He whirled her around and faced, not Eden Walker Steadman, but—well, not Eden Walker Steadman.
The woman was around Eden's age, but her eyes were wide with apprehension as she looked, not at Sam, but desperately around her. Presumably for a cop.
"Oh, geez, I am so sorry" Sam said, aghast. "I, ah ... whoa. Really. I'm sorry. You look just like someone else."
"No, I don't," she said with brisk hostility. "Please let go of me. Do I look like a blonde to you?"
"Uh, no. Brunette, washed in shades of auburn. Definitely not a blonde. Sorry. Here. Um ..." He let her go, then patted smooth the sleeve of her pale blue sundress. He was behaving, of course, like an idiot, but he didn't know how to assuage this innocent victim whose face bore absolutely no resemblance to Eden's.
Her eyes were green, very green, for one thing, whereas Eden's were a startling blue. "I was told that I might find Eden, uh, Walker here, at the gallery," he said, winging it.
"You might have. Once."
Yes!
And her nose had a bridge to it. An interesting nose, a Debra Winger nose, but nothing like Eden's, which was straight and aristocratic. "I don't know what this Eden looks like," he went on, "so naturally I thought—"
"You just said that I looked like her," the woman pointed out.
Not at all. Eden had high, hollow cheekbones; this woman had more rounded ones. "And so you do. Look like her, I mean. From the description of her that I got, I mean."
"I'm a brunette."
"Yes. You are."
"Eden's a blonde!"
"No, she's not."
"How do you know?"
Shit. Caught. He wriggled free and made a dash for the end zone. "What did you mean, I might once have found her here? She isn't here anymore?"
"Who are you?"
Leery of what stories Eden might have made up about him, Sam lied and said, "Percy. Percy Billings." God, a Percy, yet. He couldn't have named himself Stone or Cliff or something.
"Look, Mr. Billings—"
"Call me Percy." Hey, what the hell.
"Look... Percy..." She cocked her head sideways at him. "Percy? Honestly? You don't look like a Percy."
Thank God for that. "Be that as it may..." he said with a smile. "I'm an attorney. A probate attorney named Percy Billings."
Up came her left eyebrow. "Really? My father's a probate attorney."
Holy shit. "Small world," he said faintly.
"What firm are you with?"
Holy shit. "None that you'd know. I'm from, uh, Austin."
"You don't sound like a Texan. You sound New England."
"I wasn't born in Austin; I just practice there."
"Are you looking for Eden on business?"
Oh, yeah: she had the Attorney Gene, all right. And yet she looked so fresh, so winsome. "I'm not here to subpoena Eden or anything, if that's what you're worried about," he reassured her.
"Attorneys don't serve subpoenas."
"We can if we want to," he said. He didn't know if they could or not; he was flying blind and getting more disoriented by the minute. Just his rotten luck to stumble onto a probate attorney's daughter who happened to know Eden.
"Look, I appreciate your effort to protect Eden's privacy," he said, "but it's really hot and—"
"Shouldn't you be used to the heat?"
"—I'd like to get on with my mission. Thank you for your time."
He gave her a barely civil smile and turned to head back to the gallery.
"Wait, Percy-if-that's-who-you-are!"
Back around he turned. She looked completely undecided about whether to trust him or not. "Why are you looking for her?" she said in a voice that sounded oddly distressed.
With a softer smile he said, "I'm afraid I can't breech my client's confidentiality."
"Why are you looking for her?" she demanded, sounding genuinely anguished now.
"I'm sorry. Really. If you would just tell me where I can find her..."
"Find her? Sure. Just—look for the nearest married man!" she said bitterly, after which she suddenly burst into tears, changed her mind, stopped, turned, and ran away.
While Sam, agape, watched her flee, three thoughts went through his mind. One: she was obviously the wife of Eden's latest prey. Two: she didn't look anything like Eden, either from the front or the back. And three: Eden was now a blonde.
Oh, and four: it stung like hell to know that Eden was still running around seducing other men.
