Page 24

The letdown was far worse than the anger or the tears. It bordered on outright depression, Hannah thought. She retreated to the upstairs veranda as soon as she was inside the house. Rafe did not try to stop her.

Half an hour later, stretched out in a wicker lounger, with Winston hovering loyally beside her, she tried to sort out her mangled emotions and jumbled thoughts. She gazed at the restless surface of the bay and told herself that she had overreacted. She had, in fact, come unglued in a way that was most unusual for her.

Obviously she had been under more stress lately than she had realized.

She had every right to be furious with Rafe for that scene at the Eclipse Bay Gas and Go, she decided. But why had she let events get to her like that? She had been screaming at Pete Levare. She had nearly burst into tears in front of all those people.

What was the matter with her?

The answer was out there, but she knew she did not want to deal with it. She almost welcomed the sound of Rafe’s footsteps behind her. Anything was better than looking at the hard facts of her situation.

“You okay?” he asked.

She took some satisfaction from the fact that he sounded worried.

“I’m pissed,” she said.

“Yeah. I know.” He handed her a glass of iced tea. After a second’s hesitation she took it from him. He seemed relieved. He lowered himself onto a wicker chair and rested his elbows on his knees. “It was my fault.”

“We’ve already established that.” She examined the glass in her hand. The tea was not ordinary black tea over ice. It was a luscious green-gold in color. There was a sprig of mint draped artistically over the rim and tiny little mint leaves frozen inside each ice cube. A crisp straw poked over the edge of the glass. An impossibly thin slice of lemon floated in the crystal-clear depths. “There’s no little paper umbrella,” she said.

He examined the glass critically and then shook his head once, decisively. “An umbrella would have been over the top.”

“Just like that scene at the gas station.” She sipped the tea through the straw. It was perfect. Cold, strong, and invigorating. “Why did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Ask me to marry you in that dumb, tacky way.”

“You sure you want to reopen that conversation?”

“I want an answer.”

He looked out at the silver surface of the bay. “All right. I wanted to marry you the day you got out of the car here at Dreamscape, but I knew you wouldn’t take a chance on me. At least, not right away.”

Tea sloshed over the side of her glass. She sputtered wildly, “You what …?”

He did not respond to her interruption. Instead he plowed ahead with a sort of dogged determination. She got the feeling that having launched himself on this venture, he was bound to see it through to the conclusion, even if that conclusion was ill-fated.

“During the past few days I thought maybe we were getting closer. Making progress.”

“Having sex, you mean.”

He nodded agreeably. “That, too. But I didn’t want to push it.”

“The sex?”

“The relationship.”

“Oh, that.” She scowled. “Why not?”

“Mostly because I figured you’d get nervous and back off.”

“Me? You’re the one who claims to have a deep-seated fear of having inherited a genetic tendency to screw up relationships.”

“I had every right to play my cards close to the chest. I wasn’t sure what I was dealing with. After all, you told me you’d drawn up a new list of qualifications for a husband. Hell, you wouldn’t even tell me what was on the revised version.”

She dropped her head against the back of the lounger. “That stupid list.”

“Yeah. That stupid list. Worrying about it has been a real source of stress for me, Hannah.”

Her hand stilled on Winston’s head. “It has?”

“That damned list has driven me nuts. At any rate, this afternoon at the gas station when you started to tell everyone that the subject of marriage had never even come up between us, I guess I got a little irritated. Hell, I lost my temper.” He paused. “And whatever common sense I’ve got.”

She slowly lowered the glass. “Are you serious?”

He turned his head back to look at her. “Dead serious.”

“You’ve been thinking about marriage since I first got here?”

“Before that, if you want the truth.” He looked down at his loosely clasped hands for a moment. When he raised his head again his eyes were bleak. “Maybe since I got the news about Dreamscape from Isabel’s lawyer and realized that you were still single.”

“I don’t understand,” she whispered. “What put the notion of marriage into your head? Did you have some crazy idea that it would be the simplest way to deal with our inheritance?”

“Hell, no. Marriage is not a simple way of handling anything. I know that better than anyone.”

“Then why?” Her voice was rising again. She’d have to watch that. She was a Harte, after all.

Rafe’s jaw tightened. “It’s hard to explain. It just seemed right somehow. When I got the letter from the lawyer things started to fall into place. For the first time in my life I knew exactly what I wanted. It was as if I’d been groping my way through a fog bank for years and suddenly the fog evaporated.”

