First Impressions by Jude Deveraux (13)

Chapter Twelve

EDEN woke at five A.M. thinking, The sooner I solve this thing, the sooner it will go away. She lay in bed for thirty minutes as she explored the idea. Since McBride had appeared in her life, everything had been abnormal. Snakes in her bedroom, locked in a cellar, men prowling around outside. The list seemed to be endless. The worst part of it all was that, eventually, Brad was going to find out the truth. While it was true that, so far, Brad seemed to be an all-round great guy, she didn’t relish the idea of telling him that she was being investigated by the FBI. For spying. Or being connected to a spy. Any way she told it, it sounded bad. Whatever happened between her and Brad, whether it became romantic or it was merely a working relationship, nothing would be helped by her being connected to the FBI.

Quietly, she got out of bed and walked to the window. Below, in her garden, the one she’d planned and installed, was a man. He was standing under the little arbor that she’d covered in confederate jasmine. She couldn’t see all of him, but she could see enough to know he was there. She was being watched. Spied on.

Turning, she went into her bathroom and took a long, hot shower. Sometimes she did her best thinking while she was in the shower. McBride said that it was believed that she knew something. Or owned something. Since, until a few weeks ago, she’d owned next to nothing, she didn’t think that was the problem. On the other hand, McBride said that an agent had been killed here in Arundel. It was a hit-and-run. Was it an accident, or did someone know the woman was an FBI agent? If an FBI agent was killed here in Arundel, maybe that meant this place had more to do with the spy than she, Eden, did.

She got out of the shower, dressed, partly blow-dried her hair, then stuck some fat Velcro rollers in the top of it. She applied enough makeup to keep her from looking as though her face had been erased (wasn’t getting older wonderful?), then went to the manuscripts in the corner of her bedroom. Only one of them was urgent, meaning that it had a deadline to be copyedited. Eden opened it and found two grammar errors on one page. Take and bring, she thought. Why couldn’t people get those right? She closed the manuscript box. Obviously, the book was going to take some time.

Setting that manuscript aside, she looked at the others. She was supposed to read them and decide whether or not they were worth publishing. With these books, grammar and punctuation didn’t matter. Not even sentence structure mattered. Everything was about the story. If it was a ripping good yarn, some person, maybe Eden, would be told to fix the writing.

It took her an hour to determine that none of the manuscripts were about spies. There was only one murder mystery, but it was set in Victorian England and was about a man who surgically killed prostitutes. “That’s original,” she muttered to herself and closed the big box containing the 612 pages.

Smells coming from downstairs wafted up to her, so she uncurled her legs and went down to the kitchen. McBride had his back to her and was cooking pancakes. Beside him was a plate with a stack that had to be a foot and a half high.

“Expecting company?” she asked as she sat on a stool.

He didn’t turn around but gave a nod toward the kitchen door.

“Oh, them,” she said. “I thought they were going to be here in shifts, one at a time.”

He put four pancakes on a plate, put it in front of her, then turned back to the stove. “Changing shifts, so there’re two of them here right now.”

She put her knife in the butter, then pulled it out. Funny how being around good-looking men made you think about every bite you took. She put a small amount of syrup on the pancakes and cut. They were good! “Your own recipe?”

“Naw. It was on the package. I just added water.”

“And bananas and strawberries. And what’s the lumpy stuff?”

“Oatmeal.” When he glanced back at her he was smiling. “Okay, so I added a little of this and that. Living alone, you learn some things.”

She ate three more bites before she spoke. “Do you have a photo of the agent who was killed? The hit-and-run?”

Jared didn’t say anything for a moment, then he turned to look at her, spatula in hand. “What do you have in mind? You wouldn’t be thinking of helping me, would you? I mean, give up being hostile and fighting me at every turn, and actually helping me?”

She shook her head at him. “What is it that women see in you?”

“It would take me so long to tell you that we wouldn’t have time to look for any clues.”

“Spare me,” Eden said, but she smiled. “You want me to take those pancakes out to the men?”

“No. You’re not supposed to know they’re there.”

“Not even the man under my jasmine arch?”

“Especially not him.” His face changed to serious. “I heard you up early. Did you think of anything that might have a bearing on the case?”

“If you mean, did I remember any spy meetings that I attended, no I didn’t. I went through the manuscripts on the floor and there’s nothing that makes me think any of them was written by an international spy. But then, what do you know about the man personally? What did he do as a hobby? A lot of romance novels are written by men so maybe he—”

“Wrote a bodice ripper?”

“Hey!” Eden said. “Don’t disparage those novels to anyone in the publishing industry. They’re our meat and potatoes. You know who’s the most powerful person in publishing?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “It’s the woman in the grocery store who throws a book into her cart. She decides everything.”

Jared blinked at her a couple of times. “Two speeches in two days.”

