Copper Lake Secrets (3 page)

She repeated the words in her head as she slowly got the car moving again. Tall pines grew dense on either side of the road, testament to the lucrative logging business that had taken the original Howard’s fortune and increased it a hundredfold. As far as she knew, Grandfather had never worked in logging or any other business. He’d managed his investments from his study on the first floor and done whatever caught his fancy. She vaguely remembered fishing poles and rifles and shovels, and the glare every time he’d looked at her…

Before she realized it, she’d reached the gate. It stood open in welcome. She drove through, and the hairs on her nape stood on end. Was it quieter inside the gate than out? Did the sun shine a little less brightly, chase away fewer shadows? If she rolled the windows down, would the air be a little thicker?

“Oh, for God’s sake. Valerie’s right. I
am
being melodramatic. It’s a house.” As it came into sight, she amended that. “A big, creepy, spooky house, but still just a house. I haven’t entered the first circle of hell.”

At least, she prayed she hadn’t.

Live oaks lined the drive, huge branches arching overhead to shade it. The house and its buildings—a guest cottage, the old farm manager’s office and a few storage sheds—sat at the rear edge of an expanse of manicured lawn. The brick of the pillars that marched across the front of the house had mellowed to a dusky rose, but there was no fading to the paint on the boards. The colors were crisp white and dark green, but still looked unwelcoming.

A fairly new pickup was parked near the cottage—silver, spotless, too high for a woman of Grand mother’s stature to climb into without help. Its tag was from Kentucky, and she wondered as she pulled in beside it if some stranger-to-her relative was visiting. The recent generations of Howards hadn’t been eager to stick around Copper Lake. Her father had left at twenty, his brother and most of their cousins soon after.

When she got out of the car, Reece was relieved to note that the sun was just as warm here as it’d been outside the gate and the air was no heavier than anywhere else in the humid South. It smelled fresh like pine and muddy like the Gullah River that ran a hundred feet on the other side of the gate.

She was closing the door when she felt eyes on her. Grandmother? Her housekeeper? The driver of the truck? Or the ghosts her father insisted inhabited Fair Winds?

Ghosts that might have been joined a few months ago by Grandfather’s malevolent spirit.

Evie’s voice again:
Spirits generally won’t harm you.

Oh, man, she hoped that was true. But if Arthur Howard’s ghost lived in that house, she’d be sleeping with one eye open.

The gazes, it turned out, were more corporeal. Seated at a table on the patio fifty feet away, just to the left of the silent fountain, sat a frail, white-haired woman and a much younger, much darker, much…
more…
man, both of them watching her.

Reece stared. Grandmother had gotten
old,
was her first thought, which she immediately scoffed at. Willadene Howard had been frail-looking and white-haired for as long as she could remember, but the frailty part was deceiving. She’d always been strong, stern, unyielding, and in spite of her age—seventy-seven? no, seventy-eight—she certainly still was. She didn’t even show any surprise at Reece’s appearance out of the fifteen-year-old blue as she rose to her feet. When Reece got close enough that Grandmother didn’t have to raise her voice—Howard women never raised their voices—she announced, “You’re late.”

Maybe she didn’t recognize her, Reece thought. Maybe she was expecting someone else. She thought of the responses she could make:
Hello, Grandmother. It’s me, Reece, the granddaughter you let Grandfather terrorize.
Or
Nice to see you, Grandmother. You’re looking well.
Or
Sorry I missed your birthday party, Grandmother, but I thought of you that day.

What came out was much simpler. “For what?”

“Your grandfather’s funeral was four and a half months ago.”

There was nothing Reece could say that wouldn’t sound callous, so she said nothing. She walked closer to the table, knowing Grandmother wouldn’t expect a hug, and sat on the marble rim of the fountain.

Grandmother turned her attention back to the man, who hadn’t shown any reaction so far. “This is my granddaughter, Clarice Howard, who pretends that she sprang full-grown into this world without the bother of parents or family.” With a dismissive sniff, she went on.

“Mr. Jones and I are discussing a restoration project we intend to undertake.”

