Finding Laura Read online

  “Now, this,” Laura said as they paused on the veranda to gaze out over the gardens stretching into the distance, “I like.”

  “My favorite place in the whole world,” Josie confessed. “It’s taken fifty years to get these gardens absolutely perfect, and I think it was worth every day’s work. The head gardener’s been here for thirty years, and he’s a real artist.”

  Scanning what she could see of the acres and acres of landscaped grounds, Laura thought she saw something surprising off toward the southwest. “Is that a maze I see?”

  Josie nodded happily. “Yeah, and it’s great. Amelia’s husband, David, had it designed back in the fifties; he was a great one for puzzles, I’m told. And this one’s absolutely diabolical. It took me nearly a year of trying before I discovered the key to the thing. Now I can go straight to the center—where there’s a lovely little gazebo, by the way—and straight back out without taking any wrong turns. But I can’t tell you how many times I got lost and finally had to yell for help.”

  Laura, who was also a great one for puzzles, said hastily, “Don’t tell me the key. Maybe I’ll have time to explore.”

  “Of course you will,” Josie told her. “Amelia rests after lunch every day, as she said, so you’ll have that time for sure.”

  “You mean you won’t be baby-sitting me every day?” Laura asked, a smile taking the sting out of her words.

  Josie laughed. “It’s not as bad as that, I promise you. Amelia asked me to look after you today because she wants you to feel comfortable here. Plus, I can answer a lot of the questions you no doubt have about the family. Come on, we’ll take the path to the maze.”

  Laura was more than willing, but as they crossed over yards of manicured lawn to reach the path, she said, “Isn’t there a swimming pool? I don’t see one.”

  “You’re walking over it—literally,” Josie said. “Amelia had it filled in forty years ago after David drowned in it.”

  Remembering now that she had heard something about that, Laura said, “Was he a bad swimmer?”

  “No, a very good one. But he apparently slipped on the tiles around the pool and fell in, hitting his head on the edge. At least, that’s what the investigators determined; there weren’t any witnesses.” She shook her head slightly. “There’s been a great deal of misfortune in the Kilbourne family.”

  Laura knew that Josie herself was a widow, but it didn’t seem quite the time to probe into that. So she merely said, “That often seems the case with very powerful families.”

  Josie nodded. “As if fate takes away as much as it gives. Here—this is the path to the maze.”

  The path was gravel, scrupulously neat, and wound lazily among azalea bushes that had long since lost their spring blooms, and groups of rosebushes still providing valiant color, and flower beds and lush green plants of every kind. There was even a babbling brook crossed by an arched wooden bridge.

  Laura took in the beauty of her surroundings, absently contrasting this sprawling, flourishing, vividly alive place with the dark stillness of the house, but what she said was, “So Amelia expects me to ask questions about the family?”

  “Well, she didn’t say in so many words,” Josie replied frankly. “But I certainly expect you to. Look, I don’t see any reason to be coy about any of this, Laura, and I hope you agree.”

  “I do.” Laura glanced at the woman walking beside her, wondering which was most important here, Josie’s apparent willingness to be open or her auburn hair.

  “Good. So we both know that the police considered you a suspect in Peter’s murder, at least for a while, and that the newspapers are hinting without much subtlety that you were his mistress.”

  “I wasn’t,” Laura said firmly. “I met him for the first and only time the day he died, when he came to my apartment to try and buy back the mirror I’d bought here that day.”

  Josie looked up at her curiously. “That’s what Amelia said. It’s funny about that mirror, though.”

  Laura felt her pulse quicken. “You know something about it?”

  “The mirror itself? No. In fact, I can’t remember ever seeing it. Which is why I find it odd that Peter wanted to buy it back from you. I mean, if it had been important to the family, I think I would have known about it.”

  “That is why he came to my apartment,” Laura heard herself say a touch defensively.

  Josie smiled quickly. “I believe you. Or at least, I believe that’s what he told you.”

  Laura frowned. “What he told me?”

