“Of course I do,” she mumbled.
“Ah. You knew all along I’d be the man you married—the man who’s adored you all your life,” he said in a reverent voice. “You won’t be sorry you got rid of Frye. I’ll show you what you’ve been missing, Celesta.”
A few minutes after twelve, Celesta entered the warehouse of Perkins Lumber despite the gnawing feeling that she should run the other way. The cavernous room, stacked with sweet-smelling boards and kegs of nails, echoed eerily with her footsteps. The employees were out for their noon meal, yet Celesta wondered if she was being watched. Something seemed to be lurking around the corner . . . were those footsteps, stopping when hers did?
It’s your wild imagination, which needs to be exercised on paper, she told herself. It’s the beating of the tell-tale heart Poe wrote about, the narrator’s own pulse driving him insane.
Then she did hear steps, light and pert, and she gasped when a pretty young woman swayed around a tall set of shelves. “Joy! You startled me,” she yelped, sounding like she’d been caught with her drawers down in the boss’s office.
Miss Holliday smiled slyly and kept walking. “Enjoy your dinner with Mr. Perkins, Celesta. He’s certainly . . . excited about it.”
Celesta turned before the secretary could see how red her face was. Why did men have to brag about their conquests? Why did she feel like she was sneaking around, when eating dinner in public was a perfectly acceptable way to be seen with Patrick?
Or was dinner what he had in mind? Celesta’s steps faltered as she reached the door to his small, secluded office, because Perkins was gazing at her as though she had no clothes on. The sunlight from the single window made his red-blond hair glimmer like a halo, yet his expression was anything but angelic. His white shirt displayed broad shoulders and a lean physique accented by his stylish suspenders. He loosened his collar.
“You came,” he murmured.
“Of course I did. We agreed to meet for dinner—”
“Come here. All morning I’ve been imagining you with your hair done up, wearing a pretty dress,” he said in a low voice, “and I’m not disappointed. Maybe, if I’m lucky, you wore that red lingerie under it. Had a devil of a time convincing Miss Holliday to leave so I could find out.”
Her mouth went dry. Before she could flee, Patrick grabbed her hand and pulled her close, shutting the door and then trapping her against it. “Patrick, I— somebody could barge in—”
“Not likely. They’re getting double pay to stay away for the next hour,” he purred against her ear. “Celesta, feel what you’re doing to me, honey. I need you so damn bad.”
She was momentarily stunned when Perkins pressed her palm against his crotch, but then she shoved him away. “Of all the humiliating—to tell your employees I was coming here so you could—”
“I never said a word about—”
“Well, Joy certainly knew! Maybe from experience, am I right?” It was the wrong thing to say, but she refused to become this man’s plaything, the whispered-about mistress of Perkins Lumber.
Patrick sucked in his breath, catching her subtle rose perfume and the indignation that flashed in her eyes. The scarlet flowers in her dark, tapestry-pattern dress set off the velvet choker gracing her neck . . . her slender, sensitive neck where the vein pulsed visibly.
He dropped his hands and stepped away from her. “Girls like Miss Holliday pale beside you, Celesta,” he whispered, watching her circle away from him. “But you’re nobody’s fool. You know that to keep dancing you have to pay the piper, and he’s certainly played you a gracious tune. I’ve given you a job, a home again. A little kiss before dinner seems an appropriate reward for my generosity, don’t you think? You never refused Frye when he asked.”
She didn’t dare turn her back on him, and her caution gave him the advantage he needed. Patrick walked slowly toward her. When she bumped back against his wooden desk, the sound rang like a knell in the stuffy little office.
“Patrick, please don’t hurt me. I didn’t mean to—”
“You don’t have a thing to worry about, my love,” he murmured, his smile tight with desire. “You know what I want, and you’re no stranger to a man’s needs. Used to drive me crazy, thinking about you and Frye together. But now you’re mine, and we can express our passions freely and skillfully, without any shy fumblings.”
