The Quiet Storm

She scrambled to her feet. The boy rose, too, watching him out of huge, thickly lashed eyes that didn’t appear to miss anything. Beau started to greet him, then remembered the boy wouldn’t hear the words. Unsure if the boy could read lips, he finally opted for a wave and a smile.

“This is Alex,” Elizabeth said, signing for the boy’s benefit as she spoke. “Alex, this is Mr. Riley.”

The boy smiled shyly and held out his hand like a perfect little gentleman. Beau tucked his grin away and crouched to his level, shaking the offered hand solemnly.

“I need to talk to our visitor for a while so you can go play with your…” Elizabeth paused for a moment as if her mind wandered or she forgot the words she was signing while she spoke aloud. “Grandmother,” she finally said. “Abuela. Can you do that? I’ll try to tell you a story before bed.”

The boy nodded. Picking up one of the trucks—a miniature blue Peterbilt with bright orange flames licking down the sides—he hurried past Beau with another shy smile and slipped his hand into the older woman’s.

A young, leggy yellow Lab Beau hadn’t noticed before bounded up from a corner and padded after them, leaving Beau alone with Elizabeth in the surprisingly comfortable, lived-in room at odds with the formality he’d seen in his quick glimpse of the rest of the house.

Elizabeth nibbled her lip for a moment then blew out a breath. “Alex is…was Tina’s little boy.”

“And his grandmother?”

“Luisa. She’s been housekeeper here since I was a baby. She and Tina lived in an apartment above the kitchen.”

The woman was a tangle of contradictions. She wore what was probably a three-hundred-dollar sweater to play trucks on the floor with her housekeeper’s grandchild and she spoke of them more like family than servants. He had to admit he was intrigued in spite of himself.

“Nice digs,” he finally said, scanning the recreation room’s plump leather couches surrounding a huge flat-screen TV. Watching Sonics games here would be almost as good as courtside seats.

Not that he would ever have the chance for either, he reminded himself. This was business. Strictly business.

She shrugged. “It’s too big for just me and Luisa and now Alex. I’ll probably sell it eventually but I hate to give up the view.”

He shifted his gaze reluctantly from the TV to the city landscape across the water. “I can see why.”

“I’m sure you’re anxious to begin,” she said after a moment. “Tina’s things are stored in…”

Her voice trailed off, and she paused for a few seconds. The color that had begun to fade now returned. “A room upstairs,” she finally finished. “If you’ll follow me, I’ll show you the way.”

He gestured to the door and she led him without a word to retrace the route he and the housekeeper had taken from the front door, then up a long, curving flight of stairs rising from the entry.

She wasn’t much of a chatterer, he couldn’t help but notice. Was it snobbishness or just reserve, as Grace had said? He followed her up the stairs, trying hard not to ogle her long, luscious legs in whitewashed blue jeans. They weren’t designer threads, he observed, just plain old off-the-shelf Levi’s that looked as if they’d been well-worn. Another piece to the puzzle.

At the top of the stairs she took off to the left and he followed her past at least ten closed doors.

How the hell many rooms were in this mausoleum anyway? he wondered. If the Quinn publishing fortune ever took a downturn, she could always open a medium-size hotel.

Finally they reached the end of the hallway and she opened the door. Inside he found a good-size bedroom where a small huddle of cardboard boxes had been stacked neatly against a wall. Not many boxes, he noted, maybe not even a dozen. A pitiful legacy for a woman who had walked the earth for twenty-eight years. The thought made him sad.

Elizabeth seemed to be on the same wavelength. “It’s not much,” she said, her voice small and sorrowful. “I’m not sure what you hope to find here.”

“I’m not, either. I’ll know when I see it.”

“Would you prefer if I left you alone?”

He smiled a little at the barely concealed eagerness in her expression. Obviously, something about him made Miss Millionaire Quinn nervous. He had to admit he liked the sensation.

