“I think Tess wanted to hide them. She got them somewhere and wanted to hide them where no one would look.”
“Ah, yes, hide them in plain sight. So she took them to the frame shop and left them there, meaning to return and get them later.”
“No, she sent us the claim ticket.” Bill handed the piece of paper across the desk to Jared.
“You had this, but you didn’t show it to me?”
“I didn’t know we had it. It was mixed in with her reports, and—”
Jared looked at Bill in speculation. Was he telling the truth that they had overlooked something like this? Either Bill wasn’t telling everything or he was flat out lying.
Bill wouldn’t meet Jared’s eyes. “I want you off the case,” he said quietly. “Two agents are dead, and we still don’t know anything.”
Jared gave his boss, his friend, a half smile. “Afraid I’ll bite the dust on this one?”
“Hoping for it,” Bill said, but his face was serious.
“What are you doing to protect her?” Jared asked.
“We’re just trying to watch her, that’s all. She has no idea a man was killed outside her house last night. All she’s concerned about is finding her son-in-law and getting him to take his wife home.”
“So where is the son-in-law?”
“Busy,” Bill said.
“I see. You’re keeping him too busy to take his wife away. You don’t want anything to mess up the bait, do you? You’re dangling this innocent woman in front of the killer, so you might as well dangle the daughter too, is that it?”
“Maybe if you had found out what she knows this wouldn’t be happening,” Bill snapped.
“She doesn’t know anything,” Jared shot back. “At least not anything that would cause some spy to swallow her name.”
“Yeah, well, maybe. I’m not convinced.” He started to move the papers on his desk about, letting Jared know that his time was up. “You find out anything new, let me know.”
“Yeah, sure,” Jared said as he left the office. Outside the door, he leaned against the wall and thought for a moment. He needed to find out who painted those watercolors of Eden’s old house. He needed to—Hell, there were a thousand things that needed to be done, and he was going to do them. He went back to his office and told his secretary that he wasn’t feeling well. In fact, he felt a bout of stomach flu combined with bubonic plague coming on, and he thought he was going to be out of the office for at least a week, maybe two.
She smiled at him conspiratorially. “Call your mom and she’ll get in touch with you if there’s an emergency?”
“Yeah,” Jared said with a grin, then he grabbed a couple of firearms and was gone.
It took all of Eden’s courage to get dressed and drive to the Queen Anne office the next morning. She wavered between fear and courage, then back again. What if Brad wouldn’t see her? What if he ordered her out of his office and told her he never wanted to see her again? The next second she told herself that she was being absurd. They were adults. She and Brad hardly knew each other, so he had no claim on her and therefore no right to expect anything from her. In the next moment she was down again as she thought about what Minnie had told her about Brad’s ex-wife and how she’d been unfaithful. “I am not his wife!” she said aloud as she pulled into the wide road that led to the clubhouse. “And I wasn’t being unfaithful.”
This morning with Melissa had been very bad. During the night her daughter seemed to have lost all her bravado. She’d stopped complaining and telling Eden that she was in the right and that she should be standing up to Stuart. Instead, Melissa had poked at her cereal and said that Stuart was working very hard to make a home for her and the baby.
Part of Eden thought she should stay at home and hold Melissa’s hand. It was “mother’s instinct.” When Melissa had been a child Eden had stayed home from work whenever her daughter had even the slightest thing wrong with her—which is why Eden had lost job after job. “You do great work,” her employers had told her. “It’s just that you’re absent too many days, so we’re going to have to let you go.”
As Melissa pushed her cereal around in her bowl, she looked up at Eden with sad eyes, the same eyes she’d turned on her mother when she was a child. But Eden looked at her hugely pregnant daughter and said, “I’m going. Melissa, dear, you have my cell number, the number of the doctor, and the hospital. If anything happens, let me know.”
“But what if I go into labor?” Melissa said as she jumped down from the bar stool—and the dishes in the plate rack rattled.
“You haven’t even dropped yet,” Eden said, pulling on her cardigan. “I think you have at least six weeks before you deliver. Why don’t you take a long, hot bath and watch a few movies on TV? I’ll be back this afternoon, and I’ll bring some fish. We’ll wrap it in paper bags and bake it, like we did when you were a child.”
“But, Mother—” Melissa began.
“You’ll be fine,” Eden said, then quickly kissed her daughter’s cheek and hurried out the door.
Now, as she pulled into the parking lot of Queen Anne, her heart was pounding. How angry was Brad? And how did he express anger? Yelling? No, that didn’t seem like him. Coldness? Did he just shut out a person and say nothing to them? Is that how it would be from now on?
Eden was sure her heart was in her throat as she walked into the office of Queen Anne. She’d already driven past his law office downtown and seen that his car wasn’t there. She decided to go to Queen Anne, and if he wasn’t there she was going to try his house.