How to Murder a Millionaire (19 page)

"You're ready for something else."

I put one hand over my eyes and tried not to laugh. Or cry. It had been a long, long day and I was too drained, too weak to resist even the most clumsy effort at romance. "You're going to have this discussion now?"

"You can tell me to buzz off, if you like," he went on, undeterred. "But I won't—I'm not trying to get
something out of you. I saw you at the New Hope
post office once last winter. You dropped a yellow umbrella. And you were crying all by yourself. Jesus. Nora, you broke my heart right there in front of the
stamp machine. And then one day in February you came out of the Episcopal church in some kind of exercise outfit, and you looked so spectacular that I— well, I asked around. When somebody said Rory was your friend, I gave him a call. He thought it was pretty funny that I was mooning around after you, so he—"

"You have no idea how colossally bad your timing is."

"I wish it hadn't happened the way it did. You know what I'm saying? I'd like to start again. Put the past behind us. I know we're different, but—well."

He finally gave up trying to explain himself.

"What did you mean," I asked again, "that I'd done my time?"

He didn't answer right away. In a moment, he said steadily, "I think you're finished with those people, those guys in the suits with the Palm Pilots and the coke on weekends. You've played with the little boys long enough."

He pulled the Volvo into the farm's long drive and parked near the back door. It took me a moment of fumbling to unfasten the seatbelt and gather my bag. By the time I did, he had come around and opened the car door for me. I got out into the darkness, and he didn't move. He seemed taller, more substantial and more thoroughly masculine than ever. Wearing that suit, even with the tie loosened, he could have passed for a blue-blooded banker or a law-abiding stockbroker. But he wasn't either of those things.

"Nora," he said, his voice soft and intense.

Like an idiot, I let him kiss me.

Chapter 14

Okay, I should have known it was coming and done something to stop it.

But it felt good to hold on to those shoulders and let something besides murder and my sisters consume me. I just plain forgot what I was doing and with whom. And in another minute the kiss escalated from a first move into something more steamy. He wrapped one arm around me and pulled my whole body tight against his, then ran the other hand into my hair to hold me for a long, slow, deliberate kiss that melted my reluctance into a hot cauldron of hormonal soup.

Fortunately my brain didn't totally self-destruct. I knew I'd better call a halt or we'd be upstairs, sprawled on a pile of discarded clothes, in the next five minutes.

Which would not have been a good idea.

Really.

So I broke the kiss and let out a long, shaky breath.

"This is not good," I said, somehow unable to let go of him.

"Feels great to me."

"Trust me, it isn't."

"I disagree." He slipped closer to try again.

"For one thing, I can smell Emma's perfume on you."

"Oh, damn," he said, laughing.

I pushed past him, feeling more scared than annoyed. This definitely was not the way I'd planned my evening. I got out my keys to unlock the back door.

"Nora—"

Except the door was already open.

I must have said something, because he was beside me again in an instant.

"Wait here," he said, sounding very different. He went inside.

Of course I followed. I turned on the light.

A tornado had gone through my house. The destruction took my breath away.

My knees wobbled, and I sat down on what was left of a kitchen chair. "This has not been a good day."

All but two of my kitchen chairs had been smashed against the stove. A bag of oatmeal was spilled on the floor with splintered chair legs and the contents of all my cabinets. Pieces of dishes mingled with broken jars of homemade applesauce. Through the doorway, I could see that the dining room floor was ankle deep in books. Even my Audrey Weymount paintings had been torn off the wall and thrown on the floor, their frames broken.

Libby's mess had been simple slovenly living, but this was the systematic work of vandals.

Abruzzo headed for the rest of the house and said over his shoulder, "Stay here. And I mean it this time."

An out-of-body experience took over. My physical self seemed to stay in the chair and my consciousness floated up to the ceiling to absorb the destruction and the silence. The house was very cold and I hugged myself, shivering. I heard Abruzzo take the stairs in leaps and I sat listening to him go through the rooms overhead. When I could manage, I got up and ran
some water from the tap into my palm to drink. But my hand shook so badly that the cold water ran down my elbows into the sink.

"You okay?" Abruzzo was back. He grabbed my wrist.

"Give me a minute. Is the rest of the house—?"

"Just like this, torn apart. I'll call the police."

Louder than I intended, I said, "No, wait!"

Abruzzo swung me around. His face was very different. He was a man I didn't know, an angry one who looked capable of slugging anyone he chose. "Now, look," he said. "This isn't funny."

"I just need a minute to think."

"Jesus Christ. This is something you shouldn't be handling without the police."

"I just—"

"What the hell are you hiding?"

"Nothing!"

"Then you're protecting somebody."

"Who would I—?"

"Dammit, Nora, this has gone too far. What if you'd been here when this happened?"

"It's just vandals. They wouldn't have come if I'd been here."

"You need help, for godsake."

"Not from the police!" I shouted.

He let go of my wrist. The house was absolutely silent.

"Now that," he said very quietly, "calls for some explaining."

"Please," I begged. "Let me figure out what's happening. Just give me time to think."

"All right," he said, calmer. "Maybe you better take a look around to see what's missing."

"My laptop is still here."

The computer sat undisturbed on the kitchen table. We both looked at it blankly.

"Any self-respecting thief would have taken that first thing," he said.

I nodded. My heart began to throb.

"Anything else you want to check on?"

"Y-yes." But I couldn't seem to move.

"You want me to look for you?" he asked.

