Page 1 of Not the Bodyguard's Widow
1
Candle wax drippedonto grandmother’s embroidered linen tablecloth. Kimberly pushed her chair back from the end of the table and blew out each flickering flame, then listened as the grandfather clock in the entrance hall played “Lord Bless This Hour” before chiming the first of ten counts. Flipping on the lights, she groaned. More wax speckled the tablecloth than what she’d seenrunning from the greedy little flames, the candle nearest her husband’s vacant seat having left a small ring. Letting the candles burn for hours was a mistake. She’d lost track of time staring into the dancing lights, knowingthat Jeremy would enter the house any moment. At least she’d chosen the white candles, rather than red, for Valentine’s Day or the pink and blue ones to hint at her surprise. She’d google how to remove the wax from the heirloom.
In the kitchen, Kimberly turned the oven from warm to off, then grabbed a roll and smeared it with raspberry jam. The dinner she’d prepared no longer whetted her appetite, but she knew better than to go to bed on an empty stomach. A wedge of the Edam cheese balanced the carbs she consumed. Her view from the kitchen window blurred as tears filled her eyes.
Kimberly stored the entire pan of Chicken Cacciatore in the refrigerator. She wouldn’t touch it, but the bodyguards Jeremy insisted keep watch over her would. Over the last five years, she’d mastered eluding them. She owed today’s disappearance to her OB-GYN appointment. They didn’t deserve to know the news before her husband did, and so she’d ditched them by walking out the backdoor of the restaurant. Her bodyguards had learned about her last two miscarriages before Jeremy had, and they’d reported them to her father-in-law before she could call her husband. She berated herself for the umpteenth time. Why did she continue to believe Jeremy’s lies? The five-thirty text reassuring her he would be home in a half hour was the latest of five years of falsehoods. It would have been easier had he been covering up an affair.
On their Thanksgiving cruise, he’d promised to make things right at work, even if it meant paying a hefty fine. His promises of putting her first were believable under the Caribbean sun, but after their return, his late nights grew later and later as hesupposedlymet with the FBI, SEC, IRS, or some other government alphabet-soup agency only to come home smelling of his father’s cigars and causing her to wonder if he had been honest about the Ponzi scheme the company ran. Her Christmas present of $10,000 cash to hold her over “just in case” should have warned her that the lies hadn’t stopped. And he’d grown even more secretive in the last seven weeks. Why wasn’t he the man she thought she’d married?
Perhaps she should march into the FBI and explain what little she knew. Which was nothing. The conversations had ended when she’d entered the room and Jeremy insisted that what they had done couldn’t really be considered a Ponzi scheme and would not impress any agents. What would it mean for the child growing inside her to have a criminal for a father?
Kimberly cleared the fruit bowl from the table. According to the expectant-mom website, her little he or she was the size of a navel orange this week. Oranges didn’t pair well with the rest of the dinner menu. She’d put them on the table mostly so they could talk about what the beginning of their second trimester meant.
The love of moneywasthe root of all evil. The biblical statement had proven true in her marriage. She would have been better off marrying a poor plaid-wearing man like the heroes in all those Hearthfire Christmas movies. A desire to rage and scream filled her, but she knew that even though she’d dismissed the staff for the evening, she was likely being watched.
If only she could be a starving artist again. But even her career, which Jeremy referred to as a hobby, had gone too far for that. Her illustrated children’s books were now in demand. If he had any idea exactly how much she made, she’d never get her father-in-law out of her life, not until he had it invested in his firm.
The grandfather clock chimed half past the hour. Kimberly turned off the downstairs lights and checked the alarm panel, inputting the code showing she was in the house alone and retiring for the night. Halfway up the stairs, the alarm beeped, indicating security had allowed a car past the front gate. The alarm wouldn’t have sounded for Jeremy’s car. Kimberly turned and hurried down the stairs.
Jax, one of the bodyguards, met her in the entryway, having let himself in the house. “It’s a police car, ma’am. Would you like to talk to them on the porch or in the sitting room?”
Apparently it was a forgone conclusionthat she would talk with the police. She chose an option Jax hadn’t given her and stepped between the large guard and the double doors. “I’ll answer the door.”
On the steps stood a young officer and her older partner, hats in hand. “Mrs. Kimberly Thompson?”
“That is me.”
“We are here to inform youthat your husband was in a drunk-driving accident on Shoreline Road, about fifty miles north of here.”
“Who hit him? Which hospital is he at?” She could forgive him for being late since it wasn’t his fault. Fifty miles?Why Oregon? Jeremy had beencoming home. She reached for the wall to steady herself. She should have eaten more.
The older officer shook his head. “No one else was involved, ma’am. I am sorry to inform you—your husband is dead.”
No! They were wrong. Jeremy never drank more than a glass of wine and then only on rare occasions. “But he doesn’t dri—” The officers’ faces faded as oblivion enveloped her.
2
Three months later
Thursday mornings werethe quietest of the week. Alex read through the security reports from the various C&O holdings entrusted to Hastings Security. Last night’sviolent Northern Indiana thunderstorm had toppled a tree at the Crawfords’s property and caused a power outage and alarm failure at Candace Ogilvie’s Art House. The local contract security company had determined in a drive-by that a downed limb on the roof was causing the skylight alarm to go off every twenty minutes ever since the power had come back on this morning. The limb had been removed, but the alarm continued to send out false alerts. The system was proprietary to Hastings Security, and the security contractor didn’t have the parts to make a repair.
A deliberate ploy on Hastings’s part. Several of the college students who roomed together at Art House had not only embarked on successful careers but married six of the wealthiest men in the country. Since the women had painted almost every available surface in the house during their Friday-night pizza parties, the walls, cupboards, and doors were now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The fewer people who knew about the interior, the better. Candace Ogilvie had yet to decide what to do with her old house since her marriage, and so it remained alarmed and maintained.
Many of the Hastings Security employees had beenassigned for events related to the Mother’s Day weekend, but with the Crawfords and Ogilvies in Europe for an extended vacation, he wasn’t likely to get any calls from them.
Alex crossed the hall to his father’s office. “Do you mind if I run down to C&O’s Indiana properties? There wasstorm damage at the cottage, and the Art House alarm system is sounding false signals every twenty minutes. The local service has messaged me seven times this morning.”
Jethro Hastings swiped through several screens on his tablet. “Sure you don’t want to send someone else? Anyone on Alan’s tech crew can fix a faulty alarm. Sounds like a classic case of something going bump in the night and nothing to worry about.”
“I would like to get away from the office for a bit.” And the family. With his twin sister expecting triplets and his older brother practically engaged to the mother of a six-month-old, Alex wanted some time away from the craziness. Baby things everywhere and Mom looking at him and the rest of the brothers as if wondering when they would find wives.
His father studied him for a long moment. “Take an extra day. We have things covered here. Be back in time for Sunday dinner. Your mother wants everyone together for Mother’s Day.”
Alex turned to leave.
“And, son, on that extra day off, hike, fish, or do something for you. Don’t turn it into a working vacation day.”
Alex didn’t bother dropping by his condo as he left town. His go-bag was packed with enough clothing for three days, and he had a full week of clothes at the old caretaker’s house on the Crawford property, which Hastings’s bodyguards used as a base when the Crawfords or Ogilvies vacationed in Indiana. The repair on the alarm wouldn’t take more than an hour, and if there had been a break-in, Candace’s nosy neighbor would have called 911. Candace’s roommate had been correct the day they installed the security system—the sleepy college town didn’t have enough crime to worry about. And with neighbors like Candace’s, the system was redundant.
