The Pinebox Vendetta Read online

  Planting some secret microphone…goading him into saying more about Owen and recording it…hmm…would tailing him from here get you anywhere…?

  “I need to get out to the gallery,” Jamie said, standing, picking a plastic milk bottle off his tray. “Was there a cans-and-bottles bin inside, did you notice?”

  Rock snapped out of his plotting.

  “Uh, dunno,” he said. “I save mine to toss directly into the ocean. My personal gift to all those stuck-up dolphins.”

  Jamie frowned again—the joyless crank—and left to deposit the various trash and non-trash byproducts of his meal in their proper receptacles.

  As he passed out of sight, Rock’s gaze dropped underneath the cafeteria table.

  The rucksack.

  Chapter 12

  Before the Daily Cafe, before the brick, Jamie had proposed going to the Yale University Art Gallery. He suggested—and Sam agreed—it would be a nice break from the wall-to-wall reunion schedule, whose many events could leave your feet sore and head numb from so much nostalgia.

  As Sam strolled from the European to the Asian collection, she supposed he’d been right. It was a nice break. The ten minutes she’d sat in front of Stella’s Brooklyn Bridge—a brilliant deconstruction of the vista she saw every day—had done her mind and body good.

  Joss loved it, too. She’d been fascinated by the shimmering van Gogh and earthy Gauguins. When was the last time I took her to the Met? Sam thought. The gallery wonders were of a piece with the other experiences she’d had this weekend—the lecture, the architectural tour de force. Joss was growing before her very eyes, and Sam was loving it.

  But she also felt that brick should get to the police.

  “Mom, it’s gold pigment on silk,” Joss said, marveling at a hanging scroll. “It’s fourteenth century! Can you even believe they made this six hundred years ago?”

  Sam stepped closer and examined the scroll beside her daughter. She’d taken several art history courses and now felt that expanding of the mind she’d almost forgotten—the peace and possibility of being in a quiet place, considering another human being’s masterwork.

  It was nearly one-thirty. She and Joss had left Jamie and Rock Pruitt alone in Commons an hour ago.

  Where was Jamie? Were they still talking? If so, about what?

  Sam felt sure that whatever Rock had wanted from Jamie, its underpinnings were sinister.

  A dim corner of her brain worried Rock knew about the brick somehow. Had he been looking at her funny? Maybe the Pruitts had been following her—following her because they’d spotted her with Jamie earlier. How many operatives did they have available for that sort of thing?

  What if their people were busting into her room this very moment, tossing her drawers until they found her smoking-gun evidence?

  It was fantastical, but the pinebox vendetta had produced plenty of fantastical episodes over the years. Daring thefts. Forgeries in the halls of Congress. Murder. It was said Nathaniel Gallagher had secured a deal with Britain to circumvent the War of 1812—until Virgil Pruitt riled up cotton farmers for the sole purpose of denying the Gallaghers a political victory.

  When Joss had seen enough of the scroll, they found a staircase and walked back to the ground floor, entering the Ancient Art collection.

  “Holy cat,” Joss murmured.

  A seven-foot-wide lion of glazed brick stopped them in their tracks. The animal looked wicked—sharp teeth, oriental-style face.

  Sam flinched. The thing looked ready to pounce from its backdrop and eat them.

  Footsteps approached from behind.

  “I always think he’s looking sideways, at you,” said a voice.

  Jamie’s.

  Sam staggered back a step, and Jamie caught her. Joss, examining the lion’s crosshatched mane with her nose just inches from the piece, didn’t see.

  “Whoa,” Sam said. “Thanks.”

  Jamie lingered letting go of her. “No problem. Art can be scary, huh?”

  “Apparently.”

  She smiled and returned the favor with her own touch, clutching him for balance longer than was strictly necessary.

  She felt relieved to see him here, with the familiar rucksack on his back. Relieved he was away from Rock Pruitt. She’d had time to think since the Daily Cafe, and decided she understood his reaction—his resistance—to the brick. Escaping his family’s never-ending fight with the Pruitts was why he’d fled to the Peace Corps, why he’d made his life in Africa.

