Smoke in Mirrors

  . . . And nearly landed ignominiously on her rear when her knees threatened to dissolve. She had to grab the tiled edge to steady herself. This was mortifying. Absolutely mortifying.

  She took a deep breath and pulled herself together with an act of will.

  “What burning hypothetical question is that?” she asked.

  “When I picked out that bed you’re using, I definitely was thinking about myself.”

  Forget the steamed soybeans in their pods and the dazzling display of deceptively casual culinary skill with which she had planned to wow him tonight. She jerked open the refrigerator and reached inside for the plastic container filled with the remains of the potato salad she had made yesterday. She grabbed the leftover hummus and some lettuce, too.

  “I wouldn’t read too much into that little display of hormones on parade, if I were you.” She slammed the refrigerator shut and put the containers on the counter. “We were both overstimulated from our big, scary adventure. Too much adrenaline, like you said earlier.”

  He watched her, a disturbing intensity in his gaze. “Blame it on the adrenaline if you want. But whatever it was, it wasn’t fake. Right?”

  She pretended she had not heard him while she washed her hands at the sink. The project provided her with the perfect excuse to keep her back to him.

  “Leonora?”

  “What? I’m trying to put a meal together, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “You weren’t faking it a few minutes ago, were you?”

  “Oh, for goodness’s sake.” She picked up the knife and sawed violently at the loaf of crusty bread she had bought in town yesterday.

  “Give me that much, at least,” Thomas said. “My male ego is on the line here.”

  She glanced quickly over her shoulder. Sexy laughter gleamed in his eyes. He did not look like a man with a serious ego problem. She very much doubted that he needed her to assure him that her response had been genuine. She had been nothing if not blatant.

  On the other hand, his wife had run off with his business partner. That kind of thing had to leave a mark.

  “For the record,” she said, “I’m a terrible actress. I don’t fake anything well.” Then she went back to work on the sandwiches.

  “I wasn’t faking anything, either,” he said softly.

  She thought about the feel of his heavily aroused body between her thighs.

  “I noticed,” she said.

  By the time they sat down to eat at the table near the window, the atmosphere in the kitchen had subtly altered. The charged sensuality still shimmered in the invisible currents of air that swirled around her, but there was something else, too. She was aware of a cozy, comfortable, intimate warmth. It felt good to have Thomas sitting here across from her.

  She suddenly regretted that she had fed him leftovers.

  The fog lifted while they did the dishes. Thomas got his coat from the closet. She followed him outside, hugging herself against the chill of the clear, starry night.

  He paused and looked past her into the hall of the small house. “I’ve got a lot of work to do in there. I’m going to replace the windows and redo the bathroom from the plumbing out. The flooring is good, though. Solid oak. Just needs to be refinished.”

  She followed his gaze. “Do you plan to stay on here in Wing Cove after this is all over?”

  “Depends. I came here after Bethany died because I could see that Deke was in trouble. Figured I’d stick around until he came out of his depression. But I’m not tied to Wing Cove. I can do my work anywhere. Wrench isn’t fussy, either. What about you? You tied to that job down in California?”

  “Not anymore. I can go back if I want, but I’ll see how I feel about it when the time comes.” Hard to explain, even to herself, but this journey to Wing Cove felt like a turning point in her life. She couldn’t make out the shape of the changes that were coming but she knew things would be different after this venture. “The only thing I’m tied to is a person. My grandmother. If I move, she’ll move.”

  “Sure.”

  Thomas took a step closer and kissed her. He did not put his hands on her. She could have pulled back. But she didn’t.

  He ended the kiss.

  “Didn’t think it was just the adrenaline,” he said, looking satisfied.

  He went down the steps, got into the SUV and drove away into the night.

  She went to bed and lay awake in the darkness for a long time, thinking about how it had been to have Thomas there that evening. This situation was already complicated enough as it was. It would be extremely reckless to add a torrid affair to the volatile brew.

  She forced herself to refocus on the business that had brought her to Wing Cove. When that got her nowhere, she spent some time mulling over what she and Thomas had seen in Alex’s cabin.

  Eventually she slipped into a restless sleep.

  . . . And plunged straight into a dark dream.

  She walked down a long, shadowed hall lined with old, dark mirrors. Somewhere in this corridor the truth was trapped inside a looking glass. All she had to do was look into the right mirror and she would get the answers she had come here to find.

  She stopped in front of an ornate, Rococo-style English looking glass and saw Meredith inside, looking out at her.

  You can’t sleep yet, Meredith said silently.

  She whirled around and found Alex Rhodes watching her from inside the depths of a garish fun-house mirror. He gave her his sexy smile, inviting her to join him in some private joke. But the smile was all wrong. As she watched his features became twisted and distorted. His yellow eyes glowed.

  She turned away and continued down the endless hall of mirrors, searching for the truth.

  Chapter Eleven

  They sat in the dark room with the glowing monitor and looked at the little plastic bags on Deke’s desk. Wrench was flopped on his back on the floor, legs in the air. Thomas draped his arm over the edge of the chair and absently rubbed the dog’s stomach.

