Veil of Night: A Novel Read online

  Now she was well and truly exhausted. If the phone rang again tonight, she’d be damned if she answered it or returned any calls—unless Madelyn called her, of course.

  Or maybe Eric.

  No, he wouldn’t call. She knew he wouldn’t. Next week … maybe. She had to hold to her wait-and-see decision.

  The only thing that would soothe her frazzled nerves was a couple of hours of HGTV. She settled down to a string of several episodes of House Hunters, trying to guess which house each person would buy and getting the right answer most of the time, though sometimes the choice absolutely floored her.

  She was immersed in the third episode when her cell phone rang. The sound automatically made her tense, because she used her cell almost exclusively for work. Warily she picked it up and looked at the window. Bishop Delaney? Why on earth would he be calling? She clicked on the call.

  “Hi, Bishop. Is something wrong?”

  “There’s been a murder at the reception hall,” he said baldly. “I don’t know who, but I thought, well, we did leave you there with Carnivore Edwards.”

  After a blank second during which she digested the news, she got a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. “Oh my God. Do you think Melissa—” She couldn’t complete the thought. It would be so horrible if Melissa had been attacked and murdered, though she was the most likely victim, considering the location. “Are you certain there was a murder?”

  “That’s what a friend of mine heard. He was driving home and tried to take that route, but the street was blocked off and he had to take a detour. He stopped and asked at the nearest service station, of course, and they told him they’d heard some woman had been killed.”

  “When? What time?” There might have been a function held at the reception hall that night, though if there had been one scheduled Melissa hadn’t mentioned it. You could never predict what might happen when a group of people got together. She hoped there had been an event held at the hall tonight, because that would drastically cut the odds that Melissa had been the one harmed.

  “Haven’t been able to find out. Details at eleven.”

  Jaclyn hadn’t intended to stay up that long, but now she had to, to find out who had been murdered. She and Bishop spent a few minutes speculating on what might have happened, but that was unproductive because neither of them had any way of knowing. After they hung up she switched to each of the local network stations in turn, but none of them had anything showing other than regular programming, not even a news crawl at the bottom of the screen. Murder wasn’t huge news in Atlanta unless someone important was involved, or the crime was particularly gruesome.

  Her doorbell rang at nine forty-five. She was so on edge that she shot to her feet, her heartbeat hammering. Who on earth—?

  She glanced down at herself, and grabbed a sweater from the entry closet to cover her obviously braless state, and pulled it on as she peeked through the peephole.

  Eric?

  He was undoubtedly one of the men standing on her stoop. In a flash the worst possible reason for his presence hit her like a blow a thousand times harder than Carrie Edwards’s slap. Oh. My. God. Madelyn. Something had happened to her mother. The murder—

  She fumbled with the lock, and jerked the door open. Her lips felt numb as she stared up at him. “Mom?” she asked in a thin, tight voice. “Is my mom okay?”

  Eric and the other man glanced at each other. “As far as we know,” he said, and she almost collapsed with relief, sagging against the door frame.

  “This is Sergeant Garvey,” he said, introducing the other man. “May we come in? We’d like to ask you some questions about Carrie Edwards.”

  She’d been so white when she’d jerked the door open that he’d thought she was about to faint. She still seemed shaky as she stepped back. “Carrie? I mean, yes, come in. So my mom—and it wasn’t Melissa. Was it? Did Carrie kill Melissa?” She clenched her hands together almost as if she were praying, standing there in the small entry, her blue eyes huge in her pale, strained face.

  She looked as freshly clean and unadorned and unabashedly sexy as she had the night before, Eric thought, though a sweater covered the tank top tonight. As he and Garvey stepped in he saw the open closet door in the entry, a coat hanger still swaying slightly, and knew she’d grabbed the sweater just before opening the door. Part of him regretted that, because he wanted to see her breasts again. Another part of him was glad she’d put on the sweater, because he sure as hell didn’t want Garvey seeing them. Distantly he recognized that feeling possessive about her wasn’t good, but that was something he’d deal with later.

  Garvey’s sharp gaze was taking in everything, from every detail of the stylish town house to Jaclyn herself. The sergeant had put in years on the detective level, in some rough places, before settling in Hopewell and moving up the ranks. As for Eric, given his previous involvement with Jaclyn, there wasn’t any way he’d be allowed to question her by himself, which was fine with him. Whether she was guilty or innocent, Garvey was there as another set of eyes, another honed instinct, and as a witness that the job had been done right.

  “Carrie Edwards was murdered this afternoon,” he said. “How were you aware of this?”

  “I wasn’t,” she said. “Not that it was Carrie, I mean. I got a phone call—” She waved a hand toward the living room, which was evidently meant to indicate a phone was in there somewhere, then took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. Let’s sit down, please. Would you like some coffee? I can put on a pot of coffee.”

  “No, thanks,” Eric said hastily, before Garvey could accept. He didn’t want to deal with that swill again, not even a polite sip or two. They all sat down, and Jaclyn picked up the remote to turn off the television. He slipped his notebook out of his inside jacket pocket and made some notes.

  “Who called you?” he asked, keeping his tone as conversational as possible.

  “Bishop Delaney. He’s the floral designer who’s doing Carrie’s wedding. Was doing it, anyway. He’d heard—A friend of his had called, told him a woman had been killed at the reception hall, so he called me.”

  “Why did he call you?”

  “Because this afternoon he and the other vendors left me there alone with Carrie and he thought—oh.” The last word escaped her on a little gasp and she froze, her face going even whiter as she stared at him. She swallowed, her lips moving several times even though nothing else came out.

  He watched her reach the inescapable conclusion, watched the expression in her eyes change from blank shock to a quick flash of anger, before going blank again. This time, though, the blankness was more of a deliberate shield.

  “You know what happened this afternoon,” she said flatly. “You think I killed her.”

  Chapter Ten

  “WE’RE QUESTIONING EVERYONE,” HE REPLIED IN A smooth tone. “Why exactly did this Bishop Delaney call you?”

  She didn’t believe him. Oh, she believed they would eventually question everyone who had been at the reception hall that afternoon, but considering what had happened, she had to be at the top of their suspect list.

  The sharp twist of pain in her chest both surprised and dismayed her. She didn’t want to feel hurt. It was stupid. Intellectually, she knew that Eric was doing his job, knew she couldn’t expect him to do anything else. They had no ties. They hadn’t even dated. There was nothing between them other than a one-night stand.

  But however sound and rational her intellect could be, emotionally she felt as if she’d been punched in the stomach. It wasn’t any one thing, it was everything together: the shock and uneasiness over learning someone had been murdered at the reception hall, and thinking it might be Melissa, who was a friend even if she wasn’t a close one; then there had been the visceral, unreasoning panic when she’d thought Eric had come to notify her that something had happened to Madelyn. Jaclyn thought of herself as a basically strong person, but in that moment the black terror had almost sent her to her knees. Just when she’d been pulling herself ba