Chapter Eighteen
“IREALLY don’t know what to think,” Melissa was saying as she held the hose on her mother. “I was already in Arundel when I called you. In the past, in normal circumstances, I would have gone straight to you, but you’ve been acting so strangely lately that I wasn’t sure what to do, so that’s why I called first and asked permission to visit my own mother.”
The water from the hose was icy, and if Eden had had her way, she would have gone upstairs, peeled off her muddy clothing, and jumped in the shower, no matter how much mud she tracked in, but Melissa had been horrified at that idea. Eden thought maybe her daughter was enjoying spraying cold water on her mother. Eden bit down on her tongue to keep from talking and scrubbed off mud as quickly as she could. She glanced at Brad. He was standing under the big cypress tree in front of her house and looking at all the things he’d sent her. She’d have to thank him later—and that thought warmed her a bit.
Melissa was telling her story for the second time. “I had no idea what to do when my own mother told me I couldn’t visit her, so I did the only thing I could think of and went to the office of Mrs. Farrington’s lawyer. It was only by chance that I remembered his name. Really, Mother, you have been so secretive about all of this that I feel like I don’t even know you. You can’t imagine my surprise when I met the daughter of the lawyer and she informed me that her father and you were thinking about getting married.”
“Melissa,” Eden said, turning around to face her daughter, “could you please keep your voice down? I don’t think—” She broke off because her daughter hit her in the side of the head with a freezing blast of water. The nozzle was set on “jet.”
“Sorry,” Melissa said, but she didn’t sound sorry. “It has been almost more than I can bear. First you leave me in New York, then you don’t call for weeks on end, then Stuart and I—” She paused to sniff. “Well, that’s all over with. What with all the stress in my life, it’s a wonder I’m not in labor.”
“You look great,” Eden said, rubbing mud off of her. “You look like a poster for a healthy pregnancy.” She just managed to dodge the next blast of water. “I think that’s enough hosing.”
“No, you still have some mud in your hair. Bend down.”
“I think—” When another jet shot past her ear, Eden grit her teeth. This was punishment, pure and simple. Eden had never spanked her daughter but right now she was wondering if it was not too late to begin.
“I really don’t think this is something to smile about,” Melissa said just before her mother took the hose out of her hand.
“Neither do I,” Eden said, pushing the arm down on the hose bib. “As soon as I get cleaned up and into some warm clothes, we’ll talk about everything. But right now I’m wet and I’m cold.”
“Alone, Mother,” Melissa said. “I want to talk to you alone.”
Eden looked around her garden. Three FBI agents were standing together, and she knew that McBride and some man named Teasdale had gone to the house where McBride was supposed to be living. Brad, looking forlorn and hurt and unable to understand what was going on, had moved to her front porch steps. Now and then he’d glance at Eden, his eyes begging her to talk to him and reassure him that everything was okay between them. Besides Brad’s and Melissa’s concerns, there was a murder to solve and a riddle to answer. “If I can,” Eden answered at last.
“What does that mean?” Melissa asked, following her mother into the house. “Don’t you think your daughter comes first? Your pregnant daughter?”
Eden was dripping water across the old wooden floorboards of the kitchen, through the hallway, and up the stairs. For all that Melissa kept saying that her pregnancy was hard on her, she was right behind her mother as Eden bounded up the stairs.
“Yes, of course, you come first in my life,” Eden said. “But right now there are some things going on that—”
“I remember this place,” Melissa said from behind her. “I remember these paintings.”
On the wall, all the way up the stairs, were Tyrrell Farrington’s watercolors. Two of them showed the creek, his family’s boats lined up along the dock. The Farrington boats had all been sold, and the boathouse had fallen down long ago.
Pausing, Eden looked at the paintings. She opened her mouth to tell her daughter that a necklace had been painted on a family portrait and that had led them to solving the mystery of the Farrington Sapphires. But she didn’t say anything, as she didn’t think Melissa would be interested. Why was it that love took precedence over everything else in life? Eden hadn’t been able to enjoy the beautiful gifts that Brad had sent her because of her love for her daughter. And now Melissa couldn’t think of anything else expect her love for her husband.
And, yes, Melissa did love him. Eden could hear it in every word out of her daughter’s mouth. In between the complaints about having found her mother rolling about in the mud with a man Melissa had never met, her daughter told her everything about what Stuart had done—or not done. According to Melissa, Stuart had turned into a different person the second Eden left—and Melissa didn’t like the new Stuart one bit!
