“I promise.” She opened the screen door and went into the house.
“Gram?” Ann said as she followed with Dante practically attached to her hip. “How can I possibly find out who killed his mother? Much less where her remains are.”
“I suggest you start by finding Addy’s journal. She was a much worse gossip than I am, and a whole lot meaner, to boot. If she knew, it’s in that journal.”
ANN CHECKED for Paul’s car before she went into his house, but it wasn’t in the parking area. He must still be at the airfield. For a moment she had the terrible thought that he might have flown away, never to return. Then she remembered he couldn’t, not in his own plane, at any rate. It was in pieces.
She wanted to finish this job. Buddy had given her a punch list. Now was as good a time as any to tackle a few of the final tasks.
She made her way through the garden to the summerhouse. Buddy said it would have to come down. They might save the summer kitchen where Paul’s studio had been, but this little pergola was infested with termites. Ann had drawn up a plan to rebuild it with new wood. Now she needed to save one of the Victorian sconces that held up the posts. If Paul wanted to duplicate them to use on his garage or another summerhouse, he’d have a model to copy.
The wooden seat that ran around all eight sides of the little building seemed solid enough when she tested it with her weight. She climbed onto it, took her cat’s paw and carefully pried loose the nails that held the sconce to the roof.
Every time she shifted her weight she heard an ominous creak from the wood beneath her feet. She worked quickly, removed the sconce and stepped down from the seat just as the wood gave way.
She caught herself before she fell, but managed to scrape her elbow. It hurt like the dickens, but didn’t bleed. She’d have to clean it up before it got infected.
Could Aunt Addy have left her journal somewhere outside the house? The seats in the pergola opened to provide space to store pillows and linen for picnics. She checked all the openings, but found nothing except a couple of tattered pillows that had not seen service for many years.
Ann only knew Aunt Addy as her piano teacher and had no idea where the old lady would have hidden a journal.
Still, she was certainly familiar with all the hiding spots Victorians built into their houses. They adored nooks and crannies. She’d come across several obvious places in the course of her restoration. That left the ones that were truly hidden. Great.
Aunt Addy had been small and thin. She wouldn’t have had the strength to saw pieces out of the floor or cut away part of a baseboard. From the garden, Ann looked up toward the big bay window behind which the piano was silhouetted.
Could there be a hiding place somewhere in the piano itself? It would have to be somewhere that wouldn’t interfere with the tone or action of the keys.
In the library Ann got down on the floor and began her search. She started with the piano legs and progressed methodically to the lid and finally to the back. She did the same thing with the padded piano bench. No sign that anything had ever been disturbed. She pulled at a couple of tacks on the seat of the bench, and succeeded only in breaking a fingernail and raising a cloud of dust.
Then she sat on the floor with Dante’s head in her lap and cursed.
This was the first time she’d allowed herself to think about this morning. She found she was shivering. Her teeth were chattering as though she was coming down with a chill.
Suddenly she wanted to see the photograph of Paul’s mother once more—the woman she’d become when the laughing girl in Uncle David’s sketches had been broken by sorrow.
She told Dante to stay and went upstairs, past a couple of painters who were finishing the front bedroom. There was no need to sneak around. She had a good excuse to go anywhere in this house she chose.
Where she chose to go was Paul’s bedroom.
Her heart lurched when she closed the door behind her. That dumb mattress! She ought to stick a knife into the thing. She brushed away angry tears and turned her head firmly away.
His suitcase was open on the floor in the corner. Despite his weeks of camping out, everything was in military order. She removed a dozen pairs of socks, picked up the framed picture of Michelle Bouvet with her young son, sat down on the mattress and stared at it.
The shot had been taken in front of some building that looked official. A library, maybe, or a bank.
She wore her hair in a severe style, pulled back in a bun, Ann guessed.
She had on short white gloves, which definitely dated the photo.
Her dress looked as though it had cost some money. It was a plain princess-cut coatdress with three-quarter-length sleeves. Something about the perfect fit, the drape of the cloth—some sort of cotton faille, Ann would guess—said that it had been created for her. French-women always dressed with such flair.
The fabric itself was a black-and-white geometric pattern that looked almost cubist. Her shoes had very high heels and very pointed toes, and appeared to be patent leather. The outfit contrasted sharply with the expression of the woman herself. Had she owned it when she’d known Uncle David?
Ann wondered if Michelle had sewn the dress herself. Surely she couldn’t afford a dress that looked like a designer creation. Having a baby had not thickened her waist or swollen her breasts much, either. As a matter of fact, she was almost painfully thin.
Ann looked down at her own full bosom. Clothes never did hang right on her, but this woman could have been a runway model.
She put the picture carefully back into Paul’s suitcase. He’d never know she’d looked at it. She slipped out of his room and back downstairs in time to encounter her father coming up.
“I got that sconce from the summerhouse,” she said.
“What’s with you? You been crying? Your nose is all red. What’d you do to your arm?”
“Just a scratch. I’ll clean it up when I get home.”
“Where’s Paul?”
“Still out at the airfield, I guess.”
Buddy looked at her curiously, but she slipped by him and ran out the front door with Dante close on her heels.