Reece’s face warmed at the criticism, but she brushed it off as the man leaned forward, his hand extended. “Mr. Jones,” she greeted him.

“Just Jones.” His voice was deep, his accent Southern with a hint of something else. Black hair a bit too long for her taste framed olive skin and the darkest eyes she’d ever looked into.
Mysterious
was the first descriptor that leaped into her head, followed quickly by more:
handsome. Sexy.
Maybe
dangerous.

She shook his hand, noting callused skin, long fingers, heat, a kind of lazy strength.

He released her hand and sat back again. She resisted the urge to tuck both hands under her arms and laid them flat on the marble instead. Rather than deal with Grandmother head-on, she directed a question to the general area between them. “The house appears to be in good shape. What are you restoring?” Left to her, she would be tearing the place down, not fixing it up.

“You can’t judge a house by its facade. Everything gets creaky after fifteen years.” Grandmother’s tone remained snippy when she went on. “Mr. Jones is an expert in garden restoration. He’s going to bring back Fair Winds’ gardens to their former glory. Not that you ever bothered to learn family history, Clarice, but a few generations ago, the gardens here were considered the best in all of the South and the rest of the country, as well. They were designed by one of the greatest landscape architects of the time. They covered fourteen acres and took ten years to complete.”

She waited, obviously, for a response from Reece. The only one she gave was inconsequential. “I go by Reece now.”

Grandmother’s lips pursed and her blue gaze sharpened. Across the table from her, Jones was making a point of gazing off into the distance, looking at neither of them.

“Gardens. Really.” Too little too late, judging by Grandmother’s expression. The only flowers Reece had ever seen at Fair Winds were the wild jasmine that grew in the woods. Her mother had told her their name and urged her to breathe deeply of their fragrance. Not long after, Valerie had left, the emptiness in Reece’s memory had begun and the smell of jasmine always left her melancholy.

A shiver passed over her, like a cloud over the sun, but she ignored it, focusing on the stranger again. Did
just Jones
look like a landscape architect, or whatever his title would be? She’d never met a landscape architect, but she doubted it. He seemed more the outdoors type, the one who’d do the actual work to bring the architect’s plans to life. His skin was bronzed, his T-shirt stretched across a broad chest, and his arms were hard-muscled. He was a man far better acquainted with hard work than desk-sitting.

“Sit,” Grandmother commanded, pointing to an empty chair as she got to her feet without a hint of creakiness. “Entertain Mr. Jones while I get some papers from your grandfather’s study. We’ll let him get started, and then we’ll talk.”

Reece obediently moved to the chair, automatically stiffening her spine, the way Grandmother had nagged her that summer.
Howard women do not slump. Howard women hold their heads high. Howard women—

The door closed with a click, followed by a chuckle nearby. Her gaze switched to the gardener/architect wearing a look of amusement. “That last bit sounded like a threat, didn’t it?”

And then we’ll talk.
It
was
a threat. And even though she’d come there just for that purpose, at the moment, it was the last thing in the world she wanted to do.

Swallowing hard, she tried instead to focus on the rest of Grandmother’s words. She might have trust issues and abandonment issues and a tad of melodrama, but she could be polite to a stranger. Her mother required it. Her job required it. Hell,
life
required it. But the question that came out wasn’t exactly polite.

“So…is Jones your first name or last?”

Chapter 2

“D
oes it matter?” Jones asked, aware his lazy tone gave no hint of the tension thrumming through him. She didn’t appear to recognize either him or his name, didn’t appear to realize she’d asked him that question once before, the first time they’d met. Had he been so forgettable? Considering that he and Glen had saved her life, he’d think not…but she was, after all, a Howard.

Or was she just damn good at pretending? At lying?

He’d thought he’d lucked out when he returned to the farm this morning to a job offer that would give him virtually unlimited access to the Howard property, but having Clarice Howard show up, too… If there were a casino nearby, he’d head straight there to place all sorts of bets because today he was definitely
hot.

