but especially watching you go through all the triumphs and sorrows that come with owning your own grove. Yeah, I want to win this election.”
Jenny rolled forward to nudge his shoulder. “Then I’ll help make it happen.”
Before he could respond, her desktop computer dinged and she sprang off the sofa. “It’s probably nothing,” she said as she wiggled her mouse to wake up the monitor, but her eyes soon widened. Whatever just popped up on her computer must be interesting because she seemed completely spellbound.
He stood. “What is it?”
She made a few choked sounds as though unable to draw a breath or form a sentence. All she could do was gesture to the monitor and he hurried to her side.
The screen was filled with a full-color image of Svetlana Markova sitting on the porch swing at Summerlin Groves and grinning at the camera as if she hadn’t a care in the world.
Wyatt’s heart began to thud. The photograph was attached to a message at a genealogy website with a single question in the subject line: Is this the Svetlana you are looking for?
Wyatt listened as Jenny explained the genealogy website and how she’d been fielding responses ever since posting her question three days earlier, but this was the first response of substance, and it was a doozy.
The message came from an anonymous profile that had been created only an hour ago under the name “HistoryGeek.”
The woman in the photograph had the same high cheekbones and arching dark brows as the lady in the Truman photograph, although her clothes were starkly different. Instead of a formal suit, she wore a plain white blouse knotted at her waist, a pair of capri slacks, and ballet flats as she smiled from the porch swing. It had a very fifties aura, with a touch of Audrey Hepburn.
The room suddenly felt warm, and he tugged the top couple buttons on his uniform open. “Can anyone else see this message?” he asked, and Jenny shook her head.
“He sent this to me privately. I’m worried he might be . . .”
Her voice trailed off, but he knew what she feared. HistoryGeek might be related to Svetlana and have a claim to the Fabergé egg. He could even be someone involved in her death. Wyatt stared at the blinking cursor, knowing that HistoryGeek had just sent this message and was probably waiting for a response.
“Ask him how he knows Svetlana,” he prompted.
Jenny keyed in the question and hit the send button.
The reply came quickly: I didn’t personally know her, but I know a lot about her. Can I come to your grove to discuss?
“No!” Wyatt said. “We don’t know who this person is. And how does he know you live on a grove?”
“It’s all over my FamilyOrigin profile.”
Wyatt let out an aggravated sigh. If he’d been here when she created this account he would never have let her dump all that personal information onto the web for the whole world to see, but it was too late now.
“Ask if he’s in Florida,” Wyatt said.
Jenny typed in the question, and the reply immediately popped up: Tampa. I could be over in an hour and a half .
Wyatt started pacing. “I don’t like this. We don’t know who this guy is, and he obviously doesn’t want you to know. Otherwise he wouldn’t be using an anonymous account.”
“I know,” Jenny admitted. “But we can’t let him get away because I want to know everything he has.”
“Let me take the keyboard,” Wyatt suggested, and she instantly vacated the chair. He settled his hands over the keyboard and typed: Can you tell me how you got interested in Svetlana Markova?
The reply came two minutes later. I’d prefer not to put things in writing. Can we meet? I’ll gladly tell you everything I know about her.
Wyatt swiveled in the chair to look at Jenny. “Don’t let him out here,” he warned. “There’s something off about this.”
“What about meeting him in a public place? The Brickhouse?”
It was a good suggestion because the Brickhouse was always crowded. He turned back to the keyboard and typed: Let’s meet at the Brickhouse on Amity’s town square .
This time there was a long pause before HistoryGeek finally replied: Sorry. I’m a vegan.
Now Wyatt was certain there was something weird about this guy, and quickly typed a reply. How about the Green Goddess? It was the only vegan restaurant in the entire county, but it still didn’t appeal to the guy on the other end of the conversation.
Sorry. The metal chairs at the Green Goddess give me a backache. I can drive out to your grove and we can talk there. I’ll even bring a vegan dinner for us to share.
This guy was clearly familiar with Amity because, yes, the Green Goddess had awful chairs. His frustration mounted. HistoryGeek knew where Jenny lived, and Wyatt needed to get to the bottom of this.
“The only place we’re going to meet this guy is the Sheriff’s Department,” he told Jenny. “I can get us a private room.”
Jenny nodded. “Go ahead and suggest it.”
He did. This time there was a long pause . . . almost five minutes before a reply popped up.
Okay, I’ll meet you at the Brickhouse. I’ll just have iced tea .
The Brickhouse would be safe. It was crowded, and half the clientele was probably armed. Only an idiot would try something there.
He met Jenny’s gaze. “I’ll go with you. Are you in?”
She nodded, and Wyatt keyed in a response. I’ll book a table under the name HistoryGeek for six o’clock tonight.