Shivering, she stood beside her car and waited while Connie backed the van into its place and climbed out, jingling keys. Giving Jane a little wave, she bent to unlock the back door of the shop, then straightened, calling out cheerily, “Hullo, dear-back from Washington so soon?”

Sidling closer, Jane thrust her hands into the pockets of her coat and gave a nervous laugh and a little shrug of vexation. “Oh-wouldn’t you know, the girls have gone off skiing with their father? Very spur-of-the-moment-typically David. Of course, I’d have had to come back to work today, anyway. Unless I took a sick day, I suppose. I could have, but if I’d stayed longer, I wouldn’t have had anyone to pick me up at the airport, would I? So I guess it’s just as well…” She was babbling. She never babbled.

Take a deep breath, Jane.

“There, dear, you’re shivering.” Connie was standing beside the back door of her shop, holding it open for her, smiling in her usual friendly way. “Do come in-I’ll just put the kettle on.”

Chapter 17

Hawk was climbing back into the driver’s seat, having just received directions to the main highway from a farmer in a pickup truck with a bale of hay the size of Delaware in the back, when the cellular phone rang.

“Jeez,” he muttered to himself as he grabbed at it, “they got a camera in this thing, or what?”

Campbell sounded out of breath. “Hawkins? Not good news here. Mrs. Carlysle just showed up at the suspect’s shop.”

Hawk threw the Nissan into Drive and swore with a vehemence unprecedented even for him. “Get her out of there,” he snarled. “Now.”

“No can do. The suspect’s en route, due to arrive any minute. Can’t risk being spotted.”

“So, what now?” The Nissan’s tires spun briefly on wet grass before they made contact with pavement. Hawk set his jaw and pressed down on the accelerator pedal. “You can’t go in. Not if there’s a chance-”

“Look, Hawkins,” Campbell said with the arrogance that made the FBI such a pain in the butt to work with sometimes, “you’re just gonna have to trust us, okay? We’re not any more anxious than you are for some innocent civilian to get caught in the crossfire, but we both know what’s at stake here. We’ve taken every precaution, and we have every reason to believe we can pull this off without anybody getting hurt.”

Every reason to believe? thought Hawk. Great. Just great.

“We’ve got the whole place wired,” Campbell went on in a smug Bureau purr that made Hawk grind his teeth. “Both picture and sound. We’ll be monitoring the situation from the word go. We’ve got both front and rear exits covered, plus the alley, the parking lot and the whole damn square, and a Hostage Rescue Team ready to roll just in case.”

In case? In case what? Hawk wanted to shout. In case Emma/ Galina puts a gun to Jane’s head, the way she did to Loizeau’s? If she does that, you moron, there won’t be anything for the Hostage Rescue Team to do except carry in the body bag!

A vision came to him then, a vision of Jane’s face, her eyes lifting to his with that sudden, miraculous leap of light and joy that always made him think of dolphins. Then he saw her eyes go dull and flat, the light in them forever quenched, and with it all the joy and light there was in the world. His world.

Carlysle…you idiot…why couldn’t you have trusted me? After last night…after everything…was that too much to ask?

“O…kay…suspect has arrived.” Agent Campbell was trying without success to bury his excitement in a monotone drawl. “She’s pulling into the parking lot at the rear of the shop. Mrs. Carlysle has exited her vehicle. So has the suspect…she’s waving at Mrs. Carlysle…suspect now appears to be unlocking the door of the shop. Okay, both Carlysle and the suspect are inside… we have them on the monitors. Hawk?”

“Yeah?” Becoming aware that his chest was hurting, he grabbed for a breath.

“What’s your ETA now?”

“I dunno.” Hawk glanced down at the speedometer needle, which was hovering around seventy-five. How far could it be to the damn town, anyway? “Five minutes?”

“Take your time. Doesn’t look like Mrs. Carlysle’s in any immediate danger.”

“How the hell you figure that?” Hawk growled.

Campbell exhaled audibly. “They’re having tea.”


“There you are…honey…and lemon.”

Jane watched while Connie, who preferred milk in her tea, poured herself a generous dollop and returned the carton to the camp-size refrigerator that shared the limited space in her cluttered workroom with a working, 1930s-vintage gas stove. An equally old-fashioned teakettle sat on one of the stove’s burners beneath its tea cozy, comfortably steeping.

“Would you like a biscuit, dear?”

“Oh, no…thanks.” Jane stirred and sipped her tea. tasting nothing. Her mind, from the moment she’d entered Connie’s shop, had seemed capable of only one coherent thought: It can’t be true. It can’t be. This is Connie…my friend.

