Glancing around, he saw the figurine he’d noticed on the mantel downstairs a few days ago—a china ballerina with one foot propped on a stool, holding the laces of a red shoe in both hands. He remembered thinking at the time that there was something disarming about the tiny painted face.
Great. The last thing he needed at this point was to be disarmed.
He unplugged the air-conditioner unit, lifted it out and eased it onto a chair. She’d told him to store the unit in one of the unused rooms for now, so he crossed the hall and shoved open the door of the room at the head of the stairs. The room had two double-hung windows, both with what was probably the original glass. He lingered a moment in the musty room, looking out through the wavery glass to a marsh, a narrow creek and a steep, wooded ridge. The archeologist in him wondered what was underneath the dunes and ridges. While his ever-curious romantic side imagined a grounded shipwreck collecting sand over the centuries, the realist in him admitted it was far more likely to be a fallen tree, or even a clump of grass. It didn’t take a geologist to know that barrier islands were constantly moving.
Closing the door behind him, he returned to her bedroom to close the window, making a mental note to look for a screen. A flash of color caught his attention when he turned to leave. Her closet door hung open. Another project for him to tackle, although, short of leveling the whole house, there wasn’t much he could do. Maybe reset the hinges.
His gaze strayed to the colorful array of clothing crammed inside the narrow space. He was no fashion expert, but he figured most of the stuff, while it might be suitable for the country club set she had moved in, wasn’t going to do her much good down here. Maybe the blue jeans. The pair she’d been wearing when she’d left could have cost anywhere from ten bucks to a couple of hundred, he was no expert when it came to ladies’ clothing. A few months ago they’d probably fit her like a coat of primer, but not anymore. She’d lost weight. Too much worry. Too much physical labor on top of too little sleep.
At least he was seeing that she ate three squares a day now. Before he’d showed up she’d evidently been subsisting on peanut butter and tea.
Her bedroom was directly over his. Instead of claiming the front room with its eastern exposure, she’d chosen one where the sun wouldn’t wake her until mid-morning. He could hear her up here at night, rolling and tossing. More than once he’d been tempted to offer his own insomnia cure. Fortunately, his survival instincts had kicked in before he could make a major mistake.
Still, he lingered in the room that smelled of her subtle perfume, staring at the pillow that bore a faint impression of her head. She hadn’t made her bed. Probably used to having someone do it for her.
Restlessly, he shifted his stance. Now what? Go through the damned files, or go out and whack some more weeds?
Downstairs, he opened a beer and settled down in the recliner, determined to discover why she’d brought these particular folders with her. He figured he had a minimum of two hours before she got back. After some forty-five minutes of scanning documents, most of which should long since have been consigned to the shredder, he stood and stretched, wondering how a man with the organizational skills of a three-toed sloth could have managed to rip off his own company without leaving a whisper of evidence. BFC’s computers had immediately been impounded. Bonnard’s personal secretary had been questioned repeatedly, to no avail. According to Will, the executive offices were still off-limits to all but authorized police personnel.
And here he was, more than five hundred miles away, searching through obsolete dental records and unpaid traffic tickets. One entire folder had been devoted to statements from a department store where, according to Will, Macy regularly maxed out her accounts. Somehow, he couldn’t see Val Bonnard letting overdue accounts pile up. Not the way she’d tackled the stalagmites inside that oven.
On the other hand, he couldn’t see Frank Bonnard running up bills at a place that catered mostly to women—unless he’d been keeping a mistress on the side, and there’d been no evidence of that. No evidence of any women in his life other than the daughter and a few close friends, most of whom weren’t exactly arm-candy material.
Damn it, he liked nothing better than a challenge, but so far, this one had him buffaloed.
He closed the last folder and laid it aside. When it came to thinking like an accountant he was at a disadvantage. His brain simply wasn’t wired that way. It didn’t help when his thoughts kept straying off the reservation.
