Ready & Willing (3 page)

Two

AUDREY AWOKE TO FIND SUNSHINE STREAMING THROUGH
the French doors in her bedroom and feeling more exhausted than she’d been before going to bed. It was as if she’d spent the hours between one and six, when she should have been sleeping soundly, partying instead. She even felt a little hungover, even though she hadn’t imbibed anything before bed except Chunky Monkey ice cream.

And she’d had weird dreams, too, she recalled, especially the one with Captain Summerfield. It had been so vivid at the time, but now she could only remember snippets of it. She hated dreams like that, the ones that felt so real, it was tough to shake them off in the morning. But her house now appeared to be just the way she’d left it, not the masculine domain of a dead riverboat captain. She looked over at the French doors leading to the widow’s walk and noted how the gold voile panels she’d hung there bloomed inward from the morning breeze. Funny but she thought for sure she’d closed those doors the night before. Even though the April nights had been balmy and pleasant, she wasn’t the type to leave anything in her house opened or unlocked after dark.

The April mornings were surprisingly pleasant, too, she thought further as she rose from bed, so why did she have goose bumps severe enough to make her rub her arms to warm them? After closing and latching the doors, she snagged a hoodie from one of the still-unpacked boxes and thrust her arms into it as she headed downstairs. She tossed a breathless “Good morning, Captain,” to Silas Summerfield as she passed his portrait in the landing, then—

Then spun around, because Silas Summerfield’s portrait was no longer in the landing. In its place was the Art Deco print she’d taken down in order to hang it there.

Okay, now that really was weird. She distinctly remembered hanging the painting right there the day before, and she recalled saying good night to the captain as she made her way up to bed.

Right? Wasn’t that what she’d done?

She closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead, trying to remember. Though, granted, that was a risky business before she’d had her coffee . . .

Maybe she’d hung the portrait in the second-floor landing, she told herself. She had been working awfully hard this week, and she’d been exhausted yesterday. Maybe she’d confused the second-floor landing with the third floor. Hey, it could happen. The house was in such a state of disarray that it was hard to tell one room from another. But when she rounded the stairs onto the second floor landing, there was no sign of Captain Summerfield there, either. Feeling more muddle-headed than ever, Audrey continued down the stairs to the living room. The morning sun streamed through the east-facing mullioned windows, casting mottled light on the hardwood floors and pastel Orientals, and creeping toward the ornately carved Victorian furnishings upholstered in colors as soft as the rugs. The ivory walls glowed almost gold in the creamy light, and—

And then Audrey just about jumped out of her skin, because there, suddenly, was Captain Summerfield, right in the middle of her shop. He was hanging over her fireplace where yesterday had hung an oversized and stylized logo for Finery. And that wasn’t the only thing that had been disrupted. On the mantelpiece below the logo, she’d displayed a half-dozen hats that she considered some of her best creations. A good three thousand dollars’ worth of millinery fashioned from delicate lace and feathers to beadwork that represented months of work. Now, however, they were scattered all over the floor, the obvious result of someone having angrily swept a hand across the entire row, sending all the hats flying pell-mell to the floor.

Good God! Someone had broken into her house last night! For all she knew, the intruder might still be inside!

Audrey didn’t waste any time after that. She ran straight for the front door, not caring that she was still in her pajamas and hadn’t even put on any shoes. She ran to the house next door, having been welcomed to the neighborhood by its owners her first day in her new house. Stephen and Finn owned a restaurant on Main Street that didn’t open until lunchtime, and they rented an upstairs apartment to a young woman Audrey had met only a couple of times and whose name escaped her at the moment. Surely, at least one of them would be home this morning.

In fact, all three were, but none was any more prepared to face the day than she was.

“Audrey?” Finn asked sleepily when he opened the front door. He was still in his pajamas, too, though his were paisley silk and tailored to match perfectly the robe he was knotting over them. He was in his midfifties, his blond hair liberally threaded with silver, with one of those perpetually thin frames that even being surrounded by food all day did nothing to fatten. “What’s wrong? The sun’s barely up.”