“What, precisely, do you want?”

He spread his hands. “Nothing too bizarre. You. The inn and the restaurant. A future.”

She waited for him to add undying love and mutual devotion to the list. But he didn’t. “I see. Some people would say that a marriage between a Harte and a Madison would definitely qualify as bizarre.”

He watched her intently. “Look, I don’t know what’s on this new list of yours, but I’ve done some changing during the past eight years. I still don’t meet all the requirements you gave me when you were nineteen—”

“I was twenty that night, not nineteen.”

“Whatever. The thing is, I do meet at least some of those specifications, and I’m willing to work on the rest.”

“Why?” she asked bluntly.

He leaned forward, intense and earnest. “You’re a Harte. You ought to see the logic in us getting married. Hey, we’d be going into this deal with our eyes wide open. We know a hell of a lot more about each other than most people know about their potential spouses. We’ve got some history together. Three generations of it. We’d have Dreamscape to work on together. Sharing a business enterprise is a very bonding experience.”

“You think so?”

“Sure.” He was warming to his theme now. “For my part, I can guarantee that this wouldn’t be another typical Madison marriage.”

She sipped her tea, reluctantly fascinated. “In what way?”

“I just told you.” He spread his hands in a gesture of exasperation. “It won’t be based on some wild, romantic fantasy of endless lust.”

“No lust at all?” she asked around the straw.

His jaw locked. “I’m not saying I don’t find you attractive. You know I do. We’re sexually compatible. That’s important in a marriage.”

“Sexual compatibility is nice,” she agreed.

“Right. Real important.”

“But what you’re proposing here is a marriage of convenience.”

“What I’m proposing,” he said, his voice tightening, “is a marriage based on the sort of things that are supposed to appeal to a Harte, the kind of crap that was on that original list of yours: Mutual goals. Shared interests, et cetera, et cetera.”

The edge in his voice made her look at him quickly, but his face was an unreadable mask.

“Right.” She jiggled the straw among the ice cubes.

“Crap.”

He drew a breath. “Okay, ‘crap’ was not a great word. Look, what I’m trying to say here is that I think we’ve got a shot at making a marriage work. Hannah, you told me once that I didn’t have to repeat the same mistakes my father and my grandfather made. I haven’t been one hundred percent successful, but I have managed to avoid some of the larger disasters. And I did meet the goal I set for myself eight years ago.”

“You didn’t end up in jail.”

“Doesn’t that count for something?”

“Huh.”

“It’s taken me a while to find out what I want in life, but I’ve got it straight now. I need to know if you can stretch your new list of requirements in a husband to accommodate me.”

“Depends.” She steeled herself. “You see, the new edition of my list is extremely short, at least compared to the old one. Only one requirement is on it.”

He watched her the way Winston watched seagulls. Hope and determination burned in his eyes, but so did the knowledge of potential defeat.

The roar of a sturdy truck engine rumbled in the drive on the opposite side of the house. Winston removed his head from under Hannah’s hand and hurried off around the corner to investigate. Rafe frowned, clearly annoyed by the interruption. Then he realized who it was and surged to his feet.

“That will be A.Z.,” he said. He started after Winston.

Hannah glared at his back. “So much for declaring undying love and devotion.” But she said it very softly so that he would not hear her because it was entirely possible that he did not have either to declare.

Who would have guessed that a Madison would have ever settled for a marriage based on mutual interests and shared goals?

Who would have guessed that a Harte would have hungered for a little wild passion and romantic love?

The noise of the truck engine ceased abruptly. Hannah got up from the lounger and followed Rafe and Winston around the corner.

“This here’s the log for that night.” Arizona opened the black leather-bound volume on the kitchen table and swiveled it around so that Rafe and Hannah could look at the entries. “That first Thornley reception was a big event. Lots of folks there, including some from Portland.”

“We’re looking for a record of a car that left the parking lot and returned between midnight and two.” Rafe slid the log closer to get a better look at the tiny, meticulously made notations. “I assume you stayed until the reception ended, A.Z.?”

“Until the last car pulled out of the lot,” she assured him. “No point keeping a half-assed record, I say.”

Hannah flipped pages. “There are a lot of entries here. It’s going to take a while to go through them.”

“Take your time.” Arizona shoved herself to her feet. “Reckon I’ll go out into the sunroom and relax while you two conduct your little investigation. Mind if I pour myself some more of your coffee, Rafe?”

