Chapter Fourteen
AS soon as Eden said good-bye to Brad at the Queen Anne clubhouse, she felt a sense of panic. She was to cook a meal for a man who maybe, possibly, might become part of her life. What was she to cook? Words from Mrs. Farrington came back to her. “Honey, don’t ever try to impress a man with your cooking, especially one you want to marry. If you spend all day in the kitchen making him the first meal you serve him, he’ll expect you to spend exactly the same amount of time on every meal you cook for him.”
As she got into the car with Jared behind the wheel, she put her hands to her temples. What would taste great but was easy to prepare? She didn’t want it to seem that she was trying too hard. “I need to go to a grocery,” she said, and Jared turned left.
“So what were you and Granville talking about while I was taking pictures?” he asked.
“We were exchanging spy information,” she said as he pulled into the parking lot of the Food Lion. “Wait for me here while I get—”
She cut off as he got out of the car to go with her. Inside, he followed her around in silence, watching everyone who got near them while Eden shopped.
When they got home, Eden went to the kitchen to begin to cook. Her face looked as though she was trying to pass an exam that would get her into college.
“Mind if I…?” He motioned to her telephone, and she knew he was asking if he could check her messages. That he knew her PIN number didn’t surprise her at all. He pushed buttons, listened, then hung up.
“Minnie?” she asked.
He raised his eyebrows in a way that made him look a bit like a trapped animal. “Four calls.”
Eden waited a moment to see if he was going to call Minnie back, but he didn’t. He sat on a stool on the far side of the Vermont soap-stone-topped island and watched her moving from stove to sink to counter to refrigerator and tried to lighten the mood. “You’ve never cooked for me like that,” he said in a false whine.
“I’m not trying to win your heart. Here, you can chop the onions,” she said as she pushed a cutting board, a knife, and a big Vidalia onion toward him.
“You know, don’t you, that there’s been research done on this. Women complain that men never help them in the kitchen, but studies have found that women always dump the most odious jobs on men when they do try to help. It makes men stop offering to help.”
She didn’t look up from the pot simmering on the stove. “And who says our tax dollars are unwisely spent?”
Jared gave a little smile as he started chopping an onion.
At exactly seven, Brad showed up at the screen door in the front, yellow and white daisies and mums in one arm, two bottles of white wine in the other, and a chocolate cake in a box at his feet.
“Am I early?” he asked.
Eden had taken a five-minute shower. She hoped she looked half as good to him as he did to her. He had on a tan cotton short-sleeve shirt, freshly ironed trousers, and he looked like he’d just stepped off a yacht. It was all she could do to keep her hands off of him.
But she knew that McBride was five feet away, so she behaved herself as he opened the door. She took the cake, the flowers, and the wine and handed them all to McBride. He grimaced, letting her know that he didn’t like being a packhorse, but he turned away to take the things into the kitchen.
As soon as he was out of the room, Brad opened the screen door and reached down to pick up something else he’d brought. “It’s a little house-warming gift,” he said, and handed her a plant.
She looked at the plant, rubbed a leaf with her fingertips, and smelled it, then she looked into Brad’s eyes. Slowly, she set the plant on the floor, then looked at him. Their minds were in accord. He put his arms around her, and as she knew they would, their bodies fit together perfectly. When his lips touched hers it was with a pent-up desire that seemed to have been held inside her for a lifetime. Whenever she’d kissed a man in her life, she had always been cautious. She didn’t want to lead him on, didn’t want him to think that she was going to give more than she was going to. But with Brad she didn’t feel cautious. She didn’t feel tentative. She felt that this man was the one she’d been searching for for a very long time.
She kissed him with passion and with promise. Their lips and tongues met; their bodies met. Perhaps it was Eden’s imagination, but it seemed that their spirits met.
She wasn’t sure what would have happened if McBride hadn’t cleared his throat.
Brad pulled his lips from hers, and reluctantly, Eden moved her head down to rest on his shoulder. Her heart was pounding so hard that she couldn’t allow her face to be seen. Brad stroked her hair and after a few moments she was able to pull away and look at McBride.
“Wow,” Jared said in a falsely teasing voice. His expression looked as though he’d like to hit Brad. “Do you react like that to anybody who gives you a plant?”
