Shadowed Paradise (28 page)

Claire murmured an appropriate response, then
dragged her feet back to her computer. For a long time she simply
stared at the screen, not seeing the rows of figures on the
database. Her vision was filled with Ken Millard towering over
diminutive Maggie McKinnon, his height, his masculinity
overshadowing her, overpowering her . . .

Claire shuddered, blinked. The screen came
back in focus. Her imagination was on hyperdrive, her job stuck on
idle. Grimly, she settled down to merging and printing two hundred
invoices.

Virginia Bentley was lying in wait for her
granddaughter when Claire came through the door. Ginny stopped
scraping carrots and exiled Jamie to the swing that hung from a
giant live oak in the yard below.

“
You can’t sit model homes out back of
beyond,” Ginny stated without preamble, wiping her hands on her
apron. “It’s out of the question.”

“
Brad has his life savings tied up in
that development. I
have
to
sit the models.”

“
Brad will just have to find a man for
the job.”

“
No.” Claire had inherited Ginny’s
stubbornness.

“
Claire Hilliard, you’ll listen to your
grandmother! I’ve been around a half century longer than you have,
and I know what I’m talking about. Sitting those models is sheer
lunacy!”

Wordlessly, Claire bent down to retrieve a
bottle of gin from under the counter and proceeded to fix them both
a gin and tonic, Ginny Bentley’s favorite drink for a hot summer
afternoon. “Let’s sit down a minute,” Claire suggested, leading the
way into the greatroom.

“
Brad and I have discussed it at
length,” she admitted when they had each settled into their
favorite chairs. “I’ll only work the models while Brad and the
construction workers are on site. I’ll never be alone. Until the
first model is finished I’ll be in a small construction trailer,
right in front of the model the crews are working on. It’s going to
have a phone, a computer and a fax machine. When the crew is
through, I’m through. That’s usually around four o’clock. We won’t
catch the after-work crowd, but that can’t be helped. We’ll get
them on the weekends instead.”

“
You can’t work seven days a week,”
Ginny protested, eagerly seizing upon this additional
objection.

“
We’re going to be open Wednesday
through Sunday until we can afford to hire extra help. Jamie can be
with us on weekends, and after school. We want you to have some
peace and quiet again.” Dear lord, Claire thought, she was spouting
all the arguments Brad had used on her.

“
I’ll have plenty of peace and quiet if
you’re both dead,” Ginny snapped. As the silence lengthened, she
sighed. “So you’re going to marry him, are you?”

“
It begins to look that way,” Claire
murmured. “Brad’s rather like a bulldozer, he just rolls right over
objections, doubts—”

“
You have doubts?” Ginny asked
sharply.

Claire took a long sip of her drink, stared
out over the sparkling blue of the bay. “Only about myself,” she
admitted softly. “I never thought to stay here. Everything is so
different, so . . . foreign. There are the tourists, the retirees,
and then there’s the real Florida. The people who work here, the
ones who know what it’s really like. I’ve caught a glimpse of that
world, and I’m not sure I can live with it, that I’ll ever fit
in.”

“
Are you being a snob,
child?”

“
Possibly.”

“
I thought you loved him.”

Claire chuckled. “There speaks the romance
novelist.”

“
Well, don’t you?”

“
I adore him. I’m mad about him. And,
yes, I can’t live without him. So I’m stuck, right?”

“
Your romanticism overwhelms me.”
Sarcasm dripped from the woman who had made a fortune writing about
a myriad loves of a lifetime.

Claire procrastinated. “Just give me a little
more time to lick my wounds. If I take on Brad Blue, it’s for life,
and I want to be sure I know what I’m doing. That’s another reason
I have to sit his models. I’ll be working with him every day, and
I’ll be working out there in his jungle, which fascinates me but
also scares me. I need to find out if I can take it. If I can live
with a Florida cracker. Does that make sense?”

Ginny Bentley hauled herself up out of her
favorite chair and gave her granddaughter a hug. “Yes, it does, but
that doesn’t keep me from being terrified.”

After Ginny returned to the kitchen, Claire
stood at one of the windows and looked down on Jamie happily
swinging below, one grubby sneaker deliberately plowing a furrow
into the sandy soil. What was right for Jamie? For herself?

