Trust No One (4 page)

Grace was quite certain that Julius’s money was not the old kind. He had the edge of a self-made man—the kind of man who was accustomed to fighting for what he wanted.

“The house you bought used to be owned by your neighbor, Harley Montoya,” she said. “I was surprised to hear that he had sold it. He’s owned that property and the house he lives in for nearly a decade.”

“Harley says it’s time to downsize. What about you? Planning to stick around Cloud Lake?”

“For a while. Now that I’m unemployed I need to watch every penny. Mom kept the lake house after she and Kirk retired but they
only use it during the summer. They suggested that I save rent money by living here until I figure out my new career path.”

“Where do they live now?” Julius asked.

“They moved to Scottsdale a couple of years ago. Mom sold her gift shop here in Cloud Lake and Kirk turned over his insurance business to his sons. At the moment Mom and Kirk are on a world cruise.”

“Irene said you have a sister?”

“Alison, yes. She’s a lawyer in Portland.”

“So you intend to stay here in Cloud Lake only until you get your act together?”

“That’s the plan,” Grace said.

“What’s your strategy?”

She blinked. “I thought I just explained my plan.”

Julius shot her an amused glance. “I’m talking about your strategy for finding a new career path.”

“Oh, that.” She flushed. “I’m still working on it.”

She didn’t owe him any explanations, she reminded herself.

“You must have some thoughts on the subject,” he said.

“Actually, no, I don’t,” she said, going for a frosty, back-off tone. “My life has been somewhat complicated lately.”

“I know. Must have been tough finding the body of your boss the way you did.”

She hesitated, not sure she wanted to go down that particular conversational path.

“I try not to think about it,” she said coolly.

“The Witherspoon Way will collapse without Witherspoon at the helm.”

She crossed her arms and gazed fixedly at the pavement through the windshield.

“Trust me, all of us who worked for Sprague Witherspoon are aware of that,” she said.

“You need a job. Sounds like your problem is pretty straightforward.”

“Is that right? And just when, exactly, was the last time you found yourself out of work?”

To her surprise he pondered that briefly.

“It’s been a while,” he admitted.

She gave him a steely smile. “In other words, you really have no idea whatsoever about the current job market, let alone how complicated my particular situation might be.”

“How did you find the job with Witherspoon?”

The question caught her off guard. “I sort of stumbled into it. That’s usually how I find a new job.”

“You stumbled into working for a motivational speaker?”

“Well, yes. A year and a half ago I was looking for a new direction. I decided to attend a Witherspoon Way seminar hoping to get some ideas. After Sprague Witherspoon talked to the audience I waited around to speak to him.”

“About what?” Julius sounded genuinely curious.

“While Sprague was giving his seminar on positive thinking, I came up with some ideas about how he could take his concepts in different directions.” She unfolded her arms and spread her hands. “To my surprise, he listened to me. The next thing I knew, he was offering me a job. Once I was on board he let me have free rein. Working for the Witherspoon Way was the best job I’ve ever had.”

“Just how many jobs have you had?”

“A lot.” She sighed. “It’s embarrassing, to tell you the truth. And it makes for a sketchy résumé. Some job-hopping is okay but beyond a certain point it makes you look—”

“Flighty. Unreliable. Undependable.”

She winced. “All of the above. My sister knew that she wanted to be a lawyer by the time she was a senior in high school. But here I am, still searching for a career path that will last longer than eighteen months.”

“You’ve got a problem,” Julius said. “You need a business plan.”

She stared at him. “A business plan for landing a job?”

“As far as I can tell, everything in life works better if you have a good, well-thought-out plan.”

It was all she could do not to laugh. He sounded so serious.

“Are you talking about a five-year plan?” she asked lightly. “Because I don’t think Mom will give me free rent for five years.”

“Not a five-year plan—not for finding a career. More like a three-months-at-the-outside strategy. If you’re serious about this you need to set goals and meet them.”

“I’ve never been much of a long-term planner,” she said.

“No kidding. I would not have guessed that.”

