In a Heartbeat - Elizabeth Adler [29]
“About those millions . . .”
“Yes?”
“We’ll talk about it later,” he said, tucking into a plate of beans and rice with guacamole, chicken tacos, and a green sauce that almost blew his head off. He gasped, agonized. “You don’t need a gun, this is a killer.”
She ignored the food. “But someone wants to kill you. I heard him say so, on the phone.”
“You’re dreamin’, honey.” He grinned. “What we do know is that the robber was an expert. Or at least he was certainly expert at getting rid of the body and cleaning up the place. Even the safe had been relocked, as well as the front door. The flooding obliterated any tire tracks or footprints. So, as they say, Zelda honey, that is that. Now, why don’t you enjoy some of this killer food.”
“There is nothing,” she said, picking at her tamale, “so foolish as a man. Especially a rich man. And you still haven’t told me that story.”
“I will,” he promised. “Later.”
“I’ll drive,” she said when they left the restaurant. “I’ve never driven a BMW, and besides, I want to take you somewhere special.”
He climbed into the passenger seat and she streaked off, heading west down Pico to Santa Monica, then north on Pacific Coast Highway, driving alongside the ocean, through Malibu until she finally made a sweeping U-turn and parked on the rough shoulder on the ocean side of the highway. She pressed a button and the windows slid down. A mere sliver of moon failed to cast any light on the dark waters, but the soft slur of waves on the shore wafted gently into the car, along with the cooler night air.
“Peace,” she sighed, laying her head back against the cool black leather. She turned her head slightly and her eyes met Ed’s.
“Now, tell me about your childhood,” she said quietly.
22
It was not easy for Ed to talk about his family. And in fact he had done so only once before. And that was to another woman.
Ed was the youngest of a brood of six, born in the wooded upslopes of Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains, in a two-room shack with a corrugated tin roof, and plank walls patched with tarpaper on the outside and wallpapered with newspapers on the inside.
For the first fourteen years of his life, Ed never went more than fifteen miles from his homestead. His daddy’s ancient Dodge pickup barely made the trip into Hainsville on a Saturday, loaded with the root vegetables he grew for market. The locals said his pa could grow anything on his small but fertile five acres, but still and all, he barely made enough to keep a roof over their heads and feed his hungry brood, who craved more meat than potatoes.
Trout, smallmouth bass, and rock bass from the streams were not enough to stave the eternal hunger of six growing kids, who endured squash and beans only because they had no choice, and who were sent out to scavenge the woods for the plentiful wild mushrooms and seasonal berries and nuts to add to the family’s larder.
Like his three brothers and two sisters, Ed was a skinny kid, always hungry, always on the alert, and handy with a rifle, scouting for quail and squirrel or woodcock, anything to bring variety to the stewpot his mother had constantly on the stove.
Once a handsome woman, Ellin was so thin that her skeleton showed through her translucent flesh, every bone apparent, the sinews knotted like ropes in her work-weary body. Her meager breasts had nourished six children in quick succession; her calloused hands had soothed their fevered heads when they were sick. She had sung them to sleep in a tired soprano, and smiled as she kissed them good night, promising that one day, soon perhaps, things would be better.
“Then I’ll buy you a new dress, Ma,” young Ed had promised.
“And no doubt I would have also promised her a diamond ring,” Ed said to Mel, “had I known about diamonds then. Which, being only an ignorant young hillbilly, I did not.”
All six kids looked like their ma: narrow hard-boned faces, deep-set blue eyes sunken beneath strong black brows, ears set flat against the