Authors: Virginia Kantra

Tags: #Contemporary Romance, #mobi, #Romantic Suspense, #epub, #Fiction

Home Before Midnight (2 page)

BOOK: Home Before Midnight

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Paul shrugged dismissively. “You know Helen never reads the paper. Or pays attention to the news, if she can help it.”

Bailey squashed the satisfaction she felt at his small disloyalty. “But she’s from the area. I mean, the town is named after her family. She knows people.”

“But she doesn’t understand my work. I want you, Bailey.”

Bailey’s heart beat a little faster.

“We both want you,” he had added. “Helen will be glad for the company, and I need your help with this book.”

Bailey doubted Helen would deign to notice her existence. But it was irresistible to be needed. To be valued for something other than her ability to attract and keep the right man. The “right man,” as defined by Bailey’s mother, being any white, single, thirty-year-old, Methodist, Southern professional.

Maybe Paul didn’t meet her mama’s specifications.

Maybe he didn’t feel Bailey’s writing was ready to show anyone else yet.

But he needed her. He’d said so.

After the move, he’d even insisted she make her home with them, with Paul and Helen, in Helen’s house. God knew, he had said with a droll look, there was enough room.

The old Stokes place had been built in the 1930s for a large and prosperous family. The sweeping verandas and imposing columns in front were balanced by two thoroughly modern additions in back, the master suite and a kitchen-and-dining wing, flanking an artfully landscaped swimming pool.

Bailey had her own room and bathroom in the original part of the house, with high ceilings and heavy wood trim that more than made up for the uneven floors and cramped shower. Maybe she didn’t have a view of the pool, but she was welcome to use it whenever Helen wasn’t entertaining or sunbathing or, well, there.

She wouldn’t be there now,
Bailey thought, glancing at the clock. It was almost midnight. On her “at home” nights, Helen went to bed early and fell asleep with the television on. No one would notice, no one would care, if Bailey snuck down to the kitchen and fixed a snack to eat by the pool.

Unless Paul was up, working.

Bailey pushed the thought away.

She made her way downstairs in the dark, refusing even to look in the direction of his study to see if his lights were on. All she wanted was to sit by the pool and watch the cool gleam of the water and the bugs committing suicide in the patio lights while she smothered her restlessness in ice cream.
Stress eating,
Dr. Phil called it.
Ask yourself what you really want.

She knew what she wanted.

And what she couldn’t have.

Ice cream was better. Safer.

In the kitchen, she dug deep into a round carton of Edy’s butter pecan. The heaped ice cream looked lonely in the bowl, so she added sliced strawberries and then a squeeze of chocolate syrup and then—on impulse—a second spoon.

Two-fisted eater?
her conscience mocked.

She ignored it. Carrying her spoils, she slid open the patio door, flipped on the lights . . . and froze. Apprehension squeezed her chest. Something big drifted below the surface of the water, dark against the submerged lights. Something big and dark, with floating hair.

Bailey took a step forward, dread backing up in her lungs.

Helen was not in her room.

She was in the pool. Facedown, at the bottom. Faint, dark swirls curled upward through the luminous blue water.

Bailey’s bowl slipped from her hands and shattered against the Mexican tile.

LIEUTENANT Steve Burke hadn’t worked the graveyard shift since he was a wet-behind-the-ears detective. Most investigative work took place during the day, when folks were awake and around to talk to. But in a small department, rank was no protection against a shit assignment. Somebody had to be on call through the midnight hours, and it was usually the new guy. Steve didn’t mind. It meant flextime, some time to spend with Gabrielle.

Of course, Gabby wouldn’t be happy if she woke and found him gone, but he’d left a note. With any luck, he’d be back before breakfast.

He pulled up the long drive and parked his truck behind an ambulance and a pair of black-and-whites. The big house was lit up like the folks inside were giving a party, which, from what he’d heard, wouldn’t have been unusual. Not that he’d ever been invited. He grimaced and got out of the truck, grabbing his kit from the passenger seat. Helen Stokes Ellis might have married a man who was Not From Around Here, as folks delicately and pointedly referred to Yankees. But now that she was back home, she didn’t socialize with people who were Not Her Kind.

Steve had never met Paul Ellis, the husband, but he’d heard stories about him, too. The briefing room was thicker with gossip than the barbershop or his mother’s Wednesday morning Bible group. Ellis was a real pain in the ass. He’d recently pissed off the chief of police by implying that his department had railroaded a murder investigation twenty years ago.

It was all before Steve’s time, but his sympathies were with the department. He had no patience with self-styled experts. And no reason to believe Ellis wouldn’t be equally critical of the police’s handling of his wife’s death.

No wonder the patrol officer on duty tonight had been anxious to pass the buck to Steve.

Steve prowled up the walk, carrying his kit. Yellow crime scene tape was strung around the house like bizarre party decorations.
That
would get the neighbors’ attention in the morning. How long, he wondered, before the press showed up? Not just the local press, either, the papers from Raleigh and Durham and even Charlotte. Paul Ellis was a bestselling true crime writer. His wife was a wealthy older woman who’d spent years maneuvering on the social pages. This case had the potential to blow up in Steve’s face. And the explosion could attract national media attention.

