She smiled apologetically, pushing her dark hair back from her face. “Sorry to bother you. But have you seen Regan? Regan Poole?”
“Why?”
She blushed, or maybe that was the sun on her face. “I thought . . . I saw you watching everyone, and I hoped you might have noticed where she’d gone.”
Steve shook his head. “Not why did you ask me. Why are you looking for her?”
“Oh.” This time she definitely blushed. “She’s supposed to ride back to the house with Paul. The limo’s waiting.”
Steve took his hands from his pockets. “She already left with the lawyer.”
Her brows drew together. “Macon Reynolds?”
“Yep.”
“You know him?”
She’d given him the name of Helen’s lawyer. Did she remember? “We’ve met,” he said. “Turns out he was a year behind me in school.”
“Right. This is Stokesville. Everybody knows everybody. So did you two have a little reunion party?”
“Not really. We didn’t exactly run with the same crowd in high school.”
“Which crowd was that?”
“Macon Reynolds,” he said carefully, “was one of those kids who drove their own cars and raided their parents’ liquor cabinets after school.”
A smile touched her lips. “And you didn’t drink and drive.”
Steve shrugged. “Not during football season. And the rest of the time . . .” He stopped. He wasn’t here to tell her the story of his childhood.
“The rest of the time,” she prompted.
This was Stokesville, he reasoned. Everybody knew everybody. What he didn’t tell her, she could learn from somebody else.
“I worked for my dad in the lumber yard.”
“Is he here?”
Steve looked out over the sunlit hill, his hands in his pockets. “He’s dead.”
“I know. Mama told me,” she added. “I meant, is he buried here?”
Memories of his father’s funeral crowded him like ghosts: his daughter’s warm weight, his mother’s drawn face, Teresa, slim and elegant in her good black coat . . .
“On the other side. In the low-rent district.”
“I’m sorry,” Bailey said. “It must be hard.”
“It was five years ago,” he said flatly.
“I don’t imagine you ever get over the loss of a parent.”
Grandma says I really need a mother. Maybe you could get married again.
“We manage,” he said.
Bailey bit her lip. “I wish Regan hadn’t gone with Mr. Reynolds.”
Steve pulled himself together. “You don’t like him?”
“I hardly know him. But Regan was supposed to ride with Paul. He’s waiting for her.”
Steve didn’t see what the big deal was. Unless Bailey couldn’t bear to disappoint her boss.
“So you go,” he suggested roughly.
“I’d rather not.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not family. It wouldn’t look right.”
True enough. According to Eugenia, folks in town were already speculating about Bailey’s role in the Ellis household, their talk fueled by Regan’s obvious hostility.
But he said, “You worry too much what people think.”
“That’s not true. I gave up caring what other people think in high school.”
He recalled the photo on her mother’s fridge, the skinny girl squinting at the camera with hope and defiance. She’d had enough confidence then to dream her own dreams. Enough courage to tackle New York. “So what happened?”
“Nothing happened. I have certain responsibilities now.”
He met her gaze. “To Ellis.”
“Well . . . yes.”
Disappointment pinched him. What the hell had he expected? Nothing. He knew where her loyalties and priorities lay.
And his.
“Better run along, then,” he said. “Tell him his stepdaughter took off with the lawyer.”
“I will.”
But she stayed rooted on the sunlit slope, pink-cheeked and warm and alive, while the dead stretched around them in all directions. A breeze teased a strand of hair across her face.
Steve fisted his hands in his pockets. “What are you waiting for?”
At his impatient tone, her chin came up. “How about a ride?”
“A ride,” he repeated without expression.
“I told you. I don’t want to take the limo with Paul.”
“How did you get here?”
Her gaze dropped. “In the limo with Paul. But Regan was with us.” She looked up at him through her lashes, and something stirred in his belly. “You could offer me a lift.”
He wasn’t here to flirt with her. “Knock it off. You’re not the type.”
“Excuse me?”
“The ‘I have always depended on the kindness of strangers’ act,” he said. “It’s not you.”
“Well, I wouldn’t have said you were the type to quote Tennessee Williams, either, so we’re even.”
She waited, as if she expected a response. But he didn’t have one to give her. Didn’t have anything to offer any woman.
Her smile faded. “Right. Never mind.”
She turned away.