  With a faint smile, Josie said, “Peter was a womanizer. Or, more accurately, I think, he was a sort of serial lover. One woman after another, one conquest after another. It fed his ego, and maybe something more, I don’t know. If he saw you at the estate sale—and it’s quite possible he did—then I’d expect him to pursue you any way he could. The mirror could have been a handy excuse to meet you.”

  That was a possibility Laura had not considered, but after she thought about it for a moment, she shook her head. “No, I don’t think that was it. He really wanted to buy the mirror back.”

  “He didn’t make a pass?”

  Laura hesitated, then said, “A small verbal one. But it was the mirror he came after, I’m sure of it.”

  “Well, if you’re right about that, I’m really puzzled.” It was Josie’s turn to frown. “I saw the inventory before the sale, sort of checking up on Peter, if you want the truth, and I didn’t even notice the mirror.”

  “Peter was in charge of the inventory?”

  Josie nodded. “Amelia put him in charge when she decided to have the sale—and before Daniel came back home. Peter was supposed to take a look at every item and make sure it wasn’t something we didn’t want sold. It shouldn’t have been a very difficult job, since most of that stuff in the attic and basement had been there for years and years. All he had to do, really, was get an appraiser to check out everything. Which he did. Anything deemed especially valuable was tagged with a floor price, and the rest tagged to be auctioned to the highest bidder.”

  “Daniel wasn’t involved in the sale?” Laura asked, remembering Cassidy’s remarks on the subject.

  “Well … yes and no. By the time he heard about it and came home, most of the details had been covered. But he did make sure Peter had gotten a really good appraiser, and I know he went over the list of items the appraiser considered too valuable to sell without a floor.” She paused, then added, “As a matter of fact, he didn’t see the entire inventory until after the sale, late that afternoon. I remember him asking Peter about it.”

  “You didn’t hear them discuss the list, did you?”

  Josie shook her head. “No, I left the library and went upstairs for a few minutes. When I came back down, neither of them was in the library.”

  Laura thought about it, wondering inevitably if it had been Daniel who had noticed the mirror on the complete inventory, and if it had been he who had sent Peter to buy it back. But why, then, would Daniel show so much disbelief of Laura’s story if he knew it was the truth? What possible reason could he have for pretending he knew nothing about the mirror?

  It didn’t make sense.

  Josie was also silent while they followed their path around a weeping willow tree, through a section of lush fernlike plants, and finally to a long wooden bench placed on a hill overlooking the huge maze. Then she said, “If you stand here long enough and concentrate, you can work out the key to the maze. Why don’t we sit down for a few minutes?”

  “Sounds good to me.” Laura was happy to sit here in the cool, sunlit garden and look down on the neatly clipped hedges that made up the maze. She didn’t concentrate on trying to figure out the secret, just admired the fully four acres of a living puzzle. She could see, in the center, the pagodalike roof of the gazebo protruding above the greenery, a visible but elusive goal.

  Laura half turned and looked at her companion, then impulsively unclipped from the sketchpad the small pouch containing her charcoal pencils and op
ened the sketchpad, turning to a fresh page. “Do you mind?” she asked. “I could use the practice.”

  Josie looked startled, then shrugged. “Sure, go ahead. Should I sit a different way, or—”

  “No, just relax. And keep talking. Tell me about Amelia.”

  “Amelia … What can I say about her? She took me in and gave me a job when I didn’t have anywhere else to go. She’s always been kind to me. Never made me feel like a … poor relation living on charity. She has a mind like a steel trap, and her memory is incredible.”

  Sketching rapidly, glancing from the pad to Josie’s lovely face, Laura said, “She’s had quite a bit of tragedy in her life.”

  Josie nodded, looking out over the maze but not really seeing it. “Yes, she has. She and David had twenty years together, but his death was so sudden and unexpected.… She still mourns him, you know. That’s his place at the foot of the table. And she still wears black.” Josie frowned slightly.

  Wondering what had caused that brief disturbance, Laura said neutrally, “Forty years is a long time to mourn.”

