she and Kalea appraised yesterday. Charlotte must have been checking their work last night when . . . The poor woman. Addie looked at the teacup and tried to paint a picture in her mind of what Charlotte was doing when the incident happened. But there was nothing else on the desk that would indicate what Charlotte was working on.
Keeping half an eye on where she stood in relation to the body and the chair, Addie stepped around the desk to her right and paused at the door. She strained to listen for sounds of the police having arrived. They might not think this is an emergency, but they aren’t trapped in the room with the body, either. And where is Blake? He’d had plenty of time to inform the staff of an “incident,” as he called it, and to return to keep her company through this. Because it was all getting a little bit too creepy for her liking, what with the dead body, the look on the face of said body, and the fact that no matter how hard Addie tried to stay out of the line of sight—so to speak—she still felt as though she were being watched. The same uneasy feelings she’d had yesterday resurfaced and she kept trying to tell herself it was simply the power of suggestion, the same thing she had mocked Paige for.
Well, enough was enough. She could only stay calm and levelheaded for so long in this room that seemed to be filled with gaping eyes. She’d call the police directly and tell them to get a move on it. She tugged her phone out of her front skinny-jeans pocket and saw a missed text from Serena.
Stay out of trouble!
Too late, my friend, Addie replied. It’s already found me!
Out of habit, she punched in Marc’s cell number but caught herself. Since he’d been away, Jerry was acting chief of police, but she didn’t have Jerry’s private cell number. If she did call Marc, for all she knew, since he hadn’t contacted her recently, he might answer from a beach on the Riviera, and she wasn’t sure she could handle that right now.
In an attempt to keep her mind occupied, and not think about Marc’s possible whereabouts or the charge she had been delegated to watch over, she scrolled through her messages and recent calls and growled when there was still no word from Kalea. She tucked her phone back in her pocket, not certain if she should be relieved or concerned that her cousin had ditched her again. But it really wasn’t out of character for the girl she knew back at college. Although, yesterday Addie had a glimmer of what an actual adult relationship with Kalea could be like. At least she hoped what one would be like, but obviously her cousin hadn’t changed, and it wasn’t meant to be.
Unless, of course, Kalea had arrived and was out there somewhere and couldn’t get in because Blake had closed off the room until after the police came. Fingers crossed, that was it, and she didn’t need to write off her cousin for another ten years. On the other hand, her cousin could have at least called. Addie cursed her lack of mental capacity the day before after she’d been rattled by whatever it was she’d seen on the stairs. She hadn’t even thought to get Kalea’s number from her. Now she had no way of reaching her to find out what was going on.
Frustrated with herself, Addie’s eyes darted around the room, and her gaze landed on the table where the individual books set for auction were displayed. She hissed a swear word under her breath. Why did I even bother?
After all the time she’d spent organizing their placement, either Charlotte or Robert had gone ahead and added their own touch. Robert! Where was he? Blake had told her his car was here, but there had been no sign of him. Was he the reason, not Garrett, that Kalea had a last-minute change of dinner plans? Her stomach pitched at the thought of that one, but with her cousin, one could never tell what attracted her to most of the men she dated. Addie shivered. There was that feeling again. She glanced at the desk chair to make sure she hadn’t wandered into its line of sight and crept to the table to see what havoc Robert or Charlotte had wreaked on her work.
It was pure chaos. Books were everywhere. The