Did they really have a choice?

She lusted after Brad Blue. The alternative
was endless loneliness, for no other man could ever measure up.
Jamie needed a father. Ginny needed a rest. There was the exciting
challenge of working with Brad to build a Florida-friendly
community, a satisfying task that truly appealed to her. The
northern invasion could not be stopped. It was far better for the
new Floridians to live with their environment than pave it over and
turn it into just another bit of suburban blight only partially
concealed by a few strategically placed palms and hibiscus
bushes.

And yet . . .

There were alligators, snakes, spiders,
attack ants whose bites raised blisters and had been known to kill.
Vultures munched on the daily road kill of raccoons, possums and
armadillos. The sinister black birds were so accustomed to the
advance of so-called civilization they didn’t even lift their heads
as cars whizzed by.

And now it was possible some two-legged
critter might want to kill her.

Would she ever be
free?
Of bitterness, anguished memories, terror,
guilt? Was there any hope at all?

“
Am I crazy?” Claire demanded later
that evening as she and Brad sat on a sofa in the cozy elegance of
Palm Court’s living room. “The day Ken and I had lunch at the
jetties he was so fussy, so precise, so
weird
, my hair stood on end.”

Brad raised one shaggy blond brow.
“Would you prefer that your accountant
not
be precise?” he inquired mildly.

“
Oh, for heaven’s sake, you know what I
mean!”

“
I may be relieved to hear he doesn’t
turn you on, but that doesn’t make him a murderer.” When Claire’s
only response was an inelegant snort, Brad caught her chin between
his fingers, tilting it up to meet his quizzical smile. “Believe
me, my love, I’ve known Ken Millard since he was a myopic
six-year-old. He’s about as harmless as they come.

My love
. Was
she really? Claire wondered. The words came so easily, she could
hear the phrase echoing from his lips through years of other women,
other loves. Hope whispered he meant it, however lightly the words
slipped out, but her heart had doubts. Like some old pendulum
clock, she swung first one way, then the other. Tick.
Tock.

Strong. Weak.

Brave. Fearful.

Embrace love. Run like hell.

Brad’s callused fingers still lingered on
Claire’s chin. “Okay,” he said lightly, “we won’t dismiss old Ken,
or any of my off-the-wall hunches either.” He removed his hand and
leaned back into the cocoon of the soft brocaded upholstery. “As
long as we’re tossing pies in the sky, do you have any other
suspects in mind?”

“
There’s no need to be
patronizing.”

“
Patronizing? Me?” Brad exploded.
“You’re female. You’re in the real estate business. If you weren’t
smart enough to realize the killer could be someone you know, you
never would have thought of Ken. So take a minute and see if you
can think of anyone else who might be harboring a sick
soul.”

As much as Claire resented Brad’s dismissing
her doubts about Ken Millard, he had a point. If not Ken, then the
killer was likely someone closely associate with the real estate
community. But of course she had to play devil’s advocate. “Maybe
he just finds Realtors an easy mark.”

“
Maybe. But do me a favor. Expand your
horizons beyond Ken.”

“
Okay,” Claire sighed. “There was an
odd incident about a month ago. I helped Maggie McKinnon do a
market evaluation on a mobile home. We’d just gotten the first
warning about using the buddy system, so Jake Spanos went with
Maggie on the listing appointment. When they got there, the owner
was all biceps and beard, slumped down in this big old chair, with
a shotgun lying on the floor right by his fingertips. I know that
doesn’t mean much, but surely he’s worth checking out.”

“
No law against having a shotgun in
your home,” Brad pointed out, reasonably enough. “The circumstances
were spooky but scarcely illegal. You have a name on this
character?”

“
It’s still on my computer. I’ll call
you in the morning.” And may Phil Tierney never find out who made
trouble for a potential client.

“
I’ll have the police run him through
their files, see if he has a record,” Brad said, “but I have a
feeling our killer comes in a smoother package. Someone charming
enough, and good looking enough, to keep women from exercising
their usual caution.”

“
You’re probably right,” Claire sighed.
“From what Maggie says, the shotgun guy was a real mess. Guaranteed
to scare almost anyone half to death.”