“I need to use your phone,” she told him. “Someone broke into my house last night, and I’m afraid they might still be there.”

“Oh, dear,” he said with some alarm, opening the door wider to let her in. “There’s a cordless in the kitchen. Go straight back.”

Stephen was coming down the stairs as she passed them, the utter opposite of his partner in virtually every way. Although the two men were about the same age, Stephen was a good six inches shorter than Finn, with a broad midsection and arms like barrels. And his sleepwear consisted of sweatpants and a Gold’s Gym T-shirt.

“What’s going on?” he asked. Though he was speaking not to the hastily departing Audrey, but to his partner.

“Audrey’s been burgled,” Finn said. “And we could be next.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she heard Stephen say as she reached for the phone. “We have a better security system here than we do at the restaurant.” To Audrey, he called, “We’ll give you the number of our security guy before you leave.”

She nodded as she punched 911, then dipped her head in a perfunctory greeting to Finn and Stephen’s tenant, who sat at the kitchen table in pajama pants decorated with cartoon cupcakes and a shapeless Sullivan University sweatshirt. Her boyishly short auburn hair was spiked enough to indicate that she, too, had risen from bed only recently, and faint purple crescents beneath enormous brown eyes indicated she hadn’t gotten nearly enough sleep. Neither feature detracted from her beauty, however, which was almost startling in its flawlessness. She flinched visibly at Audrey’s sudden appearance, then relaxed—a little, anyway—when she saw who it was. Still, she clutched her coffee cup tightly with both hands as she muttered a greeting, and she looked at Stephen with alarm when he entered the room behind Audrey.

Cecilia, she remembered. That was her name. She looked to be in her late twenties, but even with the superficial knowledge Audrey had of her, she’d developed the impression that Cecilia was one of those “old soul” types who seemed to claim an ample and sundry collection of life experiences. Which was strange, since she never seemed to leave her apartment.

Any further reflection on Cecilia fled, however, when the 9ll dispatcher picked up at the other end of the line. After Audrey explained what had happened and described her fear that the intruder might still be in her house, the dispatcher promised to send a car. No sooner had Stephen dug out a card from a kitchen drawer for a local security company than they saw a Louisville Metro Police car roll to a halt in the alley behind the house, its blue lights tumbling.

For a second time, Audrey related what had happened to the two uniformed officers who emerged, this time adding a few more details about the vandalized hats and the mysterious moving painting. The more she talked, however, the less concerned the two police officers seemed to be. For that matter, so did Finn and Stephen. Even Cecilia, who had become so twitchy at the prospect of a break-in next door that Audrey had begun to think she would be jolted by the appearance of a piece of lint, grew noticeably less twitchy. And, okay, Audrey supposed in the scheme of things, hat trashing and portrait shuffling probably weren’t up there with hate crimes and felony assault. It could still give a person a major wiggins.

“We’ll have a look around,” said the first officer, a sturdy-looking brunette with a sleekly arranged chignon whose nametag identified her only as Milosevic. “But I’m pretty confident whoever’s responsible is gone by now.”

Her partner, a blond, all-American-boy type who looked fresh from the academy, name-tagged Andrews, nodded in agreement. “If they’d wanted to hurt you, they would’ve had ample opportunity while you were asleep.”

Oh, that was a reassuring thought.

“I mean,” he added, “if you didn’t even hear the guy going up and down the stairs lugging a heavy painting, you wouldn’t have woken up if he’d snuck into your bedroom.”

Really
reassuring thought.

The kid smiled. “Jeez, think about it. He could’ve killed you if he wanted to. And you never would’ve known what hit—”

“Andrews,” Milosevic said sharply. “Let’s go have a look.”

Stephen leaned in close and pressed the business card into Audrey’s hand. “You might want to call the security guy today,” he said too quietly for the departing police officers to hear. “If nothing else, you can rest easy knowing Andrews can’t get in.”

Audrey nodded but said nothing. It was hard getting the words past the unmitigated terror that was lodged in her throat.

