Chapter 17
I let Stick drive home. He even tried to hand the keys back to me when I gave them to him, but I shook my head and moved to the passenger side.
It wasn’t that I was mad, or so mad that I didn’t want to drive. And I wasn’t so overcome with emotion of the idea of Caroline Stratton dying that I wouldn’t properly be able to shift Yvette.
I just felt kind of numb. Like everything I knew had been turned upside down.
Stick Whatever was apparently taking care of a dying Caro Stratton and she’d asked me to visit her.
Yeah, everything was turned upside down.
“Okay, spill,” I said, after we’d cleared the town of Chesney and were heading back to Schoolport. We’d driven in silence since leaving Caroline’s home.
“What exactly do you want to know?”
“Why you?” But the moment I asked the question, the answer came to me. “Because of your experience with your father.”
“Yep. Grayson knew—somehow found out—about me taking care of my father. I actually got pretty good with it, administered IVs and shit. Even thought about doing it long term after he died.”
“But by then you’d had a taste of the fast, quick money car stealing brought?”
He didn’t look at me, just stared ahead at the bare road as he drove the deserted highway to Schoolport.
“It wasn’t even that. It was more…” He gave a flip of the wrist that rested on the stick shift. “Never mind, it’s stupid.”
“I’m on a highway in a car I didn’t want, with a guy I barely know, after visiting my mother’s nemesis to find her dying of cancer.” I took a deep breath, ran my fingers through my hair, tangling in the curls. “I think I can handle stupid.”
He snuck a look at me and I gave him a “go on” nod.
“It wasn’t the stealing of the cars. Yeah, sure, there’s an adrenaline rush that comes with it. And, of course, the thrill of not getting caught.”
“Of course,” I said, like I knew what he was talking about.
“It was the info gathering I got off on. The making connections, forming the network.”
I stayed silent, not really sure what he was talking about. I figured he just went up to a car and, you know…stole it.
“I built up the best group of sources around.”
“I don’t get it.” He looked at me suspiciously. “Oh, come on, tell me. Who cares now, if you’re really out of it,” I added.
He made some kind of silent decision, took a deep breath and told me about his network of valets, cleaning people, gardeners, hairdressers—anyone who would know when people would be on vacation or away.
He also knew about every high-end luxury or sports car that was purchased in a three-county area.
“I’d keep my eye on them all. And when we’d get a…request for a particular car, I’d know exactly where to go to get the information on when the car would be the easiest to…liberate.”
I snorted at his word choice. But I had to say (although, of course, I wouldn’t say), it was pretty genius. Except… “Any one of those people could have turned on you.”
“But they didn’t.”
“But they could have.”
“Ah, but that’s the risk you take. That’s always the risk you take when you trust someone with your secrets, Jane.”
I didn’t touch that bait, just let it dangle on his pole.
“And these people were cool with you getting out of the biz? I’m assuming they were compensated for their information?”
“They were. Very well compensated.”
“So they couldn’t have been very happy about your newfound respectability.”
“They weren’t. Well, I think a couple were relieved. A few, the ones I thought were the best—I gave them the option of letting me pass their names on to…”
“On to who?”
“The people who requested the cars. The people that, in a way, I worked for.”
“And I’ll bet they were not pleased either.”
I saw his hand tense on the gearshift knob, then soften, as if he feared hurting Yvette.
“You’d be right.”
“No broken legs or anything?”
“Nah, not their style.”
“What is their style?”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. It was unpleasant, but eventually they saw the value in me divulging my contacts. I only gave them a few at first, until I was sure that there would be no repercussions and they were sure they could trust my people.”
“And this has all happened since the night Lucas was arrested? And you’ve become Nurse Nancy? Stick has been a very busy boy.”
He rolled his eyes at me without looking my way. I could just feel it.
“Shortly after that night, yeah.”
We rode in silence for a bit, entered Schoolport and took the turn off Main to head to campus.
I played it all in my head, the series of events that landed us here. “Why do I have the feeling that Grayson Spaulding played puppet master on all of this?”
“I don’t know, why do you have that feeling?”
I sighed. “Oh, shut up. Tell me how he was involved.”
“Shut up? Or tell you how Spaulding is involved? What’s it going to be, Jane?”
He was infuriating. It was like dealing with a five-year-old. Except a five-year-old didn’t make my insides squirm like they did now as Stick looked at me and grinned.
I quirked a brow at him and motioned with my hand for him to go on.
“Spaulding and I had a conversation not long after that. And somehow it came up about my experience with my father dying from cancer.”
“Somehow?”
“You wanna hear or not?”
“Go on.”
“Caroline was going to need help. And as you now know, she didn’t want Betsy or Joey changing their plans just to be with her.”
“They would want to know.”
