“Are you still here?” Rowan growled at his brother. He wasn’t in the mood for anyone’s company, Scott’s in particular.
“Don’t worry, you’ve only got me for tonight. I’m flying to Melbourne tomorrow morning to watch the race and to see what I’ve bought.” His brother eased back into the blue-and-tan abstract patterned lounger fitted against the bulkhead. The colors emphasized Scott’s eyes and for a moment Rowan imagined his father sitting there with his feet on the coffee table. His brother wore a scruffy pair of designer jeans, an old Aran sweater and he’d paid a million dollars for a horse, sight unseen.
It was like seeing him through fresh eyes. No wonder Jo had taken one look at him and run. No wonder his mother had done the same to his father.
Rowan turned away. “I need a drink, do you want one?”
“No. Tonight I’m teetotal. Have to fly the Hughes up to Auckland early tomorrow.” Although Scott was licensed to fly a helicopter and a twin-engine plane, it was part of what Rowan saw as an affectation, not to fly them himself unless absolutely necessary.
“What happened to your pilot?”
“I gave him a week’s leave. I didn’t know about the horse then.”
Rowan poured himself two fingers of Cardhu malt, swallowing it down in one gulp, then he poured another.
“Hey, take it steady, brother.” Scott’s feet hit the floor and he came over to the cabinet where Rowan stood tipping back the second whiskey. He was shorter by a good four inches, slighter and dark where Rowan took after his mother. “Look, let’s face it, Rowan, she wasn’t for you. It would have been better all round if you’d let it go after the last disaster. I know what I’m talking about. Stick to your own kind. They know the rules.”
“I love Jo. And I’m going to have her, so mind your own damn business!” His glass hit the top of the cabinet with a clunk.
Scott picked it up and swiped at the damp ring with his sleeve. “You think I don’t know what you’re going through? Well, my last disaster with a woman happened right here on the Fancy. Would you believe I caught her piercing condoms with a needle! Yeah, I learned my lesson there. Always supply your own.”
Rowan just shook his head and headed for the galley. “Did you bring anything to eat?”
“I’ve ordered pizzas.”
“Well, I hope you ordered plenty. I could eat a horse. Even a million-dollar one.”
Scott laughed, sounding relieved.
Jo parked across the street from the inn. It was in darkness but she’d be sure to find Molly in the kitchen. Apart from Betty, she didn’t appear to have many friends.
Walking through the alley separating the inn from its nearest neighbor, she approached quietly until a movement in the darkness told her she wasn’t alone. “Who’s there?”
“It’s me, Detective Jo.”
Ginny appeared in the light of the old yellowed fluorescent tubes glowing through the high-barred kitchen windows. It personified what she’d come to believe about Rocky. He’d been all show up front, but weak on the inside where it counted. Essentially he’d lacked the humanity needed to care for anyone other than himself. No wonder he hadn’t been surprised someone could want to kill him.
“Hey, Ginny. Why are you hanging around the inn at this time of night? Is your mom working?”
“No, I wanted to speak to Molly. I wanted to say how sorry I was about Mr. Skelton. I meant to come before, then I thought maybe Molly wouldn’t be too happy about me seeing him naked and all that. It was terrible what they did to him, I can’t get it out of my head.”
“All the more reason for not hanging around in the dark.” By rights the kid should have gone for counseling, but the facilities just weren’t available. She’d tried to tell Bull he should bring someone in for Ginny and for Molly. With one eye on his budget, he’d laughed off her suggestions as another of her peculiar Auckland ideas. “Why didn’t you go in?”
“Molly has a visitor. He got here just before me and I was going to wait till he left.”
“Well, I haven’t got the time to hang around and I don’t think Molly will want to see anyone else after I’ve had a word with her. I probably won’t be long, so how ’bout I give you a lift home? Your mom is probably worried sick.”
“That’d be cool. I didn’t fancy walking home in the dark.”
“You go wait by my car. I’ll be as quick as I can.”
