by Kylie Logan
“That,” I said.
“And that is . . . ?”
I stopped and turned to him. “You were waiting for me.”
A smile inched up the corners of his mouth and made his eyes spark. “I’ve been waiting for you all my life.”
I somehow managed to control a groan, but I could do nothing about the rolling of my eyes. “Corny,” I told him.
“But true.”
It was my turn to cross my arms over my chest. I settled my weight back against one foot, too, the better to look up and look him in the eye. “Not true. You told me once that you only date Irish women.”
“And you told me that since you grew up in the foster system and don’t know your biological family, you don’t know what your ethnic background is.” The pat he gave me on the shoulder might have been interpreted as nothing more than friendly if his hand didn’t linger so long. “You’re gorgeous. You’re intelligent. You’ve got determination and spunk and character. I’ve decided you must be Irish.”
If I knew whether he was kidding, the statement wouldn’t have knocked me so much for a loop. If he knew I knew he wasn’t kidding, he would have taken advantage.
I was leaving.
I was going to work for Senator Katherine Stone. Or at least that’s what I hoped.
I couldn’t afford entanglements. Or regrets. I couldn’t risk getting into something I knew it wouldn’t be easy to get out of.
And the something I had in mind with Declan would have been very hard to get out of.
I pasted on a smile that probably wasn’t completely convincing. “Lucky me. Suddenly Irish. Does this mean I get invited to all your family parties?”
“You’re always invited to my family parties. And you’re right . . . lucky you. It means I can officially date you now.”
I started for my car. “We always seem to be together—doesn’t that count as dating?”
“I was thinking less murder investigation, more dinner by candlelight.”
When it was with the right guy, I liked dinner by candlelight.
Only I was afraid Declan was a little too right.
I unlocked my car door and looked at him over the hood, where he stood near the passenger door. “Are you coming with me?” I asked him.
“Does that make this a date?”
I unlocked the door for him anyway.
Declan hooked his seat belt and settled back. “So we’re going to check out the rest of Rocky’s house, eh?”
I waited to give him a sidelong glance until I’d backed out of my parking space and got out onto the street. “You know that. Sophie must have told you. Just like she must have called you and asked you to come along.”
“Not really.” He scratched a hand behind his ear. “She actually walked over to the shop this morning and told me what you had in mind. No calling involved.”
At least he got big points for honesty.
I waited my turn at a four-way stop. “And did she say why she thought it was important for you to be there?”
“Two heads are better than one, remember. And two people will make the searching go faster.”
“Only that’s not what Sophie said, is it?”
His grin warmed up the small space between us. “You know her well.”
“She’s easy to know. With Sophie, what you see is what you get.”
“I like that in a woman.”
It was my turn to grin. “Maybe you should date Sophie.”
Declan laughed. “My parents would never approve. Charnowski! She’s definitely not Irish!”
We drove in silence for a few minutes before I asked, “So what did she really say? I mean, to get you to come along. Sophie didn’t tell you that I needed help searching the house.”
“But she did say she didn’t like the idea of you being in a house where a murder had recently been committed.” Declan’s smile settled. “She cares about you, Laurel.”
It was true and I knew it. But when I took the time to think about it, I always ended up annoyed. Years of living in the system, and it wasn’t that I didn’t trust such straightforward motives, it was just that it was completely impossible for me to understand them.
My answer to the problem was simple—I just didn’t think about it, and to prove it, I concentrated on the road ahead.
We arrived at Pacifique just a little while later, but no sooner were we up the long, winding drive than I slammed on the brakes.
“That’s her!” I pointed to the front of the house and the woman in the ratty jeans and maroon cardigan who was standing at the door. “That’s Minnie Greenway.”
When I made to jump out of the car, Declan put a hand on my arm to stop me. “You think she’s dangerous?”
“I think she’s as nutty as a fruitcake. But I don’t care. I want to know what she’s doing here.” I shook him off, got out of the car, and strode up to the front door. It wasn’t until I got there that I realized Minnie had a phone in her hand and a wide (and dare I say it, kooky?) smile on her face.
“What’s up, Minnie?”
She chortled. “Calling her.” She looked at the phone, not at me, and punched in a series of numbers. “That ought to drive her around the bend! I keep calling. And I let it ring three, four, five times. Then I hang up!” She did just that and laughed her head off. “That ought to teach her a lesson!”
“Teach who?” Declan had followed me up to the front door, but when he asked the question, Minnie barely spared him a look.
“Oh, won’t this just get her little French knickers in a twist!” Minnie dialed the number again and from somewhere inside the house, I heard the faint ring of Rocky’s phone. “Three, four, five . . . six this time!” Again, she disconnected the call and laughed like a loon. “She’ll get tired of getting up to answer the phone. She’ll get mad.”
If Rocky had been there, I actually might have been annoyed. The way it was, I simply felt sorry for Minnie. “Rocky’s not home,” I told her.
It took her a second to process the information. “What?”
