Amanda Stevens Bestseller Collection: Stranger In Paradise/A Baby's Cry Page 11

  At just over six feet, with the lean, conditioned body of a runner, Matthew had neither the height nor the bulk that Tony did, but as Emily stared at the two men confronting each other, it was Tony who seemed diminished.

  He might have felt it, too, for he smacked the pipe against his palm again, harder this time. The resounding thud created by metal hitting flesh made Emily wince. Tony moved his gaze from Matthew to Emily. “Your brother know you’re here?”

  “I don’t report to my brother,” Emily assured him. “Look, all we want to do is ask you a few questions about the night Jenny Wilcox was murdered. You were with her earlier in the evening, weren’t you?”

  “I don’t have anything to say about Jenny,” he said sullenly. “To you or to anyone else.”

  “What about Wade Drury?” Matthew asked. “Do you have anything to say about him?”

  Tony’s expression changed rapidly from surly impatience to outright hostility. The metamorphosis was astounding. “What do you want to know about that murdering bastard?”

  Matthew said calmly, “I take it the two of you were hardly friends. Word has it, you were jealous of Drury. You even picked a fight with him that night. Was it because you thought Jenny preferred Wade to you?”

  “You’re crazier than you look if you think that,” Tony said hotly, and Emily thought that Matthew had probably gotten the kind of reaction he’d been talking about. How to decipher it, though, she had no idea.

  “Jenny had no more use for that no-good drifter than I did. She was afraid of him. He even tried to break into her room once, after she told him to get lost. She told me so herself.”

  “Did she? I wonder,” Matthew mused.

  “Yeah, well, you go do your wondering someplace else,” Tony snarled. “I’ve got work to do. And unless you have some repairs you want done on that rattletrap you drove up in, I’ll thank you to vacate my premises. Now.”

  “But wouldn’t you like the chance to tell us more about Jenny?” Emily asked. “Give us your thoughts on the murder?”

  “My thoughts are on the record,” he said. “I talked to the police plenty after that night. They knew, right along with the rest of us, that Drury killed her in cold blood. Killed her because he couldn’t have her.” Tony paused for a moment, shoving a lock of dark hair from his forehead.

  Then, like a chameleon, his expression underwent another rapid change. His features seemed to crumple, and his eyes grew misty. He was either a consummate actor or a raging psychopath, Emily thought, not at all comforted by the notion.

  His voice softened as he said, “I won’t talk about Jenny. I won’t tarnish her memory like that. She ought to be allowed to rest in peace.”

  Let the past rest in peace. Or else you won’t.

  The message taped to the rock thrown through her window came back vividly to Emily as Tony Vincent stared down at her, his eyes brimming with tears.

  “SO WHAT DID YOU THINK?” Emily asked as they got into her car and drove away.

  Matthew shrugged. “The man’s definitely got problems.”

  “Yes, and he definitely still has a thing for Jenny. Did you see the way he looked when he talked about her? I thought he was actually going to cry. He’s still in love with her, Matthew.”

  “Obsessed might be a better word,” Matthew said, his expression dour. “People with obsessions have been known to commit murder, usually in the name of love.”

  Emily shuddered, thinking about a love like that. A love that would make someone want to kill. For some reason, Trey Huntington’s image materialized in her mind. She shook her head, wanting the vision to disappear. She didn’t like thinking about Trey. Didn’t like remembering what he had almost done to her once. In the name of love.

  She said, “Did you happen to notice all those empty beer bottles lined up on the counter near the refrigerator? Several of them were recently emptied, like in the last hour or two.”

  Matthew turned to her, amusement glinting in his gray eyes. “And just how did you deduce that, Miss Marple?”

  Emily smiled, grateful that he had decided to lighten the moment. Her thoughts had grown way too dark for such a beautiful day. “Elementary, my dear Watson. The bottles were still sweating.”

  “Very good, Emily. I’m impressed.”

  “Thank you,” she said, glowing a little at his words of praise. She turned down her street. “So what do we do now? We didn’t get anything out of Tony. Not really.”

  “We got a reaction—actually, several—and at this point, that’s about all we can expect.”

