First Impressions (Edenton 1)

When McBride removed enough mud off his face to give her a wicked grin, he pointed, and Eden didn’t have to look to see what he was looking at. He was pointing toward the driveway, and she could hear gravel crunching.

“A car?” she asked over the noise of the helicopter.

McBride nodded vigorously.

“Brad?”

He nodded with such energy and enthusiasm that Eden wanted to hit him—if she could find her hand, that is.

“Girl in the car,” he yelled. “Looks like you.”

“Like me?” Twisting as best she could, Eden looked at the car that had stopped in the driveway. It was Brad’s car, and he was driving. Beside him sat Melissa.

Eden thought maybe there were tears in her eyes under the mud, but she wasn’t sure. She turned back to McBride. What other horrible, rotten, humiliating thing could happen to her?

In the next second the helicopter stopped to hover above them. In the noise and the wind, she looked up to see two men hanging out of the door with rifles aimed at her and McBride.

“Are you all right?” came a voice over a loudspeaker, and Eden was sure that everyone in Arundel heard it.

“Yes,” Eden tried to shout up to the men over the noise of the helicopter.

“They mean me,” Jared yelled, grinning. “I’m the good guy, remember? You’re the suspect. They want to make sure you haven’t hurt me—again.”

Behind them, Eden heard a car door slam, then a wail that every mother on earth responded to. “Mother,” came the voice, a high, plaintive wail that carried above the roar of the helicopter hovering over them.

“Kill me now,” Eden said, and fell back into the mud.

Chapter Eighteen

“IREALLY don’t know what to think,” Melissa was saying as she held the hose on her mother. “I was already in Arundel when I called you. In the past, in normal circumstances, I would have gone straight to you, but you’ve been acting so strangely lately that I wasn’t sure what to do, so that’s why I called first and asked permission to visit my own mother.”

The water from the hose was icy, and if Eden had had her way, she would have gone upstairs, peeled off her muddy clothing, and jumped in the shower, no matter how much mud she tracked in, but Melissa had been horrified at that idea. Eden thought maybe her daughter was enjoying spraying cold water on her mother. Eden bit down on her tongue to keep from talking and scrubbed off mud as quickly as she could. She glanced at Brad. He was standing under the big cypress tree in front of her house and looking at all the things he’d sent her. She’d have to thank him later—and that thought warmed her a bit.

Melissa was telling her story for the second time. “I had no idea what to do when my own mother told me I couldn’t visit her, so I did the only thing I could think of and went to the office of Mrs. Farrington’s lawyer. It was only by chance that I remembered his name. Really, Mother, you have been so secretive about all of this that I feel like I don’t even know you. You can’t imagine my surprise when I met the daughter of the lawyer and she informed me that her father and you were thinking about getting married.”

“Melissa,” Eden said, turning around to face her daughter, “could you please keep your voice down? I don’t think—” She broke off because her daughter hit her in the side of the head with a freezing blast of water. The nozzle was set on “jet.”

“Sorry,” Melissa said, but she didn’t sound sorry. “It has been almost more than I can bear. First you leave me in New York, then you don’t call for weeks on end, then Stuart and I—” She paused to sniff. “Well, that’s all over with. What with all the stress in my life, it’s a wonder I’m not in labor.”

“You look great,” Eden said, rubbing mud off of her. “You look like a poster for a healthy pregnancy.” She just managed to dodge the next blast of water. “I think that’s enough hosing.”

“No, you still have some mud in your hair. Bend down.”

“I think—” When another jet shot past her ear, Eden grit her teeth. This was punishment, pure and simple. Eden had never spanked her daughter but right now she was wondering if it was not too late to begin.

“I really don’t think this is something to smile about,” Melissa said just before her mother took the hose out of her hand.

“Neither do I,” Eden said, pushing the arm down on the hose bib. “As soon as I get cleaned up and into some warm clothes, we’ll talk about everything. But right now I’m wet and I’m cold.”

“Alone, Mother,” Melissa said. “I want to talk to you alone.”

Eden looked around her garden. Three FBI agents were standing together, and she knew that McBride and some man named Teasdale had gone to the house where McBride was supposed to be living. Brad, looking forlorn and hurt and unable to understand what was going on, had moved to her front porch steps. Now and then he’d glance at Eden, his eyes begging her to talk to him and reassure him that everything was okay between them. Besides Brad’s and Melissa’s concerns, there was a murder to solve and a riddle to answer. “If I can,” Eden answered at last.

“What does that mean?” Melissa asked, following her mother into the house. “Don’t you think your daughter comes first? Your pregnant daughter?”

Eden was dripping water across the old wooden floorboards of the kitchen, through the hallway, and up the stairs. For all that Melissa kept saying that her pregnancy was hard on her, she was right behind her mother as Eden bounded up the stairs.

“Yes, of course, you come first in my life,” Eden said. “But right now there are some things going on that—”