Paradise County (34 page)

She had dreamed of her father again last night. The memory came
back in a rush. This time she’d been standing in the middle of a bright, sunlit meadow, and he’d been walking to meet her. She’d been smiling, happy to see him, but then he’d started running toward her and yelling and waving his arms, and she had realized that he had been trying to frighten something away. She’d had the sense that whatever it was was behind her, looming near, but she’d been too scared to turn around and look… .

“Alex?” The voice that came over the walkie-talkie sounded decidedly grouchy. Breaking into her reverie right when it did, it made her jump.

“Good morning, Joe,” she said, recovering. It was daylight, and her tone was frosty.

“Your sister was outside with my son about two
A.M.
I just thought you ought to know.”

“Oh, God. How do you know?”

“I was in the kitchen when Eli came sneaking in.”

“And did you blister his ass?” She remembered his prescription for Neely, and asked the question mockingly.

“I told him not to do it again.”

“Tough disciplinarian, aren’t you? You talk the talk, but you don’t walk the walk.”

“Your sister needs straightening out. My son doesn’t.”

“Your son was out there, too!”

“I’m not just talking about last night, and you know it. By the way, she told Eli that I was sleeping with you. What did you do, give her a play-by-play?”

“No, of course I didn’t… . You know something, I don’t like your tone.”

“Oh, that just makes me want to cry.”

“I don’t have to listen to this,” Alex said, seething, and took great satisfaction in turning the unit off.

Now as grouchy as Joe had sounded, she took a shower, pulled on her black leather pants with a long-sleeved white T-shirt—she was going to have to have Andrea send someone over to the house and pack up some more clothes for her if she was going to stay here for three weeks—and
headed downstairs, beating a fist on Neely’s door as she passed it. Hannibal padded at her heels. It was only when she opened the refrigerator door to pour the complaining feline some milk that it occurred to her to wonder how he had gotten into her bedroom.

Her door had been locked. She was certain he hadn’t been in there when she’d gone to bed the night before. Neely had carried him into her room. Alex could picture the scene clearly. She knew she wasn’t mistaken about that.

Neely had gone out to meet Eli. Hannibal could have gotten out of Neely’s room then. But that didn’t explain how he had gotten into her room.

“Did you sneak out to meet Eli after I went to bed last night?” Alex asked Neely without preamble when her sister came trudging down the stairs. Dressed in the outfit she had described last night without, thankfully, the addition of the purple feather, Neely looked anything but bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning.

Alex never thought she’d be glad to see the diamond stud.

“So what if I did? And how’d you know, anyway?” Neely yawned hugely and poured herself a glass of orange juice.

“Joe told me. He also said you told Eli I’d been sleeping with him.”

Neely took a sip of juice and made a face at the taste. “Was it confidential information? Sorry, I didn’t know.”

“Damn it, Neely… .” Alex gritted her teeth. “You had no business going out in the middle of the night, and you had no business talking to anyone about my sex life. Which you are just speculating about, by the way!”

“Oh, yeah, right, like it isn’t true.”

Alex glared at her sister, then abandoned the argument in favor of a burning question.

“Do you know how Hannibal got in my room last night?”

Neely looked surprised. “How would I know? Actually, I thought he slept with me.”

“He was on my bed when I woke up.”

“Was he? I wonder how he managed that?” Neely took another sip of juice.

“I don’t know. But he was there.”

“Cool. A cat who can materialize and dematerialize at will.”

The muffled sound of a horn tooting in the driveway interrupted.

“Shit,” Neely said, taking one last swallow of orange juice and setting the glass down. “That’s Eli. Gotta go. By the way, I decided to forget the tongue stud. Eli thinks au naturel is just fine.”

“Oh God,” Alex muttered as Neely sauntered from the room and, a moment later, went banging out the front door. With Joe around, this thing Neely had for Eli was definitely not good. Grimacing, she made a pot of coffee and pondered the mystery of the dematerializing cat. Hannibal, who wasn’t talking, watched her and purred.

Could he possibly have gotten into her room when she had gone downstairs to get the walkie-talkie? Only if he’d been let out of Neely’s room by then. But Joe had said Neely had been outside around two. She’d gone down for the walkie-talkie far earlier than that.

