by Jenna Mills
“This isn’t a game,” he said very quietly, but as her eyes flared, the lie echoed like a shout. It was a game. He was with her for one reason and one reason only: to nail Marcel Lambert. When the bastard was behind bars, this pretend alliance would fall away, leaving only the residue of lies.
“Five minutes,” he said, pivoting toward the door. “And then I’m outta here.”
The sound came first, that of shuffling from the windows toward the right. Then the voice, soft and young. Nervous. “D-don’t go.”
He reached for the doorknob, but before he could turn it, Evangeline put her hand to his. “No.” Her voice was soft, her touch forceful. “You’ll scare her.”
He stilled at the words, hated that she was right.
“Let me,” she said, and when he twisted back to her, when he saw the calm warmth that had once been his hallmark glowing in her eyes, he knew if anyone could coax the girl into talking, it was Evangeline.
But he didn’t release her hand. He curled his fingers with hers and led her toward the grimy windows.
“Don’t be afraid.” She spoke to the girl, but her eyes met Gabe’s. “We’ll play this by your rules.”
Motioning for Evangeline to step closer, he made himself wait two steps behind.
“Y’all aren’t the first, you know,” the girl said, and Evangeline stopped abruptly, shooting a quick glance at Gabe. He nodded, gestured for her to ask the question.
“Not the first to what?”
Beyond her, the first traces of an afternoon thunderstorm darkened the horizon. With it the breeze rushed through the old columns, rattling the panes of the window. “To come here,” the girl said. “Ask questions about Darci.”
Gabe tensed.
“Is that why you’re scared?” Evangeline stood just outside the window now. “Is that why you wanted to meet here and not in the city?”
“Rosemunde says they’re still here, even if I can’t see them. That they’re watching.”
The way they watched Gabe. Silently. From the shadows. He felt them, even if he hadn’t seen them. They were getting bolder. Last night they’d tipped off Evangeline. Today they’d blown out his tire.
“Who?” Evangeline asked. “Who’s here?”
“The men,” the girl said, and her voice shook. “The ones who know who killed Darci.”
And who wanted to make damn sure no one stepped forward to strengthen the prosecution’s case.
Gabe stepped closer, but Evangeline held up her arm and shook her head. “What do they want?”
A shadow shifted. “They came to the bakery, asking questions and showing pictures, said it was too bad about Darci, that it sure would be a shame if she wasn’t the only one to meet her maker earlier than expected.”
The words ground through Gabe. He stepped to Evangeline and put his hand to the small of her back. “That’s not going to happen,” he vowed with a roughness his poker buddies wouldn’t have believed possible, not from cool, calm, always-in-control, Fontenot.
“I’m not—” He broke off, remembered he was supposed to be Russell Rae the friend of Darci’s, not Gabe the avenger. “Sheriff Savoie won’t let that happen.”
“Did…did she seem scared to you? The last time I talked to her, she seemed so happy….”
The sadness in the girl’s voice got to him. She’d been Darci’s friend. She’d loved her. The thought of those final moments, when Darci had clawed against the hands wrapped around her throat…
Gabe knew what those thoughts did to a person.
“Things spun out of control fast,” he said, and the gentleness came easily. Saura had seen Darci at a party a few days before her death. Wide-eyed, she’d said. Skittish.
“I don’t think she knew she was in danger,” Evangeline added, but they both knew that was a lie. Darci had called D’Ambrosia the morning of her death.
“Not until the very end,” Evangeline added.
“Did she say anything to you?” Gabe asked. “About him?”
Above the increasing caw of the birds, he heard the girl’s sharp intake of breath. “Marcel?” Gabe could practically see her making the sign of the cross—not in fear, but adoration. “He didn’t do it. He couldn’t have.”
“How do you know that?” Evangeline’s voice was calm and reassuring, the way it always was when she cross-examined and bluffed.
