Old Loves Die Hard (A Mac Faraday Mystery) (2 page)

“How?” Mac asked.

David answered, “Automatic doors.”

Mac pointed out, “But the pet department is all the way in the back.”

“Yeah. They said he actually nosed through the inventory to pick just the one he wanted.”

“Why didn’t anyone stop him?”

“By the time the manager and clerks got over their stunned disbelief, Gnarly was long gone.” David pointed his finger at the shepherd hiding his face against the back of Mac’s legs. “You need to do something about your klepto dog.”

Before Mac could respond Gnarly jumped to his feet, went on point, and barked to signal the arrival of a visitor. As if on cue, the doorbell sounded.

“We have visitors,” Archie said.

“Probably the FBI to pick up Gnarly for robbing the Bank of America,” David said.

Grateful for the interruption, Mac went inside. From the back deck, he had to cross the dining room, up three steps and across the living area to the front foyer. Months after his windfall, he still had to get used to the vastness of his inheritance. The granite floors, antiques passed down through generations, authentic paintings including a Monet, leather furniture, stone fireplaces in each room, they were all his.

He was still in awe of the painting above the fireplace mantle of Mickey Forsythe, Robin Spencer’s chief detective. The image was that of a man, dressed in stylishly casual clothes, sitting in a wing-backed leather chair. Gray touched the temples of his auburn hair. His facial features included chiseled cheekbones and a strong jaw. His blue eyes seemed to jump out of the painting. Mickey’s German shepherd sat at attention by his side.

Mac wasn’t the only one who had noticed the similarities between Robin Spencer’s fictional detective and her long-lost son. Like Mac, Mickey was a homicide detective when he came into a multi-million dollar inheritance. Retired from police work, he spent his time solving murder mysteries with Diablo, his faithful canine companion.

Sometimes the painting over the fireplace would make the hair on the back of Mac’s neck stand up. So much so that he had considered sending it up to the Spencer Inn on the top of Spencer Mountain to hang in the lobby across from Robin’s portrait.

Mac sensed that Gnarly followed him more in need of his protection from the authorities than to protect his master from any potential danger that might be waiting on the other side of the door. As they passed the love seat in the living room, Gnarly, who had taken ownership of the chair, jumped up and peered over the back of it to the foyer.

Through the beveled cut glass in the door, Mac could make out a woman smoothing her hair and straightening her clothes in anticipation of his greeting her.

A forced grin filled her face as soon as her eyes met his. “Mac!” she sang out as if no time had passed since their last meeting in divorce court when the judge had ended their twenty-year marriage with the single pound of a gavel. The year before that, she had thrown him out of their home.

Feeling as stunned as the market manager when Gnarly walked in and walked out with his stolen goodie, Mac uttered her name in two disjointed squawks. “Chris—tine?” After staring at her long enough to determine that her presence on his doorstep wasn’t a nightmare from his imagination, he asked, “What are you doing here?”

“I decided to come out for a visit.” When she craned her neck to see beyond him into the manor, he caught a whiff of the alcohol on her breath. She was wrapped in her decade-old blue trench coat. Under that, Mac saw she wore blue jeans over white athletic shoes.

She had to be curious about what he had inherited on the day their divorce had become final. Out of spite, he wanted to tell her to ask their two children, both college students who had inherited large trust funds from their grandmother for their education. Since the home she had won in their divorce was over three hours away, she had to have driven quite a way to see what would have been hers if she had only stayed married to him for just a little while longer.

Mac gave in to his manners. “Do you want to come in?”

As if she feared he would change his mind, she hurried across the threshold into the foyer. “You look good. You’re tanner than usual. Have you been using a tanning booth or some of those lotions?”

Showing her into the living room, Mac replied that he had spent a lot of time outside.

“Golf?”

“Tennis. I play twice a week.” He wondered if he should return her compliment by saying how good she looked. Catching his reflection in the mirror in the corner curio containing glass artifacts Robin had purchased during a trip to China, he had to admit that he did look good. The regular tennis games with Garrett County’s prosecuting attorney Ben Fleming kept him trim and fit even if he did lose the majority of their matches.

