The Count of Carolina Read online

  Nicole opened the door and turned back. “You’re right. I am your mother. And that gives me lifetime lecturing privileges. About everything! See you in a few hours. If Dad wakes up while I’m gone, tell him I won’t be late.”

  The Lexus was parked outside, taking advantage of the morning sun to burn off the dew that characterized springtime in the mountains. Pushing the unlock button on the key, she heard the chirp. Still standing just outside the front door, she pushed the remote start button as well. Another thing years of training in the world of international intrigue had taught her was whenever possible, start the car before you get in. That gives you a margin of safety should the vehicle explode.

  This time, it didn’t, and she got in the driver’s seat. It was still not really warm outside— low fifties this morning—but it was warm enough that the sun had heated the dark interior and she pushed the button to roll the window down. The breeze felt good, and she breathed in deeply.

  The Porters’ house was on Cook Street, one of the more affluent sections of the city. Her destination was a farm to the north of Denver, in the township of Milliken. It was a place she went when she needed guidance and couldn’t turn to Dan.

  This morning, Nicole drove at a leisurely pace, making the drive an exercise. She decided she would use the ride to be aware of the input she was getting from all five of her senses. Sight was easy. The day was gorgeous, and as she drove out of the city, she soaked in the color. Even while still passing through urban stretches, she marveled at the blueness of the sky, the green of the lawns first, and then the fields. But she pressed herself to find even more beauty, and was rewarded when she looked to her left, far out in a plowed field, when she saw a shed with a ridiculously red roof, which had no business being where it was: smack in the middle of the plot, not giving a damn.

  Right about that time, she became aware of the smell of the tilled soil. It had rained the day before and the aroma was oddly exotic and perfectly mundane at the same time. She locked the memory of it away.

  As far as hearing… well, that was dedicated, as it always was when Cole was behind the wheel, to music. One of the things she’d insisted upon when she and Dan had shopped for her car was concert-hall-quality sound, and the dealer delivered. Today, she was listening to KQMT, a classic rock station. The DJ was firing on all cylinders. In the twenty minutes she’d been driving, Miss Donna Dagger had played “Turn the Page” by Bob Seger followed by “Baba O’Riley” by the Who, “Go Your Own Way” by Fleetwood Mac (interesting choice, Nicole had thought), and was now starting “Aqualung” by Tull.

  “Holy mother of shit, Donna Dagger! You are slaying, Queen!”

  By the time the song reached Martin Barre’s guitar solo, Cole had moved on to the sense of touch. Although she could feel the contours and anomalies of the road surface through the steering wheel, this was not the sensation on which she was focusing. Rather she was feeling, as tactilely as she did the wheel, the weight and smooth skin of a Gibson Les Paul as she mentally matched Jethro Tull’s amazing guitarist note for note, electric nuance for nuance. She had first heard this song when she was twelve, she remembered… with a wince. Discovering “Aqualung” was just about the only thing good that had happened in 1983. When she found out that the album had been released the year she’d been born, it became even more special to her and she never listened to the title track with playing air guitar, even if only in her mind.

  Recognizing a landmark, Cole realized she was not far from her intended destination and she hadn’t yet tuned in to her sense of taste. But that too was easy, because she could still taste the fresh mint of her toothpaste, but as with the guitar, the taste she was focusing on was one remembered. It made her smile.

  She slowed the Lexus and turned into the long driveway of a quaint farm. It was a working farm, to be sure, but it was scaled for a comfortable operation for a family of four if everyone pulled their weight. That was evident as she parked the car and stepped out into the pungent country air as two preteen girls, clearly twins, were picking through a good-sized patch of recently tilled soil.

  “Hi, Vic. Hey, Abbers,” she called to them.

  They both looked up. Nicole’s trick for telling them apart was a small white scar on Victoria’s forehead, the result of an errantly thrown stone by her sister when they were eight. But from this distance, she wasn’t sure which of them called back, “Hi, Mrs. Porter! Mom and Dad are in the house.”

