“After three o’clock,” Emily said. She pushed her chair back.
Sherrie put the cards down. “What happened to your watch, Morganna?”
“I’m just not wearing it today.” The evasion felt like a lie.
“And you forgot your engagement ring, too, I see,” Sherrie murmured.
From across the table Carol said, “If I owned a rock like that one, I’d never forget to put it on.”
“You did just forget it—right?” Sherrie said. “Because the rumor that’s flying around town says that every jewel you used to own is in a bank vault somewhere as security for a loan to keep Sloan afloat for a week or two longer.”
Emily said sharply, “That’s ridiculous.”
Morganna was relieved not to have to answer. What could she have said, anyway—that she didn’t know where her jewelry was or exactly how Sloan was putting it to use?
She saw Sherrie and Carol out and closed the front door behind them with relief. “No question, I have got to find something better to do with my time than bridge,” she muttered. “Can you stay a minute, Emily? I have something I want to show you.” She led Emily into the miniature room, where the circus-theme room box sat alone on a display pedestal.
Emily’s eyes widened. She carefully stepped closer.
Morganna tried to look at the room box as if she, like Emily, had never seen it before. The lion-cage bed, the popcorn-cart desk, the circus train which perched on its room-encircling track. But what she was really interested in was Emily’s reaction to the sculpted clay figure of a little boy, less than four inches long, who sprawled across the carpet looking at a comic book. He was complete with freckles, a scrape on his elbow, and mud encrusted on his infinitesimal running shoes.
Morganna reached around to the back of the room box and flipped a hidden switch. The train started to chug around the room, and the tiny carousel began to revolve and play carnival music.
But Emily was still looking at the doll. “So that’s why you were buying special clay. You’ve never done dolls before, so what made you decide to add one this time?”
Morganna shrugged. “Something Sloan said, I guess—about the scenes being chilly without people. I thought it was worth a try. I think I’ll give him a playmate, too. And maybe a dog. What do you think?”
“Do you have time? The ball’s only a couple of days off.” Emily didn’t wait for an answer. “About Sloan…I saw Millicent Pendergast at the country club today, Morganna. She told me she’s withdrawing Sloan’s invitation to host the Carousel Ball.”
“But she can’t do that,” Morganna protested.
“You know Millicent does whatever she wants where the Carousel Ball is concerned. She thinks she owns it. Her excuse is that she isn’t actually disinviting him, because he never formally agreed to be a host.”
“It was the night of the fire that she asked him. He’s had a few other things on his mind since then.”
“I mentioned that. I even suggested that she call him and ask. She said very virtuously that rather than bother him when he’s so busy, she’s just going to consider that he refused the honor.”
“Well, we’ll see what she says to me when I point out that if she’d invited him on time in the first place, instead of delaying for as long as humanly possible, she’d have had an answer long before the fire.”
“Morganna, you might not want to push it. Why do you think she told me what she was going to do?”
“Because she knew you’d pass it on to me, of course.”
“I don’t suppose she was doing it out of fondness for you, but she has handed you a good excuse not to show up at the ball. Sloan is busy, and—”
“Why wouldn’t we…You mean we might want to hide our heads because of that rumor Sherrie mentioned this afternoon?”
“It’s not the only one, honey. I’ve heard half a dozen more at least, and they’re even uglier. I have to get home. But I wanted you to be warned about Millicent and have a chance to think about what you’re going to do.” Her gaze rested on the room box. “And I want that, too. I wonder how much I’ll have to pay at the auction.”
“Good question,” Morganna mused. “Just don’t hold your breath about it being there, if Sloan isn’t welcome.”
As if her mention of his name had summoned him, Sloan was coming up the steps to the side door as Emily left. He looked tired, Morganna thought, and she wasted a moment wishing that she was on the same easy terms with him that her mother was. Abigail would probably have taken one look at him and ordered him to sit down so she could rub his neck.
Instead Morganna moved back from the door so he didn’t have to brush past her. “What’s happened?”
“They took Joel off the ventilator today.”
But that should be good news, she thought. “Does that mean he can talk?”
“He’s got a pretty sore throat from the tubes—but yes. He can talk.”
“So it’s all right now.”
“Not exactly. He told the investigator he doesn’t remember going into the building or walking into my office, much less turning on the lamp.”
“Shock, I suppose,” Morganna said. “It must have been so painful that his mind just blotted out the explosion. But surely he confirmed that he saw a man running away before he went inside?”
Sloan shook his head. “He doesn’t remember anything after he pulled up in front of the building. And the doctors say, considering the odd ways that amnesia works, he may never remember.”
And that meant he couldn’t confirm what he had told Sloan that night. “Now what?”
“I don’t know. The good news is that it appears you’re off the hook with the investigator, Morganna.”
She frowned. “He doesn’t suspect me anymore? How did that happen?”
Sloan’s smile held no humor. “Because now he seems to think I did it myself.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
MORGANNA said flatly, “That’s absolute nonsense. Burn your own building? Destroy your own business? Why?”
