by Alice Sharpe
“Some of my holdings,” Nelson said.
It looked as though he owned most of New Harbor. Tess turned and found him standing closer than she expected. “I think I can understand why you hated having your father’s art given away to the museum,” she said, backing up a little. “They’d look wonderful hanging on your walls.”
“I don’t need more decorations on my walls,” he said. “The collection was worth a small fortune. It was an investment. When Irene told me what Madeline had in mind, I was stunned. But legally it all belonged to my stepmother to do with as she wished. Trust me, I double-checked.”
“The art itself—”
“Was beautiful, of course. And now most of it is gone, and what remains will soon be hanging on the museum walls in a room named after my father. Part of the deal, though now, of course, it can be a much smaller room than before. Meanwhile, I have plenty to keep me busy.”
“Your investments,” she mused.
He gestured at another row of photos, this of a man windsurfing. “This is my new passion. Wonderful sport,” he said. “Man against nature. I’ve a trip planned for Hawaii later this month.”
Tess hobbled over to the window located behind Nelson’s desk to admire the magnificent view that included miles of rolling dunes, straight beaches, line upon line of gentle waves, a vast sky overhead, all of it tinted a million shades of bluish gray. For a moment she could almost see herself walking alone on the sand, and instantly her imagination provided an escort, a tall man with black hair whose head dipped close to hers.
Reality came back with a bang as she felt movement behind her. The next thing she knew, Nelson had wrapped one arm around her from behind, parted her hair, and pressed his lips against the back of her neck.
She was so stunned she couldn’t think.
“Play your cards right and you can go with me to Maui,” Nelson whispered.
In that instant another movement caught Tess’s attention, this one coming from outside the window. A man suddenly appeared, raindrops spattering his glossy black hair, running down his face, glistening on his lashes. He looked in the window, apparently saw Tess, started to smile and then opened his mouth in shock.
Ryan!
For a second they stared into each other’s eyes, then he disappeared around a corner.
Nelson kissed her again. His grip around her waist tightened. “Turn around and let me kiss you properly,” he murmured.
She turned around all right, but put her hand over his mouth as he lunged toward her.
“I’m sorry,” she said, dropping her hand. “This isn’t a good time.” Was Ryan still out there looking in?
“You are different today,” Nelson allowed. “You haven’t asked me a million questions like usual. I suppose I have your brush with death to thank?”
His phrasing made her jump. “Yes,” she said, briefly meeting his intense gaze. “That and Muffy. Your stepmother is very upset.”
“My stepmother is crazy about that unpedigreed mutt.”
Tess wanted to move away from him, but she didn’t. It would be a shame to waste Katie’s obvious efforts to seduce the truth out of Nelson just because she didn’t like him. “Tell me what we talked about on Tuesday,” she said, running a hand up and down his cashmere-covered arm, trying her best to look flirtatious. She wasn’t good at this kind of thing. Her life had given her few opportunities to toy with men, and it didn’t come naturally.
His lips twisted into a smile. He stared at the bandage wrapping her head. Had it slipped?
“You asked me about my stepmother’s house fire,” he said. “You seemed fascinated by the details.”
“Which details?” Tess murmured as she touched her bandages. They felt okay.
He leaned closer. “The details concerning me,” he said without elaborating.
“I just find you so fascinating,” she gushed. “Did I come here to your house or did you come to mine?”
He laughed. “Caroline, what are you playing at? You know you won’t tell me where you live. You came to my downtown office. You took a picture of my newest windsurfing trophy with your phone, then left like a shot.”
The trophy on the phone! “Was I upset?”
He shrugged. “Hard to tell with you, isn’t it? Plus, I got a call from Vince. I was a little preoccupied afterward—that jerk’s whining is getting to me.”
“He seemed so angry today—”
“He thinks I owe him every penny he lost. His life is spiraling away, and all he can do is blame me.”
“And are you to blame?” she asked breathlessly.
