She was suddenly very sleepy, so sleepy that she could hardly make it to the bathroom to put on her nightgown. Ten minutes later, she was asleep in the bed that had once belonged to generations of Farringtons.
Chapter Seven
“BILL, calm down,” Jared said into his cell phone. “Stop yelling so loud. She’ll hear you. Yes, I did give her something to make her sleep. Poor thing, this has hit her hard. No, I’m not going soft on you.” He listened for a moment. “If you’ll calm down, I’ll tell you why I told her who I was and what I want. Are you ready to listen?”
Jared took a deep breath. “Something is going on around here, but I can’t figure out what it is. Some lawyer is acting like Ms. Palmer is the love of his life, but she only met him a couple of days ago. I don’t trust him. Something isn’t right. I think he wants something and he’s planning to get it. But she’s falling for him hook, line, and sinker. She seems to believe every word out of his mouth. He even told her some cock-and-bull story about being unfaithful to his ex-wife while the woman was dying of cancer, and she swallowed it. It was all I could do to not step in and tell her a few home truths.”
Pausing, he listened. “Yeah, I guess he could be on the up-and-up, but I doubt it. The point is that I saw that I didn’t have a chance with her. She isn’t what I thought she was going to be. She’s isn’t some desperate, lonely woman who swoons every time a man makes a move toward her.” He hesitated. “She’s more of a no-nonsense type of woman, so I took the chance of telling her the truth. Besides, she’d already figured out that nearly everything I’d said or done was a lie. She should have worked for us.”
Jared rolled his eyes and listened. “No, I’m not falling for her. It’s just that I made a judgment call and decided that the best thing to do was to tell her who I am, what I want, and see if she can help figure out why Applegate swallowed her name and Social Security number. By the way, I want you to see if Applegate was writing a book, maybe a tell-all about his life undercover. Maybe he just wanted her as his editor.” Jared smiled at the phone. “Yeah, she came up with that idea. She’s not dumb. Look, I didn’t call you to get yelled at. I need you to send someone here to do something for me. Ms. Palmer is a bit upset with me, so she’s told me to get out of her house, to get out of town, actually. What I need is for you to send a man down here and maybe fire a few shots so she’ll realize this is serious. No,” Jared said patiently, “not at anyone, just fire a few shots around. I need to have a reason to stay near her. If she thinks she’s in danger, she’ll be more receptive to my hanging around her as a bodyguard, so to speak.”
Jared listened, grimacing. “Yes, I know this is supposed to be an undercover assignment, and I know you think I shouldn’t have told her anything, but I did. Now I want you to send a man out here right away. Put him in a car tonight. She’s to meet Granville tomorrow at ten A.M., but I want her to miss that meeting. He’s getting too close too fast, and I don’t like it at all. Look, I gotta go. I put this red concoction on the cuts on my feet and it’s burning. I have to take a shower, and I need to get a couple of hours sleep so I’ll be ready for this man. Send somebody good, understand? I don’t want any cock-ups. I’ll call you tomorrow and let you know how everything went. Oh, and, Bill, thanks for doing this.”
Smiling, Jared hung up the phone, turned it off so it wouldn’t ring, then hid it under the bedsprings. Throwing back the covers, he got out of bed and pulled the sling off his arm. In the hospital they’d asked him if he thought he needed a sling, and he’d moaned that he did. Now he flexed his arm, made a fist of his hand, then dropped to the floor and did half a dozen one-arm push-ups. The arm was okay, but he was disgusted that so few push-ups could make him feel so sore.
He pulled off his clothes, dropped them on the floor, then picked them up and put them on the chair by the bed. In the shower, he let the hot water run over him and wash away all the “wounds” that he’d colored his body with. He’d wanted Eden to think that he was bleeding and in pain. He hoped she didn’t miss the red nail polish he’d taken from her bedroom. That, mixed with a little of her cocoa butter cream and some nail polish remover, had made a reddish mess that was burning his scabbed cuts.
He soaped himself and thought about how angry Bill had been when Jared told him that he’d told Eden the truth. But she’d made Jared feel like he had in the third grade when his teacher wouldn’t believe a word he’d said. Other teachers had believed him. He’d made up elaborate stories about why he was late or where he’d been, and they’d all believed him. But not Mrs. Lancaster. She’d looked him in the eye and told him he had to write lines as punishment for lying.
Eden was like Mrs. Lancaster. She didn’t believe him either. Clever girl! he thought. She’d seen that his clothes were too new, that there was no table saw in his garage, and she’d called the electric company about the houses being on the same circuit. If she knew he was a liar, how was he supposed to make her like him so much that she revealed secrets to him? And with Granville around, how could Jared get close to the woman as quickly as possible?
While he’d stood outside the dining room listening to her and Granville talk,
Jared had thought about telling Eden the truth. No lying, just the facts of the case. He’d present it to her as a problem and let her help solve it.
As he’d hobbled up the stairs, he told himself that wouldn’t work. If she was told about a spy, she’d throw him out, and he’d never find out anything. No, he thought, he’d better not do that. But then, he’d stood at the window and watched her and Granville in the moonlit garden, and he’d felt something that was rare for him: jealousy. Granville was older than Jared, not in as good shape, and had a boring office job, but it looked as though “the girl” was falling for him.
Jared had turned away from the window in disgust at himself for having such juvenile thoughts. This was a job, he told himself. It was the same as other jobs. But somehow it was already different. For one thing, he’d never before worked in a middle-class home situation. Gangsters, thugs, drug lords, the underworld had all been in his working life, but not this. This was a nice house, a nice woman, and a nice town—and they made thoughts of retirement and having a normal life come into his mind.
