B008KQO31S EBOK (21 page)

The serious cooks filtered in, rubbing elbows with the chefs, carrying cut flowers with their purchases. Then came the grocery shoppers with their pull carts and strollers, and finally the tourists with their cameras and white running shoes. By nine-thirty, the place was chaotic.

There was something unfinished between himself and Phil, something he had to name with certainty before it would leave him alone. His gut told him to seek her out again and he knew better than to ignore his instincts.

They’d saved his sorry butt a few times.

No doubt McAllister would be sniffing around, determined to make the career move of courting Phil. It would only be decent to make sure that lawyer didn’t pressure Phil into something she didn’t want to do, that her parents didn’t short-circuit her plans.

He wanted to be sure that didn’t happen. He wanted to know before he left.

He remembered her suggestion that he could have stayed in her spare room. Maybe they could make a deal. He could cook for her in exchange for a few days’ of crashing on her couch. He needed somewhere to stay and she couldn’t live on Indian take-out forever. Josie might end up calling and he wanted to be there.

It seemed like something friends might do for each other.

He ignored the way his pulse picked up. He was just going to resolve unfinished business.

Someone dropped a quarter in his cup and he jumped as it splashed in the last increment of coffee. He fingered the stubble on his chin and cast a glance over his dirty jeans.

There was absolutely no guarantee that Phil would even talk to him. A shave and some new clothes were in order if he was going to be persuasive at all.

And groceries. He stepped away from the wall in anticipation. The good thing about knowing that a woman doesn’t cook is the certainty that her cupboards and refrigerator are bare. Phil probably didn’t have so much as a pot to her name.

He’d just have to buy everything he could possibly need. There was a spring in his step as he set to work.

S
o, I’d been joking about Nick being my lucky charm, but everything sure went to heck in a hurry once I abandoned him in Lucia’s house. I knew I shouldn’t be disappointed that he hadn’t been able to confide in me and I tried to tell myself that I didn’t care that he was gone.

Again.

Nick had stepped out of my life and this time, he wasn’t coming back. I should in fact have been
glad
, though I was no more persuaded of that than that I wasn’t disappointed.

I did admit that I didn’t know that much about Nick Sullivan. He’d always been a mystery—that had once been part of his appeal—and the kind of guy who didn’t tell you what he was really thinking. I had assumed from the beginning of this little adventure that Sean was responsible for killing Lucia.

But I lay in bed that night thinking. Seeing all that money in Nick’s wallet made me uneasy. It wasn’t just the question of where Nick had gotten it, though it’s not that hard to lay hands on a couple of thousand at least temporarily.

It bugged me just that he had it. Who carried around that kind of cash? No one, in these days of instant tellers and credit cards.

No one, except someone who had been
planning
to disappear. I couldn’t have dropped out of sight on a moment’s notice, not without leaving a paper trail of bank machine withdrawals and credit card slips, or at least one monster withdrawal. It looked as though Nick had known he was going to find Lucia murdered and that he would need to fade away fast.

Which neatly explained why he had finally come home after all these years. He had had something to do. I shivered and nestled deeper into my cozy bed.

The worst thing was thinking that my parents might have been right. I vowed to never tell them the truth—but then, they were already sure they were right.

On the other hand, Nick coming home to murder Lucia didn’t explain why on earth he had bothered to hunt me down, let alone our whole adventure tour package. Had that been just for old times’ sake?

Seemed like a lot of trouble to me.

But then, having three older brothers has convinced me that men are inexplicable creatures of whim—even though they like to present themselves as denizens of practicality. At least I know that they don’t always plan everything they do and that impulse can certainly rule the day.

Especially a certain kind of impulse. Look where it had gotten my oldest brother, James. Marcia might have been gorgeous in her time, but now that she had three kids, a successful lawyer husband, a big house and a big rock, she didn’t bother with appearances much. Looks had faded, or at least ceased to be artificially enhanced, and her personality had become much more of an issue. In short, she’s a shrew—and probably most of the reason James is a workaholic.

