“Never easy. A pity she took after me rather than her father.”
“She’s lovely,” Maggie told her, searching for something to say. “I hope to see more of her. Her husband suggested that we have dinner.”
“Stan’s a good man. Solid. He’s always loved her.” The sad, elusive smile touched her lips. “He’s been kind to me.”
When she turned over the next picture, Maggie felt her stiffen. She saw the smile freeze rather than fade. Looking down, she saw William Morgan and a young, perhaps teenaged Stan Agee. This more recent photo was in color, and the trees in the background were vibrant with fall. The two men were dressed in flannel shirts and caps, and each wore a drab-colored vest with what looked to Maggie like small weights around the hem. Each carried a shotgun.
Shells, not weights, Maggie realized as she looked at the vests again. They must’ve been hunting. And they stood, she noted, near the slope of the gully. Disturbed, she looked at the trees again, at the tapestry she wanted to see for herself.
“Joyce would’ve taken this,” Louella murmured. “She hunted with her father. He taught her how to handle guns before she was twelve. It didn’t matter that she hated them; she learned to please him. William looks pleased,” Louella continued, though Maggie couldn’t see it. “He liked to hunt this land. Now we know he died here. Here,” she repeated, placing a palm over the picture. “Not three miles away, in the river. He never left his land. Somehow I think I always knew.”
“Mrs. Morgan.” Maggie set the pictures aside and laid a hand on her arm. “I know this must be difficult for you; it must be like going through it all over again. I wish there was something I could do.”
Turning her head, Louella fixed Maggie with a long, unsmiling stare. “Put in your pond,” she said flatly. “Plant your flowers. That’s as it should be. The rest is over.”
When she started to rise, Maggie found herself more disturbed by the emotionless reply than she would’ve been with a bout of tears. “Your pictures,” she began helplessly.
“Keep them.” Louella walked to the doorway before she turned. “I’ve no need for them anymore.”
Should she have been depressed? Maggie wondered as she listened to the car drive away. Was her reaction normal empathy for another’s tragedy, or was she allowing herself to become personally involved again? Over the last few days, she’d nearly convinced herself that the Morgan business had nothing to do with her. Now, after one brief contact, it was beginning again.
Yet it was more than a sense of involvement, Maggie admitted as she rubbed her arms to bring back warmth. There’d been something eerie in the way Louella had looked at the pictures. As if, Maggie reflected, she’d been putting the people in them to rest, though only one was dead.
Imagination again, she scolded herself. An overactive one. Yet hadn’t there been something odd in the way Louella had studied that last snapshot? It had been as if she’d been searching for details, looking for something. With a frown, Maggie walked over and sifted through the pictures herself, stopping when she came to the color print.
There was William Morgan again, his hair a bit thinner, his eyes a bit sterner than they’d been in the Easter photo. Sheriff Agee stood beside him, hardly more than a boy, his build not quite filled out, his hair a little shaggy. He’d looked even more like a beachcomber in his youth, Maggie decided, though he held the gun as if he were very familiar with firearms. Looking at him, Maggie could easily see why Joyce had fallen for him hard enough to give up dreams of fame and fortune. He was young, handsome, with a trace of cocky sexuality around his mouth.
She could understand, too, why Joyce had feared and obeyed and struggled to please the man beside him. William Morgan looked straight at the camera, legs spread, the gun held in both hands. Cliff had described him as a hard, cold man. Maggie had no trouble believing him, but it didn’t explain why Louella had been so disturbed by this one picture. Or why, Maggie added, she herself became uneasy when she looked at it.
Annoyed by her own susceptibility, she started to study the picture more closely when the rumble outside warned of another approaching vehicle.
When it rains it pours, she thought bad-temperedly. Tossing the picture carelessly on top of the others, she walked to the window. When Cliff’s pickup came into view, the flare of excitement left her shaken. Oh, no, Maggie warned herself. Not again. A woman who makes the same mistake twice deserves what she gets. Determined, she picked up her brush and began to paint in long, hard strokes. Let him knock all he wanted, she thought with an angry toss of her head. She had work to do.
