“Thanks for the ride home,” Grace said. She unbuckled her safety belt and reached for the door handle. “Nice meeting you. I’m sure we’ll run into each other in town. Don’t bother getting out of the car. I can manage just fine on my own.”
She could tell that he was not paying attention to her less-than-sparkling chatter. He sat, unmoving, his strong, competent hands resting on the wheel, and contemplated the house as if he had never seen one.
“I had a career plan by the time I was eleven years old,” he said.
“Yep, I’m not surprised.” She got the car door open, grabbed the edges of the trench coat and prepared to jump down to the ground. “I had you pegged as one of those.”
“One of those what?”
“One of those folks who always knows where he’s going.” She gripped the handhold and plunged off the seat. For an instant she hovered precariously in midair. Relief shot through her when she landed on both feet. She turned and looked back at him. “Must be nice.”
He popped open his own door, uncoiled from behind the wheel and circled the front of the vehicle. He got to her before she reached the porch steps.
“It helps to know what you want,” he said. “It clarifies choices and streamlines the decision matrix.”
The cool, calculating way he watched her sent a little chill down her spine. Or was it a thrill? The possibility made her catch her breath. Wrong time and probably the wrong man. Send him on his way.
“What was your career plan at eleven?” she said, instead.
“I wanted to get rich.”
She paused to search his face in the porch light. “Why?”
“Because I figured out that money gives a man power.”
“Over others?”
He considered that and then shrugged. “Maybe. Depending on the situation. But that wasn’t why I wanted to get rich.”
She watched him closely. “You wanted control over your own life.”
“Yeah, that about sums it up.”
“That’s a perfectly reasonable objective. It seems to have worked out well for you. Congratulations. Good night, Julius.”
She hitched the strap of her purse over her shoulder and walked quickly toward the front porch steps. The relentless crunch of gravel behind her made her stop in mid-stride. When she turned to confront him, he stopped, too.
“It’s okay,” she said briskly. “You don’t need to see me to my door.”
“I said I’d take you home. You’re not home until you’re inside the house.”
For some reason, anger crackled through her. “I’m not your responsibility.”
“You are until you’re home.” He waited.
She gripped her keys very tightly. “I can’t believe I just snapped at you because you’re trying to do the gentlemanly thing. I apologize. Jeez. Where are my manners? Sorry. I’m a little tense these days. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” He stood there in the moonlight as if he was willing to wait until dawn for her to make the next move.
“Right,” she said. “The door.”
She turned again and hurried up the steps. Julius followed her across the front porch, keeping a little distance between them, careful not to crowd her.
She dug the keys out of her purse, got the door open, stepped across the threshold and flipped the wall switch. Two lamps came up, revealing the warm, casually comfortable space. Her mother had been in what Grace and Alison referred to as her Rustic Retreat phase when she last redecorated.
The wooden floors were burnished with age. Two overstuffed chairs and a deep sofa upholstered in dark brown leather were positioned on a honey-colored area rug. A large brass basket on the stone hearth held kindling for the cold, dark fireplace.
Several landscapes featuring quaint cottages, wooden docks and old boathouses around the shores of Cloud Lake hung on the walls. Visitors rarely noticed that there was no painting of the most picturesque structure on the lake, the long-abandoned Cloud Lake Inn.
Grace turned around a second time to confront Julius. In the glare of the front porch light his gold-brown eyes were heavily shadowed. She could see that he was drinking in every detail of the living room behind her. She searched for a word to describe what she thought she detected in his expression and came up with hungry.
Don’t go there, she told herself. If you feed him he might hang around. This was not a good time for her to be taking in strays. She was not here to fix Julius Arkwright. If she did, he would probably walk away like all the others.
And this man just might be the one she would regret setting free.
She opened her mouth to thank him politely and bid him good night.
“Would you like to come in for some herbal tea?” she heard herself say instead.
Five
Thanks,” he said. He moved across the threshold and closed the door. “I don’t think I’ve ever had herbal tea. Sounds . . . interesting.”
For a few seconds she could only stand there, shocked at what she had just done. When she realized that he was watching her, waiting for her to make the next move, she pulled herself together. She hadn’t offered to feed him, she thought. It was just tea.
“Tea,” she said. She turned on her heel. “Kitchen.”
She dropped her clutch on one of the overstuffed chairs and went into the big, old-fashioned kitchen. Through the airy curtains she could see the moonstruck surface of the water. Here and there the lights of some of the lakefront houses glittered in the trees. A long necklace of low lamps marked the footpath that circled the lake.
She discovered she had to concentrate just to remember how to boil the water in the kettle.
She switched on the gas burner and reminded herself again that it was just tea. The fact that for some reason she was feeling a little rush of edgy exhilaration was probably going to be a problem later. But at that moment she did not care.
