Private Affair

by Rebecca York

  “That’s an abrupt change of subject.”

  “Subtle, huh?”

  He laughed, then asked, “Do you want me to help with anything? I mean, with the breakfast.”

  “Get forks.”

  “In the left-hand drawer of the hutch, right?”

  “Yes.”

  As she dished the eggs onto plates, he said, “That’s more than I usually eat in the morning.”

  “Me too.”

  “Doesn’t a model have to stay pencil-thin?”

  “That’s how you see me?”

  He suddenly felt like he’d taken a step into quicksand. “No.”

  “How do you see me?”

  Now he was sinking deeper into the trap he’d created for himself. “Um, as a very attractive woman.” He could have added desirable, but she already knew his thinking on that score.

  Her gaze held his for a long moment.

  “A supermodel has to stay pencil-thin.”

  “You’re saying that’s not what you are.”

  “More like a successful model. That’s a whole other level of commitment.”

  He resisted the temptation to look her up and down. “Still, you’re breaking your training, aren’t you?” he said.

  “Yes. But I like the freedom,” she answered as she set the plates on the table. “And anyway, I read about a new diet in a women’s magazine. You eat what you want five days a week and diet on two.”

  “That works?”

  “It has for me.”

  Deliberately switching the subject away from anything personal, he looked around the kitchen and said, “I guess you all did some remodeling.”

  She seemed relieved to get off the topic of diets. “Yes, maybe ten years ago. Right before my mom died. Dad did it for her, so he kind of wasted the money.”

  Although he’d vowed to keep the conversation off of anything personal, he couldn’t stop himself from asking, “What happened to her?”

  Olivia pulled out the chair opposite him and sat down. “I guess you could say it was bad luck. She was having terrible pains in her chest and abdomen. She was afraid she was having a heart attack, but it turned out to be her gallbladder. She went into the hospital to have it removed and got one of those awful skin-eating bacteria. She died a week later.”

  He winced. “Your dad took it hard?”

  “We both did. She’d always been a buffer between me and him. With her gone, it was like the two of us were cooped up here.”

  Like us, Max thought, but didn’t say it.

  “That was in your senior year?”

  “Yes.”

  “Before or after the party?”

  “After.”

  When she reached down to fiddle with her fork, he knew she hadn’t wanted to get back to the subject of the party.

  “Her dying was a major factor in my getting out of here. It was in the summer, and I was trying to decide what to do. Then I suddenly had some money I could use any way I wanted.” She kept her gaze focused on her food. “Dad and I never really got along, and I knew I had to get out of the house—one way or the other.”

  “Why not?”

  “He came from a long line of male chauvinists. Rural men who were the breadwinners and the law in their little world. They were pretty isolated, and they could do what they wanted. Maybe he even wished there wasn’t so much modern communication. He had very definite ideas on everything—including the role of women in the family. He wanted things done his way, and Mom and I had to conform.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, I remember Mom wanting to bring in some extra money. But he made it clear that it would shame him for his wife to have a job outside the home. Besides, he said she’d be happier staying home where a wife belonged.”

  “He dictated what would make her happy?”

  “Remember, he thought he knew best. If she wanted to make a difference in their finances, she could do it by saving money. By freezing and canning her own vegetables and fruits instead of buying them at the grocery store. Or by making her own clothes. She made mine, too, actually. She had a natural talent for it. Maybe that’s where I got my early interest in fashion. We’d go to the fabric store together and spend a lot of time looking at the pattern books and the materials. She also made the curtains, and she even made rag rugs.”

  “Why did she marry him?” Max asked. Because of his own screwed-up family, he was always interested in how unsuitable couples had gotten together. He’d never asked his mom why she’d married his father. Probably he should have. But he’d avoided the subject because it had been easier to ignore the past. Was that why Olivia avoided talking about that party back in high school?

  Olivia answered his question. “Maybe he hid his need to dominate from her when they were dating. Maybe he knew that if he came across as too controlling, he wouldn’t get her.”

  “He loved her?”

  “I think he loved both of us—in his own way. But he was an old-fashioned man, and he wanted everything on his own terms. And if he didn’t get them, he…lashed out. Verbally. And in my case, spanking me with a coat hanger.”

  “You couldn’t get away with that today,” he said, his voice turning rough.

  “I know it’s frowned upon. Nobody would do it in public. But in the privacy of your own home, I think you still can. Unless the kid ratted out the parent, but most kids keep their mouths shut, I think. I mean, if you get your parents in trouble, what happens to you? Anyway, Mom took his frugality advice to heart, and then some. And not entirely in the way he intended. She had stashed some money in a bank account. I don’t know if she had fantasies about leaving him, or if it was just that she wanted me to have more choices than she did.” She stopped and took a breath. “She’d written me a letter about it that she said not to read unless something happened to her. After she died, I read the letter and got the money. Actually, the account had my name on it, too. When I’d signed the card, I hadn’t realized what it was.”

