All That Glitters. Mary Brady

the window in the door to the garage. If he picked up an ax or a chain saw, she could run out a door on either end of the breezeway.

      She put a hand to her wet hair and shoved a large clump out of her eyes. Maybe if she could see more clearly, she wouldn’t think such dire thoughts.

      He rounded the SUV making a beeline for where she stood in the doorway. Coming to murder her? “Con men don’t usually turn to murder, unless it’s a last resort” were the FBI agent’s exact words. The woman had seemed confident in herself, but Addy wondered if she was pushing this guy toward said last resort. She had once thought of herself as a good judge of character, but now she’d just have to rely on being extra careful.

      She stepped away as he swung open the door. Inside the breezeway, Hale seemed to be racing to remove the rain suit, hanging each piece on hooks on the wall. Then he ripped off his overshirt and damp baggy work pants, tossing each item onto the top of a nearby washing machine. When he turned in her direction, a sweep of raw appreciation for the masculine body made her face flush. She had no idea what had been living under those business suits.

      With his dark T-shirt and dark athletic shorts clinging to his body, there was little she could not intimately imagine about this rat. Too bad.

      He took a step toward where she had made a large water spot on the floor, and she stood up taller. Getting timid would not get her the scoop every journalist wanted and only she was brave or crazy enough to go after.

      “Zachary Hale, I’m Adriana Bonacorda. I’d like to get your side of the story.”

      He looked at her for a long moment. Drops of rain fell from his water-darkened hair still tipped with summer’s blond, and splatted onto the smooth, clean concrete garage floor.

      “I’d like to throw you out in the rain.” There was only candor, not malice, in his deep voice, a voice to fit the body.

      He turned and strode away. When he went through the door to the house and didn’t close it behind him, she tore off her coat and hung it on the hook beside his. Ripped off her wet clothing and hung it there also.

      Then, in her girl shorts and tank top, she grabbed her bags and scrambled inside after him.

      When she flipped a light switch, she found herself alone in a large old-fashioned kitchen with a cold wood-burning stove and a wooden icebox with shining brass hardware. Antique pots and bowls hung from hooks and the fireplace with a stone mantel had to have been built with the house, perhaps two hundred years ago.

      She put her bags down on the old-style braided rug, and shivering, dug in her duffel for the fleece pants and hoodie she brought because she knew Maine was colder than Massachusetts. Darn cold, she thought as she shoved a leg into the pants.

      “Close and latch the shutters in there. Cross-tape every window without a shutter.” Hale had disappeared into the interior of the house but his barked commands filtered back to her through the sound of the pounding rain. A roll of wide masking tape sat on the wooden counter next to the icebox.

      The first window, long and tall, was flanked by sheer curtains with tulips fancifully stitched across the bottom.

      She surveyed for a moment.

       Open the window, reach out in the pounding rain and pull the shutter closed.

      Easy peasy.

      She struggled to push up the first heavy window and when it wouldn’t stay by itself, propped it open with her shoulder while she reached out and pulled the shutters closed. The shutter’s latch fell easily into place, but she struggled to lower the heavy wood and glass window without letting it drop and shatter into a million shards.

      After she was finished, a large puddle of rainwater stood on the linoleum around her feet and she was wet again.

      When she heard shutters slam in the next room, she closed the next two sets, grabbed the tape and a flashlight from the old wooden kitchen table, just in case, and hurried past Hale into the parlor to do the same in there.

      The light she had turned on blinked out, as did the ones in the rooms she had left behind. She flipped on her flashlight.

      In the beam of light she could see furniture and fixtures she might have seen in her grandmother’s home or at one of her old aunts’ houses when she was a kid. Her flashlight paused on a round table with three tiers that would serve no purpose in today’s world and then a pair of bulldogs that might be banks. Hale was trying to protect the place as if it was a museum. Wait. It was a museum, of sorts.

      When Hale strode past her, she got busy and finished the parlor. A library across the hall and then a maid’s quarters at the back of the house needed her attention next. When she heard Hale run up the stairs, she finished two more rooms and followed. The first bedroom she worked on had a dark four-poster bed complete with a wooden canopy—if that’s what they called the wood ones—and velvet curtains. On a stand sat a pitcher and bowl that had once been used for washing up in the morning. A small primitive bathroom sat tucked between this and the next bedroom and she closed the shutters on all of them and taped a window in the hallway.

      She could hear Hale on the third floor or attic or whatever was up there slamming shutters and then his footsteps hurrying.

      By the time she finished a fourth bedroom and third sitting room, Hale stood, a shadow in the doorway. She resisted the urge to shine the beam in his direction and the ambient light was too dim to see the expression on his face. A spark of fear sent a prickle of pain along the nerves just under her skin, but there would be no “flight” today.

      “Thank you,” he said and vanished. This time, he didn’t call back to her.

      The lights flickered on and she wandered out of the bedroom to look in the other rooms down the hallway. Every bedroom had an antique bed or two, some older than others. One was even a rope bed used by the early settlers in lieu of a mattress. The house seemed to be a collection of antiquities spanning the ages.

      Addy was not an expert, but she had seen enough around Boston to know colonial American through early-twentieth-century furnishings when she saw them. None of the rooms looked as if they had been lived in for a very long time, with the exception of the four-poster bedroom. It had a space heater sitting near the fireplace. He could entrench himself in this room and make her sleep on the stiff and formal settee in the parlor.

      She loped down the stairs doubting Zachary Hale was going out into the storm again, but he wasn’t in the kitchen or the rest of the house. When she heard sounds in the garage again she went out to see him unloading groceries and water from the SUV.

      He now wore a navy pull-on shirt with a button V and jeans, and she assumed dry underwear. She’d give a few bucks herself for some of those right now. She had some in her duffel bag, but since she might be tossed out into the storm at any moment...

      Throwing her out was exactly what she expected a guy like Zachary Hale to do. He wouldn’t steal from old ladies and then open his home to a reporter, unless he had other plans for the reporter.

      She swallowed against the tightness in her throat, let herself out into the garage and grabbed four of the gallon bottles of water from the SUV and followed Hale up a set of stairs at the back wall of the garage. Wherever he was going, there must be a place to make food.

      If anyone understood why people went into an ax murderer’s dark basement without back up, it was an investigative journalist, especially one with no options in the outside world short of minimum-wage jobs—if she could even get one of those.

      Only her sister would miss her, and that was a maybe, because her sister was busy with two children, living in a tiny apartment and had only called her because she was in dire straights.

      Addy shook her head. Their lives were such a mess.

      She shouldered open the door at the top of the stairs at the rear of the garage and stopped short. The door opened into a large loft where vaulted ceilings spread out over a comfy living space. This explained where in the unused house he stayed. He didn’t.

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