Scarlet Nights: An Edilean Novel Read online

  As the investigation went forward, fortunately, it was backed by a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that said the gullibility of a person didn’t eliminate the fact that a crime had been committed. People who did what Mitzi had done were as guilty as bank robbers.

  State criminal law and federal law work in opposite ways. Criminals arrested by state law enforcement are incarcerated, then evidence is found. But the Feds will spend years gathering information before arrests are made. Unfortunately, the first time around, when they were ready to indict Mitzi and twenty-eight of her family members, she’d been told what was coming. She and her son had disappeared where no one could find them.

  As Mike straightened the papers, he agreed with the captain that the only reason Stefan and his mother would come to a two-bit town like Edilean, Virginia, would be for something really big. And it looked like during the time Mitzi was missing, she’d found another way to extort money, and this time, it involved Miss Sara Shaw.

  Mike put the papers in his bedside table drawer, making a mental note to take them out in the morning. He couldn’t risk Sara finding them when she snooped through his room.

  As he closed the drawer, he couldn’t help but think of the irony of the evening. This afternoon, while he’d spent a couple of hours at Williamsburg’s outlet mall buying new clothes, he’d envisioned a nice, domestic evening with Sara. They’d have good food and the wine that was never opened. He imagined that after dinner he’d get his new clothes out of his car, and he and Sara would go through them. Since she was in the business, he’d ask her advice about what he should wear. And every scenario that he came up with ended with Sara telling him what it was that the Vandlos wanted. But, somehow, everything had fallen through.

  As he turned off the light, Mike thought, Strippers. From now on, he was going to deal only with strippers. No more good girls who made no sense whatsoever.

  5

  THE NEXT MORNING, Sara awoke with what she knew was a hangover. Two margaritas wouldn’t be enough to make most people drunk, but Sara’d never been able to tolerate much alcohol.

  As she splashed cold water on her face, she began to remember what she’d said to Mike the night before. Her excuse was that he’d asked too many questions about Greg, made too many insinuations, and added to all the other things going on now, it had been more than she could take.

  She would, of course, have to apologize to him. Last night, it had seemed clear that … well, it was almost as though people were plotting against her—but that couldn’t be true. However, the idea stayed with her and began to grow.

  As the day wore on and she worked constantly on the pile of sewing, she told herself that it couldn’t be possible that Tess had worked with the whole town to bring in Mike to get Sara away from Greg.

  But there was an old murder mystery on TV, and as she sewed and listened, she seemed to see conspiracy in every second of the last few days. Greg abruptly called away; Luke taking over her apartment; Sara having to move into Tess’s place where the trapdoor was. Then Tess’s mysterious brother just “happens” to show up—and now he was living in the small apartment with her.

  At one, Sara went to the kitchen to get lunch and saw that the refrigerator was full of the food Mike had cooked. What had he been planning last night with that delicious meal? She vaguely remembered accusing him of trying to seduce her.

  Maybe she’d watched too many black-and-white movies, but she had an image of herself drunk and winding up in bed with Mike. Then two men with cameras with huge round flashbulb holders would burst in and take their photo.

  Would they give the lurid pictures to Greg? For a sickening moment Sara imagined Greg’s rage if he saw photos of her in bed with another man. He went ballistic when she so much as laughed at a salesman’s joke. “It’s just because I love you so very much,” Greg’d said many times.

  She got a plate from Tess’s cabinet, filled it with the food Mike had cooked, put a paper towel over the top, and microwaved it. She poured herself a big glass of iced tea and sat down to a feast.

  As Mike left the title office with the fat portfolio in his hand, the closing complete, he was still shaking his head about Sara. He hadn’t been able to figure out what he’d done to make her so angry. Sure, maybe his arrival through her bedroom floor was a bit crude, but he still saw no other way to get close to her as fast as he did. If he’d knocked on the door and introduced himself, she would have been polite, but he would have been sent to a hotel and he wouldn’t have seen her again.

  Truthfully, he thought the way the townspeople were ganging up on her against the man she wanted to marry was too much. While it was true that he knew Vandlo was a criminal, they didn’t. Where was all this “support” that women talked about all the time? TV from four until six was what Mike called the “Support Hours.” One time when Tess was staying with him—he was recovering from a bullet wound (his fourth)—and he was bored with being still, and sick of pain, he took his frustration out on the TV. He tossed a pillow at it and said, “If I hear the word support one more time, I’m throwing the thing out the window. No matter how stupid a person is, how bad a decision, all you women care about is that you ‘support’ each other.”

  “So now I’m one of ‘you women’?” Tess asked calmly, not even looking up from her magazine. “I can assure you that never in my life have I supported a woman when she made a decision so stupid that she got shot.”

  In an instant, Mike’s bad temper left him and he managed to get off the couch and cook a decent dinner for Tess. Two days later, she went home to Edilean.

  As Mike drove away from Williamsburg, he wondered if he should bother cooking. He was bending over backward to impress Sara, but no matter what he did, he made her furious. Never before had he had trouble with women. In fact, one of his big problems in life had been that women liked him too much. They flirted with him and teased him. In fact, he’d never had to do any work to get a woman he wanted.

  But that wasn’t the case with Miss Sara Shaw. She had disliked him from the moment she saw him, and her animosity toward him had increased rapidly since then. But then, as he’d told the captain, women like Sara were a complete and total mystery to him.

  When he got back to Edilean Manor, he almost expected the door to the apartment to be bolted, but it was unlocked. The detective in him came to the fore. Maybe he’d conduct classes on home safety in Edilean and talk to them about the importance of keeping their doors locked. He saw Luke at Sara’s apartment, carrying out what looked to be the kitchen sink, and again Mike felt sorry for her. The entire town was against her, and he thought that if he were in her shoes, he might marry a person just to spite them.

  Inside Tess’s apartment, he glanced down the hall to the bedroom Sara was using, but it was empty. As he put the folio from the title company on the table, he thought that maybe later he would talk to her about what the town was doing to her. Maybe that would loosen things up between them. Or he could talk to her about becoming the owner of a farm. She might help him relax about taking on such a heavy responsibility.

  When he looked out the window, he saw Sara outside, sitting under a big tree, her cell in her hand, with her never-ending sewing on the table beside her. This morning the captain had sent him information through Tess. Just as they’d hoped would happen, Stefan’s temper had erupted when he’d talked to the police about his wife’s arrest. Within minutes, he was handcuffed and put in a holding cell. The captain had gleefully told Tess of the accusations and threats that Vandlo had shouted at the police as he was put into jail. And Stefan kept saying that he “had to get back,” which was taken to mean that he had to return to Sara and the scam he had going with her.

  When he’d been taken into custody, his phone had been confiscated, so they saw all the e-mails and text messages that Sara had sent Stefan Vandlo since he’d left Edilean in such a hurry.

  Sara’s messages to him were a mixture of anger and pleading. She kept asking him where he was and when he’d be back. She�€