He kicked the recliner back another notch and tried not to think about the way her bed had looked, with its rumpled sheets and the thick duvet. Tried not to think about the way it smelled—the lingering scent of white flowers.
Finishing off his beer, he set the bottle on the floor, closed his eyes and made an effort to view the overall situation through the lens of a maritime archeologist faced with the task of locating a well-documented wreck. With Will’s help, he’d done the preliminaries before he’d ever left Greenwich, both of them reaching the same obvious conclusion. Trouble was, their conclusion no longer held water. Their damned conclusion had begun to crumble the minute he’d seen her—seen the way she was living.
At first he’d rationalized that she was smarter than he’d given her credit for being, but even that hadn’t held up. Too many times he’d seen her face after she’d been holed up in here with the damned files—a mixture of sadness, frustration…even irritation. He’d been tempted more than once to tell her he felt the same way himself. Not the sadness, but the rest of it.
But if he told her that, he’d have to admit he’d been lying to her from the first, by omission if not commission. Whatever her opinion of him was now, it would sink even lower. And dammit, it mattered to him. More than it should. Torn loyalties were the pits.
So ease off on the testosterone and jump-start your brain, jerk!
Even a disinterested spectator would be forced to concede that Bonnard hadn’t dug a hole under his cabbage patch and buried his plunder. Nor had he shoveled a ton of gold bullion down a coal chute to his basement. The question remained—how the devil had he pulled it off? If he’d been skimming profits over a matter of years, why hadn’t anyone noticed? These were professional number-crunchers whose sole purpose was to invest money for maximum profits, see that it was properly allocated and that none of it, other than legitimately earned commissions, went astray. If any money had followed her here, she’d been damned clever at hiding it.
Granted, there was that closet full of fancy clothes upstairs. And her watch—the only jewelry she wore—was a good one. Even so, it had probably cost less than his old stainless-steel Submariner. From what he knew of Val Bonnard—and he was getting to know her far better than he’d ever intended—material things weren’t that important to her. Not if she was thinking about keeping this old relic of a house and making the kind of improvements she’d been talking about recently. Cape jasmine bushes on each side of the porch and a fresh paint job?
The most telling of all, though, was the fact that she was cleaning cottages. Hell, he didn’t even want her cleaning this one. Her hands were a mess—she had blisters on top of blisters. Some of that stuff she was breathing, she probably needed a mask for.
He had started out wondering how far a guilty woman would go to cover her tracks. At this point he was all but convinced that not only wasn’t she a part of the scam, she honestly believed in her father’s innocence.
Which meant that, in her own way, she was as much a victim as Will.
Nine
Mac stood and glared at the white satin ballet slippers half hidden under the sofa. What in God’s name, he wondered, had made him offer to play detective? He didn’t have the right mindset, much less the right skills. Not in this century. Not when real, live people were involved, people he cared about. People who wore ballet slippers and muttered ladylike curses at a dirty oven.
Flipping the last file into the box, he thought about getting himself another beer, but he’d already had two. He wa
s having enough trouble keeping his mind on track without blurring the edges with alcohol. He’d never been much of a drinker, mindful of the familiar warning that drinking and diving don’t mix.
“Okay, MacBride, put it in perspective. Small company, fewer than half a dozen employees in a position to cook the books.”
The most likely candidate, CFO Sam Hutchinson, had been turned inside out and given a clean bill of health. Next most likely was in no condition to testify, at least not in any earthly court. If Bonnard had hoped to escape paying taxes, he’d succeeded…the hard way.
For the first time Mac wondered if Will could have pulled it off. Opportunity wouldn’t have been a problem. As for motivation, one had to look no further than Macy, who had left him as soon as she’d realized that any accountant whose name was even whispered in context with a financial scandal might as well look for a job bagging groceries.
Will had started out as an accountant shortly before he and Macy were married, then had worked his way through law school with Macy cracking the whip. A small-town beauty queen, she’d been working as a paralegal when they’d met. Macy had always been more ambitious than her husband.