“I—I saw them together,” Darci’s friend stammered. “He looked at her the way every girl wants to be looked at. And he promised…”
Gabe leaned closer. They’d gotten to her, the men at the country grocery or someone else on Lambert’s payroll. They’d compromised her. This was all some kind of clever setup or game, just like the meet the night before—“Promised what?”
“To take care of her,” she said softly, and inside the house, the shadows deepened, making it impossible to discern where she stood. “That’s why he…”
Marcel had taken care of Darci, all right. “Why he what?” Gabe asked.
Silence.
He narrowed his eyes, felt his heart slam. “Why he what?” But even as the words ripped from him, he knew there would be no answer.
“She’s gone,” Evangeline said.
“Like hell.” Gabe ran to the front door, put his hand to the knob and kicked it open. Inside, the tired old house groaned around him, the curved stairway to the right and the wide hall running through the center, the twin parlors on either side. “Why he what?” he shouted again.
She’d slipped. She’d almost told them something. He took off through the shadows toward the back of the house, through the ballroom to the dining room, where a single door flapped in the breeze. “Why he what?”
“Gabe.”
It was only his name; that was all she said. But the sound of it on her voice, all soft and sincere and…concerned, slipped through him like a slow slide of whiskey. He rejected the surge, didn’t let himself move when he felt her touch. She came up from behind him and put her hands to his back, as if she had every goddamn right to do so. Then she pressed her body to his, gentle, intimate. As if they were in this together.
“She’s gone.”
And for a jagged white moment, he didn’t know who the hell she meant—Darci’s friend, or the cutthroat attorney who’d lifted her mouth to his, even as she’d driven the knife into his back.
“He got to her.” His throat burned on the words. He stared beyond the back porch, where the sprawl of oaks sloped down to the lazy bayou. “She’s scared out of her mind.”
“She is,” Evangeline agreed, and the words feathered against the side of his neck. “But that doesn’t mean she’s lying.”
He turned to her without thinking, raised his hands before he could make himself stop. Still he didn’t touch, didn’t let himself. But he could do nothing about what he saw in her eyes, the dark, dark swirl. The uncertainty.
The need.
“Maybe she’s just confused,” she said as the breeze blew a few strands of hair against her mouth. “Maybe she’s just trying to make sense out of what happened.”
“Then she’s a fool,” he said, stripping every shred of emotion from his voice. That had been his hallmark, his trademark. No emotion, strip it all away. Say what had to be said, do what had to be done, then walk away from the carnage, move on, don’t look back.
Even if something dangerously close to hurt flashed in Evangeline’s eyes.
“Let’s go.” He closed the door and headed toward the front of the house. “There’s nothing here.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
He should have kept walking. He should have kept straight on for the truck and gotten inside, not looked back. But the note of discovery made him turn.
She stood where he’d left her, by the back door with her flyaway shirt blowing in the breeze, hair still stuck against her lips. But in her hand she held a business card.
“Dot’s Bakery,” she said, flipping it over. Her eyes met his, a slow smile curved her lips. “It’s a map.”<
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On the outside it looked like an old hunting cabin. The wood was weathered, the foliage overgrown. Vines climbed the front. Ferns sprang up around the foundation. A few simple white flowers bloomed foolishly. And the live oaks sprawled in all directions. It was like stepping into a still life.
Evangeline let Gabe approach first, knowing that it was somehow important. He’d spoken little since they’d left the plantation. For the most part he’d kept a hand on the wheel and his eyes on the road. Taking the three steps leading to the Acadian-style porch, he strode toward the door. But then he stopped and turned toward an artful arrangement of clay pots. Seven of them, four different sizes. They all contained dead plants. Annuals, she would guess from the weathered stems. Pansies.
Their gazes collided, and the shock curled clear down to her toes. He was a man of Armani suits, leather briefcases and Italian shoes, but somehow the low-riding blue jeans and grease-stained ivory button-down looked…right. And for a fractured moment, she could almost see him pulling a hose to the pots and watering the flowers.