“This is lemon balm,” Eden said, smiling lovingly at Brad.
“Is there something I’m missing?”
“Lemon balm’s Latin name is Melissa officinalis. I named my daughter after this plant, and Brad knew it. It’s just a thing between gardeners, that’s all.”
“Ah, right,” Jared said, looking from one to the other of them, then he gave a false smile. “Maybe we should eat while it’s still hot.”
“Like me,” Brad whispered as he followed Eden into the dining room, and again she giggled.
During dinner, Eden told herself that she had to stop acting like a teenager, but she was feeling as nervous as a girl on her first date. Brad and McBride talked about some things, but she wasn’t sure what they were saying. Something about the house down the road, the one where the woman who had been hit by the car had lived. Eden cleared the plates after the appetizer (cold asparagus wrapped in paper-thin ham) and brought in the bowls of vegetables (spring peas, tiny new potatoes, itty-bitty carrots) and the roast chicken that she’d wrapped in rosemary from her garden.
Gradually, she was able to calm herself and began to listen to McBride and Brad and even to make a few comments. She had to give it to McBride that he never strayed from his job. His main concern was about the woman who had lived down the road, and he never left the subject. He had quickly secured Brad’s permission to visit the house. To search it, she thought.
She served Brad’s cake on a tall silver pedestal cake stand that Mrs. Farrington had loved.
“Ah, yes,” Brad said, looking at the cake stand. “Pulled out of the walls,” he said.
As they ate cake (from a bakery, not homemade) and had coffee, Eden said to Brad as she cleared the table, “Did you bring them?”
“They’re in the car. I’ll go get them.”
“Get what?” Jared asked as soon as Brad left, and Eden told him about the watercolors.
Jared’s face started turning red, looking as though he was about to explode. “You’ve known about these watercolors all afternoon, but you didn’t tell me about them?”
“Yes, I knew about them, and, no, I didn’t tell you. Do you plan to arrest me for withholding evidence?” She glared at him. “So help me, if you get angry I’ll start keeping everything from you.”
“You can’t do that!”
“Oh, no? Try me.”
Jared glared back at her. “If Granville knows about the watercolors, what else does he know? And how does he know about the watercolors? What did you tell him about me?”
“Don’t look at me like that. I told him nothing, but he’s figured out a lot. He says he knows that you’re not what you say you are, and he knows that you were snooping in my house the night I beat you up. Right now I wish I’d used a weapon on you.”
At that statement, Jared’s face showed astonishment and disbelief, then he started to get angry. “If I hadn’t been here, you’d be dead of snakebite by now.”
“If you hadn’t been here, I doubt very much if any snakes or men would have been inside my house.”
“You think I caused all this?” Jared gasped out.
“You—” Eden began, then saw Brad.
“Did I miss something?” Brad asked.
“Nothing worth repeating,” Eden said, smiling coldly at McBride as Brad put the box on the dining table.
“This has been a great evening,” Jared said as he put himself between the box and Brad. “Lotta fun, but—” He yawned hugely. “I think it’s time all of us hit the hay. Maybe we can do this again, Granville.”
Brad didn’t move, just stood there and stared at Jared. “I’m not leaving.”
Jared took a step closer to him. “I think—”
“Stop it, both of you!” Eden said. “You! McBride, back off. Brad knows a lot about this and maybe he can help us.”
“Help us with what?” Jared asked, glaring at her.
“Finding out whatever it is that you’re trying to find out,” Brad said, his lips in a line and staring at McBride.
“I’m not—”
“The two of you fighting like a couple of dogs isn’t going to help anything,” Eden said. She put her body between the two men, then put her hand on Brad’s chest. “Mr. McBride believes that the woman who rented your house was murdered, that it wasn’t an accident, and he’s here trying to find out who killed her and why.” Her eyes begged Brad to accept what she was telling him and to ask no more questions. Brad’s lawyer-mind would, of course, see right away that what she was saying made no sense. A murder investigation didn’t cause the investigator to move in with a person who’d not even been in town the same time as the victim. And, besides, earlier Eden had admitted that McBride was protecting Eden. From what?
Understanding, Brad picked up her hand and kissed her fingertips. “For you, anything.”