Smiling, Eden glanced down at her plate. “The point is that I didn’t see anything in the manuscripts that might reveal the secrets of some spy. But maybe he didn’t write about that. Maybe he wrote something else and he wanted me to edit the book.”

“I don’t think he wrote anything. And, no, I don’t have any concrete reasons for thinking that, except for being in this business nearly thirty years. The writer-editor angle doesn’t smell right to me.”

“Thirty years. You’re older than you look.”

Jared started to defend himself, then smiled at her. She was teasing him. “More pancakes, or are you afraid Granville won’t like you if you gain a pound or two?”

Eden ignored his jibe. “This morning I decided that the sooner this mystery is solved, the sooner you’ll leave and I can fully participate in what is shaping up to be an interesting life.”

Jared put his hand to his heart. “You’ve injured me, but, basically, I like that idea.” He looked down at the pancakes on the griddle. “You know, don’t you, that I could be thrown out of the bureau for telling you all this.”

That statement made her angry. “I guess they just want a helpless victim who gets shot at, tied up, then rescued by the big strong hero.”

“It’s the way I usually work,” he said solemnly. “I don’t mind the rope burns but I hate the duct tape.”

Eden laughed. “First of all,” she said, “I want to know your theories on this. If you think this has nothing to do with Applegate wanting to get a book published, what do you think it does have to do with?”

“This house,” he said quickly. “Maybe it’s about those sapphires that I don’t think were ever sold. Treasure hunters can be fanatical.”

“I guess we can’t very well show Applegate’s photo around town, but maybe we could show a picture of the agent who was killed. Or at least ask questions about her.”

“We,” Jared said, smiling and looking at her, his eyes soft.

“So help me, McBride, if you start making passes at me, I’ll…”

“You’ll what?” he asked, his eyes teasing.

She grimaced. “I’m not going to play word games with you. Take the pancakes out to the men who aren’t there, then come back in and we’ll look at the documents you have.”

For a moment Jared stood there, looking as if he was trying to decide whether or not to show her anything. “You’re certainly a bossy little thing, aren’t you?”

“When you’re a single mother, you have to be. You can’t say ‘Wait until your father gets home.’ You have to be mother and father to your child, so you learn to be the boss.”

Jared looked at her for a moment, then turned away and picked up the pancakes. He put the plate and the butter and syrup on a tray, added some big glasses of orange juice, and went out the door.

As Eden turned toward the stairs, she caught sight of herself in the black glass door of the microwave. She still had rollers in her hair.

An hour later, Eden was in the dining room, surrounded by gardening books and grid paper. She’d told McBride that she thought that the best person to ask about the agent was Minnie and she was sure she’d see her this afternoon when she met with Brad. Between now and then, Eden planned to make some sketches for ideas for eighteenth-century–style gardens. “I don’t need hours, I need days to do this,” she said in a half whine.

“Good,” McBride said, ignoring her plea for a pep talk. “That’ll give me time to do some things.” He didn’t elaborate.

He helped her haul the books from the cabinet in her bedroom downstairs to the dining room where she could spread out. When he saw her pad of twenty-year-old paper, he smiled but said nothing. Once everything she had—but not all that she needed—was in place, he went upstairs. She could hear him walking about now and then, and a few times heard him on his cell phone. And Minnie called him three times on Eden’s house phone. The first two times, Eden answered the phone, but the third time it rang, she yelled for McBride to get it. It was Minnie.

Eden went through books that were like old friends to her. When she opened them, they vividly reminded her of the time when she’d lived there with Mrs. Farrington and Melissa. It was odd to so clearly remember herself then and to think of herself now, and to look at all that had happened to her in her life. When she’d lived there she’d never thought much about the future. That’s what happiness did to a person, she thought. It made them content. If it had been left to Eden, she would have stayed there forever.

She looked up from her book at the ceiling molding. It had been repaired and now, except for a couple hundred years of wear, was as good as new. She looked about the room and could almost feel Mrs. Farrington there, could hear her voice, could see her smile as she held Melissa on her lap and told her stories about the Farrington family. Smiling, Eden looked about the room. As always, the late-nineteenth-century paintings of Tyrrell Farrington were on the wall. They weren’t good, but they weren’t bad either. Talent aside, Tyrrell had been as fanatical about his family as Mrs. Farrington was. He had painted a history of the family. There were ancestor portraits done from life and from the memories of old relatives, as well as four paintings of the house itself, each from a different angle. It was interesting to see how plants had grown. The pecan trees were still there, only much bigger. Tyrrell had never married and had lived in Farrington Manor all his life. When he was a young man he’d gone on a Grand Tour that lasted over three years. Mrs. Farrington said that if his mother hadn’t faked a heart attack, and his father hadn’t cut off his allowance, Tyrrell would have spent the rest of his life in Paris. Instead, he’d returned home, sulking and sullen, and had spent the rest of his life painting. Now the walls of the old house were covered with his work.

