The breath froze in her chest as recognition slammed into her.
Peter Ashford, looking disheveled and inebriated.
She glanced at the monstrous house, eerily illuminated by uplights and headlights. This was Peter’s house?
Which meant, she realized with dawning horror, that the woman who was dead was…Angela Ashford.
14
The lost look on Peter’s face made Carlotta’s heart swell in agony. Before she had time to think, she was out of the car and moving toward him in the semidarkness. “Peter?”
He turned at the sound of her voice and when he saw her, his face creased in confusion. “Carlotta? What are you doing here?”
“I dropped off Wesley. He’s here…in an official capacity,” she said vaguely. “We had no idea this was your house…that Angela—” She broke off, at a loss for words.
He embraced her and she could feel desperation palpating through his heated skin. She could also smell the gin on his breath and on his shirt. He was drunk, and she wondered how much his clinging to her was to keep himself upright. Then he buried his face in her hair and pulled her body against his. She ached to give him the comfort he sought, but when she realized that Detective Terry was gaping at them, she reluctantly pulled away and cleared her throat.
Detective Terry’s eyebrows sat high on his forehead. “I take it you two know each other?”
“Old friends,” Carlotta supplied quickly, then her gaze caught on the pool about twenty yards below them, shrouded in the mist that rose from the surface of the heated water. Angela’s body, clad in black, lay on the pale background of the concrete pool surround, her limbs at awkward angles. Carlotta swallowed hard against the cold truth that Angela was dead.
Peter looked at the scene and dragged his hand down his face. “I have to go to her,” he said, and the detective relented with a nod, falling into step behind him.
Carlotta didn’t know whether to stay or to go, or to walk down with the men. She didn’t relish seeing the body up close, but she also didn’t want to just leave. She hugged herself, running her hands up and down her arms to ward off the damp chill that blanketed everything that didn’t move—which would include Angela’s body, she noted ruefully.
Peter turned back. “Carlotta…I could use a friend right now.”
She hesitated, darting a glance at the detective, who looked extremely irritated at the idea of her going with them.
“Try to stay out of the way,” Detective Terry said, then continued tromping down the incline.
She followed them, careful to stay behind while still in Peter’s peripheral vision. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. He seemed so…so…disconnected. She wondered if he was in shock. No tears, no prostrate hysterics. Maybe the alcohol had numbed his senses, but back when they had dated, alcohol had always made him more emotional.
He moved like an automaton, staring straight ahead, his hands hanging limply by his sides as he walked by the vehicles parked in the paved turnaround in front of the house, including a car with the medical examiner’s shield on the side and a plain white van that Carlotta assumed belonged to Cooper Craft. As they approached the tall wrought-iron fence that enclosed the pool, Carlotta glanced around nervously.
She took in the palatial lines of the brick house, the sweeping steps that led from the turnaround, the huge fountain, the two-story entryway and the soaring Palladian windows, eerily dark. The house looked cold, empty…dead. By contrast, the gated pool area adjacent to the house was blazing with lights, the deep water an unnatural blue. With steam rising from the surface, the water resembled a witch’s cauldron. Taking deep breaths against the turmoil in her stomach, she followed the men down a short lighted stone path to a gate that had been propped open. The scent of chlorine burned the air, which seemed swollen with humidity and sadness.
Wesley and Cooper stood off to the side of the pool next to a small waterfall, apparently waiting for the police to complete their investigation. A youngish man with Medical Examiner on his jacket stood over Angela’s body, taking photos. Carlotta made eye contact with Wesley, who looked confused at her appearance. Then his gaze went to Peter and back to her, wide-eyed. She nodded, trying to answer the questions that must be whirling through his mind, and walked over to where they stood.
“Isn’t that Peter Ashford?” Wesley whispered.
“Yes,” she murmured.
“And that’s his wife?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus,” Wesley said. “Nice place.”
“Wesley!”
He looked contrite and pressed his lips together.
“Do you know the family?” Cooper asked them asked under his breath.
“That’s sis’s old boyfriend,” Wesley offered. “The one she was crying—”
“Do you know what happened?” she cut in, shooting Wesley a lethal look.
“Accidental drowning is what I was told,” Cooper offered quietly. “She must have fallen in.”
Her gaze cut to Angela’s still body and the gray wetness around her on the concrete from her saturated clothing. When she’d been shopping for swimsuits, Angela had mentioned that she didn’t know how to swim. She was still wearing the chunky-heeled black knee boots that Carlotta had sold to her—they must have felt like lead when she’d gone under the surface of the water. The pool was about twenty-five feet wide—she would have been a mere body’s length from safety. The vision sent a shudder through Carlotta. The entire scene was surreal, an unimaginable nightmare.
“The maid found her,” Wesley added, nodding to an open sliding glass door leading into the house. A small, older woman stood in the doorway, her shoulders hunched, a handkerchief covering her face.
The uniformed officers apparently had been waiting for Detective Terry to arrive because when they saw him, they straightened from the body. Peter’s knees buckled and Detective Terry steadied him, guiding him toward the open door into the expansive house. She heard the detective say something about coffee. The maid scurried aside and turned on a light. The wall facing the pool was made almost completely of glass. From where Carlotta stood, she saw Peter sink into a chair around a table in a room that appeared to be a sunroom or a casual dining room. He covered his face with his hands.
Carlotta’s body strained toward him, but she forced her attention away from the man with whom she had been so recently and so bizarrely reunited and back to the scene unfolding around the pool.
The officers talking to Detective Terry gestured toward the water, perhaps indicating where they had found the body. At the end of the pool sat an outdoor kitchen with a stone fireplace, appliances and a bar. From her vantage point she could see at least two bottles of gin, along with a silver flask that looked like the one Angela had drunk from in the dressing room. Behind the bar area was a small cottage—the guesthouse, Carlotta presumed, recalling what Peter had said about the pool addition being more than he had envisioned.
But she silently applauded Angela’s ambition. It was a garden paradise, with huge sago palms in clay pots, beds of lush flowers and a flagstone path to a hot tub lined with mosaic tiles. It was a picture out of Better Home and Gardens…except for the body lying poolside. Angela Ashford hadn’t lived to enjoy the luxurious addition to her posh home.
Next to the pool, Detective Terry had been in discussion with the medical examiner, and now knelt over the body, pulling a set of plastic gloves from his jacket pocket. He snapped them on and lifted the mass of golden