His chest squeezed. Hadn’t his daughter had enough experience with death and dying without Eugenia sharing her fears of her own mortality? “Well . . .”
“She said she’s going to Asheville on Friday with her book club group.”
He breathed again. “But she’ll be back Saturday night.”
His daughter watched him from the corners of her eyes. “Grandma says what I really need is a mother.”
“Your grandmother talks too much,” Steve said grimly.
Gabrielle ignored this. “You could get married again.”
Jesus.
“I don’t think that will work,” Steve said gently.
She sat back on her heels, giving him her full attention. “Why not?”
He didn’t have the time or energy to invest in another relationship. He didn’t have the heart. Or the guts.
“Well . . . I don’t really know anybody.”
Gabrielle cocked her head.
Steve felt uneasy. He’d seen that look before when Teresa wanted something. It used to presage a shopping trip. But Gabrielle couldn’t go shopping for a mother.
He tried to clarify. “Before two people can get married they have to do a lot of other stuff first. Like go on dates.”
“Oh.” Gabrielle sighed. “Yeah, I guess you wouldn’t be good at that.”
“Right,” Steve said, relieved. But curiosity wouldn’t let him let it go. “Why not?”
Gabrielle grinned. “Because you’d make your date leave the movie.”
He laughed.
“I think that’s everything,” Bailey told Paul, desperately upbeat. She popped the flash drive from his laptop’s USB port. “I’ve backed up all your files and the documents folder. I can work from my parents’ house.”
As long as she could persuade her dad to stay out of his office and her mother to leave her alone.
Dorothy, who preferred even the TV to her own company, had never understood or approved of her younger daughter’s desire for solitude.
What are you doing up there?
she would call up the stairs when Bailey used to escape to her room after school.
You’re not doing anything.
Nothing but reading or writing or dreaming.
Nothing her mother considered worthwhile.
And leave your door open!
she’d say, as if she could save her daughter from the perversion of privacy that way.
How can you expect to get anywhere if you spend all your time in your room?
Well, maybe Mom was right on that one.
Because here Bailey was, almost twenty-seven years old, unpublished, unmarried, slinking home to escape the scandal of an unconsummated love affair and an ongoing murder investigation, moving back under her parents’ roof and driving her mother’s car.
As a career development, it pretty much sucked. As personal achievements went, it was an all-time low.
Paul slouched against the corner of his desk, stretching out long, elegant legs in perfectly pressed khaki. “I want you to stay.”
Bailey ignored the lick of longing and dropped the lipstick-sized flash drive into her purse. “My being here makes Regan uncomfortable.”
He held her gaze, a smile touching the corner of his mouth. “And you’re being gone makes
me
uncomfortable.”
She resisted the lure of that long look. Being needed was one thing. Being stupid was another. “I can’t stay. Regan thinks—”
“Regan’s opinions are hardly my biggest concern right now.”
“What Regan thinks, other people will be saying.”
Paul shrugged. “Small town, small minds.”
“Big mouths,” Bailey said. “People talk.”
“So what? As soon as I finish this book, we’ll be gone. Back to New York, where we belong.”
That “we” should have thrilled her. Wasn’t that what she wanted? Paul and New York. She didn’t belong in Stokesville. She never had.
And yet . . . Her family lived here. Her father owned the hardware store. Her sister belonged to the Junior League. Her mother . . . How would her mother hold up her head in church if the whole congregation was whispering about her daughter’s relationship with her famous boss?
Didn’t Paul see that? Or didn’t he care?
“It’s going to be difficult to leave town if—”
You’re arrested for murder.
She gulped. “—if the police decide to listen to gossip,” she finished weakly.
“Let them. You of all people know I was faithful to Helen.”
Bailey flushed guiltily. Yes, she did.
“I
loved
her,” Paul said dramatically.
Bailey winced. But a small, cold kernel held aloof, observing, as if she were watching a mediocre actor in a very bad play. She didn’t much like her own role, either.
“Unfortunately, the police are more interested in your dry-cleaning than your feelings,” she said.
“The police are incompetent.”
Bailey didn’t think Steve Burke was incompetent at all. But she said, “All the more reason for you to be careful.”
“I am being careful. I spoke to my lawyer. And I revoked that consent to search.”
After she’d told him Steve Burke had confiscated his best black suit to test for blood stains.
“Are you sure that was a good idea?” Bailey asked.
“I’m under no obligation to cooperate with Barney Fife. Besides, as you pointed out, I could hardly host Helen’s funeral from my hotel room.”
He’d picked a heck of a time to start listening to her. “Yes, but now the police might think you have something to hide.”
“I don’t care what they think. They can’t prove anything, and I don’t have to let them in my house.”