Eden looked back at her papers.

“How’s it coming?”

She looked up at Jared. “I don’t know. I designed one garden over twenty years ago, and since then I’ve done a thousand other jobs. It’s hard for me to remember everything that I knew.”

“It’s not like you’re not used to using your brain. You got your college degree while holding down a full-time job, remember?”

She looked at him suspiciously. “And what was my degree in?”

“American history, minor in English lit.”

She looked at the eraser on her pencil. “I guess I have a file at the FBI.”

“It’s more like a whole cabinet.”

Eden groaned.

“Come on, it’s not that bad,” Jared said, pulling out a dining-room chair and sitting down across from her. “I made a few calls and found out some things. Wanta hear?”

“Maybe,” she said cautiously. “Is it bad?”

“Not to me,” he said cheerfully.

She narrowed her eyes at him. “You found out something bad about Brad, didn’t you? So help me, McBride, if you—”

“Did you know that McBride isn’t my real name?”

“Whatever your real name is, I don’t want to hear it. What did you find out? Other than everything there is to know about Minnie Norfleet, that is.”

He ignored her remark. “Tess Brewster—that was the name of the agent who was killed—lived—”

“Did you know her?”

“Yes,” Jared said succinctly, letting Eden know that he didn’t want to talk about that. “Tess rented a house just down the road from here. A converted—”

“Overseer’s house,” Eden said. “I know the place well.”

“Overseer?” he asked, one eyebrow raised. “Like in Uncle Tom’s Cabin?”

“Don’t give me that Yankee look,” she said. “Nearly all the overseers for Farrington Manor were African-American, and I know. I did the research, remember? That house used to belong to Farrington Manor, but it was sold many years ago. Mrs. Farrington told me that at one point it was derelict and cows wandered through it, but one of the—” She opened her eyes wide.

“Right,” he said. “One of the Granvilles bought it. It now belongs to your Mr. Slick.”

“Brad,” she said, ignoring the disparaging nickname. “That’s good. I’ll ask Brad about the woman and the accident this afternoon.”

“Think he’ll tell you anything?”

“No, of course not. I think Brad killed the woman and will want to cover it up. You’re disgusting, you know that?”

“You’re the first woman who has ever thought that.”

“Why don’t you go outside and talk to one of the men skulking out there? And if any of them smoke, tell them not to throw their butts in my garden. At least I think it’s my garden,” she said under her breath. “I don’t seem to have time to go outside to even look at it. There are probably weeds taller than I am.”

“That’s easy,” Jared said, smiling at her.

“Go! Get away from me! I have to work.”

But Jared didn’t move out of the chair across from her. He opened one of her books and looked at a photo of red tulips surrounded by a trim boxwood hedge. “I thought your idea of making those people beg you to create a garden for them was great. So what constitutes an eighteenth-century garden?”

“Pattern, symmetry. And they need outbuildings,” she said, distracted.

“There are enough of those around here. I’ve never seen so many buildings falling down as there are here in North Carolina.”

Looking up from her book, Eden stared at him in silence.

“What’s that look for?”

“Maybe I could work with the Arundel Historical Society and Restoration North Carolina and move some of the smaller buildings into Queen Anne. The buildings could be restored.”

“Good idea. Glad I thought of it.”

She shook her head at him. “Your ego must reach the moon.”

He smiled at her and didn’t seem as though he planned to go away. “So tell me about all this,” he said, motioning to the many books on the table. “It looks interesting.”

She opened her favorite book, The Gardens of Colonial Williamsburg by Brinkley and Chappell, to the Benjamin Waller garden. “See,” she said, “you need pattern and symmetry, and different plants are used together.”

When Jared’s face showed that he didn’t understand but wanted to hear more, she warmed to her subject. “In America today, because we have so much land, we tend to plant one crop in one space. Modern American families will plant a quarter acre of corn, for instance. Or they’ll put in a dozen tomato plants and make sure that nothing else is near their tomatoes. All very clean and sterile. The colonials lived in a dangerous world, so they lived close to one another, but they still had to grow a lot of their own food.”

“Country in the city.”

“More or less. In Williamsburg, the houses had half-acre lots, and it is amazing that they could fit so many plantings into that small space. Every inch of their lots was used. And nothing was barren. They didn’t have the luxury of space.”

Jared looked as though he wanted her to go on.

“Take herbs, for instance. Today, if an American wants to plant herbs, they put in an herb garden. They tend to separate everything. Herbs are here, fruit trees are there, vegetables are there, and flowers are over there. All separate. But the colonials mixed things up—which, today, we’re rediscovering is a better idea.”

“A cottage garden,” Jared said, looking pleased with himself.

