“Thank God you’re there.” Paul’s voice flowed, warm and fervent, over the line. If she’d been less distracted by her mother, less annoyed by Lieutenant I-Have-A-Prior-Engagement, her heart would have leaped. “Bailey, I need you. I’m in trouble.”
Anxiety clenched her chest. She forced herself to breathe deeply. To speak calmly. To think.
Steve had just left her mother’s house. Had he even had time to drive to the Do Drop and make an arrest?
“Have you called a lawyer?” she asked.
“What are you talking about? I called Feinstein in New York, but he won’t be in until tomorrow.”
Feinstein was Paul’s doctor.
“Are you all right?” Bailey asked.
“Of course I’m not all right,” Paul said. “That’s what I’m telling you. My Xanax is in the house, and I can’t reach Feinstein for a new prescription. I need you to get it for me.”
Relief washed over her in a warm tide. Relief and shame that she had ever doubted him. Only for a second, but the twinge lingered like the residual ache after a dentist appointment. It was Burke’s fault, she decided, poking in where he wasn’t wanted, prodding her with his questions and his bold, black eyes.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’ll call the pharmacy.”
“You’re not listening,” Paul chided. “The prescription can’t be refilled. I need you to get my pills from the house.”
Can’t be refilled? How much had he been taking?
But of course she couldn’t ask him that. Not when he was under so much stress.
She turned to the counter, hunching her shoulders so she wouldn’t have to see her mother’s avid eyes and disapproving mouth. “Won’t there be an officer on duty at the house?”
“You think I should ask him to go through my medicine cabinet and get my drugs for me?”
Bailey’s flush deepened. Paul could be such an asshole. “I meant . . . What if he objects to my being there?”
“He can’t. It’s my house. You’re my assistant. If he doesn’t like it, I’ll revoke my consent to search. I won’t be inconvenienced because some stupid cop is hunting for evidence of an intruder when it’s perfectly plain to the chief and everyone else that Helen drowned.”
Bailey suspected Steve Burke wasn’t stupid at all.
Twelve years with the Metropolitan police force
. But that wasn’t what Paul needed to hear right now.
“I’ll go right away,” she promised.
“I never should have signed that damn consent.”
Privately, she agreed with him. But he had been eager, even insistent, that he had nothing to hide.
“I’m sure they’ll be done soon,” she said soothingly. What had Steve said? “One more day. Maybe two.”
“I didn’t pack for two days. I only expected to be away overnight. I need things. Socks. Boxers. My laptop. I can’t write the damn book on hotel stationery.”
Bailey jammed her tiny mobile under her ear, stretching her other hand for the paper and pencil her mother kept by the kitchen phone.
Underwear,
she wrote.
Laptop
.
“Of course not,” she said, while a small, disloyal part of her wondered how Paul could even think about the book with his wife’s funeral scheduled for Friday. “Anything else?”
“My black suit should go to the cleaner’s. I’ll need it for Friday.”
Dry-cleaning,
she wrote. So he
was
thinking about the funeral. But something about the request niggled at her like a persistent toothache.
Before she could figure it out, Paul spoke again. “Has Regan called about her flight?”
“Not yet.”
“Find out when she’s coming in. She’ll need a ride from the airport.”
Bailey made another note. “Did you book a room for her at the Do Drop?”
“I haven’t had time,” Paul said stiffly. “I can’t think of everything.”
He was upset, Bailey reminded herself. Overcome. She wrote
reservations
next to
taxi
. “How many rooms?”
By mid-July, most of Helen’s social set would already have fled New York for the Cape and the Hamptons. But surely some of them would brave the heat and humidity of Stokesville, North Carolina, for her funeral?
“How should I know? Just take care of it.”
“Can do.” Bailey drew a circle around
reservations
and added a question mark. “What about Richard?”
Richard and Regan—attractive, headstrong, and disagreeable—were the children of Helen’s first marriage to local developer Jackson Poole. They resented their mother’s second husband bitterly. All Paul’s charm and all Helen’s assurances had failed to convince them he hadn’t married her to get his hands on their inheritance. Bailey they simply despised as his stooge.
Paul sighed. “Who can say what Richard will do? But you’d better reserve a room, in case he shows up.”
“I’m sorry,” Bailey said gently. “Is there anything I can do?”
Paul hesitated. “I don’t want to bother you.”
Who else could he turn to? He was a brilliant, driven, difficult man. He was estranged from his own family. He had fans and admirers and precious few friends.
“It’s not a bother,” she assured him.
“Do you think while you’re at the house you could pick up the mail?”
Bailey winced. She wasn’t his therapist. She was his gofer. He didn’t need her sympathy.
“Got it.”
Mail,
she wrote, her pencil point digging into the paper.
“And don’t forget my suit.”
Bailey underlined
dry-cleaning
with two short, sharp jabs of her pencil. “I won’t.”