Celesta leaned backward to evade his kiss, yet again he had her trapped. He held her, and while his free hand yanked her dress up over her knees he claimed her with another kiss. The fact that she had been with Damon proved to her what a selfish, uncaring lover Perkins was, and it gave her the presence of mind to jerk her face away. She pushed against his chest, but he only chuckled and pulled her closer.
“You know me well, Celesta, and I’m glad I never lost faith that you’d someday be mine,” he murmured. “Challenge me, sweetheart—your struggle excites me. God, I hate it when a woman just lets me. Nothing less satisfying than someone who lies there and takes it.”
Celesta had no intention of giving in to him, but with Patrick wedged between her legs, leaning her backward onto his desk top, she was at a distinct disadvantage. He was moaning, burrowing his head between her breasts while she thought frantically of ways to fend him off. Her hands were shoving at his shoulders, a futile effort until the heat of his palm at the top of her thigh startled her into action. Suddenly she was grabbing his neck, clutching him desperately.
His eyes widened. “Two can play that game, Celesta,” he rasped, “and you can’t possibly win it.”
To prove his point, Patrick grasped the velvet ribbon on either side of her heart-shaped locket and pulled it so tightly it could’ve strangled her. For a moment, she saw bright flashes of light, and her head started to spin. When her hands dropped limply to her sides, he released her.
“Don’t ever threaten me,” he warned. “Women who don’t give me what I want are always sorry, honey. Believe that, and I’ll never have to put you in your place again.”
Wheezing, Celesta was too dazed to protest when he slid her back until she was lying flat with her hips at the edge of his desk. Her neck still throbbed where the metal locket had bruised it; she wondered why her captor appeared to be moving so slowly when her blood was rushing through her body at an alarming speed. If she didn’t distract him soon, he’d have her drawers down . . . already her skirts were fluttering around her waist as Patrick drank in her exposed thighs and underthings.
“I’m glad we don’t have to hurry,” he breathed, smiling now that she was so compliant. “Most of my life I’ve daydreamed about what you’d look like naked . . . how lovely you must be beneath your simple dresses. It was worth the wait, Celesta.”
When he leaned over her to take a tapestry-covered breast into his mouth, Celesta squeezed her eyes shut. There had to be a way—this rapist in rich man’s clothing wasn’t going to claim her! Pretending to stroke him, she kept panting for breath while drawing both feet up along the outsides of his legs. Once her heels reached his hip bones she could surely thrust him backward and—
A loud shattering of glass made them both gasp, and then a heavy object thudded against the side of the desk.
“Son of a—who’d put a brick through my window?” Perkins demanded, rushing toward the jagged pane.
Celesta scrambled to her feet and grabbed the timely projectile to defend herself. “There’s a note attached,” she said, eyeing Patrick nervously. “It reads, ‘Miss Montgomery—and her money—will never be yours. I’m wise to you, Perkins. Better watch your back.’”
“Is it signed?”
“Would you put your name on such a note? Who knew I was coming here?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” he jeered, snatching the brick from her hands. He read the message and exhaled with contempt. “Whoever wrote it’s behind the times if he thinks any of your uncle’s money will end up in your name. Is that Frye’s handwriting?”
She wished desperately that it were. Despite his nast
y habit of leading women to their graves, Damon Frye was much better company than the bully she was with now . . . and odd as it seemed, Patrick sounded peeved enough that her money might be behind his interest in her, after all. Had she been as blind to his motives as she’d been to Frye’s?
“Damon writes a much neater hand,” Celesta replied quietly. “Close as I can tell, that was written by Ambrose himself.”
He gaped, and—as she’d hoped—lost all interest in their tryst. “From what I’ve seen, he has no plans to pass the estate on to—he’ll be broke by the time those three steamers are in the water, and everyone knows it. That’s all people are talking about.”
“Perhaps he’s protecting me, rather than an inheritance that wasn’t mine to count yet,” she said as she backed toward the door. “Or perhaps he thinks the inspiration for the Celestial Fortune deserves better than a tawdry desktop seduction. Or it could be that Katherine’s come to herself and convinced him—”
“Get out of here,” he spat, bitterness rising like bile in his throat. “Takes more than a brick through my window to sidetrack me from the woman I’ve always wanted. And not a word of this to Mother,” he
warned sharply. “We’ll take up where we left off when I get to the bottom of this.”
