“I remember this place,” Melissa said from behind her. “I remember these paintings.”
On the wall, all the way up the stairs, were Tyrrell Farrington’s watercolors. Two of them showed the creek, his family’s boats lined up along the dock. The Farrington boats had all been sold, and the boathouse had fallen down long ago.
Pausing, Eden looked at the paintings. She opened her mouth to tell her daughter that a necklace had been painted on a family portrait and that had led them to solving the mystery of the Farrington Sapphires. But she didn’t say anything, as she didn’t think Melissa would be interested. Why was it that love took precedence over everything else in life? Eden hadn’t been able to enjoy the beautiful gifts that Brad had sent her because of her love for her daughter. And now Melissa couldn’t think of anything else expect her love for her husband.
And, yes, Melissa did love him. Eden could hear it in every word out of her daughter’s mouth. In between the complaints about having found her mother rolling about in the mud with a man Melissa had never met, her daughter told her everything about what Stuart had done—or not done. According to Melissa, Stuart had turned into a different person the second Eden left—and Melissa didn’t like the new Stuart one bit!
However, from Eden’s perspective, it looked as though Stuart had had a dose of reality after his mother-in-law left town. Since they’d married, Stuart had had Eden to depend on. She’d been there to make sure the rent was paid and food was on the table. Once Eden was gone, responsibilities had been dumped on Stuart. By necessity, he had gone from being a timid little man who was content to wait years for a promotion, to being a man who was making every effort to better himself. Eden thought she might like the new man Stuart had become much better than the old one.
But she couldn’t tell Melissa that. Melissa was still a little girl, torn between being her mother’s daughter and being a grown-up with a husband and soon a child to take care of.
If I had stayed, Eden thought, my daughter would never have grown up. She is so spoiled she would have turned the baby over to me. Eden shook her head to clear it. She didn’t want to think that maybe she’d made some really big mistakes in raising her daughter. Oddly, it was as though she could hear McBride’s voice in her head and he was telling her that it wasn’t too late to start over.
Melissa followed her mother into her bedroom and would have gone into the bathroom with her, but Eden shut the doors. Once she was alone in her bathroom, Eden wanted to fill the tub and soak in it for hours. Truthfully, she wanted to tie the towels together and climb out the window and escape all of them. She didn’t look forward to facing Brad, or trying to deal with her daughter’s marital problems, or to talking to the FBI men who’d flown in.
“Being an adult is overrated,” she muttered under her breath, then got into the shower for the second time that day. She was going to have to face all of them. What was she going to say to Brad about why she’d been rolling about in the mud with McBride? Smiling, she wondered what McBride was telling his boss about the way they’d been found.
Forty-five minutes was all that Eden could drag out for a shower and blow-drying her hair. Bracing herself, she opened the bathroom door and prepared to face her daughter. It was time to come up with explanations.
Eden nearly
wept with joy when she saw her daughter, her big belly in front of her, stretched out on her mother’s bed, sound asleep. She spread a cover over Melissa and offered a silent prayer of thanks. “One down and about fifty to go,” she muttered.
As she stepped out of her bedroom, she almost ran into McBride. He had a duffel bag in his hand, so she knew he was moving out of her house. This is good, the intelligent side of her said, but the other side thought of omelets and pancakes and having someone to ride across the peanut fields with.
“Was it bad?” she asked softly, knowing he’d know what she meant.
“Yeah,” he answered, glancing at the head of the stairs. He took Eden’s arm and pulled her toward her bedroom. But when he opened the door, he saw Melissa just as she was turning over in her sleep, her belly so big it hid her face. “Should we call a doctor?” he asked, with almost fear in his voice.
“We should call her husband,” Eden said as McBride pulled her into his bedroom.
He closed the door behind them and seemed not to know where to begin.
“Did you get in a lot of trouble?” she asked.
“More than you can imagine. There is no more cover. This town is going to know about us by evening, if they don’t already know.” He glanced quickly at her. “By us, I mean the agency.”
She watched as he walked toward the window and looked out. She knew what was down there: at least three agents, and in the field sat a helicopter. If her tax dollars weren’t paying for the thing, she’d wish it would sink in the mud.
He looked back at her. “No one any longer thinks you know anything. Someone remembered seeing a book about missing treasures in Applegate’s apartment, so they think that searching for them was his hobby. They’ve decided that the paper he swallowed had a lot of other stuff on it, and it just happened to have your name at the bottom.” He took a breath. “Anyway, they’re pulling me off the case. Your part in this is over.”
Eden sat down. “I see.” It’s what she’d wanted, but at the same time fear ran through her. “What about the men who ransacked my house?”
“They think it was some relative of Mrs. Farrington’s who thinks he should have inherited this house rather than you. That makes it a domestic problem, not FBI.”
“But Mrs. Farrington didn’t have any relatives.”
“Not that you know about,” he said. “I’ve managed to persuade the agency to look into people who are related to her distantly. And”—he hesitated—“that son of hers knew a lot of very bad people. We think he made friends while he was in prison.” Jared looked at her hard.
Eden pushed away the images that came into her mind of how a person made “friends” while in prison. “So you think that one of them…”
“Tried to find the treasure. I was told that the agency, as a favor, will splash it on the news about finding the necklace and its being a fake. We hope that will keep future treasure hunters away from you. They—we—think you’ll be safe if no one thinks a valuable necklace is hidden inside your house. You’ll have a bit of publicity for a while, but it’ll blow over the first time a movie star gets a divorce.”
“So the necklace isn’t valuable?”
Jared lifted his eyebrows.
“Worth anything at all?”