“She’s not home,” I told Minnie. “That’s why we stopped by. You know, to check on the house and pick up the mail and any phone messages she might have.”
“Of course she’s home!” Minnie dialed again, but this time, she didn’t let Rocky’s phone ring nearly as long. She hung up, and Minnie’s lips folded in on themselves. “That will teach her!” she grumbled, and without another word, a look at the house, or another dialed call, she turned around and walked away.
Declan watched her go. “I see what you mean about her being a little off.”
“And a little obsessed with Rocky, too, I think.”
Minnie didn’t go down the drive, she headed across the front lawn, and we watched until she disappeared into a grove of flaming red maples.
“I don’t know,” Declan said. “She might be obsessed, but she doesn’t exactly strike me as a calculating murderer.”
“Maybe not.” I fished in my purse for Rocky’s key. “But remember those notes on Rocky’s calendar. I think we might have just found the source of all those harassing phone calls.”
Chapter 9
I knew Tony Russo had stopped over at Pacifique after I called him and told him about the date book; he’d gotten the key from Sophie. From the looks of the house, he hadn’t touched another thing. Either that, or he was the world’s most orderly cop.
We were upstairs, me and Declan, and I had never been on the second floor of the house and needed to get my bearings.
“Bedrooms that way,” I said, pointing down either side of the hallway in front of us from where we stood at the top of the stairway. “Bathroom at the end of the hall, I bet.” Then again, the SALLE DE BAIN sign on the door was a dead giveaway. “Where do you want to start?”
Declan stepped around me and peeked into the room nearest to us. “Rock
y’s bedroom is probably the most logical place,” he said. He poked a thumb toward the room he’d just looked into. “That’s not it. It’s more of a library. Tons of books, an easy chair, a reading lamp.”
Tons of books.
And they’d all need to be looked through.
I didn’t even realize I’d sighed until Declan put a hand on my arm. “Hey, we don’t have to do it all in one day. That’s the good thing about Sophie being the executrix. We’ve got access to the house.”
I walked down the hall and looked into the next room. The walls were covered with framed botanical prints, and there were two chairs across from each other and a small table with a stained glass lamp on it over on the far side of the room. In the center of the room was a large table with a chair pulled up to it.
There wasn’t a single thing on the table.
“That’s weird, don’t you think?” I strolled into the room and touched a finger to the table. “Why have a table and not use it?”
“Who says she didn’t use it? Maybe Rocky used it all the time. Maybe sometime before she died, she just cleaned up whatever it was she was doing.”
I gave Declan a look (head dipped, eyebrows raised, mouth pulled up at one corner) and he got the message.
“Okay. You’re right.” He joined me inside the room. “If she used it all the time, you’d expect this room to be just like the rest of Rocky’s house. And downstairs, things are crammed one on top of the other.”
“And this table is as clean as a whistle.” Don’t ask me what I thought I’d see, but I bent so that I could look at the tabletop in the light that streamed into the room from windows on the opposite wall. “You think the cops have dusted for prints?”
“After that date book you found, I’m sure they did.”
“Do you suppose they found anything?”
It was his turn to give me a look. “Tony’s a friend, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to spill the beans to me when it comes to his investigation.”
I got it. I really did.
Which didn’t mean I believed it.
“So what did he say about the date book?” I asked Declan.
“That he’d look into it.”
“And what did he say about Minnie Greenway?”
She was long gone, but he glanced out the window anyway, toward the lawn and the trees and somewhere in the distance, the farm next door where crazy Minnie lived and made harassing phone calls and her husband, Otis, worried about her. “He said people around here know who she is. She’s got a reputation.”
“For being loony.”
“For making threats.”
I’d been checking out a hand-colored engraving of a rose, and I spun to face Declan. “And you didn’t tell me?”
“I just did.”
“She’s looking more and more like a suspect to me.”
“So, what, you’re going to march on over there and arrest her? That’s what the police are for, Laurel. They’ll get to the bottom of this.”
He was right.
I knew he was right.
It bugged the heck out of me.
“So why should we even bother?” I asked him.
“Because if we don’t look through what’s here, Sophie’s going to have to do it, and something tells me that would break Sophie’s heart.”
Right again.
“And if we find anything that can help Tony out, that’s a bonus,” he added.
“So we’ll look!” But not in that room. Even in the few minutes we’d been in there, I knew that room had no secrets to reveal.
The third room we checked had been turned into a guest room with a four-poster brass bed and a lovely little vanity painted white and highlighted with gold touches. As far as I knew, Rocky didn’t have a lot of visitors, but still, the room had a lived-in look, like she sat in there often, maybe toying with the tiny Limoges boxes on the dresser, or arranging and rearranging the French porcelain vase painted with roses and the set of figurines dressed in ruffles and lace that sat on a table near the window.
I breathed in deep and caught the scent of Chanel No. 5 still lingering in the air.
“What happens to it all?” I asked Declan over the ball of emotion that suddenly blocked my throat.
