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She’d wanted to be a lawyer even as a child, but she hadn’t imagined that work would be the only thing in her life.
“Whoa!” Alexis whispered as a balding, mustachioed man pushed open the door. “Heads up! It’s Poirot!”
The man’s mustache was more of a simple brush than Poirot’s elaborate handlebar affair, but he was dark and small and close enough in appearance to the fictional detective for them to appreciate the whimsy. Athena was grateful for the light moment considering their sad purpose in being here.
The man walked into the room with a sheaf of papers and stood across the table from the sisters as he introduced himself.
“Good afternoon,” he said in slightly accented English that only served to heighten the Poirot effect. “Welcome to Portland. I’m…”
Then he seemed to forget who he was as his eyes went from Alexis to Athena, back to Alexis, on to Augusta, widening with every pass. “I’m, ah…”
“Bernard Pineau,” Athena said, taking charge. She’d been born nineteen minutes before Alexis, and thirty-seven minutes before Augusta. She’d always thought of herself as the eldest. “You’re Bernard Pineau. Didn’t Aunt Sadie tell you we’re identical triplets?”
“She did, yes,” he replied with a self-conscious laugh. “But knowing that and seeing it for oneself are two very different things. Please, pardon me for staring.”
Athena nodded. As children, she and her sisters had grown accustomed to the gasps and stares their identical appearances created. But now with careers on opposite coasts and Alexis on another continent, that seldom happened. There were moments when she missed it.
Athena introduced herself, then Lex and Gusty.
Pineau shook hands across the table and took his chair.
“You must be the lawyer from Washington, D.C.,” Pineau guessed, focusing on Athena. She wouldn’t have cared that he’d guessed, except that she knew he’d done it after a glance at her suit jacket—all that was visible above the table. It made her feel morose.
“Sadie was very proud of you,” he added sincerely.
Resentment fell away and she experienced a moment’s comfort. “Thank you.”
He studied the other two women, then smiled at Alexis. “You have the studio in Rome?”
Alexis nodded. “I do.”
“I have your Madonna 4 in my study at home,” he said. “Sadie gave it to me for my birthday. My wife and I treasure it.”
Alexis was surprised. “I’m glad. Aunt Sadie was my self-appointed PR person and one-man sales force.”
“She was.” He turned to Augusta.
“I’m the teacher,” she said. “In Pansy Junction, California. Third grade. I love it.”
He smiled indulgently at her. Augusta always inspired smiles.
Then he folded his hands atop the documents he’d brought with him and asked solicitously, “Would you like coffee before we begin?”
Three heads shook.
“We’ve just had lunch,” Athena explained.
He nodded. “Then, before we begin, let me offer my condolences on the loss of your aunt. I met her just a year ago when we first worked on this will, and I found her to be a most charming and enlightened woman.”
Athena opened her mouth to speak and discovered she had no voice.
“Thank you,” Alexis said. “We did, too.”
Pineau squared the pages on the table and began to read the formal legalese. “I, Sadie Richmond, being of sound mind…”
He read on and Athena and her sisters exchanged grim glances. There was no avarice here, no eagerness to know what Sadie had left to whom. Just a still profound disbelief that she was gone and a willingness to carry out her wishes.
“To Athena,” the lawyer said, turning over a page, “I leave my Tiffany watch with the diamond fleur-de-lis in the hope that looking at it will brighten her tight schedule. I also leave her my aquamarine-and-diamond bar brooch to dress up her serious suits.”
Athena closed her eyes and saw images of her aunt wearing the brooch on the shoulder of a smart black dress, on the lapel of her burgundy wool suit, on the blue blazer she’d worn to the Dancer’s Beach Regatta every summer.
Tears welled in Athena’s throat but she swallowed them.
“To Alexis,” Pineau continued, “I leave my entire collection of berets because she always complimented me on them and has the flair to wear them, herself. And I want her to have the Degas in the upstairs hall because she might have posed for it.”
Athena remembered the gilt-framed painting of a ballerina executing a grand jeté and thought the gift appropriate. Alexis always moved as though in ballet slippers.
A tear fell down Alexis’s cheek and Augusta covered her hand with her own.
“To Augusta, I leave my doll collection and the Steiff bear she cuddled with when her sisters were too much for her.”
Gusty nodded, her lips trembling dangerously. Alexis patted her back.
“I wish the girls to share whatever they would like of my clothes and my jewelry, then donate the rest to a women’s shelter. I apologize to them for the paltry contents of my savings account, but they know how I’ve loved my travels. I wish it and my few stocks to be divided equally among them.”
Pineau paused to take a breath.
Alexis and Augusta leaned back in thought and Athena let her mind drift to her favorite memory of Sadie. She was striding ahead of them up the beach at Cliffside, wearing pedal pushers and a T-shirt, her graying blond hair tied up in a scarf as she led them in the collection of shells and other ocean treasures.