By the time Eden came up the stairs after Granville left, Jared was prepared for her. He had no doubt that she was going to tell him to get out, so he’d made his wounds look as though they were bleeding. She couldn’t throw out someone dripping blood, could she?
She hadn’t surprised him when she’d told him that she knew that everything he’d told her was a lie. But he was surprised when, even knowing that, she’d gone downstairs and made him a tray of food. It was while she was downstairs that he made the final decision to tell her the truth. He was aware that part of him was hoping she’d be so interested in what he told her that she’d spend more time with him. But she told him to leave. He was going to have to resort to other methods to get close enough to her to find out what she knew. By the time he got back into bed, he was smiling again. When he’d first surveyed the place, before Eden had arrived, he’d seen a cellar beneath the house. It looked old enough to have petroglyphs on the walls, and he didn’t relish spending any time down there, but it would do as a hideout for a few hours. Still smiling, he went to sleep.
Chapter Eight
EDEN awoke to the horror of someone’s hand pressed firmly over her mouth. Her first impulse was to lash out, but a face and a warm breath were near her ear. “It’s me, and please don’t hurt me again,” came the unmistakable voice of Jared McBride. “I’m still bleeding from the last time. There are people downstairs. If I take my hand away, will you be quiet?”
Eyes wide, Eden nodded. It was too dark to see his face, but McBride’s tone of voice told her this wasn’t serious. She first thought, What is he up to now? Slowly, he moved his hand away from her mouth, as though he didn’t want to move. He was very close to her, leaning over her so that he was practically in bed with her. She rolled away from him and reached for the telephone by her bed, but Jared stopped her. Silently, he pointed to the cell phone in a case on his belt, letting her know it would be better to use that. He motioned to the door, gesturing that they should get out as soon as possible. As far as she could tell, he meant for her to leave the room as she was, which meant running off with this man who she didn’t trust while wearing only her nightgown. She was glad that she’d been in too much of a hurry to put her clothes away the night before when she’d dressed to meet Brad. Draped across the end of the bed were her jeans, a sweater, and a T-shirt. She stuck her feet into her running shoes as she grabbed her clothes, then tiptoed out of the room behind McBride.
Since Eden had seen or heard nothing and had only McBride’s word that anyone was in the house, Eden couldn’t feel very cautious. In fact, she felt nothing but annoyance. What time was it anyway? She was glad to see that last night she’d been too tired to remove her watch. The house was dark, but the watch had a little button on the side that she pushed, and it lit up the dial. Ten minutes until five A.M.
McBride was crouching down like a character in an Xbox game and moving stealthily along the chair rail. Eden gave a yawn, then a shiver. Her nightgown had been fine under the covers, but now she was getting cold. She hugged her clothes to her and thought about stopping to put them on.
“Are you sure—?” she began, but McBride cut her off. In an instant, he had grabbed her and put his hand over her mouth to keep her from talking. What she wanted to say was a very sarcastic “I see that you recovered well.” But she said nothing. Last night she’d seen that the wounds she’d given him were bleeding. And he’d held his arm that was still in a sling as though it hurt him very much. She’d felt so sorry for him that she’d been tempted to spoon-feed him again.
But right now, he had one arm around her waist and the other around her head with his hand over her mouth. So where was his sling? Why wasn’t he limping? If he was lying about his injuries, just as he’d lied about everything else, then he was probably lying about someone being in her house. She lifted her foot with the intention of slamming it down on his instep. Her plan was to run for the phone while he held his foot in pain. She figured she could punch the buttons for 911 before he could get to her.
But in the next moment she heard whispered voices from downstairs and became rigid with fear. McBride was still holding her, but Eden was no longer fighting him. He said one quiet word: “Cellar.”
She nodded, and he dropped his hand from her mouth. At the end of the wide corridor upstairs was a door to what looked like a closet. It was true that there were brooms and mops in there, but behind them was a little door that opened to reveal an old staircase that was so narrow it was dangerous. It had been the fate of the poor overworked servants in centuries past to have to use those stairs, rather than the wide stairs in the front of the house.
As Eden pushed aside the handles of half a dozen old mops and a vacuum cleaner that was probably in use in 1910, she felt anger run through her. McBride had searched her house enough that he knew about the stairs down to the kitchen, which led to the other staircase down into the old cellar. Even when she’d lived here before, the narrow stairs to the kitchen had not been used. And only Eden had used the cellar. Mrs. Farrington had been accidentally locked in the cellar when she was nine, so she’d refused to ever go down there again. She’d wanted to fill the thing up with sand. But it seemed that Snooping McBride knew where the cellar was.
There was no light in the narrow staircase, so Eden went first and felt her way along the wall. Behind her, she heard McBride readjust the mops and brooms, then carefully close the little door. Eden had to repress a yelp when her face ran into a thick cobweb, a cobweb that made her realize that if McBride had seen the old staircase, he hadn’t been down it. Gingerly, she felt each step before putting her foot on it. She didn’t know if the staircase had been restored or was still made of rotting wood, as it had been when she lived there.
At the bottom of the stairs, McBride touched her shoulder, letting her know that he wanted to go first into the kitchen. When she stepped back into the tiny space, of necessity his body pressed against hers. She held the clothes over her arm tightly between them. Cautiously, he opened the door. Eden was relieved that the hinges didn’t squeak.
McBride stepped out into the dark kitchen and looked around. For a moment he disappeared from sight, then he came back. Putting his finger to his lips, he motioned for her to follow him.