Seventeen
Nadine read the email from Daniel one more time. Take the vacation , he’d written . We can cover your role with absolutely no problem. Get the rest you need.
Although it was reasonable to assume Daniel meant no more than he wrote, Nadine couldn’t shake the suspicion that he thought she was expendable. Well, there was nothing stopping her from getting to the bottom of Dot’s story now. She would get this exclusive, and she would show Daniel what she could do.
Although Nadine felt enormously insensitive, as if she’d barely waited for the body to cool, Brent told her the sooner they got to work, the better.
“You saw the boxes,” he’d said in a defeated tone when she’d called to confirm details of their invasion of Dot’s home. “I want to help my aunt, but you’ll have to do what you can in three weeks.”
So the next morning, a holiday Monday at nine o’clock, Nadine met Wes at Dot’s front door, each clutching a coffee. They observed their matching sustainable mugs without comment.
“Four two six seven,” repeated Nadine, looking between her phone and where Wes stood at the keypad near the door. “That’s what Brent sent to me.”
“I told you it’s not working,” said Wes in an overly calm tone that screamed frustration.
“Try it again.”
“I’ve tried it three times.”
“Did you press pound?”
He rubbed his hand over his eyes. “Why would I push pound? So I can get to the customer service agent? It’s a door, not an automated complaint line.”
She shoved her phone in his face. “Brent’s email says four two six seven. Four two six seven .”
He grabbed the phone and scanned the message. Never had a man tapped in numbers more smugly than Wes at that moment. “Four. Two. Five . Seven.” The lock whirred, and he turned to her with an expressively neutral face before taking a long sip of coffee.
“Oh.” Nadine squinted. “Huh. I guess it is a five. How do you like that?”
Wes didn’t dignify this with a response.
Stepping into the foyer with Sir Latimer and Janice the wonky-eyed cheetah, uncertainty engulfed Nadine, and she almost left, overcome with a sense that she didn’t belong in this huge empty house.
Before she could act, cats materialized from all directions. Erma wove around Wes’s legs, purring loudly between head butts, while Octavia meowed piteously from around the corner.
“Someone has a fan,” said Nadine. She could have sworn Erma was the one who avoided people, but she seemed happy enough with Wes. The cat skittered away when Nadine reached down for pets. She didn’t like that. She was a cat person. Cats loved her. She’d be damned if she’d put up with the cat liking Wes better.
Wes eyed the cats. “They want food,” he said. “Not friendship.” He headed toward the kitchen, and the parade of four cats followed him like the Pied Piper.
“The two aren’t mutually exclusive,” Nadine said after him. She lingered in the hall. There was a lot of work to be done in the attic, but if she was living here for three weeks (with Wes!), then she needed to check out the rest of the house to make sure some distant cousin wasn’t camping out unnoticed in one of the wings. Well, no research was ever wasted, and Brent had given them free rein apart from Dot’s bedroom.
She was also nosy as hell.
“Are you coming, or do I have to feed these beasts by myself?” called Wes.
Nadine walked to the kitchen—slowly, to aggravate him, because although they were friendlier, old habits die hard—and found Wes in the middle of a group of incensed felines.
“I can’t find the food, but they’re circling,” he said. “It’s only a matter of minutes until they start chewing on my ankles, the land sharks.”
“Did you check the cabinets?”
“Of course I checked the cabinets. Do you think I’ve been standing here trying to locate the food through clairvoyance?”
Trying to avoid tripping over the cats, the two of them ransacked the kitchen, looking for a bag of kibble or cans of wet food. Nothing.
“What about the fridge?” Nadine finally asked, hands massaging her neck as she tried to think where in this warehouse of a mansion the cat food would be. For all she knew, Dot had an entire room filled with racks of imperishables, like a nuclear fallout shelter.
“Who would refrigerate cat food?” Wes sounded doubtful as he yanked open the door of the massive Sub-Zero fridge. “Oh.”