The sparkle in her green eyes as she shut the office door made him swear violently. Damn her, had she duped him again? It made no sense for Ambrose Ransom to pull such a juvenile stunt, and he doubted Frye would risk showing his face in Hannibal. Which meant that just as when they were growing up, Celesta had probably bluffed him.
He was getting closer, though. As Patrick swept the shards of glass from the office floor, he smiled to himself, whetted by the viewing of her primly clothed beauty. Frye might’ve been the first to win her favors, but his own victory would be more permanent—and more lucrative. Because he’d tipped his hand, the raven-haired heiress would be leery of his advances now, but by God he would find a way to claim her. It was a matter of creating the right situation—the right time and place, with irresistible bait—so that Celesta Montgomery could no longer refuse him.
Chapter 29
“What we need is a party!” Eula exclaimed. “Despite the unsettling events these past weeks, your twenty-first birthday shouldn’t go uncelebrated, dear. And the fact that it’s on Halloween has always been an excuse for a masquerade. What do you think?”
Celesta smiled and continued folding clothes. “We did have some memorable parties when I was in school—”
“And our ballroom’s been much too quiet since Tom passed on,” her employer insisted. “We need music and dancing, gossip and games! Why, I feel excited just thinking about a masked ball! We’ll have a huge cake—and it’ll be the perfect way to get your aunt Katherine into society again. Surely Ambrose wouldn’t deny her an evening out because of that infernal leg.”
She chortled. “If anything, he uses his peg to spark conversations. It doesn’t keep him from clumping down the sidewalks in town, pumping hands like a politician.”
“He thrives on his notoriety, doesn’t he?” Eula picked her own underthings out of the laundry basket and began to fold them into piles on the kitchen table, where the two of them sat. “I hate to speak ill of your kin, Celesta, but I still think he played a despicable trick on his wife and sisters, and I’ll never trust him again. Patrick tells me the bankers have the same qualms, even though the Ransom fortune is considerable collateral against those three new steamers.”
Mrs. Perkins always discussed other peoples’ money as though it were a member of their family and subject to the same speculation, just as she always held her son’s ideas up as gospel, so Celesta merely shrugged. “After the Jekyll-and-Hyde switch he pulled on me, I can’t pretend to know what he’s plotting. And I really don’t care, as long as he’s tending to Katherine.”
The woman beside her nodded. “She certainly looks normal. I just wish she’d start talking again,” Eula clucked. “Nearly a month it’s been since she uttered a sound, and besides worrying her friends, it can’t be good for her marriage. Lord knows living with Ambrose must be a strain these days . . . she surely has things to say to that underhanded husband of hers.”
“She writes him notes. Nasty ones, at times.”
Perhaps it wasn’t proper to discuss such matters; but the past few weeks had been lonely ones, and Celesta craved female chatter. She made sure she was never alone with Patrick, but since her circle of family and friends had shrunk so drastically, she couldn’t keep from discussing her personal concerns with Eula Perkins. “When I was visiting a few days ago, she seemed on the verge of laughing with me—just blurting something out. But it wouldn’t come.”
“Perhaps with time,” the little blonde consoled her. “We can only hope and pray, and wait.”
Several moments passed while they folded the clothes. Celesta was pleased, as much for Katherine as for herself, that Eula wanted to have a party. She was a lavish hostess, and she would use this as an opportunity to flaunt Patrick’s successes with Perkins Lumber for the first time since his father died. It would give them something to look forward to, add a purpose to days that bored her with their predictable tasks and housework.
And perhaps the anticipation would spark her creativity again. She finished a Sally Sharpe story two days ago, but sensed the Girl Detective’s sleuthing lacked its usual luster. Even though she was back in her childhood room, where her pen had first found words, the atmosphere was charged with Patrick’s suggestiveness and the poignancy of Mama’s unslept-in bed . . . and the unshakable feeling that the solution to her mother’s poisoning was right here, if she only knew where to look. Her birthday was two weeks away, yet she was no closer to naming the killer than when she’d promised herself she’d do that.
