by Nora Roberts
“Working, brooding, feeling sorry for myself, and decided the only thing in that mix that makes me feel like me is working. So I’m going to try to do something to eliminate the need for brooding and self-pity.”
Hester gave him a satisfied smile. “There now. That’s my grandson.”
“Where’s your walker?”
Her face reset into haughty lines. “I retired it. The doctors put enough hardware in me to hold a battleship together. The physical therapist works me like a drill sergeant. If I can tolerate that, I can damn well get around without an old-lady walker.”
“Are you still hurting?”
“Here and there, from time to time, and less than I was. I’d say, about the same as you. They won’t beat us, Eli.”
She, too, had lost weight, and the accident as well as the difficult recovery had dug more lines into her face. But her eyes were as fierce as ever, and he took comfort in that.
“I’m starting to believe that.”
While Eli talked with his grandmother, Duncan pulled his car to the curb, studied the house through the long lens of his camera. Then, lowering it, he took out his recorder to add to his notes for the day.
He settled in to wait.
Seven
PART OF THE JOB WAS BOREDOM. KIRBY DUNCAN SLOUCHED in his nondescript sedan, nibbling on carrot sticks. He had a new lady friend, and the potential for sex convinced him to drop ten pounds.
He’d managed two.
He’d moved the car once in the past two hours, and considered moving it again. Instinct told him Landon was probably settled in for a while—family dinner most likely as Duncan had snapped shots of the mother, the father and most recently the sister with husband and toddler in tow.
But his job was to sit on Landon, so sit he would.
He followed the job into Boston—an easy tail even with traffic—to the building that housed Landon’s lawyer. That had given him an opportunity to do a casual walk-around of Landon’s car. Nothing to see there.
Some ninety minutes later he’d followed Landon around the Commons, then tailed him to a high-priced salon, waiting while Landon got a trim. Not that Duncan saw much difference for the fifty-plus the snip cost.
But it took all kinds, Christ knew.
Landon made another stop at a florist, came out loaded.
Just a guy running a few errands in the city before he paid a visit to family. Ordinary crap.
In fact, as far as Duncan could see, all Landon did was ordinary crap, and not a hell of a lot of that. If the guy killed his wife and got away with it, Landon sure wasn’t out celebrating.
His report, to date, ran pretty thin. A few walks on the beach, the encounter with the sexy housekeeper and the woman who’d given Landon a solid squeeze—and turned out to be the married mother of three.
He figured there was some heat between Landon and the housekeeper, but he couldn’t connect them prior to Landon’s return to the house at the beach.
Still, his background check showed him Abra Walsh had a history of hooking up with violent types, which would make Landon the perfect match—if he bashed the wife’s head in, which Duncan had come to doubt. Maybe Landon was her current choice, he thought, but current was key as he couldn’t find one crumb to start a trail cozying the two of them up before the murder.
Even the thin report he had didn’t hold with the client’s insistence Landon was guilty, or with the certainty of Duncan’s old friend Wolfe, one of Boston’s finest, that Landon had snapped and bashed his cheating wife’s brains in.
The longer he watched, the less guilty the poor bastard looked.
To draw out information, he’d tried the direct approach, as with the sexy housekeeper, and the more circular style with the clerk at the B&B and a couple others. Just commenting on the big house on the bluff, asking, as any tourist might, about its history, its owners.
He’d gotten an earful there about a fortune built initially on booze, from pirate plunder to distilleries to running whiskey during the bad old days of Prohibition. Legends of stolen jewels hidden for generations, family scandals, the expected ghosts, heroes, villains right up to Eli Landon’s scandal.
His most entertaining source had been the pretty clerk in a gift shop who’d been happy to spend a half hour on a gloomy, preseason afternoon gossiping with a paying customer. Gossips often stood as a PI’s best friend, and Heather Lockaby had been plenty friendly.
She felt terrible for Eli, Duncan recalled. Deemed the dead wife a cold, unfriendly snob who couldn’t even take the time to pay visits to Eli’s elderly grandmother. She’d gone off track with Hester Landon’s fall, but he’d reeled her back easily enough.
According to the loose-tongued Heather, Landon hadn’t lacked for female companionship during his summers and breaks at Whiskey Beach, or during his teens and twenties in any case. He’d liked to party, to suck down beers at the local watering holes and ride around in his convertible.
Nobody, according to Heather, expected him to settle down and get married before he hit thirty. And there’d been plenty of speculation about that, which had died off when no baby came along.
It was obvious there was trouble in paradise when Eli stopped bringing her to Bluff House, then when he stopped coming. Nobody blinked an eye when word circulated about a divorce.
