Paradise County (22 page)

“I’ve seen your current stepmother. I have to admit, I can’t picture her being motherly towards Neely or anyone.”

Alex smiled a little. “No, being a mother is not much in Mercedes’ line, I’m afraid. Not that I dislike her. I don’t. We get along very well, when we’re together. Neely’s a different story. If you push Neely, she pushes back twice as hard, and Mercedes can’t seem to get that through her head. She and Neely don’t get on.”

“So what do you do? Now that you’re all grown up and out of school? Or do rich girls do anything at all?”

Alex blinked. “Are you
trying
to be insulting?”

Joe laughed. “Sorry. My experience of billionaires’ daughters is limited.”

She sent him a narrow-eyed look. “I’m a photographer. A very good photographer, if I do say so myself. You know those big picture books people have lying around on their coffee tables? I take the pictures. It doesn’t pay all that well, but that’s never been a concern before.”

“I suppose your ex-fiancé was rolling in dough too?” They had reached the driveway that led to Whistledown, and Joe headed up it.

Alex sniffed derisively. Surprisingly, the mention of Paul barely hurt. She was getting over him faster than she would ever have thought was possible—and she knew the reason. A sexual attraction to another man was a powerful palliative. “Suffice it to say that his new wife is the daughter of a very rich man. He’s successful in what he does, but he doesn’t have any real money. Or at least, he didn’t. Now that he’s married to Tara Gould, he does. Actually, finding out about Paul was probably the best thing to come out of all this. I wouldn’t like to be married for my money.”

He gave her a crooked smile. “There’s no reason why you should be.
You’re a beautiful woman. Intelligent. Charming. A little bossy, but maybe that’s just me.”

Alex laughed. “Thank you. I think.”

Whistledown was in front of them, and Alex couldn’t help looking up at the upstairs porch as Joe stopped the truck. Involuntarily she shivered. There—right there, between the two tall windows on the right—was where she had seen the man. Today there was nothing there. She could see clear through the railing to the white-painted stone.

“Ready?” He was already getting out of the truck. Alex climbed out too, without waiting for him to come around and open her door. She lagged a little behind as they headed up the front walk. Last night’s terror was too fresh a memory to be so easily discarded.

“I’ve checked the place over with a fine-tooth comb, by myself and with your sister, and as far as I can tell not a thing’s out of place.” Joe’s voice interrupted her musings. He had opened the door and was waiting for her to precede him into the house.

For a moment longer Alex hung back, her sense of dread as solid a barrier as a wall would have been. But then she glanced at Joe. He was big and strong and utterly reliable. She totally trusted in his ability to deal with whatever they might encounter. At the very least, he would keep her safe. With that thought firmly in mind, she walked past him into the house.

Without electricity, the interior was dark and faintly eerie even on so bright a day. The heavy curtains, which were still drawn from the night before, were responsible for that, of course, Alex told herself stoutly. The faint aroma of rose potpourri wafted beneath her nostrils. The house seemed almost too quiet, as if it waited for something. For her? The thought popped into her head of its own volition, and Alex shivered again. She had to bite her lip to keep from protesting as Joe shut the door behind them.

For a moment the house seemed to close in around her. The sudden gloom seemed alive with shadows that seemed to hang back in the corners like silent wraiths.

“Let’s get some light in here.” Joe broke the spell by striding into the
living room and opening the curtains. Alex, trailing him (no way was she letting him out of her sight), gave a sigh of relief. With sunlight pouring in, the atmosphere no longer seemed so ominous. She followed Joe through the downstairs as he opened curtains in each room.

When they reached the kitchen, Alex stood for a moment glancing around. Since her father had bought the house, the kitchen had been outfitted with malachite green granite countertops and hand-painted Smallbone cabinets, which gave the room an old-fashioned look. The floor was paved with bricks waxed to a dull luster, and the walls were heavy wood paneling painted a soft green. It was a beautiful room, just as all the rooms at Whistledown were beautiful. At least, Alex thought, they were beautiful on the outside. She still had that sense of some kind of repellent undercurrent running beneath.