Jo had come here on a hunch. Though it would take Molly’s collaboration to make it pay off. It would be interesting to see who was visiting her. Most likely the answer would be a priest or funeral director.
For maybe two seconds she had wondered if Molly was involved. A bit of putting two and two together, hoping to come up with five. That would make life too easy. Besides, she couldn’t see someone Molly’s size shifting Rocky on her own.
Then there was that business about her and Rocky trying to have children. What a rat he’d been. A tweak at her amateur psychologist’s button suggested Molly’s fetish for beautiful crystal et al was simply compensation for being childless.
Amateur being the optimum word in that little analysis.
As Ginny’s footsteps receded, Jo fished a small flashlight out of her purse and swung the beam around as she walked. The Dumpster was no more than twelve feet from the door, but she could imagine it seeming a lot farther at one in the morning in the dark.
She knocked on the door then rang the bell for good measure. As she waited she shone the pencil-thin blade of light overhead. The lamp above the door was broken. Trust Rocky. His motto should have been, never put off till tomorrow what you can do today, for tomorrow you might be dead.
She felt sorry for Molly. No wonder she placed such value on perfection. How had she and Rocky gotten together in the first place? They appeared to have very little in common.
Not like you and Rowan. She pushed the notion back where it belonged in the dark recesses of her mind. Turned out they hadn’t had as much in common as she’d thought.
What was Molly doing? Hadn’t she heard the bell? She’d give it another ten seconds and she’d ring again.
“Who is it?” The door never budged and the voice sounded far away as if coming from the end of a tunnel.
“Detective Jellic. Sorry to bother you, but I’ll only take a minute of your time.”
“Hold on then till I unlock the door.”
Jo’s eyebrows rose. Just who did Molly have in there that she needed to lock the door? A lover…nah, she couldn’t see Molly jumping into bed with someone a couple days after Rocky had gotten murdered. Though she’d come across a few like that in the old days, up in Auckland.
The deadlock clicked and the door slid back. Molly had on a navy apron liberally streaked with flour.
Baking. She’d known Molly wasn’t the type.
“Shut the door behind you.” Molly flung the instruction over her shoulder and padded into the kitchen in a pair of pink slippers with fur trim. Without her heels there was nothing of her from back on. Compared to Jo, she’d always been small. Let’s face it, who wasn’t, yet tonight Molly appeared to have shrunk.
“You thinking of opening soon?” Jo asked, looking at the mixer tilted back with its dough hook pointing toward the ceiling. Folds of pastry sat in a square and a silver-colored rolling pin sat alongside. She hadn’t known they made them in stainless steel, but then she wasn’t much of a cook.
“I am, tomorrow as it happens. You know what they say. Needs must when the devil drives,” said Molly, thumping the rolling pin down onto the pastry in a way that the nun who’d taught home ec said was sure to make it tough. And sure enough, Jo’s attempts had always come out like leather.
Molly might also have picked a more politic saying for a woman whose husband had supposedly been killed by satanists. But then maybe she didn’t believe that any more than Jo did.
“So what did you want?” Molly asked, breaking the silence that filled the spaces between the rhythmic thumps and swishes of turning pastry while Jo looked aroun
d the room.
Unless she’d hidden the guy under the table, they were the only two in the room. Jo said the first thing to come to her mind, lowering her eyes to check. “Rowan assures me you’ll have your check very soon.” No one there.
“I’m as likely to fall for a check’s-in-the-mail story as I am to believe in UFOs.” The pastry received another few thumps. “What do you want now, Sergeant? I have a lot of work ahead of me. Nothing got done yesterday.”
“I wanted to have a look at those magazines that were at the side of your bed.”
“You mean you’ve come to bother me because you’ve run out of reading material?”
“No, it’s part of my investigation. Did Rocky swap any of his heavy-metal magazines?”
“Not that I know of.” Molly wiped her hands on her apron. “Wait here, I’ll get them for you. Don’t want no strangers seeing my bed unmade.”
