She unlinked her arms and threw them wide. “But there was someone else there tonight. We saw him.” She hesitated. “Or her.”
“McPherson’s only got our word on that.”
“Okay, you’ve made your point. You know something? I think I need a drink, too.”
She marched to the refrigerator, opened it and took out the last bottle of beer. “By the way, I am well aware of the fact that you saved my life tonight.” She removed the top of the bottle. “Thank you.”
“Huh.” He drank more beer.
“True, you scared the living daylights out of me, appearing out of nowhere up there on the deck. But if you hadn’t been there, I might not have realized what the intruder was doing until it was too late.”
“You were scared? How the hell do you think I felt when I realized you had broken into the Web ouse in the middle of the night and that there was someone else inside with you?
You want to compare heart palpitations, lady?”
Best to ignore that, she decided.
“You never did tell me why you followed me,” she said after a while.
“That should be obvious. I’m renting a cabin to a woman who has a bad tendency to get into trouble in the middle of the night. An innkeeper has to take precautions when he’s dealing with guests like you.”
“You’re really pissed, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, I’m really pissed,” he growled. “You shouldn’t have gone anywhere near that damn house.”
“You know, you make it hard to be properly grateful when you take that senior-officer-chewing-out-a-subordinate attitude.”
He brooded for a moment.
“Why the hell did you go back there tonight?” he asked.
She leaned against the edge of the sink and contemplated the label on the beer bottle.
“You heard wha said to McPherson. It’s been bothering me that Pamela didn’t leave a suicide note.
Tonight, after you and Jason left after dinner, I got to thinking about it. I still had the utility room key. So I drove out t he house to take a look. The intruder interrupted me while I was searching upstairs.”
“I heard what you told McPherson.” Luke’s mouth twisted humorlessly. “I also know you lied through your teeth.”
She felt her face turn hot. “What do you mean?”
“You don’t believe Pamela committed suicide, so you didn’t go to the Webb house to look for a note.
You went looking for something else.” He paused a beat and lowered his voice.
“What’s more, I thin ou found it.”
When in doubt, stall, she thought.
“Out of curiosity, what makes you say that?” she asked.
“Call me psychic.”
“I’m no more in the mood for games than you are tonight,” she said tightly.
“You and I have spent more serious quality time together in the past couple of days than a lot of married couples do in a year. Let’s just say I’ve learned a few things about you. When I listened to you give your story to McPherson, I got a real solid hunch that you weren’t being one hundred percent straight with him.”
“We found a dead woman together, escaped from an exploding house fire set by an arsonist and conducted a couple of unpleasant conversations with the local police and a U.S. senator. You’ve go n odd notion of quality time.”
“Probably.” He watched her with a relentless expression. “You going to tell me what you found?”
Why not tell him? Unlike Sam McPherson and Ryland Webb, he was at least taking her semi-seriously.
“In the old days Pamela had a hiding place in her bedroom,” she said quietly. “A small space behind a light switch plate. That was where she kept the things that she didn’t want her father or the housekeeper to find. Not that either of them seemed to care enough to actually look for any of her secrets. At any rate, she showed the hiding place to me and made me promise never to reveal it. I got to thinking abou t tonight and decided to take a look.”
“Switch plate?” He nodded to himself. “Well, that explains the screwdriver. I wondered where yo ound it and what you planned to do with it.”
“When I heard the intruder enter the house, I realized that the screwdriver was all I had in the way of a weapon.” The beer bottle trembled in her fingers. She tightened her grip on it. “In case he found me,
you see. I didn’t know what else to do.”
Very deliberately Luke set down his bottle, removed hers from her shaking fingers and put it on the counter beside his own.
His powerful hands closed around her shoulders.
“It would have made a very good weapon, if you’d needed one,” he said. His tone was low and roug ut curiously soothing.
She realized that he was trying to comfort her. The temptation to let herself relax against that stron all of reassurance and understanding was almost overwhelming.
Common sense smashed through her. This was not good, she thought. She had spent years cultivatin he self-control that protected her. Damned if she would fall apart now in front of this man—a man she barely knew, quality time or not.
“The screwdriver wouldn’t have been much use against that inferno of a house fire,”
she said evenly.
He moved his hands upward from her shoulders, cradling her face between his palms. “What did yo ind in the Webb house tonight?”
She exhaled slowly and reached into the front pocket of her s black jeans. “Nothing that looks like a terrifically useful clue. Which is why I didn’t mention it to Sam McPherson.”
She withdrew the key and held it out to him on her palm. ”
He lowered his hands from her face and picked up the key.
“Any idea what this opens?” he asked, examining it closely.
She shook her head. “No. Looks like a very ordinary key, doesn’t it?”
“Ordinary is right. A key like this could open anything. House, storage locker, toolshed, garage.” He frowned a little. “It’s a high-quality key, though. The kind you can’t get duplicated, at least not at th sual instant key-making places. Someone spent some money to have an expensive piece of hardware installed somewhere.”
“There’s no way of knowing when Pamela stashed it behind the light switch plate,”
she said. “For al know she tucked it away years ago and forgot about it.” She hesitated, thinking.
“Except—”
“Except what?”
“It looks new, don’t you think? It’s still bright and shiny. It hasn’t had a chance to get scratched or dulled with use. Also, there was a thin coating of dust on the inside of the junction box, but none on the key. Wouldn’t you think that if it had been sitting inside that wall for several years it would have collected some dust?”