  “I can’t get past a vision of the two of you breaking into Rhodes’s house.” Deke shook his head, looking amazed and maybe even a little amused. “I’d like to have been there to see you both hustling your rears out the back as he was coming in the front door.”

  “Trust me, you didn’t miss anything.”

  “Black velvet and a weird mirror, huh? Guess it goes with those phony yellow eyes of his. Interesting.”

  “I don’t know what he’s up to, but he’s in this thing deep,” Thomas said. “He made the move on Leonora. Mentioned Meredith’s name to her. Probably trying to see how she’d react. The only thing I can figure is that he knows about the million and a half bucks.”

  “That money is safely back in the endowment account, thanks to Leonora.”

  “Yeah, but Rhodes wouldn’t have any way of knowing that, would he?”

  Deke’s amusement faded. “He was in town at the time Bethany died.”

  “I know. But I can’t see any connection. Except the drug rumors.”

  Deke picked up one of the bags and looked closely at the blue-green powder in the corner. “If this stuff is some kind of illegal shit we probably should be careful about how we deal with it. Don’t want to give Ed Stovall an excuse for arresting us.”

  “Can you get it tested quietly?”

  “Sure. I know someone in the chemistry department. A grad student. He’ll do it, for a price.”

  “We need to check out Rhodes, too.”

  “That,” Deke said, “I will handle personally. I just hope I have more luck than I did with my other research.”

  “You didn’t find anything new on the Eubanks murder?”

  “Nothing more than what was reported in those clippings. Sebastian Eubanks, widely held to be a couple of bricks shy of a full load, was presumed to have been shot by a burglar he surprised in the mansion one night. No one was ever arrested. End of story.”

  Thomas gripped the arms of the chair. “Leonora is talking about playing lady spy. Ment
ioned signing up for some stress counseling from Rhodes. Said it would be a good way to get close to him. Maybe pick up more information.”

  Deke studied the bags. “Might work.”

  “I don’t give a damn if it would work or not. She’s not going to do it. Not if I have anything to say about it.”

  “The thing is, you don’t have anything to say about it,” Deke pointed out.

  Thomas looked at him.

  Deke held up a hand. “Remember what that therapist you dated for a while told you. You’ve got control issues.”

  “This isn’t a control thing. It’s common sense.” Thomas shoved himself up out of the chair and walked to the nearest window. He yanked the curtains open. “I don’t want her alone with that son of a bitch for five minutes. Rhodes is up to something. I can feel it. He may be dangerous.”

  Crystalline silence descended. It lasted only a few seconds but that was more than enough time for him to realize how much he had given away. Deke wasn’t the only one taken by surprise.

  “Sure, I understand,” Deke said. “Can’t be too careful around a guy with fake yellow eyes.”

  He thinks I’m jealous. Thomas tightened his grip on the curtain. Hell, he’s right.

  All he had been able to think about last night after leaving Leonora was how much he hadn’t wanted to leave her. When he had gotten back to the house he’d spent a couple of hours in his workshop, drilling holes in some boards he planned to use for shelving. The effort to distract himself from memories of the superheated kiss in her kitchen had been spectacularly unsuccessful.

  When he had awakened this morning he had taken Wrench up into the woods on the bluffs where the dog could run free of the leash. The two of them had prowled through the dripping trees for over an hour while Thomas had come to terms with the new reality in his life.

  He wanted Leonora more than he had wanted anything else in a very long time.

  With acceptance came the need for planning and action. So, okay, he had control issues. So what? He worked damn hard at staying in control. He’d practiced diligently since the nights when he’d been a kid trapped in a bedroom with Deke, listening to the noise of their parents quarrelling, both of them afraid to go to sleep because they might wake up and discover that their father had moved out.

  He had gotten so good at the control thing that when he was confronted with situations he could not control physically, he could at least control his own emotional reaction to the events.

  Take his divorce, for instance. In the end, he’d been more annoyed by the dissolution of a perfectly good business partnership than he had the ruination of his marriage. Which probably didn’t say much for the marriage, but that was another matter.

  The bottom line was that with Leonora he was, for the first time, conscious of feeling edgy and restless, not quite in full control. He needed to do something, anything.

  Before coming here to Deke’s house, he’d rearranged the drawer in the nightstand beside his bed. It hadn’t been easy. He’d been forced to remove a flashlight, the remote, some electrical cables, a stack of financial magazines, a carton of tissues, three pens and a notebook to get at the box of condoms that had somehow worked its way to the rear of the drawer.

  He had opened the box, removed two of the little packets and put them into his wallet. Then he had carefully placed the box back into the drawer. Right at the front, where he could find it again quickly. In the dark.

  It wasn’t much in the way of concrete action, but it was something.

  A man had to think positive.

  She heard the muffled squeak behind the paneled wall just as she pulled out the C tray in the old wooden catalog. The faint noise was followed by the low murmur of voices. Julie Bromley and her boyfriend, Travis, were doing their lunch hour disappearing act again, taking the concealed flight of servant’s stairs to the third floor.

  She gave them a few minutes to get where they were going, marking their progress by the creaks and groans of the hidden staircase. When the sounds ceased, she closed the catalog drawer, left the office and went to the door of the library to check the long, gloom-filled central hall.

