CHAPTER TWELVE
After motioning for her to have a seat in one of the archtop chairs in his living room, he began heading for the bar. “What would you care to drink?” he asked as he walked.
“A Pepsi would be awesome,” Maude said as she sat in the chair with her shoulder bag on her lap.
Edmund almost stopped in his tracks. A Pepsi? “I don’t think I have that particular beverage. Try again.”
“Then any soda will do.”
Edmund was behind the bar. She could tell she was irritating him once more. “Try again.”
But she really didn’t want any liquor. Not in a stranger’s house. Besides, who would offer somebody a drink but didn’t have soft drinks? “Water will do,” she said, although she really wanted a soda.
Edmund assumed she didn’t drink, but he didn’t care enough to ask her either way. He poured himself a glass of champagne. “Do you prefer your water bottled or in a glass?”
“A glass will do,” Maude said.
Wrong answer, he thought, and brought her a bottled water instead. But before he handed it to her, he lectured her. “Never accept a glass of anything from a man you don’t know,” he said to her.
Maude felt insufficient once again. As if she couldn’t possibly add up to what this man viewed as a reasonable adult.
And what she hated was that he was right.
He could have spiked her glass of water, rendered her unconscious, and the rest could have been history.
Or worse. She should have thought of that herself!
She looked at the bottle in his hand and then up at him.
He was an older man, fortyish she would guess, with a thick head of hair, very nice blue eyes, and he was well-dressed.
He was perhaps an attractive person, maybe even extremely so, but all she saw was Natasha’s brother.
All she could think about was getting help for Natasha and, in so doing, getting help for the biggest story she’d ever worked on.
That was why she didn’t argue when he treated her as if she was some kid. “Thank you,” she said, as she accepted the bottled water.
But as he sat down, crossed his legs and sipped his champagne, she opened her bottle of water, took a long sip, and looked around at the massive chandeliers, four in a row from the open floorplan of a living room that kept going into the dining hall.
And the huge paintings on the walls that she’d bet were real or really good fakes, and the double spiral staircase that swept up three stories high were incredible.
It felt as if she was in some kind of an architectural wonder the way that ceiling reached up so high.
For a girl like her who’d never been in a house so grand, it was a sight to behold. She couldn’t stop looking up.
Edmund stared at her as she looked up. And something within him kept telling him that he knew her. That they’d met before. But where? She said she was from Dillon. She knew Natasha. She was a reporter.
And that was when his eyes stretched. He remembered! It was at the publisher’s house four years ago when Tasha was hired as their new editor. She was fired a year later, and for good cause, but he remembered Maude. He remembered when she literally fell in his lap. And she fascinated him even then.
He also remembered how she turned down his thinly veiled attempt to get her in bed. She was a serious sort of person. Why would she bother to advocate for Tasha? He remembered her!
He might have remembered her, but Maude had no clue about him. She was too busy looking up in her own fascination. But one thing about Maude, she never let a new experience overwhelm her. She looked down and got on with it. “I hope I didn’t interrupt your dinner.”
Edmund looked at her. “Dinner?”
She pointed to the other end of the massive room that housed his dining hall. Plates were still on the table, and bowls and glasses.
“No interruption,” he said. “We were done.” In more ways than one, he thought.
“This is some house,” Maude said. “I knew surgeons made the big bucks, but I never thought they made’em this big.”
She smiled, but Edmund didn’t return her smile. Because now he was suspicious. She claimed to know Natasha, and was willing to come all this way, but she didn’t know her family background? “Perhaps you should give me more information on what’s going on with my sister.”
“Oh. Right. Yes, sir,” said Maude. He was such a formal man that she felt formal around him. Not at all comfortable like she always felt around Natasha. They might have been sister and brother, but they were so unalike.
But she wasn’t there to psychoanalyze the man. She was there to help Natasha. “I am a reporter. I mean, I was a reporter for the Dillon Post-Dispatch. Your sister was the city editor of the paper for a little while. She didn’t keep the job very long--”
“I’m aware,” Edmund said.
