Breaking Free

The pinkness of irritability reached up Mrs. Lipton’s neck and into her cheeks. “Why don’t you wait in the library, officers?” she said curtly. “I’ll see if Miss Fairchild can meet with you.”

Dylan removed his hat as they followed the stout housekeeper in her starched navy-and-white uniform through a vaulted hallway decorated with broad-leafed plants, sleek sculptures and breezy rattan furniture. The decor had been redone since Dylan had been here last winter. It looked cold to him. But then they didn’t pay him to pick out color swatches and match drapes. That was his ex’s department.

The thought of Sally shot a familiar jolt of annoyance through him that compounded his feeling of ill will toward Louisa, the past suddenly crowding in on him.

Mrs. Lipton threw open a set of solid old jarrah-wood doors, ushering the two men into the library of polished wood, leather furniture, antique tomes, old art and a general aura of established wealth.

Dylan immediately eyed the elaborate, glassed-in gun collection beyond the fireplace. If Louisa’s Smith & Wesson was in that cabinet he was going to have a problem. It would mean the pistol they had in the lab belonged to someone else.

Again, he cursed that he’d been forced to move prematurely. He needed the serial number on that murder weapon.

“Can I send for some tea while you wait?” The housekeeper’s voice remained tight.

“No. Thank you,” Dylan said, striding into the vast room where Sam Whittleson had come damn near to getting himself shot to death the first time.

Late-afternoon sunlight streamed in through French doors open to the patio, the water in the pool outside shimmering as if someone had just dived in. But Dylan made straight for the cabinet, pulse quickening as he noted a vacant spot on the red velvet where Louisa’s .38 had rested last June.

It was missing.

But as he leaned forward for a closer inspection of her collection, the library doors swung open with a crash and Louisa Fairchild’s voice resounded through the room.

“What in hell do you people want now!”

Dylan straightened, turned slowly to face her, projecting a powerful confidence and calm he didn’t quite feel.

Framed by the double doorway and flanked by her stubby housekeeper holding her black velvet riding helmet, Louisa Fairchild cut a tall, sophisticated and formidable figure for her eighty years—spine held stiff, crisp cotton stock-tied blouse high at the neck, tan breeches, dusty leather riding boots and silvery hair pulled back in a sleek chignon. She had handsome features and the very tanned and lined face of an Australian outdoorswoman. Her hands were brown, too. Veined, but elegant. Strong. Working hands, if rich ones.

Louisa was a blend of what defined this country in many ways. A woman of the land, one who’d made her wealth from it. Descended from a family that had risen from common stock brought over on boats to the penal colony to become rich in a warm climate of equal opportunity.

If Louisa had the same respect for equal justice as she had for opportunity, if Dylan didn’t hate her so much for what she’d done to his family, he might even find a grudging respect for this matriarch. He thought of his own frail mother, of this formidable woman’s indirect role in unraveling her.

“G’day, Miss Fairchild—”

“Cut to the chase, Detective Sergeant,” she snapped. “What do you want?”

He noted the strain in her neck muscles, the way she held her riding crop tight against her thigh, and he let silence hang for a few beats, just to rattle her further.

“We’d like to ask you some questions, Miss Fairchild,” he said, walking slowly toward her. “We’d like to know, for example, where your Smith & Wesson revolver is.”

Her eyes flicked to the gun cabinet and back. Her hand clenched the crop tighter. “If you’re here about that Sam Whittleson thing—”

“You mean his homicide?” “I have nothing to say about that. And I must insist you get off my estate.”

“Perhaps you’d like to come down to the Pepper Flats station then, just to answer a few questions?”

“Are you arresting me, Detective Sergeant?” Her chin tilted up in defiance. “Because if not, I have no intention of going anywhere with you, and I’m ordering you off my land. Now. Before I call my lawyers.”

“Then I’m afraid we’ll have to do this the hard way, ma’am,” Dylan said, reaching for the cuffs at his belt.

“Miss Louisa Fairchild,” he said, reaching for her arm, “I’m placing you under arrest for the murder of Sam Whittleson.”

Megan Stafford stepped out of the pool, wet hair splashing droplets at her feet as she reached for her towel, the evening sun balmy and soft against her bare skin.

She began to towel herself as she studied the purplishyellow haze on the horizon. It looked as though a thunderstorm was brewing, but she knew better. The haze was from the Koongorra fires.

It reminded her of Black Christmas when bushfire had raged across New South Wales for almost three weeks—the longest continuous bushfire emergency in the state’s history. No one in this region took the threat of mega fires for granted after that, especially with drought conditions like this.

Especially after the scare at Lochlain Racing, a neighboring stud farm owned by Tyler Preston.

Megan and her brother Patrick had arrived at Fairchild Acres two days after the murder of Sam Whittleson and the tragic Lochlain blaze. Sam had been shot in the Thorough-bred barn at Lochlain, late at night. One shot in the chest, one in the back. His body had then been dragged into a vacant horse stall, doused in turpentine and set ablaze. The fire had spread quickly through the H-shaped barn buildings, devastating the farm with losses into the millions.

Several prize Thoroughbreds had died; nearly forty others were left injured and incapable of ever racing again.

The barn had been under closed-circuit-camera surveillance, but the CD containing the footage from that night was missing.

Now emotions in the region were as brittle as the rustling dry gum leaves—the whole valley fearing an arsonist and murderer was loose among them.

Megan bent sideways, trying to knock water out of her ear. It had been an awkward time to arrive. She felt strange to be here at all.

She and Patrick had come to Fairchild Acres at the behest of their estranged great-aunt Louisa, who wished to determine if her only living relatives were worthy of her inheritance.

Louisa’s blunt letter had been a slap in the face to Megan.

She knew the woman by reputation only as a cold-hearted and phenomenally wealthy battleaxe with a prized talent for spotting winning horses. She also knew her great-aunt had—for some unspoken reason—banished her own sister Betty from Fairchild Acres many, many years ago, totally severing that branch of her family. Megan’s gran had never spoken about the incident. Neither had Megan’s mother.

And the family secret had died with them.

Megan had adored her Granny Betty, and she had no interest in the fortune of the noxious old dame who had shunned her gran.

If it hadn’t been for some serious argument on the part of her pragmatic brother, who claimed Betty had been denied her rightful share of the Fairchild estate, Megan would not have taken time off work, packed her bags and been standing barefoot at the Fairchild pool right now.

But the Fairchild legacy Megan had really come seeking was not money. She’d come to find an answer to that old family secret. She wanted to know where her gran had really come from, and why she’d been banished. It was a sense of birthright, of belonging, that Megan hungered for.

But her thoughts were suddenly shattered as the unflappable Mrs. Lipton came barreling out of the library. “Megan! Megan! Come quick! It’s Miss Fairchild! They’re arresting her!”

Megan stilled, towel in midair. “Arresting Louisa? What for?”

“Murder!”

Megan dropped her towel, grabbed a pool robe from the deck chair, and yanked it over her arms as she raced up the flagstone steps to the library.

She froze in the doorway.

A large sandy-haired cop was ushering a handcuffed Louisa out of the library as a skinny young policeman moved towards the gun cabinet.

Megan’s heart started to hammer. “Louisa?”

They all spun round.