Good, he thought. Let her go. He didn’t mix his personal and professional lives. He didn’t need her blundering in where she didn’t belong, blurring his careful boundaries.
On the other hand, she was a piece of the puzzle, part of the picture he was assembling of Helen Ellis’s life and death. And she’d been holding out on him last night. He was sure of it.
He watched her wobble down the hill, head high, heels sinking in the soft, bright grass, and felt as if the sun had ducked behind a cloud, leaving everything dim and cold.
“I’ll pick you up at the front gate,” he called after her.
She didn’t stop her march down the green slope. “Forget it. I don’t accept rides from strangers anyway.”
“So get to know me,” he replied.
She turned then, folding her arms to glare up at him. “What good will that do?”
No good at all.
Reason whispered he didn’t have to give her a lift to talk to her. He knew where she lived. He could set her down for a come-to-Jesus meeting at her mother’s kitchen table. Hell, he could drag her attractive ass down to the station and interview her in the presence of Margie Conner.
“It’s just a ride,” he said. Who was he trying to convince? Her? Or himself?
Bailey hesitated. “I’ll have to tell Paul.”
Right. Couldn’t forget old Paul.
“You do that,” he said, and stalked off to get his truck before either of them could change their minds.
IT was just a ride, Bailey reminded herself as she hurried toward the cemetery entrance. Headstones glittered in the sun. Tall groupings of cypress cast short, sharp shadows against the grass. Bailey’s face flushed. She was sweating. Glowing, her mother would have said, but Bailey had no illusions.
Beyond the heavy iron gate, Steve’s truck stuck out from the line of parked vehicles, as oversized and aggressively masculine as its owner.
Her steps slowed. Her heart beat faster.
He swung from the cab, big and dark in his loose-fitting suit, and opened her door.
“I can do that,” she protested automatically.
He slanted a look down at her. “Yeah, but why should you?”
She sidled past him. His white dress shirt practically steamed with heat. Her nipples, clearly unconnected to her brain and receiving signals from somewhere else, stood at attention. “Why should you?”
“Because it’s polite?” he suggested.
She climbed into the passenger seat, tugging on her skirt. She should have worn pantyhose. “Men use gestures of courtesy to establish status. If you open my door, I’m proceeding at your discretion. It sets you in a superior position to me.”
“Try telling that to my mother.”
“Excuse me?”
He looked up from her bare legs, a gleam in his eyes. “When I was a kid, my mother tanned my hide if I didn’t hold the door for her. If you want to call over her knee a superior position . . .”
Bailey relaxed enough to smile. After the heat outside, the air-conditioned cab felt like heaven. Sinking into the deep leather seat, she gave herself up to the luxury of being driven.
Steve slid into the seat beside her, his shoulders filling the cabin, his right knee jutting into space. Her space. She pressed her thighs together and shifted them toward the door. They drove a while in silence—not uncomfortable, but with a crackle to it like the static from the police radio in the dash. His square, strong hands rested easily on the wheel.
She cleared her throat. “Nice truck.”
He shot her a look. “I didn’t take you for a pickup girl.”
“A double entendre. Should I be impressed?”
His mouth quirked. “Just making an observation.”
“Contrary to what you may have heard in truck commercials and country songs, not all women go for men who drive trucks.”
“You never dated a guy because of his ride?”
She shook her head. “You have me mixed up with my sister.”
“I never dated your sister.”
He was probably the only football player at Jefferson High who hadn’t. So what?
“Why not?” she asked.
His grin spread. “Not interested.”
“Everybody was interested in Leann,” Bailey said with equal parts pride and resentment. Oh, you’re sisters, the teacher would say on the first day, looking up from her gradebook, obviously struggling to connect the beautiful fairy child from years ago with the squat brown dwarf before her. I hope you’ll do as well in school as Leann.
And she had. Academically, at least, Bailey had always done better than her sister. Better than poor Tanya Dawler, whose journal, continued in fits and starts over weeks of detention, was full of misspellings and complaints.
Bailey was a spelling whiz. But she skipped ahead in her reading, she argued with her teachers, she scribbled stories in class. She never made it look easy, the way Leann had. She never made people like her.
“Leann was the most popular girl in school.”
Steve frowned. “Blond, right? Cheerleading squad?”
“And homecoming court,” Bailey said, making an effort to be generous.
“She was a freshman.”
“Only for one year.”
“My senior year. She was too young.”
