“She ran up accounts at Bergdorf’s and Barney’s in the six figures, all on the prospect that I was going to marry her. After I got rid of her, Harry Winston’s called me and asked if I wanted to continue holding the ten-carat pink diamond ring.”
“Ah,” Sara said. They had reached the Vancurren house and she felt R.J. take a step backward. She turned to him, her eyes pleading. “You’re not going in, are you?”
“No, and you can’t go with me. This is something I need to do alone. I don’t need a committee meeting every time I want to get something done.”
Sara looked up at the top floor of the old Victorian mansion and saw a light behind the curtain, then a shadow. David and Ariel were back. Sara knew that what R.J. was saying was correct. It had taken as much time to get David and Ariel calmed down about the body as it had to try to deal with it. Part of her wanted to go back to them. This would be her chance to get to know David better. She’d show him that she was calm under stress, that she could handle things. R.J. was the natural leader of the four because he was the oldest and more experienced, but with R.J. out of the picture, maybe Sara could take over.
Yes, she thought, she’d take over and David would hate her for it. Ariel would swoon in his manly arms and David would sweep her up and carry her to the altar. And Sara would be left behind. Strong, capable Sara would be left behind.
“I’m going with you,” she said more firmly, bracing herself for the coming argument with R.J.
“You’d miss your chance with Mr. Politician.”
“What makes you think he wants a political career?”
“I listen and I watch people. You thought you might be in love with him, didn’t you?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. It’s complicated. He belongs to my mother’s family and I’d like to be a part of them.” She glanced up at the window. “But I think I inherited all my genes from my father’s sharecropper family.”
R.J. looked around. They were on the edge of the town, hidden under some trees, and Sara could feel that he had something to say, but he didn’t say it. “Are you sure you want to go with me?” he asked. “I could use your help.”
She waited, her breath held. It seemed that she’d never wanted anything as much as she wanted to stay with R.J. If there was any way for them to get out of this mess, he would find it.
“Okay,” he said at last and started walking rapidly. “But you do what I tell you.”
“I always do.”
“Actually, you don’t,” he said softly. “In fact, you’ve never taken me up on any offer I’ve ever made you.”
Sara didn’t want to talk about them. She was having trouble following him in the dark at the rocky edge of the road. Ariel’s expensive Italian sandals weren’t made for actual walking. “How can you plan something with Nezbit’s wife when you haven’t even met her? Maybe she’s as much beneath your standards as the beautiful Phyllis Vancurren.”
“You twist everything around, don’t you? If I like a woman, that proves I’m a leacher. If I don’t like her, that makes me a snob.”
“Just so we understand each other,” Sara said.
R.J. laughed. “Come on, let’s get some sleep.”
“Where?”
“How about a front porch? I’ve seen a lot of those what-do-you-call-’ems with cushions on them.”
“Chaises. Daybeds. Lounges. I guess we better not try to break into a house.”
“No, I think not,” R.J. said. “You up for a night of mosquitoes?”
“Sure. Mosquitoes aren’t as bad as bullets. Do you know anything about Nezbit’s widow?”
“I know that if she knows she’s a widow, then she’s in on it. My plan is not, as you seem to think it is, to seduce her. I mean to seduce her six children.”
“What?! You can’t—”
“You always believe the worst of me, don’t you?” he said, putting his hand on her elbow and steering her toward a dark house with a huge porch. There were half a dozen pieces of furniture on the porch. “When you were a kid, was there anything that your father did that you didn’t know about?”
“No,” Sara said slowly, walking up the stairs of the porch. She smiled as she thought about what R.J. was saying. To get information out of an adult would take a long time, but they had only days. But what child didn’t blab everything they knew to anyone who asked?
Still smiling, she sat down on one of the two cushioned daybeds on the porch. The cushions were musty and she could feel torn places in them. If she saw them in daylight she’d probably be horrified. Were there mouse nests in them? Bugs? What about snakes?
“Come on, Johnson,” R.J. said softly, reaching across the distance until he felt her hand. “The worst is over. If the police knew about the death, by now they would have arrested all four of us. My guess is that, at the most, two people know about Nezbit’s death.”