Adele, who up until now had been a fountain of facts and knowledge, dried up like the arroyos of Mitch’s childhood in the summer. She cocked her head.

“Oh, there they are now, dears. The tour group that was supposed to have been here at eleven.” She patted Eve’s arm and ushered them out into the gallery. “You keep that photo, Eve. And you might want to check with your uncle and let him know we’ve returned an original. Feel free to poke around the grounds. I’d better hustle, or I’ll never get them rounded up. People always think they can treat these houses the way they do their own.”

Her voice faded as she clattered down the stairs, and in a moment they heard her greeting the group. The buzz of a busload of people filtered up through the floor.

“Ready to go?” he asked. “Or do you want to look around?”

“No, I’m ready.” Her voice was flat. Preoccupied. “But I’ll be back. That woman was hiding something, and I’m going to find out what it is.”

15

MAYBE MITCH WAS RIGHT. Maybe she was making too much out of a silly photograph. So two teenagers were cuddling. What did that mean? Teenagers cuddled all the time. It was the seventies, for heaven’s sake. Just because her mom was cuddling with the wrong boy…

Wrong in whose opinion? Yours?

Maybe she’d dated Roy at one time and then decided that Gibson was The One after she’d graduated from college. Then why had Adele changed the subject so fast?

Eve hadn’t been coaxing secrets out of guests four days a week, nine months a year for three years for nothing. She could spot a diversionary tactic a mile away-especially from a person who wasn’t used to lying.

Eve pulled out her phone while Mitch stood in the eerie blue light in front of the windows of the dolphin tank at the aquarium. He was lost in a completely appealing, childlike wonder at the swooping and darting of the creatures.

“Dylan,” she said when he answered, “I need you to do something for me on the qt.”

He didn’t even remind her that it was Saturday and he would have been completely within his rights to ignore her number on his digital display. “Sure. What’s up?”

“I need you to get the home number of a docent who works at a plantation called Mirabel. Ever heard of it?”

“I’ve been there, yeah.”

“You have?”

“My senior thesis was on representations of slave culture in the cinema. I’ve been to every place open to the public within about fifty miles of Atlanta.”

No kidding. The things she was learning about people this weekend. “You probably talked to this lady, then. Her name is Adele and she’s a volunteer with the Ashmere Trust.”

“So you need home phone and address?”

“Just phone. I think she has some information for me, but I want to talk to her in private.”

“Am I doing this clandestinely or as a rep of the show?”

“Use whatever method gets you that number.”

“Copy that, boss. I have thumbscrews and cuffs in my date book. Agent Moore out.”

With a smile, she hung up. She’d lobbed him some pretty weird requests since he’d come to work for her, and only once had he come up empty-handed. Of course, as it turned out, that particular member of the state senate had been arrested for shoplifting shortly afterward, so maybe it was just as well she hadn’t had him on the show.

It took Dylan less than half an hour to call her back. “I’ve got your number,” he said without preamble. “Got a pen?” He dictated it, and she wrote it on the notepad she kept in her handbag for this kind of thing.

“How’d you get it? Or should I not press you to reveal your sources?”

“It was easy,” he said with a touch of pride. “I just explained to the girl at the trust’s switchboard who I was and hinted that Adele might be on the scope for the show, and she was happy to give me her phone number. She probably would have given me the lady’s address and all the names of her kids, too, but I stopped her in time.”

Eve thanked him and disconnected. Now what should she do? Call Adele and arrange a meeting so she could force out of her whatever she was hiding? Or come at it in a more circuitous way and hope she let something slip?

Ha. Adele was a Southern lady. No manipulation would work on her. Honesty was the best approach.

“Have you been here so many times that you’re bored silly?”

Mitch ambled up to her, his presence like a breath of air in the stifling confusion of her own thoughts.

“No, actually, I’ve never been here. It’s kind of fun being a tourist in your own town.”

“Forgive me for noticing, but you’ve spent more time on the phone than you have looking at the fish.”

Speaking of honesty…

“I’m still bugged about that photo. I had Dylan track down Adele’s home number so I can talk to her about it some more.”

“Seems to me you’d be better off talking to someone in the family, like your grandmother or your uncle,” he said reasonably. “Up until today, you never even heard of Adele.”

“I’m going to do that, too.”

“Are you sure you want to?” He took her hand and began to walk slowly toward the exit. “I mean, look at it from their point of view. You turn up on their doorstep asking a bunch of questions about a casual photo taken thirty years ago. All weirdness aside, how can it matter now?”

She exhaled, a long breath that acknowledged he was probably right. “I know. I can’t argue that. Maybe it’s just some compulsion inside me to connect with the past.”

“Brought on by what?”

She glanced at him. Was the timing right? “I don’t know. Maybe because I’ve spent the last couple of weeks thinking about the future.”

“I hear you. I have to admit this deal is consuming most of my waking hours, too.”

Now, what had happened here? She’d given him a classic opener to have a conversation about whether this was only a fling, or whether it could be something more, and he’d sent it swerving back to her. She didn’t want to talk about business. If the truth were told, she was sick of thinking about the lawsuit and the station and the show and everybody’s expectations.

Eve wanted to talk about them. She’d spent the last three years talking about relationships, while her personal life was as bare as a winter field. So how long could a person talk about something without really experiencing it?

If she were really honest with herself, maybe she’d been happy that way. If you became an expert on something, you could control it. You could live it in a surface kind of way, without risking your emotions and your vulnerabilities. The time had come to delve below the surface. To experience something so deeply that it might change her forever.

A deeply frightening thought.

But a challenge, too. And who had learned to be good at dealing with those over the last three years?

“I didn’t mean the deal. I meant my personal future.” She took a breath and plunged, feeling like one of those dolphins landing in the deep end of the tank. “And yours. Do you mean to tell me you haven’t spent your waking hours thinking about me?”

As they went outside, the late afternoon heat clamped down on them like a smothering blanket. Eve hurried her steps as they made their way back to the car.

“Let me rephrase that,” Mitch said. “Thinking about this deal means thinking about you. At night I dream about you. I wake up aroused, which means I start the day thinking about you. I’ve come to the conclusion I must be some kind of obsessive personality.”

Well, there was nothing wrong with that. This was more like it.

“Have you given any thought to what happens when the deal is done?” she asked carefully. “About where this affair of ours might be going? Or if it’s going anywhere?”

He pulled onto the freeway and she realized he was taking her back to her place.

Ooh. Maybe they could shower the sweat of the day away. Together. She had some beautiful European soap that would suds up nicely and-