Minutes passed, but he didn’t come to her door. Maggie continued to paint, telling herself it didn’t matter to her what he was doing outside. When she tried to lean closer to the window to look through, paint smeared from the sill to her jeans. Swearing, she wiped at it and made it worse.
She didn’t give a damn about Cliff Delaney, Maggie told herself. But she did care about having people wander around on her land. It was her right to go out and see what he was up to and order him away, she told herself as she set down her brush. If he were only checking on how her grass was growing, she fumed as she headed for the door, he should still have the courtesy to announce himself. By not announcing himself, he was denying her the satisfaction of ignoring him.
She yanked open the door but didn’t, as she’d expected, see him bending over the little green sprouts that had begun to shoot up through the topsoil. Neither was he looking out over the plugs of phlox or the juniper shrubs on her front bank. Perhaps, Maggie thought with a frown, he’d gone around to check on the last project to be completed, the crown vetch on her eroding rear bank.
Annoyed that she hadn’t thought of that in the first place, she started to turn back into the house when a movement near the gully caught her eye. For an instant, basic, primitive fear that slept in her awoke. She thought of ghouls and phantoms and legends of shades that never rest. In the next instant she recognized Cliff. As infuriated as she was embarrassed by her own reaction, she went to confront him.
As she drew closer, Maggie saw the willow, slender, small and tenderly green. Cliff was setting the ball of roots into a hole he’d dug out of the rocky soil with a pick and shovel. He stood perhaps six feet from the slope of the gully, his shirt tossed carelessly on the ground. She could see the muscles in his back ripple as he began to shovel dirt back into the hole. The twinge of her stomach told her that her reaction to him was no less powerful now than it had been before they’d made love.
Maggie straightened her shoulders and angled her chin. “What’re you doing?”
Because he continued to shovel without breaking rhythm, she decided he’d known she was coming. “Planting a tree,” Cliff said easily.
Her eyes narrowed dangerously. “I can see that. As far as I remember, I didn’t order a willow from you.”
“No.” He knelt down to mound and smooth the dirt at the base of the tree. She watched his hands, knowing now what they could do on her body. It seemed he had the same talent with soil. “No charge.”
Impatient with his nonanswers and with her own growing arousal, she folded her arms. “Why are you planting a tree I didn’t buy?”
Satisfied that the willow was secure, he rose. Leaning casually on the shovel, he studied her. No, he hadn’t gotten her out of his system, Cliff decided. Seeing her again didn’t relieve the knots of tension he’d been living with for days. Somehow he’d known it wouldn’t, but he’d had to try. “Some people might call it a peace offering,” he told her at length, then watched her mouth open and close again.
Maggie looked at the tree. It was so young, so fragile, but one day she would see it in full sweep, spreading over her pond, and— She stopped, realizing that it was the first time she’d thought of going through with the pond since the discovery. He must have known that, just as he’d known the willow might be enough to make her see the beauty and serenity again. Most of her anger had drained before she remembered to hold on to any of it.
br /> “A peace offering,” she repeated, running a finger down one delicate leaf. “Is that what you call it?”
Her voice had been cool, but he saw that her eyes had already started to warm. He wondered how many strong men she’d slain with that one look. “Maybe.” He sliced the shovel into the ground where it stood, tilting slightly to the left. “Got anything cold in there to drink?”
It was an apology, Maggie decided, perhaps the only kind a man like him could give. It only took her five seconds to decide to accept it. “Maybe,” she said in an equal tone, then turned to walk back toward the house. A smile curved her lips when he fell into step beside her. “Your men did an excellent job,” she continued while they circled around toward the rear of the house. “I’m anxious to see how the stuff over the retaining wall’s going to look.”
