Secrets Of Bella Terra (10 page)

“You have delivered. I swim every day.” Ebrillwen shook Rafe’s hand firmly. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Mr. Di Luca.”
None of it favorable
, her tone implied, and her eyes did not warm.

Not that he expected every woman to fawn over him.

But they usually did.

So he made a judgment: Miss Jones had broad shoulders and a narrow waist that gave her an inverted-triangle shape, and all she needed was jodhpurs and a riding crop to be the caricature of a British boarding school principal. This woman would respond to straight talk from him. “Mrs. Jones, during my stay, I’ll be working in town and here at the resort, looking for clues about what happened to my grandmother, Sarah Di Luca. I imagine you know your staff better than anyone, and if you can offer me any assistance, if you’ve seen anything suspicious, I’d be grateful for your guidance.”

Ebrillwen’s dark eyes narrowed on him. “When I arrived, we had many hooligans here.”

He got the feeling she was including him in her condemnation.

She continued. “But I cleared out the staff and rehired to my taste, and for the most part I would stake my reputation on their trustworthiness. My young men and women are reliable.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Jones,” Brooke said, and started to turn away.

“However.” Mrs. Jones stopped them with a single, sharply intoned word. “I see sloppiness in other areas in the resort. If Miss Petersson would give me a free hand over the spa staff and the gardening staff, I could whip them into shape.”

Brooke stood straight, looked her right in the eyes, and said, “Ebrillwen, when I need someone to take over the supervision of the spa and the garden, you’ll be the first to know.”

Mrs. Jones nodded stiffly. “Miss Petersson, I hope I didn’t offend.”

Brooke’s smile was nothing short of snappish. “I take stock of my employees on a regular basis and do occasionally revise my opinion of their competence. Keep that in mind, please.”

It was a threat . . . and a promise of retribution. He had no idea his Brooke could command with such authority—or frighten a woman as intimidating as Ebrillwen Jones.

“Of course.” Mrs. Jones inclined her head.

Brooke walked out of the room, leaving Rafe staring after her in amazement.

“Mr. Di Luca?” Mrs. Jones said. “I will contact you if I recognize any problem with my staff.”

By that she meant she’d have to see someone wiping their bloody switchblade on a corpse before she’d report any discrepancies to him. “As Miss Petersson just pointed out to me, it would be more appropriate if you report to her.”

“Yes, I believe that’s correct.” Frost dripped from every word.

He hurried after Brooke, catching up with her as she strode out the door and into the gardens. “You’re a formidable woman,” he said.

“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t undermine my authority among the staff that I supervise. I realize you’re on the hunt, and I have the greatest sympathy and desire that you succeed in finding Sarah’s attacker. At the same time, I require the staff to report to me, not you. In the case of the gardening crew, which is predominantly men, there’s already a tendency to want to dismiss my authority.” Brooke stopped, turned to face him, and pointed her finger in his face. “I do not have the time to complete my duties at Bella Terra, call my mother every day, and spend time making sure your grandmother has everything she needs at the hospital if I have to follow around after you and reestablish my authority here!”

Man. He hadn’t faced a woman so coldly angry since basic training and his first smart-ass remark to a female drill sergeant. “I’ll make sure that anyone I speak to knows I’m doing so with your permission.”

“Good idea. And don’t countermand my command while I’m standing there.” Swinging on her heel, she strode up the path again.

As he followed, he mused that he should be ashamed for being more concerned with the shape of her ass than the weight of her authority.

Y
et Rafe followed Brooke, watched the way her shoulders took on the erect posture he associated with the military.

Yep. She was mad.

He supposed she had the right.

So he let the spring air cool her cheeks, and watched the dappled sunlight as it slid golden fingers over her dark hair and down her back. When the path widened and he judged she’d had a moment to regain her composure, he caught up with her. “You don’t need to spend all your extra time taking care of my family. I can go back to the hospital tonight and take care of my grandmother.”

“No, you can’t.” Brooke glanced at him and shook her head as if he were nothing but a big, bumbling idiot. “Because of the concussion, they don’t want her standing on her own yet. You can’t help her to the bathroom when she wants to go. You can’t help her keep her cast dry while she showers.”

“I’m a tough guy,” he said with a full helping of irony. “I can do it.”

