No Harm (The Kate Teague Mysteries Book 1)

by Wendy Hornsby

  “See the fire?” she asked. “It’s breaking over the ridge near where the cemetery must be.”

  “Cemetery’s a good firebreak,” Dolph said. “Fire’ll never get down this far.”

  “Maybe,” she said doubtfully. “Just the same, I’ll go ask the gardener to put some hoses out by the bluff.”

  “And while you’re up there, get out of those black clothes. You’ve done your duty.”

  “You’re not telling me what to do, are you?”

  She could hear him still chuckling as she climbed the hot stairs.

  Back in the house, Kate retreated into the small powder room off the foyer and took off her jacket. She turned on the cold water, letting it run over her bare arms as she looked at her face in the mirror. The hot, dry wind had taken its toll, emphasizing the fine lines around her pale gray eyes, messing her hair to expose the perversely stiff strands of silver that grew in a clump from the crown of her head and stood in stark contrast to the black. Usually, she paid no attention to these small symbols of aging, but today they were niggling reminders that time was running out, both for Kate and the children she hoped to have. With her damp fingers she combed her hair to hide the thin thatch of gray. The water glistened darkly on her hair, like the dried blood caked on Mother’s scalp. She swallowed back the bile in her throat.

  “Kate?” Carl called from deep inside the house. “Is that you?”

  “Coming,” she said. Moving quickly, feeling the bogey behind her, Kate turned out the bathroom light and followed the sound of Carl’s voice. She found him in her grandfather’s study, stretched out on a well-worn leather sofa, a glass of straw-colored wine in his hand. Light from a beveled glass window cast a rainbow across his handsome, smooth face.

  He sat up to pour her some wine from the half-empty bottle. “Where you been?”

  “Walking.” Kate stood in the middle of the room, a little nervous to be alone with him.

  “Sit down, Kate. Relax. We have few minutes before we have to get Mom at the airport.”

  “I forgot,” she said, sinking into a deep burgundy velvet chair. She wondered how he’d managed to slip in this visit from his mother, since Helga had never come to see them while they were married. The prospect of entertaining her ex-mother-in-law was grim. “How long is Helga staying?”

  “Don’t know. I was so shocked she said she was coming I forgot to ask.” He looked up at her. “Now ask the next question.”

  “Which is?”

  “How long am I staying?”

  “Okay. How long?”

  “Till you tell me to go. Forever, I hope.”

  She felt that knotting inside again. “Carl, I…”

  “I know, I know. I won’t say anything about it again. Just so you know where I stand. We’ll talk about something else.” He sipped his drink.

  In the uncomfortable silence, she drank some of the dry wine and surveyed the room, all leather and mahogany, and thought about changes she would make to brighten it, make it her own. It would be fun, but a lot of work. “This is a big place,” she said.

  “For one person, it is.” When she started to protest he made a time-out sign with his hands. “Don’t get your back up. Point of information only. Just explain something to me. When your grandfather built houses for Dolph and Miles on either side here, why didn’t he build one for your father, too?”

  “For his baby, Cornell?” Kate shrugged. “I suppose he just assumed Daddy would never leave home. Grandpa never could separate himself from Daddy, or the mischief he got into.”

  “Vicarious thrills,” Carl mused.

  “Probably.” Kate agreed. “I wish I remembered him better. He seemed to spend most of his time on his sailboat, tacking through the inner harbor, drinking himself into a stupor. Probably couldn’t have managed a place of his own. Or didn’t want to be bothered.”

  “Your mother could have managed. Your grandfather could have made her a sort of guardian. In loco parentis.”

  “He didn’t trust her.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because of her birth defect.”

  Carl perked up. “I was never aware of any birth defect.”

  “She was born female.”

  “Oh. That defect.”

  “After Daddy died, Grandpa was always afraid some man would take advantage of her, gain control of his estate. So he only gave her use of this place during her lifetime. I was the owner of record.”

  “Wasn’t he afraid you’d be taken advantage of?”

  “What choice did he have? I’m the last of the line. And besides, he never met you.”