“Crown vetch,” Cliff supplied before he stopped to check the job, as she’d suspected he would. “You should see something come through in four or five more days. It’ll spread fast enough to cover this bank before summer’s over.” He kept his hands in his back pockets as he studied the work his men had done and thought of the woman beside him. “You’ve been busy?”
Maggie lifted a brow. “I suppose so. The house needs a lot of attention.”
“Seen the paper?”
“No,” she said, puzzled. “Why?”
Cliff shrugged, then walked ahead to the screen door to open it. “There was a big story on finding William Morgan buried on his old land. Land,” he continued when Maggie moved by him into the kitchen, “recently purchased by a celebrated songwriter.”
She turned sharply. “They had my name?”
“Yeah, it was mentioned—several times.”
“Damn,” she whispered, and, forgetting he’d asked for a drink, she dropped into a chair. “I’d wanted to avoid that.” Half hopefully, she glanced up. “The local paper?”
Helping himself, Cliff went to the refrigerator and searched out a soda. “Morganville doesn’t have a paper. There were stories in the Frederick Post and the Herald Mail.” As he twisted off the top, he nodded toward the phone sitting off the hook. “If you hadn’t done that, you’d have already answered a flood of calls from reporters.” And from himself, Cliff thought silently. In the past twenty-four hours, he’d called her a dozen times. He’d vacillated between being frantic and furious every time he’d gotten a busy signal. What kind of woman left her phone off the hook for hours at a time? One who was independent of the outside world, he mused, or one who was hiding from it. Lifting the bottle, he drank. “That your escape route these days?”
In defense, Maggie rose and slammed the receiver back in place. “I don’t need to escape from anything. You said yourself that this whole business doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
“So I did.” He examined the liquid left in the bottle. “Maybe you were escaping from something else.” He shifted his gaze until it locked on hers. “Were you hiding from me, Maggie?”
“Certainly not.” She swept over to the sink and began to scrub the paint splatters from her hands. “I told you, I’ve been busy.”
“Too busy to answer the phone?”
“The phone’s a distraction. If you want to start an argument, Cliff, you can just take your peace offering and—” The phone shrilled behind her so that she ended her suggestion with an oath. Before she could answer it herself, Cliff had picked up the phone.
“Yes?” He watched the fury spring into her eyes as he leaned on the counter. He’d missed that, he discovered, just as he’d missed the subtle sexiness of the scent she wore. “No, I’m sorry, Miss Fitzgerald isn’t available for comment.” He replaced the receiver while Maggie wiped her damp hands on her jeans.
“I can screen my own calls, thank you. When I want a liaison, I’ll let you know.”
He drank from the bottle again. “Just saving you some aggravation.”
“I don’t want you or anyone to save me aggravation,” she fumed. “It’s my aggravation, and I’ll do whatever I want with it.” He grinned, but before she could think of any retaliation, the phone rang again. “Don’t you dare,” she warned. Shoving him aside, she answered herself.
“Hello.”
“Damn it, Maggie, you’ve been leaving the phone off the hook again.”
She let out a huff of breath. A reporter might’ve been easier to deal with. “Hello, C.J. How are you?”
“I’ll tell you how I am!”
Maggie drew the phone back from her ear and scowled at Cliff. “There’s no need for you to hang around.”
He took another long sip from the bottle before he settled back comfortably. “I don’t mind.”
“Maggie!” C.J.’s voice vibrated in her ear. “Who the hell are you talking to?”
“Nobody,” she mumbled, deliberately turning her back on Cliff. “You were going to tell me how you were.”
“For the past twenty-four hours I’ve been frantic trying to get through to you. Maggie, it’s irresponsible to leave your phone off the hook when people’re trying to reach you.”
There was a bag of cookies on the counter. Maggie dug into it, then bit into one with a vengeance. “Obviously I left it off the hook so I couldn’t be reached.”
“If I hadn’t gotten you this time, I was going to send a telegram, and I’m not even sure they deliver telegrams in that place. What the hell have you been doing?”
