She got up, showered, then went downstairs.
“You’re feeling better?” Susan asked.
“Yes, much. I’m sorry I’ve been ill. Why don’t you take a long break?”
“I would, but I don’t want to miss it. I’d love to go and get my cell phone, though. I think they are about to walk.”
Joan followed the nanny’s gaze and was delighted to see Ryland and Marco both trying to stand as they held onto the wall.
“Oh my goodness! Go get your phone, I still don’t have one and Lissa would kill me if we didn’t capture this moment.”
The new nanny bolted upstairs, but it was a false alarm, and neither Marco or Ryland made another attempt to walk that day.
To Joan’s relief, none of the triplets tried to say their first words while their parents were gone. Just in case, Joan made a point of singing the Mama Papa lullaby she made up whenever she was in charge of putting them to sleep. She hoped their first words wouldn’t be Auntie Joan.
Miss Susan also had the cameras prepped for first words, should they come while Lissa and Julio were away. It was day eight of their honeymoon with only six days left to go, so Joan kept her finger’s crossed that the boys would not reach any of those milestones while they were gone.
She was taking a nap, trying not to think about Antonio, when one of the household staffers knocked on her door.
“There’s someone to see you,” she said.
Joan got up, her heart thumping. She hoped that this someone was Antonio, but when she opened the door she was surprised to see Raul, the man who’d failed to show up at the wedding. The man who’d invited the two people that Lissa and Julio would not want to see.
Her face went rigid. “What are you doing here?” she asked, her voice steel.
“I wanted to explain, why I didn’t make the wedding,” he said. He looked so sad and apologetic that her anger softened, and she led him to the kitchen. She was glad Mamacita had taken the day off to go back to Barcelona, but she was also glad that Susan and several staffers, including Ruiz the security man, were close by if she needed their help.
“Remember those two people I asked you to invite?” he began.
“Yes,” Joan said coldly.
“Well, I went to the airport to pick them up, where Tom told me to get them-”
“Tom? Tom who?”
“Tom Akers. He’s the guy that told me about the contract for the commercial project. He told me to ask you for the invitation to the wedding and that I needed to get in contact with your brother in law,” he said innocently.
“Okay, let me get this straight. Tom Akers asked you to get Tina Peters and Will Gruebers into the wedding. Did he say why?”
“Like I said, he said they wanted to go and they were important people so it would be good for our business, but that’s not what happened.”
“Fine,” Joan said, pulling in her questions as she sat back. “So, what did happen?”
“Well,” he said, his eyes growing wide with excitement. “Like I said, I went to get them at the airport. I was holding a sign with their names and they’d started towards me, one of them yelling at me that she was Tina Peters. But, just before they got to me, armed men pulled them aside, a ton of them. They raised a scene and then that Willa woman started pointing to me. I dropped the sign and bolted, and for some reason, no one chased me.”
Joan stared at him.
“So, where have you been all this time? Why didn’t you come here and tell me this before now?”
“I would have, but I didn’t make it to my car.”
“They arrested you?”
“No!”
“Then what happened?”
“I got brave.”
“You what?”
“I decided to go back inside and turn myself in.”
“But, you didn’t do anything.”
“I know, which is why I think I wasn’t afraid to do it.”
Joan was getting a bit of a headache. Raul was truly not the sharpest toothpick in the box.
“It wasn’t easy, I had to convince the security people that I was sent to pick up the women that got arrested and that they should question me. Eventually, when I mentioned their names, they finally took me back.”
“So, you were arrested?”
“Nope, detained. Under anti-terrorism laws.”
“Wow,” Joan said.
“They eventually let me out, but only after they got me to agree to do a sting.”
“Wait a minute, go back. Are you saying that they were questioning Willa and Tina for terrorism?”
“Yep. Apparently, they’d been tracking the two women and when they went through security they identified a device in Willa’s luggage which they thought was suspicious, but wasn’t caught during the initial screening.”
“Huh?”
“Yeah, they have the x-ray machines, and some of them actually record the images. The first line security guard didn’t stop her, but after she’d boarded the plane in London a second inspector saw the object and flagged it. As soon as her luggage was opened they found what they’d suspected.”
“A bomb?” Joan asked, not believing that Willa or Tina would do something that stupid.
“No, not a bomb, but some illegal hacking device with a special shape.”
Joan shook her head as if trying to shake away the cobwebs. None of this was making any sense.
Raul continued. “So, the two women apparently denied having any knowledge that this communicati
ons device was illegal or meant for ill purpose. They both confessed, right in front of me, that Tom Akers sent them to disrupt a competitor’s business and it had nothing to do with infiltrating the Royal Family. It took a while, but they finally convinced them. They also insisted that I had nothing to do with anything, other than being, their patsy... whatever that means.”
Joan smiled at the naive man before her. He wasn’t a bad guy.
“So, where are they now?”
“Deported.”
Joan felt herself warm towards this man, the bearer of such good news. Knowing that Tina Peters, her sister’s former right-hand employee and the biggest traitor she’d ever known, had been thrown out of Europe forever – that was almost as good as a bitch slap. Willa was a different story.
She had to ask, not that Raul would be able to explain.
“Willa is German, where was she deported to?”
“Oh no, not German. She’s from Czechoslovakia., she was using a fake passport, working for the Russians. They kicked her out on espionage charges.”
That didn’t make sense. How could a woman who’d worked for Julio all those years be a spy?
She stopped trying to figure it out.
“Well, I’m glad they let you go, Raul, and I want to thank you for telling me,” she said.
Raul smiled and gave her a hug. “I hope you have a wonderful life, Joan.”
She walked him to his car and waved him away, her belief in the goodness of most people restored.
After he left, she called Abby and brought her up to speed.
Abby agreed that the spying angle and Julio Torres didn’t make sense.
“Maybe they were trying to get to the Viscount and gain access to the Spanish government.”
“Maybe so. My brain hurts just thinking about all this. So, how’s the apartment coming?”
“Great. Ready to go the minute they come back. Are you still thinking of quitting?”
“I am.”
“That’s too bad, Joan. We’re all going to miss you. Where are you going to go?”
“I don’t know.”
Abby said, “Hey, did you hear the good news?”