He’d looked for her on the internet and had found several Clarice Howards, just not the right one. He’d asked the gossipy waitress at the restaurant next to the motel about her, but the woman hadn’t recognized the name, didn’t know anything about a Howard granddaughter. She’d had nothing but good, though, to say about the grandson, Mark, who lived in Copper Lake.

Mark, who, along with Reece, was the last person Jones had seen with his brother. Mark, who had threatened both Glen and Jones.

“I take it you don’t live around here,” he remarked.

“No.” That seemed all she wanted to say, but after a moment, she went on. “I live in New Orleans.”

“The Big Easy.”

“Once upon a time.” Another moment, then a gesture toward his truck. “You’re from Kentucky?”

“I live there.” He was
from
a small place in South Carolina, just a few miles across the Georgia state line. He’d been back only once in fifteen years. His father had begun the conversation with “Are you back to stay?” and ended it a few seconds later with a terse “Then you should go.” He’d followed up with closing the door in Jones’s face.

Big Dan was not a forgiving man.

“What brings you to Georgia?” he asked.

Reece didn’t shift uncomfortably in the wrought-iron chair, but he had the impression she wanted to. “A visit to my grandmother.”

“She was surprised to see you. You don’t come often?”

“It’s been a while.”

Then her gaze met his. Soft brown eyes. He liked all kinds of women, but brown-eyed blondes were a particular weakness. Not this one, though. Not one who, his gut told him, was somehow involved in Glen’s disappearance.

“What made you think Grandmother was surprised?”

“I’m good at reading people.” Truth was, he’d heard Miss Willa gasp the instant she’d gotten a good look at Reece.
Lord, she looks like her daddy,
the old woman had murmured.
I never thought…

She’d ever see her again? The resemblance to her father couldn’t have been that surprising. She looked the same as she had fifteen years ago, just older. She still wore her hair short and sleek; she still had that honey-gold skin; she still had an air about her of…fragility, he decided. She was five foot seven, give or take an inch, and slender but not unappealingly so. She didn’t
look
like a waif in need of protection, but everything else about Reece Howard said she was.

But appearances, he well knew, were often deceiving.

Deliberately he changed the subject. “Do you know much about the old gardens?”

Despite the change, the stiffness in her shoulders didn’t ease a bit. Would she be against the project? Was she envisioning her inheritance being frittered away on flowers and fountains? “No, Grandmother’s right. I didn’t learn the family history the way a proper Howard should.”

History could be overrated. He knew his own family history for generations, but that still didn’t make them want any contact with him. They didn’t feel any less betrayed; he didn’t feel any less rejected.

“I’ve seen photos from as early as the 1870s,” he went on, his gaze settling on the fountain beside them. Built of marble and brick, with a statue in the middle, it was silent, dirty, the water stagnant in the bottom. “They were incredible. Fountains, pools, terraces. Wild flowers, herb gardens, roses… They covered this entire area—” he waved one hand in a circle “—and extended into the woods for the shade gardens. Fair Winds once had more varieties of azaleas and crape myrtles than any other garden in the country.”

“And you’re going to replant all that.” Her tone was neutral, no resistance but no enthusiasm, either.

“Probably not all, but as much as we can. We have the original plans, photographs, detailed records from the head gardeners. We can make it look very much like it used to.”

“What happened to the gardens?”

He shrugged. “Apparently, your grandfather had everything removed. The pools were filled in, the statues taken away, the terraces leveled. Miss Willa didn’t say why, and I didn’t ask.”

Reece muttered something, but all he caught was
mean
and
old.
She’d missed the funeral, Miss Willa had said. Grandfather or not, apparently Reece wasn’t missing Arthur Howard.

Shadow fell over them, and the wind swirled with a chill absent a few seconds earlier. A few brown leaves rattled against the base of the fountain, then grew still as the air did.

As Reece did. She sat motionless, goose bumps raised all the way down her arms. He considered offering an explanation—a cloud over the sun, though there were no clouds in the sky; a gust of mechanically-cooled air from an open window or door, though he could see none of those, either—but judging by the look on her face, she didn’t need an explanation. She knew better than him the truth behind the odd moment.