Brad’s bare heels dug into the thick beige
carpet as he stretched his long legs. “So what we’ve got,” he
declared, “is jackshit. Four dead Realtors and an unidentified
elderly female skeleton in Pine Grove and not a decent clue among
’em.”

“
You think the skeleton that dog found
was part of all this?”

“
I don’t know. The sheriff thinks I’m
nuts, but for some gut reason I think there could be a connection
between the bones in the Grove and the Realtor murders.”

“
Vicky DelVecchio said it was probably
a case where some retiree’s wife died and he buried her himself so
he could enjoy both their Social Security checks.”

“
Trust Vicky to take the cynic’s view.
Her theory’s probably better than mine, but somehow bells keep
going off. My hunch is so strong I can taste it.”

“
Like I have about Ken Millard,” Claire
murmured provocatively.

Brad’s lips curled in derision. “Poor old
Ken. He can’t help it if he sees the world and everyone in it as a
neat set of figures.”

“
He certainly noticed Maggie McKinnon’s
figure,” Claire retorted. “He’s asked her out to supper. At The
Pelican.”

“
Good for him,” Brad chuckled. “There’s
life in the poor boy after all.”

He could laugh about Ken Millard all he
wanted, Claire thought, but she wasn’t about to write the
accountant off as a suspect. “So what are you going to do?” she
challenged. “What about all this high-tech forensic stuff? DNA and
semen matches, things like that?”

“
Matches with what? Do you expect us to
hold clinics where we line up all the men in two counties and test
them?”

“
Sorry.”

“
Apologies are mine,” said Brad, making
a show of raising her hand to his lips and casually fitting his
reply between kissing her fingers one by one. “My frustration is
showing. Yes, my dear Ms. Langdon, we’re getting a more than ample
collection of forensic evidence. If we ever come up with a suspect
for crossmatch, we should have him cold.”

Never mind that she felt those kisses
in regions far removed from her fingers
.
Stick to the subject, Langdon. The life you save may be your
own
. “Have you been down to Pine Grove yet?” she
asked, struggling to match Brad’s nonchalant tone.

“
Fat chance I can find anything
forensics missed. They’ve sifted the crime scene as finely as an
ancient burial mound. But I still want to go down there and take a
look.”

“
Can I come?”

Two shades of blue eyes met, and held.
“Tomorrow’s a work day,” Brad countered, “or have you given Phil
notice?”

Claire ignored his lack of enthusiasm. “So
we’ll go after work.” She was certain she heard his teeth
grind.

“
Fine. Tomorrow, five o’clock. I’ll
pick you up at T & T.”

Much later, as Claire floated up the ramp to
her grandmother’s house, she realized her sense of well-being
wasn’t solely due to great sex. She had stood up to the macho
manipulator and he hadn’t yelled, balked or even said no.

Claire was back to clutching the pickup’s
shoulder harness the next afternoon as they made the ten-mile trip
to Pine Grove in what she was certain was record time. After all
the stories she’d heard about Pine Grove’s abandoned streets, its
ghost town atmosphere, her first glimpse of the cluster of
unpretentious storefront businesses along the Tamiami Trail was
disappointing. A wide place on the Trail, pretending to be a town.
Nothing eerie about it.At the town’s sole stoplight Brad turned
right, driving over a broad canal, and suddenly they were in an
area of stuccoed ranch-style homes that would not have looked out
of place among their more affluent neighbors in Golden Beach. So
where were Pine Grove’s spooky roads to nowhere?

Another mile, another canal, and then .
. .
nothing
but wilderness.
Not even other cars. Stretched out at right angles on either side
of the narrow road were long-abandoned streets, each two or three
blocks long, leading straight as an arrow into the heart of the
Florida wilderness. Clumps of grass sprouted between cracks in the
pavement. Jungle greenery had crept back, overhanging the macadam
slashes into its heart. Incredibly, each of these overgrown
straight lines to nowhere had its own street sign, neat white
letters on a green background, as if the streets planned by the
long-defunct developers were thriving areas of Pine Grove suburbia.
Beyond eerie, Claire thought. Almost other worldly.