by Anne Stuart
She never considered how odd that was. In Pompasse’s home she was so protected that she was practically smothered. He allowed no one to talk to her, he wanted to know where she was and what she’d been doing, what she was reading, what she was buying, what she was dreaming and what she was thinking. And she’d told him.
Some of it.
The rest she kept for the empty church with the shattered windows letting in the clear Tuscan light.
The early-morning air was cool and damp, and she took Maguire the steep way, hoping his affection for cigarettes would have him wheezing before they were halfway there. He was disgustingly fit, and if she hadn’t been so set on ignoring him he would have probably kept up a running conversation.
She hated having to bring him up here. Hated to spoil the ruined sanctity of the place with his annoying presence. But it was a small price to pay to get rid of him. Once they found the journals and the missing paintings, and once he left, then she could reclaim it. At least for the short time she was here.
“What’s that over there?” he demanded. He wasn’t even panting—he must be in better shape than she’d realized. And then she remembered what he looked like in a towel, and she realized he was in very good shape indeed. And she didn’t want to be thinking about that.
Charlie took a surreptitious gulp of air. She’d forgotten how steep it was on this rocky path. She really should have taken him the longer way, but that would have meant more time in his company, and she wanted to avoid that.
She glanced toward the little cottage. “That’s where Madame Antonella lives.”
“The old bat? How long’s she been there?”
“Since Pompasse bought the place. She was his first model, and she never left his side.”
“Not many women did,” he said. “He must have been quite the stud. Ruined you for other men, did he?”
She turned. The path fell away beneath him, and she could look out over the rich valley. “One push, Maguire, and with luck you’d break your neck.”
“Is that how Pompasse was murdered?”
It was like a slap in the face. “He wasn’t murdered, Maguire. He fell. Madame Antonella is senile—she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”
“She may be senile but she makes sense. Admit it, Charlie. There are too many people who wanted Pompasse dead. Including you.”
“I didn’t want him dead. I didn’t care. I’d left him. Divorced him, or so I thought.” The moment the words were out of her mouth she could have bitten her tongue, and of course he was on them immediately.
“So you thought?” he echoed. “He never signed the papers? Sounds like the Pompasse we all know and love. So he kept you on a string, after all, just like all the others. Now, why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“Leave it, Maguire,” she said wearily. “All that matters is that I thought I was divorced. I hadn’t seen him in five years—he was part of my past.”
“Not yet, he isn’t. Maybe when you bury his ashes in the vineyard he will be. Or maybe he’ll never let you go. You’ll be like Madame Antonella, crazy as a loon, wandering around mourning your lost Pompasse.”
“At least you won’t be around to witness it,” she said in her calm voice. “Do you want to keep baiting me or do you want to look for the goddamned paintings?”
He grinned, and she cursed herself for letting him see that he’d gotten to her. But the fact was, he had. Easily. He knew just what buttons to push to make her say and do things that she was usually too self-contained to do.
“We’ll look for the goddamned paintings,” he said.
The church hadn’t changed much in the last five years. The early-morning sun cast a warm, rosy glow over the pale stone, and it sat there in the tangled underbrush, a simple country chapel with no airs or graces. Farmers and peasants had worshiped there for centuries—the upper classes had driven down into Geppi to attend the huge cathedral. Whenever practicing Catholics had joined their transient household, they, too, would drive down to Geppi, and Lauretta, Tomaso and Madame Antonella never missed Sunday mass.
But this was a different kind of church. One that belonged to the earth, to nature, to the sky pouring in from the open roof, to the smell of leaves and dirt and the warmth of the sun. And Charlie always used to think that if God wanted to hang out anywhere, he’d be close to the earth in a place like this, rather than in the stultified, incense-laden air of Our Lady of Geppi Cathedral.
She paused in the entryway. The wooden doors were long gone, leaving the building open to the elements and whatever wild animals happened to wander by. Maguire was just behind her, not even short of breath, and she realized with a start that she’d never come here with anyone. She’d always been alone.
Just as she would have preferred to be alone now. The church was her secret, sacred spot—she didn’t want to be sharing it with the interloper. Particularly one as disturbing to her equilibrium as Maguire was.
Maguire, with his usual sensitivity, simply walked past her into the interior. “Where do you think he might have hidden them?”
She had no choice but to follow. “I didn’t say he’d hidden them. He must have had some reason for removing them from the farmhouse, and this is a logical place to have put them.”
“I wouldn’t think so. It’s damp and exposed up here. Not the best place to keep oil paintings. Wouldn’t he be more likely to have kept them in the apartment in Florence? Or rented some kind of storage facility?”
“But that would have required getting help, and no one in the household has any idea what happened to the paintings. According to Lauretta, they just seemed to vanish one by one. Pompasse had to carry them someplace, and this is about as far as he could have managed.”
“Maybe. Who says Pompasse did it?”
“Because he would have raised holy hell if anyone else had tampered with his precious paintings,” she said. “It’s only logical.”
“Good point. But then, life isn’t always logical.”
“Tell me about it,” she muttered.
