Dead Certain

suit. Beneath the soft tousle of his brown hair his eyes looked tired and his shoulders seemed to sag. However, at the sight of me he broke into a grin as big and warm as summertime.
    “You look beautiful,” he said, slipping his arm around my waist and drawing me toward him for a quick kiss. Then he stepped back, looked me quizzically in the eye, and then glanced down at my shoes. “My, Little Red Riding Hood, how tall you’ve grown,” he remarked.
    “Cheryl’s to blame,” I explained somewhat incoherently. “Did you get a verdict? Are we celebrating tonight or drowning your sorrows?”
    “Celebrating,” replied Elliott. “The jury came back for the plaintiff and awarded us $6.7 million in damages.”
    I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “Ooh,” I squealed in my best chorus-girl impersonation. “I’m going to have to start calling you the six-million-dollar man.”
    “Please, the six-point-seven-million-dollar man,” joked Elliott as the hostess came over and showed us to a table for two in a quiet corner of the restaurant. As we sat down he noticed the bag.
    “A present for me?” he inquired.
    “Actually, it’s a message for my mother. I was hoping you might send it out and have it dusted for prints.” I went on to describe the package that had been sent to my mother’s house and the message scrawled on the single sheet inside it as we took our seats.
    “I can’t believe she opened it without knowing who it was from,” remarked Elliott once I’d finished. “If it really was a bomb, she would have been killed.”
    “I’m sure that’s what whoever sent it wants her to think.”
    “I’ll send it out to our forensics guys and have them take a look at it. But I doubt they’ll turn up anything useful after the thing’s gone through the post office. So who do you think sent it?”
    “Who knows? My mother’s been on every TV and radio station in the city the past couple of days. Maybe it’s from some Bolshevik who hates rich people or some disgruntled former servant. God knows, you could populate a small town in Wisconsin with the people she’s fired.”
    “That wouldn’t explain why it came now, not unless you’re a big believer in coincidence. It seems to me like a pretty good bet that this was deliberately sent to scare her off her crusade against HCC.”
    “In that case it worked. Mother showed up at my office this afternoon to try and wriggle out of trying to block the sale.”
    “And I suppose you didn’t let her.”
    “You’re damned right I didn’t let her,” I announced, tearing into the warm baguette that had just materialized on our table.
    “My mother told me I’d meet girls like you,” reported Elliott gravely.
    “Girls like what?”
    “Girls who like trouble.”
    “It has nothing to do with liking trouble,” I protested. “My mother came to me with this half-baked idea that she wanted to keep HCC from buying Prescott Memorial. I suspected that her motives were truly selfish— she literally didn’t want some company out of Atlanta taking away the Founders Ball and all the other Lady Bountiful accoutrements she enjoys as a trustee of the hospital. I got involved because she’s my mother and I didn’t have the backbone to say no. The only trouble is that the deeper I dug, the more convinced I became that whatever her motives, my mother was right in fighting the sale. There’s no way I’m going to let her back down after we’ve come this far.”
    “Even if she’s being threatened?”
    “Especially if she’s being threatened,” I declared. “If you give in to threats, in the end you’re just rewarding bullies.”
    “I agree with you one hundred percent,” said Elliott. “But I just love it when you get all riled up like that.” I threw a piece of my bread at him. “I still want to know who you think might have sent it.”
    “Well, for starters, HCC.”
    “In which case they’ll follow it up with something worse if this doesn’t dissuade her.”
    “You’re serious.”
    “If you’re going to go around bullying people, you have to be willing to follow through on your threats or else no one will take you seriously. Everything I’ve found out about Gerald Packman says that he means business and he’s not above using force. When he worked for a fried-chicken franchise, he was having trouble with a couple of his food delivery people refusing to unload trucks. Supposedly he was waiting for them at one of the restaurants. As soon