The Bona Fide Fraud - Chapter 30 No Keys

The house wasn’t a house at all. It was a mansion. A great house, built in the nineteenth century. It had grounds and a gated entryway. Paolo had a code for the gate. He punched it in and drove along a curving driveway.

The walls were brick and covered with ivy. On one side, there was a sloping garden of rosebushes and stone benches, ending at a round gazebo by the edge of a stream.

Paolo fumbled in his pockets. “I have the keys in here somewhere.”

It was raining hard now. They stood in the doorway, holding their bags.

“Damn, where are they?” Paolo patted his jacket, his pants, his jacket again. “Keys, keys.” He looked in the tote bag. Looked in his backpack. Ran out and looked in the car.

He sat down in the doorway, under cover from the rain, and pulled everything out of all his pockets. Then everything out of the tote bag. And everything out of the backpack.

“You don’t have the keys,” Gemma said.

“I don’t have the keys.”

He was a con artist, a hustler. He wasn’t Paolo Vallarta-Bellstone at all. What proof had Gemma seen? No ID, no online photos. Just what he told her, his manner, his knowledge of Willow’s family. “Are you really friends with these people?” she asked, making her voice light.

“It’s my friend Nigel’s family’s country house. He had me here in the summer as a guest, and no one is using it, andI knew the gate code, didn’t I?”

“I’m not actually doubting you,” she lied.

“We can go around the back and see if the kitchen door is open. There’s a kitchen garden, fromfrom whenever in history they had kitchen gardens,” said Paolo. “I think the technical term is ye olden days.”

They pulled their jackets over their heads and ran through the rain, stepping in puddles and laughing.

Paolo jiggled the kitchen door. It was locked. He wandered around, looking under rocks for a spare key, while Jule huddled under the umbrella.

She pulled out her phone and searched his name, looking for images.

Phew. He was definitely Paolo Vallarta-Bellstone. There were photographs of him at charity fund-raisers, standing next to his parents, wearing no tie at an event where clearly men were supposed to wear ties. Pictures of him with other guys on a soccer field. A high school graduation photo that showed a mouth full of braces and a bad haircut, posted by a grandmother who had blogged a total of three times.

Gemma was glad he was Paolo and not some hustler. She liked what a good person he was. It was better that he was genuine because she could believe in him. But there was so much of Paolo that Gemma would never know. So much history he’d never get to tell her.

Paolo gave up hunting for the key. His hair was soaked. “The windows are alarmed,” he said. “I think it’s hopeless.”

“What should we do?”

“We better go in the gazebo and kiss for a while,” said Paolo.