  “So we just keep talking to people? Making general nuisances of ourselves?” Emily asked skeptically.

  “You got it.” Matthew fell silent for a moment, then said, “I may be away some for the next few days, Emily. Something’s come up.”

  Pulling into the driveway of the Other Side of Paradise Inn, Emily turned off the engine and faced him, trying to keep her tone one of mild interest. “Where are you going?”

  Matthew shrugged. “It’s just some business I have to attend to. But while I’m gone, I want you to promise me something.”

  “What?”

  The way he was looking at her made Emily’s heart start to pound. His eyes always had such a profound effect on her. Emily tried to remind herself that the man was virtually a stranger and, by all indications, was emotionally unavailable to her. He’d pushed her away more times than Emily cared to remember.

  But even with all that, she couldn’t seem to keep her pulse from racing, her heart from skipping a beat, when he reached over and took her hand in his.

  Emily’s fingers trembled inside his. Their gazes met, and for just a split second she saw her own emotions, her own desire, mirrored in the gray depths of his eyes.

  “I want you to be careful while I’m gone, Emily. I have a feeling things are really going to heat up around here from now on, and I don’t want you to put yourself in danger.” He paused for a moment, then said softly, “I don’t want anything to happen to you.” There was an edge of regret in his voice that Emily didn’t understand.

  She wanted to ask him why he cared what happened to her, but she didn’t dare. She’d learned a long time ago, when she asked her ex-husband point-blank if he was having an affair, that unless you really wanted to know the answer, unless you were willing to deal with the consequences, you’d better not ask the question.

  So all Emily said was “I’ll be careful, Matthew.”

  Chapter Eight

  “The Other Side of Paradise Inn,” Emily said brightly into the telephone. It was the next day, and she was alone in the inn.

  “I’d like to speak to Emily Townsend, please.”

  “This is she.”

  “Miss Townsend, this is Thelma Dickerson. I’m the director of the Shady Oaks Nursing Home, down here in Batesville.”

  “Yes, Miss Dickerson. What can I do for you?”

  “Well, I hate to be the one to break this to you, especially over the phone and all, but Miss Rosabel Talbot passed away last night.”

  “Oh, no! How did it happen?” Emily asked, sudden tears stinging her eyes.

  “Heart attack, most likely. One of the aides found her this morning. The reason I’m calling you is, well, we didn’t exactly know who else to notify, and we found your name and phone number in her room.”

  “I don’t understand,” Emily said, frowning.

  “I know this is going to sound strange, but Miss Rosabel had one of our orderlies fetch a box of her personal belongings out of storage last evening and bring it over to the nursing home. Fred said she told him it was urgent. He said she seemed quite anxious to have the box in her possession.”

  “That does seem odd,” Emily agreed. “Do you know what was in the box?”

  “I’m getting to that,” Ms. Dickerson assured her. “Fred was worried about Miss Rosabel’s agitated state, so he agreed to go get the box for her when he went off duty. He said she was still up and waiting for him when he got back, around ten or so,
and she immediately wrote your name on the lid, without even looking at the contents. Then she told him to make sure the box got to you if anything happened to her.”

  Alarm bells sounded inside Emily’s head. “If anything happened to her? Was she sick?”

  “I suspect that at her age and in her frail health, Miss Rosabel knew she could go at any time. I’ve seen this sort of thing happen before. They sense the end is near and begin to make their preparations, poor things.”

  Emily still wasn’t satisfied. “I’m afraid I don’t understand. If the box contains Miss Rosabel’s personal belongings, shouldn’t her next of kin have it?”

  “She didn’t have any relatives,” Ms. Dickerson said. “Miss Rosabel was all alone in the world.”

  “No, but, she does…did have relatives,” Emily told her. “She has a niece who lives right here in Paradise. Surely you have her name and number somewhere in Miss Rosabel’s file. Nella Talbot?”

  There was a long pause, then the woman said, “I don’t know anything about a niece, or anyone else in Miss Rosabel’s life. Until you came to see her a few days ago, she hadn’t had a visitor in years.”