  “Shrewd old bastard.”

  “De mortuis,” Kate said, pulling herself out of her chair. “Look. You wouldn’t mind, really, if I don’t go to the airport with you?”

  “Not if you don’t want to go.” Carl sounded stiff.

  “I have some things to do around here. School starts next week and everything is in such a mess. All my books are just where the movers dumped them when I moved in here with Mother last June. I’m going upstairs to see if I can get myself organized. You relax,” she passed a cool hand over his forehead.

  Carl caught her hand and brought her down beside him. “I can’t believe you’re going back to work, after everything you’ve been through. Call the department chairman and have him find a replacement. Take a trip. Get away for a while.”

  It was an old argument, one she thought the divorce had settled forever. “I’ll think about it.”

  “No you won’t.” Carl sighed with deep frustration. He ran his hand through his sun-lightened hair. Kate noticed with annoyance how perfectly the hair fell back into place.

  A stiff ocean breeze began to soften the searing heat of the day. Kate went up to the small room that had once been her nursery. Originally her grandmother’s sewing room, it was like a small-faceted jewel set in the ocean side of the house. Three tall mullioned windows angled in an oriel filtered soft southern light into the room. Ancient cypress trees on the bluff below reached up past the oriel sills, making the room seem like a treehouse suspended on a branch over the ocean.

  Kate pulled her desk into the oriel, turning it so her back would be to the light when she worked. She leaned against the desk, and, with her finger, she traced the words “safe harbor” that were wrought into the middle window.

  Sometimes, as a child, the oriel had been her ship, carrying her out through the breakwater to the open sea toward sailors’ heaven. Miles always told her, “If there’s a heaven for sailors, your father’s there.” She wanted to be there with him, away from the strictures of her grandfather’s house and his arguments with Mother.

  Kate opened the long middle drawer of her desk and very carefully removed a small framed sampler. The sampler was her only memento from the grandmother she had never known. Embroidered on linen in intricate stitches with silk thread so faded by time that its original color was lost, was a brief Whittier poem. It had been a talisman to her as a child, protecting her from the angers of her grandfather. She tapped a small nail into the window frame and hung the sampler on it. It seemed to belong in “safe harbor”:

  And so beside the silent sea,

  I wait with muffled oar;

  No harm from Him can come to me

  On ocean or on shore

  Kate looked out to the narrow spine of wooden steps leading down to the beach. Halfway down was the small landing where her grandmother’s body had been found so many years ago. A suicide; no one ever mentioned her. Now only two of her grandmother’s three children were left to remember her life and grieve her passing. Grief for her mother’s death washed over Kate, carrying with it sadness for her own daughter who would never be born to remember.

  THREE

  “SO, KATE.” Reece put his skinny rump down beside her on Mina’s velvet settee, forcing Kate to juggle her after-dinner coffee. “How’s our little heiress?”

  “All right, I guess.” Kate moved over to make more room for her cousin-by-marriage, Min
a’s nephew. His freckled face shone from too much sun, too much scotch. “You still working on War and Peace?”

  “No.”

  “Heavy going, huh?”

  “Right. Fall asleep holding that sucker, it could kill you. I’ll stick with Architectural Review.” Reece gave the others in the room a quick glance, as if to make sure they weren’t listening. “I want to ask you something.”

  “You’ve lost your new job and you want to borrow my checkbook until something turns up?”

  “Be serious. Listen, Sy Ratcher said something at the funeral that really bothers me. Did he talk to you?”

  “No. About what?”

  “A deal he was working with your mother. He seemed awfully nervous, wondered if you would honor her agreements, mentioned the ‘old family ties.’”

  “My mother and Sy Ratcher? That’s a laugh. He’s a real estate developer. What would he want with Mother? She didn’t have anything to develop.”

  “But she had influence to peddle.”

  “True. She had.” It was the use of the past tense that jarred her, made her aware of the emptiness in the air around her, the space usually filled with her mother’s low voice, perfect-pitch laughter. Kate turned her head, half-expecting Mother to come in from the next room and fill the space, just as she always had, holding someone with power to be brokered close by her side. But Mother wasn’t there. Kate felt let down, then a little foolish that, even for an instant, she had expected Mother would ever again come through the door.