  “And you’re out here working your lives away, while they lounge in the house?”

  “I know, right?” said… the other. “They’re probably playing on our PS4.”

  “They probably are!” Nicole laughed, waving over her shoulder as she walked onto the porch. The front door was open behind a screen door that had seen better days. It was a few degrees cooler out in the country than it had been in the city, but Nicole knew that her friends Wally and Darlene were a hardy pair. And she knew damn well they would be playing a video game.

  Calling through the screen intentionally loud enough for the girls to hear, Nicole said, “Hey, are you two lovebirds running around naked in here?”

  “Ewww!” the twins moaned in unison.

  Darlene came to the door. “Coley! Are you grossing out my daughters again?”

  “I know that drives them crazy,” Nicole said as Darlene wrapped her arms around her.

  “Wall!” the woman called as they walked into the kitchen. “Nicole’s here. Put down the controller and come out so we can have a cookie or something.”

  A moment later, the huge man appeared. Wally looked exactly like a 21st Century farmer should look, Nicole always thought. Burly, work-hardened, dressed sensibly in a long-sleeved Pink Floyd tee and jeans with a beard that would give any competing facial hair in the neighborhood an inferiority complex that would keep beard-therapists in business for years, he was nonetheless blessed with sparkling eyes of blue that radiated compassion. Alright, she thought as she embraced him, maybe a lot of that is how I picture modern farmers because that how Wally looks, and not the other way around. “Nicole Porter,” Wally said upon releasing her from his bear-like embrace. “To what do we owe the eternal pleasure?”

  Nicole let out a heavy sigh. “Well, remember how poor Dan felt when he found out the truth? Remember how his entire existence became unmoored? That’s kind of been like that for me since we got back from Romania. There’s so much more that he doesn’t know.”

  Darlene immediately put her arm around the taller woman’s shoulder. “Oh, Cole. This sounds like a conversation for the study. We need comfy chairs and privacy. And cookies.” Grabbing the entire crock of treats, they made their way, first into the neat office where Wally kept track of the farms finances, then into the secret study that opened with the movement of a book high on a shelf. This was primarily Darlene’s domain.

  As a controller for Cleanup Crew, Darlene had the formidable responsibility of assigning missions to cleaners, like Nicole, across North America. CUC employed many cleaners, a large number of handlers who were a cleaner’s first contact upon arriving for a mission, as well as men and women in several other roles. But there were only seven controllers, one on each continent.

  Darlene was special, however. When Nicole had first come into the CUC fold, Darlene had been the Chief Executive of the entire organization. At that point, she was still acting as the North American controller, but also oversaw the entire operation. During Nicole’s time away from active field work while raising her children, she had gradually taken over many of Darlene’s supervisory duties, and right before the kids were deemed independent enough for her to resume globe-hopping as a cleaner, Darlene passed the CE mantle to her.

  But she would always be Nicole’s mentor, and that was why Nicole turned to her and Wally in challenging times. The truth was that not even Wally knew all the details of how Cole had become a part of Cleanup Crew. He was aware that Darlene had in fact recruited her, but as that had happened a few years before he and his wife had met, and becau
se he was sensitive to the fact that the details were not offered to him, he had never pressed either woman on the matter. In that spirit, he let Darlene take the lead today, as he could see Nicole needed her guide’s counsel.

  Darlene knew just what form that lead needed to take. She sat beside Cole in silence. The younger woman knew what her friend was doing. She had never pushed Nicole. She didn’t need to. If anything, over the years, she’d had to rein her in. Far more often, however, she’d learned it was best to just wait on her for a little while.

  “I need an assignment,” Nicole said finally.

  “What’s the urgency?” Darlene asked.

  “Urgency?” Nicole replied, instantly-ruffled feathers clearly audible in her voice. “No, no urgency. I just want to go to work. What’s so weird about that?”

  Darlene smiled ever so slightly. “No one said anything about anybody being weird, angel.”