“Help yourself.” He reached for a pen and the lined tablet he had set out on the table.

“Thanks.” Arizona reached for the pot. “Been a while since I sat in Isabel’s sunroom. Miss those visits. Isabel always had something interesting to say.”

The sad, faintly wistful note in Arizona’s voice caught Hannah off guard. She looked up quickly.

Arizona headed for the kitchen door, chunky mug in hand. “I could talk to her, you know? She understood when I told her about the goings-on up at the institute. Didn’t laugh the way some folks do.”

Arizona ambled out into the hall and disappeared in the direction of the solarium. Hannah gazed after her for a moment, aware of a glimmer of curiosity.

“I wonder just how close Arizona and Aunt Isabel actually were,” she said quietly. “As far as I know, neither of them ever married. They were friends for a long time. You don’t suppose—?”

“None of our business.” Rafe wrote down a license plate number. “This will go faster if you take the notes while I read the entries.”

“All right.” She took the pen from him and positioned the yellow tablet. “Go.”

It was a discouraging process. Arizona’s log was more than a simple list of license plates, names, and times. It was complicated by extensive notations. Rafe read some of them aloud.

…Member of the Inner Circle?

…Claims to be from Portland but spotted a copy of the New York Times on the backseat…

…Showed up for last Tuesday’s secret meeting at the institute. Probably on the inside…

“She’s crafted a fantasy world for herself,” Hannah whispered. “It’s amazing.”

“I’m not so sure it’s any more amazing than the fact that we’re sitting here going through her fantasy world logbooks because we think we can use them to solve an eight-year-old murder.”

“Okay, you’ve got a point.” Hannah tapped the pen against the table. “I can see where some people might conclude that we’re as far out in left field as Arizona herself.”

It took nearly half an hour to get through the log for the night of Kaitlin Sadler’s death. Hannah was privately on the verge of conceding defeat when Rafe paused at a license plate number.

“Huh,” he said.

She looked up quickly. “What?”

“We’ve been concentrating on plates and vehicles connected with the Thornley campaign.”

“So?”

Rafe sat back slowly and shoved his hands into his back pockets. He studied the open logbook. “None of them left and returned during that two-hour window. Maybe we’ve been coming at this from the wrong angle.”

Hannah did not like the dark excitement in his voice. “You think maybe whoever left to meet Kaitlin borrowed someone else’s car?”

“Maybe.” Rafe hesitated. “But there’s another possibility. From what we can figure out, Kaitlin was acting on impulse that night. She had made up her mind to leave town in the morning. She needed cash in a hurry. We’ve been going on the assumption that she tried to sell the blackmail tapes to someone from Thornley’s camp. But there was another potential market for those tapes.”

“What market is that?”

“The media.”

“Well, sure.” Hannah tossed aside the pen. “But why would anyone in the media murder her after agreeing to buy the incriminating tapes? The last thing a journalist would want to do is get rid of his source. He’d want backup for his story.”

“Not if,” Rafe said slowly, “he planned to use the tapes to blackmail Thornley himself.”

Hannah drew a breath and let it out carefully. “The news of Thornley’s interest in lingerie never appeared in the media. You think that’s because some journalist who attended the reception that night kept the tapes and has been using them to blackmail Thornley all these years?”

Without a word, Rafe took one hand out of his back pocket and rotated the logbook so that she could see the entry he had marked.

“Not some journalist,” he said quietly. “One Kaitlin knew well enough to call in a hurry that night. One she had reason to believe might be interested in handling a sleazy story about Thornley. An old acquaintance she thought she could trust.”

Hannah looked down at the name written next to a license number. Stunned, she glanced quickly at the notes she had been making. The vehicle had left the reception shortly after midnight. It had returned at one-forty-seven A.M .

“A journalist,” Rafe went on very quietly, “who might have known that Arizona Snow had a habit of hiding in the shadows to make notes about events at the institute. One who might have decided that even though no one in town ever paid any attention to A.Z.’s conspiracy theories, it would probably be a good idea to steal the log for that evening.”

A chill of disbelief numbed Hannah. “You think Kaitlin tried to sell the tapes to Jed Steadman?”

An hour later Hannah paused halfway across the sunroom to glare at Mitchell, Rafe, and Arizona. All three of them glowered back at her.

“What the heck are we supposed to do now?” she demanded. “The big idea was to take the evidence to Jed Steadman and let him run with the story. Now it looks like he’s the chief suspect.”

