Brady squirmed, so Sara knelt to put him down. His bare toes curled against the sturdy nap of the new gray-blue carpet. Until recently, the store’s flooring had consisted of worn tile squares circa 1955—some black, some green, about half of them broken. Hank had refused to waste money on a building he regarded as “a piece of junk waiting for the wrecking ball.” Sara never had the funds to re-decorate, but finally decided to use some of the trust money Julia’s lawyer sent each month to make Brady’s play area safe and comfortable.
“Mine,” Brady said, reaching for the bottom drawer of Sara’s desk. She’d been careful to have all the drawers fitted with locks—except one, which belonged to Brady. She made sure a healthy snack was in the drawer at all times.
She couldn’t help smiling at his triumphant chortle when he pulled a thick hunk of toasted bread from the drawer. His ash-brown curls, as thick and lush as his mother’s had been, bounced as he toddled to his miniature cash register and sat down to play.
Sara glanced around; she’d nearly forgotten the customer now unobtrusively tucked in a corner near the cookbooks. That’s odd, she thought. Her occasional male cook usually carried the tragic look of the recently divorced. This fellow didn’t strike her as needy or interested in cordon bleu cooking. And he definitely seemed vaguely familiar.
She started in his direction, but was deflected by Claudie’s loud “Whoopee!”
“Holy sh—shimany,” Keneesha exclaimed. “Look at this, Sara J. Lord God, what I wouldn’t give to be size eight!”
Sara joined her friends at the counter to examine Jenny’s discarded clothes. It wasn’t until the bell tinkled that she remembered the cookbook man.
BO POCKETED his palm-size camera and exited the bookstore, ducking into the alley. A mural of the store’s name was painted in five-foot-tall lettering along the brick wall. Clever name for a bookstore, he thought. I wonder if Sara made it up?
Thinking of Sara made him scowl. Normally, Bo liked his job, but at this particular moment he felt like a piece of excrement wedged between the proverbial rock and a hard place.
Ren Bishop was the brother Bo never had, his one true friend, and Bo owed him more than he could ever repay—but he wasn’t happy about the turn this case had taken.
I should have seen it coming, he silently groused as he opened the door of his car, a twenty-year-old Mazda with peeled paint and two primed dents in the fender. His work car, like Bo himself, knew how to be inconspicuous. “Two years without a goddamn lead,” he muttered. “The only witness finally comes home after trekking through India, and what do I find? A dead Jewel and a kid that’s got Bishop written all over his face!”
Lowering himself to the tattered upholstery, Bo pictured the sideswiped look on his friend’s face when he’d left the courthouse. It reminded him of that night two years ago when Ren had stumbled down the gangplank of Bo’s houseboat, vulnerable, exposed and all too human.
“I screwed up, Bo,” Ren had confessed, pacing from one end of Bo’s tiny living room to the other. “Positively. Beyond all screwups.”
“Did you kill someone?”
“Of course not.”
“Then stop pacing. You’re making me seasick.” Bo had been surprisingly unnerved by his friend’s agitation. In college, Ren had been known as Mr. Unflappable. Bo didn’t like seeing him flapped.
Ren proceeded to spill his guts about the redhead who’d mysteriously disappeared after one night of passion. Bo recalled half hoping that Jewel was a blackmailer so he’d have a chance to meet her. But nothing happened. If that night clerk had stayed in India, Bo never would have had a clue to Jewel’s true identity.
“That’s Mrs. Hovant. Julia,” the twenty-year-old clerk told him, after Bo gave her Ren’s description of the woman. “She and Dr. Hovant used to come up from Sac five or six times a season, depending on the snow. Maybe they still do. I don’t know. I don’t work at the lodge anymore.”
With a little cautious probing, Bo also found out that the day in question stuck in the clerk’s memory because Julia had come to the lodge alone. “I asked her where the doc was, and she said something like ‘Getting his rocks off at a medical convention.’ She didn’t seem too happy,” the clerk told him.
The rest had been child’s play for the PI.
Bo heaved a sigh, stirring the dust on his dashboard. He’d expected Ren to mourn Jewel’s death, but this thing about the kid had caught him off guard. Bo had tried to downplay Ren’s concern, but he had to admit the possible date of conception fell eerily close to the one-night stand.
Still, Bo had balked at pursuing it, partly because of what it might do to Sara, an innocent bystander in this little passion play.
“Even if, for argument’s sake, the kid is yours,” Bo had argued, “there’s nothing you can do at this point. It’s your word against the mother’s, and she’s dead.”
“As the biological father I’d have more rights than an aunt.”
“But it comes down to proof. How can you get the proof without admitting what you did? Which, if I remember correctly, was what you hired me to make sure never happened.”
“I don’t suppose there’s any way I can. But regardless of how it affects my political future, I still have to know.”
Bo sighed and started the car. A couple of discreet photos and the kid’s blood type from his medical records. This Bo could do, but that would be it.
“You have to draw the line somewhere,” he muttered to himself. “Even for a friend.”
CHAPTER TWO
REN YANKED ON THE CORD of the wooden blinds with more force than the old rope could take. The handle came off in his hand and the heavy shades crashed back to the mahogany sill with an ominous thunk. He sighed and tossed the yellowed plastic piece on the sideboard.
I’ve got to call a decorator, Ren thought. Although he seldom used the formal dining room, he knew it would be called into play more often once he and Eve were married. At present, the room reflected Babe’s favorite decorating motif: Ostentatious. The opulent crystal chandelier cast an amber glow across the Regency-style table at its eight saffron brocade chairs. Without benefit of the morning light streaming through its mullioned windows, the room’s musty gloom matched Ren’s mood.
Ren blamed part of his foul mood on his alarm clock. If he’d remembered to set it, he would have made his weekly golf game. Instead, he’d slept in till nine-thirty. Ren pushed on the swinging door and entered his kitchen, a pristine world of black-and-white tile—the first room he’d remodeled after he moved in.
His home had once belonged to his parents, but after his father died, Babe, wanting something smaller and more luxurious, sold the house to Ren. He loved the old beast, just as his father had, but the forty-year-old house needed work.
“Coffee,” he mumbled, moving like a bear just out of hibernation. Ren took a deep breath, hoping to discover his coffeemaker was still warming his morning brew. His nostrils crinkled. No light beckoned from the stainless steel coffeemaker, but the smell of overcooked coffee lingered.
Ren microwaved a mug of the tar-like liquid and carried it to the small bistro table in the glass-enclosed breakfast nook. He sat on one of the waist-high stools covered in black-and-white hound’s-tooth.
The wall phone rang before he could take a sip of his coffee. He stretched to pick it up. “Hello.”
“Hi, handsome, sorry about last night. I’d have called, but you wouldn’t believe how late we got out of the booth.”
Ren had no trouble picturing his fiancée as she rattled off her apology. No doubt she was in her car, zipping through the light, Saturday-morning traffic on Interstate 80, headed back into