She wasn’t paying much attention to him. Her blue eyes, rimmed in red and framed with dark swollen circles, gazed up at the beams in the two-story foyer and living room. Her mouth hung in awe at the discovery of each new treasure that she had missed out on.

“What are you doing here, Christine?” He decided to skip the vacant compliment about her looking good to go straight for the heart.

Her eyes filled with tears and spilled down her cheeks. “I screwed up.”

“I know,” Mac said. “You didn’t need to drive all the way out here to Spencer to tell me that.”

Wailing, she buried her face in her hands.

Behind her, Gnarly watched while sitting up in the love seat with his front paws resting on top of the back. When her cry rose to a loud shriek, he buried his face in his paws.

“Mac, what’s going on?” Archie rushed in from the back deck with David close behind her.

The two women met each other’s gaze.

Christine asked first, “Is this Archie?”

As if she didn’t know the answer, Archie looked at Mac.

“Yes.” Standing up straight, Mac crossed over to stand next to her. “This is R.C. Monday. She lives in the guest cottage.” He went on to introduce David. “David O’Callaghan is our chief of police. He’s a good friend of mine. He came to ask for my help in solving a robbery that happened in town today.”

“Our children told me a lot about you,” she told them. “I’m Christine. I’m sure Mac told you a lot about me.”

“Not really,” Archie replied quickly.

As if to remind Mac that he had forgotten someone during his introductions, Gnarly let out a loud whine.

Startled by the noise behind her, Christine whirled around. Spying the German shepherd filling the love seat and almost at eye level with her, she announced, “That’s a dog.”

“That’s Gnarly,” Mac said.

Eying Gnarly with a mixture of fear and curiosity, Christine stayed rooted in the middle of the living room without moving toward him. Gnarly was equally ambivalent about her.

“Did you drive out here alone?” Mac wondered how she had managed to drive in her inebriated condition without being pulled over by the police.

“Yes,” she mumbled.

“Where’s Stephen?”

At the mention of the name of the man for whom she had divorced him, she burst into hysterical cries again. “I’m so sorry, Mac. Please forgive me. Please let me have another chance. After all we had been through together—” Suddenly, she was on her knees with both arms wrapped around his legs while sobbing into his thighs.

David snatched his keys from his pocket. Announcing that he had reports to finish at the police station, he hurried past them.

“But what about the robbery at the market?” Mac called out.

“I’ll pay off the manager.” David was out the door and gone.

Mac didn’t know whether to ask Archie for help or not. She answered for him. “I have a tight deadline.” She galloped out to the deck to head down to her cottage.

When Christine began choking on her sobs, Gnarly dug his stolen bone out from under the cushion and leapt over the back of the love seat to follow after Archie.

“Get up, Christine.” Mac pulled her up to her feet by her armpits and dragged her over to the sofa.

Her tears had glued strands of her golden blond hair to her wet cheeks. Mac recalled a time, as recently as the day that he had come home to find his belongings packed up in the garage, when she would never have left home without each hair being in place.

“Stephen left you, didn’t he?”

“We did have a good marriage,” she choked out. “If I hadn’t made that one mistake—” Clasping her arms around his neck she tried to kiss him.

While diving backwards to dodge her lips, he released her hold on his neck. “You threw me out of my own home.” He folded her hands in her lap.

“You were always such a good gentle man.” Each word came out slowly and deliberately in her effort to appear in control.

“Funny,” Mac said, “that’s not what your lawyer told the judge.”

“Stephen told him to say that.” Her tears fell anew. “If he hadn’t seduced me—he made me all these promises and told me how you didn’t treat me right and how I deserved so much better than our little house in the suburbs with its little lawn and…He said that I deserved so much more and that he could give it all to me because I deserved more.” Batting her tears out of her eyes, she waved her hands and glanced at the elegance surrounding her in the manor. “Like this.”

“Maguire certainly thought what we had was good enough to take away from me and move into,” Mac noted. “What about your job?”

“You want to rub my nose in it, don’t you?” she spat out. “Tristan told you.” She guessed which of their two children had spilled the beans about her losing her job due to her alcoholic state.