The sun was streaming through the open roof, and dust motes danced on the beams of light. Maguire had moved on ahead, and she saw that the hole in the center of the floor had caved in, making passage impossible. Except for the board that someone had placed across it, and Maguire was already navigating it with careless speed. He stopped at the other end, looking at her quizzically. “Are you coming? There’s no other way around it.”
“What about the back entrance? There used to be a door….”
“I’ve already poked around here and there’s no other way. Just rubble. You’ve got a choice, lady. Either walk the plank or go back to the farmhouse.”
“Walk the plank,” she repeated. She looked across the great gaping hole at him. In the sunlight he looked very much like a pirate, with his unshaven face and shaggy hair, his piercing eyes and rumpled clothing. No peg leg or eye patch or parrot on his shoulder, though. Maybe being a pirate was a state of mind.
“Are you afraid of heights?” he taunted her when she still hesitated. “You were scrambling up the hillside like a mountain goat—I wouldn’t think a steep drop would make you nervous.”
She was tired of arguing with him. She started across the plank, too fast, and it wobbled beneath her. For a moment she froze, terrified, only to have Maguire step onto the end, grab her and haul her to the other side.
He didn’t let go of her, not for a moment, and she was still too shaken from the experience to notice that his hands were on her. Touching her. And then she did.
She jerked her face up to his, and then stepped away. He let her go, of course. But she could still feel his hands on her arms. She didn’t like to be touched. Not by men like him.
“I assume you’ve checked this level,” she said, refusing to show how shaken she was, “but we may as well go through the rooms again, just to be on the safe side.”
“Lead on,” he said amiably. “I just hope we don’t find anything.”
“I thought
we wanted to find the paintings? Otherwise why are we here?”
“I do. But not here. It’s cold and damp, and God knows what kind of damage they could have incurred. Pompasse’s estate is already looking shaky—if those paintings don’t show up then you’re going to have a rough time of it. They were some of his most valuable pieces.”
“Do you know which ones are missing?”
“As far as I can tell there are three famous ones that are unaccounted for. Charlie When She Left, Awakening and Amber Moon.”
“Those are all of me,” she said, uneasy.
“So they are. The question is, are any later ones missing, as well? Lauretta and Tomaso say no, just those three. I’m not convinced.”
“Why would my paintings be the ones that were taken?”
“I can think of a number of reasons. Maybe somebody doesn’t like you,” he suggested cheerfully. “Or maybe they’re worth more than the others. Money talks, you know.”
“I don’t like it,” she said.
“Neither do I. That’s a lot of money unaccounted for.”
“Sweet of you to worry. If the paintings are here they wouldn’t have been here long enough for them to be destroyed. I’ll worry about the estate—your job is simply to detail the assets. Isn’t it?” She kept thinking about that computer screen, with her name on it. Not the widow, not Madame Pompasse or Ms. Thomas. Charlie.
“Sure thing, love,” he said.
She turned. “You want to stop calling me that? Love, honey, sweetheart? It’s condescending and annoying. You know perfectly well I’m not your love or your sweetheart.”
“Maybe it’s wishful thinking.”
“Yeah, right,” she scoffed. “And don’t call me lady, either.”
“Ah, but there’s no doubt that’s exactly what you are. An overbred lady faced with a down-and-dirty bloke like me. It obviously drives your fastidious soul crazy.”
“I couldn’t care less about you!” she snapped.
“Glad to hear it, love.”
Charlie turned from him with a suppressed snarl, giving up.
She hadn’t really expected to find anything on the first floor—Maguire struck her as a thorough man, and he would have searched the place. Not that he couldn’t have missed something, given the rubble of stonework that cluttered the shattered ruins of the building. But he hadn’t found the stairs to the lower level, the old catacombs. It was blocked by fallen roof timbers, hidden in the shadows, and he hadn’t even realized there was a door there, one of the few still in existence in the old church.
Together they cleared the way, the dust rising around them. The door was stuck, but Maguire used brute force, yanking it open, and another shower of dust covered him. He looked less like a pirate and more like a ghost, and in other circumstances Charlie might have been amused. Not here, not now.
“Watch out for the rats,” she said as she started down the dark, winding stairway.
“Don’t you think we need an electric torch or something?” he asked, not moving. “It’s dark as pitch down there.”
“You want to go back and get one? I’m not afraid of the dark, but if you have problems…”
He started after her down the narrow stone stairs, and she let herself grin in the darkness, feeling childishly smug. In the end Maguire was simply a man—easy enough to bait when his pride was involved.
“Your eyes get used to it,” she said as she felt her way down the uneven stone stairs. In fact, it was darker than she remembered, and she kept thinking her foot was going to connect with something long and skinny and furry. She couldn’t imagine why rats would live in the old church—there was nothing to eat there, but she knew for a fact that they did.
By the time her foot reached the rough flooring of the bottom level her eyes had begun to adjust. Light filtered through the hole in the floor overhead; beams of light from the warm Tuscan sun that flowed through the nonexistent roof. Originally the area had been a large open space, but now it was filled with rocks and rubble.
