“And I have three more boxes of things to go through,” Carly added her part. “Most of it will be things from when I lived with Lorraine, but some of it will be stuff Marguerite brought to me after our placement. I haven’t opened them in years and I don’t think they’ll contain anything useful. But at this point,” she shrugged and let her voice trail off.
“I’ll help you,” Drew said, earning a look this time not just from Vivi but from Ian and Wyatt too. Naomi didn’t so much as look at him as try, unsuccessfully, to suppress a grin. “I’ll need to spend an hour or two working later this afternoon, but I can help now.”
“That would be great, thank you,” Carly said.
“And so that leaves you, my dear,” Vivi said turning to her husband.
“I’ll keep everyone on task and watch Jeffery today, since Lucas has to leave. I figure that will leave you free to do what you need to,” he said. “And, if we all want to meet again back here tonight, I can make sure everyone gets fed,” he added, making his wife smile.
“That would be great, thank you,” Vivi said to him. It did not escape Drew’s notice that Carly had said those same words to him.
Not wanting to be subjected to another one of Vivi’s inquisitive looks, he moved farther into the room and looked at Carly. When she met his gaze he spoke. “Are you ready?”
She held his gaze, took a deep breath, and nodded.
Chapter Thirteen
Drew turned his car around, waited for Carly to pull out ahead of him, then followed her down Vivi and Ian’s drive. In his rearview mirror, he saw Marcus and Vivi talking as they watched them drive away.
For a moment, he wondered if they were talking about him, then chuckled at the thought. They might be curious about him, but he was hardly the most interesting thing going on in Windsor.
He used his time in the car to call to a friend in the private security industry. There were few people he trusted more than Jay Alexander and his team, which included Dani and Ty, and asking Jay to ferret out what had happened to the Lamot/Davidson holdings would free him up to do whatever Carly might need him to do. He still wanted to talk with Marcus, but given that Marcus had only been nineteen when he’d lost the family holdings, Drew preferred to get the details from an experienced, less-involved party.
As he pulled up beside Carly in front of her house fifteen minutes later, he ended his call. He could hear her punching in the alarm code when he stepped onto the porch and as he closed the door behind him, he noticed that she kept her eyes averted from his as she silently reached out for his jacket.
“Hey,” he said, as she moved past him. She draped their jackets on the backs of two kitchen chairs, then headed toward the stairs. “How are you?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said as she started up the steps.
“Carly?” he said, not moving from where he’d stopped inside the door. She could ignore him or she could stop; he thought the odds were fifty-fifty either way.
Pausing with her back to him, she hesitated, then turned.
“How are you?” he repeated.
She pursed her lips and looked away. But then looked back and met his eyes. “I don’t know,” she said. “Honestly? I think I’m still letting it all sink in. I have more questions than answers—about more than just what happened to Marguerite and why. But I don’t have the time or the space I know I need to think about it, so I’m going to do the only thing I know I can do right now and that’s work. I know I can’t work this like any other case, I can’t really stay unemotional about it, but I can follow the processes and procedures I’ve been trained to follow, and deal with the emotions as they come.”
Drew looked at her for a long moment. She was entering the fray without hesitation and with her eyes wide open, well aware that she’d be dealing with her own memories and emotions and doubts as they navigated this investigation. He’d worked with some of the toughest women—people—in the business, and in his opinion, Carly held her own with all of them.
He gave a sharp nod, “What do you need me to do?”
She offered him a small smile. “Help me get the boxes down?”
“Of course, where are they?”
She waved a hand behind her, “In my closet upstairs.”
Without another word, he followed her up. The staircase came to a small landing at the top before it made a ninety-degree turn to the right, which led to two more steps up before entering the bedroom.
As Drew stepped into the room, his eyes swept over the bed and landed on the set of wide French doors that led out onto another little porch. His gaze lingered there, it would be a great place to have a morning cup of coffee.
The wide plank oak floors, the kind that weren’t seen much anymore, had rough-hewn edges and uneven coloring, lending themselves to the charm of the renovation. Painted a colonial gray and lined with cream-colored wainscoting, the wall colors went well with both the dark wood of the floors and Carly’s Shaker-style bed. The simple elegance of the king-sized piece, capped off with a colorful quilt, created a warm and inviting space.
The room itself ran the full length of the house and sat on top of the living room. A doorway to his left looked to lead to a bathroom, and one to his right presumably led to the closet—both of which sat over the kitchen/dining area side of the house.
“Over here,” she said, leading him toward the door to his right.
“It’s a beautiful room,” he commented, following her into a large walk-in closet. Carly hastily picked up a few items of clothing from the floor and tossed them into a linen basket.
“Thank you, the owners did as good a job up here, as they did downstairs, and I do love it. The boxes we need are up there.” She pointed to three cardboard containers sitting on the top shelf of her closet. One sat on its own while two were stacked on top of each other. “I put them up there when I moved in. I’ve unpacked the rest of my things, but I put these away since I had no intention of unpacking them.”
