Home Before Midnight Page 10

  The rattle of luggage wheels and the clack of Regan’s heels echoed through the dim, cavernous garage.

  Bailey fished in her purse. A keyless entry code bleeped from the line of cars along one wall.

  Regan stopped dead, staring at the parked silver Lexus. “That’s my mother’s car.”

  “Paul thought you would be more comfortable in this than in my mother’s car.” Bailey opened the trunk and hefted Regan’s suitcase inside. “And having driven my mom’s car around for the past couple days, I can tell you he’s totally right.”

  Her dry tone invited Regan to share the joke, but Regan didn’t want to share anything. Certainly not with the dweeb. She had no right to drive Helen’s car.

  Regan flung herself in the front seat, flipped all the air-conditioning vents in her direction and dropped her head against the headrest.

  Bailey eased the Lexus out of its slot, exiting the parking deck so slowly Regan wanted to scream. Sun slammed through the windshield. Outside, the landscaped curves and staked-out trees withered in the heat as the car picked up speed.

  “So, how was your flight?” Bailey asked.

  Like she cared.

  Regan turned her face to the window. She didn’t have to talk to Bailey. Bailey was nothing. Nobody. A glorified geek who’d gone to the public school with every other hick in town. She’d escaped on some kind of scholarship, but she couldn’t be that smart, or she wouldn’t be working for Paul.

  For almost an hour, they drove in silence. The sun glittered on the concrete median and glared on the road. Regan’s head pounded from an overload of caffeine and not enough sleep. She closed her eyes.

  “We’re here.”

  Regan started. Blinked.

  Bailey cut the engine and turned to face her, cheerful and falsely confident as a substitute teacher in middle school. “I’ll take your bag to your room. Can I get you something to eat?”

  Regan dragged herself together. “No.”

  All she wanted was sleep.

  And for her father to be alive, and for her mother to be lying out by the pool nodding off over a drink and a cigarette, and for this nightmare to be over, but none of those things were happening. She might as well nap.

  Paul acted exactly as expected, lots of deep, tragic looks and fake paternal hugs. Regan leaned in from the shoulder to keep him off her boobs and stepped back.

  “Dear girl,” he kept saying.

  The dweeb had the decency not to stick around while Paul acted all grateful and relieved Regan was here for her own mother’s funeral. She heard the secretary tromping upstairs lugging the bag and then in the kitchen talking to some other women. The church ladies must have been in and out all day, delivering the covered dishes, plates of ham, Co-cola cake and cheese straws that accompanied death in Stokesville. Regan knew she should go out there and thank them, but just the thought of all that food made her want to hurl. Let Little Miss Efficiency deal with it.

  “I’m going to lie down,” she announced. “See you at dinner.”

  Paul gave her a small, sad smile. “Whatever you want, dear girl. We’re just family tonight.”

  Family, my ass. He wasn’t her family. She didn’t have family anymore, except for Richard, and he wasn’t here. She should have told her brother he didn’t get any money unless he showed up.

  Regan stopped at the top of the stairs. Now there was an idea. Maybe she could sell it to the lawyer.

  She shoved open the door to her old room and dropped her purse on the bed. A splash of color on the dresser caught her eye: flowers, fresh garden flowers, in a tiny silver bud vase beside a pile of magazines. Tears sprang to her eyes. Ah, shit.

  The last few times she’d visited her mother in New York, Helen had done the same thing, left flowers and fresh towels, a bottle of spring water and the latest magazines beside her bed. Her mother had never been big on the kissy-face stuff, so the gesture had really meant something—a sign of her mother’s love, a tacit acknowledgment of Regan’s new, grown-up status. She touched the flowers’ petals. Thumbed through the magazines. All her favorites were there, Cosmo, People, Us, just like before.

  Her head pounded. Exactly like before.

  Which meant . . . Which meant . . .

  Her chest tightened. The magazines hadn’t been her mother’s doing. Hadn’t been her mother’s idea. The magazines, the water, the flowers, everything, were from fucking efficient Bailey.

  Heat swept Regan. She stormed out of her room and down the stairs, her rage and grief boiling inside her.

  Bailey had left the kitchen and was talking quietly with Paul in the hall. Something about the way they stood—too close, heads bent together in easy intimacy—hit Regan in the gut.

  “What is she still doing here?”

  They looked up at her with nearly identical expressions of controlled patience. Like a couple. Like a unit. That was wrong.

  Bailey hesitated, as if waiting for Paul to speak. When he didn’t, she said gently, “I’m just helping with the funeral arrangements.”

  Like she’d “helped” with the flower arrangement in Regan’s room?

  “I can do that. She was my mother. You can buzz off.”

  “No, she can’t.” Paul sounded cool, almost amused. “She lives here, too, Regan.”