Behind them, Jared rolled his eyes, then glanced at the box on the table. It seemed that wanting to see what his friend and colleague had left behind was overriding his common sense.
When the two men seemed to have silently agreed to back off, Eden turned to the box and opened it. Slowly, she withdrew nine framed watercolors, each nine by twelve, and put them on the table, one beside the other.
“Hank said he should charge me rent on them,” Brad said into the heavy silence. “He was going to put them in an auction this weekend.”
Jared set the box on the floor, and the three of them looked at the paintings. They were nice, what the English call “chocolate box” paintings, meaning they were like the romanticized house and garden paintings that are often seen on boxes of chocolates. Not great art, but charming, something you could easily look at every day and not get tired of. All the pictures were of Farrington Manor. Two were of the exterior, and the rest were of the interior.
Standing up straight, Brad looked at Eden. “I did not give her or anyone else permission to enter your house. It was kept locked, and I made sure that someone came by here every day to check on the place. I didn’t want pipes freezing and not find out about it for a week.”
Eden waved her hand to let Brad know that she wasn’t concerned that the woman had illegally entered her house. “Maybe this is what she was doing when she was out at two A.M. These curtains are heavy, and there are blinds under them. She could have closed off the windows to block out enough light so that she could have worked in here at night. The question is why?”
Brad couldn’t let go of his feeling of wrongdoing. “The truth is that if she’d asked for permission to paint the interiors I would have said yes. So why didn’t she ask me?”
“Maybe she didn’t trust you,” Jared said. “You have a lot to gain with this house being inherited by an attractive woman like Ms. Palmer.”
Turning, her face red, Eden opened her mouth to bawl McBride out for his insinuation, but then she heard Brad laugh.
“That’s it, Eden, I’m after your money and this old house.” He seemed to be truly amused by what Jared was implying. He looked at Eden. “You know, don’t you, that if either of us had any sense we’d sell our old houses and buy one of those new brick things in Queen Anne. I could get us a real deal.”
Eden smiled at the absurdity of the idea. “Trade an authentic Queen Anne for a fake one?”
Jared grimaced as he looked from one to the other. “All right,” he said, “point taken. Now, could you two get back to these watercolors? What do you see in them? Anything different? Unusual?”
Brad looked down at the nine pictures, but Eden looked across the table at Jared. Was he asking for Brad’s help? What was next? Would he tell Brad what was going on? Trust him? Looking at McBride, Eden raised her eyebrows in disbelief.
Understanding her completely, Jared pointed to the paintings, as though to tell her to get busy and stop trying to analyze things.
“Nothing,” Brad said after a few minutes. “I don’t see anything unusual. Eden, you haven’t changed the house at all since you returned, and these pictures show the house just as it is now.” He looked at Jared. “Of course it would help if I knew what I was looking for.”
Jared didn’t open his mouth and didn’t look as though he was going to. He cast a glance at Eden as though to warn her, but she smiled coolly at him in return, then looked down at the paintings.
She had no idea what she was looking for either. Why had an FBI agent painted the interiors of her house? If she wanted to make a record of the place, why not photograph it? There was the living room with the pale green paneling and the furniture that nearly matched the color of the walls. The paintings were so detailed that they even showed six of Tyrrell Farrington’s paintings, so familiar to Eden that she rarely looked at them anymore. The dining room showed the table and chairs, the windows with the tall burgundy velvet curtains drawn, and more of Tyrrell’s paintings. There was the hall with the big secretary, and the master bedroom. There was even a painting of Eden’s bathroom, with the big clawfooted tub in the corner. As far as she could tell, the pictures were photographically correct.
“I see nothing different,” she said.
Straightening, Brad looked at Jared. “Me neither. What is it we’re supposed to see?”
Jared put his hands in his pockets and stepped back. “I don’t know.” He stared at the fireplace for a moment and seemed to be trying to make a decision. When he looked back at them he seemed to have softened. Some of his animosity seemed to have left him. “I don’t know,” he repeated softly. “We’re pretty sure Ms. Brewster’s death was no accident, and we’d like to know who killed her and why.”
“Can I assume that Brewster is the real name of my tenant? It’s not the name I knew her by, but that’s neither here nor there. And what do you mean by ‘we’? Who are you affiliated with?”
