Kathleen O'Brien - Quiet as the Grave

“But I’ve been looking forward to it,” he said in a throaty voice. “I’m eager to get to know you better, Suzie. You’re such a talented young woman.”

Oh, man, she really, really didn’t like people invading her space, and this guy was so close she could see the tiny broken veins around his nose. If she were painting his face, she’d need a whole tube of cadmium red.

A drinker. Great. She needed that.

She tried one last time to be smart, to remember the mortgage payments. Would it kill her to ride in the car with the guy one time? Her town house was only ten minutes away. She thought of the red short-shorts and the screaming kids who puked up tartar sauce on the tables. She thought of the way she had come dragging home every night, too tired and angry to paint.

He touched her arm. Still smiling, he ran his index finger slowly up, until it disappeared under the little cap sleeve of her T-shirt. She shivered in disgust, and she saw his gaze slip to her nipples.

Oh, no, you don’t, buddy. Waaay over the line.

She narrowed her eyes.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Kuspit. I guess I didn’t understand exactly what you wanted. The portrait is forty-five hundred. But if you’re expecting to have a thing with me on the side, that’s going to cost extra.”

He blinked once, but then his grin twisted, and his fingers crept up another inch. They found her shoulder and cupped it. What an incredible sleazeball! He thought she was playing games.

“Oh, is that so?” He raised one eyebrow. “How much extra?”

She scrunched up her mouth and made a low hum of consideration. “Let’s see,” she said. “I’d say…oh, about…no…well, let’s see…”

She looked him straight in the eye. “Oh, yeah, now I remember. There’s not enough money in the world.”

His brows dived together. His hand tightened on her shoulder and pulled her in, and his other arm started to come up. She didn’t stop to find out what he had in mind. She swung out with the camera as hard as she could.

He was so close she couldn’t get much leverage. Still, the camera connected with his cheek and made a nice little thump, followed by a grunt of shocked outrage.

“Shit,” he said, recoiling. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

She didn’t bother to answer. He was holding his cheek, looking at her as if she’d broken his jaw, which she definitely had not. She knew what that sounded like. She’d broken a bone once, the left radius of a university teaching assistant who’d thought he could teach her something more than algebra and had to be set straight the hard way.

This guy wasn’t hurt. He was just a big baby.

She reached out, lifted his hand from the cheek and eyed it calmly, pleased to see she’d drawn at least a little blood. He’d have a nice colorful bruise there tomorrow.

She felt like blowing smoke from the tip of her camera, gunslinger style. But that would have been gloating.

Still, she was pleased to discover that, even after ten years of learning to play nice and conform, she hadn’t lost her touch entirely.

It wasn’t until she was halfway home in the cab that she realized what she had lost.

She leaned her head against the cracked vinyl seat and let out a groan.

Blast it. She’d lost four-and-a-half thousand dollars.

DEBRA PAWLEY DECIDED to go over to the Millner-Frome mansion a couple of hours early so that she could make sure everything was spiffed up and gleaming for the open house at noon.

She was by God going to sell this house today.

Tuxedo Lake was one of the most desirable communities in this part of upstate New York. It was about thirty minutes northeast of Albany, just close enough to be considered a bedroom community…if you didn’t plan to sleep late.

The lake itself was big and elegant, with sandy shores you could get away with calling a beach in your brochures. A picturesque ring of low granite cliffs nearly circled the lake, and if a sailboat drifted by at the right moment, your brochure illustration looked dynamite.

The mansion itself was gorgeous. A 6,462-square-foot French château jewel, complete with marble vestibule, formal library, swimming pool with central fountain and Jacuzzi. Nanny quarters over the four-car garage.

Debra didn’t often let herself envy the houses she listed. But she envied this one.

When she sold it, she’d make a bundle in commission.

If she sold it. The house might be perfect, but the house’s history was a mess. Justine Frome had mysteriously disappeared two years ago and had never been heard from since. The police suspected foul play, and so did her parents. Justine’s father had dragged the lake and jackhammered up the swimming pool looking for her, but no body had ever been found.

That was the problem in a nutshell. Debra didn’t mean to be insensitive, but who wanted to pay a couple of mil for a beautiful lakefront home if they were always going to be wondering when a body might bob out of the lake, or start stinking up the basement?

She left her car out on the street, planted her Open House sign in the most visible spot and then hiked up the long, showy entry to the mansion. She liked to let the buyers drive into the main portico. It tempted them. They loved the look of their own cars under that elegant, shady arch.

Please, God, let there be buyers today. Her last open house had brought in half a dozen gawkers and only two legitimate lookers who had scurried out of the house like cartoon mice when they heard the Where’s Justine? story. Legally, she had to tell it.

Debra propped her bag of cleaning and cooking supplies against her shin while she fumbled with the front door keys. Off to the right, she heard the growl of Richie Graham’s hedge clippers. He was probably shaping the boxwood hedge, which surrounded a glorious garden of White Persian Lilacs. They probably would be in full bloom thanks to all the rain.

