“Okay. I’ll see what I can do. I promised Carson I’d have coffee ready when he came for his car, so I’d better get in there and see if I can find something to go with that coffee. We finished dinner almost four hours ago.”
Gunther walked toward the stairs, stopped, and looked at her. “Suppose it’s three o’clock in the morning when he gets here?”
She’d be up if he didn’t get there until daybreak, and the flex of her shoulder in a slight shrug confirmed it. “When did you know me to fail to keep my word?”
“Am I invited for coffee?”
She didn’t answer, for she knew it was one of his tongue-in-cheek efforts to needle her. When the doorbell rang a little over two hours later, she rushed to it, put the chain in place, and peeped out.
“Carson! What on earth?”
His grin did little to reassure her as she stared at his torn, sooty, and sagging clothing. “You said you’d have coffee ready for me.”
She welcomed him with her arms open, pulling him as tightly to her as her strength would allow. “My Lord. You were in that burning building. Come on in and sit down.” She pointed to an oversized leather chair.
“Thank you for waiting up for me. There were times when I thought I’d never get here. I’d love to wash my face and hands.”
“I always do what I promised,” she said, taking his hand and walking with him to the lavatory near the foyer. “Go have a seat while I bring the coffee.” She turned on the coffee-maker, warmed some biscuits, and put a glass of water on the tray that she’d prepared earlier.
“This is wonderful,” he said when she placed the coffee, warm biscuits, ham, butter, and jam on the coffee table. “I’m fine, just exhausted.” He took a big swallow of coffee, put the cup down, and tasted a buttered biscuit. “Hmm. Honey, this hits the spot. I’m hungry, but I think I needed pampering as much as I needed food. I’m exhausted, but I feel great, if that makes any sense. After I helped clear away that rubble, I dragged six people out of that death trap.”
She refilled his coffee cup and brought it back to him. “What happened? Don’t they have alarms in that hotel? The fire seemed small enough at first to allow people to get out without difficulty.”
“Apparently the alarm in some of the guest rooms didn’t work. And you can bet some of the guests had been drinking and were in a deep sleep, so the alarm didn’t awaken them.” He ate another biscuit and ham sandwich. “I know I had a big dinner with you, but right now, I’m starved. That was more manual labor than I’d done in years.”
He finished eating, leaned back, and took a long, deep breath.
“Do you want to spend the night here?” she asked him. “We have a guest room.”
His gaze, soft and warm, didn’t prepare her for his answer. “Thanks. But when I spend the night under the same roof as you, we’ll sleep in the same bed.” She knew her eyes had widened, but he acted as if they hadn’t. “I’d better finish this and go. I’ve got a busy day starting in six and a half hours.”
At the door, he kissed her without passion, but she didn’t mind. She’d learned more about him that night than in the previous months she’d known him. He was the man for her. And he’d find that will, too, because he wouldn’t let that, or anything like it, conquer him.
Minutes after Carson reached his office the next morning, his receptionist buzzed him. “Mr. Edgar Farrell here to see you.”
Carson stared at Edgar, annoyed at the intrusion and not bothering to hide it. “I thought you asked if you could call me. What can I do for you that requires a visit?”
Edgar took a seat and crossed his knees. “I like to talk business in person. Talking on the phone can land you in trouble.”
Immediately alert, Carson sat forward, his eyes narrowed. “What do you have to say to me that could land you in trouble?”
“Look, man. I’m going back to Vegas day after tomorrow morning, because the fire gutted two floors of that hotel. It’s closed, and my gig there is up. I’m the one who engaged you for this job, so I’m telling you that if you find that will and it’s unfavorable to me, don’t tell Gunther and Shirley about it.”
As little as he thought of Edgar, he hadn’t expected him to sink to that level. He wondered how far the man would go. “How would I get paid?” he asked, appearing to consider the proposition. “If I don’t give the will to the lawyer, it won’t be probated, and if I do give it to him, he’ll share the contents with your siblings.”