And she, personally, knew before it came out that the cold fish of a wife was having an affair. It just stood to reason. She didn’t blame Eli one bit for being upset and lighting into her. No, she didn’t. And if he killed her, and naturally she didn’t think that for a minute, she was sure it had been an accident.
He didn’t ask how smacking a woman on the back of the head with a poker a few times equaled accident, as he’d already dropped two hundred and fifty bucks on whatnots to keep her talking, and outside of the entertainment value, she’d given him nothing.
Still, he found it interesting that at least some of the locals suspected the favored son of murder. And suspicion opened doors. He’d be knocking on them in the days to come and earn his fee.
For now, he considered moving on, calling it a day. Or at least taking a quick bathroom break.
He shifted his numb ass side to side as his cell phone rang.
“Duncan.” He shifted again at his client’s voice. “As it happens I’m sitting outside his parents’ house on Beacon Hill. He drove into Boston this morning. I’ll have a report for you by—”
He shifted butt cheeks again as the client interrupted with a spate of questions.
“Yeah, that’s right. He’s been in Boston all day, met with his lawyer, got a haircut, bought some flowers.”
The client paid the bills, he reminded himself as he logged the call in his book. “His sister and her family went in about a half hour ago. Looks like full family visit. Given the timing, I’d say he’s here for dinner at least. I don’t think there’s going to be any more activity here so . . . If that’s what you want. I can do that.”
It’s your money, Duncan thought, and resigned himself to a long evening. “I’ll contact you when he comes out.”
When the phone clicked in his ear, Duncan shook his head. Clients paid the bills, he thought again, and ate another carrot stick.
Maybe he’d been gone only a few weeks, but it felt like a homecoming. Logs snapped and flamed in the big stone fireplace, the old dog Sadie curled in front of it. Everyone sat around what they called the family parlor, with its familiar mix of antiques and family photos, red lilies in a slim vase on the piano, as they might have sat, talked, sipped wine on any evening before the world collapsed.
Even his grandmother, who rather than object had enjoyed having him carry her down the steps and depositing her in her favored wingback chair, chatted away as if nothing had changed.
The baby helped, he supposed. Pretty as a gumdrop, fast as lightning, the not-quite-three-year-old Selina just filled the room with energy and fun.
She demanded he play, so Eli sat on the floor and helped build a castle out of blocks
for her princess doll.
A simple thing, an ordinary thing, and something that reminded him he’d once imagined having kids of his own.
He thought his parents looked less strained than they did when he left for Whiskey Beach a few weeks before. The ordeal they’d been through had deepened the creases in his father’s face, brought a near-translucent pallor to his mother’s.
But they’d never wavered, he thought.
“I’m going to feed this very busy girl.” Eli’s sister laid a hand over her husband’s for a squeeze as she rose. “Uncle Eli, why don’t you give me a hand getting her set up?”
“Ah . . . sure.”
Since Selina, her doll dangling from her fingers, lifted her arms, beamed that irresistible smile, he scooped her up to carry her into the kitchen.
The broad-shouldered Alice ruled over the expansive six-burner stove. “Hungry, is she?”
Selina immediately deserted Eli, stretching her arms out for the cook. “There’s my princess. I’ve got her,” she told Tricia, expertly securing Selina to the shelf of her hip. “She can eat and keep me company—and Carmel, too, once I tell her we’ve got our girl to ourselves. We’ll have dinner on the table for the rest of you commoners in about forty minutes.”
“Thanks. If she gives you any trouble—”
“Trouble?” Eyes popping comically wide, Alice spoke with exaggerated shock. “Look at that face.”
Laughing, Selina wrapped her arms around the cook’s neck and gave her version of a whisper. “I have cookies?”
“After your dinner,” Alice whispered back. “We’re fine.” She made a shooing gesture. “Go relax.”
“Be good,” Tricia warned her daughter, then took her brother’s hand. At nearly six feet, with a toughly toned body and a determined will, she easily pulled him out of the kitchen, then away from the parlor toward the library. “I want a minute with you.”
“I figured. I’m fine. Everything’s fine, so—”
“Just stop.”
Unlike their more soft-spoken, diplomatic mother, Tricia took her personality clues from her straight-ahead, flinty and opinionated paternal grandfather.
Which could be why she now served as COO of Landon Whiskey.
“We’re all being very careful to talk about anything but what happened, what’s happening and how you’re dealing with it. And that’s fine, but now it’s you and me. Face-to-face, no e-mail, which you can carefully compose and edit. What’s going on with you, Eli?”
“I’m writing pretty steadily. I’m taking walks on the beach. I’m eating regular meals because Gran’s housekeeper keeps making them.”
