Quiet as the Grave

If she sold it. The house might be perfect, but the house’s history was a mess. Justine Frome had mysteriously disappeared two years ago and had never been heard from since. The police suspected foul play, and so did her parents. Justine’s father had dragged the lake and jackhammered up the swimming pool looking for her, but no body had ever been found.

That was the problem in a nutshell. Debra didn’t mean to be insensitive, but who wanted to pay a couple of mil for a beautiful lakefront home if they were always going to be wondering when a body might bob out of the lake, or start stinking up the basement?

She left her car out on the street, planted her Open House sign in the most visible spot and then hiked up the long, showy entry to the mansion. She liked to let the buyers drive into the main portico. It tempted them. They loved the look of their own cars under that elegant, shady arch.

Please, God, let there be buyers today. Her last open house had brought in half a dozen gawkers and only two legitimate lookers who had scurried out of the house like cartoon mice when they heard the Where’s Justine? story. Legally, she had to tell it.

Debra propped her bag of cleaning and cooking supplies against her shin while she fumbled with the front door keys. Off to the right, she heard the growl of Richie Graham’s hedge clippers. He was probably shaping the boxwood hedge, which surrounded a glorious garden of White Persian Lilacs. They probably would be in full bloom thanks to all the rain.

Richie…well, that was a good news–bad news situation. Richie had been the gardener for this house, and many of the Tuxedo Lake mansions, for about ten years now, and he created some spectacular lawns. He’d lived in the nanny quarters, serving as caretaker for the mansion ever since Justine’s father, Alton Millner, had moved out a few months ago.

He was as scruffy, rugged and sexy as Lady Chatterley’s lover, which was the good news. Debra had watched the female prospective buyers watching Richie, and several times she’d been tempted to hand them one of the Chinese lacquer bowls to catch the drool.

The bad news was that he was terrible about tracking mud all over the marble floors, especially when the weather was as soupy as it had been lately.

The hedge clippers stopped just as she got the dead bolt to turn. In a matter of minutes, as she was arranging her supplies on the kitchen’s granite counter, she felt a shadow fall into the room, and she knew Richie had arrived.

“Hey, there, gorgeous,” he said in his husky voice that always seemed to be laced with amusement.

He might well be amused by that comment. Debra knew she wasn’t gorgeous. She wasn’t even really pretty. She was, as her mom put it, “acceptable.”

It had been a hard lesson to learn, but she’d learned it. She’d even learned to compensate for it, though good makeup and a flattering haircut could go only so far.

“Hi, Richie,” she said, twisting her head to smile at him.

Now he was gorgeous. He was wearing his regular uniform, a pair of white jeans that somehow managed to cup his butt and practically fall off his bony hips at the same time. Work boots. And nothing else.

She wondered if he picked white because he knew that, on him, smudges of earth were paradoxically sexy, making you think he might grab you and make painful, thorny, but ecstatic and perfumed love to you in the rose garden.

Or did he just know that the white set off his tanned torso to perfection? Once, hiding here in the kitchen and looking out the window, she’d watched him hose off his dirty chest, the clear water finding that fault line down the center, the one that bisected the pectorals and ended at the navel….

She wiped her flushed brow with the back of her hand and wished that she weren’t always, always attracted to bad boys.

“You showing the place today?”

She nodded, pulling herself together. She already had one bad boy lover. She didn’t need two, not even in her fantasies.

“Yes. It starts at noon. I hope you haven’t tracked mud all over the foyer.”

“I might have.” He rubbed his chest lazily, still grinning. “It’s rained every day for two weeks. It’s like a swamp out there.”

She sighed, reached over and grabbed a damp sponge.

“Here,” she said, tossing it to him. “You can clean it up, then.”

He caught the sponge with one hand. He looked at it a minute, then squeezed it hard, until water oozed between his fingers. He rubbed it slowly over his face, and then, when it was gray with dirt, he tossed it back to her.

“Can’t,” he said. “The boxwood is only half-done. Gotta get back to it. I’ll help you with that gingerbread when you’re done. Just leave it in the stove.”

She made a face, but she wasn’t really mad. She didn’t mind if he wanted the gingerbread. She made it only to fill the air with the comforting scents of cinnamon and nutmeg during the open house.