  He’d seen the feud up close and didn’t want Sam and Joss embroiled in it.

  He’d been protecting them.

  This simple fact renewed Sam. The fact of his existence, this man she’d thought dead for ten years, renewed her. Sam felt alive. Even the brick, as heavily as it weighed on her, fed this new sensation that life mattered again. That important events were happening and she was steering them—or at least driving in the same car.

  “So,” she said.

  “So,” Jamie answered.

  “What happened at Commons? What was Rock trying to pull?”

  “I don’t even know.” Jamie stepped closer to the lion, squinting as though it might contain some clue to their classmate’s motives. “But I’m not going to worry about it.”

  He grinned back at her. Their fingers brushed. Sam couldn’t have said who initiated the move.

  When Joss shifted to consider a different perspective on the lion, she spotted Jamie. Her face brightened and she gave a half-wave. Jamie raised a palm.

  The gesture was nothing really, but its modesty warmed Sam through. She felt grateful he’d suggested the art gallery. Grateful he’d shielded Joss from whatever crass things Rock had said at lunch. Grateful he’d ditched his family to spend his day with them—to make their humble pair into a trio.

  She said, “I forgot how much I loved this place.”

  “It takes you out of your world,” Jamie agreed. “I remember Norah used to come here, just about every weekend.”

  Sam gave him a teasing look. “That’s the second time you’ve mentioned Norah Fowler. Were you hoping to bump into her here?”

  He shrugged. “I hoped I’d bump into a bunch of people.”

  The look between them was a little too intense so Sam asked, “Did you visit galleries in Africa? Or museums?”

  “Just the Johannesburg in South Africa. It’s an impressive collection, but museums aren’t big in Africa. Not in my group of friends, at least.”

  He said this without a hint of preaching or superiority.

  “Did you like living there?” Sam asked. “When you think of settling, is that—er, do you…”

  She didn’t finish. Jamie looked at his shoes, twisting on the gallery floor.

  Sam’s face flushed as she realized the discussion had reached a precarious spot. Why did I say that? “Settling?” God, I sound like I’m projecting some future, don’t I?

  Maybe the whole weekend had been too quick. Whose idea had it been to hang out so much?

  Had they been trading invitations or had she been driving this? Who’d invited whom to Commons for lunch?

  Sam couldn’t remember.

  She hadn’t started out intending to spend every free moment with Jamie Gallagher. Whenever there had been a choice or a fork in plans, the best option—for Joss, for them both—had always included Jamie.

  Was she in the wrong?

  Was she leading him on? Leading herself on?

  Jamie plunked down on a gallery sofa. “I think I’ll settle here.”

  Like that, the moment was defused.

  Sam could’ve fallen into his lap. Rock Pruitt and the bloody brick seemed a million miles away. Ditto for Abe and her Five Year Wait, even though these bore directly on her feelings. Her husband’s sharp spite, all the bitternesses between them—it all felt small and light now.

  Sam took a fresh look around. She was surrounded by centuries of art—millennia of it. Lifetimes funneled into ideas and canvases, artists who gave everything
for a thing they believed.

  No more petty, she thought. No more negative.

  Inwardly, she chuckled. What are you, turning into a life coach? What did any of this mean—in concrete terms—for her and Abe? For Joss? She didn’t know.

  Falling into a crush didn’t make the stakes any lower.

  Sam said, “I imagine the janitors do a nightly sweep.” She leaned into the back of the sofa. “It’s doubtful they’ll let you camp among the art.”

  Jamie snapped his fingers in mock chagrin.

  Sam realized her daughter, standing nearby, had caught the tail end of this flirt. By instinct she summoned a neutral expression—replacing whatever dreamy face she’d had before—but Joss never saw it. She was already off, prancing ahead to the Indo-Pacific wing.

  Sam noticed the man in the lobby. He wore a jacket despite the balmy June weather, clean-shaven, hair combed back from his temples in perfect horizontals. His strides were careful and measured. He wasn’t looking at art.

  She avoided eye contact with him as they exited the lobby. Neither Joss nor Jamie seemed to notice.

