Secrets Of The Rose. Lois Richer

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      “I don’t remember exactly when Tim bought the house. But he never knew Grant. He came after that.” She smiled. “Aimee loves Tim. And he loves her. Tim often used to watch her playing while I was busy arranging details for the garden.”

      “The garden?” Natalie stood at the window, her eyes on the newly tilled earth beyond the windows.

      Shelby sucked in a breath of courage. Rehashing all these details seemed futile to her, but she supposed the police had to start somewhere.

      “The rose garden. Yes.” She walked to the doors, pulled them open and motioned to the area beyond. “My husband loved roses. This was his garden. I’m working on plans to make this house and its grounds a public attraction, as a sort of memorial to him. He’d want to share the beauty he and Gran planned. Grant was my grandmother’s soul mate when it came to roses.” She couldn’t help the little smile that bubbled up at the memories.

      Natalie scribbled in her book.

      “The two of them had this saying: ‘The secrets of the rose can teach you about life.’” Clear as a bell, she heard Grant’s voice repeating the familiar phrase, his hands grimy with soil, face flushed from the sun, his grin radiant. He was so real in that moment, she could have believed he was standing there.

      Then, like a mirage, the image dissipated, and she was alone.

      Again.

      Shelby swallowed, stared at the bush nearest the doors, the last one Grant had planted. Deep Secret he’d named it.

      “Anyway, that’s my plan,” she murmured. “Aimee and I don’t need all this room.” Not anymore. Not with just the two of them.

      Or would there now be only one person living in her grandmother’s home? She pushed away the ugly thought, concentrated on the detective. “Anything else you need to know?”

      “You grew up in this house?” Natalie Brazier seemed surprised.

      “With my grandmother, yes. My parents died when I was young. Gran took me in, cared for me, loved me. She helped erase—” Just in time Shelby stopped herself. There was no point in rehashing her childhood. “I was a researcher. This was home base. She told me it would always be mine. That was after I’d come back from Istanbul. I was hired to retrieve a painting for a museum. I met Grant in Istanbul.”

      Shelby watched the men moving methodically across her lawn, knew they were police, scouring the ground for any clue they might find.

      “Look, none of that past history matters, does it? I just want to find my daughter.” Her arms ached to hold that squirming little body, to feel those pudgy hands cup her face, kiss her cheek with a sticky sweetness that mere water couldn’t wash away. Would she ever feel that again?

      “We’re trying, Shelby. Humor me, will you?”

      As if she had a choice? Shelby let her glance slide around the room, felt a stab of anguish when it came upon the Christmas portrait they’d had taken the summer before, while the roses still bloomed. Aimee, beautiful beyond description in her white fairy-princess dress, as she called it. Grant, brown and fit from that trip to Greece, with his arms around “his girls.” Herself, grinning, blissfully happy, totally unaware her world would soon shatter. In the weeks and months that followed, Aimee was the reason she’d hung on, kept it together. The Christmas cards with the picture sat in the basement yet, still boxed, never to be sent. But this one photo she kept up here. It helped ease the loss of Grant somehow, helped her remember to be grateful she had his child to love.

      Aimee. Her baby. If Aimee didn’t come home…Fear for her beloved girl clawed at her. She was so tiny, so innocent. Shelby’s heart shuddered. She could no more stop her tears than the rush of love that welled up inside her.

      “I’m sorry,” she apologized over and over, “I can’t seem to stop crying.”

      “You go ahead and cry if you want. Believe me, I understand.” Obviously uncomfortable, Natalie got up, walked around the room. “This is an interesting old house. How many rooms are there?”

      “H-how many rooms?” Shelby considered it a most dubious inquiry to make at this particular time and began to wonder about Natalie’s experience in cases such as this. Shelby’s patience was running short, she wanted action. “I don’t know how many rooms there are. I never counted them.”

      “Did your husband mind living here?”

      Shelby blinked. She’d always assumed Grant had loved the old place as much as she. But she realized now that she’d never outright asked him. Something else there hadn’t been time to do.

      “He always said he liked this room the most. We couldn’t have bought anything like this house, not at first, certainly not until we got the business off the ground. But it was my grandmother’s home and she didn’t want to leave. It seemed easier to move in with her when she started to fail, give her those last few years in the place she loved, among her roses. Of course, when Aimee came, we were glad she was near, that she could watch her great-granddaughter grow up.”

      She knew she was babbling and grasped for control. Suddenly a new thought hit. Shelby felt her eyes widen, knew she was staring at Natalie. She should have expected this!

      “What’s wrong, Shelby?”

      “I know how this works,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “What’s the percentage of parental involvement in cases of missing children—eighty per cent?” She glared at Natalie. “You suspect I may have had something to do with my daughter’s disappearance. That’s why you questioned me about the garden. You think I buried her?” She stopped, regained control, then continued. “Well, I didn’t! Search every room, go through every yard of the grounds. Tear them up if you want to. I don’t care. But you’re wasting time and I don’t know how much time Aimee has!”

      “I didn’t mean to imply anything.” The hollowness of the words echoed around the room. “It’s standard procedure.”

      “I don’t care about procedure. Just find my daughter,” she ordered through clenched teeth.

      “Shelby, I wasn’t trying—”

      “Listen to me, Detective. I love my daughter more than my life. I’ll give anything I possess to get Aimee back, do anything I need to. I don’t care how much it costs, I don’t care what extremes we have to go to. I just want her back—safe. Do you understand?”

      Natalie didn’t answer immediately. Instead she walked across the room, sat down, leaned back against the sofa, her face inscrutable. Finally she broke the silence.

      “All right. Let’s find Aimee.”

      TWO

      “I hope I’m not intruding. I saw you sitting out here, and wondered if there was something I could do.”

      Tim Austen’s quiet voice roused Shelby from her contemplation of the hedge beyond. She blinked away the shadows, watched him shift from one foot to the other, hands thrust into his pants. In all the time she’d known him, her neighbor had always looked perfectly comfortable here. Now he seemed oddly fretful and that surprised her.

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