“No! And don’t you start on me too! Everyone has a right to privacy, and besides, I’ve heard enough complaints about him from my mother, from this whole town. I bet you have things you don’t want people to know about.”
“Ask me anything. I’m an open book.” He removed the two Cornish hens he’d ordered that morning and quickly began to stuff them with wild rice and herbs he’d prepared before he went out to see Sara. One of the good things about his life of living undercover was that he’d had to work at a lot of jobs. One of the handiest was the eighteen months he’d spent as a sous chef for a restaurant in Arizona. He could whip out a fajita in ten minutes.
“Where did you grow up?”
“Akron, Ohio.”
“Why does Tess refuse to talk about her childhood?”
“I thought this was about me, not my sister.”
“She’s my friend; you’re a stranger.”
Mike tied up the hens. He’d once tied up a man in the same way, legs together, arms in the back, cord down his front. “You’re right. What’s about me is about Tess. Our parents were killed in a car wreck when I was twelve and Tess was five, so we were raised by our maternal grandparents.” He put the birds in the oven.
“I’ve heard of your grandmother.”
“I bet you have. They tell you what a bad-tempered woman she was?”
“Yes,” Sara said quietly. “Was your grandfather nice?”
Mike looked back at her. “We rarely saw him. Grans said he had to travel for his job, but after he died in ’99, I found out that he’d had a second family.”
“Good heavens.” Sara paused with the fork on the way to her mouth and watched as Mike took the seat across from her.
“Are you beginning to see why Tess doesn’t talk about her childhood?”
“Yes,” Sara said, looking at him. “Please tell me more. I need something to take my mind off my own problems. My mother said you joined the police force when you were still a teenager.”
Mike hesitated. Never in any of his undercover work had he been required to tell the truth about himself. But there were people in this town who’d known his grandmother, so if he lied, Sara would find out about it. “I was older, so I ran interference between little Tess and Grans, but there was only so much I could take. On the night I graduated from high school, I told the old woman that if she so much as touched Tess I’d kill her, then I left town.”
“But of course you wouldn’t have. Killed her, that is.”
Mike looked up from his salad, but he didn’t answer.
“What did you do after you left?”
“I’d always wanted to see the ocean, so I …” He smiled in memory. “I flipped a coin to see which one I’d go to and the East Coast won—or lost, I guess. I bummed my way to Florida and stopped in Fort Lauderdale.” He took another bite. “One thing led to another and I joined the police force.” He looked up at her. “And here I am now.”
“What about Tess?”
“She’s done well, hasn’t she?”
“No, I mean, when did you get back with her?”
“When she graduated from high school, I was waiting outside for her. I’d already picked up her bags from where she’d thrown them out her bedroom window. She threw her cap and gown in our grandmother’s face, got in my car, and we drove away.”
“I guess you were the one who put her through college.”
Mike had told all that he could without giving away any real information, so he shrugged. Miss Sara Hélèna Shaw was certainly a curious young woman. He knew that while he was out she’d gone through his room. Out of habit, he’d marked the drawers and aligned the little throw rug with the floorboards. When he returned, everything had been slightly askew. He was glad he’d left the case files with his weapons in the hidden compartment under the carpet in the trunk of his car.
He got up to look in the oven window. “So who do you know more about now? Me or the man you’re planning to marry?”
“What an odd question. Because I’ve never met my fiancé’s parents doesn’t mean I don’t know everything else about him. I know what he likes to eat, how he drives a car, what he wants in the future, about his last two girlfriends who broke his heart, his—”
“What he wants for the future?” Mike asked sharply. “And what would that be?”
Sara looked down at her hands. “The usual. A home and children.” She wasn’t about to tell him that birth control pills made her swell, that Greg was scrupulous in using protection, and that he was vague about when he wanted to start having children.
“Is what he wants here in Edilean? Did he tell you that in those exact words? What did he say?” The moment he spoke, Mike cursed the eagerness in his voice and hoped Sara wouldn’t pick up on it.
But she did.
“They got Tess to send you here, didn’t they?” Sara stood up.
“Tess to send me here? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said honestly. “Who is ‘they’?”
“This town. They all think they own me. Other people come and go, but not me.” Her voice was rising. “Sweet little Sara Shaw stays at home and helps people. Everyone else goes away and does things, but I stay here and watch other people come back with their careers and their husbands and their adorable little kids. But good ol’ Sara is always here.”
Putting her hands on the table, she leaned toward him. “You can tell all of them—your sister, Ramsey, Luke, everyone—that they may not like Greg but I do. He’s made me achieve things. He may be abrupt and rude at times, but at least he gives me hope for the future.”
She leaned so far forward her face was inches from his. “As for you, Mr. Newland, you can forget about trying to get information out of me, or seducing me away from Greg, or whatever you have planned, because it won’t work. Do you understand me? I’m not interested in you or any other man, so you might as well leave now.”
With that, she went down the hall to her bedroom and slammed the door.
Mike fell back against the chair in utter bewilderment. He had no idea what he’d just been accused of. “Seduce her?” He hadn’t come close to her.