Leann was almost nine years older than Bailey.
“Or you were too old,” Bailey said tartly.
Steve grunted. “You would know. Your boss is what, fifty-two?”
“Forty-seven. And what does that have to do with anything?”
“I’m just saying. He’s too old for you.”
She clutched her fat, zippered purse in her lap. “I didn’t know there was an age limit for employers.”
“Is that all he is?”
She glared. “Is that a personal question, or should I call a lawyer?”
“You could just answer,” he suggested mildly.
“I thought we’d been over this.”
“You told me you worked for him. Your mother told me you weren’t romantically involved. Which is what you would have told her whether you were or not.”
Bailey felt a hot pricking in her chest like a smattering of cinders.
She’d known she was a suspect. She’d accepted that he had a responsibility to investigate her.
But he had no right to lay her open for his judgment, to dissect her feelings, feelings she had never once, in two years, acted upon.
“Not,” she said.
“You can tell me if you were.” His voice was deep. Confiding. “No shame in not coming right out with it.”
She recognized the burning in her chest as anger. She took a breath, to steady herself and her voice.
“No shame,” she repeated.
“Nope.”
“In lying.”
He shrugged. “A lot of people are reluctant to talk to the police.”
The anger flared, brief and bright. She damped it. “What about adultery? Any shame in that?”
He hesitated. She had the impression he was choosing his words carefully. “You’re not married. You’ve been all alone in the big city for a couple of years. Must have been pretty overwhelming at times. It’s not hard to see how you might imagine yourself attracted to an older man.”
The anger collapsed and fed on itself like a building in flames. She could hardly breathe. This was horrible. Horrible, because it was true. Or close enough, anyway.
“You have no idea what it was like,” she said, her chest burning, her throat tight.
“Why don’t you tell me?”
No way.
She stared through the windshield without seeing anything. She’d never told anyone how she felt—how pressured, how discouraged—as her work piled up and her social life dwindled. Months and opportunities slipped away while she divided her evenings between the uncorrected manuscripts she carted home on the subway and the unsuitable men she tried to avoid bringing home at all. Men who seemed cute enough or nice enough or intelligent enough until—surprise!—they revealed a penchant for cocaine or spanking or women’s underwear.
She had thought working for Paul would be better. She had hoped her schedule as his assistant wouldn’t drain her time and creative energy the way the stacks of unread, un-proofed manuscripts had done. She had imagined indulging a crush on her married boss was less damaging than endless, joyless dates with hopeless men.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Three strikes, and you’re out.
She took a deep breath. “Okay, maybe I was attracted, a little. But I never did anything about it.”
Even in her own ears, that sounded lame.
“Why not?”
Because she had morals. Standards. Didn’t she? But with all her self-deceptions and self-justifications scraped bare, she wasn’t prepared to argue the point.
“He’s married. Was married,” she corrected. “And he’s my boss.”
“So? It wouldn’t be the first time an employer took advantage of an employee.”
“Paul wouldn’t do that.”
Steve raised his eyebrows without looking away from the road. “Seems to me he does it all the time.”
Bailey winced. She wanted to protest she didn’t know what he was talking about. But she did. Steve already thought she was a doormat and a slut. No point in convincing him she was an idiot and a liar, too.
“That’s different,” she mumbled. “Anyway, Paul was devoted to Helen.”
“Helen’s dead.”
She hugged her arms. “I didn’t kill her.”
“I’m not saying you did.”
“But you’re thinking it.”
The truck turned a corner. Almost there. Her hands tightened on her purse. The buckle dug into her palm.
“I’m keeping an open mind,” he said.
She stuck out her chin so it wouldn’t tremble. “Yeah? Is that why you’re questioning me about my relationship with Paul?”
“Maybe I’m trying to warn you.”
Her heart thumped. “Warn me about what?”
“Keeping bad company.”
“That sounds like something my mother would say,” she said, forcing herself to speak lightly.
He shrugged. “I thought it sounded better.”
“Better than what?”
He looked at her with flat, dark eyes. Cop’s eyes. Her breath clogged in her throat. “Accessory after the fact.”
TEN
“WHO invited Officer Grumpy?”
Regan’s loud voice attracted glances, scandalized and indulgent, from the funeral crowd surrounding the buffet table. Paul wondered how many of Stokesville’s senior citizens were there for the free food and how many had come for the gossip.
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