“Abra? She’s gorgeous, isn’t she?”
“No. She’s interesting.”
Amused, Tricia sat on the arm of a wide leather chair. “Among other things. I’m glad to hear all that, Eli, because it sounds like just what you should be doing right now. But if it’s all going so well, why are you back in Boston?”
“I can’t come in, see my family? What am I, banished?”
And even then the way her finger shot up, pointed, reminded him of their grandfather.
“Don’t evade. You didn’t have any plans to come back until Easter, but here you are. Spill it.”
“It’s no big deal. I wanted to talk, face-to-face, with Neal.” He glanced toward the doorway. “Look, I don’t want to upset Mom and Dad, there’s no point. And I can see they look less stressed. The Piedmonts are making noises about a wrongful-death suit.”
“That’s bullshit, just bullshit. It’s straight-out harassment at this point, Eli. You should . . . talk to Neal,” she ended, and blew out a breath. “As you did. What does he think?”
“He thinks it’s noise, at least for now. I told him to hire a new investigator, to find a woman this time.”
“You’re coming back,” Tricia stated, and her eyes filled.
“Don’t. Jesus, Tricia.”
“It’s not just that—you—or not altogether. It’s hormones. I’m pregnant. I cried this morning singing ‘Wheels on the Bus’ with Sellie.”
“Oh. Wow.” He felt a grin start up from his feet, straight up through his heart. “That’s good, right?”
“It’s great. Max and I are thrilled. We’re not telling anybody yet, though I think Mom suspects. I’m only about seven weeks. What the hell.” She sniffed back the tears. “I’ll clear it with Max. We’ll tell everybody at dinner. Why not make it a celebration?”
“And keep the topic off me.”
“Yes, don’t say I never did anything for you.” She rose, wrapped her arms around him. “I’ll shift everyone’s focus if you promise no more careful e-mails, not to me. You tell me when you’re having a bad day. And if you are, and you want company, I can work it so Sellie and I come up for a couple days. Max if he can manage it. You don’t have to be alone.”
She would, he thought. Tricia would shuffle, realign, reschedule—she was an expert at it—and she’d do it for him.
“I’m doing okay alone, no offense. I’m figuring things out I let go of for too long.”
“The offer stands. And we won’t wait for one if you’re still there this summer. We’ll just come. I’ll float like the whale I’ll be by then and let everybody wait on me.”
“Typical.”
“Say that when you haul around an extra twenty pounds and obsess about stretch marks. Go ahead back. I’m just going to peek in and make sure Selina hasn’t sweet-talked Alice into those pre-dinner cookies.”
At nine o’clock that evening, Abra finished her at-home yoga class, grabbed a bottle of water as her students rolled up mats.
“Sorry I was a little late,” Heather said—again. “Things just got away from me today.”
“It’s no problem.”
“I hate missing the warm-up breathing. It always helps me.” Heather let out a sigh, pushed air down with her hands and made Abra smile.
Nothing brought Heather down. She imagined the woman talked in her sleep, just as she did through a sixty-minute massage.
“I ran out of the house like a maniac,” Heather continued. “Oh, I did notice Eli’s car wasn’t at Bluff House. Don’t tell me he’s already gone back to Boston.”
“No.”
Unwilling to leave it at that, Heather zipped up her coat. “I just wondered. It’s such a big house. With Hester, well, she’s a fixture, if you know what I mean. But I imagine, especially with everything he must have on his mind, Eli just rattles around in that place.”
“Not that I’ve noticed.”
“I know you see him when you go over to take care of the house, so that’s some company. But I’d just think, with all that time on his hands, well, he wouldn’t know what to do with himself. That can’t be healthy.”
“He’s writing a novel, Heather.”
“Well, I know that’s what he says. Or that’s what people say he says, but he was a lawyer. What does a lawyer know about writing novels?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Ask John Grisham.”
Heather opened her mouth, closed it again. “Oh, I guess that’s true. But still—”
“Heather, I think it’s starting to rain.” Greta Parrish stepped up. “Would you mind giving me a ride home? I think I may have a little cold coming on.”
“Oh, well, sure I will. Just let me grab my mat.”
“You owe me,” Greta murmured as Heather dashed off.
“Big time.” She gave the older woman a grateful squeeze of the hand, then hurried off to look busy stacking mats.
The minute her house was empty, she let out a sigh.
She loved her at-home classes, the intimacy, the casual conversations before and after. But there were times . . .
After she’d straightened the sunroom, she went upstairs, put on her favorite pajamas—fluffy white sheep frolicking over a pink background—then walked back down.