Jared mumbled, “Yeah, Tess Brewster.” Then he had a look on his face that said he’d told all that he was going to.
Brad looked back at the watercolors. “Think anything is written on the back of these pictures?”
Fifteen minutes later, they’d taken the pictures out of their frames, but there was nothing written on them. Nor was there a signature at the bottom. No proof that Ms. Brewster had painted them.
“There has to be something,” Eden said, frustrated. “If all she’d wanted to do was record what was here, she could have taken a roll of film.”
“Or a thousand photos on one disk,” Jared said.
Brad sat down on a dining-room chair and kept looking at the pictures. “Murdered. She was run down in the wee hours of the morning, so someone knew she was in here night after night. Someone was watching her. I wonder if they had any idea what she was doing inside this house?”
“Obviously not,” Eden said, “or they would have taken the paintings before she could get them to the framers.”
Jared looked at her in amazement. “Good point. So someone was watching her, but they didn’t know what she was doing.”
“Maybe they thought she was doing something else,” Brad said.
“Searching for those damned jewels,” Jared said and sat down, his fingers on his temples. “Look, I knew Tess for years. Not well, but we were friendly enough, I guess, but I never knew she could paint.”
“What if she was doing this just to kill time?” Eden asked. “No reason, but just waiting.”
“For someone?” Brad asked. “Or for something to happen?”
“Very possible,” Jared said, nodding.
“Like a watchdog,” Brad said.
Eden walked to the far end of the room. “So Ms. Brewster sneaked into the house at night and waited for whatever, or watched for something, and to keep herself busy, she made watercolors of the house. It wouldn’t take much light, a good flashlight would be enough. Then, one day, when she was leaving or just arriving, someone hit her with a car and ran off.”
“So maybe the pictures she was doing had nothing to do with anything,” Brad said.
Jared glanced at Brad but said nothing. He seemed to be determined to give nothing more away.
“I’ve never been on a stakeout,” Brad said, looking at Jared, “but from what I’ve seen on TV, they’re pretty boring.”
“Yeah,” Eden said. “In the movies, the men mostly seem to eat fried food. I think painting watercolors would be better than that. A watercolor box is quite portable.”
Jared leaned forward, his arms on the table. “I’m not convinced. I feel that there’s something in these pictures. She took them to the framer’s for a reason.”
“Yeah,” Brad said. “I know what you mean. If you write something down, someone can read it. And if you make a call, someone can trace it. So how to leave a message that no one knows is a message?”
Jared looked at Brad with new respect.
“So what was the message she was trying to leave?” Eden asked, looking at the pictures. “She didn’t take photos because—” She looked at the two men, then her eyes lit up. “Because something is different in these pictures. You know, like where they have two pictures and you’re supposed to find out what’s different.”
The three of them looked at one another.
“I’ll take the living room, you take the hall,” Brad said.
“I’ll take the dining room,” Jared said.
“Bed and bath,” Eden said.
In a flurry of motion, they grabbed their pictures and separated. Twenty minutes later, they met back in the dining room.
“Nothing,” Jared said.
“Nothing,” Brad and Eden echoed.
“I even checked ol’ Tyrrell’s paintings,” Brad said.
“You mean these paintings that are all over the house?” Jared asked.
“Yeah. Painted by an angry son of the house,” Eden said, smiling. “He wanted to live in Paris, but the family wouldn’t allow it, so to get them back, he returned home and never left. He wouldn’t marry and produce babies, wouldn’t have anything to do with the running of the family businesses. He just painted night and day, and these are the results.” Eden waved her hand about to indicate the paintings on the walls. “Mrs. Farrington always said that for talent, they’d make a good bonfire, but they’re family, so they were kept. Personally, I rather like them.”
“That’s because you like families,” Brad said.
“Yes, that’s true,” Eden said, smiling at him, and their hands inched toward each other’s.
“At least he got to see that necklace that caused so much fuss,” Jared said.
Eden’s and Brad’s hands stopped moving, and they looked at each other, then at Jared.
“What?” Eden asked.
“Here,” Jared said, picking up the now-unframed watercolor. It was a picture of the big hallway in the center of the house. On the wall was a portrait of a woman with a little white dog. Due to the nature of the medium, it was blurry, but there was a blue and white necklace around the woman’s neck.
