Jasmine Cresswell - Payback

Avery wiped her tears with the backs of her hands, leaving a streak of dirt. Not only that, she didn’t immediately find a pure white tissue and remove the smudge. Kate wouldn’t have been shocked if the world had shuddered to an immediate halt at such a betrayal of the accepted order.

“I saw Luke Savarini today,” Avery said.

The name struck Kate like a blow. She stepped back, hoping her smile looked more natural than it felt. “Well, that would certainly be enough to reduce me to tears. I can’t imagine why he made you cry, though. He’s quite civilized in company.”

Kate’s feeble attempt at humor flew right past her mother. Avery drew in a short, shaky breath. “Luke was in Washington, D.C., with his sister a couple of weeks ago. They were eating dinner in a restaurant there. Luke says he saw…your father…eating dinner there, too. Right in the restaurant. In D.C. Well, a suburb, actually. But basically in the D.C. area.”

Kate knew she couldn’t have heard right. “Wait. I’m confused. Luke was in Washington, D.C., with one of his sisters and he claimed that he saw my father? He saw Ron Raven?”

“So he says. He seems remarkably sure of his facts.”

“Did he speak to my father?” Kate realized she was shaking. Despite that, her voice sounded oddly controlled.

“No.”

“Why not? Didn’t it occur to him that it might be helpful to find out what the hell my father was doing alive in Washington, D.C., when everyone thinks he’s dead in Miami?” She was still shaking and it was a lot easier to be sarcastic than to work out what she was actually feeling.

“It seems that your father…that Ron ran away as soon as he realized that Luke had recognized him. Luke tried to catch up with him, but he couldn’t. Apparently, there was a woman with him.”

Kate’s brow wrinkled. “With Luke?”

“No, sorry. I’m not being entirely coherent, am I? Your father was with another woman. Quite a young woman. Luke thought she might be in her thirties. Early forties at most. But he definitely said that your father recognized him.”

She was going to kill Luke, Kate decided. She was going to find some long, slow, agonizing way of causing his death and then she was going to stand over him and watch it happen. In fact, she wouldn’t just stand passively and watch. She’d dance a celebratory jig as the lifeblood oozed out of him. For what conceivable reason had the stupid man found it necessary to share his delusions about seeing Ron Raven? Her father was dead, murdered in a Miami hotel room along with his companion, a still-unidentified woman. Luke must know how badly Avery had suffered from the media frenzy provoked by reports of Ron’s bigamy, not to mention the sinister security video of the body bags being wheeled onto the yacht, presumably by the murderer himself. Why would Luke choose to open a wound that had been closed only with great courage and slow, painful effort on her mother’s part?

“Obviously Luke was mistaken.” Kate managed by some miracle to keep the rage out of her voice. Luke had no idea how lucky he was not to be anywhere within striking range of her supersharp chef’s knives or he’d be singing soprano from now on. “Heavens, Mom, you’re not paying any attention to his nonsense, are you? He must have sniffed a few too many of his own cognac fumes.”

“Is that what you think? That Luke was imagining things?”

“Yes, that’s what I think! Of course it is.” Contemplating the alternative possibility that her father might be alive and deliberately hiding from his wives and children left Kate feeling sick to her stomach. She had assumed nothing much worse could happen than losing her father before she had a chance to confront him about the lifetime of lies and deception that he’d perpetrated. Apparently she’d been wrong. The possibility that he might be alive and in hiding was even more difficult than accepting his death. Anger lodged as a hot pain in her chest, making it difficult to breathe.

Avery turned and recommenced scrubbing the shelves built at the side of the brick fireplace. She spoke to the wall. “The thing is…Well, in an odd sort of way, what Luke said didn’t come as a total surprise to me.”

Kate stared at her mother’s back. “I don’t understand.”

“After the initial shock of Ron’s disappearance wore off, I was never as sure as everyone else that he was dead. I know his…other wife in Wyoming never doubted that he’d been murdered. But I…wondered.”

“What are you telling me, Mom?” Kate forced herself not to shout as she struggled to keep her anger with Luke separate from the surprise caused by her mother’s admission. “Why aren’t you sure Dad was…is dead? The police seemed pretty certain of what happened that night in Miami.”

“Yes, I know, but the penthouse was mortgaged, you see.”

“You’re going to have to spell that out more clearly, Mom. What has a mortgage on the penthouse got to do with Dad’s death?”

“What happened to the money?” Avery asked. “That’s what I kept asking myself after the initial shock wore off. Where is it?”

“Where is what money, Mom?” Kate was beginning to worry that her mother was losing it. Normally the most precise of women, right now Avery was making no sense at all.

“The money Ron raised with the mortgage,” Avery explained. “We owned the penthouse free and clear, I’m sure of it. It’s true that I never paid close attention to Ron’s business deals—there were so many of them—but I was quite well-informed about our personal finances.” Her voice flattened. “Or, to be more accurate, I was well informed about those parts of our personal finances that Ron felt safe to share with me.”

Which left out a hell of a lot, Kate reflected grimly, given that her father had been supporting another entire family in Wyoming that neither she nor her mother had known anything about until Ron Raven was officially declared missing.

“There could be a dozen reasons why Dad needed cash,” she pointed out. “Hundreds, in fact, given that he lied to both of us all the time. We haven’t the faintest clue what was going on with his finances, or any other part of his life, if you get right down to it.” After months of coming to terms with her father’s betrayal, Kate managed to state the sordid truth without being overwhelmed by bitterness.

“That’s true,” her mother conceded. “But Ron never expressed any need to mortgage the penthouse in the twenty years since we bought it. Why, two months before he disappeared, did he suddenly decide to take out a three-million-dollar loan? We weren’t facing any unexpected expenses, and it’s inconsistent with the way he’d handled our personal finances for the entire time we were together.”

“Because he didn’t consult you about the mortgage, you mean?”

Avery nodded. “In retrospect, I understand he wasn’t really asking for my opinion when we discussed our personal finances, but he at least went through the motions. I had the illusion we were making decisions together, even if the reality was otherwise. But Ron never breathed a word about the mortgage on the penthouse. I only found out it existed after he’d disappeared. Why?”

It seemed to Kate that her mother was placing too much emphasis on a relatively trivial part of the myriad deceptions Ron Raven had perpetrated on them both. The penthouse mortgage might be the only financial deception Avery had uncovered to this point. That didn’t mean it was the only deception Ron had engaged in, not by a long shot.

“Perhaps Dad wanted to put extra capital into his business?” she suggested. “Have you talked to Uncle Paul about it? That must be the answer, Mom. Raven Enterprises needed an infusion of cash for some reason, and Dad raised the money by taking out a mortgage on the penthouse.”