The image jarred her. She’d prepared relentlessly, had forced herself to plan through every scenario—to confront Gabe, to battle him. To bring him down.
But, God help her, it had never occurred to her that she would like him. Want him. It shouldn’t have been possible, not with Jimmy rotting in Angola and juror number three’s daughter being raised by a shattered grandmother.
But there it was, there it had been from the start. When he looked at her, her throat tightened. In disgust, she’d told herself. Contempt. Maybe even anticipation. For making sure he paid for his sins, she wanted to believe, but not this, not seeing him on an old weathered porch in the middle of nowhere, watering plants.
It was too simple, too…innocent.
Shoving the unwanted image aside, she joined him on the wide porch and went for the door, stopped at the welcome mat. Not old and faded like everything else, but bright and cheery and…new.
Then she put her hand to the knob and turned, stepped inside and stopped.
The more the pieces fell together, the more they refused to fit.
Then Gabe was there, standing a step too close. “What the hell—”
As her eyes adjusted to the hazy light, she took it all in, the white lace curtains and the pink-and-cream braided rugs, the quaint arrangement of furniture and the state-of-the-art electronics. The photograph. “Darci…”
And Marcel.
In a small old-fashioned frame, the picture sat on a wicker table next to a cream sofa in a pattern of peach and buttery yellow hydrangeas. His arm was around her. She was leaning into him. They were both smiling.
Evangeline moved toward it, knew better than to touch it. Going down on a knee, she studied the image, looking for something dark or sinister lurking beneath the surface.
Gabe kept going, taking long hard strides toward the closed door at the back of the room. Using his shirttail, he put his hand to the knob and pushed inside.
Beyond him she could see the bed, big and brass with a white lace canopy draped over the top. Joining him, she took in the rest of the small room, the pine dresser with a vase of dead flowers on top, the wood trunk at the foot of the bed, the bookcase filled with paperbacks and more framed photographs—all of Darci and Marcel.
Gabe swore softly. “Well, isn’t this cozy?”
“This wasn’t in the police report,” Evangeline said. There’d been no mention of a cabin on the outskirts of Wild Berry, belonging to Darci or Marcel. He was a married man. He had a house on the lake in the city, a summer home that had been destroyed by Katrina near Pass Christian, Mississippi. A condo in Aspen. Both had been searched. Nothing linking the restaurateur to an inappropriate relationship with a woman young enough to be his daughter had been found.
But this…
Anticipation quickened through Evangeline—the evidence here would keep the investigative team busy for days. “We need to call D’Ambrosia,” she said, reaching into her purse for her phone.
Gabe’s hand to her wrist stopped her. “Not yet.”
She twisted toward him, saw the hard look in his eyes, and before he even took the first step, she knew that he had no intention of waiting for anyone else. He broke from her and crossed to the dresser, stabbed his hand into the wrinkled fabric of his shirt. Then he yanked open a drawer. And another. From inside the third he pulled out two pillowcases—peach in a rose chintz pattern—and tossed one to her. “You want the bedroom or the front room?”
The television alone would set someone back at least three grand. No way had Darci furnished the cabin on her own—if she’d ever even been here to begin with.
The stack of CDs seemed right, though, a collection of pop and country, with two popular new-age bands thrown in. And the celebrity-gossip magazines made sense. The latest Cameron Monroe book, Secret Sins, struck him as ironic.
In the kitchen he found two boxes of green tea, one with five tea bags missing, pomegranate juice in the refrigerator next to a pricey bottle of white wine and a six-pack of beer, none missing. The cheese was molded, the sandwich meat reeked. But there was no milk, nothing with a date that would indicate how long the cabin had stood empty.
“Gabe.”
He turned to find Evangeline standing in the doorway to the bedroom. With late afternoon, the light filtering through the windows had faded, leaving shadows to spill around her.