However, from Eden’s perspective, it looked as though Stuart had had a dose of reality after his mother-in-law left town. Since they’d married, Stuart had had Eden to depend on. She’d been there to make sure the rent was paid and food was on the table. Once Eden was gone, responsibilities had been dumped on Stuart. By necessity, he had gone from being a timid little man who was content to wait years for a promotion, to being a man who was making every effort to better himself. Eden thought she might like the new man Stuart had become much better than the old one.
But she couldn’t tell Melissa that. Melissa was still a little girl, torn between being her mother’s daughter and being a grown-up with a husband and soon a child to take care of.
If I had stayed, Eden thought, my daughter would never have grown up. She is so spoiled she would have turned the baby over to me. Eden shook her head to clear it. She didn’t want to think that maybe she’d made some really big mistakes in raising her daughter. Oddly, it was as though she could hear McBride’s voice in her head and he was telling her that it wasn’t too late to start over.
Melissa followed her mother into her bedroom and would have gone into the bathroom with her, but Eden shut the doors. Once she was alone in her bathroom, Eden wanted to fill the tub and soak in it for hours. Truthfully, she wanted to tie the towels together and climb out the window and escape all of them. She didn’t look forward to facing Brad, or trying to deal with her daughter’s marital problems, or to talking to the FBI men who’d flown in.
“Being an adult is overrated,” she muttered under her breath, then got into the shower for the second time that day. She was going to have to face all of them. What was she going to say to Brad about why she’d been rolling about in the mud with McBride? Smiling, she wondered what McBride was telling his boss about the way they’d been found.
Forty-five minutes was all that Eden could drag out for a shower and blow-drying her hair. Bracing herself, she opened the bathroom door and prepared to face her daughter. It was time to come up with explanations.
Eden nearly wept with joy when she saw her daughter, her big belly in front of her, stretched out on her mother’s bed, sound asleep. She spread a cover over Melissa and offered a silent prayer of thanks. “One down and about fifty to go,” she muttered.
As she stepped out of her bedroom, she almost ran into McBride. He had a duffel bag in his hand, so she knew he was moving out of her house. This is good, the intelligent side of her said, but the other side thought of omelets and pancakes and having someone to ride across the peanut fields with.
“Was it bad?” she asked softly, knowing he’d know what she meant.
“Yeah,” he answered, glancing at the head of the stairs. He took Eden’s arm and pulled her toward her bedroom. But when he opened the door, he saw Melissa just as she was turning over in her sleep, her belly so big it hid her face. “Should we call a doctor?” he asked, with almost fear in his voice.
“We should call her husband,” Eden said as McBride pulled her into his bedroom.
He closed the door behind them and seemed not to know where to begin.
“Did you get in a lot of trouble?” she asked.
“More than you can imagine. There is no more cover. This town is going to know about us by evening, if they don’t already know.” He glanced quickly at her. “By us, I mean the agency.”
She watched as he walked toward the window and looked out. She knew what was down there: at least three agents, and in the field sat a helicopter. If her tax dollars weren’t paying for the thing, she’d wish it would sink in the mud.
He looked back at her. “No one any longer thinks you know anything. Someone remembered seeing a book about missing treasures in Applegate’s apartment, so they think that searching for them was his hobby. They’ve decided that the paper he swallowed had a lot of other stuff on it, and it just happened to have your name at the bottom.” He took a breath. “Anyway, they’re pulling me off the case. Your part in this is over.”
Eden sat down. “I see.” It’s what she’d wanted, but at the same time fear ran through her. “What about the men who ransacked my house?”
“They think it was some relative of Mrs. Farrington’s who thinks he should have inherited this house rather than you. That makes it a domestic problem, not FBI.”
“But Mrs. Farrington didn’t have any relatives.”
“Not that you know about,” he said. “I’ve managed to persuade the agency to look into people who are related to her distantly. And”—he hesitated—“that son of hers knew a lot of very bad people. We think he made friends while he was in prison.” Jared looked at her hard.
Eden pushed away the images that came into her mind of how a person made “friends” while in prison. “So you think that one of them…”
“Tried to find the treasure. I was told that the agency, as a favor, will splash it on the news about finding the necklace and its being a fake. We hope that will keep future treasure hunters away from you. They—we—think you’ll be safe if no one thinks a valuable necklace is hidden inside your house. You’ll have a bit of publicity for a while, but it’ll blow over the first time a movie star gets a divorce.”