Richie…well, that was a good news–bad news situation. Richie had been the gardener for this house, and many of the Tuxedo Lake mansions, for about ten years now, and he created some spectacular lawns. He’d lived in the nanny quarters, serving as caretaker for the mansion ever since Justine’s father, Alton Millner, had moved out a few months ago.

He was as scruffy, rugged and sexy as Lady Chatterley’s lover, which was the good news. Debra had watched the female prospective buyers watching Richie, and several times she’d been tempted to hand them one of the Chinese lacquer bowls to catch the drool.

The bad news was that he was terrible about tracking mud all over the marble floors, especially when the weather was as soupy as it had been lately.

The hedge clippers stopped just as she got the dead bolt to turn. In a matter of minutes, as she was arranging her supplies on the kitchen’s granite counter, she felt a shadow fall into the room, and she knew Richie had arrived.

“Hey, there, gorgeous,” he said in his husky voice that always seemed to be laced with amusement.

He might well be amused by that comment. Debra knew she wasn’t gorgeous. She wasn’t even really pretty. She was, as her mom put it, “acceptable.”

It had been a hard lesson to learn, but she’d learned it. She’d even learned to compensate for it, though good makeup and a flattering haircut could go only so far.

“Hi, Richie,” she said, twisting her head to smile at him.

Now he was gorgeous. He was wearing his regular uniform, a pair of white jeans that somehow managed to cup his butt and practically fall off his bony hips at the same time. Work boots. And nothing else.

She wondered if he picked white because he knew that, on him, smudges of earth were paradoxically sexy, making you think he might grab you and make painful, thorny, but ecstatic and perfumed love to you in the rose garden.

Or did he just know that the white set off his tanned torso to perfection? Once, hiding here in the kitchen and looking out the window, she’d watched him hose off his dirty chest, the clear water finding that fault line down the center, the one that bisected the pectorals and ended at the navel….

She wiped her flushed brow with the back of her hand and wished that she weren’t always, always attracted to bad boys.

“You showing the place today?”

She nodded, pulling herself together. She already had one bad boy lover. She didn’t need two, not even in her fantasies.

“Yes. It starts at noon. I hope you haven’t tracked mud all over the foyer.”

“I might have.” He rubbed his chest lazily, still grinning. “It’s rained every day for two weeks. It’s like a swamp out there.”

She sighed, reached over and grabbed a damp sponge.

“Here,” she said, tossing it to him. “You can clean it up, then.”

He caught the sponge with one hand. He looked at it a minute, then squeezed it hard, until water oozed between his fingers. He rubbed it slowly over his face, and then, when it was gray with dirt, he tossed it back to her.

“Can’t,” he said. “The boxwood is only half-done. Gotta get back to it. I’ll help you with that gingerbread when you’re done. Just leave it in the stove.”

She made a face, but she wasn’t really mad. She didn’t mind if he wanted the gingerbread. She made it only to fill the air with the comforting scents of cinnamon and nutmeg during the open house.

And she didn’t even mind that he wouldn’t clean up his own muddy footprints.

That was her problem. She simply didn’t know how to get mad at a sexy rascal like that, even when he deserved it. It was, as her mother was fond of pointing out, her Achilles’ heel.

Turned out Richie had been pulling her chain anyhow. The house was spotless, and the little touch-cleaning she did was largely unnecessary. She opened a couple of windows to let the fresh spring air in. Then she dusted a couple of picture frames. Finally, she vacuumed the library’s Persian rug and the plush wall-to-wall in the master bedroom.

Done. And still an hour to go before anyone showed up. She was going to sell this house, she told herself again. Her mom had called last week and offered to let her come home to live if things got too tough up here in New York.

No way in hell was she going back home. She’d sell this house today.

Still in the master bedroom, she gazed through the lake window that led onto a small, circular overlook. From up here you could see the entire lawn. Richie was still taming the boxwood, his muscular arms hoisting the heavy clippers as if they were made of feathers.

On the other side, the west side of the house, she could just glimpse Phil and Judy Stott’s yard. They didn’t use Richie, and it showed. They were out there now, fertilizing a bulb garden that was just about played out for the season. Debra and Judy were friends, but she was glad you couldn’t see much of their yard from the ground. It wouldn’t be a selling point.

The glistening blue lake was, though, especially on a clear morning like this, when half a dozen sailboats floated out there, as white as scraps of fallen clouds.

Thank God the torrential rains had ended. Debra had been here in bad weather, and it gave the lake an eerie silvery-green cast. On stormy days, you could imagine poor Justine lying there on the mucky bottom, small fish camouflaging themselves in the waving strands of her faded hair.

What had happened to her?

This tiny balcony, for instance… The wrought-iron railing was too low. If she’d been standing here, and someone had come up behind her, it wouldn’t have taken much. One push, and she could easily have lost her balance.

But who would have pushed her? The most obvious answer, of course, would be her husband, Mike Frome. And Debra knew that wasn’t possible.