First Impressions Read online

  When she didn’t say anything, he stood up. “Come on, we both need sleep. Tomorrow we’ll start looking through this house to see what we can find.”

  “I have to meet Brad tomorrow.”

  “That’s not until the afternoon.”

  “I need to research eighteenth-century gardens so I can start designing them. After I see the land, that is. And I have to get to those manuscripts from my publishing house. They have deadlines on them. And I need to call my daughter to see how she’s doing. And I—”

  “Tomorrow,” Jared said. “Get a good night’s sleep, then we’ll take care of everything else, starting tomorrow. Tomorrow we’ll—” He broke off when her phone rang.

  “It’s probably Brad,” she said, just to annoy him, but it wasn’t Brad. “It’s for you. It’s Minnie.”

  She handed McBride the phone, then started back up the stairs, but she couldn’t help but overhear him. He didn’t say much, just answered questions with “Yeah, sure” and “I think so” and “Love to,” but his voice had lowered and was as soft as a kitten’s. Eden couldn’t control a tiny flash of jealousy that ran through her.

  As she went up the stairs, her legs were heavy with fatigue and the responsibility of all that was going on around her. Tonight she’d had too much wine to be able to think clearly about anything, and that included McBride.

  After he put down the phone, Jared walked up the stairs behind her. She didn’t see him flash a tiny penlight off and on three times to signal the people outside. And an hour later when she was in bed, she slept so soundly that she didn’t hear the footsteps in the attic above her head. All the records she’d filed so many years ago, all the Farrington furniture and mementos of the family that hadn’t been sold, were being gone through slowly and carefully.

  Chapter Twelve

  EDEN woke at five A.M. thinking, The sooner I solve this thing, the sooner it will go away. She lay in bed for thirty minutes as she explored the idea. Since McBride had appeared in her life, everything had been abnormal. Snakes in her bedroom, locked in a cellar, men prowling around outside. The list seemed to be endless. The worst part of it all was that, eventually, Brad was going to find out the truth. While it was true that, so far, Brad seemed to be an all-round great guy, she didn’t relish the idea of telling him that she was being investigated by the FBI. For spying. Or being connected to a spy. Any way she told it, it sounded bad. Whatever happened between her and Brad, whether it became romantic or it was merely a working relationship, nothing would be helped by her being connected to the FBI.

  Quietly, she got out of bed and walked to the window. Below, in her garden, the one she’d planned and installed, was a man. He was standing under the little arbor that she’d covered in confederate jasmine. She couldn’t see all of him, but she could see enough to know he was there. She was being watched. Spied on.

  Turning, she went into her bathroom and took a long, hot shower. Sometimes she did her best thinking while she was in the shower. McBride said that it was believed that she knew something. Or owned something. Since, until a few weeks ago, she’d owned next to nothing, she didn’t think that was the problem. On the other hand, McBride said that an agent had been killed here in Arundel. It was a hit-and-run. Was it an accident, or did someone know the woman was an FBI agent? If an FBI agent was killed here in Arundel, maybe that meant this place had more to do with the spy than she, Eden, did.

  She got out of the shower, dressed, partly blow-dried her hair, then stuck some fat Velcro rollers in the top of it. She applied enough makeup to keep her from looking as though her face had been erased (wasn’t getting older wonderful?), then went to the manuscripts in the corner of her bedroom. Only one of them was urgent, meaning that it had a deadline to be copyedited. Eden opened it and found two grammar errors on one page. Take and bring, she thought. Why couldn’t people get those right? She closed the manuscript box. Obviously, the book was going to take some time.

  Setting that manuscript aside, she looked at the others. She was supposed to read them and decide whether or not they were worth publishing. With these books, grammar and punctuation didn’t matter. Not even sentence structure mattered. Everything was about the story. If it was a ripping good yarn, some person, maybe Eden, would be told to fix the writing.

  It took her an hour to determine that none of the manuscripts were about spies. There was only one murder mystery, but it was set in Victorian England and was about a man who surgically killed prostitutes. “That’s original,” she muttered to herself and closed the big box containing the 612 pages.

  Smells coming from downstairs wafted up to her, so she uncurled her legs and went down to the kitchen. McBride had his back to her and was cooking pancakes. Beside him was a plate with a stack that had to be a foot and a half high.

  “Expecting company?” she asked as she sat on a stool.

  He didn’t turn around but gave a nod toward the kitchen door.

  “Oh, them,” she said. “I thought they were going to be here in shifts, one at a time.”

  He put four pancakes on a plate, put it in front of her, then turned back to the stove. “Changing shifts, so there’re two of them here right now.”

  She put her knife in the butter, then pulled it out. Funny how being around good-looking men made you think about every bite you took. She put a small amount of syrup on the pancakes and cut. They were good! “Your own recipe?”

  “Naw. It was on the package. I just added water.”

  “And bananas and strawberries. And what’s the lumpy stuff?”

  “Oatmeal.” When he glanced back at her he was smiling. “Okay, so I added a little of this and that. Living alone, you learn some things.”

  She ate three more bites before she spoke. “Do you have a photo of the agent who was killed? The hit-and-run?”

  Jared didn’t say anything for a moment, then he turned to look at her, spatula in hand. “What do you have in mind? You wouldn’t be thinking of helping me, would you? I mean, give up being hostile and fighting me at every turn, and actually helping me?”

  She shook her head at him. “What is it that women see in you?”

  “It would take me so long to tell you that we wouldn’t have time to look for any clues.”

  “Spare me,” Eden said, but she smiled. “You want me to take those pancakes out to the men?”

  “No. You’re not supposed to know they’re there.”

  “Not even the man under my jasmine arch?”

  “Especially not him.” His face changed to serious. “I heard you up early. Did you think of anything that might have a bearing on the case?”

  “If you mean, did I remember any spy meetings that I attended, no I didn’t. I went through the manuscripts on the floor and there’s nothing that makes me think any of them was written by an international spy. But then, what do you know about the man personally? What did he do as a hobby? A lot of romance novels are written by men so maybe he—”

  “Wrote a bodice ripper?”

  “Hey!” Eden said. “Don’t disparage those novels to anyone in the publishing industry. They’re our meat and potatoes. You know who’s the most powerful person in publishing?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “It’s the woman in the grocery store who throws a book into her cart. She decides everything.”

  Jared blinked at her a couple of times. “Two speeches in two days.”

  Smiling, Eden glanced down at her plate. “The point is that I didn’t see anything in the manuscripts that might reveal the secrets of some spy. But maybe he didn’t write about that. Maybe he wrote something else and he wanted me to edit the book.”

  “I don’t think he wrote anything. And, no, I don’t have any concrete reasons for thinking that, except for being in this business nearly thirty years. The writer-editor angle doesn’t smell right to me.”

  “Thirty years. You’re older than you look.”

  Jared started to defend himself, then smiled at her. She was teasing him. “More pancakes, or are