“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’m not too great at dealing with tears…not the way folks like you make a life out of comforting others.”
A watery chuckle left her lips. “You did perfect.”
Their gazes met and held. Laurel’s mouth went dry, and her breath came in small spurts. When had this particular shade of gray—warm and smooth and enveloping— become her favorite color? Their faces drifted toward each other…closer…closer…
“Mo-o-om!”
Caroline’s call rang through Laurel’s head. She jerked back and gasped. David’s head turned toward the doorway, and Laurel’s gaze followed his. Caroline trooped into the kitchen dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, hair in a ponytail.
“What are you doing on the floor?” She blinked at them.
“Um…oh…I don’t—”
“We were inspecting the damage,” David interrupted Laurel’s stammer. “These eggs are dried onto the walls and floor. It’ll take a lot of scrubbing to get them off.”
Laurel grabbed the edge of the counter and pulled herself to her feet. David rose beside her.
“I’m afraid with dried eggs scrubbing won’t be sufficient,” she said. “We’ll have to paint and may have to retile the floor.”
“Oh, man, what a bother!” Caroline frowned. “What smells so bad?”
“Sour milk,” Laurel answered, gesturing toward the empty jug in the middle of curdled glops on the floor.
“Milk?” David drew his brows together. “I thought Janice told the police she took your milk home.”
Laurel opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Janice had said that she’d come into the house to get the milk. Had she been lying to protect Caroline and her? It wasn’t like her friend to stray from the truth, but perhaps in her mind, the cause had been sufficient.
“I’ll ask her about it. In the meantime, we might as well do what we can to get this place livable again.”
Caroline’s shoulders slumped. “I thought you were going to hire some cleaners.”
“I may have to rethink that.” She shook her head as she decided to keep her answer vague. Explaining that they may not receive any insurance reimbursement would stress Caroline and might prompt an unwanted offer of financial assistance from David.
“Besides,” she went on, “it might be good therapy for us to roll up our sleeves and put a little sweat equity into our own place. We have to catalog missing items anyway, so we might as well pick up as we go.”
“I’m in.” Caroline stood to attention.
“Me, too,” David said. “The cleaning part anyway. And don’t tell me I don’t have to do this.”
“Well, you don’t.” A smile formed on Laurel’s face. “But I’m not going to turn you down.” David grinned, and Laurel’s heart performed cartwheels. She looked away quickly. “The cleaning supplies are in the pantry, but who knows what mayhem we’ll find in there.”
So much for defining boundaries with him as she’d intended to do today. How could she resist his sympathetic willingness to help?
David opened the pantry door. “What do you know? The vandal missed this area.”
Caroline clapped her hands, while Laurel thanked the Lord under her breath. In short order, she had handed out cleaning implements and supplies and assigned duties. She gave herself the chore of the kitchen and sent her daughter and David to the living room and dining room. Caroline could catalog any missing items while the male muscle set furniture to rights. Meanwhile, the tough scrubbing jobs would give Laurel time to think.
On her hands and knees with scrub bucket by her side, she attacked the smelly milk puddles and dried eggs on the floor. What was up with Janice’s fabrication about coming in to get the milk and forgetting to reset the alarm system? Had she been here at all? If not, how did the security system get deactivated? There must be some other explanation than an outright lie.
Laurel would have been willing to swear that she’d armed the system when they left for her speaking engagement. Yet, the more she strained to recall every detail of their departure, the less she was sure of anything. Recent events blurred with dozens of other trips. But even if she had been the one to leave the security system unarmed, how would a prospective burglar become aware of her oversight, and how would they get into the house in the first place without damaging doors, locks or windows?
The spare set of keys on top of the refrigerator! Laurel hissed in a breath.
Of course, the burglar would have needed to be inside before he could access those. Or maybe, just maybe, he’d found a way to get them prior to the breakin. If that was the case, then their burglar and, theoretically, Melissa Eldon’s killer, could be someone she knew—someone she’d invited into her home. A coworker? A friend? A friend of a friend? There’d been that Labor Day barbecue she’d hosted for the SPC staff and their families. Lots of people had been in and out of the house, and she didn’t know everyone personally.
If the keys were missing, wouldn’t that suggest to Detective Berg and his partner that someone else would have had access to the house and to the trunk of her car? She hadn’t looked at those keys for close to a year and wouldn’t have known they were gone. Lots of people had second sets lying around that they never bothered with unless there was an emergency.
She righted an upended kitchen chair. Please, God, don’t let those keys be there. She dragged the chair to the refrigerator and climbed onto it. Holding her breath, she peered over the top of the fridge.
The layer of dust was downright intimidating. Janice’s mantelpiece had nothing on the top of Laurel’s refrigerator. There was no way anyone could move a set of keys and later replace them without creating telltale marks in the dust.
Laurel let out a long groan. There they sat, mocking her. This ring of keys held access to both the house and the car, and it hadn’t been moved. The only other person who had a key to the house was Janice, and even she didn’t have keys to Laurel’s car. Besides, she was the friend who had apparently lied to protect Caroline and her. No! She wasn’t going to start suspecting Janice of dishonesty. There had to be some other explanation. Janice was more than a friend. She was the sister Laurel never had. Janice had proved more than faithful over the years and deserved Laurel’s trust.