“I’ve been working,” she said between her teeth. “I can’t work when the phone’s ringing off the wall and people are forever coming by. I moved out here to be alone. I’m still waiting for that to happen.”
“That’s a nice attitude,” he tossed back. In Los Angeles, C.J. searched through his desk drawer for a roll of antacids. “You’ve got people all over the country worried about you.”
“Damn it, people all over the country don’t have to worry about me. I’m fine!”
“You sound fine.”
With an effort, Maggie controlled her precarious temper. When she lost it with C. J., she invariably lost the bout, as well. “I’m sorry I snapped at you, C.J., but I’m tired of being criticized for doing what I want to do.”
“I’m not criticizing you,” he grumbled over the peppermint-flavored pill. “It’s just natural concern. For God’s sake, Maggie, who wouldn’t be concerned after that business in the paper?”
She tensed and, without thinking, turned back to face Cliff. He was watching her intently, the neck of the bottle held loosely in his fingers. “What business in the paper?”
“About that man’s—ah, what was left of that man being dug up on your property. Good God, Maggie, I nearly had a heart attack when I read it. Then, not being able to reach you—”
“I’m sorry.” She dragged a hand through her hair. “I’m really sorry, C.J. I didn’t think it would hit the papers, at least not out there.”
“So what I didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me?”
She smiled at the offended tone of voice. “Yes, something like that. I’d’ve called you with the details if I’d realized the news would get that far.”
“Get this far?” he retorted, unappeased. “Maggie, you know that anything with your name in it’s going to hit the press on both sides of the Atlantic.”
She began to rub one finger slowly up and down her right temple. “And you know that was one of the reasons I wanted to get out.”
“Where you live isn’t going to change that.”
She sighed. “Apparently not.”
“Besides, that doesn’t have anything to do with what’s happened now,” C.J. argued. He pressed a hand to his nervous stomach and wondered if a glass of Perrier would calm him. Maybe scotch would be a better idea.
“I haven’t seen the paper,” Maggie began in an even tone, “but I’m sure the whole thing was blown out of proportion.”
“Blown out of proportion?” Again, she had to move the receiver back from her ear. A few steps away, Cliff heard C.J.’s voice clearly. “Did you or did you not stumble over a
pile of—of bones?”
She grimaced at the image. “Not exactly.” She had to concentrate harder on keeping her voice calm. “Actually, it was the dog that found them. The police came right out and took over. I really haven’t been involved.” She saw Cliff lift a brow at her final statement but made no comment.
“Maggie, it said that man had been murdered and buried right there, only yards from your house.”
“Ten years ago.” She pressed her fingers more firmly against her temple.
“Maggie, come home.”
She closed her eyes, because his voice held the kind of plea that was hard to resist. “C.J., I am home.”
“Damn it, how am I supposed to sleep at night thinking of you alone out in the middle of nowhere? For God’s sake, you’re one of the most successful, wealthiest, most celebrated women in the world, and you’re living in Dogpatch.”
“If I’m successful, wealthy and celebrated, I can live wherever I want.” She struggled against temper again. However he phrased it, whatever his tone, the concern was real. It was better to concentrate on that. “Besides, C.J., I have the vicious guard dog you sent me.” She looked down to where Killer was sleeping peacefully at Cliff’s feet. When she lifted her gaze, she found herself smiling into Cliff’s face. “I couldn’t be safer.”
“If you hired a bodyguard—”
Now she laughed. “You’re being an old woman again. The last thing I need’s a bodyguard. I’m fine,” she went on quickly before he could comment. “I’ve finished the score, I’ve a dozen ideas for new songs running around in my head, and I’m even considering another musical. Why don’t you tell me how brilliant the score was?”
“You know it’s brilliant,” he mumbled. “It’s probably the best thing you’ve done.”
“More,” she insisted. “Tell me more. My ego’s starving.”