“No. A cottage garden prides itself on having twenty-five different species in one bed, and everything is free-form. The colonials couldn’t have stood that. They wanted order and symmetry, so they’d make a design, architectural really, and each shape would be bordered by a hedge of one plant, such as boxwood, or lavender. Then, inside, they’d put their flowers or vegetables. And they would put plants together that helped each other.”

“How do plants help each other?”

Eden opened a new book put out by her publishing house on companion gardening. “Certain plants like each other, and there’s a theory that if you have problems with bugs on your crop, then you should plant something else nearby that the bugs like more than your crop. In the Middle Ages, no one would plant strawberries without planting borage next to it. Lovage goes near the tomatoes, and hyssop has to be with grapes. They’re best friends. You grow catnip and use the branches as a mulch to repel the odious Japanese beetles—which, thankfully, the colonials didn’t have. Valerian draws worms to the surface to aerate the soil, and it adds minerals to the compost pile. And marigolds should be everywhere. Bugs hate the smell of marigolds.”

Jared blinked at her. “And you say you’ve forgotten what you knew.”

Eden smiled at his praise. “I think I can remember most of it with some study, and of course there’s so much more that’s been published since I was gardening. Back then, people didn’t even believe in mulch, and only a few people had any idea what a compost heap was.”

“Imagine that.”

Eden laughed. “It’s a matter of what’s old is new again. We’re finally learning that nature and our ancestors knew what they were doing. They were organic gardeners out of necessity, and now a lot of people are looking into how they did it.” She looked down at her paper. “Designing these gardens for other people is my problem. How do I do that? The colonials could get four gardens out of a half-acre lot.”

“How big are the lots at Queen Anne?”

She looked at him. “Unfortunately, I don’t know, but I assume the ones not on the water are from one to three acres.”

“What would you do with three acres?”

“In colonial times it would have been pastureland, with sheep, cows, and horses, but now it could be a croquet lawn or a putting green. Just so it’s not two and a half acres of lawn that has to be mowed.” When she looked down at her pad and began to write, Jared leaned across the table and looked at the paper. “Must have,” she’d written at the top of the page.

“So show me a hypothetical design,” he said.

“Okay,” she said, glad for his interest, because she needed someone to run her ideas past. “It’s like this. Here’s the house.” She drew a rectangle near one end of the paper. “I’d bring in at least one old building and have it restored—and thank you for that idea. I’ll be sure and give you credit.” She drew a small square to the left of the page. “Now we connect the buildings with a walkway. Colonials didn’t have a huge lawn where people could walk anywhere they pleased.”

“And these were the guys fighting for freedom?”

“Before power mowers, having an acre of lawn to mow wasn’t freedom.”

“Point taken.”

“Here, near the house, we enclose a place for a pleasure garden that would be used for picnics and just sitting outside on warm evenings.” She drew a rectangle near the house, then surrounded it with what looked like rounded shrubs. “Trees at each corner, and over here a little gazebo, but you have to be careful of gazebos so you don’t make it look Victorian.”

“Then what?” Jared asked.

“The kitchen garden. Not too far from the house, but not too close either. A colonial kitchen garden was a thing of beauty and didn’t need to be hidden.” She drew six narrow rectangles, then a square with a diamond in the center. As Jared watched, she drew paths off the diamond.

“I see. You could put a fountain there in the middle. An authentic-looking fountain, of course.”

She smiled at him. “Now, curving pathways to connect all the spaces, and they’d all be tree-lined, of course. This was before air-conditioning, so shade was important. And, depending on the size of the property…” She turned the pages in the book to the plan for the Governor’s Palace and described the various “rooms.” There was a “ballroom garden” filled with topiaries, a maze made from hedges of American holly, a canal stocked with fish, and a bowling green. It was a garden that nearly bankrupted the government, but Eden thought it was worth every cent.

Jared looked up from the book. “So where do the ATVs race?”

“On the highway, with the eighteen-wheelers,” she said instantly, and he laughed.

“I’ll take you on one for a spin one day, and you’ll love it.”

“I doubt it,” she said, then looked at her watch. “I have to go meet Brad.” Her eyes pleaded with him to not go with her.

“Sorry,” he said, “but it’s my duty to keep you safe. Tell Mr.—”

She gave him a look to cut it out.

“Granville,” Jared said. “Tell him that I’m going to help you with the designing.”

She started to protest but stopped herself. What good would it do? “You wouldn’t happen to have a camera, would you?”

“Digital, five million pixels, with a one gigabyte card.”

She raised her eyebrows, impressed. “Okay, you can take pictures of everything for me.”

“Meant to do that anyway,” he said softly. “I want you to get us into that house where Tess lived, okay?”

Eden nodded. She wasn’t sure how she was going to ask Brad, but she’d figure out something. She smiled at McBride, and he smiled back. Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all.

“So what’s for lunch?” he asked, and she groaned.