Red Lily (In the Garden 3)

“Just tell me where I turn, Nora.”

“Should be a right in about two miles.” David let the map lay on his lap and shifted to enjoy the scenery. “Now that we’re so hot on the trail of the mysterious jewels, just what are we going to do if and when we find out where the bracelet originally came from?”

“Knowledge is power.” Harper shrugged. “Something like that. And I’ve had enough of sitting around waiting for something to happen. The jeweler said it came from the Hopkins estate.”

“Cream cheese.”

“What? You’re hungry?”

“Cream cheese,” David repeated. “You spread it on smooth and thick. ‘My girlfriend really loved the bracelet. She’s got a birthday coming up soon, and since it was such a hit with her, I wondered if you had any matching pieces. Something from the same estate? That’s the Kent estate, isn’t it?’ Guy practically fell over himself to give you the information, even if he did try to sell you a couple of gaudy rings. Ethel Hopkins did not have flawless taste. You should’ve sprung for the earrings, though. Hayley would love them.”

“I just bought her a bracelet. Earrings are overkill at this point.”

“Your right’s coming up. Earrings are never overkill,” he added when Harper made the turn. “About a half mile down this road. Should be on the left.”

He pulled into a double drive beside a late-model Town Car, then sat tapping his fingers on the steering wheel as he studied the lay of the land.

The house was large and well-kept in an old, well-to-do neighborhood. It was a two-story English Tudor with a good selection of foundation plants, an old oak, and a nicely shaped dogwood in the front. The lawn was trimmed and lushly green, which meant lawn service or automatic sprinklers.

“Okay, what have we got here?” he queried. “Established, upper middle class.”

“Ethel’s only surviving daughter, Mae Hopkins Ives Fitzpatrick,” David read from the notes he’d taken from the courthouse records. “She’s seventy-six. Twice married, twice widowed. And you can thank me for digging that up so quickly due to my brilliant observation of Mitch’s methods.”

“Let’s see if we can charm our way in, then get her to tell us if she remembers when her mother came by the bracelet.”

They went to the door, rang the bell, and waited in the thick heat.

The woman who opened the door had a short, sleek cap of brown hair, and faded blue eyes behind the lenses of fashionable gold-framed glasses. She was tiny, maybe an inch over five feet, and workout trim in a pair of blue cotton pants and a crisp white camp shirt. There were pearls around her throat, whopping sapphires on the ring fingers of either hand, and delicate gold hoops in her ears.

“You don’t look like salesmen to me.” She spoke in a raspy voice and kept a hand on the handle of the screened door.

“No, ma’am.” Harper warmed up his smile. “I’m Harper Ashby, and this is my friend David Wentworth. We’d like to speak with Mae Fitzpatrick.”

“That’s what you’re doing.”

Genetic good luck or, more likely, a skilled plastic surgeon, Harper thought, had shaved a good ten years off her seventy-six. “I’m pleased to meet you, Miz Fitzpatrick. I realize this is an odd sort of intrusion, but I wonder if we might come in and have a word with you?”

The color of her eyes might have been faded, but the expression of them was sharp as a scalpel. “Do I look like the simpleminded sort of woman who lets strange men into her house?”

“No, ma’am.” But he had to wonder why a woman who claimed good sense would believe a screened door was any sort of barrier. “If you wouldn’t mind then, if I could just ask you a few questions regarding a—”

“Ashby, you said?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Any relation to Miriam Norwood Ashby?”

“Yes, ma’am. She was my paternal grandmother.”

“I knew her a little.”

“I can’t really claim the same.”

“Don’t expect so, as she’s been dead some time now. You’d be Rosalind Harper’s boy then.”

“Yes, ma’am, her oldest.”

“I’ve met her a time or two. First time being at her wedding to John Ashby. You have the look of her, don’t you?”