  “You’re the architect,” she said to Reece. “You work with characters like Sy Ratcher all the time. What do you think he’s up to?”

  “No good.” Reece sipped his drink, surveying Dolph and Mina’s richly appointed drawing room over the rim of his glass. “I love this place. I love all three of them. They’re just about the only beachfront property left in Santa Angelica that hasn’t been ruined by developers. It occurred to me this afternoon that pretty soon they’ll all be yours. What are you going to do with them?

  “Tear them down and build condos.”

  Reece blanched. “You wouldn’t really?”

  “Relax,” she patted his shoulder. “I’m not going to do anything for a long, long time. The property can’t be sold or changed unless Dolph, Miles, and I all agree. And none of us would ever sell to a character like Sy Ratcher.”

  Reece caressed the placket of his green silk shirt. “Everyone has a price.”

  “Not Mina. You couldn’t get her out of here if you set a bomb off under her.”

  “She doesn’t have a vote, remember? Wrong side of the family.”

  “Just the same,” Kate said.

  “They came close once, trying to raise money to keep her old man out of the clink.”

  “What happened?”

  “The old boy died.” He raised his glass to his aunt’s back in a silent toast. “Gone to embezzler’s heaven. Then there was the claim against the estate in behalf of your father’s bastard.”

  “My father’s what?” Kate bolted to her feet, knocking Reece’s glass on her way up.

  “Hey, watch it! This shirt has to be dry cleaned.” He tried to sponge himself with a minuscule linen napkin. “We don’t all have your money.”

  “You’re so full of it.”

  “Shut up.” He patted the seat beside him. “Sit down. Behave yourself. Your mother-in-law is eyeing us. Do you want Helga to think we’re a bunch of heathens?”

  “Maybe we are a bunch of heathens. It wasn’t Daddy’s bastard, anyway. It was Miles’s.”

  “That’s not what Mina says.”

  Kate watched him carefully, looking for the curl at the corner of his mouth that always gave him away. “You’re making it up, aren’t you? You’re pissed that Mina stuck you with handshaking duty at the cemetery today and you’re just getting some digs in.”

  “Mina’s the authority about the lurid past. Ask her.”

  “Why bother? Who needs a bastard when we have you?” She punched at his concave midsection. “Where’s Lydia? Someone needs to be here to keep an eye on you.”

  “You forget about the faculty meeting?”

  “Oh, yeah. Missing that is the one good thing that happened to me today.”

  There was a rustle and stir in the far corner of the room as Dolph and Carl mixed fresh drinks. Dolph came offering Kate a dry sherry in a tiny crystal glass. “Did you bring your picture?”

  “Just as you asked.” She took the fragment out of her pocket and traded it for the sherry. “Think you know who it is?”

  He shook his head. “Mina,” he called across the room, “would you take a look at this please?”

  “What is it?” Mina came closer, bringing Carl and Helga with her. She looked at the torn picture. “It’s feet, dear. Four of them.”

  “I can see that,” Dolph grumped, “but whose?”

  Carl bent over Dolph’s shoulder. “Not much to go by.”

  “The important thing,” Kate said, “is figuring out if this picture was in Mother’s handbag, if it was someone she knew. It might be just beach trash.”

  “Let me look again.” Mina tweezed the fragment between thumb and index finger and held it out to Helga. “Look at those dumpy shoes, Helga. Had to be during the war.”

  Helga narrowed her eyes. “Had to be after the war. We couldn’t get nice oxfords like those for children during the war. I used to stand in shoe lines for hours to get Carl the most wretched little shoes.”

  “Shoe rationing,” Mina groaned. “What a nightmare.”

  “Go ahead, Mom,” Carl encouraged. “What about the woman’s shoes?”

  “They’re nice quality. Suede. My guess is they’re postwar, too. But not much after. Look, Mina.” Helga outlined the ragged top edge of the picture. “You can see one of her legs almost to the knee, and there’s no skirt. If this was taken after forty-seven or forty-eight, you’d see some skirt.”