  It’s nothing. So what if he doesn’t look like a student or a professor?

  He could be an insurance salesman on lunch break. He could be gallery security.

  Wouldn’t gallery security be in uniform, though?

  Her fear mounted on the walk back to Silliman. A second man, browsing a newsstand, struck her as too ordered and circumspect. And how long had that car been idling there, one stoplight back on Chapel Street? When it abruptly turned left—the direction of the dorm—Sam imagined a pair of eyes tracked her out the passenger-side window.

  She walked faster. A gap of several sidewalk panels opened between her and the other two. Joss had started complaining her legs were tired from all that gallery browsing.

  Sam kept silent about her racing concerns. She didn’t want to spook Joss. Or Jamie, who surely had no appetite for cloak-and-dagger feud talk.

  It’s nothing, she told herself again.

  When they reached the college gate, Sam couldn’t help speeding through and ahead to the entryway. Jamie had a key, he could let them in.

  She galloped upstairs two at a time. She dashed through the common room with a smiling “Hey!” to Laurel, burst into her and Joss’s bedroom…and knelt at the bed.

  The brick was there, underneath, in its Ziploc.

  “Breathe.” She gripped the university-issue dresser, its knotty wood comforting in her fingers.

  The Pruitts can’t know about the brick. You found it yesterday. They would’ve had to have the God Quad bugged or some kind of surveillance on Henrik Schumer.

  She reminded herself it had been twenty-three years since Derek Dickerson’s death. Not even the power-hungry Pruitts could maintain surveillance for two decades.

  Right?

  Sam laid down on the bed, allowing herself a moment. Her ribs and lower back hurt. Her feet felt gross—she slipped off her shoes and socks and kneaded her soles.

  What a day.

  She tried relaxing as voices drifted through the wall. Joss was raving to Laurel about the gallery, asking Jamie whenever she couldn’t think of an artist’s or piece’s name.

  The brick was safe. She would have to take it back to New York, she realized. Rushing decades-old evidence to the New Haven police on a Sunday made no sense. She’d have to think more about which law enforcement channel to pursue.

  For now, she would keep recording audio, keep amassing material for the documentary.

  Would the brick’s discovery go into the documentary? Sam wasn’t sure. If the authorities didn’t believe her, or the trace evidence was somehow beyond DNA analysis, she supposed it could. It might serve as that one bit of new information, that buzzworthy nugget that raised the project’s profile.

  “Mom! Where ARE you, Mom?”

  Joss’s voice from the common room.

  Sam sat up and stretched, twisting in place.

  “In here!” she called. “Coming…”

  She slipped on sandals and joined the others.

  Joss was hyper, pirouetting in the middle of the common room. “What’re we doing tonight?”

  She blinked several times, eager. Clearly she had a specific answer in mind.

  “Our plans are in flux at the moment,” Sam said. “Why?”

  Joss peeked to Jamie, who glanced away retiringly. “Can we go to the naming ceremony? He said we could.”

  Jamie quickly added, “I’m obligated—I told my sister I would.”

  “Can we?” Joss had been on her tiptoes a full ten seconds. “They’re having speakers—Owen Gallagher is speaking!”

  She argued that reunion events were basically over, when would they have another opportunity like this?, c’mon Mom…

  Sam looked between her daughter and Jamie Gallagher. She couldn’t ask Jamie in what capacity he was inviting them—that would be too forward, like her utterance about “settling” at the gallery.

  Still, she worried if they accepted, they would be attending the ceremony with Jamie. She didn’t think she should give that impression to him or Joss.

  Laurel was folding clothes she hadn’t worn this weekend, packing for home.

  Sam said, “Are you going to this ceremony, Laurel?”

  She figured Jamie would’ve extended the invitation to her. If they all went as a group, there would be no pressure or assumptions.

  Laurel looked to Jamie.

  He said, “Like I said, you’re more than welcome. The more the merrier.”

  Then Laurel looked to Sam and, angled such that only Sam could see, made her brow into question marks.

  Sam gave a tight nod.

  “Sure,” Laurel said. “I have a late flight, might as well. What time does it start?”