An unmade bed? Now that she found hard to believe. The woman was a neat freak. For a moment she regretted asking Ginny to wait by the car. She’d like to hang around outside to find out who was hiding in the back room. Lover…or accomplice? A shiver of unaccountable fear snaked up her spine and curled into a tight knot at the base of her skull.
Phew! She huffed out the breath she’d been holding and tried to remember if the door had locked automatically behind her. Damn, she hadn’t brought her gun. All she had was the small flashlight in her pocket. She’d been stupid to come in here alone. Rowan filled her mind in the few strides it took to circle the table on her way to the door. She’d never told him she loved him and now…now it might be too late.
All she could see was Rowan’s face as he’d left her office that afternoon. A few more strides and she’d be out of here.
Rowan. She needed to see Rowan.
Jo looked over her shoulder; she was in the clear.
Then she spied the knife block.
“Damned intuition,” she cursed, but it didn’t stop her from turning back.
The whole world stilled, holding its breath as she slid the knife she wanted out of its slot.
There it was not an inch from the end. A rough nick in the blade where it had hit the mixer while she and Rowan watched Molly. The blade gleamed, catching the light as she eyed its size. Eight inches long, tapered point and two inches at the handle.
Spirits buoyant, she sang out, “Gotcha!”
The word barely sprang from her lips when the air around her thickened and quaked with tension as if its mass surged from Tane’s Throat.
Jo stepped back into the dull thunk with its pain chaser. A black hole swallowed the cluster of stars exploding in front of her eyes, then she followed them down in a headlong dive with the knife still in her hand.
Chapter 15
R owan couldn’t remember Scott being as enthusiastic about anything as this horse. And that’s what kept him in his seat, listening, while his brother extolled his horse Winnatexal’s virtues ad infinitum. For years all that had made him happy had been business. Racehorses at least had the distinction of being unpredictable—as opposed to money—and when Scott touched it, inevitably, the three of them became richer.
Scott had the Midas touch.
And Taine had the green thumb. His younger brother had always been the one who’d hung around old man Jackson while he worked in the garden and in two years he’d be bottling his first vintage.
So, what was his special gift?
Had the good fairies been on strike the day he was born?
He’d like to think they’d given him a loving heart, but maybe that only counted in Jo’s favor. As sure as the sun would come up over Nicks Bay tomorrow, he knew he’d never love anyone the way he loved her. The knowledge crowded his chest until he could hardly breathe, thinking he would never succeed in winning her.
So he listened to Scott’s rambles, bloodlines, anything had to be preferable to his own pessimistic wanderings, drinking his fourth—or was it his fifth—scotch. He’d begun to mellow out.
“You’re not really paying attention, are you?”
It took him a few seconds to come out of the place his mind had been drawn to. Despite his best endeavors to listen to his brother, he had his parents on his mind. “Why did you call this boat after the first Fancy? Don’t you feel it was somewhat crass?” The words, “even for you,” hung in the air between them.
“I did it as a memorial to Mom and Dad.”
“And it didn’t occur to you that Dad might have deliberately killed them both by sinking the original boat?”
“Hell, no!” The glass of soda in Scott’s hand clattered onto the table, slopping over onto the polished wood like an old bloodstain. “Don’t tell me you’ve been harboring that thought all these years?”
Rowan nodded.
“God, man, why didn’t you tell me? Why did you never say?” Scott shook his head and chewed at his thumbnail with his elbow balanced on the table. “All this time and you never knew how happy they were, but of course you didn’t see them leave. Dad was all puffed up and full of himself and Mom glowed. It was as if they’d turned back the clock, in love again for the first time.”
Scott seemed so certain, and God, Rowan wanted to be persuaded, but he wasn’t totally convinced. “Then how do you think it happened out in the middle of nowhere?”
“I figure a foreign merchant ship probably wandered out of the shipping lanes and ran through them, so get any other thought out of your head. I console myself with the thought that they were happy. That they were together. It’s more than most people get.”
Rowan agreed. At least his parents had been together. Which brought to mind the night he’d almost died holding Jo.