  “How did your father like your getting the money?”

  “He hated it because it gave me some independence. That’s how I could afford to go to New York and start trying to get modeling jobs.”

  “It paid off.”

  “Well, I’ve worked steadily since I got my first job modeling for an underwear catalog.”

  Olivia in sexy underwear. He was tempted to look it up on the web, but he kept his mouth shut.

  “This is the first time since I started working regularly that I’ve taken more than a couple of days off.”

  “You should have done it more often,” Max said. “That’s one good thing about working for Rockfort. We can arrange for time off.”

  “A good policy,” she said as she forked up some of the eggs.

  “We liked arranging the agency the way we wanted it.”

  “It’s just the three of you?” Olivia asked.

  “For now. But we may take on some more partners.”

  He took a bite. “These are good. What did you do to them?”

  “I just put in a little deli ham and green pepper, plus some seasonings.”

  After he’d chewed and swallowed, he said, “And your boss is mad about your bailing out.”

  “My agent.”

  “You probably pay his bills.”

  “Yes, but he was a major part of my success. He saw that I had raw talent, and he showed me how to capitalize on it. He got me the right haircut and took me to a studio that taught me makeup techniques. He showed me how to walk and how to present myself in the best way. He even coached me in fending off the inevitable pushy men—but in a nice way. In case they were important.”

  Max snorted.

  “I was grateful for all the coaching—and for the steady stream of work. Now I’m thinking that he could have let me work at a little slower pace. Of course, there was always the thought in the back of my mind that a model’s career is limited.”

  “By what?”

  “Her age, for one thing. There’s always someo
ne younger and fresher coming up.” She looked like she wanted to say more but had perhaps thought better of it.

  He found he was hungry and finished the meal. She had taken less but she also cleaned her plate. When they were done, he cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher while she washed the skillet in the sink.

  “I want to go out and look at the barbed-wire trap,” he said. “And see if I can find anything else.” He waited for a moment. “Do you mind coming with me?”

  “No. I want to see.” She gave him a quick look. “You have your gun?”

  “Yeah. I think that’s going to be standard operating procedure from now on.”

  “That’s why you wore your jacket?”

  “Yes.”

  They exited the house, and he locked the door behind him before taking the route he’d followed the night before in the dark.

  They headed past the barn and into the woods, with Max in the lead and walking cautiously. Even during the day, it wasn’t that easy to see the barbed wire in the dim light under the trees. It made for a dangerous stroll around the property.

  Olivia winced when she saw it. “That could have done a lot more damage.”

  Nodding in silent acknowledgment, he walked closer. He had assumed the guy who’d strung the wire had gotten away clean, but as he approached the trap, he saw a small piece of dark-colored cloth caught in one of the barbs.

  “Well, well.” He picked up a stick from the ground and tried to lift the fabric away, but it stuck to the barb. It was good quality fabric, not unlike the shirt he’d been wearing the night before, only darker.

  Olivia came closer.

  “It looks like a man’s dress shirt. I mean, someone who could have come straight here from the meeting,” she said.

  He made a sound of agreement. “Or it could be a woman, dressed in a man’s shirt. Do you remember what everyone was wearing?”

  She gave him a quick look. “Women’s clothing is my job. I remember the women’s outfits. None of the men were dressed in anything memorable. I’m sorry.”

  “As it turns out, I took pictures.”

  “How?”

  “With that pen I was using to take some notes during the strategy session.”

  “Clever.”

  “I wanted a record of the people there. I wasn’t really interested in the clothing.”

  Now he took a plastic bag and some thin rubber gloves out of his pocket and carefully untangled the fabric from the barbed wire. The material was stiff in one place, and when he held it up to the light, he thought he saw blood.

  “I think the bastard cut himself when he was getting the hell out of my way.”

  She stared at the cloth. “If he cut himself, can you get his DNA from that?”

  Chapter 11

  Olivia watched Max consider the question. “The short answer is yes. But there are a lot of factors in play. I’m not officially in law enforcement, which makes a difference in how the analysis would have to be handled. A police department’s not going to work with me. Of course there are civilian labs, like the National Forensic Support Lab, but they’re expensive, and it might take weeks to get the results. And once we knew the individual, we’d still have to look for a match in the state or the FBI database. With Maryland, we’d only get people in the state system.”

  She cleared her throat. “Don’t you have a friend in the police department that you could ask?”

  “That’s a possibility. Maybe better than looking for someone with a nasty scratch on his arm.”

  “Not very scientific.”

  “It would be a clue.”

  She followed him out of the woods and into the house, where he pulled out his cell phone and made a call—to his partners, she presumed, because he reported the barbed wire and the piece of shirt fabric.

  “We might as well go ahead with an analysis,” he said, then listened for a few moments.

  “Yeah, it may not pan out, but I’d like to at least see what we’ve got. I’ll mail it off as soon as I can.”

  When he hung up, she gave him a questioning look. “I thought you said we might as well not bother.”

