This place was, Lisa had often thought, one of the last refuges of aristocracy in America. People here knew one another’s lineage, and who you were mattered. If you weren’t the son or daughter of one of the upper-crust families, then you were to all intents and purposes invisible, just a worker bee toiling in the hive of ordinary life. Some of the wealthiest people in the world lived here, or had second homes here, or visited often. The Queen of England spent a nearly annual vacation at Lane’s End, another of the top-flight Thoroughbred farms, whose owners were among Her Majesty’s closest friends. The rulers of Saudi Arabia were regulars at the local horse sales, and they snapped up prime breeding stock for prices that brought smiles to the faces of the consignors. Hollywood icons, famous European fashion designers, and billionaire businessmen alike lived in quiet splendor on vast properties that no one outside this little enclosed world knew they owned. So many top-of-the-line private jets flew in to Blue Grass Airport that its commercial operations were secondary to its real function, which was catering to the elite. Lexington’s fabled Keeneland Race Course catered to the moneyed few and was far too swanky to allow itself to be referred to as Keeneland Race Track.
It was beautiful, anachronistic, and home sweet home. She’d been back for only eight months, and she was ready to swear she could feel her bred-in-the-bone southern gentility rising in her veins like sap.
Sometimes she longed for Boston like she longed for a cool breeze in the midst of all this cloying heat. One day, when everything here was settled, she meant to go back and pick up the pieces of the life she had made for herself there.
Lisa was jolted back to the present by the sounds of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony emanating from her purse. It was her ringtone, and as she fished her cell phone out she saw that the caller was Joel. A junior partner in his wealthy father’s real estate development company, he’d flown with his father to Chicago, where they had business that would occupy them overnight, after dropping her off at work.
“Just calling to check in,” he said when she answered, and she guessed that he had only just arrived. Bronzed, blond, and handsome enough to star in a Ralph Lauren ad, Joel was another offspring of the elite. His father was a close friend of her father’s, which meant she’d known Joel forever. They were the same age, he’d been part of the wild crowd of rich kids she’d run with in high school, and back then they’d dated for just long enough so that he’d been the one to take her to her senior prom. When he’d asked her out not long after she’d gotten back to town, she’d seen no reason not to say yes. Since then, she’d been seeing more and more of him. He’d made it pretty clear lately that he wanted to take things to the next level—i.e., he wanted them to have sex—but she wasn’t quite ready for that. In her experience, sex plus guys added up to big, messy drama sooner or later, and she had too much on her plate right at the moment to indulge in what—unless she meant to stay in Lexington permanently, which she didn’t—couldn’t ever be more than a fling.
“How was your flight?” she asked.
“Fine. Did you get your car fixed?”
“I’m driving it home right now.”
“That’s good. Anything interesting happen at work?”
Lisa thought about telling him that she’d nearly been fired, but that would mean bringing Scott into it and, given that the two had never liked each other, that would involve a more intense conversation than she wanted to have. Instead, she told him about the Garcia file and how much she resembled Angela Garcia.
“Before you start reading all kinds of things into it, you probably ought to take a closer look at that picture.” Joel’s voice was dry. “A blurry Polaroid doesn’t sound too reliable.”
“I brought the file home with me. I could drop the picture off at Walgreens on the way into work tomorrow and have it copied and enlarged.” The idea had just occurred, but it was a good one.
“Sounds like a plan,” Joel said. Then Lisa heard someone say something in the background, and he added, “Dad says hi.”
“Tell him I say hi back,” Lisa responded. Sanford Peyton had never been one of her favorite people—besides being a friend and business associate of her father’s, he tended to treat Joel as if he were ten years old and incompetent, and had always seemed to disapprove of her—but she could be polite.
“Listen, I’ve got to go. I’ll be back late tomorrow. Don’t forget we’re going to the country club on Saturday if I don’t see you before then. I’ll pick you up at seven.”
“I’ll be ready.” Lisa said good-bye and disconnected. The coming Saturday was the Fourth of July, and the club sponsored an annual buffet, dance, and fireworks display in honor of the holiday. It was a popular event, always crowded and always fun. Most of her friends who were still in town would be there. She only hoped nothing came up at work to keep her from going. Weekends, particularly Saturdays, seemed like something of a theoretical concept to nearly everybody in the prosecutor’s office.
The Fourth of July was a national holiday, however, which should mean something. If not, she would just plan to lie through her teeth about the reason she couldn’t work if she was asked to.
Turning over possible foolproof excuses, she was absentmindedly watching the antics of a field full of frisky yearlings when the Jaguar hit a pothole and died. Just like that. Bump and out.
“Oh, no,” she moaned, listening to the complete cessation of engine noise with dismay.
She barely had time to steer the car to the side of the road before it stopped dead.
“Piece of junk,” she muttered.