“You mean Rocky’s possessions? The house?” He didn’t do inscrutable well, but I gave him points for trying. “We’ll have to wait and see what the will says.”
There was no use debating. He’d only fall back on the ol’ attorney-client privilege argument again.
“Will that be after the memorial service?” I asked him.
I had no doubt he’d already heard the details, just like I had no doubt everyone in Hubbard knew them by now. Sophie was hard at work planning Rocky’s memorial service. It would be held there at Pacifique, out in the gardens. It was planned for Wednesday.
Like it or not, I had been smart to put off Fletcher Croft and Senator Stone, and now that the service was scheduled, I wouldn’t wait for Croft to call me, I’d call him and find another day for the interview.
“You doing the food?” Declan asked.
He was talking about the memorial service, not Senator Stone, and I nodded and glanced out the nearest window. On this side of the house I could see a sliver of the barn where Rocky did her planting and repotting. “We’re having a tent put up over near the barn,” I told Declan. “Sophie thought it would be better than having people in and out of the house.”
“Smart,” he said. “French food?”
“Quiche is easy for a crowd. And there will be salad and fruit. Sophie’s closing the Terminal for the day so the entire staff will be here to help. And we’ll have French wine, of course! At least enough for a toast. Sophie said she asked you to say a few words.”
“She did,” he admitted. “I tried to warn her that a few words are never enough for an Irishman, but she wouldn’t listen.”
“You’ll do fine.” I knew I was right. If anyone had the gift of blarney, it was Declan. I stepped out of the guest room to go to the only other room left, what must have been Rocky’s bedroom. “You coming?” I asked him.
He shook his head and a curl of inky hair fell across his forehead. “A woman’s bedroom . . .” He twitched his shoulders. “That’s a little personal for me.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “And you don’t get personal in women’s bedrooms?”
He stepped nearer. “Depends on the woman.”
“You mean it depends on the Irishwoman.”
A smile brightened his expression. “Yeah, Irish. Like you.”
Trust me when I say that when I turned on my heels and headed into Rocky’s bedroom, I made it look oh so casual.
Just inside the door, I stopped and caught my breath and took a look around while I willed the heat out of my cheeks.
Like the rest of the house, the bedroom was a jumble of artwork, framed photographs, and embroidered fabrics. There was a kitschy Eiffel Tower thermometer on the windowsill, a stuffed teddy bear wearing a red, white, and blue scarf on the wing chair nearby. The whole room was done in shades of milky white, light cream, and ivory, and though I am usually a sucker for color, the peacefulness of the room immediately spoke to me.
“Pacifique.” I purred the word, and for the first time, I really understood what it was all about. The whole farm was about peace, about quiet. What a shame that a life that had been devoted to serenity had ended so violently.
I shook away the thought and glanced around. Across from me were windows that looked out over the back of the house and the gardens Rocky so loved, and I imagined that every morning, she threw back the curtains that puddled on the hardwood floor and opened the windows and breathed in the scent of soil and herbs and dew-kissed flowers.
Rocky had found her peace here.
Now it was up to me to make sure she also found j
ustice.
The thought burning through my brain, I did a quick turn around the room, from the dresser across from the double bed to the lovely dressing screen of gold-painted wood with lace inserts that was opposite it.
That’s when I heard Declan call out, “Hey, Laurel! Come take a look!”
I hurried into the guest room and found him standing in the closet doorway, a hatbox covered in a cheerful floral print in shades of shrimp and green in one hand. The box was open and he reached inside and scooped out a handful of envelopes.
“Letters,” he said. “From Marie Daigneau. Some of them look like they go back quite a few years.”
I hurried over and took the first stack of letters from him. “Maybe there’s some clue,” I said, breathless when I opened the first letter. “You know, about what Rocky said. About Aurore Brisson and Yesterday’s Passion and—”
My words dissolved and my shoulders drooped and I stared at the tiny, crimped writing.
“French,” I said. “They’re in French. You don’t happen to—”
“Not me!” Declan took the letter from my hand and put it back in the envelope it came out of. “Makes sense, two old friends writing to each other. Of course they’d write in French. We’ll find someone to translate.” He put the letters back in the hatbox and closed it up. “What did you find in the bedroom?”
“I haven’t had a chance to find anything yet,” I said, and when I left the room I reminded him, “When you’re done, don’t forget the letters.”
Back in Rocky’s bedroom I did a look-through of her dresser and of the nightstand next to the bed and found all the usual things: clothing, and souvenir tickets from concerts and plays she’d attended. There was an old note she’d written to herself so she wouldn’t forget to buy flower seeds and a gallon of milk and a loaf of bread because—she said in the note—there wasn’t time in the middle of planting season to bake a loaf herself.
There was also a stack of letters with a bank logo in the return-address corner of the envelope, and thinking of the safe deposit box key, I kept those out and put them on the bed.
Everything else went back exactly where I found it after I examined it, and, hands on hips, I looked around the room. The dressing screen was against one wall and it didn’t look to me like there was any room behind it for much of anything, but I checked that out next, anyway.