She gave him a cold smile. “Sprague Witherspoon said that one of my assets was that I think outside the box.”

“There’s thinking outside the box and then there’s failing to be able to find the box in the first place. You can’t appreciate the new model until you understand the old one and why it isn’t working anymore.”

Irritation sparkled through her. “Gosh, maybe you should go into the self-help business. That sounds a lot like one of the Witherspoon Way affirmations.”

“What’s an affirmation?”

“It’s a shortcut to positive thinking. A good affirmation helps focus the mind in a productive, optimistic way.”

“Give me an example,” Julius said.

“Well, say you had a bad day at work—”

“Let’s go with something more concrete. Say you found yourself at a dinner party with friends who set you up with a boring blind date.
What kind of affirmation would you use to help you think positive about the situation?”

She went very still. “Probably better not to get too concrete.”

“I’m a businessman. I deal in concrete facts.”

“Fine,” she shot back. “You want an affirmation for this date? How about,
Things are always darkest before the dawn
? Will that work for you?”

“I don’t think that’s a Witherspoon Way affirmation. Pretty sure it’s been around for a while.”

“Got a better one?”

“I don’t do affirmations. I’ve got a couple of rules that I never break but neither of them fits our current situation.”

“Here’s my place,” she said quickly.

But he was already slowing for the turn into the tree-lined driveway that led to the small, neat house at the edge of the lake. He brought the SUV to a halt in front of the wraparound porch and shut down the engine.

The lights were still on in Agnes Gilroy’s house next door. The drapes were pulled but Grace was certain that Agnes was peering through the curtains. Agnes possessed a deep and abiding interest in the doings of her neighbors. She was bound to have heard the unfamiliar rumble of the car in the driveway.

“Thanks for the ride home,” Grace said. She unbuckled her safety belt and reached for the door handle. “Nice meeting you. I’m sure we’ll run into each other in town. Don’t bother getting out of the car. I can manage just fine on my own.”

She could tell that he was not paying attention to her less-than-sparkling chatter. He sat, unmoving, his strong, competent hands resting on the wheel, and contemplated the house as if he had never seen one.

“I had a career plan by the time I was eleven years old,” he said.

“Yep, I’m not surprised.” She got the car door open, grabbed the edges of the trench coat and prepared to jump down to the ground. “I had you pegged as one of those.”

“One of those what?”

“One of those folks who always knows where he’s going.” She gripped the handhold and plunged off the seat. For an instant she hovered precariously in midair. Relief shot through her when she landed on both feet. She turned and looked back at him. “Must be nice.”

He popped open his own door, uncoiled from behind the wheel and circled the front of the vehicle. He got to her before she reached the porch steps.

“It helps to know what you want,” he said. “It clarifies choices and streamlines the decision matrix.”

The cool, calculating way he watched her sent a little chill down her spine. Or was it a thrill? The possibility made her catch her breath.
Wrong time and probably the wrong man.
Send him on his way.

“What was your career plan at eleven?” she said, instead.

“I wanted to get rich.”

She paused to search his face in the porch light. “Why?”

“Because I figured out that money gives a man power.”

“Over others?”

He considered that and then shrugged. “Maybe. Depending on the situation. But that wasn’t why I wanted to get rich.”

She watched him closely. “You wanted control over your own life.”

“Yeah, that about sums it up.”

“That’s a perfectly reasonable objective. It seems to have worked out well for you. Congratulations. Good night, Julius.”

She hitched the strap of her purse over her shoulder and walked quickly toward the front porch steps. The relentless crunch of gravel behind her made her stop in mid-stride. When she turned to confront him, he stopped, too.

“It’s okay,” she said briskly. “You don’t need to see me to my door.”

“I said I’d take you home. You’re not home until you’re inside the house.”

For some reason, anger crackled through her. “I’m not your responsibility.”

“You are until you’re home.” He waited.