Mike ran his hands over his face. His instinct was to knock on her door and try to talk to her, but as he had no idea what to say, that would be useless. Why couldn’t she have drawn a nice big gun on him? A revolver. A semiautomatic would have been a good choice. She could have said, “Get near me again and I’ll kill you.” He’d had that said to him multiple times, and he’d always handled it easily.
The timer went off for the hens, Mike got them out of the oven, then went outside to call Tess.
She answered on the second ring.
“So what do you think of her?” Tess didn’t bother with preliminaries.
“She’s stressed-out. And she knows I’m lying.”
That astonished Tess so much she could hardly speak. “But you always lie. It’s what makes you so good at your job. You lie about … about what kind of toothpaste you use, but people never know it.”
“Are you sure you’re on my side?”
Tess didn’t laugh. “I don’t understand this. Sara believes every word of a guy the whole town knows is a jerk, but she doesn’t believe you?”
“Who can understand it?” Mike’s voice conveyed his puzzlement. “I’ve treated her like I would a princess, cooked for her, cleaned up after both of us, but she still accuses me of … I don’t really know why she’s so angry at me.”
“What about the people of Edilean? Not the newcomers, but the ones who know Sara. What’s going on with them?”
Mike took his time in answering. “I talked to some of them this morning, and they’re genuinely concerned about her. They don’t want her to be hurt.”
Tess well knew what he was saying. “That town is astonishing, isn’t it? Those people actually care about one another. Of course you have to be on the inside to get that caring, but it does happen.”
“Not what we were told about this place, is it?”
> Tess gave a low laugh. “Not by a long shot. Have you talked to anyone who knew Grans?”
“No, and I don’t want to. I’d like to think that mess was buried with her.”
“Me too,” Tess said. “So, now, I want to hear what you think of Sara.”
“I think she’s …”
“She’s what?”
“Beautiful.”
“How beautiful?”
“She makes me nervous.”
“That bad, huh?”
“The strangest things make her furious at me, but it’s impossible for me to get angry back at somebody who wears clothes that look like angels made them.”
“I know. Sara wears long sleeves even on the hottest days. She orders a lot of the fabric from Ireland, then makes her own clothes. They go with that porcelain skin of hers, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, I do,” he said in a low, throaty way.
“What about Sara as a woman? Great, huh?”
“I don’t think I’ve seen her as she really is, but I like what I’ve been told about her. Everyone in town thinks she’s practically a saint. She’s the one who volunteers to help everybody. She earns so little money that if it weren’t for her mother feeding her, she’d starve.”
Tess was glad Mike couldn’t see her because she was smiling broadly. She knew he had never come close to being serious about a woman, but then his “dating” was always connected to the undercover cases he worked on. He’d once had a torrid affair with the wife of a drug lord so he could get info about her husband. When the arrests were made, she’d slapped Mike so hard—and he let her—that he wore a neck brace for a week. Only Tess knew the despondency Mike went through after that. He’d liked the woman, even liked her two children. It had been Tess who’d taken care of him after that case and seen what he went through over it.
“I made an appointment for you tomorrow,” she said.
“For what?”
“For the house closing that I’ve been nagging you about for an entire year. It’s at the title company in Williamsburg, and now that you’re there, you can do it.”
“But I’m here on a case, so maybe another time would be better. I could—”
“No! I am not going to give you more time. I made the appointment and I texted you the address. Show up there at two, sign the papers, and the place is yours.”
“A farm! What do I want with a farm?”
“We are not going through that again,” Tess said, her teeth clenched. “Whether you like it or not, I swore to our grandmother that someday our family would own that place, and I’m keeping that promise.” Tess would never tell her brother but she’d sworn on his life, and Tess superstitiously feared that if she were to break the vow, the horrible old woman would come out of the grave and take her revenge.
Mike interrupted Tess’s ugly memories. The truth was, what else was he going to do after he retired but live close to her?
“Tell me again why you and Rams don’t live on the place?”
“He has a piece of land that he wants to build on. I’ve told you all of this. And I’ve also told you that I think you’ll like that old farm. You can move around, and fixing it up will give you something to do after you retire.”
Mike’s voice went back to teasing. “Okay, so what’s your plan for me with this farm? Am I supposed to grow corn? Or do you guys up here raise cotton?”
“That would be better than the vile job you have now. But when you visit, just don’t forget about the old man who’s the caretaker. He greets guests with a shotgun, so you’d better call first.”
“You’re not talking about old … What was his name?”
“Brewster Lang.”
“That’s right,” Mike said. “How could I forget that name? Grans’s only true friend in all of Edilean. You don’t think he’s as mean as she was, do you?”
“I think he may have taught her all she knew.”
Mike gave a low whistle. “He couldn’t be that bad.”
“Tell me when you’re going to the farm unannounced and I’ll alert the hospital to expect a man with a body full of buckshot.”
“Point taken. But he must be nearly a hundred years old now. Is he able to ever leave the place?”
“It’s not New York, where everything is delivered, so I assume he has to get food.” She paused. “Here comes Rams. I have to go.”