  Mina smiled up into the taller woman’s face. “You’re wonderfully observant, Helga.”

  “She is, isn’t she?” Carl hugged his beaming mother roughly. “She’d make a damned good detective.”

  “Not me,” Helga demurred.

  Kate noticed that Helga seemed to relax a little whenever Carl was beside her. How awkward it must be for her here, she thought, caught in a mass of shifting relationships and alliances; just as Carl was dissolving his relationship with Kate, he was forming a professional partnership with her Uncle Dolph. Kate didn’t really know Helga intimately enough to know how she felt about it all. Helga always seemed to enjoy Kate and Carl’s regular treks to northern California to see her, but she had never returned a visit, until now.

  Kate looked between them, searching for the family resemblence. There was a refinement in Carl’s features that set him apart from Helga. The high, thick cheekbones that gave her an almost horsey look were broadened and softened in him, the intelligent pale eyes set farther apart. Helga, in her simple, well-tailored dress, a coronet of silver-gray braids around her head, didn’t look out of place in the formal surroundings. But Carl, open-necked shirt tucked into chinos, belonged.

  Dolph had opened his wallet and was carefully sliding the bit of photograph into a plastic sleeve. “Miles always had a good eye for a pair of ankles. Maybe he’ll recognize these.”

  “Miles?” Helga said. “He’s the third brother? He’s been ill, hasn’t he?”

  “Ill? Yes.” Mina looked around the circle, helpless. “How do you say it nicely?”

  “Flipped is about as nice as you could get,” Reece said.

  “That’s cruel, Reece.” Dolph sounded offended.

  “I’m sorry,” Helga blushed. “I didn’t mean to be nosy.”

  “Forget it. It’s hardly a state secret.” Mina gave a wave of dismissal, the big stones on her fingers dancing sparks of light across the room. “The doctors call it ‘profound melancholia.’ Sounds very poetic, doesn’t it? What it means is he likes to be left alone. Miles has had about half-a-dozen ‘episod
es,’ as the doctors call them, when he just sort of caves in on himself. The first was during all the excitement when Kate and Carl were planning their wedding.”

  “Wait, now,” Dolph protested. “Don’t blame the kids for what happened.”

  “Well of course not.” Mina’s denial was theatrically anguished. “Kate and Carl were lovely about the whole thing and zipped down to the courthouse for a quiet ceremony. Miles was in an institution for about a year that time. Since then the stays have gotten shorter and shorter and the treatment rougher and rougher. The last time he was in he had so much shock treatment that Dolph says his brains are permanently fried.” She took a breath. “That’s not nice to say, but we’re all family here.”

  Kate cringed. Just like Mina, she thought, to find exactly the wrong thing to say. They weren’t all family anymore. As if sharing the thought, Helga moved away a step, to put her hand on Carl’s arm, defining where the family lines were drawn.

  Carl took the hand and kissed the palm. “Getting tired, Mom?”

  She nodded. “A little.”

  “I think that’s my cue.” Reece leaned heavily against Kate’s shoulder. “I’m all in, Aunt Mina. May I camp out here? Don’t think I could navigate home.”

  “Of course, darling.” Mina patted his cheek. “Your room here is always ready.”

  Carl reached for Kate. “It is late. Maybe we should all turn in.”

  She hesitated, wondering how much invitation was in the remark.

  Dolph was behind her, hand on her elbow, drawing her away from the group. “You folks go on ahead. If she’s up to it, I’d like to talk to Kate about a thing or two.”

  Kate had the feeling Dolph was responding to Carl’s suggestion that it was bedtime, giving her a graceful way out, if she wanted it. Staying behind did make things easier for her. Not sleeping with Carl, especially while they were in the same house, had been awkward, unnatural. But sex had such power. She knew that it could never be a casual thing between them again, not after all the years and beddings they’d shared. Just thinking about it, she felt the familiar stirrings that at that moment seemed a threat to all the independence she had gained since she filed for divorce. Kate glanced up at Carl, caught him watching her.