She gripped her keys very tightly. “I can’t believe I just snapped at you because you’re trying to do the gentlemanly thing. I apologize. Jeez. Where are my manners? Sorry. I’m a little tense these days. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” He stood there in the moonlight as if he was willing to wait until dawn for her to make the next move.

“Right,” she said. “The door.”

She turned again and hurried up the steps. Julius followed her across the front porch, keeping a little distance between them, careful not to crowd her.

She dug the keys out of her purse, got the door open, stepped across the threshold and flipped the wall switch. Two lamps came up, revealing the warm, casually comfortable space. Her mother had been in what Grace and Alison referred to as her Rustic Retreat phase when she last redecorated.

The wooden floors were burnished with age. Two overstuffed chairs and a deep sofa upholstered in dark brown leather were positioned on a honey-colored area rug. A large brass basket on the stone hearth held kindling for the cold, dark fireplace.

Several landscapes featuring quaint cottages, wooden docks and old boathouses around the shores of Cloud Lake hung on the walls. Visitors rarely noticed that there was no painting of the most picturesque structure on the lake, the long-abandoned Cloud Lake Inn.

Grace turned around a second time to confront Julius. In the glare of the front porch light his gold-brown eyes were heavily shadowed.
She could see that he was drinking in every detail of the living room behind her. She searched for a word to describe what she thought she detected in his expression and came up with
hungry
.

Don’t go there, she told herself. If you feed him he might hang around. This was not a good time for her to be taking in strays. She was not here to fix Julius Arkwright. If she did, he would probably walk away like all the others.

And this man just might be the one she would regret setting free.

She opened her mouth to thank him politely and bid him good night.

“Would you like to come in for some herbal tea?” she heard herself say instead.

T
hanks,” he said. He moved across the threshold and closed the door. “I don’t think I’ve ever had herbal tea. Sounds . . . interesting.”

For a few seconds she could only stand there, shocked at what she had just done. When she realized that he was watching her, waiting for her to make the next move, she pulled herself together. She hadn’t offered to feed him, she thought. It was just tea.

“Tea,” she said. She turned on her heel. “Kitchen.”

She dropped her clutch on one of the overstuffed chairs and went into the big, old-fashioned kitchen. Through the airy curtains she could see the moonstruck surface of the water. Here and there the lights of some of the lakefront houses glittered in the trees. A long necklace of low lamps marked the footpath that circled the lake.

She discovered she had to concentrate just to remember how to boil the water in the kettle.

She switched on the gas burner and reminded herself again that it was just tea. The fact that for some reason she was feeling a little rush
of edgy exhilaration was probably going to be a problem later. But at that moment she did not care.

Julius lounged against the tiled countertop and folded his arms. He somehow managed to make it look as if he was entirely at home in her kitchen—as if he was in the habit of spending a lot of time there. He watched her pluck two tea bags out of a glass canister.

“What’s in that tea you’re fixing?” he asked.

“Chamomile,” she said. “It’s supposed to promote restful sleep.”

“I usually use a medicinal dose of whiskey.”

She smiled. “I’ve been known to resort to that particular medication on occasion, myself.”

“Had some bad nights recently?”

Very deliberately she positioned the tea bags in two mugs.

“A few,” she conceded. “You were right. Finding my employer’s body was a shock.”

“I followed some of the reports in the media,” he said. “The story caught my attention because the Witherspoon Way was a rising star in the Pacific Northwest business world.”

She shook her head. “And now it’s all gone. Everything that Sprague built will soon disappear.”

“That’s the problem with any business that is founded on a personality rather than a product. Celebrities, athletes, actors—same story. They might rake in millions while they’re working but if something happens to them, the whole company implodes.”

The teakettle whistled. Grace switched off the burner and poured the hot water into the mugs.

“When it comes to the motivational seminar business, it’s definitely all about the charisma of the person at the top,” she said.

“So you’re unemployed.”

“Again.” She put one of the mugs down on the counter next to Julius. “I’m an underachiever. No other word for it. It’s time I got my
act together. I just wish I knew what I really wanted to do in life. Every time I get a glimmer of a career path, something happens to make me swerve in another direction.”

