Читать книгу Be My Valentino - Sandra D. Bricker - Страница 11

Chapter 4

4

This is your little vacation home?”

She thought Danny snickered, and she peeled her eyes off the front of the enormous wood and stone house before them.

“Danny,” Jessie told him with a sigh. “You really should have told me.”

He threw the gear into neutral and turned off the ignition. “Told you what?”

She waved her arm through the open roof with a flourish. “Told me . . . this. You let me think we were going camping or something.”

“It’s kind of like that. But the tent is really nice.”

Jessie let him climb out of the Jeep alone. She needed an extra few seconds to process what she saw in front of her.

“C’mon, Jessie,” Allie exclaimed as she trotted toward her. “I’ll show you where we’ll be.”

When Danny had said he and Riggs would sleep in the loft, leaving the master bedroom to her and Allie, she’d imagined a small staircase between them. Maybe a miniscule hallway or something. From the look of things, they were entering the equivalent to a couple of separate residences. A quaint little A-frame and a sprawling ranch pushed together to make one immaculate, inviting mountain retreat. For a dozen or more of the Callahan family’s closest friends.

Before she could tug on the door handle, Danny opened it from the other side. Jessie unbuckled the seat belt and swung her legs out, her feet landing on a sand-colored stamped concrete driveway bordered on both sides by slightly darker stones. The curved path led to massive double doors boasting large beveled glass windows that caught the afternoon light and reflected it back in colorful bursts.

Danny led the way, lugging his overstuffed duffle bag behind one shoulder while dragging Jessie’s wheeled Louis Vuitton close to his heels. She grabbed her handbag and the white leather hat box case from the backseat and flipped the handle over her wrist as she hurried to follow them.

“You’re going to love this place,” Allie told her. “Wait until you see the view from the loft.”

“The loft is off-limits,” Riggs exclaimed as he passed them.

“Oh, come on . . .”

“You girls have the whole rest of the house. The loft is The Man Zone.”

“The Man Zone,” Allie muttered to Jessie with a dramatic roll of her eyes. “Please.”

Jessie couldn’t help chuckling at the teen’s dramatic flair.

She came to a wobbly stop just inside the front door, clutching her bags, mouth gaping. From the large planks of distressed maple on the floors to the rough beams across the twenty feet of ceiling—and everything in between—the home broadcast an unmistakably advanced design aesthetic she never would have associated with Danny. His laid-back Santa Monica surfer persona hardly fit with the picture before her.

“Yeah, I know,” he said, and she snapped to attention, surprised to find him standing next to her. “It’s pretty great, right?”

Jessie turned her head and gazed at him for a moment. “Great?” she repeated with the shake of her head. “Yeah. It’s pretty great.”

“Hey, Danny,” Allie called out.

Jessie spotted her on the other side of an oversized rustic table centered beneath a rubbed bronze oval chandelier.

“I’m gonna make a sandwich, okay?”

“Sometimes I forget,” he muttered as if he hadn’t heard Allie.

Jessie watched after him as he wandered away, leaving her standing there alone.

“Hey, Callahan.” Riggs thundered down the circular staircase in the corner of the great room. “Our bags are stowed upstairs. What did Brunswick bring us to eat?”

Jessie inched past two light-green leather sofas, which faced each other over a low, square coffee table like a couple of amiable visitors. The high hearth of the stacked stone fireplace balanced one pristine pile of chopped wood with a display of heavy iron utensils beneath a mantle that matched the overhead beams. She left her handbag and cosmetics case on the table before rounding the corner and stopping, breathless, beneath the wide arched entrance to the kitchen.

Oversized squares of Mediterranean travertine led the way into the most magnificent and inviting kitchen Jessie thought she had ever seen. Stainless steel appliances and brushed nickel accents and fixtures set off two walls of cabinetry, light beige and green granite counters, and an enormous farmhouse sink. By the time Jessie found her breath again, her three companions had kicked into full gear handing off packages of cold cuts, cheese, sandwich rolls, condiments, bottled drinks . . .

“What can I do to help?” she asked.

“You can grab plates and stuff,” Riggs said. He headed through the open glass French doors that led to a massive redwood deck overlooking a large blue lake and surrounded on three sides by a bench broken up at each corner with planters of colorful flowers.

“Over there,” Allie said on her way out the door behind him.

Jessie headed toward where Danny stood at the counter slicing tomatoes. “Here?” she asked him.