Shifting into park just because she thought she should, she looked despairingly at the fuel gauge in hopes that the fix could be as simple as that. No such luck: The thing read full, so unless the gauge was as faulty as nearly everything else on the car, the cause lay elsewhere. Probably, Lisa thought, in the transmission the dealership had supposedly just fixed. The car wasn’t even hers. It was her mother’s. Martha Grant had always driven a Jaguar, time without end, and this was the last one she had bought before she had started to exhibit the symptoms that eventually led to her being diagnosed with ALS four years before. It was, unfortunately, not suited for transporting a woman in a wheelchair, which her mother now was, so Lisa had traded in her own reliable Honda for a van roomy enough to serve the purpose. With the farm’s finances in the state they were in, they couldn’t afford another car, and she wouldn’t dream of distressing her mother by getting rid of one more symbol of the way things used to be.
Which meant she got stuck with the Jag.
Lisa was fumbling in her purse for her cell phone when the sudden opening of the driver’s-side door made her jump and squeak with alarm.
3
Even as Lisa’s heart shot into her throat and her gaze darted around to discover who was accosting her on this lightly traveled country lane, she recognized Scott with a rush of relief.
“Problems, Princess?” His voice was dry. With one arm resting on the roof, he leaned down to look at her sardonically through the open door.
The annoying part was, she was actually glad to see him.
“The damned thing just stopped. I told you this morning I was having car trouble, so maybe now you’ll believe me. And don’t call me Princess.”
His lips thinned. “Want to turn off the ignition?”
As she complied, he moved away from the door and rounded the fender to stand in front of the car.
“Pop the hood,” he called, looking at her through the windshield.
She did; then, as he lifted the hood and disappeared behind it, she got out, closing the door and walking around to join him. A distant droning told her that although she couldn’t see it, somewhere in the vicinity farm machinery was at work. The faint, sweet smell of just-cut hay provided a soft undertone to the more acrid scent of something burning. That something being, she very much feared, a vital part of her engine.
Damn it, anyway.
Having shed her jacket when she’d gotten into the car, sh
e welcomed the evening’s heat as it caressed her air conditioner-chilled bare arms. Scott, too, had shed his jacket, she saw. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows, and he’d lost the tie and unbuttoned his shirt at the throat. A narrow black belt circled his trim waist, anchoring his gray suit pants just above the hipbones. Bent over the engine, he was jiggling wires and loosening caps. Reluctantly, she noticed, as she had countless times many years before, that he had a nice butt, small and tight and as toned as an athlete’s.
She believed that she just might have told him so, on one memorable occasion when she’d been an arrogant and hormone-fueled teenager. In fact, she knew she had. Her exact words had been “Nice ass” when she’d come across him, clad in shorts and a sweaty T-shirt, bent over a recalcitrant lawn mower. His reply? A scornful “Go play with your dollies, little girl.”
The memory was embarrassing, and she immediately did her best to banish it.
“You got a loose battery wire. That’s what made the car stop,” Scott said from under the hood. “I fixed it.”
“So, I’m good to go?” she asked hopefully. He was handy with engines of all types, so she wasn’t really surprised. Being the son of a mechanic, though in the case of this particular mechanic it definitely came with its own set of issues, had an upside to it. From the time he first got his license at sixteen until, as far as she knew, just about now, he’d driven a series of junkers, but he’d always managed to keep them running. She’d known him to fix kitchen appliances, the occasional broken air conditioner, and farm machinery of all types.
“Nope.” Tightening a cap he’d loosened, he straightened to look at her. “The big problem is you’re out of transmission fluid. Lucky you didn’t burn the thing up.”
“They just worked on the transmission today!”
Disengaging the support, he shut the hood with a thunk. “Well, either they forgot to put the fluid back in or you’ve got a leak. You’re lucky the battery wire came loose when it did or you’d need a new transmission. Come on, I’ll give you a ride home. Unless you want to wait here for Loverboy?”
Annoyed by this reference to Joel—which was, she knew, his intent—Lisa trailed him back around to the driver’s-side door. By the time she got there, he had already opened it for her.
“Joel’s out of town. And by the way, FYI, a word to the wise, Mr. District Attorney: Calling people names like Loverboy and Princess comes across as just a little bit juvenile,” she said. He was leaning against the rear door with his arms folded over his chest, watching her approach. “Maybe it’s time you outgrew it.”
He laughed as she ducked inside to collect her things.
“You bring it out in me. Probably because having you around dredges up all those old juvenile memories. Hey, remember the night when your mom called me over to fix the air conditioner, and you and your girlfriends—there were five of them, weren’t there? You must have been having a slumber party—decided to beat the heat by stripping off and going skinny dipping in the pool right where I could see? Wasn’t it you who yelled out, ‘Hey, stud muffin, quit looking and come and join us?’ ”
Removing her keys from the ignition, juggling her belongings, Lisa felt her cheeks heat even as she emerged from the car to glare at him.
“It was Nola, and you know it.” Nola Hampton had been her best friend for as long as she could remember. “We were sixteen.”
“Believe me, I was aware. Only the word that kept popping into my mind at the time was jailbait.”