  “We might get lucky. And maybe with those photos I took.”

  He went to his computer and opened a file. She sat down next to him as he brought up one of the pictures he’d taken with his pen the night before. It showed Tommy Larson sitting across the table from Max. He was wearing a yellow polo shirt, nothing like the scrap of fabric Max had found on the barbed wire.

  They went on to the next picture, which was of Tommy and his date. Even though Tommy’s shirt didn’t match the fabric, he was looking at Max with an annoyed expression on his face. Pictures of Brian and Troy showed shirts that were nothing like the fabric, but they revealed similar expressions.

  She dragged in a little breath.

  “What?”

  “They don’t like you.”

  “They could be remembering me as the school bad boy.”

  Olivia put her hand on his arm. “You weren’t as bad as they thought.”

  “Why not?”

  “You came to my rescue at the pizza parlor. And if you did that, you probably did other stuff that damaged your bad-boy reputation.”

  He snorted. “You mean like walking old ladies across the street?”

  “Did you?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Pressing him, she asked, “That night, would you have done it for anyone, or was it me specifically?”

  He made a low sound. “What’s the better answer?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Is it better for me to have wanted to help you specifically—or any girl?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I don’t know the answer.”

  “You don’t remember what you were thinking that evening?” she probed.

  “It was a long time ago.”

  She was pretty sure he did remember but that he didn’t want to share the memory with her, because he was deliberately backing away from an opportunity to get closer to her.

  He clicked to the next picture, and she took the opportunity to lean closer to him, as she looked at the group shot of several people at the food table. No one was wearing the shirt in question.

  Finally they’d gone through all the pictures and found nothing useful—besides the negative attitude toward Max. Not from everyone but from a lot of the men.

  She put her hand on his arm. “I’m sorry.”

  “About what?”

  “I was too wound up with myself, and I wasn’t seeing all the stuff you had to deal with while we were there.”

  He shrugged. “Part of the job. A private detective gets that a lot. Too bad it doesn’t give a clue to the killer.”

  She wanted to tell him that she wished she’d been more of a partner at the meeting. But it seemed that he wanted to stay on task. “So either it wasn’t one of those guys, or he changed his shirt.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have a padded envelope and a mailing label I can use to send the sucker?”

  “It wasn’t something my dad would have needed.”

  He clicked away from the pictures and found the address of the lab he’d used on previous occasions. Then he filled out an online form to accompany the sample and printed it using the portable printer he’d brought to the farmhouse.

  Their next stop was the closest mailbox store, in one of the new shopping centers Olivia had seen when they were driving home the night before. The detour took an hour, and it was close to noon when they drove back to the farm next door.

  “We’re going to have to use the engaged couple story with the Yeagers,” Max reminded her.

  She winced, thinking that she might as well take out an ad in the Howard County Times announcing her status.

  Max caught her reaction. “Sorry. When this is all over, you can send out announcements setting the record straight.”

  “How will that make you feel?” she suddenly asked.

 
He hesitated. “Like I completed my assignment.”

  “You mean because you caught the killer?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You won’t care that everyone will know you weren’t really engaged to the hot model?” she probed.

  “Oh well.”

  And how would she really feel about it? She’d hired him to do a job, but she was thinking it was more than that to him now. And to her. Was that what she wanted—something romantic with Max Lyon? It hadn’t started off as part of her plans. Now it was hard to avoid considering it. Still, she switched her thoughts away from herself and Max as they got out of the car.

  Bill Yeager’s wife opened the kitchen door when they knocked. She was a woman in her late forties or early fifties with a weather-roughened face. She’d changed since Olivia saw her last: She wasn’t as thin as she had been, and her hair was now a salt-and-pepper mix. Olivia felt a twinge of sadness for the woman, who apparently led a hard life, not unlike her own mother’s.

  Mrs. Yeager was obviously concerned that the owner of the farmland her husband rented had dropped by. “Ms. Olivia, what can I do for you? Is anything wrong?”

  “We just need to ask your husband a few questions about any…unauthorized visits to the farm.”

  “He don’t do that.”

  Realizing her answer had done nothing to set the woman at ease, Olivia hurried to explain. “What I meant was, if someone he doesn’t know has come by.”

  “Oh, well, he’s out in the south field inspecting the corn.”

  “Yes. It’s good we’ve had rain,” Olivia, a farmer’s daughter, said. “We’ll drive over there.”

  As they returned to the car, Max commented, “She seemed nervous.”

  Olivia laughed. “I guess it’s from years of dealing with my father. Maybe she expects the same from me.”

  “Was he hard on them?”

  “Not exactly. But he stuck to the letter of their agreement. Like when there was a bad year and half the crops dried up, the Yeagers still had to pay as much as if they’d done well.”

  He turned his gaze toward her. “You don’t do the same thing?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t need the money, and I know the Yeagers do,” Olivia said. “Plus, I feel like they’re doing me a favor, helping me keep the land.”