He tugged open the cabinet door to his left. “Plates up here. Glasses to the right. Silverware is in the drawer on the other side of me.”

As she navigated about collecting four of everything, she nudged him with her elbow. “Danny, did you grow up spending time here?”

“Yeah, my folks bought the place when I was about ten.”

She smiled, trying to imagine her grandfather standing in the middle of the cavernous kitchen, “stirrin’ up slop,” as he used to call dinner preparation.

Jessie gazed at the stretch of blue beyond the trees. “Is that Big Bear Lake out there?”

“Our little piece of it, yes.” He picked up the plate he’d prepared and nodded toward the door. “Let’s eat outside.”

She followed him. “Where did all this food come from?”

“Brunswick,” Riggs chimed in as they reached the outdoor dining table at the edge of the deck. “He’s the all-knowing Giles.”

“The what?” she asked with a chuckle.

“Len Brunswick,” Danny clarified. “He opens and closes the place for us, stocks the fridge, that kind of thing.”

“All-knowing Giles?”

“Ah.” Danny waved his hand in dismissal.

Allie giggled. “Dad likes to think of Mr. Brunswick like one of those English butlers on TV. He says they’re always named Giles. And he’s psychic because he always seems to bring our favorite foods.” Without missing a beat, she turned to her father. “Did you bring out the chips?”

“Forgot ’em,” Riggs said over a full mouth.

“Chew your food,” she remarked, hopping up and heading inside. “Were you raised in a barn?”

Riggs cackled and shook his head at Jessie. “She’s a clone of her mother.”

Allie reappeared with two bags of chips, and she tossed one to her father before taking her place at the table. “Can we go paddleboarding after supper?”

“Let’s save all that rigamarole for tomorrow. We’ll get an early start.”

“Early, as in early for you? Or early for the rest of the world?” his daughter teased.

“Hilarious.”

“Then can we go swimming?”

Riggs took another large bite from his sandwich before nodding and talking over it. “Yeah. I guess.”

* * *

Riggs and Allie raced down the dock and, without even the slightest hesitation, both of them catapulted off the end of it into the water. Danny shook his head and chuckled.

“Two pieces of the same cloth,” he remarked. “He thinks she’s just like Charlotte, but Allie’s so much like him it scares me a little.”

“She’s beautiful,” Jessie commented.

Danny held back from returning that observation back to her. She looked almost ethereal sitting there, sideways on the bench, in cropped cotton pants and a short, loose gauze blouse, the breeze from the lake toying with her hair. As she leaned against the planter, she raised her knees and wrapped her arms around them. The afternoon sun illuminated her, gave her hair the appearance of spun glass. When she lowered her sunglasses on the bridge of her nose and looked at him over top of them, his heartbeat picked up the pace to a full-on hammering against his chest.

“I’m glad you invited me along, Danny. And I especially appreciate you all shifting things to Sunday.”

“I knew you couldn’t be away from the store on a Saturday. It worked out fine. I’m just glad you wanted to come. I wasn’t sure.”

“No?”

“No,” he admitted. “The air between us has gotten a little thick since that night at your place.”

“I know.” She sighed. “I’m sorry.”

“Do you feel like telling me what that’s about?” he broached. “What is it about him and what he’s done that makes you think you can’t trust me?”

She clucked out a chuckle and pushed her sunglasses back into place. “I have no doubts about whether or not I can trust you, Danny Callahan.”

“No?”

“No,” she assured him. “I just became painfully aware of my history of leaning on the men in my life, and I don’t want you to become one of them. I need to stand on my own. I’m not sure I’ve ever done that.”

At first, he thought she must be joking. When he noted the seriousness shadowing her expression, he told her, “You’re the strongest woman I know.”

“I’m not.”

“You are.” He wasn’t about to back down. Not on this. “Everything you’ve been through in the last few months would have done most women in, Jess. But look what you did—”

“Oh, Danny,” she said softly. “You don’t understand.”

He stood and crossed the deck toward her. She reached up and took his hand, squeezing it, and Danny sat on the redwood bench beside her feet before she released him.

“Don’t shut me out, Jessie.”

The words seemed to stroke her. She removed her sunglasses entirely and balanced them on her knee. “I might have to,” she said, her voice like warm velvet. “Just for a little while.”

He wanted to argue, to plead his case and tell her how important she’d become to him. But something stopped him from doing it. Good sense, he figured. But before he could question it any further, he noticed someone walking up the stairs from the dock.