  Realizing that she was reacting to her own internal dialog and that she’d said far more than she’d intended, Nicole looked at the floor. After a moment, she said softly, “You didn’t have to say it.”

  “Nicole, it’s only been four months since Bucharest. That job took a toll on you, girl. Both you and Dan told me you left part of yourselves behind with those women.”

  Cole nodded and Wally spoke up for the first time. “In your case, Coley, you literally left part of yourself… nice puddle of blood.”

  Nicole spoke with a tint of growl in her voice, still angry at herself. “I know, right? Like, ‘Hello, I’d like to donate some DNA to your database. Will this be enough?’”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Darlene said, giving Wall a light swat. “But Wally does have a valid point in there somewhere, I assume. At the very least, it brings up the elephant. You got shot, girl. You recall that incident?”

  “You’re being intentionally unpleasant.”

  “There are things I’m doing with intention, but none of them are meant to be unpleasant. I’m just trying to point out that no one would bat an eyelash if you were to rest until summer.”

  “Summer! Oh hell, no. I cannot sit around on my ass until June…”

  “I was thinking July.”

  “Darlene Mason. For the love of the all-knowing neon animated Virgin of Greater Denver, you have clearly lost your faculties. There is no way that’s happening, and I will tell you two very good reasons why.”

  Darlene’s smile was a bit less stealthy this time. “The first?” she asked.

  “The first reason is that you are my best friend and you would not ask me to do something, or in this case not do something, that you absolutely know is outside the boundaries of my character.” There was quite a bit more that Nicole could have added to that, but the point had been made.

  “The second?”

  “The second, my beloved, is I’m the boss.”

  “She played it!” Wally suddenly burst out, causing Nicole to start.

  “Son of a bitch!” Darlene said, slapping her thigh in frustration. “Son of a bitch, you played the boss card. Wally said you would, but I was like, ‘Oh, no! Coley would never do that! Not our Coley.’”

  Wally was laughing so hard now that he was having difficulty talking, but he managed to stammer out, “I bet her twenty American goddam dollars that you’d drop it right in the middle of the table. And there it sits.” He held his huge, calloused hand out to Darlene, palm up. A moment later, when he saw she was ignoring him, he gave a nice fake cough and wiggled his fingers.

  Darlene fished into her pocket and pulled out a five, a one, and a gum wrapper. “Son of a bitch,” she said, slapping all of it, including the empty wrapper, into her husband’s hand.

  Wally looked at the money. “There’s six dollars and some garbage here. You owe me fourteen bucks.”

  “I just thought of about twenty lewd replies to that,” Nicole said.

  “That’s why, boss, I will always remain the master and you will always be my Padawan. I thought of ninety, easy.”

  “I am not worthy,” Cole said, bowing with mocking reverence. Was she beginning to feel better, in spite of herself?

  “I have a job, but…”

  “But nothing. Spill. Where’s the cleanup?”

  “That’s why the ‘but.’ It’s in South Carolina.”

  Wally clearly saw Nicole blanch at the mention of the southeastern state.

  “Okay,” she finally said, drawing out each letter slowly, as if the word had thrown tar on her thought process.

  “Well, that was one of two reasons I didn’t want to tell you about this job.”

  Nicole smiled at the turnabout. “Touché. The first?”

  “Because it is in South Carolina. I know how you… feel about that place.”

  Wally saw that despite the smile, Nicole was truly pale now, and he poured her a glass of water. She continued to smile as she took it from him, as though her face had locked in that expression. She immediately drained the entire glass. “The second?” she said finally.

  “The second is… that it is in fucking South Carolina!” Darlene shouted. Nicole sat back on the love seat and slid away from Darlene slightly. “Jesus Christ, Mrs. Porter. I could give you thirty more reasons why I wouldn’t tell you. Against one… only one… reason why I would.”

  Nicole’s face unlocked, and it clouded over once more. She asked so softly Wally had to strain to hear her: “And that reason is?”