But still, that did provide a window of opportunity when he could have crept in, and maybe hidden under her bed. If Neely, for some reason, had let him out of her room.

Until Hannibal learned to talk, that was probably the best explanation she was going to come up with, Alex told herself. Something like that had to be the answer. After all, the cat could not walk through walls.

The next few days passed quickly. Visitors stopped by, mostly acquaintances of their father who had heard through the grapevine that she and Neely were staying at Whistledown, but also a steady procession of neighbors who just wanted to say hello. Alex got out and about, checking out tiny Simpsonville and the bigger town of Shelbyville, and discovering, happily, the malls and shopping that were available in the city of Louisville, only half an hour away. She talked to Andrea daily, about mundane matters such as getting additional clothes sent down and more personal issues such as Paul’s marriage to Tara Gould and the reaction of their friends and social circle to the unexpected couple. Andrea also kept her updated on the circus, as she called it, surrounding the
House of Haywood
articles in the newspaper,
and sent Alex copies, which she could barely bring herself to look at, much less read. The headlines were lurid, the pictures of her father painful, and the text almost libelous, in her opinion, in its depiction of what it called her father’s “robber baron” style of doing business. The features on and pictures of herself and Neely and all six of her father’s wives gave the story the feeling of a slightly unsavory soap opera. Didn’t the reporters realize that they were writing about real people with real feelings? Alex fumed to Andrea. Andrea’s reply: They don’t care. Not if the story’s good.

Having checked the toxicology reports that were submitted with the autopsy papers, Andrea confirmed Alex’s conviction that her father had not been drinking at the time of his death. As for the smell of booze, when Alex related her conversation with Joe to Andrea, Andrea didn’t know what to make of it, either.

“With all the big guns involved in investigating your father’s death, I don’t see how something like that could be missed. I mean, the local police might have, but the state police were involved, and the FBI, too.” Andrea’s voice turned doubtful. “The guy telling you that is not some kind of flake, is he?”

This description was so very far from applying to Joe that Alex smiled. “No. In fact, he’s extremely reliable. If he says there was a strong smell of alcohol, there was.”

“You seem awfully sure. You want me to have somebody check into it? We’ve still got the private investigators on the payroll. They’re finishing up their final report. I could have one of them check with your source, and maybe poke around a little bit more.”

“That would be great,” Alex said gratefully.

“Alex.” Andrea’s voice was hesitant. “I know you’re having trouble accepting that your father—did what he did, but you realize that the only other option is that somebody else killed him? In other words, murder? That’s been pretty conclusively ruled out, I think. There was residue from a recently fired gun on his right hand, and the gun itself was there beside him.”

“I know all that, Andrea. But the smell of alcohol—it bothers me. Why would there be a smell of alcohol if Daddy hadn’t been drinking?”

“And you’re sure this guy isn’t wrong. Oo-kay. I’ll pass this on to the investigators.” Andrea paused. “Wait a minute. Is this the guy you were talking to when you called me Monday? Joe something-or-other? The farm manager down there?”

“That’s him.”

“Oh-ho! Mark’s been talking to him. He says he’s quite a forceful guy.”

From the sound of that, Joe had been giving Mark grief. “Yeah, I’d say that’s a pretty good description of him. What’s he been hassling Mark about?”

“Actually, he’s threatening to sue the estate if his contract isn’t honored. Mark’s looked the contract over, and he says it’s valid. He’s passed it on to David Rowe and the group to decide whether to just go ahead and pay the guy off or let him work out his time.”

“The group” referred to the other half-dozen or so lawyers involved in settling the estate, Alex knew.

“The problem with just paying him off is that there are all these horses to consider,” Alex said. “Apparently it’s going to take a little time to get them settled in with new owners.”

“You sound like you care.” A hint of amusement crept into Andrea’s voice. “This guy has got to be good-looking. Is he?”

“What makes you think that?” Alex asked defensively.