“He doesn’t seem to have settled on a precise motive. But the usual one is that the owner no longer wants to be involved in the business. Either it’s losing money, or he wants to sell but there’s no interested buyer, or he just wants to get cash as quickly as possible and collecting on insurance appears to be the fastest way.”
“Anyone who wanted a quick payoff from an insurance company would surely put a little more thought into making the fire look accidental,” Morganna mused. “And anyway, those things aren’t true with Sticks & Stones.”
Sloan shook his head. “No, but I suppose that’s why the investigator is still looking. His parting shot when we left the hospital was something about all the longstanding customers I’ve lost lately. I pointed out that he hasn’t seen anything yet—because I’m out of business for the foreseeable future, I’m bound to lose a whole lot more. The CEO of Furnishings Unlimited must be drooling about now. All he has to do is figure out who’s been buying from Sticks & Stones and move in on them while I’m dead in the water.”
“And the investigator thinks you did this on purpose? Maybe he needs to find a new job. Like teaching people how to write adventure stories—he seems to have a knack for constructing far-fetched plots. What kind of idiot does he think you are, anyway?”
Sloan started to laugh.
Morganna wrinkled her nose. “I meant that as a compliment.”
“I know you did. That’s why it was so funny.” The back of his hand brushed casually against her hair.
Morganna held her breath for an instant, but he didn’t follow up. “I was trying to say that if you’d been arranging a fire, the cause wouldn’t have been apparent.”
“Oh, he’s giving me credit for realizing how difficult it is to hide arson completely,” Sloan said wryly. “He seems to think I might have set an obvious fire, thinking that no one would seriously believe I could be that stupid.”
“But why would you have set up a trap in your own office? Why not just s
ettle for burning the building?”
“Perhaps because I was trying to throw suspicion on someone else by making myself look like a target.”
Morganna shook her head in disbelief. “By arranging a blast that could only be set off by turning on a desk lamp?”
“Touching any metal part of the lamp would have been enough to complete the circuit and turn on the bulb, actually.”
“It doesn’t matter exactly how it was triggered. My point is, whoever set it off had to be within an arm’s length of the lamp. If you were going to arrange what looked like a hit on yourself, wouldn’t you have figured out a way to touch it off without getting hurt?”
“I think he believes anyone who would set up that kind of a trap in the first place wouldn’t care who happened to get in the way. Besides, someone would be bound to go snooping on the boss’s desk sooner or later. Or I suppose I could have sent my secretary in to get something for me.”
Morganna shivered. She couldn’t even imagine someone who was inhuman enough to deliberately cause to any person the sort of injuries Joel had received. To do so without caring who was hurt—without having even the feeble excuse of wanting revenge against a specific person—was more than she could comprehend.
But this entire accusation was fiction, she reminded herself. No matter how plausible a story the investigator eventually managed to construct, there was no evidence to back it up. And without proof, the scenario was no threat to Sloan.
Except, of course, for the fact that the longer the investigator pursued blind alleys, the longer it would be until there was any settlement at all—and by that time, Sticks & Stones might be too far gone to resuscitate.
And except for the fact that suspicion could be an even more destructive force than fact was.
No matter how much the investigator might want to accuse Sloan of arson, he couldn’t possibly prove it—and so he was unlikely to make the charge at all. But just as the investigator couldn’t prove that Sloan had set the fire, Sloan would find it impossible to show conclusively that he hadn’t.
There were already half a dozen ugly rumors flying around Lakemont, Emily had said. And the trouble with a rumor was that it was difficult to deny. It was difficult to defend against, because any attempt to explain simply drew more attention to the original story. And it was difficult to weed out of the nooks and crannies where it lurked, ready to spring up again at any time.
On Saturday morning, Sloan finished reading the Chronicle’s newest story about the Sticks & Stones fire, folded the newspaper and laid it beside his breakfast plate, and picked up his coffee cup.
He wished he had sources as knowledgeable as those of the Chronicle’s reporter. Then he might at least have had a warning that the two men he’d terminated on the morning of the fire had proved to have solid alibis after all. Instead he’d found it out along with the rest of Lakemont. Why hadn’t the fire investigator told him?
So now what? Frustration made him unwilling to sit and wait, watching his business evaporate, while the investigation limped on. But he was damned if he knew what else he could do.
The dining-room door opened, and from the corner of his eye he watched Morganna come in. During the six months of their marriage, he could count on one hand the mornings when she’d actually come downstairs for breakfast. But of course she would have to choose the one day when he was at his lowest ebb and in no mood to play games. “Good morning,” he said, and raised his cup to his lips.
She took one look at him and said, “Let me have the newspaper.”
He handed it to her. “I don’t know why you’d think there’s something in it worth reading.”
“The fact that you haven’t noticed your coffee cup is empty is a dead giveaway that you have something new and important on your mind.” She opened the Chronicle with a snap and went straight to the story.
Sloan refilled his cup and watched her face tighten as she read it.
She hadn’t bothered to get dressed this morning, he noted. She wasn’t wearing any slinky purply-pink dressing gown today, though. She was wrapped from throat to toes in basic blue terry cloth. She probably thought it was just as nonrevealing as a nun’s habit.