“As I remember there are storage rooms all around the sides,” she said. “Why don’t you go that way and I’ll go this way?”
“Because it’s too bloody dark to see which way you’re pointing,” he said. “And I think we ought to stick together. There’s a lot of junk around here—you may need my help clearing the way.”
“I’m quite strong, Maguire.”
“Okay, let’s just say I don’t trust you. You could find the paintings, tell me there was nothing there, and then once I left you could sell them to private collectors without paying estate tax.”
“But then I couldn’t get rid of you as quickly. Trust me, Maguire, when you weigh the thought of millions of dollars against getting you out of my hair a couple of days early then it’s a small price to pay. Money’s overrated.”
“You know, I’m touched. I don’t know that anyone’s ever found me that annoying. I’m damned near priceless.”
“Damned near,” Charlie said agreeably. “There’s also the fact that I happen to be an honorable person.”
“Are you?” He sounded genuinely surprised by the notion.
She glanced back at him, but in the murky shadows she couldn’t see his expression. It didn’t matter. For some obscure reason he was going out of his way to annoy her. He’d say anything he could to get under her skin.
“You don’t like me very much, do you?” she said, not moving.
“What makes you say that?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe it’s your delightful manners,” she said. “Did I do something terrible to you in a former life? Do I remind you of your mother or ex-wife or something?”
“Honey, my mother is the last thing I think about when I look at you,” he drawled. “And why do you care what I think about you? Looking for my good opinion, are you?”
He was having a very negative effect on her equilibrium, she thought, trying to stifle the little surge of irritation. She worked hard at being calm, unruffled, and Maguire seemed adept at stripping away her hard-earned serenity.
“Not particularly,” she said, making an effort not to grit her teeth. “I just don’t like being baited and I wonder why you seem so determined to do it?”
“Partly it’s my charming nature,” he said genially. “And part of it is simply third-grade dynamics.”
“Third-grade dynamics?”
“Remember the little boy who sat behind you in third grade and dipped your pigtails in the ink?”
“I never had pigtails, children haven’t used ink in schools in ages, and for that matter I never went to school. I had private tutors. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Private tutors? La-di-da. You have led a charmed life, haven’t you?”
“Absolutely peachy,” she replied. “Are you going to explain yourself?”
“Nope.”
Maguire was wrong about one thing, she thought as she turned from him and picked her way over the rubble to the first storeroom. He’d said everyone who’d ever met Pompasse had reason to kill him. She’d never, in her life, felt even the slightest murderous impulse. Until she’d had to spend time with Connor Maguire.
Fortunately Maguire kept relatively quiet during the next hour, hauling stones and debris out of the way with deceptive ease, following behind her as she made her way systematically through the cells. At one point Pompasse had kept his wine here, but that chamber was equally empty, devoid of even a broken wine rack or an empty bottle. Whatever had been up here was long gone. Including the paintings.
“All right,” she said finally. “They’re not here. They probably never were.”
“What’s down that way?” Maguire demanded, gesturing toward a huge pile of wood and rubble.
“If anything’s behind there, no one’s seen it in years,” Charlie said. “It’s been that way for as long as I can remember. As a matter of fact, the whole area looks on the verge of collapse. There’s no way anyone would be able to get inside there. They must be somewhere e
lse.”
“So why did we just spend the last hour grubbing in the dirt looking for them?” Maguire grumbled.
“To be certain. Those are three good-size paintings. They couldn’t have just disappeared without anyone noticing. If a delivery truck had carted them away someone would have seen it. They had to have been moved one at a time, which means they couldn’t have gone far. This was a logical spot.”
“So where do we look next? I’m putting my money on Madame Antonella. She’s so dotty she wouldn’t even notice if someone stashed the paintings in her bedroom. Hell, she may have carted them off herself.”
“She’s an old woman, Maguire. In her seventies at least.”
“She looks like she’s as strong as an ox. Pompasse liked his models big and strapping, didn’t he?”
This time she didn’t rise to the bait. “Sometimes,” she said evenly. “I’m heading back. I was planning on stopping in to visit Madame Antonella, anyway. I’ll take a look around.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“I don’t think so. You look like you took a bath in flour. Madame Antonella has strict standards. She wouldn’t want a gentleman calling on her in your condition.”
“Hell, she should be lucky any man calls at all. And sweetie, I’m no gentleman. I thought you’d figured that much out.”
“I have,” she said dryly.
By the time they reached the main floor of the church the place was flooded with sunlight. Maguire looked ridiculous—dust everywhere, in his dark hair and his rough clothes. She glanced down at herself and realized she must look equally absurd.
Maguire had already crossed the makeshift bridge, and he turned back to look at her. “You coming?”
She took a deep breath, trying not to look down into the gaping hole beneath. “Give me a minute.”
“The longer you hesitate the worse it’s going to be,” he said, stepping back onto the plank and holding out his hand. “Just do it.”
She wasn’t sure which was more threatening—the hole beneath her or the strong hand reaching out for her. “There’s got to be another way out of here…” she began.