The only good news, and it was scant good news indeed, was that Sam's hunch had been right. Eden had taken off for Martha's Vineyard, and her trip had everything to do with the engraving. Had she brought it here with evil intent? That was a no-brainer. Where was Eden now? He didn't know. Where was the Durer? He didn't know.
He was sure he was about to find out.
Praying that she hadn't already fenced it, Sam stepped inside the quiet, intimate gallery.
****
Holly Anderson escaped up Circuit Avenue and didn't stop to catch her breath until she reached the main entrance into the Camp Ground, the old revivalist meeting place that was now one of the most charming sites in New England. Ahead of her, in the middle of a large and soothing oasis of grass, stood the historic Tabernacle, a massive whimsy of iron and pipe and rafters holding up a corrugated roof that was topped by a spire, itself topped by a large, plain cross. Rimmed all around by tiny, wildly colorful and extravagantly scrolled gingerbread houses, the plain old Tabernacle beckoned Holly, as it always did, to come sit down and muse a bit.
It was easy to do that in the Camp Ground. Maybe it was the thick canopy of trees, muting the sounds of the cars, mopeds, ferries, sirens, and boom boxes that bounced around the crowded waterfront. Maybe it was the eye-popping colors of the tiny, tent-sized Carpenter Gothic cottages, loud enough to drown out anything short of a nuclear explosion. Whatever the cause, the silence on the often empty green was a delight, one of the best-kept secrets on the island. If Holly needed a quick fix of serenity while she was in Oak Bluffs, this was where she came.
All alone, she took a seat under the cool shade of the Tabernacle and tried to make sense of the mysterious Mr. Billings. He had unnerved her, no doubt about it. When had she last burst into tears in front of a man? Never, to be exact. Her conviction that Percy Billings was not who he seemed was overwhelmed by her mortification that Percy Billings, whoever the hell he was, had seen her cry.
Why is he looking for Eden?
That's what Holly wanted to know. She spent the next hour sitting alone on the bench, with only a handful of wanderers passing in and then out of her view, as she fixated on the edgy-looking male with the sissy- sounding name.
Even if he were a lawyer, which was hard to believe, why would he want or need Eden? Why, why, why?
Eventually Holly came up with what she thought was the only possible explanation: he was there to bring Eden news of someone's death, and maybe an inheritance.
"But lawyers don't do that personally, not unless they're friends of the families," her mother argued over dinner that night. The two women were in constant communication now, comparing every new theory, every sad thought about the crisis that had mowed them down just three days earlier.
Charlotte Anderson reflected for a moment. "Maybe he's a private investigator who was working for a law firm," she threw out. "He sounds a little rough around the edges, despite the jacket and tie."
Holly bobbed her head from one side to the other. "That's slightly more plausible, I guess. But the fire in his eyes when he spun me around—boy, now that was personal. He didn't look either like a lawyer or a P.I. just then."
"A jealous boyfriend?" her mother suggested, not without a certain amount of hope.
"I don't think so," Holly decided. "He was too flustered when I turned out not to be Eden. And too stunned when I told him my father was a probate attorney. Ha! I got him there."
Charlotte Anderson peeled away a blob of congealed cheese from her slice of cold pizza and laid
it aside on the plate. "He and Eden sound like birds of a feather, if you ask me," she muttered, poking at the remains. "Two liars."
For whatever reason, Holly wanted to defend her Mr. Billings. "We don't know that for sure. We should at least give him the benefit of the doubt."
Her mother lifted her head. Tears, one more rainfall in a record season, began to fall again. "Oh, what's the difference? Eden's gone and Mr. Billings is, too, by now. We'll never know what he wanted." She wiped her eyes rather fiercely with her napkin.
"I suppose you're right," Holly conceded.
It was an oddly disappointing realization. Percy Billings was an intriguing man with a wide range of emotions. Embarrassment, sheepishness, a good-looking guy, bravado, anger, a good-looking guy, arrogance—Holly had seen all of that in the space of five minutes with him.
Too bad he was a liar.
"Do you suppose she really was an orphan?" Charlotte asked out of the blue.
"Hmm? Eden? Hard to say," Holly answered. "The only time I ever ventured a question about her family, she told me it was far too painful a subject to go into. Somehow she made it sound as if they all died on the Titanic."