“I can get somebody else to probate it. I’ve got contacts.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me.” Carson stood and leaned over Edgar, almost touching him. “I’m an officer of the law, and even if I weren’t, I would not compromise my integrity and ruin my life by going in cahoots with someone who has no principles. Miss Marks will show you out.”
“I’ll fire you.”
“You can’t. Read the contract that you signed. If you make one more underhanded suggestion to me, I will terminate the contract and expose you to boot. Please leave. Now!”
Go easy, his conscience warned. That guy could someday be your brother-in-law. He grimaced from the pain of that thought. Another reason why he should watch his steps very carefully.
The next morning, Shirley dragged herself out of bed and began sorting out her clothes for the next cruise. When trips were shorter—as her next one was—customers seemed to get more involved with on-board events and were less picayune about little things. Her cell phone rang and she glanced at the caller ID before answering. She didn’t welcome a call from Edgar, because she was still annoyed with him.
She answered without enthusiasm. “Hello.”
“It’s me, sis. Edgar. I’m headed back to Vegas tomorrow, and I ... uh ... thought I’d let you know.”
“Thanks. Have a good time.” If she sounded disinterested, she couldn’t help it.
“A ... uh ... brother out there owes me a few thousand—”
She didn’t let him finish. “Yes, and I imagine his first name is ‘slot.’ You still owe me three thousand, seven hundred dollars—the seven hundred you borrowed over a year ago—and I am not lending you any more. Have a safe—”
He hung up. She sat down on the edge of her bed and tried to exhale her anger. When would it end? After wiping away her tears, she said to herself as she got up, “I don’t have to go down with a sinking ship, because I can swim.”
“I’m having waffles for breakfast,” Mirna said when Shirley walked into the kitchen. “Mr. G will be down in a minute. You want some, or you still trying to make your waistline disappear?”
“I want some of those waffles. Yours are the best. I’ll set the table.”
After breakfast with Gunther and Mirna, she walked up the stairs along with Gunther. “It’s been years since you trailed me up the stairs. At home, you did that when you either wanted something special or you wanted to tell me something in confidence. What is it?”
She told him about her call from Edgar. “It was so unpleasant. As soon as he realized that I was not going to give him money, he hung up. No good-bye. Nothing. What’s gotten into him?”
Gunther’s right arm slid around her shoulder. “I wish I knew. Don’t let him upset you, Shirley. Maybe we have to ... well ... let him go. I hate to say it, but we can’t force Edgar to do what he ought to do and act like a mature man. He had the same opportunities and the same disadvantages that we had. He made his choices, and he’s paying for them. I hurt for him, but he won’t accept the help he needs. When you’re with Carson, pay attention to the little things.”
“I do, and especially to the way he behaves when he is not deliberately courting me. In fact, that’s what endears him to me. I like the man he is.”
About that time, Carson came to an important decision: He’d give himself one more week in which to find that will. If he failed, he’d cancel the contract and, for the first time, he’d leave a job unresolved. He didn’t relish the idea, but he didn’t plan to continue looking for a needle in a haystack.
The
morning after Edgar left Ellicott City for Las Vegas, Carson arrived at the Farrell home shortly after nine, locked the doors, fastened the chains, and went upstairs to Leon Farrell’s den.
He considered not answering his ringing cell phone, but, thinking that his office might want to contact him, he reached into his pocket. A glance told him that Shirley was his caller. He’d prefer not to talk with her right then. She’d ask where he was, and he’d rather she didn’t know. He wanted to work without the contribution or the interruption of any Farrell sibling. But on the other hand, he loved hearing her voice. With a word, she could lift his spirits faster than knowing he’d solved whatever problem confronted him.
“Hi, sweetheart.”
“Hi, hon. I’ve just learned that I have to switch travel plans. I have to leave in a couple of hours. I won’t be on the Mercury this time. I’ll be training a new public relations officer for the Utopia Girl, our new flagship. The ship sails out of Miami. Here are my phone numbers.”