“Like the closing down of the Witherspoon Way?”

“Well, yes.”

“I planned out a future once.”

“You said you knew where you were going from the age of eleven.” She blew on her tea. “You wanted to be rich. What set you on that career path?”

“My parents split up. Dad remarried and moved across the country. Never saw much of him after that, except once, years later, when he came around asking for a loan. My mother worked hard to keep a roof over our heads. She sacrificed everything for me during those years.”

Grace nodded. “That’s when you realized that money could make a huge difference. It could buy you the kind of power you needed to change your mother’s life.”

Julius smiled faintly. “Are you trying to analyze me? Because if so, I’d like to change the subject.”

“Irene said that you are a very successful venture capitalist. She told me that in Pacific Northwest business circles they call you Arkwright the Alchemist because when it comes to investments, you can turn lead into gold.”

“I’m good,” Julius said. “But I’m not that good.”

“Good enough to get very rich, though, right?”

“Rich enough.”

“I assume your mother is doing okay?”

“Mom’s fine. After money was no longer an issue she did what she always wanted to do—she went back to school to finish getting her B.A. Wound up marrying one of her professors. They live in Northern California. Doug teaches at a community college. Mom works in
the counseling office. They’re going to retire soon. I manage their investments.”

She smiled. “I assume they will both enjoy comfortable retirements?”

He shrugged that off as if it were no big deal. “Sure.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Are you satisfied with your current financial status?”

“I’ve got all the money I’ll ever need and then some. How many shirts can one man wear? How many cars can he drive? How many houses does he really want to maintain? Yes, Grace, I’m rich enough.”

She studied him for a moment.

“Do you know, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say that he had enough money,” she said. “Granted, I’ve never met many truly wealthy people. But I was under the impression that after a certain point people use money as a way to keep score.”

“That works.” Julius cautiously swallowed some of the chamomile tea and lowered the mug. “For a while.”

She raised her brows. “Would you rather go back to being non-rich?”

He smiled slowly. “No.”

“But it would be no big deal if you lost it all tomorrow. In fact, I’ll bet you would find the situation interesting.”

“Interesting?”

“As in, not boring. Starting over would be a challenge for you.”

“Maybe,” he said. “For me. But I’m no longer the only one involved. If I lost everything tomorrow, several small, promising start-ups would crash and burn. A lot of people who work for those little companies would be unemployed and so would the folks who work directly or indirectly for me. And that’s not counting the people who trust me to invest their money, like my mother.”

She leaned back against the counter beside him and took another
sip of the tea. “You’re right, of course. You’re riding the tiger. You don’t have the option of choosing to get off. If you do, you’ll be okay but a lot of other people will get eaten.”

“You didn’t expect me to consider that aspect of the situation?”

“Now, on that front, you’re wrong. I would absolutely expect you to consider your responsibilities as an employer. Irene has been my best friend since kindergarten. I know her well enough to know that she wouldn’t have tried to set me up with you if she didn’t think you were a good man.”

Julius’s mouth twitched at the corner. “I could give you a list of people who would disagree with that opinion.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt but that you’ve made a few enemies along the way.”

“Making enemies doesn’t make me a bad person?”

“Depends on the enemies,” she said.

A muffled ping sounded from the front room. She froze. Julius looked at her and then glanced toward the doorway.

She took a steadying breath. And then she took another. The jittery sensation receded.

“My phone,” she said quickly. “Just email. I’ll deal with it later.”

He nodded once and swallowed more of the tea.

“Now I’ve got a question for you,” he said.

“About my nonexistent career plans?”

“It’s a little more specific. Did you kill Sprague Witherspoon?”

She stared at him, utterly blindsided. Her brain went blank. Words failed her. First the email ping and now this.

She heard the crash when the mug she had been holding hit the floor but she could not make sense of the sound for a few heartbeats.

Julius watched her the way an entomologist might watch a butterfly in a glass jar.

“Get out,” she whispered, her voice hoarse with anger. “Now.”