Charlotte smiled wryly. "Yes, she was good at that. Remember when she told us that she had been studying art at the Sorbonne, but that she left to come back and care for her best friend who was dying of cancer?"
"Sure I do. Why?"
"Well, Nancy told me this morning that Eden once mentioned that she'd never been to France," Charlotte said. "I believed Eden. I believed everything she said." She added softly, "And so did your father."
"He'll discover what a fraud she is."
"What if he doesn't?"
Charlotte's lip began to tremble and Holly thought, I have to do something, anything, to stop the flow of this pain.
She grabbed her mother's hand and began hauling her up from her chair. "Mom, you are not going to sit in your kitchen and cry anymore—not tonight, anyway. We're going to Mad Martha's for ice cream. It's the only sensible solution to all this."
Her mother smiled haplessly—a pale echo of the warm and winning version that Holly was used to—and dabbed at her gray Katharine Hepburn bun. "My hair's a mess."
"It looks fine," Holly said, tucking in one of the longest loose ends. "You look beautiful."
And she did, too. The lines in her face made her look more kind than old, and those few extra pounds only made her more huggable. Her eyes were far and away the most beautiful that Holly had ever seen: large, green, and luminous, with thick black lashes that had never seen the business end of a mascara brush. Charlotte Anderson's beauty was of the deep-down kind. How could anyone turn his back on it?
"Come on; it's a beautiful evening," Holly coaxed. "Let's not stay inside."
Her mother sighed an acquiescence, but her mind was somewhere else. "We're so convinced that Eden's a gold digger," she mused. "What if your crazy theory is right, and Percy Billings is looking for her to give her a chunk of money? Wouldn't that be something? Do you think ... do you think she'd dump your dad?"
Holly shrugged philosophically. "Who knows? It would have to be an awful lot of money."
But in the meantime she was thinking, Eden could rub an inheritance in people's faces as proof that she wasn't after Eric Anderson's money. She'd do that even if she were a gold digger.
"Maybe she's already dumped him," said Charlotte wistfully. "Maybe he's going to walk through the front door just as soon as we go out the back."
"Then we'll go through the front, just in case." Holly meant it to sound light; it came out grim.
Ignoring it, Charlotte said, "I should wash my face. Would you get me my sunglasses from the upper deck? Lately the sun hurts my eyes when it's low."
And of course your eyes are puffy from crying, thought Holly, but she merely said, "Sure," and took the stairs two at a time to the second floor, then through a sitting room onto a deck outside of it.
The deck had a million-dollar view of Vineyard Haven Harbor. Holly hadn't been on it since her mother opened up the house for the summer; she'd been too busy with her work. She was dismayed to see that the white balusters that surrounded the deck had started to peel. That was inevitable with a house by the sea ... but still.
She remembered spending what had seemed like an entire summer on that deck when she was ten, painting every single one of those balusters for thirty-five cents apiece.
"You say you want to be an artist when you grow up," her father had said with a twinkle in his eye. "Let's see if you've got the right stuff. Let's see if you've got what it takes to keep going, after it stops being fun."
First Holly had counted all the balusters, and then she had done some multiplication. Seventy dollars! She'd never made that much money at one time in her life. It was going to be the most fun thing she ever did.
But it wasn't. It was hot and boring and endless. After every baluster came another baluster. Holly wanted many times to throw down her brush and run off to play, but she kept at it—not because she wanted the money anymore, but because she wanted to be one of those people who had the Right Stuff. Because she wanted, most of all, not to disappoint her father.
How bitterly ironic.
She couldn't bear to be up there. Her mother's sunglasses were lying on a bistro table in a corner; Holly scooped them up and turned to go back down. She was surprised to see the old telescope, still mounted on its tripod, that her father had liked to use whenever an interesting boat sailed into the harbor. On an impulse, she turned and stooped to squint through the eyepiece. As she suspected, the telescope was focused on the slip where her father kept the Vixen tied up.
As she feared, the slip was empty.