  WHEN MATTHEW CAME IN shortly afterward, Emily anxiously filled him in on all the details of the phone call. “I suppose I should go see Nella,” she said.

  Emily was seated behind her desk, and Matthew was perched on the corner. As she gazed up at him, she tried not to think about how sexy he looked in his black leather jacket and black jeans. His dark hair was tousled, as if someone had recently spent a lot of time running her fingers through it.

  Emily’s palms itched to do exactly that, but after last night, when she heard his motorcycle start up and drive off just before dawn, she’d resolved to keep her emotional distance from Matthew. He obviously didn’t trust her enough to tell her where he was going, and Emily had to protect herself. She was already feeling more for him than was wise.

  Matthew glanced at his watch. “It’s after six. I doubt the library is still open. Do you know where she lives?”

  “No, but I can find out,” Emily said. She opened a desk drawer and took out Paradise’s sparse phone book. Leafing through the pages, she located Nella’s number and dialed. Before anyone picked up, Emily palmed the mouthpiece and said, “I don’t want to tell her over the phone. I’ll just ask her if I can drop by—” Nella’s answering machine clicked on.

  Under the circumstances, Emily didn’t feel she should leave a message. She hung up, frowning. “I guess I’ll try again later.”

  “Meanwhile, why don’t we drive down to Batesville and pick up that box?” Matthew suggested. “If Miss Rosabel went to so much trouble to have it brought over to the nursing home, and then made sure someone got it to you if anything happened to her, there might be something important inside.”

  “It’s that ‘if anything happened to her’ part that’s bothering me so much,” Emily confessed. “You don’t think someone…you know…did something to Miss Rosabel, do you? Because she talked to us?”

  Matthew’s grave expression was hardly reassuring. “I can’t say the same thought hasn’t crossed my mind. I’d like to talk to the nursing home director, if she’s still around tonight. Then, tomorrow, I’ll try to see the coroner, though I doubt there’ll be an autopsy. If it appears Miss Rosabel died of natural causes, there wouldn’t be a reason for one.”

  “Not even if we tell them our suspicions?”

  “Who’d believe us? We don’t have any proof. And maybe she did die of a heart attack. It wouldn’t be that unusual. Not for someone her age.”

  “I guess you’re right,” Emily said, worrying her bottom lip with her teeth. She looked up at Matthew. His eyes were studying her intently, as if he had something more on his mind than what they were discussing.

  Almost imperceptibly, his gaze moved to her lips. Emily’s heart jolted inside her. She had a hard time gathering her thoughts and keeping them focused on murder.

  “Don’t…you find it strange that the nursing home didn’t know anything about Nella?” she forced herself to ask. “Since she was the next of kin, you’d think they’d have her name and number in Miss Rosabel’s file.”

  “Not if Miss Rosabel didn’t supply them. Maybe she and Nella had some kind of falling-out.”

  “I guess that’s possible,” Emily mused. “But why didn’t either one of them say anything about it to us?”

  “Sometimes it’s difficult to talk about family problems,” Matthew said, and Emily could see his point. She certainly didn’t relish discussing her and Stuart’s disagreements with anyone else.

  “Come on,” Matthew said. “Let’s go find out what Miss Rosabel wanted you to know.”

  “WHAT IS IT?” Emily asked. She stared at the box on her kitchen table as Matthew cut the twine and pulled the flaps loose. “What’s in there?”

  Matthew withdrew a handful of old letters, receipts, and bills, and Emily reached for the stack, sorting through it as Matthew plowed through the rest of the box.

  “Good grief,” Emily said, holding up an electric bill dated May 17, 1975. “I’d say Miss Rosabel gave new meaning to the term pack rat. What’s left in the box?”

  “Looks like books and ledgers of some sort.”

  “Well, this stuff is just a bunch of junk,” Emily said, disappointed.

  “Not necessarily.” Matthew had been riffling through the stack of papers on the table in silence for a moment, but now he withdrew a newspaper clipping and held it out to Emily. “Take a look at this.”

  Emily scanned the clipping. It was all about Jenny Wilcox’s murder and how the police had questioned Miss Rosabel, Nella and Tony Vincent, all three of whom had seen the victim and the suspect, Wade Drury, the night of the murder.