Mike laughed. “I forgot to ask: How’s the honeymoon?”
Tess’s voice dropped to a whisper. “I’m pretty sure I’m pregnant, but I haven’t told Rams yet. Buy my kid a pony and keep it on your farm. I love you. Bye.” She hung up.
When Mike clicked off the phone, he was surprised at how good Tess’s announcement made him feel. A baby? A fat little kid sticky with fruit juice, a soggy diaper, a dimple in his cheek? He could almost see the boy.
“And me living on a farm,” Mike said aloud. “A kid, a pony, and a farm. I might as well shoot myself now.”
He went back inside, ate dinner by himself, wrapped up the leftovers, and put them in the refrigerator. He went for a run and returned to see that Sara’s door was still closed, but there was a light on. After his shower, he slipped a note under her door saying he was going to bed and to please help herself to the food.
When he was in bed, he listened but heard no sound from her. He felt bad that all his questions had made her so angry that she’d gone without dinner.
After his run, he’d stopped at his car to get some of the files the captain had given him, and he stayed up until midnight reading them. Whereas he’d seen the criminal files, he hadn’t had time to read the in-depth reports.
He’d never before been involved in the Economic Crimes Unit, so reading about how the Vandlos worked fascinated him. Stefan was ordinary—seduce and take—but Mitzi was more interesting. What she did took cunning and a total disregard for the quality of human life.
Until a few years ago, Mitzi was living in upstate New Jersey and commuting into New York City, where she worked scams on rich women. She lured them to her through a tiny office in the center of Manhattan with PSYCHIC painted on the window. Women in trauma, in grief, whose lives were in chaos, thronged to her, hoping to find answers about what they should do to solve their problems. Mitzi took the ones who were so desperate for relief that they were willing to pay all they had to get out of the turmoil their lives had become.
Mitzi’s code, refined through generations, was three part: trust, faith in The Work, and control. First, she spent months gaining the trust of the women. She was an expert at body language and could tell what someone wanted within minutes of meeting her. And she listened to them in a way they had never been listened to before. Mitzi heard what her victims said and remembered it. She understood; she championed the woman, was always on her side. Mitzi was the best friend anyone could imagine.
When she’d gained her victim’s trust, Mitzi started on making her believe in “The Work” and that she, Mitzi, was only a vessel being used by spirits/angels/God, whatever appealed to the victim. Believing that she was doing everything for a Higher Power made a person feel that she’d at last found her purpose in life.
Once the victim had faith, Mitzi would start working her way into controlling and completing the isolation that was necessary to pull off a major scam. She would meet the victim, looking red-eyed and haggard, telling her that she’d been up all night with The Work and had seen horrible things. By this time Mitzi knew what the woman’s deepest fears were, so she could use them against her. If she was afraid of her ex-husband, then Mitzi said he was plotting with friends against her. It was best to get away from them.
What Mitzi really gave her victims was hope. She promised love, children, fortunes—whatever was wanted—and the frightened women held on to it like a life raft. Hope became everything to them, what they lived and breathed for. And Mitzi made them believe that only she could give them what they needed—if she was given the money to create the energy to perform the task. But it was all right to pay because
Mitzi swore that when The Work was completed, every penny would be returned.
As in all abusive relationships, there came a time when the good ended. The listening disappeared, the feeling of deep friendship, when you were both dedicated to a purpose, stopped. The victim became so desperate for that time to return that she paid more and more money. By then she had no other friends, just Mitzi, so she worked hard to please her.
But, eventually, the victim would run out of money, and that’s when Mitzi would instantly and abruptly stop the relationship. Suddenly, Mitzi’s phone would be disconnected, her office empty. If the frantic victim was able to contact Mitzi—sometimes after months of trying—her desperate pleas for help would meet Mitzi’s coldness. Crying, devastated, the victim would ask for her money to be returned, as she had been promised. That’s when Mitzi would tell her that every penny was “gone,” used up by The Work. Without the slightest bit of compassion, Mitzi would hang up.
The victim would be left alone. She was usually nearly bankrupt, and under Mitzi’s tutelage, she’d cut herself off from everyone. She had no one to turn to for moral support as she tried to recover, and she was usually too embarrassed to go to the police and tell them how—as she saw it—stupid she’d been.
If the woman did screw up her courage and go to the police, she was usually dismissed. According to them, she’d given the money away of her own free will, so there was no crime. But the Fort Lauderdale Police Department had listened to one victim and after they’d subpoenaed some of Mitzi’s many bank accounts, they were shocked at the sheer magnitude of what they saw. Mitzi Vandlo had taken millions of dollars from many women.
Whenever there’s lots of money involved in a crime, the federal bureaus step in, and everything changes. It was soon found out that Mitzi was just a small part of what looked to be one of the largest organized crime rings in the world—and no one knew anything about it.
As the investigation went forward, fortunately, it was backed by a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that said the gullibility of a person didn’t eliminate the fact that a crime had been committed. People who did what Mitzi had done were as guilty as bank robbers.