And she didn’t even mind that he wouldn’t clean up his own muddy footprints.

That was her problem. She simply didn’t know how to get mad at a sexy rascal like that, even when he deserved it. It was, as her mother was fond of pointing out, her Achilles’ heel.

Turned out Richie had been pulling her chain anyhow. The house was spotless, and the little touch-cleaning she did was largely unnecessary. She opened a couple of windows to let the fresh spring air in. Then she dusted a couple of picture frames. Finally, she vacuumed the library’s Persian rug and the plush wall-to-wall in the master bedroom.

Done. And still an hour to go before anyone showed up. She was going to sell this house, she told herself again. Her mom had called last week and offered to let her come home to live if things got too tough up here in New York.

No way in hell was she going back home. She’d sell this house today.

Still in the master bedroom, she gazed through the lake window that led onto a small, circular overlook. From up here you could see the entire lawn. Richie was still taming the boxwood, his muscular arms hoisting the heavy clippers as if they were made of feathers.

On the other side, the west side of the house, she could just glimpse Phil and Judy Stott’s yard. They didn’t use Richie, and it showed. They were out there now, fertilizing a bulb garden that was just about played out for the season. Debra and Judy were friends, but she was glad you couldn’t see much of their yard from the ground. It wouldn’t be a selling point.

The glistening blue lake was, though, especially on a clear morning like this, when half a dozen sailboats floated out there, as white as scraps of fallen clouds.

Thank God the torrential rains had ended. Debra had been here in bad weather, and it gave the lake an eerie silvery-green cast. On stormy days, you could imagine poor Justine lying there on the mucky bottom, small fish camouflaging themselves in the waving strands of her faded hair.

What had happened to her?

This tiny balcony, for instance… The wrought-iron railing was too low. If she’d been standing here, and someone had come up behind her, it wouldn’t have taken much. One push, and she could easily have lost her balance.

But who would have pushed her? The most obvious answer, of course, would be her husband, Mike Frome. And Debra knew that wasn’t possible.

Her boyfriend, Rutledge, worked for Mike. Mike was one of the good guys.

At least she had always thought he was….

She moved away from the window. None of that. She needed to fill this house with good vibes, with optimism and promise. She spied an empty cachepot beside the bed. Yes, that’s what it needed. Flowers. Nothing said “home” like flowers fresh from your own garden.

She grabbed a basket and a pair of gardening shears from the mudroom just beyond the kitchen, and then she wandered out into the yard. Richie hadn’t been kidding. It really was swampy. But it was as if the rain had intoxicated the flowers, eliminating their inhibitions, making them dress in gaudier colors, spread their lush, ripe petals wider than was prudent.

The larkspurs were the most spectacular. They dominated a multicolored patch of blooms down near the cliff edge, flanking the small stairway that led to the beach. Debra decided she had time to go that far and still wash her shoes when she got back to the house. So she settled the basket over her arm and made her way down the sloping lawn, enjoying the way the sun warmed her hair and painted lime-gold patches on the grass.

Once she stood among the larkspurs, the muddy ground giving underfoot, the lake was so close its sunny sparkles almost blinded her. When a motorboat went puttering by, someone called and waved, though she couldn’t identify the shadowy figure. Was everyone around here that friendly? She didn’t live on this lake. She couldn’t begin to afford such a snazzy address.

She squinted into the sun, wondering if it might be Rutledge, who was supposed to be doing some bookwork at Mike’s office today but who always preferred to be out on the water if he had a choice. She sure hoped he hadn’t ditched work again. There were limits even to nice Mike Frome’s patience.

When the boat curved and turned away, for several minutes she could still hear the lake lapping against the shore in nervous eddies.

She went back to cutting flowers, long purple-blue stalks that were going to look gorgeous in the white bedroom. She filled her basket to overflowing, and then stepped carefully through the mud to the other side of the stairs. She didn’t want to leave the garden lopsided.

Over here the rain had really pummeled things. The mud had run down, out of the bed, onto the grass beyond. She wasn’t sure she could find many stalks that weren’t bruised and spattered with dirt.

She bent, searching, sifting with her fingers….

Suddenly she straightened and backed up a step, her blood running cold, shrinking in her veins.