Arizona shook her head and made a tut-tut sound. “Should have guessed the local media were involved in covering up institute actions. Explains a hell of a lot, if you ask me. No wonder they’ve been able to maintain a cloak of secrecy over their activities up there.”

“If we’re right, this has nothing to do with the institute,” Hannah said with a patience she did not feel. “It’s a simple case of blackmail and murder. It looks like Kaitlin called Jed that night. He went to meet her on the path above Hidden Cove. Maybe she offered to cut him in on the blackmail deal. Or maybe she simply wanted to sell the tapes to him outright. Either way, he saw a golden opportunity to cash in on the compromising videos.”

“But he figured he’d better get rid of Kaitlin,” Mitchell said. “Probably didn’t trust her to keep her mouth shut. Or maybe he didn’t want to split the potential profits two ways.”

Rafe massaged the back of his neck. “The bottom line here is that we don’t have any hard evidence for any of this.”

“You got my logs,” Arizona reminded him.

“No offense, A.Z., but we need more than that to take this to the police.”

“We’ve still got the option of turning the story over to the media,” Hannah reminded him. “Not the Eclipse Bay Journal , obviously. But maybe one of the Portland papers will be interested.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” Rafe tapped his finger on the arm of the wicker chair. “I was counting on Jed going with the story and doing the basic legwork because it was a hometown scandal. He had the best reason to get excited about it.”

“He’ll get fired up about it, all right,” Mitchell said morosely. “Probably sue us.”

Hannah looked out over the bay. “I wish we had a little more to go on here. Rafe is right. We don’t have any hard evidence.”

There was a short, stark silence behind her.

“You know who you’re looking at now,” Mitchell said eventually. “If nothing else, you ought to be able to use what you’ve got to scare the hell out of Jed Steadman. Make sure he knows that if he makes one false move, a lot of folks will be watching. That should keep him in line.”

Arizona grunted. “Why not call up the Thornley crowd and tell them we know who’s been blackmailing their candidate all these years? That would stir things up a mite.”

“I’m not so sure Jed has been blackmailing Thornley,” Rafe said thoughtfully.

Everyone looked at him.

He sat forward and folded his arms on his knees. “When you get right down to it, there’s no evidence that Steadman has been living above his income. If he’s getting cash out of Thornley, where has the money been going?”

Another silence greeted that observation.

“Well, shoot and damn,” Mitchell muttered. “Why would he commit murder for the tapes and then sit on them for eight years?”

A cunning light appeared in Arizona’s eyes. “Why waste time prying a few bucks out of a small-time state pol when you can hold your ammunition and use it on a genuine U.S. senator?”

Hannah heard a collective intake of breath.

“You know something, A.Z.?” Rafe’s smile held no humor. “For a professional conspiracy theorist, you sometimes make a lot of sense.”

“She’s got a point, all right.” Mitchell whistled softly in admiration. “Everyone knew from the start that Thornley would probably go all the way to Washington.” He glanced at Rafe. “You know Steadman better than anyone. Think he’s into that kind of long-range planning?”

“Maybe,” Rafe said thoughtfully. “He always likes to talk about the importance of timing and planning.”

Hannah clasped her hands behind her back. “If Jed has been sitting on those tapes all this time, he must be getting a little antsy now that the big payoff is almost within reach. No wonder he freaked when Rafe and I returned to Eclipse Bay and people started to talk about the past.”

“The question is, What do we do with all this guesswork?” Mitchell asked of the room at large.

Rafe looked out over the bay. “We get a little more information, if we can.”

Hannah swung around in alarm. “What are you going to do?”

“There’s a town council meeting tonight. They’re going to be discussing the pier renovations. Jed will cover the session. It will probably run late.”

Understanding hit her. She took an urgent step toward him. “You’re going to search his house, aren’t you? Rafe, you can’t take that risk. What if a patrol car goes past his place while you’re inside and you’re spotted? If you get caught you’ll be arrested for breaking and entering. You could end up in jail.”

“Now that would be ironic,” Rafe said. “Be the fulfillment of a long-standing prophecy.”

“That is not amusing.” She whirled around to face Mitchell. “I’m sure you don’t want him to take this kind of risk. He’s your grandson. Help me out here.”

Mitchell stroked his chin. His expression of wolfish anticipation was uncomfortably familiar. “Well, I sure wouldn’t want him to take such a dumb risk on his own. Reckon I’d better go with him to keep him out of trouble.”