“You need to see this,” she said, and the stillness deepened, not gently as it had before, but with a hard, jagged slice straight through him.
She was wrong. He didn’t need to see this, didn’t want to see this, her standing in the doorway to a bedroom, looking soft and sweet and goddamned innocent, with wisps of cinnamon hair spilling around her face and anticipation glowing in her eyes.
But he closed the refrigerator and moved toward her, followed when she led him to a chest at the foot of the bed and went down on her knees. Envelopes lay scattered across the floor, two notebooks, a collection of poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
“You’re not going to like this,” she said, using the pillowcase to hand him a stack of what looked to be letters.
He took them from her, careful to keep the chintz between his hand and the paper. The sound of the anxious birds beyond the window faded as he looked down at the first, taking in the bold, masculine handwriting—and the soft, love-struck words.
…like sunshine in my otherwise dreary life…
…take you away from all this, from here, the pain and the memories, to keep you safe, keep you mine…
He slapped the page aside and looked at another, and another.
…when you touch me, my world stands still…
…your smile gives my life meaning…
He glanced up and found Evangeline watching him, and knew her thoughts mirrored his. “A jury will eat this stuff up,” she said.
A hard sound broke from his throat. “If they don’t throw up, first.”
Her smile was soft, sad. “Keep going, there’s more.”
He did as she said and soon found the second handwriting, softer and prettier, but juvenile somehow; the letters large and carefully formed, the ink pink.
…don’t know what I’d do without you…
And all Gabe could think was, how damn convenient.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Evangeline said, swiping the flyaway hairs from her face. “For the defense, this stuff is golden. So why hasn’t it been found before now? Why didn’t Lambert’s team lead the cops here?”
Gabe dropped the letters and reached for the notebook. “Cover-ups take time.”
“Cover-ups?”
“We’re here now for a reason,” he said. “Someone wants us here.” Just as someone had wanted Evangeline at the warehouse the night before. “Someone wants us to find this stuff.”
“You think Lambert—”
“I know Lambert.” He just wasn’t sure why, yet. Or how all the pieces fit. “He’s smooth. He’s good. There’s no wa
y he would just sit on evidence like this….”
“He’s denied having the affair,” Evangeline pointed out. That was a big part of why they’d come to Wild Berry in the first place, to find evidence of the relationship.
“This,” she said, gesturing to the notebook in his hands, the gooey, high school-esque poetry written in a man’s hand, “blows the lid off that.”
“Maybe that’s what he wants.” Lambert’s claim that he and Darci were just friends was unraveling. The cops had a witness who’d seen them together. Allegedly even a photograph. The longer he clung to the lie, the more suspicion fell his way.
“You think he’s filling in the blanks,” Evangeline said, “before the jury does it for him.”
He flipped another page, tried not to laugh:
Vaster than the stars and deeper than the oceans…
Lambert knew he couldn’t keep his relationship with Darci a secret. This way, with the prosecution uncovering evidence that showed how much he loved her, he could shape the jury’s perceptions, himself, rather than allowing them to come to their own perverted conclusions. “Marcel Lambert, lovesick victim,” he muttered.
“Or hero.” The words were quiet.
He looked up and found her extending a single sheet of paper toward him. He took it, stared down at the more scrawled, but still juvenile, handwriting:
He won’t leave me alone. I told him we’re over, but he won’t accept no for an answer. Help me, Marci. Tell me how to make him leave me alone—
“Son of a bitch.” Gabe practically growled. “He’s good.”
“What if he’s innocent?” Evangeline asked, and the question twisted through him. It was the same one she’d asked the day before. “What if this is real?”
“It’s not.” Dropping the letter, he stood and strode to the window, where streaks of red swirled against a pale blue sky.
Reflected in the glass, he saw Evangeline move, saw her come to her feet and step toward him. He didn’t move, just watched her destroy the distance between them and tried not to drown on the scent of powder and vanilla.