After a moment’s stunned hesitation, both Eden and Brad ran for the door of the dining room, Jared behind them. Two seconds later they were standing in front of the familiar portrait done by Tyrrell Farrington over a hundred years before. Around the woman’s neck was indeed a sapphire necklace. Gaping, mouths open, Brad and Eden stared at the portrait.
“Somebody want to let me in on what’s going on?” Jared asked from behind them.
“There was no picture of the necklace,” Brad said softly. “The Farringtons said that if it was ever photographed or reproduced in any way, that…” Brad shook his head to clear it. “Who knows what they believed about that cursed necklace? All I know for sure is that the woman in that picture didn’t have on a big, gaudy sapphire necklace when I used to visit Mrs. Farrington. She loved to keep me waiting, and I used to spend umpteen hours in this hallway. I could draw the wallpaper pattern by heart. There was no necklace.”
While Brad and Eden were standing there, immobile, staring at the painting, Jared stepped between them and lifted the big, heavy painting off the wall. “What do you say we see what’s behind this frame?”
Jared carried the big painting into the dining room, moved the watercolors aside, and put it facedown on the table. Taking his pocket knife, he started to cut the backing, but Eden put her hand on his.
“It’s new,” she said. “The paper tape is new.”
“And poorly applied,” Brad said.
“So maybe it was put on recently,” Jared said as he slit the tape around the edges.
Carefully, he pulled the painting out of the frame and saw that there was a flat, thin package taped to the back of it. On the outside, written in a shaky hand, was “Miss Eden Palmer, spinster.”
“Puts you in your place, doesn’t it?” Jared said to Eden, making a joke to lighten the air, but Brad and Eden were standing as stiff as statues, their eyes wide as they watched Jared cut the tape off the package.
Slowly, Jared cut the paper off the package, and even more slowly, torturously slowly, he began to unwrap it. “Sure you want to see what’s in here?”
Eden didn’t bother to answer him. Unblinking, her eyes were on that package. She well knew that it was Mrs. Farrington’s handwriting on the outside.
When Jared had peeled back the paper, the three of them drew in their breaths. Inside, lying on top of a white envelope, was the necklace. It was the sapphire and diamond necklace that for over a century people had been looking for.
It was Eden who recovered first. She put out her hand and touched the big, round, deep blue sapphire in the center. Two other, smaller, but equally huge, diamond-surrounded sapphires flanked it. In the light of the dining room chandelier, the necklace sparkled, with lights dancing off it to send a million colors through the air. Slowly, reverently, Eden picked up the necklace and held it, turning it in the light. She was hardly aware when Jared picked up the white envelope. It too had Eden’s name on it.
Brad took the letter and held it out to her. “It’s something from Mrs. Farrington. It’s private,” he said softly, “so I’m sure you’ll want to read it when you’re alone.”
Eden heard the tone in his voice and looked up. Both McBride and Brad were looking at her wistfully, like little children wanting her to read them a bedtime story. Smiling, Eden handed the necklace to Brad and took the letter, then carefully opened it. Mrs. Farrington had used her beloved sealing wax on the back. “The only thing the hippie culture ever did that was good was to bring back sealing wax, so it’s easy for me to find,” she used to say.
When Eden saw Mrs. Farrington’s handwriting on the letter she pulled from the envelope, she had to sit back. This is going to be difficult, she thought. The last words of a woman she’d loved very much.
“ ‘My dearest Eden and Melissa,’ ” Eden read aloud, then had to wait a moment for her eyes to clear and her voice to come back. She took a deep breath.
“ ‘Eden, dear, if you’re reading this letter, then you’ve found the necklace. Congratulations! You always were the cleverest person! I wonder how long it took before you saw that the necklace had been painted on one of Tyrrell’s dreadful paintings. I painted the necklace on Great-Aunt Hester’s neck and I think I did a damned fine job of it! Maybe I could have been a painter too. I certainly have as much talent as Tyrrell did.”
Pausing, Eden chuckled before she continued. “ ‘Oh! How I wish I could hear you laugh at that witticism. You always did laugh long and hard at my jokes. It was one of your most endearing qualities.