“You got laid off,” Mac stated.

She corrected him. “Fired.”

“You’d been with Robertson and Sons for over fifteen years,” Mac said. “You were head of the paralegal team. What happened?”

“It was political.”

“What did they say?”

“The complaint was absenteeism.” She rushed on, “I had leave saved up. And then they started complaining because I’d have a few drinks at lunch. Like I’m the only one to have two-martini lunches.”

Mac asked her, “How much have you had to drink today?”

She glanced over his shoulder at the bottle of wine on the back deck. “You first.”

“That was my first drink of the day and I didn’t drive over the mountains after drinking it.” He asked her again, “How many glasses of wine did you have before you decided to come out here looking for me?”

“Everyone needs some liquid courage before begging for mercy.” She reached for his hands. “Forgive me.”

“I forgive you.” Mac pulled his hands away. “I can do that. I’ve moved on. If you need my forgiveness in order to move on with your life after all that’s happened, then I can give it to you.”

She tried to make her smile as becoming as possible in her condition. “What about us?”

“There is no us, Christine.”

“You can’t abandon me like this, Mac,” she cried. “I’ve lost everything. I’ve got nothing. When Stephen left…” she broke into heavy sobs. “Oh, Mac…” She collapsed into his lap.

*   *   *   *

Seeing that Christine was unfit to drive, Mac grabbed her suitcase from the back seat of her five-year-old Mercedes and drove her in his car to the Spencer Inn, another part of his inheritance, so that she could sleep it off.

The resort rested at the top of Spencer Mountain. The front of the stone and cedar main lodge offered a view of the lake below and the mountains off in the distance. While resting between boating, golf, skiing, mountain biking, hiking, or any of the other host of activities, guests could enjoy the view in cane rocking chairs on the wrap-around porch. Between activities, they could partake of refreshments in the outdoor café on the multi-level deck among the flora of an elaborate living maze or, if the weather was too chilly, the lounge inside. For more formal eating, the Inn’s five-star restaurant offered dining experiences that had been favorably recorded in gourmet magazines for decades.

Mac was still trying to wrap his head around owning a resort that he couldn’t have afforded to visit a year ago.

Even with all the twists and turns driving up to the top of the mountain from Spencer Point, Christine had managed to fall asleep in the passenger seat of his Dodge Viper. When the valet opened the door to help her out, she almost fell onto the red carpet leading up the steps to the main entrance. With a bellhop in tow carrying her suitcase, Mac led Christine across the lobby to the front desk.

Seeing the inn filled with guests—some resting in front of the fireplace, others reading in front of the waterfall fountain on the other side of the lobby, and a large group going into the lounge for cocktails—Mac worried that no rooms would be available.

When the desk clerk asked if he wanted to check Christine into his private penthouse suite, he replied, “I have a private suite?”

Mac’s reaction amused the clerk. “On the top floor. We never book it. It’s available only for you and your private guests.”

Mac turned around. The guests that littered the lobby now resembled money in a coin jar. They were paying guests. Paying to stay at
his
resort. The resort he owned. It hit Mac as it had been hitting him time and again: This all belonged to him.

A wail snapped him out of his daze.

Realizing that Christine was no longer at his side, Mac whirled around.

Her shoulder bag held up to strike, Christine had run across the lobby toward the lounge. Even with the target’s back to him, Mac recognized his broad shoulders, dark hair, each strand in place, and sophisticated demeanor. With the grace of a ninja, he raised his arm to block her blow while grabbing her bag with the other to prevent a second strike.

“What are you doing here?” Stephen Maguire demanded to know. His tone suggested that he found the Spencer Inn permitting such low class through its doors offensive.

“Who is she?” Christine shoved him out of her way to get to the woman by his side.

Younger than other women that Mac had seen in Stephen Maguire’s company, Christine’s rival was as slender as his ex-wife had been in her youth. Her silky copper-colored hair and porcelain skin only further enraged Christine.

“Who she is, is irrelevant.” Stephen Maguire made no move to protect his companion when Christine charged. The girl’s eyes widened like those of a deer about to be struck by a speeding vehicle. Crying out for help, she dove to hide behind him.