She let herself into her loft and laid the sconce carefully on one of her cabinets. Cleaning her scraped skin hurt, but she refused to cry about it or anything else. Crying was counterproductive. She would not speak to Paul until she could be certain she wouldn’t break down in front of him.
She checked her answering machine to find a dozen calls. She listened to the first few. All Paul, all apologizing, all wanting to make everything between them right.
“Nuts,” she said to the answering machine. Then she sat on her bed and let Dante crawl up beside her.
If she hadn’t played right into Paul’s hands, maybe she wouldn’t feel like such an idiot. “Just want to find out about the family who built my house,” he’d said. Right.
He’d had the perfect opportunity to tell her about his mother when they’d found the sketches. But he hadn’t trusted her. The Delaneys had always considered themselves a class above the Pulliams and the Jenkinses, but they were still family. Ann had betrayed them with every nugget of gossip out of her noisy little mouth.
But none of her information would do him a whipstitch of good. Uncle David hadn’t killed Paul’s mother. Maybe he had run away from her, but men ran away from women all the time, and from everything Ann had heard about him, Uncle David hadn’t been the staunchest vessel on the ocean.
Possibly nobody had killed his mother. Maybe she’d had a heart attack, been sent to a morgue somewhere and was buried as a Jane Doe. Or met a real badass on the road. Heck, maybe Ted Bundy killed her. She certainly fit his profile. Maybe she’d accepted a ride with some trucker who’d gotten too friendly and had lost his temper when she wouldn’t put out in return for the ride.
There was not one smidgen of evidence she had ever gotten closer to Rossiter than the bus station in Memphis.
Ann leaned back against the pillows and pulled her knees up
to her chest. If Michelle had made it to Rossiter, how had she traveled? She didn’t have a car, probably didn’t have a driver’s license and certainly didn’t have money to rent a car.
Ann called her grandmother. “Gram, can you get to Rossiter from Memphis by bus?”
“Not a city bus, but the local bus to Nashville goes right by on the highway. You can tell the driver you want to stop. There used to be a bus stop where you could wait to be picked up to go to Memphis, but I think they took it down long ago.”
“You have any idea what time of day it used to run?”
“Early morning and mid-afternoon, I think. But it’s been so long, child. I’m sure bus companies have records of their old runs. You could find out.”
“Thanks, Gram.”
So it was possible that Michelle could have caught a local bus and stopped at Rossiter.
Then it was possible she hadn’t arranged to meet Uncle David. Maybe she simply dropped in unexpectedly. Boy, would that be a kick in the teeth. Of course, even if she’d come to Rossiter on the bus, she’d still have needed a ride out to Uncle David’s house. Must have taken some nerve to walk up the front drive.
There was one obvious place Ann hadn’t looked for Aunt Addy’s journal. She found the button box and dumped its contents unceremoniously on her worktable in a jumble of yarn and buttons.
She caught the edge of the leather lining and pried it up. The glue was old, but it came up in one piece. Nothing. She did the same thing with the top. Again nothing.
She replaced the yarn and buttons neatly. Suddenly she stopped and her breath caught. This couldn’t be.
She had to see that photo of Michelle again. She grabbed the magnifying glass from her stripping kit and stuck it and the small envelope from the box into the pocket of her jeans. Then she and Dante raced back across the street.
Nobody was in the upstairs hall. Buddy had left for his shift with the Rossiter police. She could hear voices from the front bathroom, where the men were installing the new toilet and sink.
She slipped back into Paul’s room and picked up the photo of Michelle again. This time she used her magnifying glass.
She took out the small packet of buttons she’d picked up from the box. They were perhaps three-quarters of an inch across. Black enamel painted with delicate white patterns. Here was a bird, there a frog, a rose, a butterfly—there couldn’t possibly be two sets of buttons exactly like this in the entire world, and definitely not in Rossiter, Tennessee.
There was only one way they could have found their way into Aunt Addy’s button box. Somebody had cut them off Michelle’s dress and saved them.
Since Michelle had left her suitcase at the bus station, she wouldn’t have had another dress with her.
She wouldn’t have taken it off for anybody but Uncle David.
Unless she wasn’t the one who took it off. And unless she was past resisting when she was stripped.
Ann couldn’t move, couldn’t think.
She could not visualize tiny Aunt Addy killing anybody.
But there were two women in the Delaney family who were capable of murder. Karen Delaney Lowrance and Maribelle Norwood Delaney.
Maribelle was long dead. Karen, however, was very much alive.
The new phone lines had still not been installed in the house, and Ann didn’t carry a cell phone. She never remembered to charge it, so the battery was always flat.
She had to tell Paul.
She had to tell Buddy. It was time to bring the police in on this.
By now the men were finished for the day. The upstairs was silent when she left Paul’s room again. Downstairs in the kitchen she could hear a couple of men arguing about the new countertops. On impulse she opened the door to the dumbwaiter and yelled, “Hey, you guys down there. Anybody got a cell phone?”
“What the…Ann? Is that you up there?”
“Yeah, Cal, you have a cell phone?”
“Sure.”
“Stay where you are. I’m coming down to borrow it.”