  Which made it worse. How much worse, Regan wasn’t sure yet. She only knew she didn’t want another woman in her mother’s house, taking her mother’s place.

  Bailey hadn’t lived with them in New York.

  “That’s bullshit,” Regan said.

  Paul drew himself up in displeasure. “I know you’re upset, dear girl, but you can’t talk that way in front of Bailey.”

  The dweeb frowned at him. “Actually, I think—”

  “I’ll fucking talk any way I want,” Regan interrupted.

  “Not in my house,” Paul said.

  “This isn’t your house. It’s mine,” Regan said, pulsing with misery and triumph. Her gaze cut from her stepfather to his secretary. “And I don’t want her here.”

  “THIS isn’t your house.” Gabrielle’s chin stuck out. “It’s Grandma’s. And Grandma said I could paint the chair.”

  The chair in question, now a lurid reddish purple, glowed in the dim garage, its feet in tiny puddles of paint. Bright, graffiti-like whorls decorated the scattered newspaper. Discarded cans of spray paint—two of them—bled and rolled on the cement floor. A fine purple spray misted the handles of Eugenia’s garden tools and the nearby lawn mower.

  Steve shook his head. What was his mother thinking?

  His daughter was easier to figure. Steve surveyed her from her paint-streaked hands to her miserable, defiant eyes, and realized it was payback time. She still hadn’t forgiven him for skipping out on the movie the other day.

  If Teresa were here . . . But she wasn’t.

  If he’d spent the morning at home . . . But he hadn’t. He’d gone in early to prepare an affidavit for a search warrant of the Ellis house.

  “I told you to wrap things up,” Walt had complained.

  “You told me to do my job,” Steve had replied.

  And damn the consequences.

  So in two hours, when the magistrate returned from lunch, Steve had to go back to convince him he had probable cause to search for a weapon. He only hoped the judge would be less hostile than the chief.

  Or Gabrielle.

  So did he give his daughter the talking-to she deserved or the attention she so obviously needed?

  “The chair, fine,” he said evenly. “Not the garage.”

  Gabrielle’s chin wobbled. “I tried outside. But the wind blew the newspaper, and it stuck to the paint.”

  “I can see that would be a problem,” Steve acknowledged. “But now we’ve got another one.”

  Her gaze slid from his. He watched her shoulders slump as she took in the purple carnage. “I’m sorry,” she muttered.

  That always helps, she’d said to Bailey.

  Well, she had him pegged.

>   He rubbed his jaw. “Need a hand with cleanup?”

  She bit her lip. Nodded.

  She was a good kid, Steve thought. A great kid. She deserved a father who spent more time with her. “Let’s move this onto the driveway so it can dry.”

  “Do you like it?” Gabrielle asked as he slid the chair onto a piece of cardboard and dragged it outside.

  “It’s very . . .” The paint blazed in the sun. “. . . purple.”

  Gabrielle scowled. Wrong answer. “It’s not purple. It’s fuchsia.”

  “Fuchsia, huh? It’s bright.”

  Teresa had loved bright colors.

  “But do you like it?” his daughter asked.

  He liked anything that made her happy. He shook out a trash bag. “Yep. You pick out the color yourself?”

  “Uh huh. Grandma said I could. And she gave me the chair from the attic.”

  Steve hunted paint thinner on the cluttered shelves. “Where are you going to put it?”

  “In my room. To make it more . . .” Kneeling, Gabrielle busied herself bundling newspaper.

  Steve glanced at his daughter’s bowed head. He knew when a subject was holding back on him. “To make it more . . . ?”

  “Like home,” she said.

  Steve felt sucker punched. “Honey . . .”

  “It’s okay,” she said, not looking up.

  It wasn’t. But for once Steve wasn’t sure how to make it right.

  “We won’t always live with Grandma,” he said. “As soon as we sell the townhouse, we’re going to buy a nice house here. And you can paint your room any color you want.”

  “I don’t want to sell our house in D.C.,” Gabrielle said, her voice muffled.

  His heart wrenched. “We talked about this, Gabby. It’s better for us to live in Stokesville now. It’s nice here, right?”

  Unless you have kids whose horizons stretch farther than the town limits, Bailey had said.

  “I know it’s tough without Rosa. But there are people here who can take care of you,” he continued doggedly.

  “I don’t need a nanny anymore. I can take care of myself.”

  “Not according to Child Services.”

  “Well, you take care of me.”

  Not well enough, he thought.

  “Sometimes I have to work,” he said. “And then it’s good your Grandma is here.”

  “Grandma says she won’t always be here.”

  His chest squeezed. Hadn’t his daughter had enough experience with death and dying without Eugenia sharing her fears of her own mortality? “Well . . .”