If it was true what Grace said, that Elizabeth was only reserved around people she didn’t know, maybe she just needed to spend a little time with him to thaw some of that ice.

“No, stay. You might see something out of place, something I would otherwise miss.”

Elizabeth stared at that small smile, at the way the sun-bronzed skin creased at the corners of his mouth and the sparkle in those green eyes. That smile was entirely too appealing for her peace of mind. It made him seem far too approachable, not nearly as terrifying, and she wondered what he would do if she snapped at him to knock it off, to just keep his blasted smiles to himself. She couldn’t, of course. Not if she didn’t want to appear any more ridiculous than she already did with her awkward pauses and jerky, stop-and-go conversation.

Staying here with him was the last thing she wanted to do. Every instinct in her shouted for her to escape while she could, to put as much distance between them as possible, which in a house as sprawling as Harbor View was a fair span. But she couldn’t do that, any more than she could politely ask him to please refrain from smiling in her presence.

Instead she forced herself to pull a low ottoman nearer the boxes. She perched on it with her hands folded in her lap and tried hard not to stare at the way the powerful muscles in his back flexed under his casual black golf shirt as he hefted a large box from the stacks and lowered it to the floor.

They lapsed into silence as he unfolded the flaps of the box and began sorting through the contents. It was so difficult seeing these things of Tina’s that she had used and loved lying forlorn, jumbled together in boxes.

Neither she nor Luisa had been able to bring themselves to sort through the boxes yet to decide what they would keep and what they would give to Goodwill.

She found it disconcerting—heartbreaking, even—to see these bits and pieces of Tina’s life examined by a stranger, no matter that she had brought him into this, no matter how well meaning his motives.

I’m sorry, she mouthed, with a prayer that Tina could hear her.

“So the victim—Tina—was the daughter of your housekeeper?”

Caught up in her thoughts, it took her a moment to register the sudden question. She blinked. “Yes,” she answered carefully. “I was only a few months old when they moved in. My mother died a short time after I was born and Luisa raised me.”

“Luisa, not your father?”

She thought of her father and the wide, unbreachable chasm between them. “He was…” Distant. Cold. “Busy. He had little time for a young child.” Especially one who tried so hard to please her father that when she finally did start to talk, years past the normal time, her words never came out right when he was around.

Beau Riley raised one of those dark eyebrows as if to encourage her to say more, but she stubbornly resisted, choosing to change the subject instead. “Tina and I were only a year apart so we were constantly together. Really, we were more like…like sisters than anything else.”

“How long did she live here?”

He was subtly interrogating her. She knew it and fought a burble of panic at having to answer a long string of questions. But if it would help him get a better idea for Tina’s life, she would try. “After high school we both moved to L.A. We shared an apartment while I attended college and she tried to find work as a model.”

That was where the wildness in Tina had first emerged, while Elizabeth had been desperately trying to pass her classes. She hadn’t noticed the changes at first, too consumed with her own struggles, trying to focus on her school-work with the awful specter of one more failure looming over her shoulder every second.

As the months passed, they had grown further and further apart until they would go days without their paths crossing even though they shared living space. Elizabeth spent every waking moment at the library and Tina had a jampacked social life and worked two jobs while she waited for the big break that never arrived.

“But you both came back?”

“Yes. My father was ill. I returned to care for him.” Though he didn’t want her here, even at the end.

“And Tina?”

She relaxed, discovering it wasn’t so very difficult to talk with him after all. For all his disconcerting abruptness the other day in his office, Detective Riley obviously must have a great deal of practice listening to people. “Her modeling career wasn’t going well. She came home to find work and it was during that time she became pregnant with Alex. After that, she stayed so Luisa and I could help with him.”

“Is the boy’s father involved in his life?”

Elizabeth shook her head. “I don’t know who he is. I wish I did, but Tina would never tell us.”

That had stung, she had to admit. But it was just another in the tangled web of secrets her friend had kept from her and Luisa, secrets she had ultimately taken to her death.