Will had practiced law for less than two years and had hated every hour of it. So when the opening at BFC had come along with its promise of advancement, she’d relented and let him off the hook, law-wise.
So yeah—Will had to be seen as a candidate. Trouble was, he couldn’t lie. Even as a kid he’d turned red-faced and glassy-eyed whenever he’d tried to lie his way out of some minor indiscretion.
Back to Bonnard, then. Which meant back to Val.
And dammit, he didn’t want her involved. He wanted her free to build a new life for herself with no messy ties to the past. With room somewhere in that new life for a freelance diver, a marine archeologist who was motivated more by intellectual curiosity than ambition.
Okay, he’d passed that hurdle—he’d admitted it, to himself, at least.
Closing his eyes, Mac allowed himself to consider various possibilities and probabilities, keeping in mind that six-ounce pop bottle that had been magnified out of all proportion. He was almost asleep when Val burst through the front door.
“Did you know it’s raining again? I can’t believe this crazy weather! Mac?” She was staring at the folders that had slipped off his lap, scattering papers across the floor. “What’s that? What are you doing?”
Oh, hell. Crunch time. He could lie and tell her the tooth fairy left them on his lap while he was napping or he could give his conscience a break and tell her the truth.
“Mac?” She was standing just inside the door looking pale, grimy and exhausted, her dark braid half unraveled, damp tendrils clinging to her face.
“You’re wet.” Caught off guard, he took the easy way out and stated the obvious.
“My car wouldn’t start. I had to flag down a jumper. Mac, what are you doing with my private papers?”
“Would you believe I was trying to figure out how to build you a file drawer?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. Look, there’s no easy way to say this—”
“Try the truth for a change.” She kicked off her sand-caked shoes and came inside the room. Sinking down onto the sofa, she folded the ends of the duvet over her lap. The temperature was probably up into the high fifties outside, but she was wet and shivering.
“Truth, whole truth, nothing but the truth. Okay, my name really is MacBride. But my stepbrother’s name is Will Jordan.” He waited for the implication to sink in. She’d been pale before. Now her face lost the last vestige of color. “Would you have given me a chance if I’d told you up front who I was?”
Spanish-moss-gray eyes darkened visibly. “I’d have—” She took a deep, shuddering breath and started over. “I might have. No, I probably wouldn’t. But why?” she begged plaintively. “I mean, why are you even here? You’re obviously not a handyman looking for work.”
He felt like the lowest form of life. There was no excuse for what he’d done. Or rather, there was, but somewhere along the way he’d become entangled in his own motivation. Now, like the tentacles of a Portuguese man o’ war, those motives were threatening to do him serious harm.
“Why were you going through my personal papers?” she repeated when long moments ticked by in silence. Her voice was too quiet, too controlled.
“Because Will’s not an embezzler.” He waited for her reaction. Wouldn’t blame her if she kicked his ass out the door and threw his gear out after him. From the way she was looking at him, she was seriously considering it.
“You don’t know that,” she said finally. “Nobody wants to believe their relative could do anything dishonest.”
“Yeah, I do know it. Val, whoever ripped off your father’s company, it wasn’t Will. For one thing, money doesn’t mean that much to him, even though maximizing profits is probably part of his job description. Was, I should say. Career-wise, he’s pretty well washed up.”
Her searching eyes never left his face. She took another deep breath and said, “My father was not a thief. I don’t care what they’re saying about him, I knew him better than anyone else, and one thing he was incapable of doing was lying. He never stole so much as a—a book of matches. Money was never what motivated him—not for himself, at least.”
Mac wondered if she realized what that admission implied. “I’ll have to take your word for it. I never met the man.”
Other than the fact that he’d lived in a pretty ritzy part of town and drove a classic Bentley, Frank Bonnard hadn’t struck him as a conspicuous consumer. Not like some men who earned considerably less, Will included. But that was Macy’s doing.