“So the necklace isn’t valuable?”
Jared lifted his eyebrows.
“Worth anything at all?”
“Historic value, and the gold is real.” He shrugged.
Eden shook her head. “I wish I knew who that French duchess was who offered it to Mrs. Farrington’s ancestor. I’ve wondered why she didn’t hide the sapphires. The story was that she showed the greedy young man the pearls, but he turned them down and demanded the sapphires.”
“Clever young woman. The pearls were probably real.”
“Yes. He did just what she wanted him to do. He took the fake gems and left her with the real stuff.”
“And later people were killed over that necklace.”
Eden leaned back in the chair. “Irony,” she whispered and thought about it all for a moment, then looked at McBride. “So you’re leaving.”
“Yes. I’m under orders, and, besides, things between you and me—”
She looked at him sharply.
“Okay, so maybe the attraction was one-sided. But I—”
“Don’t,” she said, turning her head away. She could feel him looking at her, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“Can’t blame a man for trying,” he said, and his voice changed, lightened. “I said good-bye to Minnie, and yes, I let her down easy. She was in a state over the gossip about us. And Granville’s pretty broken up over what he saw this morning. I tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t listen.”
“I’d better go to him,” Eden said, getting up.
“He had to get back to his office, but if you want to keep that going, you’d better come up with some good lies.”
She glared at McBride. “I plan to tell him the truth. There was nothing, is nothing between you and me.”
“And who’s going to believe that?”
Eden stood up. “You really are despicable, you know that?”
“Yeah.” He was grinning at her, and, suddenly, the heaviness between them was gone. Eden sat back down; they were friends again. “So how’s it with you and your daughter?”
“She’s okay. She thinks she’s a mess and that her marriage is over, but she’s okay. I figure Stuart will be here by tomorrow and demand that she return home with him.”
“Will that work?”
“Probably. I think she just wants proof of love.”
“Don’t we all?” he said under his breath.
For a moment they looked at each other, their eyes locked. Eden was the first to look away. “I’m sure your boss is right and that this whole thing was about that horrible necklace.” Her head came up. “Brad’s daughter told mine that Brad wants to marry me.”
“Is that supposed to be news?”
“No,” she said as she looked down at her hands. “What am I going to tell my daughter about all this? FBI and spies, and snakes in my bed.”
“Snakes in your bed! You and Granville have been lovers?!”
She glared at him.
“Sorry. Couldn’t resist. I agree that the truth is too much, so maybe you should make up a few lies. After spending so much time with me you should have learned a thing or two about lying.”
Eden smiled. “I should probably see a therapist about this, but I’m almost going to miss you.”
“I could give you some great memories,” he said, his eyes hot.
“Go on, get out of here.” Standing up, she smiled at him. When he hesitated, she said, “If you make a pass at me, I’ll tell my daughter that you’re a great listener. I’ll encourage her to tell you all the dreadful things her husband has done to her in the last week. In detail.”
He groaned. “If the world had referees, you’d be thrown out of the game.”
“No I wouldn’t. I’d win!”
He smiled at her. “I think you would. Okay, so now I have to go. They’re warming up the chopper for me.”
“Look, I…”
“If you say one thing about it’s having been fun, I’ll—” He broke off and looked at her, and in that one second she saw the real man, not the man who joked and laughed and told lies to cover the truth of his life, but the real man. There was pain in his eyes, and a longing for a life that he couldn’t have. It was gone as fast as it came. “I wish you and Granville the best in life. Send me an invitation to the wedding, will you?”
“Will you come?”
“And cry all over your wedding dress? No thanks.”
She laughed.
“I’ll send you a gift.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. “It’s my cell number. Only three people in the world have that number.”
She looked at the paper. “I assume that one’s your boss, then me, so who’s the other?”
“My mother, of course,” he said, giving her a cocky, one-sided grin. In the next moment he grabbed his duffel bag, kissed her cheek, and left the room.
After he left, Eden sat down on his bed and looked at the paper. Why had he given her his cell number? Why not an address?
“Because telephones are instant, that’s why,” she whispered. “If I call, he’ll be here quickly.”
She looked up at the closed door, and she knew without a doubt that Jared McBride had been lying. About what, she wasn’t sure, but she knew that he was lying. And she was sure that he wasn’t going to be very far away.