“She’d hate it. Whether you like it or not, she needs me.”

“It’s not that I don’t like it. It’s that I don’t like taking advantage of you.” In the sunlight, Brooke looked weary and a little sad, as if recent events and resort duties were taking their toll.

She shrugged off his concern. “I choose to do what I do. It’s only for a little while, only until Nonna is out of the hospital. Then Noah will hire a private nurse and I’ll visit less frequently.”

“Why don’t the nurses at the hospital do this stuff?”

Incredulous, Brooke asked, “Do you have any idea how overworked and understaffed they are at that hospital? They’ll give her care, sure, and they’re good at what they do, but there are so many patients and so few nurses.” Taking a long breath, she turned to face him. “Look. Every time I walk in there and she’s not in her bed—the nurses have her sitting on the sunporch, or she’s up in X-ray, or someone has helped her to the bathroom—my heart skips a beat. I know I’m overreacting, but my God, Rafe. If you could have seen her on the floor of the kitchen, blood oozing out of her scalp and her arm shattered. And she was on the phone! Somehow she had thought to call your aunts and they were talking to her, encouraging her to hang in there. When I see families like yours, taking care of one another, it’s, well, it’s cool. You know that. I’ve thought that forever.”

“Yes. I remember.” He remembered far too well.

“Your grandmother always made me feel part your family, and I don’t want her to have to wait for her bath or to get ready for bed. So I do what I can. That’s all. Don’t get hung up on thinking the reason I’m doing it is that I’m guilty, or the reason I’m doing it is that I’m a saint. It makes me feel good, like I’m repaying someone who has gone out of her way to be kind to me.”

“Hm.” This he believed. But he was a man who dealt in solutions. He knew how to ease Brooke’s fears and take the burden off her shoulders.

She must have heard something in his voice, for she asked, “What? Rafe?” But before she could pin him down, they broke out of the well-tended jungle of native plants and into the pool area.

The complex had been Noah’s idea, to build a recreational center that consisted of three interconnected pools with waterslides, rocky waterfalls shadowed by exotic vegetation, and a river that wound around the perimeter. A retractable roof covered two of the pools, making them an attraction in the winter, and the atmosphere was more like Hawaii than central California.

Rafe stopped at the edge of the first pool and took a deep breath. It smelled tropical, warm, welcoming.

His little brother was some smart son of a bitch. He knew what worked, what made people shake their troubles off their shoulders and relax.

Brooke was oblivious. “Part of the gardening crew is always working in the pool area. With children visiting the resort, we have vegetation emergencies on a regular basis.”

“Vegetation emergencies?” Rafe lifted his brows.

“Kids falling in bushes, kids eating leaves and berries, and parents freaking out and threatening to sue.”

“Shouldn’t the parents watch their children?”

“What a revolutionary idea.” Brooke had perfected her deadpan delivery. “But since that doesn’t always happen, we have gardeners here who extricate the children, and explain that we have no poisonous flora at the resort while dialing our on-staff nurse. In their spare time, the gardeners work on the planters.” She glanced around until she located a group of three men dressed in dark khaki uniforms. “I’ll introduce you.”

The man giving orders was about fifty, with black skin, long, curly hair, colorful tattoos up and down his arms and neck, broad, deep shoulders, and a barrel chest. He nodded as they approached, held up one finger to indicate patience, and continued speaking to his men in a slow, deep, Southern-accented voice. When he had finished giving his instructions, he ambled over and said, “What can I do for you, Ms. Petersson?”

“Rafe, this is Zachary Adams. He’s in charge of keeping our grounds groomed.”

Zachary removed his glove and offered a broad hand, cracked and rough with calluses. “You’re the Di Luca who’s in security. I imagine you’re here to investigate the attack on the elderly Mrs. Di Luca.”

“That’s right.” Rafe knew more than a few people would speculate correctly, and the shrewd expression in Zachary’s eyes proved he’d put all the pieces together. “How many people do you have working for you?”

“Full-time, twenty men, five women. Right now, springtime, I add another five hands temporarily to try to keep up with the weeds.”

“And the gophers,” Brooke added.