“That’s what I told her early on. And she agrees when it gets…closer, she’ll tell them.”
“That’s what she said to me, too.”
He nodded. “She promised. I made her promise. I told her that as hard as that year was, I was glad I was able to be there for my dad.”
He seemed embarrassed that he said that last part, and quickly went on. “Anyway, they didn’t want the news to get out yet. Wanted to keep it controlled.”
“Because of the campaign?”
“That, and the kids. And she really just wants to keep it private.”
I thought about her previous fights with the disease and how they’d been all over the papers.
The first time it was shown in a sympathetic light, as she and Joe Stratton battled the disease together while he was a senator and then presidential candidate.
The second time was just after their divorce, and it was used to vilify my philandering father.
Rightfully so. But I could see how she’d want this to be out of the public for as long as possible.
“Restoring the cars is real, and I am working on them, but they won’t take much. Her old man kept them in pretty good shape, actually.”
“But it’s your cover for being there.” It wasn’t a question.
He nodded. We reached campus, and he drove toward the student parking lot.
“And the wedding? Were you already working for her then?”
“No. That was my…audition, I’d guess you’d call it. How I could deal with that kind of group. Would I, I don’t know, pull my junk out and piss all over the bride, or something?”
I laughed. “They wanted to see the animal in an unnatural habitat and see how he did?”
“Yeah, exactly.”
I totally got that. That was kind of what everyone was waiting for me to do—show my true, low-class, daughter-of-a-home-wrecking-whore colors.
“And that kiss you laid on me on the dance floor?”
He smiled. “You know what? I kind of think that sealed the deal for Caro.”
“Does she have lots of visitors? Was that why it was important to make sure you could fit in?”
“That was the thought, but turns out she really doesn’t have all that many visitors. I’m not sure if she’s turning down offers because she’s afraid word will get out, or…”
“If she’s not getting any offers.”
“Exactly.”
“And Dotty? I’m assuming she knows?” I spoke the name like I knew Caroline’s long-time housekeeper. I’d never met her, though she’d been at the wedding, crying the whole time over “Miss Betsy” being so beautiful.
But I remembered many a time my mother would scream into the phone at my father that she needed help. And it would almost always end with, “I need my own Dotty!”
He’d hired cleaning ladies for my mom, who came twice a week, but none of them ever lasted very long.
“Anybody else helping out? Home nursing of any kind?”
“Too risky that they’d tell the press. I am the home nursing. At least for as long as I can maintain. If it gets too bad, we’ll call someone in. She won’t be…in pain, if I can help it.”
“You like her,” I said, studying him.
He shrugged. “She’s okay.” The tone of his voice, though, assured me I was right.
“Who’s to say you won’t go to the press? Bet there’d be a lot of money for that story. The first picture of an emaciated Caroline Stratton would fetch top dollar.”
“First of all, thanks for thinking that I’d be that low. Christ.”
“Can you blame me? You are—were—a thief.”
“That’s different.” I lifted a brow at that, but just motioned for him to go on. “Second, it seems Spaulding recorded a conversation I had with him about Lucas’s arrest, where, shall we say, I allude to my possible involvement.”
“He blackmailed you into doing this?” It didn’t surprise me at all, except that it was a big risk for Grayson to take. Stick was a wild card, and I wasn’t at all sure that he would respond well to coercion.
“No. I’d already agreed to do it before he told me about the recording. That’s just insurance to him. I knew I would never do something that sleazy. Now he feels safe too.”
“Why are you doing this at all? No matter what they’re paying you, surely you would have made more stealing cars.”
“There’s a shelf life on that kind of existence. And I like my freedom.”
“So you don’t think you’re one of the crooks that’s too smart to get caught.”
“Nope. A million things can happen during any…transaction, and almost all of them are going to do you in. This gig came along at the exact right time for me.”
“Gig. Like it’s playing in a club with your band or something.”
He turned into Lot H, and I saw his car in the corner where Yvette had been parked. It hadn’t been there earlier. He must have had someone drop it off for him while we were at Caroline’s.
He pulled Yvette in next to his car and cut the engine.
“You know you can’t tell anyone, right?” he said.
“Who would I tell?” I said. Just as I said it, my mother’s face flashed in front of me. Oh, man, she’d die for this kind of information. Okay, bad word choice.
“I won’t tell her,” I said. “Anyone. I won’t tell anyone.”
“Nobody,” he warned.
“I won’t.”
He studied me for a second, then nodded, as if he was convinced.
Then his eyes dropped to my mouth. He ran his hand through his hair, looked away and out to the parking lot.
“Damn,” he said.
“What?”
He looked back at me as he said, “I swore to myself I was going to keep my hands off of you.”
And then he put his hands on me.