Eula’s shriek brought her out of her woolgathering. “Mouse!” she cried, her gaze locked on the far corner of the kitchen. “It darted along the baseboard, a fat little gray thing—”
As Mrs. Perkins’s hysterics continued, Celesta’s pulse began to pound. There was only one logical solution. “I’ll go to the druggist’s for some crystals,” she said in a mute voice. “The colder weather’s driving them inside. We can’t have mice taking over, right before the party.”
The little widow blinked and finally dropped the skirts she’d hiked up off the floor. “Yes—yes you should, dear,” she mumbled. “Where there’s one mouse, more will follow. Such loathsome creatures! If you’ll go right now, I’ll finish this folding for you.”
Minutes later Celesta was strolling into the business district, prickling with tension. What would happen, now that cyanide was once again present in the Perkins household? Patrick was being stiffly polite these says, still brooding over their interrupted rendezvous, while Eula chattered nonstop—pointedly ignoring her son’s interest in the maid. Celesta felt like the little mouse that scampered into hiding, because she had a feeling that the next two weeks would reveal the identity of a bloodthirsty cat: the person who had murdered Mama . . . and who might try for her next.
That’s dime novel mentality and you know it, she chided herself as she walked toward the post office. The Ransom deaths and Ambrose’s resurrection are too much in the news these days; where Justine and Mama’s ends seem too dissimilar to be connected, a third heir’s passing would point up a scandal demanding an investigation. Any smart murderer would know that.
Celesta stuffed her latest Sally Sharpe story into the outgoing mail slot. It was silly to feel so nervous about rat poison! The subject would never have occurred to Eula, had that mouse not excited her; a woman planning the biggest costume ball of the season wouldn’t kill the guest of honor!
Would she?
Staring blankly at the rows of metal mailboxes, Celesta tried to halt her frantic thoughts. Mrs. Perkins had no reason to want her dead: she was the finest housekeeper the niggling little widow could keep on, and despite Patrick’s insistence that he wanted to marry her, she had no aspirations toward Eula’s precious boy.
A quiet chat with Mama, or a dose of Justine’s practical insight, would certainly do her good about now. Aunt Katherine could give her no advice, and she didn’t want to upset the poor woman—or let Ambrose overhear her concerns. She had a sudden, overpowering urge to feel a strong pair of masculine arms around her, to hear Damon’s low, resonant voice reassuring her that he’d see her safely through the coming days.
Celesta closed her eyes, lulled by the hiss of the lobby’s steam radiators. Damon seemed very near to her right now, and as she imagined his handsome smile she heard him saying, Nothing’s changed between us, sweetheart, but you must trust me—and realize that your clouded perceptions keep you from seeing who really killed—
“Are you all right, Celesta? Can I get you something?”
She blinked away her daydream of Damon and found Bill Thompkins standing to one side of her, peering anxiously through his spectacles. “Thank you, no—I—it’s so blustery outside, I was just soaking up some of your heat before I leave,” she stammered.
The postal clerk nodded doubtfully. “Awfully chilly for October.”
A moment’s tense silence passed. Celesta had been ready to fetch the check from her box, but even though Thompkins probably knew now that her New York uncle was really her publisher, she hesitated to raise any questions. Ever since Ambrose’s return, his informer had acted extremely busy whenever she came in, and his lingering now, as though he were going to say something that was terribly difficult for him, made Celesta uncomfortable.
“Well, I have errands to run for Eula, so—”
“Please—I—can’t tell you how horrible I feel about deceiving you and your aunts, Celesta,” Thompkins uttered. He ran his hand through his hair and shifted from one foot to the other. “Dozens of time I swore I’d tell Katherine her husband was alive, yet I was afraid to. She’s so easily upset, and when Rachel died and then Justine, there hardly seemed a good time to tell her about Ambrose.”
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