Danger in a Red Dress by Christina Dodd Page B

the ones who were hurt most by his defection.”
    “Look. Don’t give me credit for a warm and giving heart. I don’t give a damn about them and their puny little lives. But I am a Balfour. We live lives of honor. We take care of our people.” Mrs. Manly’s chest heaved, as if being two hundred feet above sea level was too much for her, as if she couldn’t get enough oxygen. “Nathan walked away without a backward glance, leaving me to clean up his mess. And I will.”
    “ Noblesse oblige , huh?” Hannah smiled at her, not believing a word of it.
    Mrs. Manly grunted, unwilling to admit to any finer feelings except the ones she’d been trained to feel. “I’d tell Carrick, leave the whole matter to him, but Carrick . . . it’s my fault. By the time I got pregnant, I knew what Nathan was. I knew his son could be charismatic, talented, and absolutely without morals or worth. But I thought . . . I let myself hope for a real child, a legitimate son who would stop Nathan from wandering. I was a fool.”
    “The other children were real, too,” Hannah said gently.
    “Not to me. I didn’t care about the first one. Or the second one. I’d been raised to think every great man had the right to take a mistress or two. Even though everyone knew about the infidelities, even though Nathan bragged about his sons, I could hold my head up, because now I had a son, too.” Mrs. Manly looked down toward the wheelchair. “I realized almost at once Carrick was like his father—a charmer who was rotten to the core. I tell myself that if I’d had Carrick to myself, I could have fixed him. Injected him with some character, some morals. Instead, I had to watch while his father swooped in every month or so, teaching him by example how successful a man could be if he didn’t give a damn about doing the right thing.”
    “That is a difficult role model to overcome,” Hannah said gently.
    “Do you know, I’ve followed the other sons’ careers. They’re men. Real men, with ambitions and work ethics and now every one of them is married and loyal to his wife, and happy. They started out with so much less than Carrick, and now they have everything, because they built their lives on good foundations.” Mrs. Manly’s hands shook. “I hate Carrick because he’s a worm willing to betray me for a dollar. He’s a failure. My failure.”
    “My mother used to tell me that she could teach me the right thing to do, but in the end, I was responsible for the person I became. It’s true of me, and it’s true of Carrick. He’s not your failure. He’s a failure of his own making.”
    Mrs. Manly lifted her head. “You are a nice girl, but you’re not a mother. There isn’t a mother in the world who believes she couldn’t have done better with her child. Certainly not me.”
    “Certainly not you,” Hannah agreed. Certainly not this woman who carried responsibility to such extremes.
    “I don’t trust him. The house is watching us, because somehow he’s fixed it so it does. Anything I do, he’s recording it. Anything I say, he’s recording it.”
    Hannah glanced down the hill. “You think your wheelchair is bugged?”
    “I don’t know. Why don’t you check and make sure?”
    “I will.” Hannah started to climb off the rock.
    Mrs. Manly stopped her with a gesture. “In a minute. Right now I don’t want anyone to know we know.”
    “Correct.” Because whoever would put video cameras in an old woman’s house and microphones in an old woman’s wheelchair was truly a scum bucket of epic proportions.
    “Why didn’t you come forward when Nathan disappeared?” Hannah asked.
    “The government considered me right from the beginning. If I had admitted knowing where the money was, they wouldn’t have said, Thank you. They’d have said, We knew it all along , and put me in prison.”
    Hannah squared her shoulders. “All right. Tell me what I need to know.”
    Mrs. Manly didn’t even have the decency to act surprised by