She sneezed, sniffed, and stood. “I need a tissue.”
“You need a hot bath and something to eat.”
“Hot tea.”
He grimaced. “Go get clean—put on something warm and dry. I’ll have the kettle boiling when you come down again. We’ll talk.”
“We’re going to talk, all right,” she said grimly. “Don’t think you’re getting off this easy.”
Easy? There was little she could do to him that his own conscience hadn’t already done.
He watched her leave, her damp socks leaving small cloudy footprints on the dark varnished floor. Oh, lady, why couldn’t you have been what I started out believing you were? Shallow, spoiled, greedy—crooked as a corkscrew?
Before heading upstairs, Val tossed her muddy sneakers on top of the washing machine. If she’d been alone in the house she’d have peeled down to the skin, cold or not, and left everything there. What a rotten stinker this whole day had turned out to be. Her first day on the job…and now this.
It wasn’t enough that she’d had to deal with some unidentifiable substance left in the sink to grow mold and attract bugs. It wasn’t enough that some creep had spilled a sticky drink on an upholstered chair that had run down onto the floor, and in cleaning it up, she’d crawled through the gunk and backed halfway across the floor, leaving a trail of sticky knee prints.
And after all that, to come home to this. Damn him! Damn him all to hell and back, how dare he do this to her! Not once, but twice. What was that old saying—fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
She should have known. Whenever a man went out of his way to be charming, it usually meant he wanted something. Not that Mac had gone out of his way to be charming—he hadn’t had to. She’d been easy prey, she admitted reluctantly as she collected a change of clothes from her bedroom.
How had he charmed her? Let me count the ways, she thought bitterly. By drinking the hot tea he despised with barely a grimace. By fascinating her with tales of historic shipping lanes and early colonial settlements, making her forget that she was so tired every bone in her body ached. By making her listen to the whispery flight of the cormorants. By making her laugh when laughing was the last thing she felt like doing. Wasn’t it enough that he’d crawled up in her attic and under her house, doing all the grung
y things she’d never even had to think of before in exchange for a rust-stained shower and a sagging bed?
Damn him for being so tempting—and herself for being so gullible.
She ran the tub full of tea-colored water that was steamy hot, thanks to her handy-dandy, double-dealing tenant. She dumped in a handful of bath salts, and then another one, just because she needed to make a gesture. Probably slip and break her neck getting out.
Serve her right.
She sank into the welcome warmth, lifted her face and closed her eyes as clouds of fragrant steam rose around her. Stress, be gone, she willed silently. Felicity would have had her chanting mantras. Felicity was into the latest version of New Age. Sandy, already a borderline alcoholic, would have poured her a stiff drink and reminded her that life was too short—she might as well enjoy what she could, while she could.
Lacking such help from her friends, Val slipped down until her hair floated around her shoulders. She had barely enough energy to manage a bath. A separate shampoo, complete with conditioner, roller drying and all the rest of her old routine, was out of the question.
Downstairs, Mac waited until he heard the water gurgling down the drain to fill the kettle and switch on a burner. Then he rummaged in the refrigerator for sandwich makings. She needed energy food. Carbohydrates were supposed to be calming, weren’t they? Hadn’t he read that somewhere?
Setting out store-bought chocolate cookies, bread, pastrami, cheese and a variety of condiments, he noticed the note he’d left for her, anchored with the salt shaker. He’d taken the call shortly after she’d driven off, promising the caller to give her the message as soon as she returned.
Not surprisingly, it had slipped his mind. On first hearing the name Mitty Stoddard he’d had a sinking feeling that things were about to go from bad to worse. Although from Val’s point of view—his, too, come to think of it—they probably couldn’t get much worse.
He smelled her before he heard her. Not that her scent was blatant, it was more a case of his being sensitized. Susceptible might be a better term.
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