Julius lounged against the tiled countertop and folded his arms. He somehow managed to make it look as if he was entirely at home in her kitchen—as if he was in the habit of spending a lot of time there. He watched her pluck two tea bags out of a glass canister.
“What’s in that tea you’re fixing?” he asked.
“Chamomile,” she said. “It’s supposed to promote restful sleep.”
“I usually use a medicinal dose of whiskey.”
She smiled. “I’ve been known to resort to that particular medication on occasion, myself.”
“Had some bad nights recently?”
Very deliberately she positioned the tea bags in two mugs.
“A few,” she conceded. “You were right. Finding my employer’s body was a shock.”
“I followed some of the reports in the media,” he said. “The story caught my attention because the Witherspoon Way was a rising star in the Pacific Northwest business world.”
She shook her head. “And now it’s all gone. Everything that Sprague built will soon disappear.”
“That’s the problem with any business that is founded on a personality rather than a product. Celebrities, athletes, actors—same story. They might rake in millions while they’re working but if something happens to them, the whole company implodes.”
The teakettle whistled. Grace switched off the burner and poured the hot water into the mugs.
“When it comes to the motivational seminar business, it’s definitely all about the charisma of the person at the top,” she said.
“So you’re unemployed.”
“Again.” She put one of the mugs down on the counter next to Julius. “I’m an underachiever. No other word for it. It’s time I got my act together. I just wish I knew what I really wanted to do in life. Every time I get a glimmer of a career path, something happens to make me swerve in another direction.”
“Like the closing down of the Witherspoon Way?”
>
“Well, yes.”
“I planned out a future once.”
“You said you knew where you were going from the age of eleven.” She blew on her tea. “You wanted to be rich. What set you on that career path?”
“My parents split up. Dad remarried and moved across the country. Never saw much of him after that, except once, years later, when he came around asking for a loan. My mother worked hard to keep a roof over our heads. She sacrificed everything for me during those years.”
Grace nodded. “That’s when you realized that money could make a huge difference. It could buy you the kind of power you needed to change your mother’s life.”
Julius smiled faintly. “Are you trying to analyze me? Because if so, I’d like to change the subject.”
“Irene said that you are a very successful venture capitalist. She told me that in Pacific Northwest business circles they call you Arkwright the Alchemist because when it comes to investments, you can turn lead into gold.”
“I’m good,” Julius said. “But I’m not that good.”
“Good enough to get very rich, though, right?”
“Rich enough.”
“I assume your mother is doing okay?”
“Mom’s fine. After money was no longer an issue she did what she always wanted to do—she went back to school to finish getting her B.A. Wound up marrying one of her professors. They live in Northern California. Doug teaches at a community college. Mom works in the counseling office. They’re going to retire soon. I manage their investments.”
She smiled. “I assume they will both enjoy comfortable retirements?”
He shrugged that off as if it were no big deal. “Sure.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Are you satisfied with your current financial status?”
“I’ve got all the money I’ll ever need and then some. How many shirts can one man wear? How many cars can he drive? How many houses does he really want to maintain? Yes, Grace, I’m rich enough.”
She studied him for a moment.
“Do you know, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say that he had enough money,” she said. “Granted, I’ve never met many truly wealthy people. But I was under the impression that after a certain point people use money as a way to keep score.”
“That works.” Julius cautiously swallowed some of the chamomile tea and lowered the mug. “For a while.”
She raised her brows. “Would you rather go back to being non-rich?”
He smiled slowly. “No.”
“But it would be no big deal if you lost it all tomorrow. In fact, I’ll bet you would find the situation interesting.”
“Interesting?”
“As in, not boring. Starting over would be a challenge for you.”
“Maybe,” he said. “For me. But I’m no longer the only one involved. If I lost everything tomorrow, several small, promising start-ups would crash and burn. A lot of people who work for those little companies would be unemployed and so would the folks who work directly or indirectly for me. And that’s not counting the people who trust me to invest their money, like my mother.”
She leaned back against the counter beside him and took another sip of the tea. “You’re right, of course. You’re riding the tiger. You don’t have the option of choosing to get off. If you do, you’ll be okay but a lot of other people will get eaten.”
“You didn’t expect me to consider that aspect of the situation?”
“Now, on that front, you’re wrong. I would absolutely expect you to consider your responsibilities as an employer. Irene has been my best friend since kindergarten. I know her well enough to know that she wouldn’t have tried to set me up with you if she didn’t think you were a good man.”
Julius’s mouth twitched at the corner. “I could give you a list of people who would disagree with that opinion.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt but that you’ve made a few enemies along the way.”
“Making enemies doesn’t make me a bad person?”
“Depends on the enemies,” she said.