Besides, there was a worse implication for the presence of the keys, undisturbed, where she always kept them. Only the set of keys attached to the car remote control that was kept securely in her purse could have been used to access both the house and the trunk of her car.
The finger of suspicion pointed squarely back at her or Caroline—or both of them—and Laurel saw no way to prove their innocence.
*
“Of all the rotten tricks!” Caroline stood, pale and sober, surveying the keyboard of the small piano in the dining room. “Something sticky has been poured all over the keys.”
Stomach roiling, David looked over her shoulder. In his book, sabotaging a musical instrument was lower than low, but venting his anger in front of Caroline wouldn’t help her deal with her feelings. Neither would downplaying the damage.
“You’re right,” he said in even tones. “There’s a sick mind at work here.” He brushed a finger across a key, then smelled the residue on his finger. “Honey, I think. It’ll be a nasty job to clean up, particularly between the keys. You’ll need to hire a professional. I’ll give my office assistant a call and have her track someone down who won’t charge you an arm and a leg.”
“Thanks, Mr. Greene.” A smile touched her face, then faded. “I keep wondering how we’re going to get through this. Everything looks so bad.”
David patted her shoulder. “I don’t pretend to know how, but I do know Who. In some form or fashion we may not be able to fathom right now, God will bring good out of what someone meant for evil.”
The small smile reappeared. “I’ve also heard that sometimes we have our part to do in order to make that happen.”
“Then let’s get busy.”
Together, they attacke
d the mess, armed with a dustpan for scooping up broken glass, multiple garbage bags and old-fashioned muscle and effort. Some of the wall art was salvageable, but none of the frames. The television was a goner, too, but the DVD player had been spared. Knickknacks were mostly in pieces.
“I hope none of these were keepsakes,” David said, holding up a decapitated china figurine.
Caroline frowned and let loose one of those expressive sighs teenagers the world over have perfected. Evidently, the figurines of women in elegant gowns—five of them—had been special.
“Those were Janice’s. Mom admired them, so Janice gave them to Mom for a birthday present the first year she was our neighbor. Mom thought the world of her ‘elegant ladies’ as she called them.”
Heart heavy, David added the figurines to the contents of a garbage bag. “So you and your mother moved to this neighborhood first?”
“We’d been here a couple of years when Janice and her husband bought the house next door. It had stood vacant for a while, but they fixed it up. Mom had to do the same for this place. It was kinda dumpy when we got it. Not run-down, but the decor was totally last century.” The final words came with an eye roll.
David chuckled, then grunted as he righted a tipped easy chair. “Your mom must be handy with a paintbrush and savvy about home decorating.”
“She can even wield a mean hammer—just don’t trust her with a cook pot.” Caroline laughed. “Since we’re putting things in order, let’s rearrange the furniture.”
“Your wish is my command, milady.” David winked and Caroline giggled. “Grab one end of the sofa. We’ll set it upright and then you show me where you want it.”
Of course, Laurel might pitch a fit and make them un-rearrange, but the extra work was worth it to make the teenager happy for a little while. Actually, he should be honored Laurel had assigned him to work with Caroline. Laurel must have decided he was at least somewhat trustworthy if she allowed him to be in the same room alone with her child.
Progress in one area called for progress in another, but his gut pinched together as he cast about in his mind for a way to fish for information. What kind of a louse stepped in to help so he could get closer to clues? He did care about Laurel and Caroline, but he also needed to uncover the truth, and he was a long way from ready to let anyone in on the common denominator between the two dead women.
They wrestled the sofa into its proper orientation. The cushions remained strewn on the floor, but that was an easy fix. He grabbed one and tossed it to Caroline for positioning.
“You’re a good kid, smart, hardworking. Anybody can see that. But school can be a pain for other reasons. Do I get the vibe that’s what’s going on with you?”
Caroline scowled as she scooped up another cushion. “It’s not schoolwork so much as people.”
“People? Other kids? You’re not being bullied, are you?”
“Nothing like that.”
Her cheeks reddened as she turned and deposited the cushion on the couch. The haste of her answer and the fact that she avoided meeting his eyes suggested otherwise.
“If someone is picking on you at school, you should tell your mother.”
The girl snorted and whirled toward him. “And have the parental tsunami unleashed on every unsuspecting student, teacher and administrator in the place? The survivors would never speak to me again!”
David bent and retrieved the last cushion—part of his strategy not to be caught smiling at the teenage drama. Not that bullying was a laughing matter. Quite the opposite. And it certainly wasn’t something that Caroline should continue to deal with on her own. She needed to talk to the appropriate people, and the first appropriate person was Laurel, not him. But he could understand her fears that Laurel might go overboard. He could tell she was a very protective mother, and she wouldn’t sit idly by if she thought her daughter was being harmed. She also might not stop to consider that drawing too much attention to herself was the last thing Caroline wanted or needed.
He straightened and handed Caroline the last cushion. She fit it into the empty space and plumped it into place with more violence than necessary.
“You don’t trust your mother to be discrete?” he said softly.