He wrote them down. “What’s your route?”
“Colorado, Costa Rica; Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua; Bahia; Ocho Rios, Jamaica; and back to Miami.”
Hmmm. Ocho Rios offered an elegant and attractive setting, and he wasn’t a man to lose out on an opportunity. “What if I join you in Ocho Rios and travel back to Miami with you? I’d make my own accommodations.”
“I’d love that, but be sure you give me a day’s notice.”
“As of now, it’s a date. I’ll give you notice if I can’t get accommodations or if some immovable object gets in my way.”
“If you have trouble getting accommodations, let me know. I’m fourth-ranking officer on that ship.”
“Right on! Are you sure it’s all right?”
“Absolutely. I’ll be happy if you’re with me. Don’t you know that?”
“I should, but I take nothing for granted. Besides, it’s your work environment, and we’ll have to be careful not to compromise your status. I’d hoped we could be together tonight, but man proposes, and God disposes, or so they say. Can you get to the airport all right?”
“Thanks. I’ve called a car service, and the cruise line foots the bill. I’ll miss you.”
“Thank God for that. If you wouldn’t, I’d be in serious trouble. Take good care of yourself. I’ll call you tonight.”
He wanted to say more, but they hadn’t gotten that far. Still, their conversation left him with a hollow feeling. He put the cell phone back into his pocket and turned his attention to his work. Having talked with Shirley, he didn’t have to answer his phone no matter how many times it rang.
As Lucas Hamilton had demonstrated a few days earlier, Carson ran his fingers along the wall until he touched a slightly depressed area; he pressed it and slid the wall panel open. He stared at the objects stored there. In light of the things on view throughout the house, some precious and some of sentimental value, one could only wonder why Leon Farrell had chosen to hide these things behind the wall.
A gilt-framed photo of a beautiful woman, almost the image of Shirley, gazed back at him. He sat on the edge of Farrell’s desk almost unable to remove his gaze from it, as her apparent softness and feminine sweetness captivated him the way Shirley had the first time he looked at her.
If this was the woman Leon Farrell loved, married, and lost in a tragic accident, it was no small wonder that after her death he became reclusive and bitter. She was breathtaking.
He thought of dismantling it in case it concealed the will but discarded the idea; such a drastic measure would have to be a last resort. Tampering with that photo seemed an invasion of the man’s privacy. He laughed at the thought.
As he stood gazing at the array of different objects, a plan took shape. He separated the plastic and wooden robots, which were mostly replicas of animals, as Edgar had stated in the most disparaging tone.
Behind the robots, he found a worn football on which someone had scrawled “Gunther.” He wondered to whom the two harmonicas on the shelf beside the football had belonged, for he’d begun to doubt that Leon Farrell cared much about music. His personal quarters didn’t contain a radio, a record or CD player, or even a television. The man seemed to have spent his later years locked up in himself.
The sight of Latin textbooks surprised him. He opened one, saw in it the name Catherine Long, and concluded that Farrell’s wife had attended an upscale private high school. More than two dozen vases of porcelain and crystal sat on the bottom shelf, a logical place, apparently, to lessen the chance that they would fall and break. He saw figurines and statues of jade and cloisonné throughout the closet in no specific order, and he wondered at that, for everything else seemed to have been placed with care and thought. In a corner of the shelf next to the top one lay what was clearly a diary, its cover of blue Chinese silk. He left it untouched.
Thinking that he had a good idea of the general contents of the secret closet, he was about to sit down and sketch the plan that had formed in his mind when he glanced toward the ceiling. On a shelf too high for him—a six-foot, three-inch man—to reach, he saw the top layer of what had been a multilayered wedding cake and beside it a photo of Leon Farrell and his bride smiling and obviously very happy. He wondered if the man’s children had ever seen it and if they had pictures of their beautiful mother.