“Danny,” the older woman called out to him. “Danny Callahan.”

He stood up and waved to her. “Mrs. Slaughter, how are you?”

“Can I stop up?”

“Of course.” Danny nodded at Jessie. “Our neighbor, Kaye Slaughter.”

She turned and planted her feet on the ground, combing through her hair with both hands.

“Danny, how are you, honey?” the woman said as she reached the top of the stairs. “I hope I’m not intruding.”

“Of course not,” he said, taking her hand. “Let me pour you something to drink. Is tea all right?”

“That would be just fine.” She brushed Jessie with a warm smile before stating, “Hello. I’m Kaye Slaughter.”

“This is Jessie Hart. Jessie, Mrs. Slaughter owns the place right down the dock.”

The woman reached out and shook Jessie’s hand. “I don’t know how many times I’ve told this boy to call me Kaye, but he insists on formalities. I don’t know whether to feel insulted or respect his upbringing.”

Jessie chuckled. “I wouldn’t be insulted.”

“Pleasure to meet you, dear.”

“You, too.”

She sat down on the bench next to Jessie and accepted the glass of tea from Danny. “Thank you. I saw your friend Aaron swimming out there with his young daughter. My, she’s grown up, hasn’t she?”

Danny grinned. “She has.”

“I was so glad to see you were here, Danny. I thought perhaps we could have a chat.”

“Anytime. You know that.”

Kaye fidgeted with a lock of short silver hair. She ran her finger around the rim of the glass and stared down into it for another long moment before speaking. “I have a situation, Danny.”

“A situation.”

“And I thought of you right away because of your being . . . you know, an investigator.”

Danny dragged one of the chairs away from the table and sat down on it across from her. Kaye Slaughter had been a friend of his family for more than a decade. The only time he remembered her breaking her game face was that week in the summer of 2009 when her husband Burt had suddenly passed away. Until now, anyway. He spotted a sense of panic mixed with confusion churning in her gray-blue eyes, and an array of possible sources ricocheted in soft pings through his thoughts.

Danny reached over and touched her hand. “Take your time and tell me what’s going on.”

“Thank you, dear.” She dabbed the tip of her nose with a tissue he hadn’t noticed she held wadded in her fist. “It could be I’m just being silly. I don’t know.”

He caught Jessie’s eye just quickly enough for an exchange of shared concern, and he nearly loved her for it.

“I know I’m getting on in years, so it could just be . . .” Her words trailed away, and she sighed. “I’ve tried to convince myself it’s my imagination, but I know it’s not, Danny. I know something strange is going on over there.”

He wanted to clarify her quick nod toward the docks. “At your place?”

“Yes. Something isn’t right.”

Jessie touched the woman’s arm. “I find it’s better not to over-think things. Our instincts are pretty much dead on.”

Kaye smiled at her. “I’m not getting any younger, so when I first noticed it . . . I started to wonder if it wasn’t a warning sign of things to come. But it’s happening more and more, so . . .”

“What’s happening more and more, Kaye?” Danny interjected.

“Oh, I’m sorry. In the beginning, I noticed things seemed to have been moved around. The spatula in the drawer instead of hanging on the rack over the stove, that kind of thing. I never keep the spatula in the drawer.”

“How long has it been happening?” Jessie asked.

“A month or so, I think. Every time I drove up from Pasadena, it seemed like something else was out of place. Then a couple of weeks ago, I noticed the key to the storage cabinet in the garage was missing from the hook in the kitchen. And you’ll never guess where I found it. Right there in the lock.”

“In the garage?” Danny asked.

“That’s right. Hanging right out of the cabinet lock.”

“Have you ever left it there before?”

“Danny, I don’t think I’ve gotten into that storage cabinet since Burt passed.”

“Well, that doesn’t sound like your imagination,” Jessie said.

“I don’t think so either. And that made me more keenly aware, and I went looking for things that might be moved or missing.” She pulled a folded sheet of paper from the pocket of her trousers and ironed it open with her palm before handing it to Danny. “I made a list.”

He took it from her and skimmed the page.

Only 5 wine glasses—should be 6

Bottle of merlot

Bathroom drawer standing open

Green pillowcase

Danny glanced up at her. “You’re missing a green pillowcase?”

