Keeper of the Bride

“What?”

“She got fed up with our questions, so she walked out.”

“You let her leave?”

“We haven’t charged her with anything. Are you saying we should have, Navarro?”

Sam’s reply was unrepeatable. With a sudden sense of anxiety, he left Yeats and headed out the front entrance of police headquarters. He stood on the sidewalk, looking up and down the street.

Nina was nowhere in sight.

Someone’s trying to kill her, he thought as he headed for his car. I have to reach her first.

From his car phone, he called Nina’s father’s house. She wasn’t there. He called Robert Bledsoe’s house. No answer. He called Lydia Warrenton’s house. Nina wasn’t there either.

On a hunch, he drove to Lydia’s Cape Elizabeth home anyway. People in distress often flee home for comfort, he reasoned. Eventually, Nina might wind up at her mother’s.

He found Lydia at home. But no Nina — not yet, at least.

“I haven’t spoken to her since yesterday morning,” said Lydia, ushering Sam into the seaview room. “I’m not sure she would come here.”

“Do you know where she might go?” Sam asked. “Someone she might turn to?”

Lydia shook her head. “I’m afraid my daughter and I aren’t very close. We never were. The truth is, she wasn’t the easiest child.”

“What do you mean, Mrs. Warrenton?”

Lydia seated herself on the white couch. Her silk pantsuit was a startling slash of purple against the pale cushions. “What I mean to say — I know it sounds awful — is that Nina was something of a disappointment to me. We offered her so many opportunities. To study abroad, for instance. At a boarding school in Switzerland. Her sister Wendy went and benefited wonderfully. But Nina refused to go. She insisted on staying home. Then there were the other things. The boys she brought home. The ridiculous outfits she’d wear. She could be doing so much with her life, but she never achieved much.”

“She earned a nursing degree.”

Lydia gave a shrug. “So do thousands of other girls.”

“She’s not any other girl, Mrs. Warrenton. She’s your daughter.”

“That’s why I expected more. Her sister speaks three languages and plays the piano and cello. She’s married to an attorney who’s in line for a judicial seat. While Nina…” Lydia sighed. “I can’t imagine how sisters could be so different.”

“Maybe the real difference,” said Sam, rising to his feet, “was in how you loved them.” He turned and walked out of the room.

“Mr. Navarro!” he heard Lydia call as he reached the front door.

He looked back. She was standing in the hallway, a woman of such perfectly groomed elegance that she didn’t seem real or alive. Or touchable.

Not like Nina at all.

“I think you have entirely the wrong idea about me and my daughter,” Lydia said.

“Does it really matter what I think?”

“I just want you to understand that I did the best I could, under the circumstances.”

“Under the circumstances,” replied Sam, “so did she.” And he left the house.

Back in his car, he debated which way to head next. Another round of phone calls came up empty. Where the hell was she?

The only place he hadn’t checked was her new apartment. She’d told him it was on Taylor Street. There was probably no phone in yet; he’d have to drive there to check it out.

On his way over, he kept thinking about what Lydia Warrenton had just told him. He thought about what it must have been like for Nina to grow up the black sheep, the unfavored child. Always doing the wrong thing, never meeting Mommy’s approval. Sam had been fortunate to have a mother who’d instilled in him a sense of his own competence.

I understand now, he thought, why you wanted to marry Robert. Marrying Robert Bledsoe was the one sure way to gain her mother’s approval. And even that had collapsed in failure.

By the time he pulled up at Nina’s new apartment building, he was angry. At Lydia, at George Cormier and his parade of wives, at the entire Cormier family for its battering of a little girl’s sense of self-worth.

He knocked harder at the apartment door than he had to.

There was no response. She wasn’t here, either.

Where are you, Nina?

He was about to leave when he impulsively gave the knob a turn. It was unlocked.

He pushed the door open. “Nina?” he called.

Then his gaze focused on the wire. It was almost invisible, a tiny line of silver that traced along the doorframe and threaded toward the ceiling.

Oh, my God…

In one fluid movement he pivoted away and dived sideways, down the hallway.

The force of the explosion blasted straight through the open door and ripped through the wall in a flying cloud of wood and plaster.

Deafened, stunned by the blast, Sam lay facedown in the hallway as debris rained onto his back.

Eight

“Man, oh man,” said Gillis. “You sure did bring down the house.”

They were standing outside, behind the yellow police line, waiting for the rest of the search team to assemble. The apartment house — what was left of it — had been cleared of any second devices, and now it was Ernie Takeda’s show. Takeda was, at that moment, diagramming the search grid, handing out evidence bags, and assigning his lab crew to their individual tasks.

Sam already knew what they’d find. Residue of Dupont label dynamite. Scraps of green two-inch-wide electrical tape. And Prima detonating cord. The same three components as the church bomb and the warehouse bomb.

And every other bomb put together by the late Vincent Spectre.

Who’s your heir apparent, Spectre? Sam wondered. To whom did you bequeath your tricks of the trade? And why is Nina Cormier the target?

Just trying to reason it through made his head pound. He was still covered in dust, his cheek was bruised and swollen, and he could barely hear out of his left ear. But he had nothing to complain about. He was alive.

Nina would not have been so fortunate.

“I’ve got to find her,” he said. “Before he does.”

“We’ve checked with the family again,” said Gillis. “Father, mother, sister. She hasn’t turned up anywhere.”

“Where the hell could she have gone?” Sam began to pace along the police line, his worry turning to agitation. “She walks out of headquarters, maybe she catches a cab or a bus. Then what? What would she do?”

“Whenever my wife gets mad, she goes shopping,” Gillis offered helpfully.

“I’m going to call the family again.” Sam turned to his car. “Maybe she’s finally shown up somewhere.”

He was about to reach inside the Taurus for the car phone when he froze, his gaze focused on the edge of the crowd. A small, dark-haired figure stood at the far end of the street. Even from that distance, Sam could read the fear, the shock, in her pale face.