Dead Certain - Mariah Stewart [10]
“Manda, it’s me, Der—”
She grabbed the phone. “Where are you?” she barked into the receiver.
“I’m home. I told you I’d be home on—”
“We need to talk, Derek.”
“I know, I know. How about breakfast in the morning? We could meet at that little B and B you love out on the river road, and we could—”
“Now, Derek.”
“Manda, it’s almost eleven, I just got in from an ungodly flight, and—”
“I don’t care if you swam home. We have a serious problem. I’ve had it with this crap, Derek. It’s no way to run a respectable business. It’s irresponsible, it’s—”
His sigh whispered against her ear. “Okay. You’re right. Let’s get it over with tonight so that we can move on tomorrow.” Derek’s voice was cheerless and held more than a trace of resignation. “I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”
“I’ll be waiting.” Her nerves already on edge from the hang-up calls, Amanda resisted the urge to slam the receiver onto its base.
She went into the kitchen and turned on the light, eyes darting around the room. Nothing amiss.
Tea would soothe, she told herself, and went about the process of filling the teakettle and hunting for the box of Morning Thunder that Derek preferred. Setting out two cups. Slicing lemon. Anything to avoid thinking about what she was going to say to Derek and how she was going to say it.
She still wasn’t certain that she wasn’t going to tell him it was time to dissolve the partnership. That maybe they both needed to move on. A last resort, to be sure, but exactly what she’d threatened the last time he’d done something stupid that had cost them a lot of money and cast a shadow on their reputation.
The kettle whistled and she turned it off, then looked out the window on the driveway side of the house, expecting Derek’s Lexus to pull in at any minute. She glanced at the clock.
11:27. He’d called at 10:42.
She went back to the foyer and separated the junk mail from the bills, read through two department store circulars, and thumbed through a magazine. Gathering the junk pile, she returned to the kitchen and looked up at the clock.
11:43. It had been an hour since Derek called. For Derek, a mere hour late was early.
Regardless of how good his intentions might be, Derek never seemed to manage to get anywhere on time. He was distracted so easily. On the way to his front door, he would pause to rearrange the flowers in a vase on the sideboard as he passed through the dining room. He would turn on a light in the living room and straighten the pillows on the sofa. He might check the mantel for dust, then call up the steps to his longtime companion, Clark Lehmann, to announce that the mantel needed dusting and engage in a discussion over whether the cleaning woman should come two days a week instead of one. He would check the messages on the answering machine and fuss with a pile of magazines.
It drove Amanda insane.
“He could have walked here by now,” Amanda grumbled as she reached for the phone on the wall and dialed his cell phone. When there was no answer, she called his home number.
“Clark? Would you please put Derek on the phone?”
Clark paused briefly before asking, “Isn’t he there with you?”
“No. Look, I understand why he would rather deal with this in the morning, and at this point we might as well. So just tell him never mind. We’ll meet for breakfast, as he’d suggested.”
“Amanda, Derek left here right after he spoke with you. Not more than five minutes after he hung up.” Clark’s voice clouded with uncertainty. “He should have been there a long time ago.”
“Well, he’s not here. Where could he have stopped between there and here?”
“At this hour on a Monday night? I can’t think of any place that’s even open around here past ten.”
“There’s that bar out near Denton Road.”
“We haven’t gone there in months. He would never go into a place like that alone, and he wouldn’t have gone there tonight. He’s exhausted from the trip and he wants to get this