Buddy was out on patrol. The station would give him her message and ask him to swing by the house.
Hack said Paul had left the airfield to get something in town. He’d be back shortly.
Ann didn’t know his cell number so she handed the phone back to Cal.
“You want us to stick around?”
“No, go on. I’ll wait for Buddy, then I’m out of here, too.”
They nodded and left.
She perched on top of the newly mounted slate countertop and worried the cuticle of her thumbnail.
That damn journal! It must have been thrown away. She’d looked every place she could think of.
Across the kitchen, the door to the dumbwaiter stood open. Half-a-dozen gallons of paint sat on the platform inside ready for the ride upstairs tomorrow morning.
“I’m crazy to think this is even possible,” she said. She removed the cans of paint and set them on the floor. Would Aunt Addy have gone to these lengths to conceal her journal? She was certainly small and limber enough.
Ann raised the platform so that she could check under it. Nothing.
She took a flashlight off the kitchen counter and shone it down the shaft. No motor. Strictly hand-operated. She shone the light up the shaft, but the light petered out before it reached the top.
Okay, nothing for it but to climb aboard and haul.
“Dante, go lie down and wait for me.”
The dog obediently padded off into the dining room and lay down.
She had a problem fitting herself into the dumbwaiter, but she managed it in the end. As she pulled, she checked for any signs of a niche in the walls. Nothing was immediately apparent.
Before she slid out into the second-floor hallway, she shone her light up. The shaft went all the way into the attic. She hadn’t seen another door up there.
She took a deep breath and began to pull. It wasn’t easy lifting her own weight, even with the counterweights that had been set up to make the platform run smoothly. As the light from the hall faded below her, she held the flashlight between her teeth and used both hands to haul herself up.
She’d almost reached the pulleys at the top of the shaft before she saw it. Someone—Aunt Addy—had fitted a bracket against the side of the shaft. The platform wouldn’t have been able to pass it, but then, the dumbwaiter was never used above the second floor. The pulleys cleared it easily.
Ann slipped the brake onto the dumbwaiter and twisted so that she could reach the package.
It came into her hand as though it had been waiting for her.
It was heavier and bulkier than she would have guessed, and the shape was much more irregular than a single book.
She lowered herself to the second-floor opening and worked herself out without dropping her parcel.
She didn’t want to get caught in Paul’s room again, but she was impatient to see what she’d found. She slipped into Paul’s bathroom, closed the shutters on the window, turned on the light and sat down on the closed toilet to investigate her prize.
She undid the twine with shaking fingers and began to unwrap the parcel. There was no journal inside, merely a sheaf of handwritten yellowing pages that bore the Delaney name and address across the top.
Another parcel had been wrapped separately, then included with this one and wrapped again. She put the pages on the sink and unwrapped the second one carefully.
When she saw what was inside, she nearly threw up.
“CALL FOR YOU in the office,” Hack told Paul. It was nearly dark. Both men were exhausted. Paul had worked like a demon all afternoon. He wanted the plane airworthy and he wanted it now.
“Can I call back?”
“Says it’s urgent.”
“Ann?” he asked, unable to hide the hope in his voice.
“A woman, but not Ann.”
“Oh, hell, all right.”
He picked up the telephone. He recognized Karen Lowrance’s upper-class drawl instantly.
“Mr
. Bouvet? Paul, I wonder if you’d do me a really big favor and drive by my house on your way home?”
Her house was in the opposite direction from his home and he told her so.
“It’s truly important, Mr. Bouvet.”
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
“Marshall, my husband, is here.” She gave a husky laugh. “In case you don’t want to be alone with me.”
He’d rather be alone with Jack the Ripper, but he didn’t say that. He tried several more times to get out of seeing her, but she was so persistent that he finally agreed. After he hung up, he turned to Hank.
“I brought some clean clothes. Can I shower in your trailer?”
“Sure. Clean towels on the right as you enter.”
When Paul left ten minutes later he looked presentable.
At the Lowrance house the front door was opened by a tubby man with gray hair, bright blue eyes and a puzzled expression. “Mr. Bouvet?” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Marshall Lowrance. I don’t believe we’ve met, sir.”
Paul completed the formalities.
“Karen’s waiting for you in the library.” He led Paul toward the room he’d been in before. As he held the door for Paul, he called out, “Honey, I’ll just be across the hall if you need me.”
Or if I do, Paul thought.
Karen had on black slacks and a black sweater. “Do sit down. Thank you so much for coming like this. May I get you something to drink?”
He shook his head and took the wing chair across from her. The Manhattan glass on the side table contained only melting ice cubes. He hoped that meant Karen was relatively sober.
She took a deep breath and said in the same easy way, “I know who you are.” Her red-tipped fingers gripped the leather armrest hard enough to make dents. Her voice, however, remained calm.
He was not surprised. Nothing about this family surprised him anymore. He’d felt the tightening of her fingers, seen her startled expression the first time she’d shaken his hand. He’d wondered at the time whether she’d seen a resemblance between him and his father.
She’d been so charming afterward, however, that he’d dismissed the idea.
House of Strangers (Harlequin Super Romance) Page 21
