Free Foxy Roxy by Nancy Martin Page B

work for Hyde Communications?”
    She looked up into his fierce face and couldn’t help smiling. “Because I’m no good at business.”
    “Nonsense. You’re young! What, twenty-two? Twenty-three?”
    “I’ll be twenty-five in the spring.”
    “Plenty of time to finish your education. You have more intelligence than all your brothers put together.”
    “I have no ambition.”
    “You would, once you got your teeth into things. It’s glorious, Arden. It’s truly glorious.”
    She loved seeing the fire in his blue eyes. She couldn’t bring herself to say how little she thought of cold-blooded business. Not when her passion lay in the power of the arts. “Slaying all those corporate dragons? Daddy, I’d be a total failure.”
    He let her go, perhaps seeing her distaste for commerce. “I won’t give up, you know.”
    “That’s rather nice to hear,” she replied.
    He fondled her hair. “Why are you so skinny? Don’t you eat anything?”
    “I want to fit in my clothes. You like?”
    He seemed baffled by her wardrobe, which maybe looked a little worse for the plane ride. “Sure.”
    She sighed. “Tell me what’s going on with the police. Have they decided how poor Uncle Julius died?”
    “There was nothing poor about him.” Quentin’s face flushed all over again. “He was murdered. Shot and killed by a coward.” He glared at the blackened house as if his keen vision might spot an important clue that the police had missed. “They tell me it was some homeless fellow who did it, but they don’t say it with much conviction. The pathetic bastard doesn’t look as if he could organize his own breakfast, let alone a killing. It’s damn frustrating not to have answers.”
    Arden found herself saying, “What must he have thought when it happened? Was Uncle Julius frightened? I hate to think he was frightened, Daddy.”
    Quentin gritted his teeth. Maybe to hold back grief. “He wasn’t.”
    “No?”
    But her father didn’t argue his opinion. Funny how he could flatly deny a fact if he didn’t like hearing it. Perhaps that was the quality that had made him most successful in life.
    Briskly, he changed the subject. “I want to know what things are missing from the house. The insurance bastards don’t want to pay for anything because that damn Monica set fire to everything. Maybe we’ll have to prove she was temporarily insane, but we’ll plan a strategy for that soon enough. I want to know if anything was removed from the house before the fire. A list is our first step. There used to be a weird painting in the upstairs hall. Remember? All squares and squiggles. Ugly as sin. Surely it was valuable. But I noticed it disappeared last May.”
    “I think it was a Braque print, that’s all, Daddy. A tourist thing. Monica probably gave it away when she redecorated the bedrooms. It was hardly worth getting upset about.”
    “She had no right to give anything away! The house and contents belong to Dodo. But Monica’s been throwing family assets at any museum that will shovel it up. All to curry favor with people Julius alienated when he had his midlife crisis. What a waste.”
    “Maybe some things are better off where they are now.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Important art belongs in a museum where it’s safe and everyone can be uplifted by it.”
    “Are you crazy? She had no right! And worse yet, I saw her with that sneaky lawyer of your grandmother’s.”
    “Henry?” His name startled Arden more than the involuntary way it popped out of her mouth.
    “That snake, Paxton,” Quentin confirmed. “He’s been up to something, too, since the fire. Julius mentioned they were at odds over Dodo’s trust, but I never got the full story. We’ll have to sort it out. But first we should know exactly what was lost in the fire. You can help with that?”
    The thought of seeing Henry Paxton again gave Arden a pang. He was an unfortunate chapter perhaps best forgotten. How had they left things? If she could