Before She Dies (Alexandria Novels 3)

Angie laughed. “Yes, I’m kidding. Most likely it’s an ice cream at the carnival and a few games of chance there. Then the afternoon in front of the television watching the Dallas game that I taped for him while he was working.”

Zoe shook her head. “I’d read that the carnival opened last Friday, but I hadn’t thought to go.”

“For David and Malcolm, it will be great fun. For me, not so much. I was never a fan of carnivals. Too dirty.”

Charlotte glanced at her cake and poked it with her fork. Too dirty.

The front door buzzer sounded and Iris moved to answer it.

Charlotte raised her hand. “Sit. I’ll get it.” She set down her cake, almost untouched, and moved down the hallway. As much as she enjoyed her staff, she understood that there would always be distance between them because she was the boss.

She checked the security camera behind Iris’s desk and spotted a man, his face turned partway from the camera. The ends of his flannel shirt hung over the painfully narrow waist of faded jeans. He had gray hair and what looked like a scruffy beard. He finished the dregs of a cigarette and then crushed it out in a stone planter filled with white mums.

“Nice,” Charlotte muttered. She considered calling the cops just as the man turned and faced the camera. He grinned as if he sensed she was staring at him.

She jerked back and for a moment could barely breathe. Time had weathered the face and grayed the hair, but there was no mistaking the sharp gray eyes that had been a fixture in a childhood she’d worked hard to erase from her memory. She stepped back from the screen, her heart knocking against her chest.

“What the hell are you doing here, Grady Tate?” The carnival was in town, but she’d stayed away because she did not want to see him. He must have seen the news coverage of the trial yesterday.

As if she’d spoken directly to him, Grady rang the bell again and then again. His arrival was clearly no accident, and he was not going anywhere.

Iris appeared at reception. “Who is ringing the bell?”

Pure, sharp panic cut into Charlotte’s belly. “I’ll take care of it.”

Iris glanced at the monitor. “He looks like something the cat dragged in.”

“He has that effect on people.”

“Who is he?”

Charlotte smoothed hands over her black pencil skirt. “Nobody.”

Iris folded her arms. “Really? Well, Nobody has rattled your cage.”

“He has not.”

“Your lips are blue.”

She moistened her lips and offered a smile too brittle to be amiable. “Just go back to the party and enjoy your cake.”

Iris tapped a manicured finger on her forearm. “I think I’ll stay right here and make sure Nobody isn’t a problem.”

Charlotte did not want Iris to meet Grady. Past colliding with present promised disaster. But making an issue could require more explaining down the road. “Eat your cake, Iris. I’ll shout if I need you.”

Plucked brows knotted. “I don’t like it.”

“I know. Thanks. But go. Please.”

“Fine.”

Swallowing the tension in her throat, Charlotte crossed and opened the front door. Grady’s fist was poised in the air ready to knock again. For a moment, he stared at her, stunned into silence. She’d changed—a lot—since the long-ago night he’d put her on the Metro bus to Alexandria. His gaze moved over her, assessing and calculating, before a slow, dangerous smile curved thin lips. “Hello, Grace.”

Blood rushed to Charlotte’s head, making her temples pound. She’d not heard that name in eighteen years. “My name is Charlotte Wellington.”

“Yeah, I saw you on the television last night. Sounds like you tore it up at that trial yesterday. Got to say I was surprised to see you. I always figured you’d have left the area after all these years.”

Tension seared her nerves. “What do you want, Grady?”

If he noticed her unease, he didn’t seem to care as he glanced beyond her into the reception area. “Aren’t you going to invite me in? Looks mighty fancy inside.”

She shifted and blocked his view. “What do you want, Grady?”

His gaze thinned, the pretense of civility melting like ice on a scorching day. What emerged was the hard cold man who had been her stepfather. “You always could piss me off in no seconds flat.”

“Get to the point or leave.”

“I raised you to respect your elders better than that, didn’t I, Grace?”

“You tracked me down after all this time to issue a lesson in good manners? I find that a hard one to swallow.”

He slid gnarled hands in the pockets of his jeans and leaned forward. “Invite me in and make nice, or I swear everyone in this town will know you are not some fancy attorney but a lowlife carnie who did what she had to do to put pennies in her pocket.”

The scents of the carnival—tobacco, cotton candy, popcorn, and grease—wafted off him, and instantly she was transported back to a time when she’d lived her days in fear and want. Despite half a lifetime of creating Charlotte Wellington, Grady could smash her image with a few words.

“Come inside. But do not call me Grace.”

His smile flashed again, quick and razor-sharp. “Now that is more like it ... Ms. Wellington.”

Charlotte stood back and waited for him to enter her reception area. Past and present had merged, and eighteen years’ worth of fear, regrets, and dread came to fruition. “What do you want, Grady?”

He took his time surveying the room, taking in the oil landscape paintings, the Oriental rugs, the sleek mahogany receptionist desk and the gold-embossed sign that read Wellington and James.

“Mighty fancy, baby girl.” He sniffed and shook his head. “Mighty fancy.”

“Don’t call me baby girl.”

“You liked it when I called you that back in the day.”

She folded her arms over her chest. “I never liked it, and if you haven’t noticed, back in the day is long gone.”

He shook his head and winked at her. “You can rewrite your past for all your fancy friends, but you and I both know the real story.”

Tension coiled in her belly. “What do you want, Grady?”

“Can’t I just come and see y

ou, baby girl?”

Grady had entered her life when she was eight and her sister Mariah ten. Her mother, reeling from her latest breakup, had met Grady when the carnival had come to Knoxville, Tennessee. Before it broke camp three weeks later, her mother had moved them into his RV. By the age of eight, Charlotte had been in five different schools and lived in nine different motels in nine different towns. This move in her young mind was as temporary as the others. But for reasons she’d never understood, Charlotte’s mother and Grady had forged some kind of bond, and before Christmas of that same year, they married. Her mother, Doris, had started working in the carnival’s Madame Divine tent as the resident psychic, while Grace and Mariah did odd jobs around the carnival.

It had gone fairly well for a time. Her mother was happy. Mariah had begun sleeping again. And she’d been able to finally keep the books she’d accumulated at yard sales. But within seven or eight months, Grady rediscovered the bottle and proved to be a nasty drunk. Her mother and Grady shared five years of explosive bliss, and when Doris died, her daughters remained with Grady. The time would have been miserable if not for Mariah.

Laughter from Charlotte’s coworkers drifted from the back conference room, prompting her to lower her voice a notch. “You never do anything without a reason. What do you want? Money?”

He glanced toward the laughter and then grinned, still taking pleasure in her unease. “I don’t need your money. Though it sure does look like you’re doing real fine for yourself.”

Nothing she could say would drive him faster to the point he’d come to make. Grady would take his sweet time.

“You were always a prickly one. The worrier of my two girls.”

“You were good at giving me enough to worry about.” Bitterness dripped from the words.

“Maybe. Maybe.” He walked to the receptionist desk and picked up a crystal paperweight. For several seconds he studied it. “I’ve been sober for eighteen years.”

“Good for you.”

He tossed the paper weight like a worn baseball. “I need your legal help.”

The paper weight had been a gift to Iris last year. It had been hand made by a glassmaker at Alexandria’s Torpedo Factory, an artist enclave on Union Street. It had cost six hundred dollars.