were to guard us against our enemies, you fool. Not against wandering family members!”
“But…she knows about us!” Apparently not content to spout these lies, Lowell actually dared to glare up at his elder.
Leigh used a knee to push the youth onto all fours, then facedown onto the floor. At least the boy knew better than to protest that!
“Leigh.” Will Donnell drew his friend back with a restraining hand on his shoulder. “I think he understands that he made a mistake.”
“But I didn’t blow it!” protested Lowell. “I intercepted her—”
“With a knife!” At least some of the other elders, behind Leigh, were murmuring agreement at Leigh’s complaint.
“She’s of the blood. Should I have used a gun?”
Only Donnell’s hand on Leigh’s shoulder kept him from reacting to such blasphemy as the boy babbled on: “I had to stop her, didn’t I? So I did. I told her to go back to her party, mind her own business, and she said that there really was a secret society!”
Leigh’s restraint on his Irish temper cracked. The hell with civilization!
Donnell held him back from kicking the boy’s teeth in. “Do you think our families have never had suspicions?” Leigh’s friend asked, more calmly. “We have ways to divert them. By confirming them for her, you’ve caused far more trouble than you prevented.”
That, brooded Donaldson Leigh, was an understatement. Certainly more trouble for young Lowell.
And, worse—more undeserved trouble for his beloved daughter, Arden.
Chapter 2
“So he kissed me, and then he just…left.”
“And you didn’t call the police,” noted Arden’s friend Valeria Diaz as the women walked through midday heat from a sleekly modern light-rail station into a questionable, once-glamorous Victorian neighborhood. Tall and dusky skinned, her coils of brown hair drawn into a practical ponytail, Val didn’t stand out in South Dallas’s run-down Oak Cliff neighborhood nearly as much as Arden did.
“The kiss wasn’t that bad,” joked Arden, before giving in and answering what her friend really meant. “There was no need for the authorities. Daddy said—” She deliberately ignored her friend’s roll of the eyes. Especially here in the South, “Daddy” was a perfectly respectable title for one’s father…just like it was acceptable to give a boy his mother’s maiden name for his first name, as with Smith. “Apparently, Lowell is an intern of my father’s. I assumed they would handle the incident internally.”
Val’s dusky face had all the expression of a stone idol—an idol with intense, topaz eyes. “Someone puts a knife to your throat, he deserves jail time, not a demotion.”
Arden’s friend and partner never had excelled at girl talk. Val had once, briefly, been a cop. She’d surely been a tomboy. “Daddy has it under control. He’s a good man.”
“Unlike his daughter, the slut.” Val’s eyes sparkled with sudden teasing, despite her mask of solemnity. “So you kissed this knight in shining timeliness?”
“Smith kissed me,” Arden clarified with assumed dignity. Then she admitted, “But I didn’t exactly bite his tongue.” No, instead she’d opened herself to him. His warm touch. His scent of heat and earth. When she should have been skewering his foot with one of her dress heels, she’d instead closed her eyes and pretended—just for a minute—that they’d never broken up. All her foolish, inappropriate longing had gone into that one stolen kiss.
Smith…
Like some desperate fool, she’d started to lift her arms around him, to draw him to her for the first time in too long….
Just as well she’d forgotten the big stick in her hand.
“There was tongue?” Val glanced over her shoulder as they walked.
“Smith always did have a peculiar kind of charm.” That roguish grin. That cocky indifference. Even during those years when they’d known and disliked each other—or thought they had—she’d sometimes wanted to kiss him just to shut him up.
“Charming as pie, ’til he dumped you.”
“Exactly.” They turned down a cracked, uneven sidewalk onto a street boasting large trees and more Victorian homes. Several had been renovated to their original elegance, but most sat in graffitied disrepair, with abandoned cars in the front yards and rusting burglar bars on the windows. Historic Oak Cliff, once a jewel among Dallas society neighborhoods, had fallen victim to postwar white flight and urban decay generations before.
Arden liked to think the recreation center for girls she and Val had started nearby could reverse some of that.
“Dumped you over the phone.” Again, Val glanced behind them. Satisfied, she turned her stern stare back to Arden. “With no warning.”
“Yes, he did.”
“Drunk off his butt.”
“I was there, Val. I’m the one who told you.”
“Boy deserved biting.” Val slid her topaz gaze disapprovingly toward Arden. “And not in any good way.”
“Well…I did hit him with a branch.”
“Good.” But Val knew her too well. “Accident, was it?”
“And I doubt I’ll see him again.” Which was a good thing, of course.
“Make sure of it, girlfriend.”
“Why, look,” said Arden brightly, to change the subject. “We’re at Miz Greta’s.”
Miss Greta Kaiser taught piano at the rec center. Her tall stone home, like the neighborhood, had forgotten its elegance beneath decades of neglect. It boasted a mansard roof with uneven iron cresting, dormer windows along the top story, and a high bay window of Second Empire style. Roman arches over its windows and doorway added an Italianate touch. But several of the cracked panes in its higher windows had been patched with cardboard or taped plastic, despite Arden’s repeated offers to help with repairs. Lost roof tiles gave the appearance of missing teeth. What must once have been a glorious garden had withered to a brown, dirt-spotted lawn, deprived of sunlight by a single, glorious oak tree and of water by the Texas heat.
It broke Arden’s heart to see it. And yet, had the home joined the ranks of the restored historic houses brightening the area here and there, Miz Greta couldn’t possibly have managed its upkeep. The divorcee had macular degeneration, a central blindness that limited her ability to manage certain tasks…which was why she’d asked for Arden’s help looking into a suspected secret society. Greta could play piano with her eyes closed. But she could no longer read without a huge magnifying glass.
Today, Arden had brought a new audio book, wrapped in crinkly tissue, for their visit. “It’s a hostess gift,” she explained to a curious Val after knocking on Miz Greta’s recessed door. The expected barking erupted from the other side. Both women took off their sunglasses, and Arden her