  “Yes.” Josie shook her head as though throwing off an unpleasant or unnerving thought. “But she had other losses during those years. Her son, John—Daniel and Peter’s father—died in 1976, in a hunting accident; he was out with a party of friends, and tragically—inexplicably—two of them accidently shot him.”

  “That was tragic,” Laura noted.

  “Par for the Kilbourne family history,” Josie told her. “Take Amelia’s daughter, Julia, for instance. She was Anne’s mother—you’ll meet Anne later. Anyway, Julia was killed in 1986, in another gun-related accident. She and her husband, Philip, thought they heard a prowler one night, so he got up and got his gun. Instead of staying in bed where he’d left her, Julia followed him. If she had called out to him … but apparently she didn’t. He mistook her for the prowler and shot her.”

  Laura stopped sketching and stared at Josie. “My God.”

  “Yeah. There was some talk at the time—naturally—but the investigation found it an accidental shooting. Philip had some kind of breakdown, I was told, and ended up moving to Europe. He hasn’t seen any of the family, even Anne, since.”

  “I’d say guns and Kilbournes don’t mix,” Laura said.

  “No kidding.” Josie’s smile was a little strained suddenly. “My husband, Jeremy, was killed five years ago. He was at a convenience store one night when it was robbed. There was an off-duty cop there who shot the robber. But in a bizarre twist nobody could ever really explain, one of the cop’s bullets ricocheted off an iron support post and went through Jeremy’s heart.”

  Laura couldn’t think of a thing to say except to repeat, “My God.”

  “Another odd chapter written in the Kilbourne family history.” Josie smiled again, this time with more ease. “You know, a couple of years ago, I went back over the family tree just out of curiosity, and the most interesting thing I found was that there hasn’t been a Kilbourne to die of disease in nearly a hundred and fifty years. All the deaths were in some way violent and/or accidental. Jeremy’s father was killed in a boating accident, for instance, and his uncle died as the result of a fall.”

  “And now Peter,” Laura murmured.

  Josie nodded. “Now Peter. I asked Daniel once if he wasn’t wary of the Kilbourne family curse. He said there was nothing he could do about curses, and that playing it safe sounded incredibly boring.”

  After a moment, Laura returned her gaze to the sketch and absently added some shading beneath the angle of Josie’s jaw. The sketch was turning out unexpectedly well, which made Laura wonder if she should stop thinking so much about what she was doing and just do it. Her fingers seemed better at their job when her mind was preoccupied by something else.

  And her mind was certainly preoccupied. “Do you believe there’s a curse?” she asked Josie.

  The older woman pursed her lips thoughtfully. “My logical mind says there’s no such thing as curses. But there’s no denying a streak of the bizarre in this family’s history. I don’t know, Laura. Maybe destiny just laid down an odd pattern for the Kilbournes. Maybe they’re paying off a lot of bad karma. Or maybe they’ve just been unlucky.”

  “How did Peter feel about it?”

  “I doubt he even thought about it, to be honest. He wasn’t an especially thoughtful man, if you know what I mean.” When Laura lifted an inquiring brow, Josie went on slowly, “Peter was always concerned more with the physical than the philosophical. I don’t just mean his women, although that was certainly part of it. He had strong appetites in other ways. He enjoyed good food and wine, and although he was basically lazy in some ways, being physically active appealed to him. He played a mean game of tennis and squash, ran in a few marathons. But he wasn’t interested in discussions, in conversation.”

  “What about Kerry?”

  Josie didn’t ask Laura to be more specific. She sighed. “I just don’t know. I never saw a single gesture of affection between them, even though they’ve lived together here at the house since they were married about four years ago. Kerry’s so sweet and gentle you’d think any man would be at least kind to her, but Peter always seemed indifferent. More punctilious than anything else, as if he owed her courtesy—and nothing more. I don’t even know how they met or why they got married. I was living here when Peter brought her home—they’d married at the office of a justice of the peace—but I was still grieving over Jeremy’s death and wasn’t really interested in what went on here in the house.”