“ ‘Now, on to business. I found the necklace—and the poor woman who was wearing it—when we renovated this old house. Toddy—you remember him, don’t you?—helped me cover everything up. Or, in this case, bury it. My great-grandfather Minton said he’d gone to New York to sell the necklace and had returned to find his beautiful wife dead on the library floor. On his deathbed he admitted to his son that he’d killed her lover, but I think he killed his wife too. There’s a stone for her in the family cemetery, but I think the grave is probably empty.
“ ‘Toddy found a grisly sight when one of the walls of the cellar came down, and I had to go down there to see it. You know how much I loved doing that! Minton must have disinterred his wife because what we were sure was her body was in a little stone-lined closet. A wall had been hastily and poorly erected to conceal the entryway. Inside was a skeleton wearing the tatters of what had surely been her wedding dress. Around her neck was the necklace that has caused my family so much misery. It’s my guess that Minton killed his wife when he discovered she was about to run off with her lover. Maybe he thought that a decent burial in a churchyard was too good for her, so he dug her up and hid her in the cellar. Or maybe he was so sick of all the unhappiness that necklace had caused that he let her have it for all eternity.
“ ‘Whatever happened, Toddy found the poor woman’s remains when the wall fell in. With the help of one of Toddy’s strong young grandsons—who, of course, was sworn to secrecy—we buried her far away from my family, and very far away from Minton. I hope that she can at last rest forever.
“ ‘As for the necklace that has caused my family so many problems, I spent several days thinking about what to do with it. Tell the world that it had been found? Then what? Have every shyster in the country show up here and try to sell me things? Would I have to tell the truth about Grandfather Minton? Would I have people wanting to write those nasty, hate-filled biographies about my family? Have the world know about the tears shed in my family over those stones? Know about the murders committed because of them? People would say the sapphires and my family had a curse on them. No, I didn’t want any of that. After a dozen sleepless nights, I decided to turn the whole thing over to you, my dear, clever Eden. The necklace is now yours, and you can do with it what you want. Wear it out to dinner. It’ll look good with your eyes.
“ ‘Finding the necklace has caused me no happiness, but finding the teapot caused me nothing but joy. Toddy came to me one Sunday morning, very excited. He said he’d seen something on TV that was like something I owned. He’d seen the hallmark of a Paul Revere teapot and remembered seeing it when he used to polish the silver for me. I can tell you that the two of us old duffers had an awful time prying up loose floorboards and walls to find that particular pot. But we found it, and I sold it, and it paid for at last making my house into the beauty that it had once been. And it paid to send four of Toddy’s grandchildren to college. The other two went on full scholarships, so they had no need of me.
“ ‘Eden, my dear, I have missed you and your dear child every day since you left. That you had to leave and why you had to leave was the curse of my life. No matter what my ancestors had done, nothing compared to the evil that was in my son. I will not burden you with what happened at the last. That is between God and me, and I pray that He can forgive me.
“ ‘The Farrington family that I sacrificed my happiness for in an attempt to keep the name going, is no more, and I think it’s fitting that it ends. Too much hate and anger runs in our blood. There was too much bloodshed in our history. Maybe Minton’s punishment for the murders he committed was that his seed should die out forever.
“ ‘Dear, dear, Eden, I leave my beloved house to you. I know this is selfish of me, for I know that you’ll take care of the house and love it as I did. I am glad that, in the end, I had the wherewithal to make it beautiful again. And I’m especially glad that I’m not leaving you a mummy in the basement.
“ ‘I wish you and Melissa all the happiness in the world. I’ve tried to keep up with where you were and what you were doing. I cried on the day of Melissa’s wedding. I hope she presents you with a dozen grandchildren.
“ ‘I’m sorry that you have never found the right man for you. Have you become bisexual like me?
“ ‘I want you to know that wherever you are, I’m looking down on you and sending you my love. If it’s possible, I will be protecting you from heaven—if they let me in there, that is.
“ ‘I must go now. I’m an old, old woman and I don’t have much strength left. I send you all my love. Kiss Melissa for me. And why don’t you give one of the younger Granville boys a call? Maybe one of them is as good in the sack as my Granville boys were.
“ ‘I will love you always,
“ ‘Alice Augusta Farrington.’ ”