“I wish we lived there instead of here,” Jeff said. “That way we could watch TV on a giant screen every night.”
“Yeah, this house is really, really boring,” Theo said.
“The only problem with Nightwinds,” Jeff said with a grimace, “is that it’s pink.”
“That’s because the wife of the original owner liked pink,” Ethan explained. “A lot.”
“Uncle Victor told me that it’s haunted by her ghost,” Theo said. “Mrs. Legg or something.”
“Foote,” Ethan said. “Her name was Camelia Foote. She was an aspiring actress.”
“What’s aspiring mean?” Theo asked.
Ethan exchanged a look with Bonnie. “It means she never became famous.”
“Oh.” Theo digested that and evidently did not consider it important. “Well, anyhow, what happened was, she died and old Mr. Foote went crazy. He lived all alone in that house for the rest of his life and never changed a thing.”
“Unfortunately, none of the later owners changed very much either,” Bonnie said dryly. “You’d think that somewhere along the line someone would at least have had it painted.”
“It stood empty most of the time until Uncle Victor picked it up for a song ten years ago after Aunt Betty died,” Ethan said. “He couldn’t afford to have the place remodeled either.”
“You’ll notice that your great-uncle did not choose to retire in Nightwinds.” Bonnie pointed out. “He headed straight for Hawaii the day after he sold his business to you.”
“He told me he was tired of the desert.” Ethan helped himself to more potatoes. “Said he wanted an ocean and a beach.”
“He told me that he wanted to look at girls in bikinis, all day,” Jeff announced.
“Yeah,” Theo added. “He said there’s even beaches where some of the ladies don’t wear any swimsuits at all.”
“No kidding?” Ethan paused, a forkful of potatoes halfway to his mouth. “I’ve got Uncle Victor’s address in Maui. Maybe I’ll pay him a visit next time I get a few free days. Take a tour of the beaches, or something.”
Jeff chortled so hard that he nearly fell out of his chair.
Theo kicked the bottom rungs of his chair. “You really like to watch bare naked ladies, Uncle Ethan?”
“Well,” Ethan said. “Given a choice between working and watching naked ladies on the beach, I’ve gotta say that—”
“I think,” Bonnie interrupted firmly, “that you’ve all said enough on the subject of naked ladies.” She looked at Ethan. “Getting back to Nightwinds, Jeff said something about your new client being an interior designer?”
“Decorator. What’s that got to do with Nightwinds?”
Bonnie ignored that. “It occurs to me that after you handle her case, you could hire her to help you do something with that pink elephant.”
“Residence,” Ethan corrected.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I have it on good authority that you’re supposed to call a house a residence. Classier sounding word. But, trust me, there’s not a chance in—”
He realized that Theo and Jeff were watching him with thinly veiled anticipation. Catching him in the act of using a forbidden word was one of their favorite spectator sports.
“I will definitely not be hiring Ms. Luce to remodel the place,” Ethan finished smoothly.
Disappointed, Jeff and Theo went back to their food.
“Why not?” Bonnie asked.
“Two reasons.” Ethan finished the last of the potatoes. “First, I can’t afford to hire a decorator at this point even if I were inclined to redo the place. Second, I doubt that Zoe Luce would make it past the front door of Nightwinds without fainting.”
Jeff stopped in mid-chew, eyes bright with curiosity. “Why would she faint, Uncle Ethan?”
“You think maybe she’d be scared of the ghost?” Theo asked.
“I doubt that Zoe Luce would be scared off by a ghost,” Ethan said. “But I’m sure that her delicate designer sensibilities would be severely traumatized by the sight of the inside of my new residence. Let’s face it, Nightwinds isn’t going to win any house-of-the-year awards.”
“That’s putting it mildly,” Bonnie murmured. “Talk about Hollywood tacky.”
“You think Ms. Luce would be so stunned she’d just fall down right there in the front hall?” Jeff asked.
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Ethan said.
“Maybe she’d start to twitch or something,” Theo suggested.
“Yeah, like this.” Jeff jerked his left arm wildly.
“Or like this.” Theo wobbled his head from side to side.
Both boys began to cackle gleefully. Their spasmodic movements got more creative.
Ethan watched both performances with open admiration. “Not bad. Yep, I’ll bet she’d collapse and start to twitch just like that.”
At the other end of the table Bonnie gave a long-suffering sigh. “Why does dinner always end like this when you eat with us, Ethan?”
“What can I say? It’s a gift.”
He drove back to Nightwinds an hour later. When he got out of the car, he stood in the drive for a moment and surveyed his new residence, wondering for some inexplicable reason what Zoe Luce would think of it. Okay, so the place did look like a Hollywood fantasy version of a Spanish Colonial mansion. And it was definitely pink, not the faded, sunwashed pink of old adobe—more like bubblegum pink. So what? It had character. Or something. And it was spacious. Plenty of room for his books and personal stuff.
Best of all, it was fully furnished, which was a very good thing because the combined financial disasters of his business and his last divorce had left him with very little in the way of furniture.
The hell with Zoe Luce’s opinion. Why should he care what she thought of Nightwinds?