  Jamie said three o’clock.

  Joss jumped in, “When does Owen Gallagher speak? He’s the main speaker, right? He must go last.”

  As Sam mouthed thank you to her former roommate, Jamie fielded Owen questions from Joss. Did he really play the bass guitar? Wasn’t his position on gun control so courageous?

  “I…am sure it is.” Jamie took a step back against her zeal. “I’ve only talked briefly with him.”

  Joss faced Sam again with her best pleading, the-world-is-sure-to-end-if-you-don’t-say-yes-to-this face.

  “Oh, give your calves a break,” Sam said. “We’ll go.”

  “Yay!” Joss twirled once more and hugged her ferociously.

  The warmth of her daughter’s body washed away Sam’s last concerns about propriety and not wanting to crowd Jamie.

  It was an exciting opportunity for Joss—a memorable capper to a weekend that’d lived up to both of their lofty hopes. It wouldn’t be fair to put the kibosh on this just because Sam felt squishy about the Jamie situation.

  Jamie suggested they meet at the new college, say 2:45?

  All parties agreed. He grinned, told Joss he’d reserve them front-row seats, and took off.

  Sam yawned wide. She looked at the clock and was just considering snack strategies when loud voices began in the courtyard.

  An argument.

  “—excuse me, what’s that?” one said.

  “I said, what were you doing up there?”

  The first speaker hesitated. “I, we were only making arrangements about—”

  “I’ll bet. I’ll bet those arrangements were marvelous.”

  Sam’s heart plunged. She took a step for the window, then decided not to look.

  Her ears were on fire. Laurel watched her with a pinched, pitying expression. By a stroke of luck, Joss had gone to the bedroom to fetch headphones.

  In another minute, Abe burst in.

  He looked like death warmed over. That flannel with rips in both elbows. His ear and nostril hairs flared in every direction, like he’d purposely teased them out. He stormed to the center of the room.

  “I thought he was dead!” roared her husband. “Huh? He’s supposed to be dead.”

&nb
sp; Sam felt wobbly. So much was wrong. That Abe was here at all. That he seemed to prefer Jamie’s being dead. That she—Sam—seemed to be getting blamed.

  “But you—I didn’t think you were coming. It’s already Sunday, the reunion is over—”

  “Sorry to screw with your plan.” He made an obnoxious face. “How long have you known Jamie Gallagher was alive? How many years?”

  “Seriously? I can’t even—”

  “Were you planning to leave straight from here? Hop the family jet to Nantucket? Well, you’re not taking Joss. You want to abandon us, you’re sick of us? No prob. But Joss comes home.”

  Sam felt stung and punched and sapped of will, but once he uttered their daughter’s name, all these emotions gelled to anger.

  Joss had come in. She’d heard—of course she had. Now she hid in Laurel’s arms, sobbing.

  The last time Sam had heard such plaintive sounds from her, they’d been in line for the roller coaster at Deno’s. Joss had been ten. The switchbacking queue had become suddenly cramped—maybe some kid had pulled out the separating rope. Bodies pressed. Yelps turned aggressive. Joss began to hyperventilate, wheezing and gripping her sleeves.

  Sam squared to her husband.

  “You. Don’t. Know. Anything.” She brought her face very near his. “Let’s go talk. Let’s go talk in the bedroom so she doesn’t—”

  “The bedroom!” he cut in wildly. “There’s a novelty. Nothing’s happened in the bedroom for years.”

  “You…idiot,” she managed, disliking the word but finding no other.

  She grabbed him, yanking at his flannel like toilet paper off a roll, pushing him ahead, away. In a wall mirror, she saw Laurel stroking Joss’s back.

  Out of the room, door closed, Sam hissed, “What are you doing? That is our daughter out there!”

  “You think I don’t know?” Abe’s voice cracked. “I’m the one who packs her snack for dance class every day. I’m the one who taught her F chord! I think I know our daughter.”

  “Okay, and why would a person who’s invested so much of himself into her—why would her father—say those things? In front of her?”

  Abe smirked. “She knows. You don’t think she sees the situation between us?”