Melia Ridge Read online

  I could only hope that she was kidding as I glanced up nervously, perhaps even guiltily, from my perch behind the monitor.

  She waited a beat, and when I didn’t automatically produce a ready-made dinner from my back pocket or a desk drawer, she tried again.

  “Yes, I see. Now that I’ve failed to smell any earthly delights – fresh salmon, or a tender pork chop, along with some steamed veggies and fresh fruit and a dollop of your exquisite homemade whipped cream, topped off by a well-aged bottle of wine – I’ll guess you have something else in mind.”

  At least she was smiling, and I did my best to match the tone she’d set.

  “Of course I do – now that you’ve given me some ideas,” I said, and sure, I was scrambling here because the last thing I’d been thinking about was dinner.

  Truth be told, the entire business with Uncle Jack and whether he was still alive or rotting in some dank grave outside of Dublin, as originally advertised, had occupied most of my thinking for the past several days, and I didn’t want to let on that I was otherwise preoccupied, particularly where Caeli was concerned.

  She didn’t look persuaded, likely because my cover-up efforts were inadequate.

  “So you’re now about to tell me to pick out a restaurant and you’ll swipe the plastic – do I have that right?” she asked, somehow managing to keep her tone playful.

  “I was actually picturing the Riverside – for salmon or pork chops, or both,” I said, thinking quickly. “If that doesn’t sound good, we can go anywhere you’d like: Sol’s, Bumper’s, the RingSide, maybe – close by or downtown – Salty’s, Tad’s, the Portland City Grill …”

  “Some wonderful suggestions – let me think about it,” she said, adeptly cutting me off while momentarily admiring her nails. She turned her hands around to show me, smiling nicely, allowing me to nod appreciatively, then took note of my posture in front of the computer and edged closer.

  “What are you working on? I thought you’d be packing, seeing as you weren’t cooking.”

  And there it was.

  I know better than to lie outright to Caeli. She can easily read my best poker face, knowing when exactly to hold and fold and sweep up every chip on the table. I also have learned through the years to refrain from attempts to hide the truth from her – even with the best of intentions. There’s just no percentage in it.

  I decided in this case to ease into it.

  “Did you know that Vinny Fierro had a younger brother?” I asked her.

  “A younger brother? No. How did you learn that?”

  I sidestepped the question.

  “So you probably didn’t know this younger brother, whose name is Roberto, by the way, is very much alive and is, by all accounts, a legal scholar, with the Vatican his particular specialty?”

  “Maybe the better question is why you’d know this,” she said this time, and the shininess of her nails was now forgotten.

  “You’d better sit down, Caeli,” I said and gestured to one of the nearby chairs. “I’ve got some good news, along with some bad news, too, and I’m not even sure which is which. Nor am I certain how to tell you what I’ve learned during the past couple of days – not yet, anyway. Lord knows I’ve given it enough thought.”

  She smiled uncertainly at me, thinly and briefly, and she sat with a concerned look tugging at the corners of her mouth and her eyes and then edged her petite frame closer to the computer screen, and to me.

  “Why don’t you begin at the beginning and go on ’til you come to the end – then stop?” she said, paraphrasing Lewis Carroll. It’s the kind of advice that good newspaper editors tell beginning reporters who have trouble getting everything they’ve just learned into their story in a timely fashion.

  “Right,” I said. “But something tells me that, well … that this won’t be as simple as letting you know what happened at last night’s city council meeting.”

  I had that much correct, at least, and smiled at her, radiating what I trusted would pass for hope and compassion and support and concern.

  She didn’t seem to reciprocate, rolling her wrists over in a gesture that indicated Let’s get on with it.

  I did my best.

  “Here’s the deal in a nutshell – good news and bad news both,” I said for openers. “According to my sources in the Fierro clan, your Uncle Jack is alive. He’s in Rome, and for reasons that I don’t yet understand, he’s been entrenched – perhaps detained is a better word? – at the Vatican, of all places.”

  Her eyes grew as round as the pictures of Jupiter that you see in the astronomy books, the ones where the gigantic planet is fiery and angry, with the superstorm swirling around and around.

  “Say that again,” she whispered.

  So I repeated the information word for word, starting with “Your Uncle Jack is alive,” and then explained in brief how Don Vincenzo’s previously unknown-to-us brother confirmed the details after my call to Fredo to locate a source for confirmation revealed Roberto’s existence.

  She was briefly stoic when I finished, no doubt contemplating the tectonic shift in the universe. Then her anger kicked up a notch, most likely both at Jack and the various church officials who’d orchestrated what seemed to be her uncle’s secret capture and perhaps even his kidnapping (what else could it be?), before she again turned her attention, and her irritation, in my direction.

  “When, exactly, did you figure this out?”

  “Well,” I began lamely, “I guess it started when the postcard arrived. And that was, let me see, a few days ago. Four? Five, maybe?”

  “A postcard? What postcard?”

  “Didn’t I tell you about the postcard?”