Athena was lost in the moment, unaware that Pineau hadn’t covered everything until he said, a little quickly, she thought, “And to David Hartford, I leave Cliffside and all its furnishings.”
Athena’s eyes flew open. She turned to her sisters and saw the same shocked surprise she felt mirrored in their faces. There was a moment of stunned silence, then a loud and simultaneous “Who?”
“David Hartford,” Pineau repeated, tapping the document with the tips of his fingers. “A friend, apparently.”
The women stared at one another again. Athena, caught completely off balance, struggled to think.
But Alexis didn’t stop to think. “I’ve never heard of him,” she said, leaning forward across the table. “A friend from where? Dancer’s Beach?”
Pineau shook his head. “She didn’t say where she met him.”
“She never mentioned him to us.” Augusta looked from one sister to the other. Heads shook confirmingly. “You have to contact him about the will, Mr. Pineau,” Athena pointed out, an unidentified but unsettling suspicion forming in the pit of her stomach where her grief for Sadie ached. “You must know where he lives. And why isn’t he here?”
“I have contacted him. He lives in Chicago, but he wasn’t able to come to the reading. So, I’ve faxed him everything he has to know, and transferred the house into his name.”
Augusta and Alexis gasped simultaneously.
“When did Aunt Sadie change the will?” Athena asked. “We know that two years ago when we were all together at Christmas, she intended to leave Cliffside to the three of us. Not that we care about possession, but…it was a family home. Who is this guy?”
“This will…” Pineau began.
“What do we know about him?” Augusta interrupted. “I mean, she loved telling us stories about her life in Dancer’s Beach. She lived very quietly, except for hosting some local events because Cliffside was so big. I can’t believe she’d have become that close to someone without telling us. And if we’ve never heard of him…”
Pineau shook his head apologetically. “My job isn’t to investigate the beneficiaries of a will, just to see that the deceased’s wishes are carried out.”
“When did she change it?” Alexis asked again.
“As I said before,” Pineau replied patiently, “we drew up this will a year ago.”
Athena stood in agitation. Alexis got to her feet and began to pace.
“I don’t understand,” Augusta said from her chair. “Where would she have met this Hartford guy?”
“Maybe on one of her trips,” Alexis suggested, stopping in the middle of the carpet. “He’s probably one of those gigolos who preys on older women and gets them to sign over their life savings. Or their house.”
“Ladies, I know you’re disappointed about Cliffside,” Pineau said quietly, “but your aunt was very calm and clearheaded when she made the change. I think she truly wanted Mr. Hartford to have it. And I personally think she was too clever a woman to be fooled by a charlatan.”
Athena frowned at him. “But we don’t know for certain, do we, because you haven’t conducted an investigation of any kind.”
Alexis gasped and snapped her fingers. “Maybe he wants Cliffside for the smugglers’ stairs!” she said to Athena. “I mean, apart from the fact that it’s a wonderful property.”
“That’s right!” Augusta cried.
Pineau looked puzzled. “What stairs?”
“When we were children,” Athena explained, “we discovered a door in the basement at Cliffside that led to a stairway through the cliff down to the beach. Sadie padlocked it, telling us that during Prohibition in Grandpa Richmond’s day, booze had been smuggled in that way. Maybe Hartford is planning to put the house to a similar use. Drugs, maybe?”
“Ladies—” Pineau pleaded.
“I know, I know.” Athena cut him off. “It’s not your job to check him out, but maybe it’s ours. Think about what’s happened here! Our aunt dies in the crash of a light plane shortly after she wills the family home to a total stranger?”
“It’s been a year since she changed the will,” Pineau pointed out again, reasonably. “We have no reason to believe the plane crash wasn’t a simple accident. And Hartford wasn’t a stranger to her.”
She ignored his attempt at reason and turned to her sisters. “Until the authorities can bring up the plane and prove to me that the crash was an accident, I think this Hartford bears looking into. What do you say?”
Augusta nodded. “Let’s do it. I took a couple of weeks’ leave.”
Athena turned to Alexis. “What about you, Lex?”
Alexis shouldered a large soft leather pouch. “My time’s my own. I’m in. Where do we start?”
“What’s Hartford’s address?” Athena asked Pineau
Pineau tapped the document on the table. “As of the moment I notified him, his address is Cliffside, Dancer’s Beach, Oregon.
Chapter One
David Hartford surveyed the wide living room of his new home and thought it looked comfortable, if not exactly true to a period or a style. He’d put some of the pieces he’d inherited into storage to make room for some of his own things. When he had time to think about it, he’d decide what to do with them.
It had been a week and a half since Aunty’s attorney had called him to let him know he’d inherited a two-acre estate overlooking the Pacific Ocean and he still couldn’t quite believe it. He’d grown up in a house three times this size, but it had never been a home, and he’d never felt as comfortable in it as he did here after barely a week.