His lucky night. There were guys already grumbling over Steve’s hiring, detectives with more seniority who’d be only too happy to accuse him of hogging the limelight . . . or point their fingers if he screwed up.

Raising the yellow tape over his head, he walked in through the open front door.

Uniforms clustered at the other end of the long hallway. Beyond them, an arch opened up on some big room walled with glass. He’d get sketches and photographs of the layout later. For now, he focused on Wayne Lewis, the responding officer. Lewis, a fresh-faced rookie, was young enough not to resent him, and hadn’t known him long enough to dislike him.

“What happened?” Steve asked quietly.

Lewis cleared his throat. “The homeowner—Helen Stokes?—was found drowned in the pool.”

The majority of drownings were accidental. Most involved the use or abuse of alcohol.

“And you called me because . . . ?”

Lewis turned red to the tips of his big ears. “The victim was fully clothed and has swelling and a slight laceration on the back of her head. She could have slipped and hit her head on the side of the pool as she fell. Or . . .”

Or she could have gotten an assist into the water.

Steve nodded. “Okay. Who’s the R.P.?” Reporting party.

“The husband,” Lewis said. “Paul Ellis.”

“He find the body?”

“Negative. The deceased was discovered just after midnight by Bailey Wells, Mr. Ellis’s personal assistant. She lives with the family,” Lewis explained.

Steve followed the patrolman’s gaze across the room, where a skinny brunette knelt beside a handsome, haggard man in a leather armchair. Her dark hair hung in lank strands around her pale face. Her plain black blouse clung to her narrow rib cage, revealing the lines of her bra and the shape of her breasts. Steve felt an unwelcome twinge of compassion. There was something vulnerable and appealing about her, even though she wouldn’t win any wet T-shirt contests, for sure.

“Why is she wet?” he asked.

And why the hell hadn’t anybody thought to bring her a towel?

“She pulled Mrs. Ellis out of the pool,” one of the other cops volunteered.

Steve looked to Lewis for confirmation.

Lewis nodded. “Apparently she was trying to resuscitate her when Mr. Ellis called 911.”

Well, that was natural, Steve conceded. Competent. Even heroic. It was just too bad the brunette’s intervention had further fucked up an already compromised crime scene.

Despite her bedraggled appearance, she was talking soothingly to the man in the chair, patting his arm.

Steve narrowed his eyes. “Who’s the guy?”

“That’s Paul Ellis.” Lewis sounded surprised he hadn’t known. “The writer.”

Like he was supposed to recognize him from his book jacket or something.

“Get her away from him,” Steve ordered.

“She’s comforting him,” the second cop said. “The man just lost his wife.”

Steve should sympathize. He’d lost his own wife thirty-one months ago. But however much he had railed against Teresa’s cause of death, at least he’d known what killed her. He didn’t know what had killed Helen Ellis yet. And he didn’t like the fact that the two major witnesses at the scene had had ample opportunity to coordinate their stories.

He glanced again at the bereaved widower and the stringy-haired brunette, assessing their reactions. Ellis looked suitably distraught, like a man confounded by the accidental drowning death of his wife. Or like a man who had committed murder.

Beside Ellis’s red-eyed display of grief, his assistant, Wells, looked pale but composed. Maybe too composed?

Steve admired self-control. He had no use for hysterics. But Bailey Wells had known the dead woman. Lived in her house. Discovered her body. He expected her to demonstrate some emotion at her death.

He studied Wells’s white face, her dilated pupils. The result of shock, maybe. It definitely wasn’t grief.

“She lives here, you said?” he asked Lewis.

“Yes, sir.”

He watched Wells lean forward to murmur to Ellis and wondered. Just how personal an assistant was she?

“Have you notified the medical examiner yet?”

“No, I . . . the paramedics responded first and I—”

“Do it now,” Steve ordered. He was too late to preserve the scene, but at least the ME could view the body. “I’m going to get consent from Ellis before I do a walk-through. Lewis, I want you to take pictures. We need to record the scene before the body’s moved. In the meantime, separate those two until I can take their statements. And somebody bring that woman a towel.”

BAILEY was barely holding it together. She huddled on a kitchen chair, listening to the low voices and slow footsteps outside, feeling as if her head had disconnected from her neck and was floating somewhere above her body.

Her body. Floating.

Bailey shuddered.

“You want another towel?” asked the female officer who had been banished with her to the kitchen. Like Bailey needed a baby-sitter.

Or a guard.

She shuddered again. She couldn’t seem to stop shaking, bone-deep tremors neither the warm night or her now-damp towel were doing a damn thing to dispel.

“No, thank you,” she said politely, because her mama had raised her children to be respectful to the law. Anyway, it wasn’t the officer’s fault Bailey was stuck in here while poor Paul wrestled his grief and guilt alone.

She’d felt better when she could comfort him. She’d felt useful. Valued.
Glad.

And then she had despised herself because it was wrong to rejoice in being needed when he was hurting so and Helen was . . .

God, she couldn’t believe it. Helen was
dead.

BOOK: Home Before Midnight

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