  “That’s a detail you left out,” she said, and a sense of calm seemed to settle over her. I was happy to see it. Calm is Caeli’s normal demeanor, and it’s a far more pleasant mantle for her to wear than, say, confusion or (and far worse) anger.

  “Why don’t you start again, and this time tell me all of it,” she said, with no need for the question mark at the end. Her tone was soft and patient, as a kindergarten teacher might address her charges on the opening day of school.

  I’ve got to say that I love it when she does exactly that to someone we’re working over for information on one of our cases for the Blake & Brown Detective Agency. But I absolutely hate it when the technique is pointed at me.

  Still, I went through it again, starting this time with the postcard’s arrival, blank except for our mailing address, and my uneasiness at immediately sharing it with her – even though it was addressed to her, even though Uncle Jack, as we both called the one-time archbishop, is Caeli’s kin and not mine.

  “You have this postcard?”

  “I do,” I said and pulled it from the pile of papers on the desk.

  She examined it carefully, front and back, and looked on questioningly a moment later.

  “I was trying to protect you,” I said. “I didn’t want anybody taking advantage of your …”

  I paused here, searching for the correct word, and she gave me the wrist-roll again – Let’s have it, Max – and I obliged as best I could.

  “I don’t know … your, ah, vulnerability, I guess.”

  I got The Look for that one, and every man who has ever gotten The Look knows exactly what I mean.

  As an aside, Caeli is an expert at The Look, which varies only slightly from what the Italians call malocchio – the Evil Eye – which Caeli also excels in mustering when needed, despite her Irish background.

  “Do I look particularly vulnerable to you, Max Blake?” she asked.

  “No. Absolutely not – of course not. You are the last person to …”

  I got The Look again, concentrated this time, a truly disdainful glare, and I stopped talking, something I should have done far ea
rlier, and gave her the opening to take the floor.

  But she didn’t take it, or at least not at first. I could see the hurt in her eyes, along with the questions that had jumped into her head: about her uncle’s motives for starting the insanity of his proposed revolution in the first place, and what he’d been doing since his rescue or capture or kidnapping or whatever you wanted to call it, and what exactly had prompted him to dispatch yet another postcard to alert her, and me, to the situation … if, in fact, that was what he was doing.

  Right then, anything seemed possible. For all I knew, one of Uncle Jack’s cronies might have sent the postcard, with Jack himself none the wiser – exactly what had happened the last time we’d received a message purported to be from Jack.

  “I can’t believe this,” she finally said. “And I don’t know what to do about it – not right now.”

  I wanted to tell her to trust her heart, as well as her head. Instead, I said nothing, giving her the space to reason things out in her own good time.

  That was my plan, at least. But she wasn’t going to let me off the hook – not for long, anyway.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “About what, exactly?”

  “About what I should do next.”

  “You or us, Caeli? Because you know that whatever decision you make, whatever path you decide to take, I’ll stand with you – even if that’s not your first choice, even if I’m not invited.”

  She looked at me with dark, penetrating eyes, no doubt calculating exactly what I’d just offered would mean for her, long term and short, and I started counting seconds off in my head. I got to 12 when she spoke again.

  “OK. So what do you think we should do – if anything?”

  I took that as a good start and gave it some additional thought, trying to place the situation into the perspective of that moment, given Caeli’s initial reaction to the news.

  “It’s clear that someone wanted you to know – wanted us to know,” I eventually said. “My guess? Uncle Jack’s talking this time, not a surrogate. But that’s only a guess.”

  She nodded, absorbing the observation.

  “Was he telling us he’s still alive?” she asked. “Or do you think he wants us to ride to his rescue – if, in fact, we think he needs rescuing?”

  “Hard to say. Best I can offer is that he made it clear the last time we were in this position that he didn’t want us to ride anywhere to save him – certainly not to Ireland. And, last I looked, the postcard is blank: no message, no clues.”

  “So this is all … what, exactly? He mentioned that first postcard to somebody he knows in Rome, and they took it upon themselves to send another one out for him, maybe? Or is it something else entirely? Where would they even get the exact same card? Where would he get one?”

  I had no answers, and I didn’t try to provide any stray thoughts. I figured that Caeli could reason it out in her own good time.

  But you’ve heard me say it before: Nothing is easy.

  “You’re pleased and angry at the same time,” I eventually said, an observation rather than a question.

  “I am,” she said. “I’m mad at him, mostly – for being so damned contrary. And I’m mad at the church for, I don’t know, covering this up, I guess. I’m angry at that crew of Italians working for Don Vincenzo in Rome for apparently going along with it, for backing the church’s play, it seems, and for keeping it all from me – from us. I’m mad at …”

  She paused, thinking about it, and came back to me.

  “When did you say you found this out?”

  “I got the confirmation a few minutes ago … just before you came home. I just got off the phone with Roberto Fierro. I wanted to verify what was going on before … before getting your hopes up, I guess.”