Chapter 4
The Flying Horses Gallery opened at ten a.m. Sixty seconds later, Sam strolled through the door. He had been told the day before by a pretentiously discreet assistant that he'd have to speak about Eden with the gallery owner herself.
The owner, it turned out, was slightly less discreet.
"Ah, yes," said Claire Delaney, sizing him up after sipping from a paper coffee cup. "Eden. She worked here briefly, but you won't find her on the island. I understand that she's off ... well, let's just say, yachting, at the moment," she explained with a dry smile. "Do you know her?"
"Vaguely. It was many years ago." That was more or less the truth. "We're not exactly pals," he ventured. Also the truth.
The gallery owner was forty, citified, and well turned out—uppity, but nouveau uppity, Sam decided. There was still something a little downtown about her. He could see it in the way she looked him over with interest.
He liked that in a woman; he wasn't much for guessing games.
She said, "Eden took up with one of our more respected summer colonists. Unfortunately, she did it while she was working for me. I didn't like that. This is a small island. When people talk about the Flying Horses Gallery, I'd prefer that it be about an exhibit here—not an exhibition."
"Do you mind if I ask how Eden got the job?"
She shrugged. "My ex-business partner knows her. Jeffrey has an unfortunate—well, it doesn't matter," she said briefly. "He knew her."
"Where can I get in touch with your business partner?"
"Ex. I have no idea. Try Palma de Majorca.
Sam probed her a little more. "When I knew her, Eden used to broker the occasional transaction," he said, keeping it bland. "Does she still?"
Claire Delaney gave him a surprised look. "Buying or selling?"
"Selling."
She said briskly, "Eden was a sales clerk, after all. As for what she bought or sold on her own time, I'm afraid I couldn't say."
It was a dismissal. Clearly she wanted Sam out of there. Was that because she was itching to call Jeffrey and give him a heads-up that someone was after Eden?
Sam flashed her a thoughtful smile and said, "Thanks for your help. Do you have any idea where Eden has gone off 'yachting'?"
She shrugged and said, "Eric could have taken the Vixe
n anywhere."
Sam lifted an eyebrow, and she explained. "Vixen is the name of Eric's boat. Rich, don't you think?"
Sam's response was a cool look.
Embarrassed, she added quickly, "I do feel badly for Eric's wife, though. Charlotte's a dear."
"I think I ran into her leaving the gallery yesterday," Sam said, calling up an image of the green-eyed brunette with the Debra Winger nose.
"You may have. She's in here fairly often." Suddenly the gallery owner decided to haul out her uppity tone. "And now you really must excuse me, Mr. Billings."
He was barely out the door when she picked up the phone and began punching in a number.
****
An hour later, Sam was still searching for a room for the night. He must have been out of his mind, thinking he could just wing it on the Vineyard in August. He'd spent the previous night sweltering on a cot jammed under the eave of a shabby bed-and-breakfast, and even that miserable hovel was now booked until Labor Day.
He was standing on the street, juggling a cell phone, inn brochures, a pen, and a notepad when he caught a glimpse of the lady with the Debra Winger nose, inching down the main drag in a bright red pickup truck that was carrying a couple of battered bureaus in the back. A FedEx van ahead of the pickup was stopped for a delivery, blocking its lane of traffic. Charlotte apparently ran on island time; she seemed resigned.
Without thinking, Sam hung up in the middle of booking the one and only free room on the Vineyard and ran up to the driver's side of the pickup.
"Hey, Charlotte!" he said, slapping the side of her door in a far too jovial greeting.
She jolted out of her reverie with a confused smile that he somehow liked to see.
"Percy?
"Who? Oh! Yeah."
"I'm not Charlotte, Percy."
"Yes you are," he told her. "Charlotte Anderson."
"Holly Anderson."
"No, I'm sure she said Charlotte."
"Who?"
"Claire Delaney.
"Claire? She knows who I am."
"I know. She said."
"My name is Holly Anderson. Once and for all, who are you?"
"I'm—hmm." Sam glanced left and right and said in a lower voice, "Can you keep this under your hat? My real name is Sam. Sam Steadman." Here we go. Take two. "I'm a private investigator."
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