“By then it might be too late.”
“Look, Louise. Don’t lose any sleep over it, okay? Just because a guy comes snooping around—”
“Is reason enough to be worried. This man looks determined, the kind of person who doesn’t give up without one helluva fight. I’m telling you, Miranda, watch that back of yours while you’re on vacation.”
Vacation. If Louise only knew what Miranda was really doing—where she was going.
Miranda wasn’t usually a woman prone to a case of nerves, but Louise’s worries, plus the mention of Ronnie Klug, had gotten to her. Ronnie Klug and his twelve-inch knife.
The fact that she was leaving town for a meeting—no, make that command performance—with her father didn’t help ease the knots in her stomach as she made her way to her car. Dutch Holland was used to getting his way, from his ex-wife and children as well as his hundreds of employees. And now, for some unknown reason, he wanted to see his firstborn.
Throwing her briefcase and coat into the trunk, she took one sweeping glance around the parking garage, then peered through the window and into the backseat of her Volvo. No one appeared to be lurking in the corners. No sinister figure in the shadows. Thank God.
Miranda slid behind the wheel and tried to ignore a blistering headache that was beginning to pound at her temples.
Within minutes she edged into traffic crawling steadfastly out of the city. The air-conditioning unit in the car was on the fritz, so she rolled down the window and studied the trunk of a Buick she was following. A gust of breathless summer air raced into the warm interior. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the rearview mirror. Not a pretty sight. Her lipstick had faded, her mascara rubbed off, and a network of tiny red lines was visible in her eyes. Her hair, pulled back into a tight knot at the base of her skull, was beginning to come loose. “Great,” she muttered, switching lanes as she yanked her hair free and tossed the thick rubber band onto the seat next to her. “Just great.”
Who was the guy who’d been asking questions about her, and why was he nosing around now, when all hell seemed to be breaking loose? When her father, curse him, had decided to yank on his patriarchal strings again? When her life was falling apart?
“Pull yourself together,” she told herself; she couldn’t afford to fall apart. Not now. She’d worked too hard to get where she was, climbed up the ladder in the DA’s office one hard-fought rung at a time and suffered her share of emotional as well as physical hardships in the process. One mysterious guy loitering around wasn’t going to get to her. She wouldn’t, couldn’t allow it. She’d spent too many years feeling victimized, spent too much money on shrinks to finally put her past behind her, kept her secrets far too long to lose it all now.
Nor was the summons from dear old Dad—a curt phone message left on her answering machine going to be her undoing. Running the fingers of one hand through her hair, massaging her scalp and letting the wind unwind the tangled strands, she drove steadily west, into the setting sun.
Dutch Holland had ordered her to meet him at the family home by the lake of all places. She had thought that the old lodge had been boarded up for years, hoped that the slipcovers and sheets that had been draped over the furniture would never be removed, prayed that the secrets hidden away in that monstrosity of a cabin would be buried forever.
“Too bad,” she muttered under her breath as she braked for a road construction crew that was packing up for the day. She maneuvered around the orange cones as one of the crewmen tossed a shovel into the back of a tar-spattered truck. A flagger—a woman in a fluorescent orange vest—paused to light a cigarette before stepping into the vehicle.
Miranda squinted against the sun. A bothersome thought bored its way into her mind. Was it possible that the mystery man who had shown up asking questions in her office was somehow connected to the summons from her father? Or was it just a coincidence that he appeared about the same time her estranged family began making demands again?
No way. Miranda Holland had been working for the law too long to believe in coincidence.
Three
“It’s now or never.” So why not never?
Miranda turned off the Volvo’s engine and heard it tick as it cooled. Through the bug-spattered windshield, she saw the placid water of the lake and she bit her lip. In her mind’s eye she was eighteen, dripping wet, scared to death, and lying through her chattering teeth. “Oh, God,” she whispered, and dropped her head for a second, resting her forehead on the steering wheel. She hadn’t been back here since that summer.
“Get a grip.” She couldn’t fall apart now. Not after all the years she’d spent making something of herself, proving to her father and the world that she was more than Dutch Holland’s daughter.
Grabbing her purse and coat, she climbed out of the car, then walked along the path leading to the wide front porch that skirted the lodge. She rapped sharply on the front door, then didn’t wait for a response. She tried the knob and the latch gave way. Suddenly she was in the house where she’d grown up, and dozens of memories tripped through her mind. Innocent memories of a pampered childhood with her two sisters, absent father, and distracted mother. Darker images from her adolescent years when she alone knew that her parents’ marriage was disintegrating, that whatever love they’d shared had slipped through their fingers. And finally that dark, fateful night when all their lives had been altered forever.
As she walked through the foyer, she was assailed by the scents of pine and solvent, wax and detergent. Hardwood floors gleamed to a soft patina as lamps, freshly dusted, cast pools of light on the newly waxed oak.
“Dad?” she called, running her fingers along the railing of the stairs that climbed three floors. There had once been a graceful wooden salmon arching upon the final post, but the fish, and all the other creatures that were carved into the railing, had been hacked away years before. Now only the scarred post remained.
“Back here.” Just the sound of his voice caused her throat to constrict a little. For the first eighteen years of her life it had been her mission to please him, to prove to him that she was just as good as any son he might have sired. He had never bothered to hide the fact that he’d wanted boys—strong, strapping sons to someday take over the business—and Miranda had attempted to fill the void caused by the lack of male heirs. Of course, all her attempts had been a futile waste of time.
Fist clenched around the strap of her purse
, she marched through the wide front hallway toward the main room in the back of the lodge, a room with a ceiling that soared three stories and boasted a wall of glass that overlooked the smooth waters of the lake.
Her father was seated in his favorite chair, a leather recliner placed strategically near the cold hearth of the fireplace. Dressed in a suit and tie, crisp white shirt, and shoes polished to a blinding gloss, he didn’t bother to rise, just cradled his drink as he leaned back and watched her enter. A newspaper lay open on the table next to his chair, and all the furniture, long draped, was uncovered. Even the grand piano on which she’d taken years of lessons was poised in the corner, as if ready for gifted hands to float over the keys and fill this old lodge with music again.
“Miranda.” Dutch’s voice was rough and cracked a little. “You look just like—”
“I know, I know.” She forced a smile. “More like Mom every day.”
“She was—still is, I imagine—a beautiful woman.”