Stephen finally wandered off to find his father, and Jane went to find Althea. I saw the two of them slip outside to have an intimate chat, and I walked back to the parlor and found Lizzie and Hal. I hugged them both and we toasted to Jane’s success.
“It’s about time we found you,” Lizzie said in a quiet voice. “We’ve been talking to Bob and Ned for the past twenty minutes.” She winked meaningfully at me and I almost laughed.
“So maybe we’ll talk tomorrow,” I said.
“You bet we will,” she said, nodding with purpose.
Hal just rolled his eyes. “I don’t want to know what you two are cooking up this time.”
Lizzie patted his cheek, gave me another wink, and they took off for home.
Seeing Lizzie and Hal made me realize I’d lost track of Mac. I’d spied him momentarily a while ago when I was talking to Stephen, but now I didn’t see him anywhere. It wasn’t as if we were here on a date, so it was none of my business if he’d already left the party. Still, I couldn’t help feeling a bit disappointed. It would have been fun to hang out with him for a while.
“Hello, Shannon.”
I whipped around. “Eric! Hello.”
He smiled. “Can I get you a drink?”
I glanced at my glass and saw that it was empty. “I’ll go with you.”
“Good.” He grinned and held out his arm, and I weaved mine through his. It was odd to be walking arm in arm with the man who had reprimanded me so thoroughly the other day. The man who’d promised to lock me in a prison cell and throw away the key. Maybe he’d been partly kidding about that, but still, I was nervous, especially as I mentally ran through all the information I was presently keeping from him.
“This place is fantastic,” he said, admiring the features of the room. “I heard you had a lot to do with renovating it.”
“My company helped out.”
“Something tells me you’re being too modest.” He ordered a glass of cabernet for me and a beer for himself. When we had our drinks, we walked out the French doors and into the garden.
“This is spectacular,” he said, looking around.
I took a sip of wine and almost spilled it down my dress. I was too nervous to think straight and knew I had to tell all. “Eric, we have to talk.”
He gazed down at me. “Right now?”
“Yes, please.”
“Let’s go for a walk.”
*
“What’s this all about?” Eric asked when we’d walked half a block from Jane’s.
I stopped and turned to him. “It’s about a priceless jeweled necklace I found in Jesse’s basement. Jesse used to tell us about it, how he’d found it while scuba diving on the Glorious Maiden.”
“But he later denied that he found it.”
“Right.” We continued walking toward the town square. “He finally admitted to Jane that he’d been joking, and that was the end of it.”
“But it wasn’t.”
“No.” I took a deep breath and forged ahead. “I found it. See, Jane decided she wants to rehab Jesse’s house and sell it, so last Tuesday I did a preliminary inspection. I don’t think it’ll take too much to clean it up, paint it. It’ll sell well, I think, but I need to . . . um, anyway, I found the necklace hidden behind the brick wall in his basement.”
I had a tendency to veer dangerously off topic when I was nervous.
“Where is it now?”
“In a safe-deposit box at the bank.” I gave him the name of the bank without him asking. And then I started describing the necklace while he alternately nodded and scowled.
Eric had this clever, insidious way of not saying anything, thereby forcing me to fill the gap and blather out all sorts of information. I told him everything—except the part where I’d been the one who wanted to tell him about the necklace right away, but Jane had insisted on waiting. I wasn’t about to throw Jane under the bus.
I made a mental note to remind her what a good friend I was.
“I’m telling you about the necklace,” I said, “because I’m afraid it might be the reason someone’s been breaking into Jesse’s house and searching for something.”
“Yes, I got that connection,” he assured me. “Any reason why you waited so long to tell me?”
“I was . . . afraid.”
“Afraid of me?”
“No, afraid that if the intruder knew I found it, then Jane or I might be in danger.”
He stopped walking and gazed down at me. “So you didn’t tell the one person who could keep you safe?”
“You mean, you?”
“Yeah, me.”
I frowned. “I think I’ve already proven that I have odd ways of dealing with things.”
He wasn’t in the mood to be cajoled. “Why didn’t you say something, Shannon?”
“I–I wanted to, but there was so much going on. I’ve got all these jobs, plus Jesse’s funeral and Jane’s opening gala and the Festival Committee meetings. Plus I was scared to death that if I told anyone, word would get out and Jane would be in danger.” I was blathering again.
“I understand your worry about your secret being exposed,” he said. “That’s a problem in small towns.”
“Thank you.”