No, he was watching the man’s jerky motions. It revealed an anxiety that was hidden beneath the practiced smile.
At last stepping through the door, Griff allowed his gaze to travel around the stables.
The long, narrow room maintained the original wood plank walls and vaulted ceiling with open beams, but the old stalls had been gutted and the floor covered with a cement slab to accommodate the six Corvettes that were in various stages of being restored.
“Nice,” Griff said, as he walked toward the nearest car, a 1968 Rally Red Corvette convertible. “You work on them?” he asked.
“No.” Lawrence stepped next to him. “My older son Matthew tinkers with them when he’s around.”
Griff sensed the man’s eagerness to change the conversation. Which made him all the more determined to find out what the man was hiding.
“Do your sons work for the family business?” he asked.
Lawrence muttered a curse before turning to face Griff.
“I think you have a misunderstanding about the business, Archer.”
“Do I?” Griff shrugged. “It seems fairly straightforward. One business. Four heirs.”
“Not one business,” the older man denied. “Two.”
“What does that mean?”
Lawrence folded his arms over his chest. In the bright overhead lights, the wrinkles that carved his face were even more apparent.
“You’re an entrepreneur,” the man said.
“I am.”
“Then you realize that the business landscape is constantly shifting and reforming.”
Griff rolled his eyes. It was the sort of mumbo jumbo they taught in business school.
“I assume you have a point?”
The square face reddened. Griff sensed the older man would have given him a tongue-lashing if he had been just a random boyfriend of Carmen’s. Or God forbid, one of his employees.
“As I’m sure you know, my brother and I inherited a lucrative chain of hardware stores.”
“Yes.”
“They’d been started by my grandparents and provided a comfortable life for our family. Unfortunately, by the mid-nineties the big-box home improvement stores had cut into our profits,” he explained. “I could see then that it was only a matter of time before we were driven completely out of business.”
Griff gave a slow nod. Later he would check the financial history of the company; for now he was more interested in what was making Lawrence so jumpy about Carmen’s unexpected arrival.
“And your brother?”
“Stuart was older than me and had been deeply instilled with a sense of family loyalty,” Lawrence said. “He refused to accept that we had to close down at least half of the stores before we went into the red.”
It was all perfectly logical, but the words sounded rehearsed.
“What did you do?” he asked.
Lawrence turned away, strolling toward the yellow Corvette that had the hood up and the engine pulled out and spread across the concrete floor in little pieces. Someone was ambitious to think they could put the thing back together.
“I continued to work with Stuart, but I started investing my money in the larger stores,” Lawrence at last admitted.
It took Griff a second to decipher what the man was telling him.
“You invested in the competition?”
Lawrence’s back stiffened, his tone defensive. “It wasn’t competition. We were the past and they were the future. I had to think of my family.”
Griff ’s lips twitched. Lawrence clearly wasn’t the sort of man to go down with the ship. Instead, he scurried off like a rat and joined the enemy.
“Did your brother know?”
“I can’t be sure.” The older man’s voice was muffled.
“Toward the end he was overwhelmed with the fact we were headed for bankruptcy. I think that might have been part of the reason he . . .” There was a small pause, as if he was searching for the right word. “Snapped. He feared that he’d failed our parents.”
“Hmm.”
Lawrence abruptly turned, glaring at Griff. “There was nothing left of the business after I’d paid for the funerals.”
Griff deliberately glanced toward the window that offered a view of the house, which had to be worth several million dollars.
“And what about this estate?”
Something flared through the pale eyes. A dangerous anger. Like a dog protecting his favorite bone.
“It belongs to the Jacobs family,” he said.
“And Carmen isn’t a Jacobs?”
With an abrupt motion, Lawrence was heading back toward the door. Griff assumed that meant the question-and-answer session was at an end.
“We should get back,” Lawrence announced. “Vi will be wondering what happened to us.”
Griff offered a meaningless smile, strolling along the line of cars until he reached the door at the far end of the stables.
“What’s in here?” he asked, halting in front of a steel door set in the back wall.
“Nothing.”
Shrugging off his mother’s training on good manners, Griff grabbed the knob and shoved open the door.
A dark unease settled in the pit of his stomach as he studied the long, narrow room painted a bright white. Directly across from him was a glass case filled with a dozen different guns. Everything from a Sig Sauer to M16 rifles. At the far end of the space were two targets that were cut out in a human shape.
“A shooting range,” he said, not needing to feign his surprise.
“My sons and I enjoy a little target practice,” Lawrence snapped, at the end of his patience.
“An interesting hobby,” Griff murmured, closing the door and crossing to join Lawrence.
They walked back to the house in silence.
Chapter Twelve
Carmen tapped her fingers on the carved arm of her chair. Frustration bubbled through her as she watched her aunt glance toward the doorway for the hundredth time.
The older woman had barely said more than ten words since they’d taken their seats in the salon. Not that Carmen hadn’t tried.
She’d asked her aunt a dozen questions about the house and what she’d been doing over the past fourteen years. Then when the tea tray had arrived, she’d tried to encourage her aunt to discuss the upcoming holidays and the parties she was attending.
Nothing.
It was as if the woman’s body was in the room, but she’d left her brain upstairs. Maybe in a jar with water, like it was dentures needing a good soak.
A pharmaceutical lobotomy.
Suddenly the words that she’d heard her father whisper when speaking about her aunt Vi made perfect sense.
“I can’t imagine what is keeping Lawrence,” the older woman breathed, aimlessly twisting a lace handkerchief between her heavily jeweled fingers.
“Griff is probably wanting to look around,” Carmen said, silently hoping Griff was having better luck than she was.
Vi turned back to Carmen. “Why?”
“He’s never been to this area before.”
A slow, disturbing blink. “More tea?”
Carmen hid her shudder. “Not for me, thanks.” She continued to tap her fingers, accepting she was going to have to be more direct. Subtle probing was getting her nowhere. “Tell me about Matthew and Baylor.”
More blinking. “What about them?”
“I haven’t seen my cousins since I was twelve years old. I’m just curious.”
The older woman took a minute to dredge through her brain fuzz.
“They both graduated from college and live in Louisville,” she finally announced.
“How nice.” Carmen smiled. “What are they doing with their lives?”
“Doing?”
Good. God. “Are they working?”
“Oh well, they work for Lawrence.” Vi gave a vague wave of her hand. “I’m not sure exactly what they do.”
“Are they married? Do they have kids?”
“No.”
Carmen grimaced. She wasn’t sure if the woman would have noticed if there’d been a couple weddings and a dozen kids.
“At least they live close enough for you to spend time with them,” she forced herself to say.
“Not really. They’re both very busy,” Vi said. “And they travel a lot.”
Carmen’s fingers tightened on the arm of her chair. “Travel where?”
“All over.”