Thank goodness Connie had done most of the talking, as usual, telling her in great detail, as the kettle was coming to a boil, all about her newest customer, something about a fantastically wealthy businessman who apparently wanted her to decorate his villa in Miami Beach.

“He’s Iranian, I behove-seems to have pots of money and no taste whatsoever.” Connie’s eyes sparkled with avarice as she bit daintily into a cookie. “I do believe I may have already found a home for some of those dreadful paintings I bought at Arlington. Oh-and that reminds me, dear-” her eyes came to rest on Jane, causing her heart to give a painful bump “-what did you find out about that nice little one you bought? Was my friend in Georgetown able to have a look at it? What did he say?”

Jane took a sip of tea, which did nothing to dispel the feeling that she’d somehow gotten Connie’s cookie crumbs stuck in her throat. Finally, she coughed and said, “I never got around to it, actually. I told you-I had to cut the whole trip short, and anyway, by the next day getting it appraised began to seem, well, just sort of silly. I’m sure it’s not valuable, and I like it anyway, so why bother? It does look very nice over the piano, though, just like I thought it would.” She set down her teacup carefully, praying Connie wouldn’t notice the slight clatter as it met the saucer.

“Actually, that’s one of the reasons I’m here. I was, um, wondering, I still need something for that space between the windows in the breakfast nook, and now that I have the one painting in the living room, the wall above the TV looks awfully bare, so I was thinking I might like to take another look at those paintings-the ones you bought. I know you said you were thinking of taking them to Miami, but…maybe I could have first crack?”


“Uh-oh.”

“What?” Hawk barked, as the ominous syllables came through the open cellular phone connection in Campbell’s deep-throated cop’s mutter.

His anxiety level shot off the scale when the FBI agent next produced a vehement rendition of his own favorite swearword, followed by an outraged, “What the hell is she doing?”

“You mind letting me in on whatever the hell it is she’s doing?” Hawk almost bellowed, ignoring a blast from a trucker’s horn as he ran the stop sign and made a hard right at the junction with the main road into Cooper’s Mill.

The FBI agent’s reply was lost in the squeal of tires.

“Say again?”

“I said, she’s asking about the paintings. How much did you tell her, Hawkins? Does she know what she’s doing? Is she out of her mind?”

“No, she’s just got one of her own,” he said grimly, slowing reluctantly for the traffic light opposite a Burger King. “Where are you? I’m coming into town now.”

“Uh, white van, city engineer’s markings, on the square across from the courthouse. There’s a loading zone next to it, you can park there. And Hawkins-for God’s sake, keep a low profile,. The last thing we want to do-”

But the light had just turned green, and Hawk was already hanging up on him.


“I don’t know…I just can’t make up my mind.” Jane propped the two paintings-one a rather dark landscape of horses grazing in a meadow, the other a vase full of overblown roses, complete with fallen petals-side by side against Connie’s big leather-topped desk and stood back to study them. They weren’t noticeably improved by distance. “The floral would do for the living room-it could do with some brightening, I think-but for the kitchen nook…you know, what I was really looking for was…” What? What am I looking for, exactly? And will I know it when I see it? “Something…”

And then she saw it, half-hidden behind the desk, the painting of a sailing ship foundering in a sickly green sea. And it was as if someone had flicked a switch in her mind, illuminating a video screen. A memory. “Something with boats,” she cried, swooping upon the painting, snatching it up and whirling away with it in triumph. “Yes-like this one.”

Connie, who had been leaning against a dining-room table set with an enormous set of Franciscan dinnerware, idly clicking her little jeweled pen and watching Jane’s search over the tops of her half glasses, straightened suddenly. “That ugly thing? In a kitchen? No, Jane, realty-that’s not for you, dear.”

“Not for you, dear.” Connie had been holding this painting, Jane remembered, when she’d said those words at the auction. But-funny, she hadn’t thought anything about it at the time-she’d been holding it so that Jane could see it, facing out, as if it had been the back of the painting she’d been looking at. Staring at it, studying it intently, with her glasses perched on the end of her nose.

“Oh, but…don’t you see?” Jane said with almost desperate brightness. “Those windows in the breakfast nook look right out over the lake. Something with boats… water…” She was babbling again, but she couldn’t seem to stop. “This really isn’t that bad, you know that? The colors would go, kind of…I mean, my kitchen is blue and yellow, and blue and yellow do make green. And with all the plants…”