“Ready to go upstairs?” Joe was standing beside the small door to one side of the kitchen that opened onto the narrow back staircase. At the thought of going upstairs, Alex’s sense of dread increased. But she reminded herself, again, that with Joe accompanying her there was nothing to fear.

“I guess.” Her obvious lack of enthusiasm made him smile. He was waiting for her by the door, and she reluctantly walked past him and began to climb.

“I don’t know, but it seems to me that if you really thought there was somebody who had no business being here in this house last night, maybe getting out of bed and chasing him wasn’t the smartest thing you ever did.” There was a faintly trenchant note to the drawled observation. Alex, already halfway up the steep stairs, cast him a look over her shoulder. Although he was two steps behind her, the top of his black head was about level with her chin, and his shoulders, hugely wide in the Michelin-man coat, seemed to fill the passage. His eyes glinted up at her in the dim light of the windowless stairwell. His solid presence was so comforting that she was willing to let his intimation of her foolishness pass.

“It probably wasn’t,” she admitted, gaining the second floor and walking slowly along the hallway with him right behind her. “But I thought …” Her voice trailed off as she looked around.

“You thought … ?”

“It might be my father.”

“Ah.” The wealth of understanding in his voice made her send him a quick, glimmering smile.

Everything was just as it had been the previous day—the soft cream walls, the elaborate white-painted doorjambs surrounding polished mahogany doors, the red Oriental runner on the dark wood floor, the console table, flanked by twin Duncan Phyfe chairs, with the elaborate hanging tapestry over it. Above the chairs were two small gilt shelves, set at eye level, and on the shelves were, as Joe had said, matching bronze statues of some mythical goddesses. Somebody, Joe probably, or maybe Neely, had returned the fallen statue to its perch. Mentally Alex reviewed the seconds before she was hit. She had tripped—she remembered that—and a glance confirmed that it could have been on the carpet, which ended in an elaborate white fringe just outside her bedroom doorway. She had stumbled forward, and put her hand on cloth—the tapestry? It was possible. Reaching out to touch the tapestry to see if the feel of it matched what she remembered, she frowned. Was the tapestry thicker and oilier than she recalled the cloth being? She thought so, but her memory of the few seconds when she had been actually falling was hazy. Was it possible that, by grabbing the tapestry, she had knocked the statue down on her own head?

Remembering the blow, her stomach grew queasy, and her poor stitched scalp seemed to throb. Just being in the hallway again brought the whole thing back to her. She could almost hear the sound of the breathing: In, out. In, out… .

“For God’s sake, don’t hyperventilate,” Joe said, grabbing her upper arms and turning her around so that she faced him, pulling her out of the memory. Alex looked up at him, realizing that she had been unconsciously mimicking the breathing she had heard. Thank God for Joe, she thought, meeting his gaze. He was making this whole terrible business much easier. His eyes darkened as their gazes clung, and his hands tightened around her arms.

A sudden sound startled them both. It wasn’t a loud sound, more of a
muffled thump, but in a supposedly empty house there shouldn’t have been any sound of that sort at all. Alex stiffened as an icy finger of foreboding ran along her spine, and turned her head sharply in the direction from whence the sound had come. Her hands came up to clutch Joe’s forearms, her nails digging into the puffy rolls of nylon in a death grip.

“What was that?” she hissed.

“Wait here.” Joe’s hands dropped away from her arms and he pulled free of her grip as he started to walk past her. “I’ll check it out.”

While leaving her alone in this hall, prey to God knew what?

“Not in this life!” She grabbed the big, warm hand closest to her as he passed and held on tight. Memories of the night before replayed themselves in her mind as she followed him down the hall. This time there was no room for any doubt. There was something—some
body—
in the house. She’d been right all along.