"No," I said, gathering myself with tremendous effort. "But I have to go upstairs."

He saw that I was afraid to be alone. He said, "Okay, let's go. I'm right behind you."

In my rush, I caught my foot on the books scattered on the dining room floor. I knelt and found the three precious first editions I owned—a book of Whitman poems, a Dashiell Hammett and a rare volume of Richardson's
Pamela.
I carried them, hugging the books instinctively.

In the sitting room, more books were all over the floor, but the CD player was still in its cabinet with all of Todd's jazz collection. A group of Libby's early watercolors had been thrown on the stairs in a shower of broken glass. The sight of my sister's paintings damaged gave me my first boost of angry adrenaline. On the upstairs landing, the linen cupboard shelves had been emptied onto the carpet.

Behind me, Abruzzo walked carefully, on alert.

In my room, my jewelry box still contained the meager collection of costume jewelry and the few family pieces I owned. Even Grandmama's sapphire ring was there. My bedclothes had been ripped off, and the mattress was askew on the box springs. Nervously, I leaned closer to see if some weirdo had left his calling card. But the bedclothes were clean, thank heavens.

Abruzzo stepped into the room and spotted the
small rabbit-eared television on my dresser. "What about jewelry?"

"It's all here."

I took a deep breath and opened the second drawer in my dresser. In my lingerie drawer, I had left the folio wrapped in a black lace slip buried under a collection of pastel bras. By some miracle, the vandals hadn't dug down through the bras to find the prize.

With trembling hands, I lifted out the folio and unwrapped it. The slip floated to the floor at my feet.

"What is it?" Abruzzo asked at my shoulder.

"It's Rory's," I said.

Unsteady again, I sat down on the bed.

Abruzzo sat beside me and gently pried the folio out of my hands. He thumbed the latch and the leather case opened.

Everything started to get murky, so I put my head between my knees again. I said, "Your self-respecting thief was probably looking for this."

"What is it?" he asked.

"Rory collected erotic art."

"Oh, yeah?" Abruzzo leafed through the pages. "He didn't mention this hobby down at the boys' club."

"It's very valuable," I said. "It's what Jonathan Longnecker asked me about this afternoon."

"How come you have it?"

I sat up again as my head cleared. "I have no idea."

Abruzzo continued to look through the pages.

I said, "Libby sent it to me. She wanted me to return it to Rory's collection without telling anyone. It's such a stupid idea that I can't imagine what she was thinking. Except . . ."

"Except?"

"Maybe Libby is doing work that's not entirely
legal. Obviously she wanted to keep her connection to this folio a secret. She didn't want anyone to know she had it—and I have to assume that includes the police."

Abruzzo didn't appear to be listening. His attention was fully engaged by the pages in front of him. "Uhm," he said.

"So I can't tell the police yet. And I can't report this break-in until I've figured out what Libby wants me to do and why. I don't want her going to jail."

"Uhmmm."

"On the other hand, I don't want to get myself in trouble either." I looked down at the writhing figures depicted on the lustrous page between us. The man's erection was huge. I blinked, and my brain snapped back to reality, which was me sitting on my bed with Michael Abruzzo while he looked at erotic pictures. I said, "Maybe I'm panicking. Maybe this really was just vandals."

"Mmmm," he said.

"Kids, perhaps."

"Brave kids to break in here in broad daylight."

"Well, it could have been teenagers looking for excitement."

"They didn't find it," Abruzzo said, turning to the next page.

I sat on the bed and looked at the wreckage of my bedroom. My eyelet sheets had been ripped to the floor, and my down-filled pillows thrown to opposite sides of the room. My slip was on the carpet, too. I wondered if Abruzzo had noticed it.

He seemed pretty absorbed by something else at the moment.

I reached for the folio and took it from him. I began replacing the pages into the leather covers. I heard
myself saying primly, "I think you've seen enough to get the general idea of Rory's taste in art."

He leaned back, hands braced on the bed behind him. "If that's art, I'll give museums a second chance."

"Rory had a very specialized collection."

"He sure did, the old dog."

I hastily snatched the black lace slip off the floor and used it to rewrap the folio. I was clumsy, though, and he reached to help. "I can manage," I said.

"You could have put this in a safety-deposit box, you know, but you've kept it up here in your bedroom." His smile made me think about kissing him outside in the dark. "What are you doing? Looking at the pictures before you go to sleep at night?"

"I thought it was safest here," I said, ridiculously prim, and stashing the folio back in my drawer. "Turns out I was right, Mr. Abruzzo."

He rose to his feet and let his gaze sweep over the bed, the eyelet lace, and my pillows on the floor. "You called me Michael before, you know. It wouldn't hurt to keep on doing it."

Somehow, using his first name in that particular location didn't seem like a good idea at all.

He turned and slouched against the door, waiting.

I couldn't meet his eye. "Thank you."

"For?"

"Not making me call the police."

"No problem," he said.

"And I shouldn't have told you about the folio," I began. I tried to find a way to say more.

When I looked up, he smiled somewhat wryly. "You don't have to worry about me. I'll keep your secret."

"Thanks."

"But you're in danger. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to see that."

Maybe I was, but just then it didn't feel like vandals were going to give me the most trouble. Suddenly I didn't want Abruzzo anywhere near my eyelet sheets. The good news was that he wasn't treating me like a hysterical child. The bad news was that I wouldn't mind being treated like a grown woman just then.