Darkness filled Jo’s vision, filled her soul. She was cold. Cold and alone. Damp bleeding from the bare earth seeped into her bones. Lying naked as the day she was born, she shivered, dreaming of warm clothes and cursed the inquisitive wind that sought out every crevice in her body.
They’d tied her up with crime-scene tape. She wondered if whoever found her would see the irony in it.
Anyone with a skerrick of decency would have allowed her at least one scrap of clothing, preferably her panties, she thought facetiously. Deadly laughter bubbled up under the duct tape strapping her mouth, nearly choking her. She breathed furiously through her nose to clear her mind.
They said these situations brought out the best and the worst in people, so she hoped to hell this was her best.
She refused to cry…or beg. Not that she could say much with her mouth bound, and she refused to let her eyes plead for her.
If anyone was to blame, it was herself. Taken out with a rolling pin. Damn!
What had been Molly’s cri de coeur? “Needs must when the devil drives.” She’d certainly put it to good use on Jo.
The youngest of the Smale brothers, Jeff had refused to meet her eyes as he carried her down the slope, and after a while she’d switched off, suffering the indignity of being trussed up like an oven-ready bird in a state of inertia.
The shakes had really begun when he’d dumped her in the middle of the crime scene. After that, it hadn’t taken much figuring to guess Molly’s intentions.
Having her skin touch the very ground where Rocky’s body had lain until yesterday was kind of creepy, but she’d get over it. The knife through the heart could take longer to get used to. The thought made her choke on a snort of laughter.
Was this a type of hysteria? All she had to do was keep it up and Molly would be redundant. She’d die laughing.
Stop it, you idiot!
Closing her eyes, she tried shifting her focus. Concentrate on Jeff. How had Molly tangled him up in a murder?
What drove his actions, apart from Molly’s whiney, nagging voice? Guilt or fear? It had to be fear. Or money…oh yeah, that was it. His brother’s bail money.
The guessing game made her brain hurt. There was a locomotive, all bells and whistles, inside her skull trying to get out. No wonder her thought processes were stunted.
> The site screen that had hid Rocky’s body flapped and she strained to see if they’d come back. Too bad someone hadn’t thought to remove the screen with the body. It gave them the perfect cover. No one passing by would even know she was here. A pang of longing broke through the brave front she was feigning. Did Rowan miss her?
She hoped so, yet she’d hate him to see her like this. Sometimes love just wasn’t enough to wipe out the memories of this sort of abuse. She’d seen it time and time again in her work…men turning away from their loved ones because that awful image simply wouldn’t go away.
Even from her angle she wasn’t a pretty sight.
That’s why she’d been thankful that the boy’s refusal to acknowledge her extended to turning away when Molly had spread her out like a starfish, tying her hand and foot to the stakes used for Rocky. If only Bull had pulled them up earlier, like she’d asked, it might have slowed Molly and Jeff down some.
She tugged on her bonds to loosen them for what seemed like the hundredth time since they’d gone and left her there.
Rowan shifted on the leather lounger, the envelope in his back pocket rustling annoyingly, the way it had all evening. With barely a glance at the franking mark from Rocky’s bank he’d shoved it out of sight. Any information from the victim’s bank manager seemed redundant. Let’s face it, he’d been too frustrated by Jo flicking him off to be bothered.
As Scott disappeared in the direction of the galley, Rowan fished the letter out of his pocket and tore the seal.
What the hell? Rocky had withdrawn fifty thousand dollars in cash from his account, the day before he died. There was something about the amount that rang a bell, but all the whiskey he’d drunk was taking its toll and he couldn’t retrieve the information from his dulled memory.
“Hey, you’ve got a visitor,” Scott called up to the saloon, arriving with Ginny in tow.
The kid’s face had gone into competition with her hair. Ginny puffed furiously and the infamous pink barrettes dangled dangerously close to the ends of her curls.
“What’s wrong, Ginny? You look done in. Take a seat and get your breath back.”
Love Under Fire Page 22