“Oh. No. The green pillowcase is supposed to be on the square pillow. But two weekends ago, it was on the rectangle, and the lilac case was on the square.”

The corner of his mouth twitched, but he reeled in the chuckle that simmered at the base of his throat.

Next to the TV Remote notation, Kaye had scribbled, “Still missing.”

½ laundry detergent gone

Wet towels in dryer—2 bath, 1 kitchen

Red comb out of the drawer—sitting in the shower

Anniversary necklace missing

“Anniversary necklace?” he asked her.

“Burt bought me a lovely amethyst necklace that we saw in one of those little shops in town.”

“Amethyst,” he repeated. “Is that valuable?”

“It was just a hundred dollars, I think. But the setting was very unique, and . . .” She swallowed before turning toward Jessie. “It was our last anniversary together before he went home.”

“I’m so sorry.”

Danny turned his attention back to the unexpectedly lengthy list.

Oatmeal cookies from the freezer

Neck roll missing from the guest room

Riley and Duncan’s bags

“Riley and Duncan’s bags?”

“When the grandchildren come up in the summer, they enjoy camping out on the deck,” she explained. “We keep their sleeping bags on the shelf in the garage. I mightn’t have noticed they were missing except that I thought to wash them before they’re out for the summer.”

“What are you thinking?” Jessie asked him.

Danny cocked a brow. “I’m thinking this has gone beyond coincidence or forgetfulness.”

“Really?” Kaye’s timid smile oozed grateful relief.

“I remember your schedule being fairly regimented. Is that still the case? Do you normally arrive and leave on the same day of the week?”

She nodded. “I volunteer at Huntington Memorial Hospital Tuesday through Thursday, and I generally make the drive up the mountain late Thursday afternoon and stay through most of the day on Sunday.”

“So you would normally leave tonight.”

“Around five.”

“I think you should go ahead and do that, just like always,” Danny advised. “Then I’ll do some surveillance and see if there’s anything going on. Do you have an extra set of keys to the house?”

“I can drop them by on my way down the hill,” she told him. “Thank you so much, Danny.”

“Don’t thank me yet. Let’s see what I can find out.”

Kaye stood up and smiled at him. “Oh, and it was a pleasure meeting you, Jessie.”

“Same here. And don’t worry. If there’s anything to find out, Danny’s the one to do it.”

Danny took the woman by the arm. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he told Jessie. “I’m just going to walk Kaye down the dock.”

“Take your time. I’ll clean up the rest of the dishes.”

Although she was a little slow going down the wooden plank stairs, Kaye still held herself with the posture of her younger days. He recalled a barbecue she’d attended right there on the deck the summer of his sixteenth birthday, wearing a flowing blue dress. To a typical sixteen-year-old, the beautiful and regal Kaye Slaughter looked like a member of the royal family on holiday. Truth told, he’d had a bit of a crush on her back then. Now, many years later, infatuation had evolved into deep affection.

When he left her at the base of the stairs leading to her own vacation home, Kaye kissed his cheek and squeezed his hand.

“I’m so grateful,” she said.

“I’ll give you a call.”

On the walk back, he slowed at the dock where Riggs and Allie lounged side by side, feet dangling over the side as they chatted sweetly. Danny envied the easy relationship between father and daughter, and he wondered whether he might ever be so blessed. As he took the stairs up toward the deck—and before he could stop the train of thought barreling down the track—he tried to imagine a sweet little girl with Jessie’s glossy dark hair and crystal blue eyes simmering with fascination for the world around her, blended with his mother’s single-dimpled smile and melodious voice.

“Oh good, you’re back,” Jessie exclaimed as he reached the wooden summit and stretched out on the long bench where she’d been sitting when he left. She grinned at him from the other side of the table, and leaned down to zip a small cooler. “I packed a few stakeout snacks for us. When do we leave?”

* * *

“I thought we’d go out Picayune way today. Maybe catch us a speckled trout ’r two.”

These was the words that delighted my Jessie’s young soul. Not ’cause she ever took to fishin’ all that much. What she did like was packin’ us up a lunch to share from the bank o’ that river, and pickin’ a Hardy Boys book to read out loud to me while I cast a line or two.

“You sure you don’t wanna bait a hook and give it a cast?”

“Nah,” she’d tell me. “That’s icky.”

“Then why you wanna go fishin’ a-tall?”

“We do our best talkin’ out here, Grampy. You wanna hear what the Hardy Boys are up to next?”