That kind of impulse would explain Nick’s steamy kisses. It didn’t feel nearly as good as I once might have thought it would to have Nick following his pecker back to me, but then, I hadn’t had a lot of sleep last night.

And I wasn’t getting much more. I actually rolled out of bed early, giving it up for lost. I still had a lot of working drawings to fill in for Mrs. H. and figured I might as well get in to the office. I had to go over the plans with Joel today so he could begin scheduling the work for the hard landscaping. The message on my answering machine could wait.

It was probably just Mom, giving me hell for not going to lunch with the eligible Mr. McAllister.

There was a depressing thought. But it was time to get my life back into all its organized little boxes. The most prudent choice would be to just forget that these last thirty hours or so of my life had ever happened. Forget Nick. Forget Lucia. Forget them all and think about a pink accent for that hellebore bed.

As if anything in my life could ever be that simple.

* * *

Well, the day started off badly and got worse.

It turned out that the interlock that Mrs. H. thought would be perfect for the little retaining wall around the garden beds didn’t stack vertically as I had thought. Each layer set back a good three inches, because that’s how the block was designed. Joel explained patiently how that would keep the wall from shifting, but I still had a problem.

If we moved the wall out to allow for this little engineering marvel, there would be a garden path wide enough for cats walking single file. Alternatively, if we started the wall where I had planned, the bed at the top would end up in the neighbor’s yard. I figured that would be a tough sell and sharpened my pencil. There had to be a way to make this work.

This was particularly problematic as Joel and I had an appointment with Mrs. H. at four-thirty to walk through the grand scheme one last time. Joel left to hunt down other possibilities for the stone while I dove in.

Elaine breezed in and out, up to her eyes in a sunroom that was being added on to a kitchen, though I have to admit I only half listened to her woes. The phone rang incessantly, of course, because the entire world sensed that I was trying to concentrate.

And ye olde sap answered every time...hoping. There’s something about optimism that is really tough to shake. They should come up with a vaccination for it.

Speaking of things that are tough to shake, Jeffrey called in the middle of the morning to repeat his invitation. I declined the so-called honor, choosing the tactful course of declaring myself busy.

He called again twenty minutes later, taking the time and trouble to explain to little ol’ me that our lunch was in his best career interests. When I still declined, he implied that I was the most miserable woman alive for not marrying him and bearing his sons on the basis of that credential alone. Further, his tone of voice made it clear that his explanation was provided since I was so stupid that I couldn’t be hoped to work out this facet of his invitation all by myself.

As a tactic intended to charm me to compliance, it was lacking a certain
je ne sais quoi
.

I told him that I thought arranged marriages had died with Victoria. It was too painful listening to him trying to figure out who or what I was talking about.

“You know,” I said helpfully. “Lie back and think of England.”

A stony silence was my only answer.

“Because she was the Queen of England and she had to produce an heir, but she was marrying a virtual stranger. That was the advice given to her for her wedding night.”

He sniffed. “I hardly think such an anecdote is appropriate under the circumstances, Philippa.”

“My point was only that her marriage is pretty much the last arranged marriage that I know about. My father may be trying to fix us up for the sake of empire, but I’m not going to play. I don’t want to have lunch with you, Jeffrey, though certainly many other, infinitely more suitable women—ones with far better taste in anecdotes—would.”

I paused, then decided what the heck. “What you need is a gorgeous smart woman, like my partner Elaine.”

He sputtered. “Never!”

“Really? I could have sworn you two had some history.”

He made a pretty good recovery. “Well, if you really want to know, I could tell you over lunch.”

I laughed despite myself. “Good try, Jeffrey, but no, thanks.”

Even he had the grace to end the conversation after that.

The phone rang as soon as I hung it up and I rolled my eyes. It was going to be one of those days.

I declined an urgent request from one of Mrs. H.’s neighbors to landscape her garden first. Not only was her attitude was annoying, but I finish jobs in much the order they come in.