“All right,” he said.

He set his unfinished tea down as calmly as though he had just remarked upon the weather. He walked across the kitchen and went into the living room. She pushed herself away from the counter and pursued him, literally chasing him out of the house.

At the door he paused to look back at her over his shoulder.

“Good night,” he said. “It’s been an interesting evening. I don’t get a lot of those.”

“No shit,” she said. “I think I can tell you why.”

“I already know the answer.” He opened the door and moved out onto the porch. “I’m pretty boring when you get to know me. Hell, sometimes I even bore myself. Don’t forget to lock your door.”

He went down the porch steps.

Infuriated, she crossed the porch and gripped the railing with both hands. “I didn’t kill Witherspoon.”

“I believe you.” He opened the SUV door. “Got any idea who did?”

“No. For heaven’s sake, if I did, I would have told the police.”

“According to Dev’s information, the Seattle police have an oversupply of suspects, including an angry adult daughter, the daughter’s fiancé and a few pissed-off seminar folks who don’t think they got their money’s worth from the Witherspoon Way. Then there are Witherspoon’s employees.”

“Why would any of us murder our employer? We were all making a lot of money working for the Witherspoon Way.”

“Dev says that there is reason to believe that someone involved in the Witherspoon Way was siphoning off a hefty amount of the profits and using phony investment statements to cover up the missing money.”

“
What?
Are you serious?”

“Ask Dev. He says he got the news from the Seattle cops this morning. There’s a lot of money missing. In my world, that counts as a motive.”

She stared at him, outraged. “Are you implying that I embezzled money from the Witherspoon Way?”

“No. I had a few questions earlier in the evening but I doubt very much that you’re an embezzler.”

“Why not? Because I’m not a financial wizard like you?”

He smiled. “This may come as a shock but it doesn’t take a lot of financial wizardry to figure out how to skim a great deal of money off the top of a successful business like the Witherspoon Way. In fact, it’s dead easy—especially if no one is paying close attention.”

“That is insulting on several levels.”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” he said. “Just stating facts.”

“Here’s a fact you can take to the bank—this blind date is officially over.” Out of the corner of her eye Grace saw the curtains twitch in Agnes Gilroy’s living room window. “Crap.”

She turned on her heel, stalked back inside the house and slammed the door. She whirled around and shot the new dead bolt. Then she secured the chain lock.

For a moment or two she stood listening to the sound of the SUV rumbling back down the drive toward Lake Circle Road.

When she knew that Julius was gone she exhaled slowly. Then she went into the kitchen and grabbed a wad of paper towels off the roll that sat on the counter next to the stove.

She wiped up the spilled chamomile tea and contemplated the possibility that someone had been draining off the profits of the Witherspoon Way. Even if that turned out to be true—and given that Devlin was a cop there was no reason to think his information wasn’t accurate—how did that relate to Sprague’s murder?

Unless Sprague had uncovered the embezzlement and confronted the embezzler.

She finished mopping up the tea and collected the pieces of the broken mug. She got to her feet and dumped the wet paper towels and the bits of pottery into the trash.

Earlier that day she had done her breathing meditation. It was time for one of the other three rituals that helped her deal with the nightmares over the years.

She walked methodically through the house, checking the shiny new locks she had installed on the doors and windows. Next she looked inside the closets and every cupboard that was large enough to conceal a person. She was annoyed with herself, as usual, when she got down on her knees and looked under the beds in the three small bedrooms. She had no idea what she would do if she actually did find someone hiding in a closet or underneath a bed but she knew she couldn’t sleep until she had verified that she was the only one in the house.

When she had completed the walk-through, she poured herself a glass of wine, sat down in one of the big chairs and took her phone out of her purse. She opened her email with the same degree of reluctance she would have felt reaching into a terrarium to pick up a snake.

The email was waiting for her. Another night, another note from a dead man. The first line was familiar.

A positive attitude is like a flashlight in a dark room.

But whoever had sent the email had altered the second line.

You can use it to see who’s waiting for you in the shadows.