“A week.”
Eden blinked at her daughter. “Are you telling me that Stuart may not even know that you’ve left him?”
Melissa tried to roll over on her side, but her big belly kept her on her back. “Mother, haven’t you been listening to me? I didn’t leave Stuart, per se. I left an impossible situation. But of course he knows I’m not there. He always calls me from whatever hotel he’s in, so when I don’t answer the phone he’ll know that I’ve left him. Or left that place, that is. You know something, Mother? I really like it here in Arundel. The fresh air. The land. The water. I like this big old house. I think Stuart and I should move in here with you. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? You’d be around your grandchild every day. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
Eden didn’t say a word—she might start screaming and never stop. Silently, she closed the door, then called Stuart yet again. Didn’t he pick up his messages? No, of course not. He thought he had a wife at home who would be answering the phone. But wait! What if Melissa had gone into labor? Surely Stuart had left a number where he could be reached.
Eden started to go back to Melissa’s room to ask, but stopped. She very well knew that her daughter would never give her the phone number. Eden was so desperate that she felt no guilt when she made a thorough search of Melissa’s handbag, but she found nothing.
Eden went to the kitchen, poured herself a big glass of wine, then took it and the bottle outside. It was still cool, and she shivered. How things in life could change in an instant, she thought. A few weeks ago she was living with her daughter and loving where she was. If it hadn’t been for her son-in-law, she would have been quite happy. She was now ashamed of the thought, but if she’d been told that Stuart had been run over by a train, she would have been secretly glad. She would have had her daughter and her grandchild to herself.
But for the last few weeks she’d led a very different life, one that consisted of grown-up things, like…Well, like rolling in the mud with a man. Working on an interesting project with two men. She thought of the night she and Brad and McBride—Jared—had found the necklace. It had been exciting and scary at the same time. And she’d done it with two men. Two of them! Handsome men looking at her as though she was what they wanted most in life. Ah, yes. Exciting and scary at the same time.
But here she was now alone. Sitting in the garden alone, sipping wine alone. In the moonlight she could see her cute little red truck. The back of it had half a dozen brand-new tools in it. Was it true that it was easier to dig with a stainless steel shovel than one that was rusty and pitted? She’d sure like to find out. Near the truck, on the little bricked area by the potting shed, were nearly three hundred plants waiting, crying out, to be put into the soil. The perennials and annuals were in four-inch pots, the bulbs in bags, and she and Jared had put the bareroot trees in buckets of water to hold them until they could be planted. That should have been today, Eden thought, but she hadn’t been able to get outside to do it.
She drank the rest of the wine and poured another glassful. Was she now going to get drunk alone? “Pathetic Palmer,” she muttered.
She knew she had to make a plan. What if Stuart was hearing her messages and not responding because he didn’t want to get back together with Melissa? If that was so, then Eden knew that she’d soon become grandmother-in-residence. When she thought of diapers and toilet-training and baby food, she took another deep drink of wine and wished she’d brought her cell phone outside with her so she could call Stuart again. Would it be too, too difficult to call every hotel in Los Angeles and ask if he was there?
Plan, she thought. She had to make a pl
an. Now that the fiasco about the necklace and that spy swallowing her name was over, she needed to think about her future. Had she ruined it with Brad? When Melissa had been hosing her down, Eden had looked at Brad’s sad eyes and had wanted to go to him, but her duties of motherhood had kept her where she was.
Eden emptied the second glass of wine, then made herself stop. It would be nice to drink so much that she couldn’t remember the last few days, but she wasn’t going to do that. Brad and Jared. She missed them both already. Jared had been a temporary…What? Friend, she thought. Jared McBride had become her friend.
As for Brad…She wanted him to become more. When she stood up, she was dizzy, but she took a few deep breaths of cool night air and managed to get up the steps and inside the house. Tomorrow she was going to go to Brad and beg him to forgive her. In spite of what she’d told Jared, she knew she couldn’t tell Brad the truth. “Well, you see,” she’d say, “I told McBride to pretend that I was a drug dealer who was trying to get away, so he did what he could to stop me, which meant that he leaped on top of me and pinned me down. And when I said ‘Push’ he pushed me, not the truck. It was actually quite humorous. And I hit him with a fistful of mud because…” Even after two big glasses of wine none of that sounded like it would make him forgive her.
As she climbed the stairs, she resolved to find Brad and talk to him. Lie to him if she had to. Do whatever was necessary to get him to forgive her. When she reached her bed, she fell on it, facedown, fully clothed, and was asleep in seconds.
Outside, in a voice so quiet it could barely be heard, a man said into a radio, “Subject has turned in for the night. Soused.” Chuckling, he put the radio in his pocket and leaned back against the post of the rose arbor. It was the last thing he ever did. A knotted rope was pulled across his throat.
“No,” Bill said calmly, “you’re not going to be allowed back on the case. That you’re taking the death of an operative this hard shows me that you’re too involved. You can’t make unbiased decisions.”
“If by that you mean that I will kill anyone who tries to hurt an innocent person, you’re right.”
Bill put his hands on his flat belly and looked at Jared pacing the room. “You want to sit down and quit this tantrum of yours? Your girlfriend is being well looked after.”
Jared sat down but only to glare at Bill. “Last night a man was killed just outside her front door. Do you call that ‘looking after’?”
“I call that verification of what we suspected. The woman is connected to a spy ring. She knows something, but you didn’t find out what it was. I’m sure you found out that she likes to walk on the beach and loves those—What were they?” He looked at the stack of papers in front of him. “Jelly beanies. Drinks of seduction, I think you called them, but you didn’t find out what she knows.” Leaning across his desk, Bill returned Jared’s glare. “But you’ve found out some things about her since you moved out, haven’t you?
“Snooping into my private e-mails and phone calls?” Jared asked, one eyebrow raised.
“Of course. So what did you find out?”
Jared got up again, trying not to pace but unable to sit still. When he’d heard that a man had been killed so close to Eden and her daughter, he thought he was going to go on a killing rampage himself. He’d wanted to gather guns and men and planes and take them to Arundel, North Carolina, and kill…That was the problem. They still had no idea who was behind whatever was going on. Two agents dead and no idea why. All they knew was that things centered around Ms. Eden Palmer and maybe around her old house. It had been with great reluctance that he’d agreed to physically remove himself from the case and give the impression that Eden was no longer being watched. But she was being watched. The cameras were still in place inside her house and out, and men were still stationed outside her house. Everything she did or said had been reported on. Jared had watched some of the hours of tapes, and had read some of the reports. The only thing he’d come up with is that if he were there he’d have let Eden’s whining daughter have a piece of his mind.
Bill was still looking at him, waiting to hear what Jared had found out. That Bill didn’t know the exact contents of what Jared was doing on his own time was reassuring. That meant that the blocks he’d put on his phone and computer were working.
“Something about Ohio,” Bill said by way of encouragement.
“Yeah, one Walter K. Runkel.”
“Let me guess. The whining brat’s father.”
Jared’s mouth turned into a smirk. It seemed that Bill had also seen some of the tapes. “Exactly. Eden said he’d been the head deacon at her church, so I did a little digging, made a few calls, and found out who he was.”
“And?”