He went down to the basement and got a four-step ladder. He had a hunch that he should begin at the top. Oddly, the icing on the cake remained white after almost forty years. He looked under it, searched behind it with a flashlight, and found half a dozen notebooks. A search of each one disclosed only diagrams for what he suspected became the wooden robots that Leon Farrell designed and constructed. To the right on that top shelf, he saw two pieces of fabric, pale blue and about three yards each. He shook them out as carefully as he could, folded them, and returned them to their corner on the top shelf.
“I ought to stop and get something to eat,” he said to himself, but he wanted to get as much done as possible that day, so he didn’t stop. His cell phone rang, and from a check of the caller ID, he saw that the caller was a lawyer with whom he occasionally worked, so he answered.
“Montgomery.”
“Hello, Carson, my man. This is Rodney Falls. I need you in a hurry.”
“What’s up, Rodney? You caught me at a bad time. I’m trying to finish up a case that’s had me dangling since January, and I’m finally zeroing in on it. I need a week. Can’t it wait?”
“Well, what choice do I have? I know you can handle this, so I don’t want to try anyone else. This guy left his bride-tobe waiting at the altar in front of six hundred and twenty guests. He’s filthy rich, and her family’s going to eat him alive. He didn’t give her a single clue that he wanted out.”
“Maybe there was foul play.”
“I doubt it. He phoned her twenty minutes before she left home to meet him at the church, and the police don’t have reports of any accidents around that time. A generation ago, the two families had a big, public spat, and the families didn’t want these two to get married. Did he get revenge for his family, or did her family kidnap him? What do you say?”
“I say I’ll be right on it seven days from now.”
Returning to his task, he stepped up on the ladder in order better to see the second highest shelf. His gaze caught a large manila envelope tied with cord, and he nearly fell off the ladder when he dived for it. He could hardly believe his eyes when he opened the envelope and saw big bundles of one-hundred-dollar bills. He closed it, retied it, and put it back where he found it. Why, if the man had a bank account and a safe-deposit box, would he store such a large amount of money in his house? Leon Farrell was an enigma.
Examining that shelf more carefully on the theory that Farrell would store the more valuable things together, Carson opened the man’s toiletries kit. He didn’t expect to find the will in that all-too-obvious place, but he did see Catherine Farrell’s engagement and wedding rings, other jewelry of hers, a very old gold watch, and a few other things
that Farrell obviously held dear.
An amateur sleuth would have pushed aside the next item Carson found—a Webster’s Dictionary—but Carson knew at once that it was a place for storage, one that looked like a book but that had a hollow center. He could hardly control his shaking fingers as he grabbed it and made his way to the desk with it. A long, tired sigh escaped him when he examined the contents and found Leon and Catherine’s marriage certificate and Catherine’s death certificate.
“At least I’m on the right track,” he said to himself. Everything that was dear to Leon he had apparently stashed away in that secret hiding place. “You were a cunning old fox, buddy, but I’m just as smart, and unless you gave that will to the undertaker to put in your casket, I’ll get it yet.”
That was a thought. He took out his cell phone, got the undertaker’s number from the operator, and phoned him.
“Never heard of such a thing,” the undertaker said when Carson posed the question. “I hadn’t had any prior contact with Mr. Farrell.”
Carson thanked him, closed the wall, and called it a day. “Yep. That will is somewhere in this place, and pretty soon I’ll have it in my hands.”
Chapter Nine
While the scent of a roasting chicken wafted through an open kitchen window, Gunther sat on the balcony of his apartment talking with Mirna and wishing there were another female other than his sister with whom he could share certain of his problems. No matter what the situation, it was almost guaranteed that Shirley would stretch logic in order to see and accept his point of view. So he talked with Mirna, his housekeeper, even though she had cynicism down to a fine art.
“You ought to put her to a test,” Mirna said. “Leopards don’t change they spots.”
“Somehow, that doesn’t seem fair, Mirna. Still, I don’t want to get involved with a woman I don’t know well. The problem is that by the time you get to know what kind of person she is, you’ve already fallen for her, because that always comes first.”
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