He summoned up his impressions of her that afternoon. Sleek red-brown hair in a stylish-looking knot, vivid, compelling face, and smoky, mysterious eyes that probably held some interesting secrets. And a very strange taste in clothes. If he recalled his kindergarten painting lessons properly, that shade of acid green wasn’t supposed to go with that purple color. There were rules about these things. At least there had been back in kindergarten.
Something told him that Zoe had probably never stuck to coloring between the lines. But, then, neither had he.
He knew that he should definitely not be thinking about her in such personal terms. She was a client, and long ago he had learned the hard way not to date clients. Besides, she would probably clash against the pink interiors of Nightwinds.
He climbed the steps, crossed the front entry with its pastel pink stone pillars, and let himself into the flamingo pink hallway.
In fairness, the interior of the house was not one hundred percent pink. There was a lot of gilt work and some white wooden molding. The giant leaves of the huge, deep pink orchids woven into the carpeting were green.
Switching on lights as he went, he made his way through the sprawling house to one of the rooms overlooking the gardens and the shallow canyon beyond.
He wove a path through the boxes of books that he had not yet had time to unpack and sat down at the grand gilt-and-pink desk near the window. Switching on the laptop, he opened a drawer to retrieve the notes he had made when he had interviewed Zoe Luce that afternoon.
He started with the usual online information resources. If all went well, it would take him about ten minutes to locate Mrs. Jennifer Mason, just as he’d told Bonnie. Easy money and Lord knew he needed it.
All did not go well.
There was no indication that Jennifer Mason had used her credit cards or written any checks in the past few months. Intrigued, he went deeper.
He found no evidence that Jennifer Mason was involved in the process of obtaining a divorce from Davis Mason. There was no sign that she had hired any of the local moving companies to assist in relocating to another town or city.
Forty-five minutes later he sat back, stretched his legs out under the desk, shoved h
is hands into his pockets, and contemplated the glowing screen.
Jennifer Mason had disappeared. He had a hunch Zoe Luce had already guessed as much before she hired him to find the woman.
Chapter Six
Zoe picked up the desk phone on the first ring.
“Enhanced Interiors.”
“You lied to me,” Ethan said on the other end.
He made the accusation in a stunningly casual tone, as if he was accustomed to having people lie to him. Maybe that was true, given his line of work, Zoe thought.
She went very still in her chair, staring unseeingly at the three framed black-and-white photographs that hung on the opposite wall.
She had taken three photos of the fanciful old house steeped in the shadows of the desert twilight. Later, she had tried to choose the most evocative shot but each had caught some elusive element, and she had been unable to select just one. She had wound up framing all three.
A client had noticed the photos hanging on the wall a few days later and had informed her that the house was known locally as Nightwinds.
“Are you there?” Ethan asked.
Don’t panic yet, she thought. Maybe it’s not as bad as it sounds.
“Yes, of course,” she said tonelessly.
How much had he learned about her in the process of searching for Jennifer Mason? Had he somehow stumbled onto the truth? Had he found a chink in the firewall that had been erected between her past and her present? And what about Arcadia? Oh, Lord, what if she had blown her friend’s cover as well as her own? She had been an idiot to hire a private investigator.
Get a grip, she told herself. Breathe. Think.
The new identities that she and Arcadia had purchased had been first class. Arcadia had insisted on paying the huge amount of cash required to get the very best quality. Ethan Truax could not have dug deep enough to uncover the truth, she assured herself, not in such a short period of time.
Besides, he’d had no reason to go looking into her past. She had paid him to search for Jennifer Mason. Why would he waste time probing into his client’s background, instead?
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, trying to keep her voice cool and even. “Did you locate Jennifer Mason?”
“No,” Ethan said.
She clutched the phone more tightly to her ear. “You couldn’t find her?”
“No,” Ethan said again. “What’s more, I don’t think you expected me to find her. And that’s what makes this all so damn interesting, you see.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We need to talk,” Ethan said. He ended the call abruptly.
Anger shafted through her. “Damn it, don’t you dare hang up on me, Truax.”
The door of her office opened without warning, jolting her. She swung around in her office chair.
Ethan walked into the room looking as if he had just come from a construction site. He wore a pair of grungy paint-stained jeans, a denim shirt, scuffed work boots, and a peaked cap emblazoned with the logo of a local tavern, Hell’s Belles. She recognized the name of the establishment. It was a sleazy dive that catered to guys who drove trucks and motorcycles. She had never been attracted to the kind of male who frequented such places.
So why was she experiencing these little hot and cold chills of awareness at the sight of Ethan? She had clearly gone a little too long without a date.
Ethan slid his phone into the pocket of his shirt. “I happened to be in the neighborhood. Thought I’d drop by.”
She put down her own phone with great care and tried to compose herself. At least this time she had the advantage of being the one on the business side of a desk.
“Is the dramatic entrance one of the tricks of the trade, Mr. Truax?”
“Like I said, we need to have a conversation and we need to have it right now.” He started toward one of the two client chairs positioned across from her desk. Then he noticed the three black-and-white shots of Nightwinds and stopped. “Who took those?”