He reached for the two stacked on top of each other and began to slide them toward himself. “Why not?” he asked, placing them on the floor and reaching for the third, bigger box.
“Most of what will be in there are things I collected while I was living with Lorraine, and just a few things from my previous life. When I finished college and the academy and then got a job, I guess I figured I probably didn’t have much use for whatever was in them, so I’ve kept them closed up.”
Handing her the larger, but lighter, of the three, he hoisted the other two then gestured for her to lead them out of her bedroom—away from her inviting bed—and back downstairs.
“You don’t sound like you’re expecting to find anything.” He set his boxes down on the coffee table as she set hers near the fireplace.
She took a seat on the floor beside her box and shook her head. “I think we need to go through them. After all, I did find the picture with Joe in it in one of my old books, but do I think we’ll find a smoking gun or something that will explain what happened? No,” she said, shaking her head.
He agreed, but dutifully, he sat on the sofa and opened the first of the two boxes in front of him. He wondered if she felt any sense of nervousness about having him go through her life like this, but when he looked up, she was already engrossed in her own box. Turning his eyes back to what lay before him, he pulled out two spiral bound notebooks.
Flipping through the pages of her notes from what looked to be two of her senior year classes—one for math and one for physics—he set them aside. Finding three more like it, he quickly dispensed with those as well. Glancing up at Carly, he saw that she’d pulled out a few items of clothing and a couple of framed pictures, one of which she held on her lap.
“What are those?” he asked.
She looked up with a start, as if she’d forgotten that she wasn’t alone.
“Pictures?” he asked, glancing at the frame she held.
Silently, she held up an image of a horse standing alert and alone in a misty field—its he
ad up and ears forward. The lighting suggested a warm, humid morning just starting to heat up and the full trees in the background pointed to summer. The beauty and the solitude of the herd animal had been captured in a startlingly vulnerable moment.
“Did you take it?”
“I did.” Carly glanced at the photo again, then set it aside. “When we were put into the program, when we went to live with Lorraine, I had to give up horses altogether. Not only did I no longer have the money for it, but I was too well known in that world to show my face there. Even if I’d disguised myself, people would have recognized me.”
“So you had to quit cold turkey?”
Her eyes darted away. “Yeah.”
He considered asking if she ever thought about riding again as an adult. But maybe, having had to give up something she’d loved, it was less painful to give it up altogether than to try to keep hold of it with one hand.
Without another word, he went back to his box. There were more photos in the binder he’d pulled out. Slowly, he turned the pages of what must have been a senior project or portfolio.
The subjects were people doing everyday things—walking down streets, gardening, playing soccer, smiling with friends, swimming in a pond somewhere. But the lighting and composition gave each photo a life of its own. Looking at one in particular, a picture of an older woman in a garden, Drew could almost hear the conversation between the woman and Carly as Carly shot it. Whoever she was, she looked back at the camera with a smile on her face, a laugh hanging in the air. She carried a basket of flowers and the light caught the edges of her summer dress. It was simple, but the still image had more life to it than he saw in many living people.
“These are remarkable,” he said as he continued to flip through the images.
When she said nothing, he looked up to find her watching him.
“What are you looking at?” she asked, unable to see what he held on his lap. He lifted the portfolio.
“Oh that. It was my senior project.”
“You’re very good.”
She lifted a shoulder. “Thanks.”
“Do you take photos anymore?”
She started to shake her head, then hesitated. “Not really. Occasionally, if there is an event in town, I’ll help out the newspaper—take some pictures and give them the images if they need them. But generally, no, I don’t.”
Drew made a mental note to himself to ask her more about her photography when the situation had settled down. With one last compliment on her work, he set the collection aside and pulled out a small box.
“I can’t believe Lorraine kept this.” Carly’s voice brought his head up. She held up a dress. A formal dress.
His lips tilted into a lopsided grin. “Prom?”
She laughed and turned the dress around so that she could look at it. The color of burnt orange, a color only someone with her skin tone and hazel eyes could pull off, the dress dangled in her hands. It had a V in the front and a deeper V in the back and looked to be something that would hug every one of her curves.
“Homecoming, hence the fall color. I can’t believe I wore this,” she said with a smile.
“What’s wrong with it?” He had no problems picturing her in it.
She made a face. “It’s a bit mature, isn’t it? I mean, I was eighteen. This looks like something I’d wear to the policeman’s ball now.”
He blinked. “Maybe you should see if it still fits.”
Her eyes shot to his and then she laughed. “Like it, do you?”
“It’s a little more revealing than the dress you were wearing when I saw you in the city last summer, when you were with Kit.” Although there had been something about that dress too, that had caught and held his attention. It had been looser than the one she held now—not a dress made to hug or cling, but one that would easily shift and slide with the gentlest of touches. “Do you still have the anklet you were wearing that night?” he asked, then wondered if perhaps he shouldn’t have—the memory of that little piece of jewelry made his mind go all sorts of places.