“Hell, no! He begged me to get in on the Parkinson land deal. I warned him it depended on zoning. Is it my fault the commissioners had a sudden attack of conscience or that Vince mortgaged his business up the wazoo?” He narrowed his eyes and added, “What’s with all these questions? Sometimes I wonder if you and Vince are—”
Just then a loud knock sounded on the outside door followed by several rings of the doorbell and the scurrying feet of the maid.
Tess recognized the loud male voice coming from the entry. Cursing Ryan under her breath, she tried to think of a way to draw Nelson’s attention back to their conversation, but the moment was lost. He strode over to the door, opening it wide and addressing the commotion out in the entry. She followed him from the room.
“HE WAS RIGHT ON THE VERGE of accusing me of working for Vince Desota,” she said a few moments later as she climbed into Ryan’s car. “You ruined everything!”
Ryan gave her a quick look. After he’d gone into his cousin-come-to-give-a-ride act, the Lingfords had consented to open the gate to allow him to drive up to the house so Tess wouldn’t have to walk the long driveway wielding cast and crutches, dodging raindrops and puddles. They couldn’t understand why he hadn’t used the intercom. He said he hadn’t seen an intercom. He said someone at Bluebird House had told him Caroline left with Irene Woodall and that Irene Woodall had mentioned coming to the Lingfords. He was just a simple guy trying to take care of his cousin.
“Why did you come after me?” Tess fussed as they drove back into town. “That wasn’t part of the plan.”
“We agreed you wouldn’t go off on a tangent without me, and you did,” he said, scathingly. His excursion around the Lingford house had left him dripping wet. It didn’t distract from his looks. In fact, it made him even sexier. Easy to imagine what he would look like coming out of the shower, for instance. Her gut reaction to his half-drowned state just made her more angry.
“Are you honestly referring to an interrogation of Nelson and Madeline Lingford as a ‘tangent’?”
“And I suppose it was part of the ‘interrogation’ to make out with your favorite suspect?”
“Make out? You call that making out?”
“Well what would you call it? It looked pretty cozy.”
“Tell me you’re not this dense.”
He said nothing, but she saw a knot in his jaw that said plenty. For some reason it reminded her of the names Irene had slipped to her, and she dug in her sweater pocket.
“Do you suppose you could put this irrational attitude of yours aside for a second and answer a question?”
“I might be able to.”
“Good.” Reading from the paper, she said, “Do the names Jim Kinsey and Clint Doyle mean anything to you?”
It took him a moment to answer. “Former Lingford employees. Why?”
“Katie must have wanted these names for a reason. Apparently she visited Irene and her daughter on the morning of her accident. Afterward she went to Nelson’s downtown office to discuss piano lessons for his stepmother. According to him, Katie asked a lot of questions. He got a phone call from Vince Desota that upset him, and I guess while he was on the phone, she used her cell phone to take a photo of his latest windsurfing trophy. Right after that, she took off. We know she started home, tried to call you, got hit by a white van.”
“Good work,” he said, but the knot was still in his jaw.
>
“Today Desota was at Nelson’s house when we got there. The two of them were really going at it.” She did her best to recount the conversation from the entry, finishing with, “How’s that for sleuthing? Now all I have to do is get an invite to Nelson’s office so I can check out that trophy.”
“No, you don’t. If Nelson thinks you’re connected to Desota, who knows what he really wants from you. If the situation warrants, I’ll go.”
Like hell!
“I’ll run Doyle and Kinsey by Donovan, the detective who investigated the fire,” Ryan added. He paused for a second as they got into heavier traffic. “There’s not much to eat at your sister’s place. Are you hungry or did Nelson fill you up on dainty little tea sandwiches?”
She glared at him. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know,” he growled.
“You’re jealous. Of Nelson.”
“I am not jealous.”
“You sure are acting jealous,” she said.
“Why would I be jealous?”
