“Officer...” she said.
“Detective Howie Berry.”
She ignored the correction. She’d known he was a detective by the plain clothes and the gold badge hanging at his waist. But if she had to suffer the indignity of sitting in a hot patrol car while waiting for her aunt, he could take being called by a lower rank.
“I’m afraid you can’t get in the house until we’ve finished up in there,” he continued, but Julianne was staring at the way one curl at the back of his neck brushed up against a strong jaw. Soft and hard. She set her hand in her lap before she reached out and pulled the curl straight.
“Detective,” she said, her attention shifting from his hair to his impossibly long eyelashes and how they brushed against the inside of his glasses when he blinked. He was cute. She was stuck in this damned patrol car with a cute detective while her aunt was facing her worst nightmare.
It was all too much. Julianne squared her shoulders, straightened her spine and finished in a haughty voice she’d learned from her mother, “If I don’t get answers now, and get to talk to my aunt, I’m calling the mayor.”
Disgust flickered over the detective’s face, but she wouldn’t back down or soften her words. Being spoiled rotten was better than being nice. Nice had gotten her nothing over the years, so Julianne had washed her hands of nice.
“Ms. Dawson.” The formal words came out of his mouth carefully, as if he was doling out expensive chocolates. “I regret to inform you, especially here and like this, that Mrs. Somerset is dead.”
“But she was alive yesterday,” she said, not able to bite her lip fast enough to keep the idiocy from escaping. First spoiled rotten and now stupid. Worse was the realization that even while sitting in a cop car, even the second after learning her favorite aunt was dead, she wanted the detective to think well of her.
She blinked against the slow buildup of liquid in her eyes.
Insecurity, not pride, had her worried about what the detective thought of her, even now. Julianne was proving to the detective—and to herself—that she was more concerned about other people’s opinions than about who she was or who she wanted to be.
Not that Aunt Binnie’s death was a surprise. Honestly, once the shock and grief wore off, relief would follow. Julianne and her mother wouldn’t have to argue about when to put her in a retirement home. And she was ninety—they’d all expected this day would come. Hoped it would be later rather than sooner. And Julianne had hoped to be sitting by the old woman’s bedside, holding her hand when her life passed out of her.
“I’m sorry,” Detective Berry said, his eyes and voice soft with sincerity. “I’m sorry this is how you have to find out.”
“Did you find her while investigating the other crime?” For a brief moment, Julianne wondered if the shock had killed her aunt.
“For the other crime?” The detective’s face had changed from initial disgust to sympathy and then to confusion, his features hardly shifting through it all. It was as if he could communicate a thesaurus of emotions with one twitch or another of his lips.
Magic lips to go with his fanciful hair.
“The one all the cop cars are here for.” Julianne waved her hand in the general direction of the commotion outside. “And the police dogs. I assume they’re here for a murder. Or something else terrible. The death of an old woman, even Aunt Binnie, wouldn’t require police dogs.”
Maybe there was some sort of frequent-caller program Julianne didn’t know about. Call the police station over a thousand times and get a handsome police dog to stand over your body while someone pronounces you dead. If so, Aunt Binnie had collected frequent-caller points like traveling salesmen collected airline miles.
“Ms. Dawson.” The slowness of his words was more than mere formality. He was treating her as if she was staring at a neon sign flashing Enter Here and asking where the door was. “Your aunt was murdered. That is why Henson couldn’t let you into the crime scene and why he kept you in the car.” Kindness in his voice caressed the reality of what he said, wrapping up the truth in sticky sweet syrup so she could swallow it without gagging, even if she had to gulp several times.
Julianne took a long, deep breath and stared into the detective’s light brown eyes. They had a ring of chocolate around the edge. For all his silly hair, the detective seemed like a steady man, holding her gaze and allowing her time to gather her dignity around her shoulders and adjust it so that it lay properly. She blinked, several times, fast enough to make the detective’s form waver, but not fast enough to hold in the tears. But she didn’t turn away from his face. If he was going to give her this news while she sat in the back of a patrol car, he could watch her cry. Neither she nor the detective would get the relief a trip to the bathroom to splash some cold water on her face would provide.
Detective Berry didn’t flinch. He knew who she was. He’d just told her that her favorite aunt was dead. Murdered. But he didn’t shrink from her. A strong man. Maybe even a kind one, she thought, as he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket. Her tissues were in her purse, which sat on the front passenger seat. Close enough for her to smell the lotion inside melting in the heat, but a million miles away for all that she could reach it.
His handkerchief smelled of laundry detergent and dryer sheets. Heavy smells, but it was soft against her eyes and nose.
That the handkerchief smelled like the detective was too intimate for a moment like this one, but she held on to that secret knowledge like she held on to the cloth. A small thing to comfort herself with. She gave her eyes another wipe with the handkerchief, then crumpled it in her hand and looked down at the soggy white square. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had offered her a handkerchief.
No, she could. Binnie had offered her one, last summer when Julianne had been over for tea and had received a text that Lewis had remarried. Tears Julianne had thought she was done with had welled up in her eyes, and Binnie had pulled out the handkerchief that she always kept tucked under her shirt and offered it to her.
Binnie, who was dead.
The subtle reminder of reality outside this car was all it took for the sense of loss that had been building to burst. What had been ladylike tears slipping down her face became a flood no handkerchief could contain. She cried because Aunt Binnie had been murdered, just like her husband—her worst fears come true. She cried because Aunt Binnie had died frightened and alone. But mostly she cried because last spring, when Binnie had asked Julianne to come over and help her plant tomatoes, Julianne had said she was too busy and now she would never get that conversation back to do over. She’d never plant tomatoes with Binnie again.
HOWIE HADN’T INTENDED to offer Ms. Dawson anything but his sympathy and a handkerchief, but somewhere between when the reality about her aunt had sunk in and now, he’d opened up his arms and she’d practically crawled onto his lap, sobbing into his shirt. Which was fine, he guessed, because there was no way the square of cotton she clutched in her fist by his ear would do anything but run away like a frightened hound dog from the amount of tears pouring from her.
He rolled the tips of his fingers along the inside of his collar, which was damp from sweat. He had left the door open, but the slight breeze wasn’t enough to make up for the greenhouse the car had become. Or for the damp warmth of her tears, the heat and softness of her body against his, the spicy, musky scent of her hair so close to his nose.
Christ. One of the first rules of good detective work was that everyone is a suspect until proved otherwise. And that included Julianne Dawson, née Somerset, who had grown up as Durham’s princess. Even though big tobacco had left the city, the Somerset family still owned large swatches of land.
Julianne Dawson was as likely to have murdered her aunt as anyone. A stabbing meant the crime had been personal. And the messiness of it suggested that the person