Her heart speeded up at the realization.

Thump.
The sound was coming from her bedroom. Trailing a step or so behind him, Alex clung tightly to Joe’s hand as they approached the partly open door. Her breathing was ragged, and she had to deliberately remind herself to keep it under control.

“Maybe we should just leave, and go get the police.” She whispered the suggestion without much hope of having it attended to.

“Shh.”
Joe stopped, and with an outstretched hand swung the door of the bedroom open the rest of the way. The creak of the door made Alex wince, and surely would have alerted anyone in the room—but the room was deserted. Alex saw that at a glance. The only possible hiding places were under the bed, or behind the closed door of the closet.

Thump.
Alex’s eyes widened. The sound
was
coming from the closet. Joe freed his hand with a quick tug, gave her a quick, meaningful frown that said as plainly as words
stay here,
and crossed the room in four long strides, leaving Alex to break into a cold sweat as she watched. If a real, live human being was in that closet, he might just have a real, live gun…

Eighteen

I
f a gun-toting housebreaker emerged, she would run. She would scream. She would call 911.

The phone was out.

Joe jerked the closet door open, looked inside—and an enormous orange tabby cat came strolling out past his feet.

For a moment Alex simply stared at it. Joe, from his expression initially as surprised as she, burst into laughter, and bent to scoop the furry behemoth up in his arms. It was a sleek and extremely well-fed-looking cat that must have weighed in the neighborhood of twenty pounds.

“Meet Hannibal,” he said, stroking the cat’s fur as he carried it toward her. “How he got in that closet I don’t know, but he seems mighty glad to see us.”

“Hannibal?” Alex repeated doubtfully. It seemed like a strange name for a cat.

“He’s a mouser,” Joe explained with a twinkle. “Good at it, too. You know, Hannibal the Cannibal?”

“Oh. Funny.”

Tail twitching, the cat looked up at Alex through slitted green eyes.
Its purr was loud enough to be heard downstairs. In between purrs it paused for breath—deep, audible breaths.

“Where did he come from?” Clearly she remembered retrieving her shoes from that selfsame closet the night before. She had shut the door afterward, she was pretty sure. Had
she
shut the animal in? Good God, could the breathing have come from him? Had she been chasing a
cat
when she fell, and had the animal somehow doubled back in the confusion and taken refuge in the closet?

Not for anything was she mentioning the possibility to Joe. Talk about feeling like a fool… .

“He’s Whistledown’s resident cat. Usually he stays in the barn. Somehow he must have gotten into the house.”

Alex patted the animal’s head a trifle gingerly—she’d never been allowed to have pets, and wasn’t quite trustful of domestic animals—and glanced up to meet Joe’s eyes. His wide grin was, she thought, at her expense. She only hoped he wasn’t having the same thought she was.

But of course he was.

“A little too solid for a ghost, but he’d make a fantastic burglar—if you had a tuna sandwich stashed away,” Joe said thoughtfully.

“Oh, shut up. And anyway, even if, by some remote possibility, he
is
the source of the breathing I heard, what about the man on the porch? A cat doesn’t explain that.”

“No,” Joe said, “it doesn’t.” But a grin continued to lurk around his mouth just the same as he put the cat down. Hannibal, tail waving in the air, stalked away. “Come on, let’s go check out the porch.”

The upstairs porch was deserted. There was nothing on it, no rocking chairs, no swing, no hanging plants. Nothing that could have perhaps cast a shadow or been transformed by darkness and imagination into the figure of a man. Alex walked to the rail where she had seen the figure and stood for a moment, looking out over the driveway and the front lawn and the road. From here, she had a clear view all the way to Joe’s house and beyond… .

Thoughtfully, she turned, leaning against the rail as she studied the wall of the house directly behind her. It was the same shade as the rest of
the stone: no fading, no cracks, nothing. Frowning, she looked down at the gray-painted boards of the floor.