“Good question. Why?”
“There’s a deli a block or two over.”
“Knock yourself out,” she said.
As he maneuvered the car through a busy intersection, she added, “There are also the two women, Irene and Madeline, to consider. Irene is suspicious of Nelson but I’m not sure if it’s only because she thinks he’s basically dishonest. Katie led Irene to believe she was interested in Nelson as marriage material and wanted to make sure he isn’t a criminal. As for Nelson, he’s obsessed with his stepmother’s money. And judging from the way he acted when we were alone, Katie was leading him on to get to the truth.”
“That does it,” Ryan announced as he pulled into a parking lot next to a place called Sea Shanty Deli. “You have to stay away from Nelson Lingford. And that means his downtown office as well as his home. Better yet, stay away from all of them!”
There he went with more autocratic decisions. Before she could react, he had parked the car and stepped outside into the drizzle.
She ended up ordering him a sandwich and herself a double chocolate shake while he called Donovan, who wasn’t in the office. “He’ll call me back when he can,” Ryan said as he carried their tray to a table by a window.
They ate in virtual silence, Tess still annoyed with Ryan’s heavy-handed proclamations. Wait until he heard she’d accepted a job at the residence.
The drive back to Katie’s place was over in a couple of minutes. As they rolled to a stop in front of the building, Ryan said, “While you were in Bluebird House this morning, I made arrangements with a friend of mine to fix Katie’s door. He said he’d drop the new key in the mailbox. I’ll come up with you—”
“No, thanks. Whoever came yesterday was looking for something. They tore the place apart. They either found it or decided it wasn’t there, and now the door is fixed. End of story.”
He stared at her a moment. “You’re still angry with me for breaking in on you at the Lingford place.”
There didn’t seem to any point in denying it, so she said nothing.
“You have to remember that I’m a cop—”
“And I’m the one who is going to get to the bottom of this,” she interrupted. “Thanks to Katie, I’m the one with the ticket in the front door, the one with the job helping Madeline Lingford organize photos of her paintings.”
“You can’t be serious.”
She opened her door. “Watch me,” she said, levering herself out of the car using her crutches just in case an interested party was looking. She bent and peered back inside the car. “If you still want to help me on this, I’ll be ready to leave tomorrow morning before nine.”
The knot was back in his jaw.
“Goodbye, Ryan.”
Using the much-hated crutches to maneuver inside the building, she got out Katie’s keys and found the one that opened the mail box. Sure enough, a shiny new gold key lay in the bottom of the box along with three pieces of junk mail, which Tess left in place. Pocketing the old key ring, she rode the elevator to the second floor where once again the old grouch cast her a glowering look from his post outside his apartment.
He opened the door as she passed, and Tess paused. An elderly shepherd mix had poked his nose out.
“You have a dog,” she said, surprised.
“Hmph—” the old man snarled.
The dog had shuffled partway into the hall, and Tess leaned down to pat his head. “What’s wrong with his eye?”
“Nothin’ that concerns you,” the man snarled.
She gently turned the dog’s head in her hand, investigating the weeping eye from different directions, finally seeing the point of a sticker extruding from the lower eyelid. “Does your dog have a veterinarian?”
“Waste of money,” the man said. Tess looked from his threadbare sweater to the shabby furniture visible through the crack in the door and understood the defensive posturing. He saw her staring past him and hugged the door closer to his hip as though ashamed of his poverty. “I think your pooch has a sticker in his eye,” she said. “Unusual for winter, but not unheard of. Maybe he was rooting around in some old weeds or something.”
The man frowned. “Could be,” he said.
“Okay. I need you to get me a few things. A clean cloth, a towel will do. Bottled water. Small tweezers, a flashlight, a little bowl. Bring them all out here. I’ll wait out here with your dog.”
