“As you guessed.”

“Arthur was illiterate?” I said, still not believing it.

“Yes,” he said.

“But he had his own business!”

“Yes. Landscaping-that was how he began, anyway. He had a wonderful sense of color and placement, loved making things grow, loved the outdoors. Even when he no longer earned most of his money that way, few things made him happier.”

“But not being able to read! I just can’t imagine how he managed to get by!”

“It wasn’t easy,” he said, closing his eyes, leaning his head back.

“I’m sorry, you probably aren’t up to talking about this right now.”

“To be honest, no, I’m not.” He yawned. “But I’ll talk more about it with you tomorrow-if you want to.” He yawned again. “You’ve got a lot to think about now, anyway,” he said drowsily.

I started the car, pulled out of the parking lot.

“Did my mother know?” I asked, unable to let this one question keep overnight.

He opened his eyes, looked over at me, then watched the road for a little while before he closed them again. I thought he wasn’t going to answer. But then he said, “According to my father, yes, she did-but only after that day in the pharmacy.” He smiled sleepily. “He always spoke highly of your mother. She kept his secret.”

“But he could have explained to my father-”

He looked over at me again. “He was ashamed that he couldn’t read. Can’t you imagine what that was like for him? My dad knew that Patrick would blame him, not your mother, for that little squeeze of her hand. That’s exactly what happened-your father assumed he made a pass at your mother. He worried at first that she would tell Patrick the truth, and his secret would be exposed to a man who already disliked him. But your mother must have seen how painful that would have been to him, because she let my father decide whether Patrick would know or not know.” He smothered another yawn, closed his eyes again. “She never told Patrick. Never told anyone. My father admired her for that.” I thought he had fallen asleep, but then he murmured, “I wish I had known her.”

As I drove home I thought about Arthur Spanning-my uncle, not my uncle, perhaps my uncle again. A man who preferred having my father think of him as an unprincipled sleazeball rather than as someone who was unable to read. Did he have a learning disability-something like dyslexia? Or had he simply never learned to read? I remembered the “six years” of education on the death certificate.

I thought of my mother, keeping secrets from the rest of us, letting us think Arthur was a womanizer, letting the rift grow between our family and her sister’s husband.

But he was a womanizer, I reminded myself. A bigamist. His illiteracy had nothing to do with that. Travis was probably right; it was impossible to imagine his parents were remarried-or whatever it would be called in this case. Why would Briana ever take him back? Because she pitied a dying man? Because of Travis?

I looked over at my sleeping cousin, his bandaged hand lying palm up in his lap.

That unexpectedly strong sense of protectiveness I had been feeling toward him all day resurfaced. The idea that someone had tried to harm him while he was staying at my home made me furious. I decided that if Rachel were awake when I got back to the house, I wanted to have a talk with her about the DeMonts.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t a smart idea to bring him home. Whoever had tried to kill him knew exactly where he was staying.

How? I wondered. How did anyone find out?

No one other than a librarian in Mission Viejo knew that Travis was the storyteller, and she knew very little of his background. And even if she had revealed to the world that Travis was Cosmo the Storyteller, she didn’t know where I lived. For that matter, she couldn’t have been certain we were going up to the Valley Plaza Branch Library; for all she knew, I would just make a phone call to that library. Certainly no one knew he’d be coming back with us. Rachel and I hadn’t known it ourselves.

I thought briefly of the car that had tailed us on the freeway. But not only had Rachel lost the tail, we weren’t in the same vehicle when we headed home. Where had the tail started?

There was a Las Piernas PD patrol car sitting outside our house when I pulled into the driveway. Jack and Rachel were sitting on the front porch, talking.

“They’re here to keep an eye on things,” Rachel said, indicating the patrol car.

“I thought you two would be gone by now,” I said.

“I think I’ll stick around,” Rachel said. “If you don’t mind. At least for tonight.”

“Not at all,” I said. “I’ll put Travis on the foldout couch.”

“Forget it!” she said. “He’s been hurt. Give him the guest-room bed. I’ll be fine on the couch.”

“He could stay at my place,” Jack offered.

But we both turned that idea down-we wanted to be able to keep an eye on him.

“I wonder if he realizes he’s got a couple of mother hens looking out after him,” Jack said.

“And what are you still doing here?” I asked.

He laughed. “Making sure the guy Rachel hosed down doesn’t come back. Not sure those two cops in the patrol car out there would be enough to stop him from killing her.”

Before he went home, Jack helped me rouse a very woozy Travis, and together we settled him into the guest room.

“Frank called,” Rachel said as soon as Jack was gone. “He’ll call back later. He’s not too happy about what’s going on.”

“You told him?” I asked.

“You’d rather he just didn’t find you at home at two in the morning?”

I shrugged. “I guess not. Listen, if he calls again, tell him I’ll be back in about an hour.”

“Back? It’s almost three in the morning. Where are you going?”

“Since I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep, I’m going to interrupt the beauty rest of the one person who might have led the bomber to my home.”

“Oh?”

“A society columnist for the Express.”

“I thought you said she didn’t know your address.”

“She doesn’t, but to keep a man happy, she might have made the effort to find out.”

Rachel laughed. “Be careful, she may be more dangerous than you think. You know where she lives?”

I nodded. “She throws an annual Christmas party at her place. I haven’t been to one in a couple years, but I went to enough of them in my single days to remember how to find her house.”

“Bene,” she said. “And don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye on your cousin.”

16

Margot Martin didn’t live far from me, at least not in miles. But then again, back when people lived in castles, the average scullery maid never lived far from the queen. Rivo Alto Island is a world away from my neighborhood.

The streets of Rivo Alto crisscross over the curving canal for which the island was named. Both the man-made island and its canal were the brainchild of a turn-of-the-century developer who looked at a mudflat and saw money. He wasn’t wrong.

Margot’s manse was one of the island’s more modern ones; someone undoubtedly tore down an older house to build it-not an uncommon practice there. As a result, you’d be hard-pressed to find another area as small as Rivo Alto crowded with so many varieties of architectural style.

The houses are closer together than those in my neighborhood, but larger, and those situated along the canal, as Margot’s is, each have private docks. The boats have plenty of space, but it’s tougher to get around on Rivo Alto in a car-I ended up double-parking in the narrow lane in back of Margot’s place. At three in the morning, I figured I’d be fine until the paperboy tried to squeeze by.

On the way over, I’d thought about everything I knew about Margot Martin. It wasn’t all that much, even though we had worked on the same paper for a number of years.

I knew that Margot had become a widow about ten years ago, and that the late Mr. Martin left her a bundle. She was his second wife; he was a widower when they met. She spent her thirties as a corporate wife, serving as Martin’s hostess at numerous business gatherings, keeping the peace among the other wives at company golf tournaments.