First Impressions Read online

  Jared didn’t open his mouth and didn’t look as though he was going to. He cast a glance at Eden as though to warn her, but she smiled coolly at him in return, then looked down at the paintings.

  She had no idea what she was looking for either. Why had an FBI agent painted the interiors of her house? If she wanted to make a record of the place, why not photograph it? There was the living room with the pale green paneling and the furniture that nearly matched the color of the walls. The paintings were so detailed that they even showed six of Tyrrell Farrington’s paintings, so familiar to Eden that she rarely looked at them anymore. The dining room showed the table and chairs, the windows with the tall burgundy velvet curtains drawn, and more of Tyrrell’s paintings. There was the hall with the big secretary, and the master bedroom. There was even a painting of Eden’s bathroom, with the big clawfooted tub in the corner. As far as she could tell, the pictures were photographically correct.

  “I see nothing different,” she said.

  Straightening, Brad looked at Jared. “Me neither. What is it we’re supposed to see?”

  Jared put his hands in his pockets and stepped back. “I don’t know.” He stared at the fireplace for a moment and seemed to be trying to make a decision. When he looked back at them he seemed to have softened. Some of his animosity seemed to have left him. “I don’t know,” he repeated softly. “We’re pretty sure Ms. Brewster’s death was no accident, and we’d like to know who killed her and why.”

  “Can I assume that Brewster is the real name of my tenant? It’s not the name I knew her by, but that’s neither here nor there. And what do you mean by ‘we’? Who are you affiliated with?”

  Jared mumbled, “Yeah, Tess Brewster.” Then he had a look on his face that said he’d told all that he was going to.

  Brad looked back at the watercolors. “Think anything is written on the back of these pictures?”

  Fifteen minutes later, they’d taken the pictures out of their frames, but there was nothing written on them. Nor was there a signature at the bottom. No proof that Ms. Brewster had painted them.

  “There has to be something,” Eden said, frustrated. “If all she’d wanted to do was record what was here, she could have taken a roll of film.”

  “Or a thousand photos on one disk,” Jared said.

  Brad sat down on a dining-room chair and kept looking at the pictures. “Murdered. She was run down in the wee hours of the morning, so someone knew she was in here night after night. Someone was watching her. I wonder if they had any idea what she was doing inside this house?”

  “Obviously not,” Eden said, “or they would have taken the paintings before she could get them to the framers.”

  Jared looked at her in amazement. “Good point. So someone was watching her, but they didn’t know what she was doing.”

  “Maybe they thought she was doing something else,” Brad said.

  “Searching for those damned jewels,” Jared said and sat down, his fingers on his temples. “Look, I knew Tess for years. Not well, but we were friendly enough, I guess, but I never knew she could paint.”

  “What if she was doing this just to kill time?” Eden asked. “No reason, but just waiting.”

  “For someone?” Brad asked. “Or for something to happen?”

  “Very possible,” Jared said, nodding.

  “Like a watchdog,” Brad said.

  Eden walked to the far end of the room. “So Ms. Brewster sneaked into the house at night and waited for whatever, or watched for something, and to keep herself busy, she made watercolors of the house. It wouldn’t take much light, a good flashlight would be enough. Then, one day, when she was leaving or just arriving, someone hit her with a car and ran off.”

  “So maybe the pictures she was doing had nothing to do with anything,” Brad said.

  Jared glanced at Brad but said nothing. He seemed to be determined to give nothing more away.

  “I’ve never been on a stakeout,” Brad said, looking at Jared, “but from what I’ve seen on TV, they’re pretty boring.”

  “Yeah,” Eden said. “In the movies, the men mostly seem to eat fried food. I think painting watercolors would be better than that. A watercolor box is quite portable.”

  Jared leaned forward, his arms on the table. “I’m not convinced. I feel that there’s something in these pictures. She took them to the framer’s for a reason.”

  “Yeah,” Brad said. “I know what you mean. If you write something down, someone can read it. And if you make a call, someone can trace it. So how to leave a message that no one knows is a message?”

  Jared looked at Brad with new respect.

  “So what was the message she was trying to leave?” Eden asked, looking at the pictures. “She didn’t take photos because—” She looked at the two men, then her eyes lit up. “Because something is different in these pictures. You know, like where they have two pictures and you’re supposed to find out what’s different.”

  The three of them looked at one another.

  “I’ll take the living room, you take the hall,” Brad said.

  “I’ll take the dining room,” Jared said.

  “Bed and bath,” Eden said.

  In a flurry of motion, they grabbed their pictures and separated. Twenty minutes later, they met back in the dining room.

  “Nothing,” Jared said.

  “Nothing,” Brad and Eden echoed.

  “I even checked ol’ Tyrrell’s paintings,” Brad said.

  “You mean these paintings that are all over the house?” Jared asked.

  “Yeah. Painted by an angry son of the house,” Eden said, smiling. “He wanted to live in Paris, but the family wouldn’t allow it, so to get them back, he returned home and never left. He wouldn’t marry and produce babies, wouldn’t have anything to do with the running of the family businesses. He just painted night and day, and these are the results.” Eden waved her hand about to indicate the paintings on the walls. “Mrs. Farrington always said that for talent, they’d make a good bonfire, but they’re family, so they were kept. Personally, I rather like them.”

  “That’s because you like families,” Brad said.

  “Yes, that’s true,” Eden said, smiling at him, and their hands inched toward each other’s.

  “At least he got to see that necklace that caused so much fuss,” Jared said.

  Eden’s and Brad’s hands stopped moving, and they looked at each other, then at Jared.

  “What?” Eden asked.

  “Here,” Jared said, picking up the now-unframed watercolor. It was a picture of the big hallway in the center of the house. On the wall was a portrait of a woman with a little white dog. Due to the nature of the medium, it was blurry, but there was a blue and white necklace around the woman’s neck.

  After a moment’s stunned hesitation, both Eden and Brad ran for the door of the dining room, Jared behind them. Two seconds later they were standing in front of the familiar portrait done by Tyrrell Farrington over a hundred years before. Around the woman’s neck was indeed a sapphire necklace. Gaping, mouths open, Brad and Eden stared at the portrait.

  “Somebody want to let me in on what’s going on?” Jared asked from behind them.

  “There was no picture of the necklace,” Brad said softly. “The Farringtons said that if it was ever photographed or reproduced in any way, that…” Brad shook his head to clear it. “Who knows what they believed about that cursed necklace? All I know for sure is that the woman in that picture didn’t have on a big, gaudy sapphire necklace when I used to visit Mrs. Farrington. She loved to keep me waiting, and I used to spend umpteen hours in this hallway. I could draw the wallpaper pattern by heart. There was no necklace.”

  While Brad and Eden were standing there, immobile, staring at the painting, Jared stepped between them and lifted the big, heavy painting off the wall. “What do you say we see what’s behind this frame?”

  Jared carried the big painting into the dining room, moved the watercolors aside, and p