He stared at her hard before finally nodding. She’d expected him to take his dog and slam the door in her face. As she leaned against the wall the old man’s dog sat down next to her legs. He pawed at his eye a couple of times but stopped when she told him to and looked up at her. This was what Tess loved about animals, and as she gently stroked his head, she knew he was content in his doggy way, even though his eye was bothering him.
Eventually the old man came back juggling everything Tess had asked for. While he held the flashlight, she flushed the eye, using the bowl to catch the excess, then maneuvered the tweezers to gently extract the sticker. She flushed the eye again and patted it dry, rewarded with a gentle flick of the dog’s tongue across her hand and a thumping of his tail on the floor.
“Good as new,” Tess said, standing.
The man’s arthritic fingers fumbled with his pet’s floppy ears in a fond gesture both man and animal seemed to enjoy. He seemed to be at a loss for words.
“He’ll be fine,” she said, briefly touching the man’s arm before once again fumbling with the crutches and hobbling toward Katie’s apartment.
Two pet situations in one day. Life as she knew it, as she liked it. Real life. People needed their animals, especially people who lived alone, who had few friends. Sometimes their pets were their only family.
She paused at Katie’s door, glancing back down the hall. The man and his dog were gone, and she smiled. The smile slid away when she found Ryan’s buddy hadn’t actually gotten around to fixing the front door. So why had he left a new key? She stuck it in her pocket with all the other keys, vastly annoyed.
Well, she wouldn’t call Ryan. No way. Better to pile the furniture in front of the door than deal with Ryan right now. She pushed open the door with the tip of one crutch, flipped on the light and stood stock-still.
The place had been ransacked again!
Before she could even begin to process that bit of news, a bigger problem launched itself out from behind the door as a man dressed in dark clothes with a stocking over his face grabbed at her. She reacted without thinking, flinging the crutches at him as she turned, heading back into the hall. The man caught her coat and she struggled free of it, her purse slipping off with the coat. Even her unbuttoned sweater fell around her feet, almost tripping her as she stumbled down the hall, gasping for breath.
She had to reach the old man’s door, but even as that thought entered her mind it was followed by another. What could he do? Her assailant caught her again, this time by the shoulder, ripping the dress, fingers digging into her skin, c
atching her so hard she flew back against his unyielding body.
She felt a small circle of cold steel press against her throat as he twisted her left arm in back of her. She prayed the lady with the Dalmatian would choose that moment to walk her dog.
“Say one word and you’re dead,” the man said. It wasn’t until that moment it dawned on her she hadn’t made a peep.
He forced her back down the hall and into Katie’s apartment, walking behind her, her arm twisted between them. They stepped over her coat. Her purse had spilled its contents when it fell. One mud-encrusted black boot landed on it full force. The man stopped for a second and used that same foot to kick everything back inside. He shut the door with a softness that stunned her with its civility.
And yet his grip was as tight and merciless as ever. One more twist on her arm and it would snap. But he hadn’t killed her outright; there might be a chance of survival.
He pushed her ahead of him into the bedroom. The door closed behind them as the bed loomed into sight and any hope the elderly man down the hall might hear a scuffle and call for help died. It was too late now.
Her knees touched the bed. A primal jab of horror shot through her core. She screamed Ryan’s name without producing so much as a squeak.
The man pushed her past the bed and slammed her against the far wall so hard her nose made a funny noise and her eyes watered. He twisted her head to the side, crunching the big black glasses against her temple and the side of her nose until they sprang off her face and fell to the floor. A hard stone of fear settled in her stomach.
“Listen carefully,” he said. “I ought to shoot you right now, but I’m not going to. Understand?”
He ran the gun muzzle up and down her throat as he spoke. She tried to take in details. Silver gun. Four- or five-inch muzzle, plastic gloves on his hand, the kind surgeons wear, the cloying smell of baby powder. The plaster wall grated into her cheek as she nodded.
“You’ve been sticking your nose into places where it doesn’t belong,” he said, the gun coming to a stop against her cheek.