  The old looking glasses glimmered malevolently in the dim light. There was no sound of activity downstairs on the first floor of the mansion.

  Satisfied that everyone was at lunch, she went to the narrow door set into the wooden paneling next to the library and pushed it open. She moved cautiously into the small space on the other side and let the panel swing shut behind her.

  Julie’s and Travis’s voices filtered down from the floor above. Somewhere overhead another door opened and closed.

  She removed the pencil-thin flashlight she had stashed in her pocket that morning and switched on the slim beam. The narrow ray revealed the twisted staircase that coiled around itself and disappeared into the shadows. The prints of Julie’s and Travis’s shoes were evident in the heavy coating of dust that covered the skinny treads. Judging from the heavy smudges in the thick grime it was obvious the pair made this hike to the forbidden third floor on a regular basis.

  She started cautiously up the staircase. The treads were so narrow that her heels hung out over the edge of each step. How in the world had the servants of yesteryear, laden as they must have been with heavy silver platters and stacks of bedding, managed to navigate these treacherous steps? It was a wonder they had not fallen and broken their necks.

  Halfway up the spiraling staircase one of the steps groaned loudly beneath her weight. That was the telltale sound she heard in the library when Julie and Travis made this trek, she thought.

  At the top of the stairs she found another slender door inset in the wooden paneling.

  She shut off the flashlight and pushed carefully against the panel. The door swung open on creaky hinges. She went through the opening and found herself in a cramped, unlit corridor that was much narrower than the hall on the floor below. In the old days this would have been the section of the house where the servants and less important guests had had their bedchambers. The only light came from the small windows at both ends of the passage.

  There were no carpets up here, she noticed. The wooden floor had not been swept or polished in a very long time. It was easy to follow the footprints in the dust.

  She went slowly down the hall. Rows of old mirrors hung on the walls, just as they did in every other section of the house. But unlike the well-kept looking glasses on the first two floors, these were all covered with a heavy accumulation of grime.

  The metal frames were badly tarnished; the wooden ones were cracked in places. Corners were missing. The gilded finishes on the eagles and scrollwork were flaked and chipped.

  There were hairline and spidery cracks in most of the reflective surfaces. In others, large shards of glass had fallen out, leaving jagged slivers of the original mirror in the frame. The layers of dirt on what was left of the glass were so thick that she could not see her own image in any of them as she went past.

  Occasional blank spaces on the walls marked places where a mirror had been removed at some time in the past. Presumably the most valuable and interesting looking glasses had been taken downstairs to add to the main collection. The ones left up here were, for all intents and purposes, in long-term storage. She wondered if the odd mirror in Alex’s house had been stolen from this floor.

  In addition to the mirrors several pieces of old, heavy, Victorian-style furniture had also been stashed up here. A pair of long, wooden tables loomed in the shadows on either side of the hall. At the far end of the corridor she could see a tall cabinet projecting out from the wall.

  Halfway along the shadowed passage, the footsteps in the dust came to a halt in front of a door.

  Assorted muffled groans reverberated through the panels. Obviously she had discovered Julie and Travis’s secret retreat.

  “Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, baby, that feels so good.”

  Travis’s voice rose into a hoarse groan of undisguised masculine satisfaction.


  Leonora flushed. She felt like a voyeur standing out here in the corridor, listening to Julie and Travis have sex. Okay, maybe not exactly a voyeur. She couldn’t actually see anything, she reminded herself. Nevertheless, it was a very uncomfortable feeling.

  Embarrassed, she hurried off. There was no excuse to hang around here. The small mystery was solved. The pair’s reasons for disappearing upstairs to this floor were now obvious.

  She might as well take the opportunity to have a quick look around before she went downstairs.

  Three-quarters of the way along the corridor she heard a door open behind her. Panic sizzled through her. She ducked behind the nearest large object, an antique cabinet, and held her breath.

  “Your zipper,” Julie said urgently. “Jeez, are you crazy? Do it up. If Mrs. Brinks sees you like that, she’ll probably fire me. We both know I can’t afford to lose this job.”

  “Take it easy.” A soft hissing sound announced that Travis had corrected the oversight. “There. All neat and tidy. Happy now?”

  “This is serious, Travis.” Julie’s voice sharpened. “I mean it. If you get me fired we’re both going to regret it.”

  “Don’t worry, it’s going to be okay. Ready?”

  “Yes. Hurry.”

  Leonora heard the door to the servants’ staircase squeak when it opened.

  “What’s the big rush?” Travis asked. “Brinks went into town for lunch, remember? She won’t be back for at least an hour.”

  “There’s something I need to do today if I get a chance.”

  “What?”

  The door to the servants’ staircase closed on Julie’s muffled answer.

  Silence settled.

  Leonora waited a few seconds and then stepped out of the protective shadow of the cabinet. She went back along the passageway to the panel door and stepped into the tiny stairwell.

  Going down the narrow staircase was more precarious than climbing it. She took her time, keeping the slender beam of the flashlight focused on the steps.

  Halfway down, she saw the thin crack of slightly lighter shadow that marked the door that opened onto the second-floor hall.