“You think I caused all this?” Jared gasped out.
“You—” Eden began, then saw Brad.
“Did I miss something?” Brad asked.
“Nothing worth repeating,” Eden said, smiling coldly at McBride as Brad put the box on the dining table.
“This has been a great evening,” Jared said as he put himself between the box and Brad. “Lotta fun, but—” He yawned hugely. “I think it’s time all of us hit the hay. Maybe we can do this again, Granville.”
Brad didn’t move, just stood there and stared at Jared. “I’m not leaving.”
Jared took a step closer to him. “I think—”
“Stop it, both of you!” Eden said. “You! McBride, back off. Brad knows a lot about this and maybe he can help us.”
“Help us with what?” Jared asked, glaring at her.
“Finding out whatever it is that you’re trying to find out,” Brad said, his lips in a line and staring at McBride.
“I’m not—”
“The two of you fighting like a couple of dogs isn’t going to help anything,” Eden said. She put her body between the two men, then put her hand on Brad’s chest. “Mr. McBride believes that the woman who rented your house was murdered, that it wasn’t an accident, and he’s here trying to find out who killed her and why.” Her eyes begged Brad to accept what she was telling him and to ask no more questions. Brad’s lawyer-mind would, of course, see right away that what she was saying made no sense. A murder investigation didn’t cause the investigator to move in with a person who’d not even been in town the same time as the victim. And, besides, earlier Eden had admitted that McBride was protecting Eden. From what?
Understanding, Brad picked up her hand and kissed her fingertips. “For you, anything.”
Behind them, Jared rolled his eyes, then glanced at the box on the table. It seemed that wanting to see what his friend and colleague had left behind was overriding his common sense.
When the two men seemed to have silently agreed to back off, Eden turned to the box and opened it. Slowly, she withdrew nine framed watercolors, each nine by twelve, and put them on the table, one beside the other.
“Hank said he should charge me rent on them,” Brad said into the heavy silence. “He was going to put them in an auction this weekend.”
Jared set the box on the floor, and the three of them looked at the paintings. They were nice, what the English call “chocolate box” paintings, meaning they were like the romanticized house and garden paintings that are often seen on boxes of chocolates. Not great art, but charming, something you could easily look at every day and not get tired of. All the pictures were of Farrington Manor. Two were of the exterior, and the rest were of the interior.
Standing up straight, Brad looked at Eden. “I did not give her or anyone else permission to enter your house. It was kept locked, and I made sure that someone came by here every day to check on the place. I didn’t want pipes freezi
ng and not find out about it for a week.”
Eden waved her hand to let Brad know that she wasn’t concerned that the woman had illegally entered her house. “Maybe this is what she was doing when she was out at two A.M. These curtains are heavy, and there are blinds under them. She could have closed off the windows to block out enough light so that she could have worked in here at night. The question is why?”
Brad couldn’t let go of his feeling of wrongdoing. “The truth is that if she’d asked for permission to paint the interiors I would have said yes. So why didn’t she ask me?”
“Maybe she didn’t trust you,” Jared said. “You have a lot to gain with this house being inherited by an attractive woman like Ms. Palmer.”
Turning, her face red, Eden opened her mouth to bawl McBride out for his insinuation, but then she heard Brad laugh.
“That’s it, Eden, I’m after your money and this old house.” He seemed to be truly amused by what Jared was implying. He looked at Eden. “You know, don’t you, that if either of us had any sense we’d sell our old houses and buy one of those new brick things in Queen Anne. I could get us a real deal.”
Eden smiled at the absurdity of the idea. “Trade an authentic Queen Anne for a fake one?”
Jared grimaced as he looked from one to the other. “All right,” he said, “point taken. Now, could you two get back to these watercolors? What do you see in them? Anything different? Unusual?”
Brad looked down at the nine pictures, but Eden looked across the table at Jared. Was he asking for Brad’s help? What was next? Would he tell Brad what was going on? Trust him? Looking at McBride, Eden raised her eyebrows in disbelief.
Understanding her completely, Jared pointed to the paintings, as though to tell her to get busy and stop trying to analyze things.
“Nothing,” Brad said after a few minutes. “I don’t see anything unusual. Eden, you haven’t changed the house at all since you returned, and these pictures show the house just as it is now.” He looked at Jared. “Of course it would help if I knew what I was looking for.”
Jared didn’t open his mouth and didn’t look as though he was going to. He cast a glance at Eden as though to warn her, but she smiled coolly at him in return, then looked down at the paintings.