Turned out, though, the terror was for nothing. The two officers gave her house a thorough search, telling her everything, save the hats in the living room, seemed to be fine. But they wanted her to come back and do a walk-through with them, just to be sure nothing was missing. Try as Audrey might to find something, however, nothing, save Captain Summerfield and the hats in the living room, seemed to have been disturbed. Even her purse, which she’d left sitting on a chair near the fireplace in full view of anyone who might have gone in there to, oh . . . she didn’t know . . . rearrange a portrait and then sweep an angry hand across the mantelpiece to knock down three grand worth of hats . . . would have seen it. Her driver’s license, cash, and credit cards were all accounted for.

“I don’t understand,” she told the police officers as they wrote up the last few notes for their report. “Why would someone come in and mess up a bunch of hats and hang a portrait somewhere else in the house?”

The officers exchanged a look that told Audrey they didn’t think anyone had.

Oh,
fine.
No matter what they thought, she knew she hadn’t been working
that
hard. Still, it wasn’t like she could come up with a better explanation.

She cleaned up after the police officers left, doing her best to repair the damage to the hats that had been swept to the floor. Most of it was only superficial, but one or two were going to need to be reshaped. What bothered Audrey even more than any of that, though, was the fact that she couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched. She was sure it was just a byproduct of having her home broken into—skeptical police officers and neighbors notwithstanding—but there it was all the same.

When she finally sat down at her kitchen table with a cup of much needed and long overdue coffee, she was still in her pajamas. Looked like it was going to be one of those late-starting days, she couldn’t help thinking as she reached for the newspaper already opened on her table.

The newspaper she couldn’t even remember bringing in from the front walk, let alone opening on her kitchen table. But the date at the top, she noted, was today’s. Even stranger, it was open to the business section, which she usually saved for last, because it was her favorite.

She was about to fold it up again when her gaze lit on the photograph of a man who looked very much like Silas Summerfield. He had the same rakish expression, right down to the entrancing smile. The man had dark hair, too, and although it was a small photograph, somehow Audrey knew his eyes would be dark, as well. On closer inspection, however, she thought maybe it wasn’t his face that had caught her attention. Maybe it was the name under the photograph that just so happened to identify the man as Nathaniel Summerfield.

Waitaminnit. Wasn’t that the name of the great-great . . . however many greats . . . grandson Captain Summerfield had told her about in her dream last night? She closed her eyes as she tried to remember. She’d been in her house, but it had been furnished with Captain Summerfield’s things, and he’d said she was the guest, not he. Then he’d told her his great-great . . . however many greats . . . grandson was in danger for some reason. He’d been very distressed about it. What was it he’d said? That his great-great . . . however many greats . . . grandson was . . .

She opened her eyes again when she remembered. He’d said his grandson was in danger of losing his soul. Something about a shady business deal, she remembered. Something about partnering with a criminal. But she couldn’t recall the particulars. She did recall, however, that Captain Summerfield had told her she would read an article about Nathaniel in today’s paper.

Wow, had she thought her dream was weird? Prophetic was more like it. And
that
was
bizarre
.

She looked down at the paper again, at the photograph of Nathaniel Summerfield. There was a photo of another man beside him named Edward Dryden who was as nondescript and bland as Nathaniel Summerfield was charismatic and handsome. The headline above the article read: “Dryden Properties set to develop downtown lofts and retail space.” Reaching for her coffee, Audrey began to read.

When she finished, she wasn’t exactly filled with a sense of foreboding. There had been nothing out of the ordinary about the development Dryden Properties would be undertaking. And his deal with Summerfield and Associates seemed to be that he was simply a client, and that Nathaniel, an attorney, wasn’t doing much more than overseeing the legalities. It was clearly Dryden’s project. There was mention made that the city block on which the developer was planning to build had originally been on the city’s radar as property they’d wanted to develop themselves, but she didn’t see how that could lead to any soul-sucking activity. Why on earth would Silas Summerfield be worried about his great-great . . . his descendant . . . over what appeared to be a perfectly legitimate connection to a perfectly legitimate client?