“You noticed my anklet?”
“Not to put too fine a point on it, but I have mentioned a time or two that my attention to detail is extraordinary.”
She stared at him as if wondering what other details he might remember, then abruptly set the dress down and reached for something else in the box. “Yes, of course I still have it,” she answered, then added nothing more.
Drew felt his temperature spike a good ten degrees. But he’d made a promise to himself to let her be the first to make a move—when a move was to be made. So he turned his focus back to the wooden jewelry box he’d just pulled out of the box.
Opening it, he found a picture lying on top of everything else inside. Obviously, not one she’d taken—in it, Carly posed in the same dress she’d been holding a moment ago. A corsage decorated her wrist and one of her arms looped through that of a young man in a suit. Her hair, much longer than she wore it now, hung down her back, with pieces of it pulled up, giving her the look of someone in a period piece. She wore no necklace, but in her ears he could see a pair of diamond stud earrings. When he lifted the photo out of the box, he saw that beneath it lay those same studs.
“Are these the earrings your mother gave you?” Drew asked, holding them out to her.
Carly looked up sharply from a book she had been thumbing through. Coming to her knees and reaching across the coffee table, she held out her hand. He dropped the studs in her outstretched hand, then watched her examine the two pieces.
“Yes, they are.”
“You look like you didn’t remember you had them.”
“No, I knew I had them, but like I said, I haven’t seen them in years. I left them with Lorraine when I went to college and haven’t needed them since. I guess I figured they were safer packed away than lying in my bathroom drawer somewhere.”
Or maybe, he thought, she hadn’t wanted the reminder. “Do you want to put them back in this box? The one with the picture of you and Mr. Young Stud in it?”
She stared at him blankly. He held up the picture. A smile started to spread across her face, one that turned into a laugh within seconds. “Oh my god,” she said, reaching for the picture, “that’s Luke Dunfey. He was a friend of my brother’s. We dated for a bit during my senior year in high school and first year of college.”
“Your brother let you date one of his friends?”
“Hey, your brother married one of your friends,” she shot back, referring to Sam and Jason.
“Wait, the Luke Dunfey?” Drew asked. He’d been about to point out that Sam and Jason had grown up together but the comment died on his lips when he suddenly recognized the name.
Carly laughed again and set the picture down. “Yes, the very same. He was a good guy. I’ve followed his politics and it seems like he’s still a good guy,” she said. One of the few respected independents in congress, in some circles the thirty-five-year old senator was already being dubbed the next John F. Kennedy.
“I can’t believe you dated Luke Dunfey,” Drew grumbled as he handed her the jewelry box that had held the picture and the earrings. She slipped both back inside as she set it on the table.
“You dated Sierra Sloane,” she said even as she went back to digging in the box beside her.
“How did you know I dated Sierra?” he asked, surprised. Three months earlier, he and Sierra, a woman who rightfully held the title of super model, had been on exactly four dates.
“Kit told me. I guess she knew Sierra from some parties they’d both attended in Europe and was not pleased to see pictures of the two of you,” Carly said.
“We went on four dates. And why would that bother Kit?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask. She just said she didn’t think someone so ‘in the limelight’ was the right person for you.”
Drew had figured out the same thing after the first two dates, but the last two had been events he’d already agreed to go to with her, so h
e hadn’t been able to break things off sooner. And now, looking at Carly sitting on her knees going through a pile of books and folders, he couldn’t agree more—he had no interest in being in the limelight, on his own or with someone else.
“What’s this?” He had reached back into his box and pulled out a DVD. It had the image of a riding arena filled with fences on the cover and a title that referred to a Long Island Classic.
“Oh, wow,” Carly reached for what he’d found once again. “It’s a collection of videos taken of my rides from the last time I competed at that venue. I took it with me to LA because I wanted to study it. This is the event I was supposed to ride at, the one the horses were being shipped to when my mom was killed.”
“Do you have a DVD player?”
“Yes.” As she bobbed her head, one of her curls fell into her face; she brushed it back subconsciously, her eyes trained on the DVD cover.
“Do you want to watch it?” he asked, wondering if it was a good idea.
She shook her head. “Or, not yet, at least. I want to get through all these boxes before we reconvene at Vivi’s tonight. Maybe if there’s time later . . .” She let her voice trail off.
Drew heard the hesitation in her voice so he let it go and turned back to his box.
Another hour passed as they thumbed through every book and notebook, examined the front and back of each photo, and did a thorough search of everything else, including all the pockets and linings of the clothing.
By about four o’clock, they had separated the contents of the boxes into two piles: items Carly wanted to donate, which included mostly clothes and a few books, and a pile of stuff to go back into a consolidated box and into her closet. Drew loaded up all of her portfolio pictures, along with her two yearbooks and a few other mementos, into the combined box. The earrings she kept out, but the picture of her with Luke Dunfey joined the other keepsakes.
An Inarticulate Sea Page 18