he’d brought a flashlight and didn’t think anyone would find whatever he’d dropped, so it wasn’t worth searching in the bushes. The
Instead, he descended the stairs two at a time and I stopped my breaths, afraid he’d decided to search for what he’d dropped after all. The footsteps moved away, however, and soon I couldn’t hear them. Was he leaving? I listened hard. No, I didn’t hear a car start up. Glass shattered somewhere around the back of the house and I realized he’d broken a window. Now was my chance. Still on all fours, I crawled forward a couple of feet, wincing as a holly leaf scored my cheek. A second later, that pain was forgotten as something jabbed into my palm. I closed my lips over the “Ow!” and it came out as a muffled, “Urmf.”
I picked up the thin, flat item, figuring it was the tool the burglar had dropped, and slipped it into my pocket. Rising to a half crouch, I shouldered my way through the remaining shrubs, saw no one on the expanse of lawn and driveway in front of me, and broke cover, doing my best gazelle impression until I thudded against my car. Scrambling around it, I flung open the driver’s door, sat and inserted the key in one motion, threw the car into reverse because the burglar’s dark sedan had me blocked in from the front, and backed down the drive faster than I’d ever backed up in my life.
As my rear wheels spun onto the pavement of the main road, I flicked on my headlights. They grazed the burglar’s car, glinting off the Mercedes hood ornament. What kind of burglar drove a Mercedes? A really successful one? I didn’t have time to think about it as horns honked to complain about my precipitate arrival onto the Mount Vernon Parkway. I straightened the wheel and stomped on the gas, waving apologetically to the car behind me. I was halfway home before it crossed my mind to call the police and anonymously report a burglary in progress.
Safely home, I poured myself a healthy glass of Chianti and eased my hand into my pocket to see what the burglar had dropped. Pulling it out with two fingers, I found one-third of a credit card, snapped off so the hard plastic formed a cutting edge. This was no professional burglar, I decided. Even I knew you couldn’t pop a dead bolt with a credit card. Holding the card under the counter light, I made out the last few letters of the burglar’s name: LIDO.
I caught my breath. Putting together the voice I’d heard with those four letters gave me the man’s identity: Marco Ingelido. Why in the world was the man who owned the most successful chain of franchised ballroom dance studios in the business, Take the Lead with Ingelido, trying to break into Corinne Blakely’s house the day after she was murdered?
Chapter 9
I rose early Thursday morning to do a private lesson with a student who was preparing for his first ballroom dance competition. We would compete in the bronze division as a professional-amateur couple. He was a fiftyish, divorced man who initially signed up for a dance class to meet women, but found himself liking it so much he decided to try his hand at competition. He liked to practice early, before work, so we were finished shortly before eight o’clock. He left for a day in cubicle-ville and I went downstairs to shower and dress.
The ringing phone yanked me out of the shower just as I turned off the taps. Grabbing a towel, I trotted to my bedside table to answer, hoping it was Maurice calling to say he had been released.
“Stacy?”
It was my mom’s voice, clear and a bit reserved, as always. Mom was not one to show a lot of emotion. “Hi, Mom.”
“Have you talked to your sister?” She also wasn’t much of one for beating around the bush or wasting time with small talk. I conjured an image of her thin, angular body and graying red hair. From the whuffling horse sounds behind her, I knew she was standing at the wall phone in her small barn, probably wearing old jodhpurs and rubber boots for mucking out. Bird, her twenty-two-year-old gelding, whickered behind her; I’d learned to ride on him and would recognize his “voice” anywhere.
“Hi, Bird. Yes. She told me about your invitation. Sounds like fun.”
She sighed. “I’m glad you think so. Danielle clearly wasn’t enamored of the idea, even though it’ll be my treat.”
“It’s the Jekyll Island thing. It’ll bring up a lot of memories of our last vacation, all of us together.”
From her silence, I knew she hadn’t previously made the connection. “That was years ago,” she finally said, as if old memories didn’t carry much weight. In my experience, sometimes they carried the most weight.
“Yeah, well.”
Another silence fell. I finally broke it. “What dates did you have in mind?”
She told me and I checked my mental calendar. “That should work. It’s the weekend after the Virginia State DanceSport Championships. Count me in.”
“Thank you, Stacy.” She hesitated. “And if you could talk your sister into it, I’d be very grateful. I hate it that things are so awkward between us.”
“Have you told her that?”
“Of course not.”
Of course not. I hung up a few minutes later, mentally shaking my head. My mom could practically read a horse’s mind, could communicate with the big beasts telepathically, but she had no clue what her own daughter was thinking. I’d do my best to talk Dani into the vacation, because it would be fun for all of us.
I headed upstairs to work on choreography for a husband-and-wife amateur team who were competing at the Virginia state competition with the Graysin Motion team. I worked in the small studio at the back of the house, liking the view of my tiny courtyard from the studio’s window. I’d worked up most of a samba routine for the pair when someone knocked on the doorjamb and spun me around.
Tav stood there, newspaper in hand, a less-than-thrilled expression on his face. “You did not think I would be interested in the fact that Maurice was arrested?”
“It made the newspaper?”
He flipped through a couple of pages and read, “‘Alexandria police announced the arrest of Maurice Goldberg, a ballroom dance instructor with Graysin Motion, for the murder of Corinne Blakely, his former wife and also a professional ballroom dancer.’ It goes on to give details about her career.”
“Well, that sucks.”
“As you say.” His mouth quirked up on one side. “Have you talked to Maurice? Is he okay? Does he have legal representation?”
I smiled, wanting to hug Tav. Even though he was worried about the studio’s reputation, he was concerned about Maurice, a man he barely knew. “I got hold of Phineas Drake and he took Maurice’s case.”
“Do I need to worry that Drake will frame me for the Blakely woman’s murder?” He looked over his shoulder in an exaggerated way and I laughed. He was well aware that Drake had offered to set someone up for Rafe’s murder when the police thought I did it.
“I don’t think so. As I understand it, Corinne had five other husbands; I’d think any of them would make a better murderer candidate than you, well, except the one who died. And she was apparently writing a tell-all memoir that was making a variety of people nervous, according to her housekeeper.”
“When did you talk to her housekeeper?” Tav asked.
“Last night.” I bent to grab my water bottle and my notes, hoping he wouldn’t dig any deeper.
“She happened to drop by the studio?” he asked in a politely skeptical voice.
“I might have stopped by Corinne’s house,” I muttered.
“Stacy-”
“Okay, I got the key from Maurice’s house and went to Corinne’s to find the manuscript,” I said all in a rush. “Maurice thinks someone murdered her to keep her book from getting published. I thought I’d find it and…” What had I planned to do if I’d come across the manuscript? “… and turn it over to the police.” Well, I might’ve.
He didn’t berate me for my stupidity. “Did you find it?”
I shook my head. “No. Mrs. Laughlin-the housekeeper-thinks she hadn’t written it yet, that all she had was an outline.”
