The Third Grave (Savannah #4) - Lisa Jackson Page 0,145

and hated, while her husband, Ryan, was going through the motions of divorcing his wife and demanding sole custody of their children.

“So much for the mommy blog,” Nikki said aloud, and Mikado swept the floor with his tail. Ashley was facing other charges as well, all stemming from aiding and abetting Tyson in his abduction and killing of the Duval sisters twenty years ago. And though how Ashley had pieced together that Tyson had killed Bronco Cravens and Owen Duval was still unclear, Nikki’s recording of Tyson and Ashley’s last conversation was part of the evidence against her. Along with Nikki’s testimony.

Tyson’s need to be Baxter’s only heir had, ultimately, gotten him killed.

And then there was Rose Duval/Jade Delacroix, who, as it turned out, was now the single living progeny of Baxter Beaumont.

Fitting.

Though Jade, on leave from the department pending an investigation into her actions, seemed disinterested in the Beaumont fortune. And there was Connie-Sue, Baxter’s wife, who had lost her only son and was dealing with a mental breakdown. She probably wouldn’t be welcoming Rose into the family with open arms. But there were ways to cut an unhappy wife out of the lion’s share of an estate. If that was Baxter’s intent. He, too, had lost his son.

But Jade was an enigma. Two people. An innocent child, robbed of her rightful destiny, and a scheming adult who, Nikki imagined, would stop at nothing to make her way in the world, her own way.

In that respect, Jade/Rose and Nikki were alike. But Jade’s actions bordered on the criminal, maybe not only bordered but stepped well over the line between right and wrong. Nikki only bent that line . . . and just a little.

Yeah, right? Who are you kidding? You’d step over just a bit to chase down a story—be honest.

She just wasn’t certain how far Delacroix would go, how much of a risk she would take, how deep she would dive into the world of lies and deception.

Maybe it was all she knew.

Nikki glanced outside to the magnolia tree and wondered how long before Jade capitulated to accepting the mantle of being the Beaumont heir, if it were offered. Would she stand by her guns and dismiss a portion of the fortune, or would she give in? Wealth was just oh, so seductive. It would take an incredibly strong person to deny its pull.

But then, who was Nikki to say?

Time would tell.

* * *

The reverend’s house wasn’t home.

And Margaret Duval Le Roy wasn’t Jade’s mother.

For that matter, Jade was no longer Rose Duval, no matter what any DNA test proved. Yet here she was, sitting on a couch beneath a huge picture of The Last Supper, a Bible laid open on the coffee table and a woman who studied every angle of Delacroix’s face as if she were memorizing it. She probably was. And her husband, grim-faced but silent, his gnarled hands folded in his lap, sat in one of the chairs near the picture window.

“I just don’t understand why you didn’t look me up. When you started figuring things out . . .” Margaret took one of Jade’s hands and laced her fingers through those of her daughter. “I spent years searching for you. I never let the police let your case go cold, so why?”

“Oh, come on. How could I? I was five,” Delacroix heard herself explaining. “I had no way to contact you, I didn’t know how, and my parents, they wouldn’t even let me discuss it. And then, you know, the years rolled by and the people who adopted me, they didn’t want me to think of anything before. It wasn’t until I was in college that I decided I had to know. And I figured if I got into law enforcement that I might be able to find out the truth, that there would be ways I could search through records and investigate, so I changed my major, got a part-time job in New Orleans, then transferred here. I knew I was from Savannah and I read enough to realize who I probably was.”

“Then you could have just looked me up!” Margaret said, as if it were that simple, as if all the years could be erased, as if she weren’t afraid that she might be found out by whoever had stolen her sisters away.

“I was hoping to find Holly and Poppy.” She thought of Holly’s locket, the one thing she could steal from the evidence department, a bit of the sister she