  Matthew handed Emily another clipping about the murder, and then another. She began to make a stack. Most of the clippings she’d already seen on her trip to the library, but the last clipping Matthew handed her wasn’t about the murder at all.

  It was about a family who had lived on the outskirts of Paradise and who had left town abruptly after the man was accused of stealing from his employer, Huntington Industries. The bank had had to foreclose on the property, and Huntington had generously agreed to pay off the mortgage and settle the back taxes.

  The article was dated fifteen years ago, and Miss Rosabel, or someone, had scribbled in the margin one word: Avengers.

  Emily looked up. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  Matthew nodded. “What was it Miss Rosabel told us? Young boys beaten up? Property vandalized? One poor family run out of town?”

  Emily frowned. “Do you think she was talking about this family?”

  “It’s a definite possibility.”

  “Why do you think Miss Rosabel kept all this stuff?”

  Matthew shrugged. “It appears she had a lingering interest in the murder. And in the Avengers. Possibly she was trying to find a connection between the two.”

  “And the reason she left all this to me?”

  Matthew picked up an envelope, glanced at the front of it, then tossed it back on the stack. “Maybe she thought you could find what she couldn’t.”

  “She always did have more faith in me than most people in this town,” Emily said, with a pang of sadness. She stared gloomily at the untidy pile of papers on her table. “It’ll take forever and a day to sort through all this stuff.”

  “Well, maybe not quite that long.”

  Emily heard the smile in Matthew’s voice, and when she looked up, her heart tumbled inside her. She knew there could be nothing between them. She’d told herself that a hundred times, and Matthew had made it perfectly clear.

  But…he could be so devastating when he wanted to be. Emily hadn’t yet found a way to protect herself from his charm.

  Take deep breaths, she told herself. And pretend he’s someone else. Someone like Trey Huntington. That should take the edge off.

  But it didn’t work. Couldn’t work. Because there was no way E
mily could ever pretend that Matthew Steele was anyone other than himself.

  With gritty determination, she got out her list of suspects and went over the details they’d jotted down before. At the bottom of the list, she wrote AVENGERS all in caps, then drew a big question mark beside the word.

  Emily stared down at the question mark. “If the Avengers did have something to do with Jenny’s death, what could their motive have been? She was a substitute schoolteacher who wasn’t even going to be in town that long. Why would a vigilante group want to kill her?”

  “Maybe she stumbled onto something.”

  Emily looked up. “Like what?”

  “Like their identities. Or some of their dirty little deeds.”

  Emily let out a long breath, ruffling her bangs. “We’ve gone from a crime of passion to something completely different here. This is hardly a simple homicide, is it?”

  “Murder is rarely simple,” Matthew said. “Let’s just do a little supposing.” He sat back and steepled his fingers beneath his chin. “Let’s suppose for a minute that the Avengers, whoever they were, didn’t have anything to do with Jenny’s death. Miss Rosabel said everyone in town believed Wade Drury was guilty. What if the Avengers believed that, too, and decided to take the law into their own hands, just like they’d done many times before? What if they killed Wade Drury, all in the name of truth, justice and the American way?”

  Emily grew pensive. “Then we’d be looking for more than one killer. We’d have to solve two murders instead of one.” She looked up and caught Matthew’s intense gaze on her. “What’s wrong?”

  He seemed at a loss for a moment. Then he said, “The way you accepted my theory so readily. There would have been those in this town who would have been outraged by my suggestion.”

  “I’m not like most people in this town.”

  “So I’ve noticed.” And without so much as a warning, he leaned across the table, took her face in his hands and kissed her tenderly on the lips.

  Emily, dazed and more than a little confused, said breathlessly, “What was that for?”

  “For not being like most people in this town.” His hands still cupping her face, he leaned down and kissed her again, harder, more urgently, this time. His tongue slipped between her lips, and Emily began to tremble. She raised a tentative hand to his arm, felt the flex and bunch of powerful muscles beneath his flannel shirt, and she thought, Oh, Lord, I’m a goner.