Hannah looked from his face to Rafe’s and back again. She groaned. “Well, shoot and damn. This is a fine time for the two of you to decide to bond.”

Mitchell studied the big house from beneath the branches of a dripping tree. Jed Steadman’s home stood dark and silent in the fog-drenched gloom. “You thought about what we’re going to do if we set off an alarm?”

“Doubt if there is one,” Rafe said. “Not many people here in Eclipse Bay are worried about crime.”

“If we’re right about Steadman, he isn’t exactly a typical resident of our fair town. You and Hannah have made him nervous lately. He might have put in an alarm. All I want to know is if you’ve got a backup plan in case we run into one.”

“You think I’d do something dicey like this without figuring all the angles first?”

“Just tell me what we’re supposed to do if we trigger an alarm.”

“We run like hell.”

Mitchell nodded. “I was afraid of that.”

“You want out before we go inside?”

“Hell, no. Haven’t had this much fun in years.”

Rafe smiled slightly to himself. “I was afraid of that.”

Getting inside was easy. Maybe a little too easy, Rafe thought as he slid the unlocked bedroom window open. He eased one leg over the sill and paused for a few seconds, listening to the silence.

“What’s the matter?” Mitchell demanded.

“Nothing.” Rafe got the other leg over the sill and stood inside the bedroom.

He was conscious of an eerie stillness in the house. A lonely quality permeated the darkness around him. He was only too well acquainted with this bleak, melancholy sensation. He had been aware of the emptiness collecting in his house in San Diego for a long time before he had made the decision to move to Eclipse Bay. Maybe this was how any man’s home felt when there was no woman in it to soften the edges and warm the shadows.

“Now what?” Mitchell whispered after he climbed through he window.

“You take this room. Look for a wall safe. I’ll go see if I can find a study or a home office. Got your gloves?”

“Sure, but we’re not exactly experts at this kind of thing. What if he realizes later that someone went through his belongings?”

“Give him something more to worry about,” Rafe said. “If we don’t turn up those tapes, giving him a good scare may be the only tactic we’ve got to use against him.”

He left Mitchell in the bedroom and went swiftly down the hall. He stopped in the doorway of another bedroom and clicked on his penlight. The room was beyond spartan in its bareness. It looked as if no one had ever slept in it. He opened a closet door. A mound of old camping equipment was piled inside.

He closed the door and went on down the hall to the next room. A quick glance revealed that Jed used it as an entertainment center. A massive television set took up a large section of one wall. Several thousand dollars’ worth of speakers and other electronic equipment were positioned around a large recliner cushioned in black leather.

A wastebasket sat next to the recliner. Rafe glanced inside and saw a small heap of trash. A little square of yellow paper and a bit of foil clung to the side of the basket.

Rafe aimed the penlight closer to the candy wrapper. It looked identical to the one he had discovered beneath the tree at the end of the Harte cottage drive. It wasn’t conclusive proof that it had been Jed who had kept watch on the house that night, but the evidence was mounting.

“Rafe.” Mitchell’s voice echoed softly from the other bedroom. It was husky with urgency. “You better take a look at this.”

Rafe swung around and hurried back down the hall. “What is it?” He rounded the corner and aimed the penlight at Mitchell, who was standing in front of a chest of drawers. “Find something?”

“It’s what I didn’t find.” Mitchell waved a hand at three open drawers. “There’s nothing in here. Cleaned out.”

“Are you sure?”

“Have a look for yourself.”

Rafe went to the closet and yanked it open. Three shirts hung limply in the far corner. A pair of worn slippers sat on the floor. The rest of the space was empty. The door of a small safe built into the closet wall hung open. There was nothing inside,

“Looks like he packed up and left.” Mitchell hooked his thumbs on his belt. “Maybe he figured out we’re on to him.”

“How could he have known?”

Mitchell shrugged. “Small town. He might have seen Arizona’s truck parked at Dreamscape this afternoon. Wouldn’t take much for him to put two and two together. He’s got to know you’re one of the few people who takes her seriously. Maybe he figured out that she was helping you look into the Sadler girl’s death. Wouldn’t be a real big leap for him.”

“No.” Rafe thought about it. “Not if he was already paranoid about that possibility. Maybe he planned for the possibility that someone would come around asking questions someday.”

“One thing’s for certain.” Mitchell turned toward the open wall safe. “If Steadman has cleared out for good, you can bet he didn’t leave those tapes behind for us to find.”