“Is that why you didn’t come swimming?” Forced mockery infused her tone as she shut the door with a swing of her hips. Another embarrassing memory with the power to make her squirm, but she’d be boiled alive before she’d let him know it.
“Absolutely.” His grin broadened as their eyes collided. “Try me now.”
For a moment her heart beat faster at the thought, even though she was pretty sure he didn’t mean it.
“Not gonna happen.”
Glad of the excuse to drop her eyes, she pushed the button on the key ring, locking the door with a beep. As she did, she lost her grip on her briefcase. It hit the pavement with a thud that popped the lock and then tipped it on its side, with about half the contents fanning out through the opening.
“Oops,” he said.
“Damn it!” Juggling purse, jacket, and keys, she crouched to shove the contents back inside and retrieve her briefcase. Scott was before her. Lisa took one look at his big, tanned hands on the partially disgorged items, remembered the Garcia file that was on top and impossible to mistake because of the red label on the tab, which all the prosecutor’s files bore, spotted it, and felt her heart start to beat faster as she waited for the inevitable explosion.
It didn’t come. Instead he pushed the files and papers back inside the briefcase, clicked the lock shut, and stood up with it. If he’d noticed the file, he gave no sign.
Lisa let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. She didn’t think he would actually fire her, but she wasn’t positive. Getting caught taking a file from the prosecutor’s office without permission was a good way to find out.
“I hate to hurry you up, but I need to be getting a move on.”
He headed back toward his black Jeep, which was parked behind the Jaguar, as he spoke. Putting her briefcase in the backseat, he opened the passenger door for her before walking around and sliding behind the wheel.
“What are you doing out this way, anyway?” she asked as they got going. She’d forgotten, briefly, that he no longer lived in the farmhouse next door to Grayson Springs, where he’d grown up.
“My dad called about an hour ago.” He didn’t have to say anything else for her to instantly get the picture. The thing about embarrassing memories was that they went both ways. Most of his probably centered on his father, a raging alcoholic who’d thought nothing of beating his sons—Scott had an older brother, Ryan—when they were growing up, or firing off shotguns for no reason, or driving around drunk in their old pickup, screaming obscenities out the window. “He wasn’t making a whole lot of sense, but I thought I’d better come check things out.”
“Oh.” The syllable acknowledged the fact that Bud Buchanan—Mr. Buchanan was how Lisa still thought of him—was probably out-of-his-mind drunk when he’d made the call. Given the way Mr. Buchanan had treated Scott—she could remember him sporting countless black eyes and fat lips, which gossip had laid at his father’s door—she thought it said a lot for him that he was still taking his father’s calls, much less driving all the way out to Woodford County after work to check on him.
“How’s it going living at home again?” Scott asked. Clearly he had no wish to talk about his father or whatever problem he was having that might have precipitated the call, and she respected that.
“It’s okay. A little claustrophobic, but I’m glad to have the time with my mother.” Her mother’s diagnosis was terminal. The only question was, how long did she have? Lisa hoped years, but she feared it might be much less. “Given the circumstances, there’s nowhere else on earth I’d rather be.”
“Yeah.” Scott’s answer, too, acknowledged a truth that they both knew. Martha Grant had been a wonderful, loving mother to her sometimes undeserving daughter, just as she had been a staunch friend to him.
Lisa remembered something. “So, did Gaylin confess?”
There was a pause as he shot her a quick surprised look. Then his mouth curved wryly. “For a second there, believe it or not, I had no earthly idea how you could have known that.”
“Jungle drums.” Her tone was light.
“No, I mean, I clean forgot you’re an honest-to-God lawyer now. Who would have thunk it? I look at you, and I automatically think of that spoiled-as-hell teenager who followed me around for a couple of summers, practically begging me to do something illegal to her.”
“I’ve grown up,” she said shortly. “It’d be nice if we could move past our shared memories. I’ll make you a deal: I’ll forget them if you will.
”
His gaze flicked toward her, and then he smiled, a slow, lazy smile that had her narrowing her eyes at him.
“Nah, remembering’s too much fun.”
Lisa refused to lose her temper. “Did Gaylin confess or not?”
“Yeah, he confessed. Even told us where he hid the murder weapon. After we cut him a deal. No death penalty.”
“He wouldn’t have gotten it, anyway. Any good defense lawyer would have argued diminished capacity and then put half a dozen weeping relatives on the stand to testify about what a good boy he was really, and how Granny wouldn’t have wanted to see her grandson executed.”
“That’s what I figured. Plus, he’s nineteen. Eighteen when he committed the crime, which would have given the defense another angle. And he agreed to life.”
“He’ll be out in fifteen.”
Scott shrugged. “The legal system’s—”
He broke off as they reached the fork in the road where the lane joined the larger Mount Olympus Road. His face changed, and his hands tightened on the wheel. Glancing around to see what he was looking at, Lisa was able to see, down the way, the Buchanan farmhouse, which was at the top of the long drive leading down to Grayson Springs. A quartet of police cars was parked in the scrub-grass yard, strobe lights flashing. A uniformed cop could be seen hurrying up the steps to the house.
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