“I know you, girlfriend. You’re not nearly as upset about Paul-the-creep as you should be. And you’re a lot more concerned about the disposal of the Whistledown assets than you have been about the settling of any other property. Now, I ask myself, what does that add up to? There’s only one answer: a hunky man.”

Alex had to laugh. “All right. He’s good-looking.”

“Good in bed? Or don’t you know that yet? Nah, you always did work fast: you know.”

“Andrea!”

“Come on, ’fess up! On a scale of one to ten, give me a number.”

“Eleven,” Alex said, laughing. “And that’s all you need to know.”

“I think I’ll come for a visit.” Andrea’s voice dropped to a sexy purr. “Or better yet, maybe I’ll find an urgent need to check on the Whistledown property personally after you come home.”

Alex laughed, but the thought of herself returning home and Andrea flying in to make a move on Joe did not amuse.

Which was ridiculous, of course. She had no claims on Joe, as she reminded herself daily. Their relationship, at the moment, had degenerated into deliberate and unmistakable coolness on her part and matter-of-fact courtesy on his, except at night, over the walkie-talkie, when she had come to depend on the low, deep drawl of his voice talking to her as a kind of lullaby to go to sleep by. Despite the sleeping pills, she wasn’t sleeping well, and she dreamed about her father nearly every night. Knowing that Joe was there, listening, was all that got her through the night.

She was actually, for purely professional reasons, around him quite a bit during the day. A call to her publisher had produced an “on spec” assignment for a coffee-table book about horse farms of the Bluegrass, which she hoped to complete while she was in residence at Whistledown. She spent quite a bit of time in Whistledown’s barn and fields, taking pictures of everything from Joe (to his annoyance) and the stablehands and grooms and exercise riders and veterinarians and various other horse-types who were in and out of the barn on a daily basis, to the horses, to the farm itself. The prospect of turning this forced sojourn into a paying assignment cheered her immeasurably. There were several more horse farms within shouting distance and even more less than an hour’s drive away, and she photographed them, too. She’d brought her favorite camera with her, simply because she rarely traveled anywhere without it. After converting one of the spare bedrooms into a makeshift photographer’s studio complete with bathroom as darkroom, Alex found she was able to do some serious work.

Inez came in, following the same schedule of cleaning the house two days a week that she adhered to when Whistledown was empty. Both Alex and Neely (the latter reluctantly) swept floors, ran the vacuum, and did laundry as needed. Alex even bought a cookbook with the aim of
refining her cooking skills and at the same time preparing wholesome homemade dinners for the two of them that did not also pack on the pounds. The results were so positive that she and Neely wound up eating pizza every night. Neely begged to be allowed to go down the hill (that’s how she referred to going to the Welches’, which she did five times a day; Joe, to Alex’s surprise, seemed to have no objection to her sister’s visits, or at least if he did she had heard nothing about it) for supper, which Alex flatly refused to permit. Joe, Neely whined, was a good cook.

“Tough it out” was Alex’s unsympathetic response. The Haywoods were not depending on the Welches any more than they had to.

One night about a week after they had settled in, just as Alex was contemplating two suspiciously pink-looking chicken breasts that she had pulled out of the oven after what she was sure was the specified time, the phone rang. Still frowning at the chicken, Alex picked up the receiver.

“Alex?” It was Joe. She had last seen him in the barn about two hours earlier. He had been showing several of the horses to a potential buyer. His expression had been rather grim, and Alex, taking pictures of the scene to his obvious but unexpressed displeasure—who owned the farm, anyway? was what the look she shot him said—had herself had felt a pang at the idea of having to part with the animals, each of whom she was coming to know and appreciate as an individual.

But there was no help for it. Even Joe now admitted as much. There was no money, and the horses had to be sold. He was making the best of a bad situation, but it was obvious he didn’t like it.

“Yes?” she responded, deliberately cool.

“Your pizza’s on its way up.” His voice was dry.

Alex frowned. “How do you know?”

“Because the delivery boy is a friend of Eli’s and he stopped by here first to drop off Eli’s algebra notes, which he borrowed. He tells me that he’s delivered pizza to your house every night for a week.”

“Good God, is there no privacy around here at all?” Alex was indignant.