And, to be fair, Sloan thought, it probably would be—to someone who had never seen her wearing the sexy purply-pink thing. Or a backless gown, a silky sweater, a short skirt, or a low-necked dinner dress—all of which, on Morganna, looked equally sexy. But Sloan had spent six months collecting views of Morganna and assembling them in his mind, and a thick blue terry-cloth robe wasn’t enough to block his mental vision.
To be perfectly truthful, he admitted, the nun’s habit wouldn’t have slowed him down much, either.
Morganna put the paper down with a slap. “Then who did Joel see running from the building?”
“You’ve gone straight to the heart of the problem. I don’t know.”
She frowned. “Who could it have been? Who could he possibly have mistaken for those men? Didn’t you say there was a homeless man living in the empty lot across the street?”
“He was there last summer. Now that it’s colder I’m sure he’s moved on.”
“That’s the answer,” Morganna said triumphantly. “He broke into the building to try to keep warm. Maybe he was trying to start up the heater in your office when—”
“With a lightbulb full of gasoline?”
“That is a problem,” she admitted. She propped her elbows on the table and put her chin in her hands. Then she frowned and looked around the room. “Hasn’t Mother come down yet? Her bedroom door was open.”
“She’s been and gone. She asked if she could borrow your car. I told her she could take the Jag but she said she’d rather drive yours. I hope you don’t mind.”
“That you gave her permission?” Morganna shook her head. “It’s your car more than mine anyway. I’m not the one who bought it.”
Her tone was perfectly casual. She hadn’t even stopped to think about what she was saying, he realized. She obviously wasn’t trying to start an argument. She wasn’t even accusing him of acting overbearing by not consulting her wishes. As far as she was concerned, she was simply stating a fact.
She’d have no doubt given the car back to him along with all of her jewelry, if she’d thought of it.
“Oh, I know where she is,” Morganna said. “She took her tiara to the jewelers.”
“Tiara?” Sloan asked doubtfully.
“There were a couple of stones loose when she got it out of the attic yesterday, so she had to rush it in for a repair before tonight,” Morganna said. He must have looked blank, for she added impatiently, “The Carousel Ball—remember?”
He’d forgotten all about it, Sloan realized. “It’s almost funny, in a painful sort of way—how things that used to seem so important suddenly lose all their meaning.”
Morganna tensed till she was almost rigid. “You’re not thinking of backing out, are you, Sloan?”
She looked as if it would be the end of her world if he did. And it was true that Lakemont society would certainly notice—and comment upon—a former queen of the ball who was stranded at the last minute without an escort because her husband had a thousand more important things to do than cater to her social pretensions.
But what did it matter to him what they said? His main reason for caring what society thought of him was that he wanted his children to someday have things easier than he had. But since Morganna had made it clear that the possibility of them ever having children was so slender it was invisible, he had no reason to put himself to any great effort on her behalf.
He opened his mouth to tell her he wasn’t going. It was only a dance, after all. Let someone else step in and fill his shoes, someone who might actually enjoy spending a good part of the evening making hypocritical small talk with girls who were barely out of their teens.
When he saw Morganna’s eyes, however, dark and wide in a face white with anxiety, he couldn’t say it. On the other hand, he was damned if he’d admit that
a wistfully pleading look had been enough to bring him to heel.
“Back out,” he said dryly, “and have to face your mother’s wrath? Not a chance.”
At the nurses’ station, Morganna learned that Joel had been moved from the trauma unit into a private room. She felt relieved by the news until she found the room and realized how much high-tech equipment still surrounded him, humming and clicking and beeping in a soft, almost syncopated rhythm. He was still obviously a very sick man.
He was asleep when she came in, and she tiptoed to the chair which stood beside his bed, and quietly sat down to wait. She’d stay for a few minutes, she decided, but if he hadn’t awakened by then she’d leave a note along with the flowers she’d brought and visit again another day.
He lay flat on his back. One leg was in a cast, his foot suspended from a bar above the bed. His head was tipped back and turned slightly away from the door so that from her chair Morganna saw him only in profile. The part of his face that she could see looked a bit swollen, but otherwise he appeared amazingly normal, considering what he’d been through. Far better than he had the night of the fire, she thought. The damage must have been much less extensive than it had looked on the first night.
Then she looked at his hands and wanted to cry. Splints and gauze bandages held each finger separate, and on one palm she could see shiny, deep red patches.
He stirred restlessly. “Who’s there?” he said gruffly. “Come around so I can see you.”
Of course, she thought. With his hands so restricted, he couldn’t easily move himself. She walked around the bed. “It’s Morganna, Joel. Sloan told me you were better and could have company now.”
She got her first good look at the rest of his face, and it took every bit of self-control she possessed not to show the shock she felt. He hadn’t escaped lightly after all; at the moment of the explosion, he’d simply had his head turned in such a way that one side of his face had taken the brunt of the blast. That half was badly swollen, angry red, and blistered. Patches of his hair had been singed, and one eyebrow had completely disappeared, leaving him looking quizzical.
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