  “That reason is that you’re the boss, damn it. I don’t get to tell you what to do, I can only advise you, and maybe, since you’re also my best friend, you little brat, I might tell you what I think I would do in the same situation.”

  Nicole looked up. Her visage, if not brightened, at least became a little less gloomy. “What would you do?”

  “If I was Darlene, I’d say, ‘Screw this one. I’m passing this to a fresh cleaner.’ But if I was Nicole, I’d take the assignment.” She paused. “And I’d take Dan.”

  Nicole winced, and the brightness, or at least the absence of gloom, reversed itself.

  “I get that working alone was probably the direction you were leaning,” Darlene said.

  “Leaning? It was the direction in which I was doing cartwheels.”

  “Like I said, I get it. Here’s the thing. This one looks like it could get tricky. I wouldn’t actually have passed it to a fresh cleaner. You’re the only one I’d really trust. But my only condition, and this is a best friend condition, so the boss card is null and void, is that you bring your husband with you. Non-negotiable.”

  Nicole considered this for a moment. She didn’t necessarily want to be apart from Dan. He’d done nothing but be amazing since before they’d returned to the States. She just wanted to be busy. She wanted to work so that she could quiet the thoughts that she didn’t even want to rehash with Darlene right now. And there had been many, many years when working had meant exactly that; being away from Dan. Being alone.

  There might be times yet when that was the case. But there was no reason for it to be this time.

  “Give me the particulars,” Nicole said.

  3

  Anniversary Plans

  When Nicole arrived home and walked through the front door, the house smelled fantastic. Dan was in the kitchen cooking up one of his famous brunches. As she walked toward the aroma, he saw her and smiled.

  “Well, hello! Did you go for a run?”

  “No, a drive. I’ll tell you all about it, but not until you feed me.” Cole saw that she’d timed her return perfectly. A big bowl of steaming home fries sat on their kitchen table next to a slightly smaller one filled with peach slices, as well as an icy-cold glass of chocolate milk next to each place setting. On the griddle portion of their Bertazzoni range, two omelets were just about ready to plate, as were several sizzling slices of bacon. Beside them, two large pieces of Texas toast were grilled to golden-brown perfection. “This all looks fantastic and I am starving.”

  Dan pulled a chair out for Nicole, and as she settled in, he b
egan placing food in front of her. He’d long ago learned that when his wife was this hungry, conversation had to wait at least until the meal was well underway. So he sat adjacent to her and concentrated on food.

  As she ate, Nicole stole a couple of glances at her husband. He was downing his food with gusto, so she reckoned that aside from some finger-shaped bruises on his neck, which would hopefully fade quickly, he was no worse for wear from her attack. He certainly seemed to have chosen to drop the issue, at least for the time being. Dan had a habit of revisiting testy subjects long after she’d thought he’d forgotten them. So she chalked up his silence, cautiously, to the oral sex.

  “My omelet is perfect, as always,” she said finally.

  “Once you get the formula down, repeated past success is fairly easy. That’s as true in the world of omelet construction as it is in the world of video game design.”

  “And killing for hire,” she said, as nonchalantly as if she’d said “And knitting caps for newborn babies.”

  Dan almost choked on a sip of chocolate milk, and Cole waited to see if any was going to end up coming out of his nose, but he’d regained his composure and there were, disappointingly, no brown streams issuing from his nostrils.

  “Jeez, Coley. How do you know J.J.’s not lurking around somewhere?”

  “You only set two places. If she were here and had smelled this, she’d be sitting right there,” Nicole said, pointing with her fork to the empty seat at the table that had been J.J.’s since she’d graduated from her highchair.

  “Okay. So there’s that. But still…”

  “Relax, Danny. We haven’t really talked about it since right after we got back from Romania. You did realize the subject would likely come up again, right?”

  Dan nodded. “Of course, of course. You just caught me off guard a little. Would I be right in guessing you brought that up as an adjunct to the story of the drive you took this morning?”

  “Yes. I went to see Wally and Darlene.”