He was giving the same kind of vibes her friends gave off: He seemed exhausted by Natasha too. But Maude kept going. “She wasn’t there very long,” she continued, “but she was a very good editor. The best one I’ve ever had.”
She could tell he was surprised to hear that, but it was the truth. “I was leaving the building a few days ago when she suddenly drove up and ran to me. And the Police was right behind her.”
“The Police?”
“Yes sir. I was kind of confused too, but it was like she was desperate to give me a sheet of paper that had a list of names on it. She told me to get in touch with everybody on that list until somebody agreed to help her. Your name was last on the list.”
“Let me guess. Nobody else agreed to help her?”
Maude nodded. “I’ll be honest with you: They seemed to despise her.”
That didn’t seem surprising to Edmund at all. “Go on.”
“She told me to save you for last. She said you were her ace in the hole. That all I had to do was say her name and you’d let me in.”
He didn’t respond to that. So Maude kept going. “After she handed me the list, the Police made it up to her and they cuffed her and took her downtown. When I called to find out what the charge was, then I knew I had to help her.”
“What’s the charge?”
Maude was still getting over it herself. “Murder. In the first degree.”
Edmund wasn’t particularly surprised when she said that word. In the first degree part, however, was surprising.
But his nonchalance surprised Maude. “You don’t seem like it’s a big deal.”
“Oh I would never be that callous. It is a very big deal. It’s just that my sister has a history.”
“Of murder?”
“Of vehicular homicide, yes. The charges were dropped, but there you have it.”
Maude didn’t know what to make of that. “What happened?”
“Aren’t you here for me to ask you questions rather than the other way around?”
“Oh. Yes sir.”
“Who is my sister accused of murdering? And “Why do you feel a need to help her? Because she was a good editor years ago?”
“Because she’s being accused of killing the wife of the very man I was investigating for corruption. But as I was doing my best investigative journalism ever, I uncovered more than just corruption.”
She waited for him to ask her what did she uncover, but he didn’t ask her anything.
So she kept going. “I found out that five years ago his first wife was killed too, and in that case he accused another woman who declared up and down that she didn’t do it.
That she was totally innocent and was being framed by Ross Hampton. ”
“Ross Hampton? Is that the name of the victim’s husband?”
“Yes sir. You know him?”
“That name sounds familiar.”
“He owns Hamp Construction. That’s why everybody calls him Hamp. But his real name is Ross Hampton. His company builds lots of new construction communities in Dillon and surrounding areas. He’s currently working on a shopping mall.”
“What is he to Natasha?”
“I have no idea.”
Edmund had an idea. But he kept it to himself. “Did Natasha tell you she was innocent?”
That was an odd question to ask about his own sister. “Not in so many words, no sir.”
“In any words did she tell you she was innocent?”
Maude realized she did not. “No. But come on now. In just five years this man has had two wives killed by two different women? Two wives. Two murders. Two different ladies did it? In their whole lives, most people have never been associated with any murders whatsoever. But in five years, he’s been intimately associated with two? No way. Nobody’s that unlucky.”
That was an unconvincing argument to Edmund. “You believe in luck? I don’t.”
“I don’t believe in weird coincidences either,” said Maude. “And if it’s true, then that would be a super-weird coincidence.”
Edmund knew it too. What in the world had Tasha gotten herself into now? It inwardly angered him. Because he was certain, given the gravity, that he was going to have to be the one to get her out of it. Their father would see to it.
But it begged the point. Why wouldn’t she have this young lady come to him first, not last?
He looked at Maude. “Do you still have that list she gave to you?”
“Yes sir,” Maude said as she rummaged through her shoulder bag and came up with the now crumbled sheet of paper. She handed it to Edmund.
Edmund looked at the various names on the list. None of them, sans his own, rang any bells. “And you said none of them would help her?”
“Not even a little bit,” said Maude. “It was as if they were offended that I even asked them.”
“Then why would she give you their names?”
“That’s what I want to know,” said Maude.
Then Edmund, still staring at the list, suddenly uncrossed his legs. And leaned forward.
“What is it?” Maude asked him.
“Come here.”
Maude stood up quickly, sat her bag in the chair, and then hurried over to him. She sat beside him. “What is it? You see something?”