The President's Daughter - Mariah Stewart [104]
Church bells from a tower somewhere close to town rang ten times, their solid clanging punctuating the quiet night like exclamation points.
The driver sighed. Where was this woman?
Perhaps she’d been scared away.
If that was the case, where might she go?
Impatient fingers tapped a nervous tune on the steering wheel. Where might a woman like Jude McDermott go to hide if she thought there was danger?
And surely she must know that there is; she has to know that the near miss was no accident. . . .
Ten-twenty P.M., but still no sign of life.
Perhaps she was with the girl. Jude had been intended to be the original target—after all, she was the one with the information—but the girl had given an opportunity not to be missed.
The point was to eliminate anyone who knew.
Simon Keller knew, but perhaps he could still be of some limited use.
Jude definitely knew. The tape had revealed this, along with Jude’s name.
Perhaps through targeting the daughter the mother would be made careless.
And careless prey, as everyone knows, is so much easier to catch. . . .
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
On her way into breakfast early the next morning, Dina found her cell phone where she’d left it the previous day, atop the table in the front hall. “ONE MISSED CALL,” the readout announced. She scrolled down for the number as she came into the dining room. She listened to Polly’s message with a smile on her face.
“You look pleased,” Betsy noted as she joined Dina in the dining room.
“I am pleased.” Dina grinned. “I just got a message from Polly. I have three potential customers waiting to hear from me. One new property and two renovations. My favorite kind of work.”
“I noticed how much happier you are after you’ve been out puttering around in the gardens.” Betsy poured a cup of coffee for Dina, then one for herself. “Though frankly, with things so out of hand and overgrown, it’s hard to imagine anyone enjoying the work.”
“Oh, this is nothing.” Dina waved a hand toward the back of the house and the garden area beyond. “These beds have been tended over the years. Some of the places I’ve worked on haven’t been weeded in fifty, seventy years, or better.”
“How do you know what to do first?”
“Well, first you get down on your hands and knees and try to see what’s lurking beneath the overgrowth.” Dina grinned. “Some plants can survive forever with the smallest amount of maintenance. Peonies can last for decades, as can roses, and some of the self-seeders, hollyhocks and such, can just keep on regenerating. On several occasions, I’ve found wonderful old varieties of plants in gardens I’ve restored, plants that I couldn’t even buy seeds for because they’re so rare. You never know when that will happen, and it certainly makes the work more interesting for me. I’m going to call these people as soon as breakfast is over.”
“Call what people?” Jude asked as she entered the room.
“Polly left a voice mail message for me that a couple of potential customers called or stopped in over the past few days. Two are possible renovations on old properties.”
“Oh, what properties? Someplace we know?” Jude helped herself to scrambled eggs from a covered dish that Mrs. Brady had placed on the sideboard earlier.
“One is that red house on the way out of town. Polly didn’t know where the other was. But there are several places around Henderson that are for sale right now. It could be any one of them. There’s the Otis place, and the Franklin farm. . . .” Dina paused to think. “Then there’s that place out on Keansey Road. . . .”
“Well, hopefully, the prospective owners won’t mind waiting until you can meet with them,” Jude said.
“Wait for what?” Dina frowned.
“Until we know it’s safe for you to go back to Henderson.”
“I won’t go into town. I’ll just take care of my business and come back here.”
“Maybe you should run this past Simon,” Betsy suggested.
“Simon has his own agenda right now. If these people are serious about this property, making them wait is unfair. They