“It’s a constant running battle with the gophers. We clean out one nest and ten more pop up.” Zachary looked disgusted. “Worst spring we’ve had. I’ve got the exterminators in to take care of the fuzzy little bastards.”

“I understand one of your gardeners disappeared the day my grandmother was hit.”

“Luis Hernández. Yeah. But he didn’t have it in him to strike an elderly woman, especially not that one. That guy was not too bright, but he was a good gardener who liked his plants. I always put him on the crew to go up to Mrs. Di Luca’s and work on her yard. He was amiable. He was religious, Catholic. She liked him, and she has a good gut about people.”

Yeah, she did. “What’d he look like?” Rafe asked.

“Hispanic, six-foot, a little overweight.”

“Family?”

“No one around here. Had a mama in L.A. Maybe he went back home.” But Zachary frowned as if he didn’t believe his own theory.

“He was worried about something,” Brooke said.

Zachary shook his head. “Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t babysit my people. I expect them to do the work and handle their own lives.”

“Anybody else you’d suspect?” Rafe asked.

“Most of the guys I hire have a record.” Zachary met Rafe’s eyes. “Hell, I have a record. But I pick out my workers pretty carefully, stay away from the violent types, stick with the petty thieves and marijuana smokers. I figure we all deserve a second chance.”

A guy dressed in the gardeners’ dark khaki came up the walk. He hesitated when he saw the group, but Zachary gestured him over. “What is it, Josh?”

“Excuse me, Mr. Adams, Miss Petersson.” Josh’s gaze skimmed Rafe in acknowledgment. “The gophers have made it into the planter between the kiddie pool and the playground equipment.” He was young, lightly tanned, blond with blue eyes, as sober as if he’d announced the return of the black plague.

“Damn it!” Zachary’s voice was virulent, but quiet. “We’ll have to shut the area, go in at night, and clean them out.” To Rafe, he said, “We can’t kill gophers in front of the kids.”

“Right.” Rafe nodded.

“Do you want me to stay late tonight to help?” Josh asked. “I can always use the overtime.”

“Good. You’re on,” Zachary said.

Rafe watched him walk away. “Why does he need the overtime?”

“Josh Hoffman is one of our local hires,” Brooke said. “After high school, he was in and out of college. Worked around the country a little, and now he’s saving to go back. Figures he’ll have enough by next fall.”

“Too bad, really. He works hard, doesn’t squirm at the tough stuff. I would have never thought it. Most of the locals don’t like to get their hands dirty.” Zachary glanced at the guys weeding the flower bed and bellowed, “Not those! We just planted those marigolds.”

The guys froze.

Zachary turned back to Rafe and Brooke. “Listen, I’ll keep an eye out for you, an ear cocked for conversations. If I stumble on anything suspicious, I’ll let you know. Now I’ve got to go before my temps take out everything we planted last week.”

After Zachary walked away, Rafe said, “I like him.”

“I like him, too.” Brooke started up a different path.

“Straightforward. Smart.” Rafe followed and made his educated guess. “Did time for a murder, right?”

Her step faltered. “Maybe.”

“That’s an answer in itself, Brooke. Don’t sweat it. I work with guys like him—the ones who learn their lesson, pay their penance, and go forward with their lives. We fight the ones who discover they like violence, and go out to kill again.”

She stopped by a small stucco cottage set off the path, with marigolds in the window box and a sturdy black door with a lock. “You’ve met the supervisors and a few of the workers. Do you think anyone is violent?”

“If it were that easy, I’d be out of a job. I know Nonna said her attacker was a white man about six feet tall. I also know that almost every person, male and female, that I’ve met today, was white and about six feet tall.”

Brooke viewed him as if he’d lost his mind. “Zachary is not white.”

“It’s easy to buy a pale mask and gloves. And your Ebrillwen Jones could easily dress the part of a man.”

“The criminal could be, as DuPey said, a drifter.”

“Do you believe that?”

“It could be.”

“That’s also an answer in itself, Brooke.” Deliberately, he loomed over her. “I wish you would tell me what you know.”

Naturally, she wasn’t intimidated at all. “Believe me or not, I don’t care. But I don’t know anything about the attack on your grandmother.”

He couldn’t believe that she did, and yet—something was wrong. Something was off. Brooke was lying to him, daring his disbelief. And why?