First Impressions Read online

  In the next second the helicopter stopped to hover above them. In the noise and the wind, she looked up to see two men hanging out of the door with rifles aimed at her and McBride.

  “Are you all right?” came a voice over a loudspeaker, and Eden was sure that everyone in Arundel heard it.

  “Yes,” Eden tried to shout up to the men over the noise of the helicopter.

  “They mean me,” Jared yelled, grinning. “I’m the good guy, remember? You’re the suspect. They want to make sure you haven’t hurt me—again.”

  Behind them, Eden heard a car door slam, then a wail that every mother on earth responded to. “Mother,” came the voice, a high, plaintive wail that carried above the roar of the helicopter hovering over them.

  “Kill me now,” Eden said, and fell back into the mud.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “IREALLY don’t know what to think,” Melissa was saying as she held the hose on her mother. “I was already in Arundel when I called you. In the past, in normal circumstances, I would have gone straight to you, but you’ve been acting so strangely lately that I wasn’t sure what to do, so that’s why I called first and asked permission to visit my own mother.”

  The water from the hose was icy, and if Eden had had her way, she would have gone upstairs, peeled off her muddy clothing, and jumped in the shower, no matter how much mud she tracked in, but Melissa had been horrified at that idea. Eden thought maybe her daughter was enjoying spraying cold water on her mother. Eden bit down on her tongue to keep from talking and scrubbed off mud as quickly as she could. She glanced at Brad. He was standing under the big cypress tree in front of her house and looking at all the things he’d sent her. She’d have to thank him later—and that thought warmed her a bit.

  Melissa was telling her story for the second time. “I had no idea what to do when my own mother told me I couldn’t visit her, so I did the only thing I could think of and went to the office of Mrs. Farrington’s lawyer. It was only by chance that I remembered his name. Really, Mother, you have been so secretive about all of this that I feel like I don’t even know you. You can’t imagine my surprise when I met the daughter of the lawyer and she informed me that her father and you were thinking about getting married.”

  “Melissa,” Eden said, turning around to face her daughter, “could you please keep your voice down? I don’t think—” She broke off because her daughter hit her in the side of the head with a freezing blast of water. The nozzle was set on “jet.”

  “Sorry,” Melissa said, but she didn’t sound sorry. “It has been almost more than I can bear. First you leave me in New York, then you don’t call for weeks on end, then Stuart and I—” She paused to sniff. “Well, that’s all over with. What with all the stress in my life, it’s a wonder I’m not in labor.”

  “You look great,” Eden said, rubbing mud off of her. “You look like a poster for a healthy pregnancy.” She just managed to dodge the next blast of water. “I think that’s enough hosing.”

  “No, you still have some mud in your hair. Bend down.”

  “I think—” When another jet shot past her ear, Eden grit her teeth. This was punishment, pure and simple. Eden had never spanked her daughter but right now she was wondering if it was not too late to begin.

  “I really don’t think this is something to smile about,” Melissa said just before her mother took the hose out of her hand.

  “Neither do I,” Eden said, pushing the arm down on the hose bib. “As soon as I get cleaned up and into some warm clothes, we’ll talk about everything. But right now I’m wet and I’m cold.”

  “Alone, Mother,” Melissa said. “I want to talk to you alone.”

  Eden looked around her garden. Three FBI agents were standing together, and she knew that McBride and some man named Teasdale had gone to the house where McBride was supposed to be living. Brad, looking forlorn and hurt and unable to understand what was going on, had moved to her front porch steps. Now and then he’d glance at Eden, his eyes begging her to talk to him and reassure him that everything was okay between them. Besides Brad’s and Melissa’s concerns, there was a murder to solve and a riddle to answer. “If I can,” Eden answered at last.

  “What does that mean?” Melissa asked, following her mother into the house. “Don’t you think your daughter comes first? Your pregnant daughter?”

  Eden was dripping water across the old wooden floorboards of the kitchen, through the hallway, and up the stairs. For all that Melissa kept saying that her pregnancy was hard on her, she was right behind her mother as Eden bounded up the stairs.

  “Yes, of course, you come first in my life,” Eden said. “But right now there are some things going on that—”

  “I remember this place,” Melissa said from behind her. “I remember these paintings.”

  On the wall, all the way up the stairs, were Tyrrell Farrington’s watercolors. Two of them showed the creek, his family’s boats lined up along the dock. The Farrington boats had all been sold, and the boathouse had fallen down long ago.

  Pausing, Eden looked at the paintings. She opened her mouth to tell her daughter that a necklace had been painted on a family portrait and that had led them to solving the mystery of the Farrington Sapphires. But she didn’t say anything, as she didn’t think Melissa would be interested. Why was it that love took precedence over everything else in life? Eden hadn’t been able to enjoy the beautiful gifts that Brad had sent her because of her love for her daughter. And now Melissa couldn’t think of anything else expect her love for her husband.

  And, yes, Melissa did love him. Eden could hear it in every word out of her daughter’s mouth. In between the complaints about having found her mother rolling about in the mud with a man Melissa had never met, her daughter told her everything about what Stuart had done—or not done. According to Melissa, Stuart had turned into a different person the second Eden left—and Melissa didn’t like the new Stuart one bit!

  However, from Eden’s perspective, it looked as though Stuart had had a dose of reality after his mother-in-law left town. Since they’d married, Stuart had had Eden to depend on. She’d been there to make sure the rent was paid and food was on the table. Once Eden was gone, responsibilities had been dumped on Stuart. By necessity, he had gone from being a timid little man who was content to wait years for a promotion, to being a man who was making every effort to better himself. Eden thought she might like the new man Stuart had become much better than the old one.

  But she couldn’t tell Melissa that. Melissa was still a little girl, torn between being her mother’s daughter and being a grown-up with a husband and soon a child to take care of.

  If I had stayed, Eden thought, my daughter would never have grown up. She is so spoiled she would have turned the baby over to me. Eden shook her head to clear it. She didn’t want to think that maybe she’d made some really big mistakes in raising her daughter. Oddly, it was as though she could hear McBride’s voice in her head and he was telling her that it wasn’t too late to start over.

  Melissa followed her mother into her bedroom and would have gone into the bathroom with her, but Eden shut the doors. Once she was alone in her bathroom, Eden wanted to fill the tub and soak in it for hours. Truthfully, she wanted to tie the towels together and climb out the window and escape all of them. She didn’t look forward to facing Brad, or trying to deal with her daughter’s marital problems, or to talking to the FBI men who’d flown in.

  “Being an adult is overrated,” she muttered under her breath, then got into the shower for the second time that day. She was going to have to face all of them. What was she going to say to Brad about why she’d been rolling about in the mud with McBride? Smiling, she wondered what McBride was telling his boss about the way they’d been found.

  Forty-five minutes was all that Eden could drag out for a shower and blow-drying her hair. Bracing herself, she opened the bathroom door and prepared to face her daughter. It was time to come up with explanations.

  Eden nearly