“I did.”
“Huh.”
“Forget the pictures, Mr. Truax.” She sat forward, impatient and anxious, and folded her hands on the desk. “Sit down and tell me exactly what is going on.”
He took one last look at the three photos and then obligingly settled into a chair. She immediately regretted asking him to take a seat. The expensive upholstery on her client chairs had never been intended to withstand dirty work clothes.
Ethan appeared oblivious to any impact he might be making on her precious chair. Lounging back against the honey-colored leather, he extended his legs and crossed his booted feet at the ankles. He removed a small notepad from the pocket of his shirt and flipped it open.
“I found no evidence to indicate the Mrs. Jennifer Mason is celebrating her newly acquired status as a soon-to-be divorced woman.” He studied his notes. “She has not used any credit cards recently. She has not used an ATM machine to remove any cash from the couple’s joint checking account nor has she written any checks on that account.” He looked up. “The account is still open, by the way. Davis Mason has not bothered to close it.”
“What does that mean?”
“Wild guess? He’s not particularly worried that his soon-to-be-ex will clean out the account.”
“Oh.” This was going to be as bad as she had feared.
“Jennifer Mason appears to have had no close friends here in town. I’m still checking that angle, but it’s not looking good. She was not a longtime resident of Whispering Springs and apparently the only socializing she did after her marriage was when she helped Mason entertain business clients. That was not a frequent occurrence.”
“Relatives?” Zoe inquired.
“Just a couple of distant cousins and an elderly aunt who live in Indiana. I called them this morning. None of them have heard from her recently nor is anyone concerned. They all said that they hadn’t seen Jennifer since she was a child and had lost contact years ago. Not what you’d call a close family.”
“In other words, no one is going to rush to file a missing persons report.”
“Unlikely,” Ethan said. “There is one more thing. I checked the legal angle. There is no divorce in progress.”
This was definitely the worst-case scenario, she thought. Jennifer Mason fit the classic profile of an abused wife who enjoyed no close contact with family or friends. What was she going to do now?
She picked up a pen to give herself something to do, clutching it so tightly that her knuckles whitened. “Thank you for looking into the matter for me, Mr. Truax. Do I owe you anything more than the minimum I paid you yesterday?”
“Oh, yeah. A lot more.”
She frowned. “How much?”
“Let’s start with some answers. What do you think happened to Jennifer Mason?”
She said nothing.
“Did you know her before she disappeared?”
“No. Never met her.”
“You think Mason murdered his wife, don’t you?”
She hesitated and then nodded, saying nothing.
“That’s a fairly serious conclusion,” Ethan said dryly. “Mind if I ask what it was that made you jump to it?”
“Just a bad feeling I got when I went out to view his residence yesterday.”
“A bad feeling,” he repeated neutrally.
“Call it intuition.”
“Okay, I’ve got some respect for intuition. Been known to use it myself. Anything else?”
Act normal. Think normal.
“The bed in the master bedroom is gone,” she said evenly. “It and a small area rug are the only furnishings that are missing. There’s a fresh coat of paint on the walls of that room.”
His brows rose. “And that was enough to make you think Jennifer Mason had met with foul play?”
She decided to try a more assertive approach. “Mr. Truax, I am a professional interior designer. I get the strong impression that you don’t think much of my career choice, but I assure you t
hat designers are, by training and inclination, observant. Something is wrong at the Mason residence. I’m sure of it.”
“Okay, take it easy. You sure Mason didn’t sell the bed?”
“Davis told me that his wife had taken it because it was important to her. It was a very large, very expensive bed, he said. But—”
“Yeah?”
“But I saw two full sets of three-hundred-and-twenty-thread-count Italian sheets in the linen closet. The sheets and pillowcases were still in the original packaging. “
“So what?”
She tapped the tip of the pen on the desk top. “Do you have any idea what two full sets of king-sized sheets of that quality cost? If Jennifer Mason took the bed, I’m sure she would have taken the sheets that she bought to go on it.”
Ethan meditated on that for a few seconds. Then he nodded. “You’ve got a point. Did Mason indicate that his wife put the bed into storage?”
“No.”
“Did he say how she arranged to pick up the bed?”
“No.” The steady litany of questions was getting on her nerves. “You’re the private detective here, not me.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right. I keep forgetting.” He took a pen out of his pocket and wrote something down in the notebook. “Was there anything else that made you suspicious when you went through Mason’s house yesterday?”
Aside from the screaming walls? She wondered silently. Gosh, no, that was enough for some obscure reason.
“There was one other strange thing,” she offered slowly.
“What?”
“The shower curtains.”
“What about them?”
“The master bath has a large, glass-walled shower and separate tub arrangement, but the other two bedrooms were obviously designed as guest rooms. They each have adjoining baths with standard combination shower-tubs with curtain enclosures. But the shower curtains in both of the guest baths are gone.”
He gave her a politely blank look. “Explain.”
“Both rooms were fully outfitted with soap, towels, and amenities. The shower curtains should have been there, too. But they were gone.” She shrugged. “I just found that a little odd, that’s all.”
He looked at her for a long time.