  “I appreciate that your heart was in the right place, Max,” she said. “Even if you should have …”

  “And I appreciate hearing that,” I said, jumping in before she could finish.

  “But I don’t know what to do … about any of it. My instincts tell me to ignore it –the whole thing … put it out of my mind, especially with what’s ahead of us.”

  “You’re right about that. Moving to Ireland is no small task,” I said.

  “And we don’t need unwanted distractions.”

  “You’re right again. We don’t.”

  “At the same time, we can’t leave Uncle Jack in the hands of people who may be holding him against his will – if what you say is true.”

  “I’m not saying it,” I said. “But the facts seem to be self-evident. Perhaps the church is merely protecting him from himself.”

  “Maybe. But my guess would be that the church is more interested in protecting the church than it is in protecting Uncle Jack.”

  “At this stage, they’re one and the same.”

  She sat back and folded her hands.

  “I suppose you’re right. But I can’t help thinking …”

  She paused again, taking her time, working it through.

  “Maybe these will help,” I said.

  I showed her the printed versions of the three photographs that Don Roberto had emailed, pointing out the two gumshoes who trailed Caeli’s uncle as he made his way across the piazza. But she wasn’t interested in the would-be detectives who were on Uncle Jack’s tail, at least not initially.

  “Look at his eyes,” she said. “He looks, I don’t know … lost. Frightened. Haunted, maybe.”

  “Maybe it’s the realization that his sins are catching up with him,” I said.

  “It doesn’t look like he’s interested in the afterlife, Max,” she said. “It’s the here and now that has his full attention.”

  “Sounds as though you’ve made a decision.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe not. But if push comes to shove …”

  “… which isn’t the case …”

  “… and I was forced to make a call on the spot …”

  “... which you are not, I’d add …”

  “… I guess it all comes down to blood.”

  I wasn’t surprised. Hell, the only thing that struck me right then was that it had taken her all of five minutes to get there.

  “So when do we leave for Rome?” I asked.

  THREE

  Shuffling the Deck

  I didn’t wait for confirmation from Caeli.

  Hell, I didn’t have to. I could see it in her eyes, and in every gesture and facial expression she made as she stared at the three photographs that were displayed on the computer screen and again in the printed versions that she held in her hands. There was no question that we were about to attempt a rescue of her mother’s brother, the Right Rev. Sean “Jack” O’Lennox, the former archbishop of Armagh in Northern Ireland, a post that he’d held for years until short weeks previous.

  Provided he needs rescuing …

  That meant, of course, that we’d need a couple of traveling companions, and I had two candidates in mind.

  I picked up my so-called smartphone, which is only as smart as its owner is capable of taking advantage of its available gimmicks and gizmos, and used the speed dial feature to ring up Fredo Fierro, the late Don Vincenzo’s son and heir and our lone client.

  At least I knew how to do that much with the damned thing.

  When Vincenzo died scant weeks earlier, he’d named Caeli and me as Fredo’s well-paid counselors. The job required us to advise our young friend on the rights of passage while assuming the mantle of running a multi-million-dollar worldwide empire and becoming the master of a phalanx of workers from around the globe and the possessor of a bank account that was stuffed to capacity, running well above so many zeroes that you’d run short of breath counting them all in a single sitting.

  But it se
emed that these days, in the aftermath of our recent Ireland trip and the supposed death of Uncle Jack, only to have him resurrected again as an unwelcome Lazarus, Freddy was doing more counseling for us than we were for him … or at least than I was.

  I didn’t like that thought and tried to shake it from my head.

  He picked up on the second ring, and I’ll say straight up that talking with Freddy is far different from talking with his father. With Don Vincenzo, I always felt as though I was sitting in the back of the classroom, the timid child afraid to raise his hand, unsure how the teacher would react to the proffered answer to any given question. But even though I’d first met Fredo when he took one of my classes at the college where I’d taught journalism for 20-plus years, I never felt as though I was the omnipotent, knowledgeable professor and he was the shy student. We had a healthy respect for one another, even then. Freddy is smart and well-trained, as well as well-educated, and he has solid instincts to match his outsized personality and his innate sense of right and wrong.

  He’s one of the good guys, all right, even if his father wasn’t as highly regarded and acquired the beginnings of his wealth through means that the U.S. government, at least, found highly questionable.

  “Professor Blake,” he said when he picked up. “I trust that my uncle was helpful.”

  “Amazingly so, Don Fredo,” I said. “My thanks again for sending him our way. I don’t know if he’s filled you in on any of the conversations we’ve had in recent days regarding the situation in Rome …”

  I let that hang in the air, hoping that he’d jump in and take hold of the discussion. But he didn’t say a thing – a technique that he’d apparently learned from his old man. Most people don’t like to hear silence in a conversation and will go out of their way to fill the void. It’s equally true that people who don’t jump in to make that silence disappear are the ones who learn things. Often, it seems, they are the people who rule the world, or at least large segments of it. (It’s a lesson that politicians of all political divides should learn and adhere to, especially when they run for the U.S. presidency.)