Hidden Riches

and have Barbara make a copy of this list for me before you go, will you?”
     
    Jed couldn’t say why he was doing it. He’d had no business going down to the shop that morning in the first place. Hewas perfectly content to spend his days working out in the gym, lifting weights in his own apartment, catching up on his reading. God knew what crazy impulse had had him wandering downstairs and somehow volunteering to make Dora’s deliveries.
    Of course, he remembered with what was almost a smile, he had gotten tipped pretty well at that. A few bucks, and in one memorable case a brightly colored tin filled with homemade Christmas cookies.
    It hadn’t been such a big deal, and it had been interesting to see how much more enthusiastically you were greeted when you knocked on someone’s door carrying a box rather than a badge.
    He could have crossed the whole experience off as a kind of experiment, but now he was standing out in the cold replacing a banister. The fact that he was enjoying it on some deep, elemental level made him feel like an idiot.
    He was forced to work outside because Dora didn’t have ten feet of unoccupied space anywhere in her building. Since her idea of tools had run to a single screwdriver and a ball peen hammer with a taped handle, he’d had to drop by Brent’s to borrow some. Of course, Mary Pat had grilled him on everything from his eating habits to his love life while plying him with Snickerdoodles. It had taken him nearly an hour to escape with his sanity and a power saw.
    The events of the day had taught Jed one important lesson: He would keep to himself from this point on, just as he had planned. When a man didn’t like people to begin with, there was no rational reason to mix with them.
    At least there was no one to bother him in the rear of the building, and he enjoyed working with his hands, liked the feel of wood under them. Once, he’d considered adding a small workshop onto the back of the house in Chestnut Hill. A place where he could have tinkered and built when the job gave him time. But that had been beforeDonny Speck. Before the investigation that had become an obsession.
    And, of course, it had been before Elaine had paid the price.
    Before Jed could switch off his mind, he saw it again. The silver Mercedes sedan sitting sedately under the carport. He saw the dull gleam of pearls around Elaine’s neck and remembered inanely that they had been a birthday gift from the first of her three husbands. He saw her eyes, the same brilliant blue as his own—perhaps the only family trait they had shared—lift and look curiously in his direction. He saw the faint annoyance in those eyes and saw himself racing across the manicured lawn, between the well-tended rosebushes that had smelled almost violently of summer.
    The sun had glinted off the chrome, speared into his eyes. A bird high up in one of the trio of apple trees had trilled insanely.
    Then the explosion had ripped through the air with a hot fist that had punched Jed back, sent him flying away toward the roses, where the petals were sheared off by the force of the blast.
    The silver Mercedes was a ball of flame with a belch of black smoke stinking upward into the summer sky. He thought he heard her scream. It could have been the screech of rending metal. He hoped it had been. He hoped she’d felt nothing after her fingers had twisted the key in the ignition and triggered the bomb.
    Swearing, Jed attacked the new banister with Brent’s power sander. It was over. Elaine was dead and couldn’t be brought back. Donny Speck was dead, thank Christ. And however much Jed might have wished it, he couldn’t kill the man again.
    And he was exactly where he wanted to be. Alone.
    “Ho, ho, ho.”
    Distracted by the hearty voice behind him, Jed switched off the sander. He turned, his eyes narrowed behind histinted aviator glasses as he studied, with equal parts annoyance and curiosity, the pink-cheeked Santa.
    “You’re a couple days early, aren’t you?”
    “Ho, ho, ho,” Santa said again, and patted his comfortable belly. “Looks like you could use a little Christmas cheer, son.”
    Resigned to the interruption, Jed took out a cigarette. “Mr. Conroy, right?” He watched Santa’s face fall. “It’s the eyes,” Jed told him, and struck a match. They were Dora’s eyes, Jed thought. Big and brown and full of secret jokes.
    “Oh.” Quentin considered, then brightened. “I suppose a policeman is trained to see past