“That’s my girl.” The warm approval in his voice more than made up for her irritation at being called a “girl.” “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“Oh.” She flushed with pleasure. “Just doing my job, that’s all.”
“You’re amazing. I’ll see you around five. With my laptop, remember.”
“Five o’clock,” she promised.
The line went dead.
Bailey tightened her grip on the phone, as if she could hold on to . . . something.
“You’re not meeting him, are you?” her mother asked.
“I work for him, Mom.” Bailey kept her tone light. “He just needs me to run a few errands.”
“Most girls your age are driving carpool. Or running errands for their husbands.”
Bailey grinned at her. “But they don’t get paid.”
“And he pays you enough to make you drive all over town?”
Not really. But it wasn’t about the money. Paul was her mentor. Her inspiration. Okay, so her time wasn’t her own, and her manuscript was nowhere close to submission. Paul still understood her goals. He valued her intelligence. He made her feel smarter, more worldly, and infinitely more appreciated.
I don’t know what I’d do without you . . . You’re amazing
.
She would never make her mother understand.
“I make more than three-quarters of the women who live in Stokesville,” Bailey said. “Anyway, Paul doesn’t have his car.”
And then it struck her.
Neither did she.
THE lobby stank of popcorn and soda-saturated carpet. Steve scanned the line in front of the concession stand. He must be the only male over thirty in the whole multiplex. He for damn sure was the only one carrying a gun.
Unless that ponytailed mama over there wrangling her toddler off the velvet rope was carrying concealed in her diaper bag . . .
A cluster of teens slouched and postured by the bank of video games, the girls in skinny spaghetti-strap tops and lip gloss, the boys in baggy shorts and overpriced sneakers. Steve watched one boy’s hand drift down his date’s back to rest on the belt of her low-rise jeans and narrowed his eyes.
“What’s the matter?” Gabrielle asked from beside him.
He rearranged his face in a smile. “Nothing, sweetheart.”
Not as long as she was still with him and not playing
Bloodlust 4
while some fourteen-year-old punk groped her behind.
“Are you really okay with the movie?”
All Steve knew about this afternoon’s feature was that it had some vaguely recognizable teenage star and the word “princess” in the title. But it was rated G, and Gabrielle had elected it as an acceptable alternative to Orlando Bloom. He could probably nap through most of it.
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he told his daughter.
“Liar,” Gabrielle said. But she was smiling, and for at least a minute he felt like they were complete again, a unit, instead of something broken with a part horribly missing.
“What do you want?” he asked as they inched to the front of the line.
“Popcorn?”
With some vague thoughts about saturated fats and spoiling her dinner, he asked, “How about Raisinets?”
Raisinets was a fruit, right?
Gabrielle looked at him with big, sad eyes. “Okay.”
Shit. Wrong answer
.
“Large popcorn, medium Coke, and a bottle of water,” Steve told the kid behind the counter.
“Extra butter?” asked the kid.
Steve looked at Gabrielle. She nodded, beaming.
“Yep. Thanks,” he said.
“No problem,” the kid said.
Steve forked a ten over the register, knowing he’d been manipulated by a nine-year-old and feeling pretty good about it. Maybe Gabrielle wouldn’t mind so much not getting her way in the big things if she had some control of the small.
“Come on,” she urged, clutching her red-and-white tub. “We’ll miss the previews.”
As he turned to follow her, his police pager went off.
PROBLEM solved,
Bailey thought, as she maneuvered the rear end of her mother’s dark blue Mercury Grand Marquis toward the road, feeling like a teenager borrowing the family sedan on a Saturday night. Back in high school, her mother had been too grateful when Bailey went out at all to ask awkward questions. Bailey figured the police officer on duty at Paul’s house wouldn’t be so complaisant. But she’d deal with that problem when she came to it.
The car lurched as a wheel ran off the drive. She strong-armed it back onto the gravel. So her driving skills were a little rusty. She hadn’t needed a car in New York. Longing for her old life in the city seized her chest: the bright awnings and dingy lights, the smells pouring from restaurant kitchens and rising from subway tunnels, the choked traffic, the swimming sidewalks, the rush of life.
She gave herself a shake. If she were back in the big city, she’d have even less chance of talking her way past the cop.
But the officer on duty, pink-eared and regretful, held firm against both Northern aggression and Southern charm.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said after about five minutes. “I’ll have to call Lieutenant Burke. He’s in charge of the scene.”
Bailey’s heart bumped.
Somehow she didn’t think Steve Burke would tolerate the contamination of his alleged crime scene. Besides, he had a “prior engagement.”
Not that she cared about that.
“Oh, I’d feel terrible bothering him on his afternoon off. If you could just ask the chief about Mr. Ellis’s medication . . .”
She held her breath while the young officer, Lewis, considered.