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No. The instant the thought occurred to him, she stepped into view, with her coworkers beside the pickup truck. Her expression was troubled, her shoulders rounded, but truthfully, she looked no worse than the three men with her. No more invested.
As Sam approached the ambulance, Cullen Simpson met him. He looked sweaty, pale and green around the gills. The kid had gone off and seen his first dead body. It had to happen sometime, but Sam wouldn’t have minded if he’d gotten more experience first.
“Where’s Tucker?”
Simpson’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “Out back with the body.”
“You okay?”
This time he bobbed his entire head, but he didn’t look at all convincing. “Mr. Greeley’s body was found by the housekeeper, Luna—Lushan—Lu—”
With a thin unsteady smile, the woman leaning against the bumper of the ambulance offered her hand. “Lunasha Ajmera.”
Sam shook hands with her, automatically assessing her. She was short, round, probably in her early to midsixties. She radiated caring and security. She looked motherly. Grandmotherly.
He introduced Ben and Lois to the woman, then circled the ambulance and headed for the lawn crew. The men instinctively drifted away, moving to the shade provided by the garage overhang, leaving Mila standing in the harsh sun.
“We’ve got to quit meeting like this,” she said.
Sam was surprised. He hadn’t been sure she had a sense of humor, especially one that bordered on inappropriate given the circumstances. She seemed to regret the comment quickly enough, pressing her lips into a thin line and directing her gaze off in the distance.
“Sounds good to me. But then we’ll have to find other places to meet.”
This time the surprise was hers. She looked at him from the corners of her eyes, her brows arched upward. Thinking his comment was even more inappropriate?
He gestured toward a grove of crape myrtles on the east side of the lawn, and they began walking that way. Lines showed how far the crew had gotten in cutting the grass before the discovery, and the fresh scents drifted up with every step they took.
“What happened?” He pulled an ink pen from his shirt pocket and a notebook from his hip pocket, flipping it open to a clean page. While they walked, his notes would be a crappy shorthand that no one but him could read, but it was enough to get the point across.
Mila removed her ball cap and swiped her sleeve across her face. Her hair was in a braid today that hung between her shoulder blades, the black glossy and glinting in the sun. “I was in the backyard getting ready to trim the junipers. Mr. Greeley likes them to be uniform. The housekeeper—”
“Lunasha.”
“She was clipping herbs when I went out back. She said she was going to get some tomatoes from the garden. I heard a gasp, and then she screamed. She came tearing out of the garden, out the gate, and grabbed me. I couldn’t understand what she was saying.”
His first impression had been wrong. Mila was shaken. Her flat narrative was proof of that. The way she stood utterly motionless. The emotional disconnect that wrapped itself around her.
“Did you know Mr. Greeley was home?”
“I didn’t think about it. I had my ruler. I was prepared.” She stepped into the grove, weaving around the trees and took a seat on the concrete bench in their shade.
“Your ruler?”
She gazed up at him before moving over a few inches on the bench, making room for him. “Did you know him?”
“I did.”
“He was…difficult.”
“He was.” Sam sat down beside her, far enough away that they couldn’t accidentally touch.
“He wanted us to ‘fix’ all these crapes as soon as they finished blooming this year. There wasn’t enough structure to them. He wanted them pruned to the same size, the same shape. He wanted the blossoms in each group to be identical in color. He wanted strict regimentation in both his yard and his gardens.”
Bracing his notebook on his knee, Sam glanced around at the trees. The bark peeling from the trunks was his favorite part of the crape myrtle, but their freeform shape and lush flowers made them gorgeous. They belonged here, growing rampant with the Southern mansion, but it didn’t surprise him at all that Greeley had wanted them under tight control or gone. He’d given pretty much the same order to everyone in his life, and everyone had chosen gone.
