Asking for Trouble - Leslie Kelly [29]
Dimples. In this man’s cheeks.
It was like seeing him for the first time, and deep inside, I felt something flutter and uncoil in my stomach. Not lust—not this time, anyway. But a warm appreciation for the man I’d just caught glimpses of beneath the surly facade.
The man I wanted to get to know better.
“Well, I’ll be sure to watch out for your…rope, then,” I said with a saucy wink.
His eyes glittered and for a second, I thought he was going to reply with a flirtatious comment of his own. But he quickly stiffened, the glint of humor fading away, as if he’d just remembered who and where he was.
I didn’t want him to retreat into himself again so soon. “So, any warnings about where I should watch my step so I avoid tripping over the bodies?”
“I’m quite sure you don’t have anything to worry about. Seaton House has hardly been a hotbed of crime, not since your Mr. Zangara was in residence, at least.”
His voice was so smooth, sometimes holding a tiny hint of an accent but most times just sounding sexy and self-assured. Very educated. Cultured.
“Where are you from, anyway?” I asked.
His eyes shifted and he walked to the fridge, helping himself to a bottle of water. “I grew up in California. Now I live—most recently I lived—in Baton Rouge.”
So why are you here? That was the next question, but I wasn’t going to ask it. I’d already sensed he was shutting down, so I quickly backpedaled, wanting him relaxed. Open and happy.
Naked wouldn’t be bad, either. But I’d get to that later.
“You said your mother was Robert Stubbs’s granddaughter. I knew he and Zangara had children around the same age. I just didn’t follow Stubb’s family line. Did your mother ever mention remembering him from her childhood?”
“No.” He opened his water bottle and lifted it to his mouth. As he sipped, I watched the movement of his throat, saw every swallow, noted the way the cords of muscle flexed beneath his skin. My legs wobbled a little bit even though I was wearing sneakers instead of my high-heeled boots.
When he’d finished, he added, “She hated this house. She told me once that she wished the whole place had gone up in flames when a big section of the third floor was destroyed by fire when she was a teenager. She never came back after marrying my father and moving out west.”
“Maybe because she knew its history.”
“Probably. It wasn’t exactly the kind of thing for a bedtime story. And the few times my uncle talked about their family, it was to say their grandfather was a miserable, mean-spirited, miserly son of a bitch.”
Hmm. From what I had found so far, that sounded exactly like Zangara’s partner, who’d come from my hometown of Chicago.
“So what happened to Zangara’s family?” he asked, looking interested in spite of himself.
“After your great-grandfather bought them out, his wife and son moved somewhere down south to start a new life. I tracked the boy up to the nineteen seventies in Atlanta, then lost him.”
Crushing his plastic water bottle, he asked, “How do you do that, anyway? Tracking people?”
“It’s not that difficult, especially in the Google age. If you have someone’s social security number and date of birth or death, it’s a breeze tracking their whole work history through the social security administration.”
“And if you don’t?”
“Makes it a little tougher, but if you know approximately when and where they were born, and you’re patient, old newspapers, land transfer paperwork, marriage licenses—they can all come into play. Of course, family bibles and personal correspondence can help, too.”
He nodded absently, then rubbed his jaw. “If you don’t find what you need in the storage room in the basement, check out the attic. There’s an access door at the north end of the third floor corridor.”
“A spooky old attic?”
With a wry look, he admitted, “Complete with cobwebs, old dressmaker’s dummies and wooden trunks big enough