She plopped onto the sofa and crossed her arms, lower lip drooping in the suspicion of a pout. “She’ll mean to, but it won’t turn out that way. She’s a crusader and gets hyper when someone is being mistreated, especially if that someone is me.”
David eased onto the sofa beside the girl. “So someone is bothering you.”
“Not someone. Someones. And it’s not bullying. It’s more like…pressure.” She kept her gaze averted and her voice to a near whisper.
“Pressure to do what?”
“Go out with a guy I don’t like.”
“Your mother allows you to date?” David’s eyebrows strained toward his hairline.
“Of course not.” She whipped her head toward him, eyes wide. “But some of the girls meet boys they like at the mall and stuff. They say they’re going to hang out with friends, and then they just don’t tell their parents that they split off when they get there to hang with a guy.”
“Your friends are pressuring you to do that…and with someone you don’t like?”
“Not my friends. His!”
Comprehension settled over David, and he sat quietly for several heartbeats. “So this boy likes you and wants you to hang out with him at the mall, but you’ve told him you’re not interested, so he’s got his buds pestering you to give in.”
Caroline didn’t say anything, just stared at her toes and nodded.
“That’s got to be hard to live with every day. Who is this jerk?”
“Just a guy you wouldn’t know.” The girl pressed her lips together.
David frowned. “You need to tell your mom. She’s your best ally in a situation like this. I’ll give you a day or two to spill and then I won’t be able to keep it to myself any longer. Your mother should speak to this kid’s parents before Thanksgiving weekend is over. And if that doesn’t work, she needs to go to the school administration.”
“You’re kidding me, right? I’m more likely to get disciplined than he is.”
“Why?”
“Because his dad practically funds our private school.”
“You don’t go to public school?”
“Mom thinks I’ll have a safer environment at a faith-based school.”
“Which one would that be?”
“Grace Academy, a couple miles from here. For once, I’m glad they don’t do bus service. That way I don’t have to deal with harassment on the way to and from school.”
“No buses? How do you get there?”
“The parents team together in rotating car pools. Personally, it seems like a pain for all concerned. Sometimes when it’s my mom’s turn she has a real hard time working it into her schedule. Sometimes she can’t. If it weren’t for Janice—”
“Did someone speak my name?” Laurel’s neighbor, wrapped in her tweed coat, popped into the room on a waft of chilly air.
“Janice!” Caroline leaped from the couch and ran into the woman’s open arms. “Did you sell a house today?”
“I think I might have, sugar.” Janice kept an arm around the teenager’s shoulder. “We’ll hear from the bank about financing right after the holiday weekend. Now I’m free to be your mom’s slave for the rest of the day.”
Caroline giggled.
“Where is she, by the way?”
The question was spoken to Caroline, but Janice’s gaze settled on David. A part interest, part loathing expression crossed her face.
“She’s in the kitchen,” he said before Caroline could answer. “Cleaning up spilled milk.”
He emphasized the word milk and narrowed his gaze. If this woman already found him disgusting, he might as well draw her ire on the milk issue, rather than putting Laurel in the position of antagonizing her friend with suspicions. Unfortunately, he couldn’t fool himself about having
purely self-sacrificing motives. He wanted answers for personal reasons.
Comprehension flowed into Janice’s eyes, and she smacked her forehead. “I can’t believe I forgot.”
She hustled toward the kitchen, and David followed, Caroline in his wake. Laurel was sitting on a chair next to the refrigerator, scrub brush in hand, bucket full of sudsy water by her feet, but it didn’t appear she’d made much progress on cleaning the floor.
Arms in the air, Janice did a slow turn in the middle of the mess. “Oooee, hon, I am so sorry. If I’d actually taken the milk, at least it wouldn’t smell like a sour cream factory in here.”
Laurel rose. “You didn’t take the milk?”
“Well, duh!” She gestured toward the empty jug. “I mean, I did come in after it, but I got a phone call from a client before I even opened the fridge. Big sale potential. He yacked my ear off so long I wandered on out without grabbing the milk. I thought I rearmed the alarm system. It’s so second nature, you know, but I must have been too distracted. Can you ever forgive me?”
Beaming, Laurel wrapped her friend in a hug. “With you, I can picture the whole thing happening. I did wonder for a few minutes if you’d lied in order to protect Caroline and me.”
Janice chuckled. “You know I’d wrestle an alligator for you two, but I draw the line at lying to the cops.”
“I’m glad about that.” Laurel clapped her hands. “Of course, you’re forgiven, but if you really want to do penance you can help me clean this up.”
“You got it, sugar. Let me run home and change into my grubbies.”
David and Caroline parted in the doorway as the woman hustled out between them.
“I knew it.” Laurel met David’s gaze. “A completely reasonable explanation, especially if you know her.”
“That’s great.” David smiled.
And it was—for the sake of Laurel’s friendship with someone she cared about. But Ms. Realtor wasn’t off his suspect list yet. Maybe Laurel hadn’t realized it yet, but if no other suspects emerged, she and Caroline remained squarely in the crosshairs of the investigation.
Love Inspired Suspense January 2014 Page 31