She looked around him. “I guess people who get it fresh.”
Wes pulled out a container and read the ingredients. “Organic farm-raised salmon. These cats eat better than me. Are you sure it’s cat food?” He double-checked it. “It is. Wow.”
Grumbling about the amount of money people spent on their pets, Wes opened the container and put it on the floor. The cats crowded around, finally silent as they ate, and Wes checked his intact ankles with relief.
“I have a plan,” announced Nadine after Wes washed his hands.
Wes leaned against the counter, arms crossed. “Okay.”
She’d been prepared for a fight, so she examined him warily. “Just okay?”
“Yeah, Barbault, just okay. We’ve got three weeks and a library’s worth of information to analyze. I’d love a plan. Plus you’d have an aneurysm if I tried to stop you.”
That was true enough not to bother arguing. “First, I want to get familiar with the house. All of it, the nooks and crannies. We don’t know if the attic is the only place she stored documents.”
“Reasonably, the most likely place is her bedroom, which Brent said is off-limits,” Wes pointed out over the sounds of cats fighting over the last scraps of food. “It’s not like she’s going to hide things in the commode.”
“Can you be sure of that?”
Wes looked at the door that led to the library, eyes glazing as he mentally reviewed the clutter. “Point taken, but Brent specifically pointed us to the attic, and we have more than enough to do there.”
“True, but I still want to see the rest of the house. For science.”
“Fine.”
“No arguing?” said Nadine.
“It’s a logical step.” His expression turned shifty. “I suppose I wouldn’t mind looking around either,” he admitted. “This house is better than a museum. God knows what we’ll find. What’s the notebook for?”
“To take notes,” she said. “Also, we can rip out the pages and leave them as a trail in case we get lost.”
That made him laugh, and Nadine would be lying if she said it didn’t make her a little proud. Wes was always hard to impress.
“Let’s go, Gretel.”
Nadine led them to the west wing and a corridor made dark by the closed doors, then turned on the lights. The ornate crystal chandeliers added more sparkle than illumination. “I feel like one of Bluebeard’s wives.” Her hand lingered on the porcelain handle of a paneled door decorated with painted cherubs.
Wes brought his hand down on hers and gave a decisive push, cracking the door open. “At least we have permission so we can avoid dismemberment.”
They took their time working through each room, six in each wing. There was only one level, so sadly that meant no grand staircase. When Wes saw Nadine checking behind curtains and in cabinets, he began doing the same without comment, as if he understood the impact of the sheer amount of true crime content she had consumed over the years, intensified by her parents’ paranoia about safety. Her mother had solemnly handed over a dog-eared copy of The Gift of Fear to Nadine when she was fifteen.
An hour later, they returned to the kitchen to make some tea and discuss their findings in a more modern, less visually bewildering setting. Nadine checked her notes as Wes filled the kettle.
“We have three bedrooms in the east wing. One gold, one blue, and one Marie Antoinette,” she said. “The east wing also has the carnival room with the carousel horses leaning against the walls and the musical instruments, the St. James gentleman’s club study with the paneled walls and Victorian hunting art, and the games room at the end with the crokinole board, billiard table, and darts.”
“Don’t forget the bathrooms,” said Wes. “Also, that was Regency-era art. Not Victorian.”
She ignored him. “That wing has the bathroom with the fancy marble tub and the unusually plain one that’s all white and bamboo. Only the Marie Antoinette has an en suite.”
Wes held out an Earl Grey tea canister and one of herbal lavender rose without speaking, and she pointed her pen at the latter. “Wasn’t the gold bedroom on the west side?” he asked as he spooned out the strongly perfumed leaves.
“No, the west wing had the silver bedroom with the stained glass on the door panel.”
“Oh, right.”
“Plus the fashion history room with the mannequins, the chinoiserie room with all that embroidery, and the room with the porcelain. There was the yellow rose bedroom and Dot’s room at the end. Each of those bedrooms had an en suite.”
