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then glanced away. “Poor old boy,” Montana said gently.
    He put the envelope on the hall table then picked up the long iron poker, shifted the logs around a bit and stood with his back to the fire, hands thrust into the pockets of his jeans, thinking about the reason he was here. With his death, Hardwick had presented him with a mystery, one Montana was determined to resolve. Plus he’d been entrusted with a mission he would take care of tonight. It was part of his job and the reason he had been at the funeral and not back at his London apartment with the cute girl who drove him crazy. Analyzing things, he wondered if he wasn’t better off after all, in the Yorkshire snowstorm, facing the emotional storm that he knew was about to get even worse.

6

Daisy
    Of all Bob’s homes, Sneadley was my favorite, though I had not yet seen his villa in Capri. Somehow we had never gotten around to that. Bob said he was too busy to take a true vacation, though that was the reason he bought the Villa Belkiss in the first place. I sat on my bed and pulled off my damp socks, looking around at the familiar room that soon would no longer be mine.
    Sneadley was the house Bob had brought me to the day after he offered me a job. After the dingy bed-sitter in Bayswater, this room looked like paradise, and when he told me I could decorate it any way I wanted, I drove into the nearest small town where I bought cans of paint and brushes, then came back and painted the place myself.
    “You’re a competent lass,” Bob had said, standing in the doorway watching me perched on a ladder running a roller over the ceiling. “I could have had the lads in to do it, y’know, you’d no need to go to all this trouble.”
    “Trouble?” I cried, elated. “This is the best thing that’s happened to me in years. I’m loving it. Besides, I used to do it when I was married. I decorated our home myself, every room.”
    “And what was your house like?” He expressed curiosity about my past life for the first time.
    “Suburban. Boring. Lonely. I’d hoped for children but it didn’t happen.”
    “Probably because you weren’t getting enough,” he said drily, making me laugh. And anyway, he was right.
    I sponge-painted the walls of that beautiful room a pale terra-cotta, until it looked the way I imagined an old Tuscan villa might, sort of faded by the years and the weather. Maybe sponge painting is now a designer cliché, a bit passé, but every time I step into that room, it welcomes me. I simply love it.
    The frames of the three tall casement windows are set deep inside paneled embrasures, with interior shutters that actually shut. I painted them a dull white and had curtains made in a heavy taffeta striped in bronze and muted gold, then put in a creamy soft carpet. The furniture was thirties, pale burled walnut. There was a sleigh bed with a plump cream silk quilt and a dressing table with little shaded silver sconces on either side of an ornate Venetian mirror. By the window was a chaise lounge in pale chenille, piled with velvety pillows, where I liked to sit and read on summer evenings with the scent of new mown grass wafting in and the faint bleats of the sheep coming from the hills.
    I put on a Diana Krall CD, went into the bathroom, went to the tub, turned on the faucets, threw in some jasmine bath oil and lit a couple of candles. Thankfully, I stripped off my funeralclothes. I left them where they lay and stepped into the bath’s soothing warmth, closing my eyes, soaking away the memory of the awful day, of the bitter cold and of my despair.
    The sound of Krall’s soft voice singing old standards drifted toward me. What lay in store for me now, I wondered, now there was no Bob Hardwick to save me? There were a lot of decisions to be made. Would I stay here in England? Go back to Chicago? Maybe try my luck in L.A. the way everybody else seemed to? My sister Lavender was married with three kids and lived in San Francisco. She was older by