  “She said she’s going to Asheville on Friday with her book club group.”

  He breathed again. “But she’ll be back Saturday night.”

  His daughter watched him from the corners of her eyes. “Grandma says what I really need is a mother.”

  “Your grandmother talks too much,” Steve said grimly.

  Gabrielle ignored this. “You could get married again.”

  Jesus.

  “I don’t think that will work,” Steve said gently.

  She sat back on her heels, giving him her full attention. “Why not?”

  He didn’t have the time or energy to invest in another relationship. He didn’t have the heart. Or the guts.

  “Well . . . I don’t really know anybody.”

  Gabrielle cocked her head.

  Steve felt uneasy. He’d seen that look before when Teresa wanted something. It used to presage a shopping trip. But Gabrielle couldn’t go shopping for a mother.

  He tried to clarify. “Before two people can get married they have to do a lot of other stuff first. Like go on dates.”

  “Oh.” Gabrielle sighed. “Yeah, I guess you wouldn’t be good at that.”

  “Right,” Steve said, relieved. But curiosity wouldn’t let him let it go. “Why not?”

  Gabrielle grinned. “Because you’d make your date leave the movie.”

  He laughed.

  “I think that’s everything,” Bailey told Paul, desperately upbeat. She popped the flash drive from his laptop’s USB port. “I’ve backed up all your files and the documents folder. I can work from my parents’ house.”

  As long as she could persuade her dad to stay out of his office and her mother to leave her alone.

  Dorothy, who preferred even the TV to her own company, had never understood or approved of her younger daughter’s desire for solitude.

  What are you doing up there? she would call up the stairs when Bailey used to escape to her room after school. You’re not doing anything.

  Nothing but reading or writing or dreaming.

  Nothing her mother considered worthwhile.

  And leave your door open! she’d say, as if she could save her daughter from the perversion of privacy that way.

  How can you expect to get anywhere if you spend all your time in your room?

  Well, maybe Mom was right on that one.

  Because here Bailey was, almost twenty-seven years old, unpublished, unmarried, slinking home to escape the scandal of an unconsummated love affair and an ongoing murder investigation, moving back under her parents’ roof and driving her mother’s car.

  As a career development, it pretty much sucked. As personal achievements went, it was an all-time low.

  Paul slouched against the corner of his desk, stretching out long, elegant legs in perfectly pressed khaki. “I want you to stay.”

  Bailey ignored the lick of longing and dropped the lipstick-sized flash drive into her purse. “My being here makes Regan uncomfortable.”

  He held her gaze, a smile touching the corner of his mouth. “And you’re being gone makes me uncomfortable.”

  She resisted the lure of that long look. Being needed was one thing. Being stupid was another. “I can’t stay. Regan thinks—”

  “Regan’s opinions are hardly my biggest concern right now.”

  “What Regan thinks, other people will be saying.”

  Paul shrugged. “Small town, small minds.”

  “Big mouths,” Bailey said. “People talk.”

  “So what? As soon as I finish this book, we’ll be gone. Back to New York, where we belong.”

  That “we” should have thrilled her. Wasn’t that what she wanted? Paul and New York. She didn’t belong in Stokesville. She never had.

  And yet . . . Her family lived here. Her father owned the hardware store. Her sister belonged to the Junior League. Her mother . . . How would her mother hold up her head in church if the whole congregation was whispering about her daughter’s relationship with her famous boss?

  Didn’t Paul see that? Or didn’t he care?

  “It’s going to be difficult to leave town if—” You’re arrested for murder. She gulped. “—if the police decide to listen to gossip,” she finished weakly.

  “Let them. You of all people know I was faithful to Helen.”

  Bailey flushed guiltily. Yes, she did.

  “I loved her,” Paul said dramatically.

  Bailey winced. But a small, cold kernel held aloof, observing, as if she were watching a mediocre actor in a very bad play. She didn’t much like her own role, either.

  “Unfortunately, the police are more interested in your dry-cleaning than your feelings,” she said.

  “The police are incompetent.”

  Bailey didn’t think Steve Burke was incompetent at all. But she said, “All the more reason for you to be careful.”

  “I am being careful. I spoke to my lawyer. And I revoked that consent to search.”

  After she’d told him Steve Burke had confiscated his best black suit to test for blood stains.

  “Are you sure that was a good idea?” Bailey asked.

  “I’m under no obligation to cooperate with Barney Fife. Besides, as you pointed out, I could hardly host Helen’s funeral from my hotel room.”

  He’d picked a heck of a time to start listening to her. “Yes, but now the police might think you have something to hide.”

 
; “I don’t care what they think. They can’t prove anything, and I don’t have to let them in my house.”