A muffled ping sounded from the front room. She froze. Julius looked at her and then glanced toward the doorway.
She took a steadying breath. And then she took another. The jittery sensation receded.
“My phone,” she said quickly. “Just email. I’ll deal with it later.”
He nodded once and swallowed more of the tea.
“Now I’ve got a question for you,” he said.
“About my nonexistent career plans?”
“It’s a little more specific. Did you kill Sprague Witherspoon?”
She stared at him, utterly blindsided. Her brain went blank. Words failed her. First the email ping and now this.
She heard the crash when the mug she had been holding hit the floor but she could not make sense of the sound for a few heartbeats.
Julius watched her the way an entomologist might watch a butterfly in a glass jar.
“Get out,” she whispered, her voice hoarse with anger. “Now.”
“All right,” he said.
He set his unfinished tea down as calmly as though he had just remarked upon the weather. He walked across the kitchen and went into the living room. She pushed herself away from the counter and pursued him, literally chasing him out of the house.
At the door he paused to look back at her over his shoulder.
“Good night,” he said. “It’s been an interesting evening. I don’t get a lot of those.”
“No shit,” she said. “I think I can tell you why.”
“I already know the answer.” He opened the door and moved out onto the porch. “I’m pretty boring when you get to know me. Hell, sometimes I even bore myself. Don’t forget to lock your door.”
He went down the porch steps.
Infuriated, she crossed the porch and gripped the railing with both hands. “I didn’t kill Witherspoon.”
“I believe you.” He opened the SUV door. “Got any idea who did?”
“No. For heaven’s sake, if I did, I would have told the police.”
“According to Dev’s information, the Seattle police have an oversupply of suspects, including an angry adult daughter, the daughter’s fiancé and a few pissed-off seminar folks who don’t think they got their money’s worth from the Witherspoon Way. Then there are Witherspoon’s employees.”
“Why would any of us murder our employer? We were all making a lot of money working for the Witherspoon Way.”
“Dev says that there is reason to believe that someone involved in the Witherspoon Way was siphoning off a hefty amount of the profits and using phony investment statements to cover up the missing money.”
“What? Are you serious?”
“Ask Dev. He says he got the news from the Seattle cops this morning. There’s a lot of money missing. In my world, that counts as a motive.”
She stared at him, outraged. “Are you implying that I embezzled money from the Witherspoon Way?”
“No. I had a few questions earlier in the evening but I doubt very much that you’re an embezzler.”
“Why not? Because I’m not a financial wizard like you?”
He smiled. “This may come as a shock but it doesn’t take a lot of financial wizardry to figure out how to skim a great deal of money off the top of a successful business like the Witherspoon Way. In fact, it’s dead easy—especially if no one is paying close attention.”
“That is insulting on several levels.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” he said. “Just stating facts.”
“Here’s a fact you can take to the bank—this blind date is officially over.” Out of the corner of her eye Grace saw the curtains twitch in Agnes Gilroy’s living room window. “Crap.”
She turned on her heel, stalked back inside the house and slammed the
door. She whirled around and shot the new dead bolt. Then she secured the chain lock.
For a moment or two she stood listening to the sound of the SUV rumbling back down the drive toward Lake Circle Road.
When she knew that Julius was gone she exhaled slowly. Then she went into the kitchen and grabbed a wad of paper towels off the roll that sat on the counter next to the stove.
She wiped up the spilled chamomile tea and contemplated the possibility that someone had been draining off the profits of the Witherspoon Way. Even if that turned out to be true—and given that Devlin was a cop there was no reason to think his information wasn’t accurate—how did that relate to Sprague’s murder?
Unless Sprague had uncovered the embezzlement and confronted the embezzler.
She finished mopping up the tea and collected the pieces of the broken mug. She got to her feet and dumped the wet paper towels and the bits of pottery into the trash.
Earlier that day she had done her breathing meditation. It was time for one of the other three rituals that helped her deal with the nightmares over the years.
She walked methodically through the house, checking the shiny new locks she had installed on the doors and windows. Next she looked inside the closets and every cupboard that was large enough to conceal a person. She was annoyed with herself, as usual, when she got down on her knees and looked under the beds in the three small bedrooms. She had no idea what she would do if she actually did find someone hiding in a closet or underneath a bed but she knew she couldn’t sleep until she had verified that she was the only one in the house.
When she had completed the walk-through, she poured herself a glass of wine, sat down in one of the big chairs and took her phone out of her purse. She opened her email with the same degree of reluctance she would have felt reaching into a terrarium to pick up a snake.
The email was waiting for her. Another night, another note from a dead man. The first line was familiar.
A positive attitude is like a flashlight in a dark room.
But whoever had sent the email had altered the second line.