Wes poured the water into the teapot. “We should pick rooms, unless you want to camp in the salon,” he said. “Which is possible. It’s big enough to host a fun fair.”
“I’d like to be in the east wing.” Nadine instinctively wanted to give Dot some privacy in death, although they were here to rummage through the detritus of her life. “Also, I’d like us to be near each other.” That might sound insecure, but the house was big and empty.
To her relief, he didn’t mock her. “I agree,” he said. “You liked the Marie Antoinette room. Why don’t you take that, and I’ll take the blue one?”
“That’s surprisingly magnanimous of you.” She loved that over-the-top room, really more of a chamber, which fulfilled her every childhood princess fantasy.
“Trust me, it’s not.”
They took their tea back through the house to check the rooms’ habitability, which was perfect. Maria had kept them spotless and stocked with clean white sheets that smelled like thyme.
“Towels are fresh too,” reported Wes, coming back from his own room reconnaissance. He looked around, shading his eyes against the sun reflecting off the metallic thread that covered the bed canopies before looking over to where Nadine lounged on one of the many low chairs in the room, which was larger than her apartment. “Are you sure you can sleep here?” he asked, shading his eyes as he moved through a dagger of sun reflected off a golden pitcher.
“Sleep?” Nadine ran her hand along the velvet of the seat, reveling in the softness. “I could live here. It’s sad though.”
“The fact that she’s successfully incorporated eighteen different decorating styles like a magician?” asked Wes as he closed the top to a rolltop desk painted ivory with delicate red poppies. “That’s more impressive than sad.”
“No, the fact that she had all this space and she was alone.”
Wes sat down on a tufted stool. Nadine carefully moved her eyes from where his thighs strained against the fabric of his chinos to what she assumed was the much safer visual landscape of the mural on the wall, which was a rather more explicit version of Apollo and Narcissus than she was used to seeing. She hadn’t noticed because the murals had faded into the background against the overall vibe of the room. She swept her gaze around, noting with horror that every wall portrayed seminude figures cavorting with each other. Wes watched with amusement.
“Looks like Dot loved Greek myths,” he said.
She hauled herself off the chaise, eyes down to avoid Leda and the swan. “Let’s look at your room.”
By the house’s standards, the blue room was peaceful and almost sedate with a nautical theme that included ships in bottles, oars, and green blown glass. The bed was plainly made, the corners pulled hospital tight, and it lacked the dozen embroidered throw pillows that covered the top half of Nadine’s bed. The chairs were brown leather, and in the corner stood an old coatrack covered with Panama hats. Wes sorted through them while Nadine opened the huge wardrobe, half expecting to see a snowy forest with a single lamppost in the distance.
“This is perfect,” he said with satisfaction.
“Excited for some Horatio Hornblower cosplay?”
“I’d prefer walking the plank to death by ruffles.” Wes joined her at the wardrobe. “How about lunch?”
Nadine grimaced when she thought back to the fridge. “She only had cat food.”
“Organic and farm-raised.”
“Still cat food.”
He adjusted the ship in the bottle. “If you’re too good for that, I brought us a picnic.”
She was about to make a joke about which tablecloth he’d matched it to but then thought of Wes planning ahead for what they would eat together and shut her mouth. For some reason, it made her wildly and inappropriately happy. Well, it stood to reason. She didn’t have to cook, which was a gift.
“Sounds perfect” was all she said, but there must have been something in her voice, because Wes looked suddenly shy. His mouth tilted in a little smile, and his eyes lowered. She hadn’t noticed how long his eyelashes were. Then he ran his hands through his hair and met her gaze before looking away again, that smile lingering but a little wider.
She liked the way it looked on him. A lot. She closed the wardrobe doors as if to trap the feelings in there. She didn’t have time for liking anything on Wes outside his ability to sort boxes. She had priorities, and admiring Wes was not one of them.