His inheritance included this twelve-room Colonial Revival home, a guest house, an apartment over a four-car garage, and a small forest of firs, ash and oak tucked around the back of the property in a half-moon embrace. A shaggy lawn stretched thirty yards in front of the property to the edge of the cliff that rose fifteen feet above the ocean. Shrubbery he couldn’t identify provided protection from the cliff’s edge.
And it was all thanks to the gratitude of a woman he’d never met, a CIA agent code-named Aunty who’d been his phone and radio contact on several jobs for the Company. He’d helped save her life in Africa when she’d been trapped in the path of a rebel advance, but he’d called in mercenaries to bring her out, so technically, they’d saved her life. That detail hadn’t mattered to her, according to Aunty’s attorney, who’d notified him of his windfall.
David was grateful, of course, and aware that the gift couldn’t have come at a more fortuitous time.
Life as a CIA agent had lost its glamour for him and his team after the fiasco in Afghanistan, and now the three of them were starting over as “civilians.”
So the large, comfortable furniture from his Chicago apartment now sat among a little round mahogany table, an old Windsor piano from the turn of the century, a curio shelf that now held his collection of hand-carved decoys. A large armoire removed from the bedroom had become a perfect entertainment center. The attorney had sent him a list of things willed to other beneficiaries and David had those shipped off to him.
He punctuated that observation with a sneeze. He held a folded handkerchief to his nose and thought it ironic that someone who’d survived spring and summer in Illinois as a boy without succumbing to allergies should be felled by the mold and mildew of an Oregon winter. Trevyn McGinty and Bram Bishop walked through the open front door, each with an armload of folding chairs borrowed from city hall’s meeting room.
“Are you going to help us?” Trevyn asked, moving on through to the dining room and shouting back over his shoulder, “or are you just going to stand there and congratulate yourself on making points with the mayor of Dancer’s Beach just two days after moving to town?”
Bram followed Trevyn with a tauntingly disparaging glance in David’s direction. “He’s going to stand there,” he said. “He thinks that just because he’s letting us live with him for a couple of months that indentures us somehow. Tell us again—” his voice rose as he went into the other room “—how we ended up having to host a party for two hundred people when we know absolutely no one here!”
There was the clatter of metal on metal as they began to open the chairs.
David pocketed his handkerchief and went into the large dining room that accommodated a table that seated twenty. For the purpose of the party, he’d distributed those chairs around the living room and placed the table at the side of the room for buffet service.
He helped place folding chairs. “Because Aunty always hosted the historical society’s masked ball every year and her…passing left them high and dry a mere ten days before the party.”
They exchanged grim glances. Trevyn and Bram had worked with Aunty, also.
Trevyn sighed and looked around the room. “She was so no-nonsense on the job,” he said with a reminiscent smile. “It’s weird to think that she had this beautiful home and willingly left it for…what? We were looking for excitement, but what is a sixty-year-old woman looking for?”
“Some kind of fulfillment, maybe,” Bram guessed. “You could tell by the way she worked she wasn’t the kind of woman who did nothing but golf.”
They were all quiet another moment, then he put a chair in place and asked briskly, “There’s no Elk’s hall or armory or anything in town where they could have had this affair? They had to have it here because that’s the way they’ve always done it?”
David shook his head. “Invitations had already gone out. Many to out-of-town people who are summer residents of Dancer’s Beach. Calling to change locations would have been too complicated. So the mayor stopped by while the two of you were still driving the U-haul in from Chicago and asked me if I’d consider saving their hides. Since all three of us will be doing business in this town in one way or another, it seemed like the sporting thing to do.”
Trevyn unfolded the last chair. “What do you know about these historical society types?”
David stood back to survey their work. “Not much, except that I imagine they’ll be Mrs. Beasley’s vintage—middle sixties—so don’t get your hopes up for a lap full of beautiful young things. But they might prove to be potential clients for your photo studio.”
“Hope so.” Trevyn flattened the seat of a chair in a corner, his expression suddenly serious. “I can’t believe Aunty left you all this—or how lucky we are that you’re still looking out for us even though we’re not in the field anymore.”
David moved a floor lamp aside several inches to make room for the chair. “We’ve been on so many rotten jobs together, it seems like now that we get to live real lives, we ought to at least start out together.”
They’d shared experiences over the past few years that made men closer than brothers. In good times, they’d been an efficient, effective machine that did the government’s dirty work.
In bad times, they’d shared one another’s pain, nursed one another’s wounds, and on a few occasions, saved one another’s lives.
The experiences made transitioning into normal, everyday life difficult. And an exercise best shared with friends. “Well, how come he got the guest house and I got the room above the garage and a daily dose of carbon monoxide?”
Bram was putting him on. He’d done his job fearlessly on their last mission when everything had gone bad on them. He was a couple of years older than Trevyn and David and had seen far more action—too much, maybe—but there wasn’t a selfish bone in his body.