Another neighbor called to demand an accounting of what we intended to do with the fence. He made it clear that if the new fence infringed so much as an inch upon his property, he would take great joy in tearing it down during the night.

I assured him that a surveyor had already staked the lot and suggested that this would be the best time to contest the location of any stakes. Since he hadn’t even seen them, I knew they had to be slightly to Mrs. Hathaway’s side of the property line—as I had requested—and obscured by the current fence. It was right on the line.

Keeping everything slightly inside the lot line can solve a lot of issues before they start. I think this neighbor was disappointed that I didn’t panic—maybe he was looking for a fight or hoping to be able to tear down that fence with his bare hands.

The phone rang again, no sign of a relief pitcher in sight.

“Coxwell & Pope.”

“Who do you have to ruin everything?” a woman demanded querulously.

“I beg your pardon?”

“If you have any sense at all, you’ll stay out of my house. You’ve ruined everything!”

The hair started to rise on the back of my neck.

Now, I couldn’t have told you what Lucia Sullivan sounded like, because it had been decades since I had heard her voice. But the caller was a woman, she sounded older and she sounded mad. I thought about that ghost I’d seen in Lucia’s greenhouse and the dots pretty much jumped into a line.

“Who is this, please?”

But she slammed the phone down so hard that I jumped.

I don’t get a lot of calls from dead people, generally speaking. In fact, this would have been a first. But I’d only been into one house uninvited of late. My hand shook a bit when I put the receiver back and I got up to make myself a nice hot cup of tea.

Then I had an idea. I could use one of those nifty phone company codes and obtain the number of the last caller to my line.

But Joel called in first, suggesting that we meet at Mrs. H.’s as he’d gotten tied up.

Grrr. Things had definitely turned against me today.

I couldn’t help thinking about that call. Why had Lucia bothered with the phone? She could have just levitated something, written on my mirror in blood or walked through the wall to deliver her message. Maybe she was an amateur in the spooking arts, being so recently dead and all.

Or maybe she wasn’t dead at all.

Or maybe someone wanted me to think that she wasn’t dead at all.

Aha! Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to clean up the greenhouse, if Nick had seen what he said he had seen. I knew I had seen nothing.

The incident might have fit another piece into the puzzle for Nick, but he was gone into the wide blue yonder. He had told me that it wasn’t my concern any longer, so he’d never get this tidbit.

His loss.

I shook my head, decided that the Coxwells didn’t have exclusivity on family weirdness, and sighed when the phone rang again.

It had taken my mother until two to hunt me down, although we both knew there was only one place I could be. She was already stinko, as evidenced by her slurred speech.

This was going to be a treat.

“Working, Mom. Can I call you back?”

“Like you did last night? I don’t think so, Philippa Elizabeth Coxwell. Don’t think I don’t know that you’re trying to avoid me.” She paused significantly, probably for an invigorating sip. “Or that I don’t know why.”

“Did you call last night?” I feigned innocence, knowing that responding in kind wouldn’t solve anything. I turned the drawing ninety degrees, then did it again, muttering under my breath a little that the solution was so elusive.

And suddenly there it was.

The path was serpentine, but from this angle looked like a voluptuous S. I could straighten the curve slightly and increase the size of the beds without sacrificing the width of the paths. There would be less stone, less curvy walkway, but the illusion of depth we’d been trying to achieve could be kept.

We could plant taller things in the middle beds to ensure that the whole garden couldn’t be seen at once. Mrs. H. wanted a sense of discovery, hence the very curvaceous path, but I was suddenly sure I could achieve the same effect without changing the wall material that she so loved.

I tucked the receiver under my chin and scribbled madly.

“Of course, I called last night, Philippa, but you didn’t call me back.”

“Late night, Mom.”

“You’re working too much.” Her voice chilled. “Or is that really what you’re doing? Jeffrey told your father that there was another man there yesterday, Philippa. What haven’t you told me? Who is this Nick? How serious are you?”