“Regan’s house,” Bailey corrected without thinking.
Paul glared.
She flushed.
“It’s ridiculous.” Lines of temper marred his lean, handsome face. “She’ll want me out next.”
“I’m sure she’ll calm down,” Bailey said soothingly. “Once I leave—”
“How am I supposed to get any work done?”
Had he always been this self-absorbed? Or was she simply more aware of it since the move back home? In New York, she had been dazzled by his notice and blinded by her own loneliness. Now, without even her little studio to provide escape, she saw too clearly how dependent she had become—financially, professionally, and emotionally.
The thought made her wince.
Paul depended on her, too, Bailey reminded herself. That’s why he was so upset.
“If you need anything, all you have to do is call,” she reassured him.
He studied her, his head angled to one side. “I suppose you could take the evidence boxes with you.”
Bailey blinked, sure she hadn’t heard him correctly. “What?”
“I’ll be far too distracted to work. You might as well use your little time away to go through the evidence boxes.”
After Billy Ray Dawler’s conviction, the evidence from his trial had been packed away into heavy cardboard file boxes. The police didn’t want to keep them; the department had a storage shortage. The district attorney’s office didn’t want to destroy them; the DA worried about the possibility of appeals. So for twenty years, the boxes sat forgotten in the DA’s property room. The current DA had been only too happy when celebrated crime writer Paul Ellis expressed an interest in the old case and offered to take them off his hands. But as far as Bailey knew, Paul had never touched them.
“What do you mean, go through them?”
“I want you to inventory the contents.”
Okay, that made sense. Paul was already reading the trial transcripts, hundreds and hundreds of pages. He had begun setting up interviews with Billy Ray and his jurors, his high school teachers, and the chief of police. Sooner or later, Paul would want to review the actual physical evidence.
But couldn’t he wait to play detective until after the funeral?
“You want me to do that now?” Bailey asked.
Paul looked pained. “I suppose you think
I
should do it.”
She felt hot and uncomfortable. Angry, and that made her even more uncomfortable. This was to be her punishment, she thought, for abandoning him. “I don’t even know what you’re looking for. Everything’s disorganized.”
“So organize it. That’s what you do.”
The implication was clear. That’s what he paid her for.
Bailey drew another deep breath.
“Right. Can do.”
Paul smiled, appeased. “I’ll help you take the boxes out to the car.” She must have looked surprised, because he added, “They’re heavy.”
She expected he’d forget his offer by the time she came back downstairs.
But her own packing didn’t take that long. Her apartment furniture—the stuff she didn’t sell, the rose wing chair with the velvet worn in spots, the 1920s steamer trunk she’d used as a coffee table—was still in storage. She planned to move her clothes in stages. Maybe by the time she emptied her closet, she’d have found a way to tell her mother she was moving home for good.
The thought made her shudder. Or maybe she’d find another place to live. Someplace close. Someplace cheap. In New York, she’d scrounged from paycheck to paycheck, and she hadn’t been in Stokesville long enough yet to save the security deposit for an apartment.
Paul carried the final carton to her mother’s car and closed the trunk with a final sounding slam. “I’ll see you tonight.”
She nodded. “Hobart Funeral Home, seven o’clock.”
“Come by the house first. I don’t want anything to go wrong tomorrow.”
She understood his concern. The funeral of Helen Stokes Ellis was sure to be well-attended. Helen might not have been well-liked, but she was One Of Our Own. And every soul at the church would show up at the house afterward, eager to eat and drink and talk in hushed tones about the flowers, the music, and the circumstances surrounding her death. Someone had to be on hand to see the silver was polished, the donated dishes were listed and labeled, and the ice didn’t run out. But . . .
“Is Regan going to want me handling the arrangements for her mother’s funeral reception?”
“I don’t give a damn what Regan wants. I need you, Bailey.”
Her objections stuck in her throat. She swallowed, unable to resist his appeal. “I’ll be there.”
Paul’s tired smile crinkled the corners of his eyes. “That’s my girl.”
Thawing, she returned his smile. But when he reached for her, she stepped back, uncomfortably conscious of the watching windows.
“So, I’ll see you at six, then,” she said.
Which gave her barely enough time to drop off her suitcase and change into a black skirt. No time for dinner, which was bad. No time for explanations, which was good.
No time to think. Maybe that was best of all.
She let herself in through the back door less than an hour later to find dirty dishes in the sink and a scooped out casserole drying on the counter. Bailey shook her head over the mess. For this she got her BA in creative writing? But she was glad to see Paul and Regan had eaten.
Rolling up the sleeves of her good white blouse, she scraped, wrapped, rinsed plates and wiped counters.
Most girls your age are driving carpool,
her mother had said.
Or running errands for their husbands.