  “They married before he brought her here?”

  “Yes, and I don’t think Amelia was too pleased. She likes Kerry, mind you, but I have a vague memory of her really ripping into Peter about it. I can’t recall what was said, just that Amelia thought Peter had made a mistake by not telling her what was going on.”

  “What was going on?”

  Josie frowned. “Well, that he’d met Kerry and decided to marry her, I suppose.”

  Laura wondered if that was all, but it was clear Josie wouldn’t know the answer even if there had been something else “going on” with Peter. “Did Kerry ever go out with him?” she asked curiously.

  “No, not that I know of. It’s like they were married in name only, if you can believe that in this day and age. They even had separate bedrooms—without a connecting door. And since my bedroom is in the same wing, I can tell you there was never any traffic back and forth that I saw—although, when they were first married, I did see Peter come out of Kerry’s bedroom a few mornings. But no sign he set foot in there in years.”

  Laura thought of Kerry’s gentle voice and smile, of the unreadable hazel eyes and the thin body and scarred face, and she couldn’t help wondering. There had to be anger there somewhere, bitterness—didn’t there? The anger of a fragile, vulnerable woman married to an indifferent man who found his pleasures elsewhere. The bitterness of a man who loved beautiful women married to a woman reluctant to show her scarred face in public. Between that very odd couple and within that very odd marriage, might there not have been rage enough for murder?

  “She was out of town when Peter was killed,” Laura heard herself say.

  Josie looked at her, understanding. “Yes, she was. But … Kerry is always pretty well veiled when she travels. Swathed in scarves and hidden behind big sunglasses, with that special makeup that hides her scars. So I suppose …”

  “The police would have checked her alibi,” Laura said.

  Josie laughed suddenly, a rueful sound. “Yes, of course. And it’s ridiculous anyway. Kerry couldn’t hurt a fly.”

  Chapter 6

  Laura shook off the idea as well, at least for the moment, and held her sketch at arm’s length to study it. Not bad, she decided.

  “May I see it?” Josie asked.

  After an instant’s hesitation, Laura turned the sketchpad around so that Josie could see her likeness.

  “Hey … you’re pretty good,” Josie said slowly, wide eyes staring at the sketch.
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  “Not good enough.” Laura smiled. “I caught the shape of your face, the curves and angles, the shadows. But not the life. Not the spark that makes your face different from every other face. Until I can do that, I won’t be good enough.”

  Josie nodded after a moment, but said, “You don’t have far to go, I’d say. Not far at all.”

  “Thanks.” Laura closed the sketchpad and clipped the pouch of pencils back in place.

  Josie got up, saying, “Why don’t we take the other path back toward the house; that’ll take us along the other side of the gardens.”

  “Suits me. Listen, if I decide to try my hand at the maze—”

  “Tell somebody you’ll be in there,” Josie said firmly. “Always. There’s an oddly muffling quality about the shrubs in the maze, so yelling for help won’t do any good unless somebody’s close by.” She grinned. “However, if you turn up missing, I’ll check the maze first thing.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.” Josie indicated the second path that had ended here overlooking the maze, and they began strolling back. “Along this path we have a Japanese-type section with a coy pond, three trellises covered with prize-winning roses, a fantastic rock garden—”

  “And a partridge in a pear tree?”

  Josie chuckled. “We just might. Suggest to Avery—he’s the head gardener—that the twelve days of Christmas might be a dandy theme, and he’ll design something incredible.”

  Laura shook her head. “It’s already incredible. I didn’t think gardens like this existed, not in a private home.”

  “Not many do. The cost of upkeep is pretty well prohibitive unless you have money to burn. The Kilbournes, for all their strange paths to destiny, have it. Especially now. Kilbourne Data is one of this country’s biggest designers and producers of computer equipment, as well as electronic components for military aircraft and satellites. And thanks to Daniel’s foresight, there’s now a division of the company engaged solely in research and development; real cutting-edge technology. Daniel’s a financial genius, to say nothing of having a genuine feel for what might be needed in the future.”