Free Jude Deveraux by First Impressions Page B

removed and filed, but the furniture had stayed
where it was, even if the pieces were on top of each other. There had simply
been nowhere else to put it all. Now, the hall was sparsely furnished, with two
small couches, a tall secretary (reproduction, not original), and a few chairs
and two little tables. For the first time in her life, Eden could see the hall
for the grand size that it was.
    'Magnificent,'
was all that she could say, and she had to blink away tears that Mrs.
Farrington had renovated the house so beautifully and that she'd left it to
Eden. The walls had paneling to half their height of twelve feet. The ceiling
was surrounded by tall, deep crown moldings. The doors at opposite ends were
original, two hundred plus years of paint painstakingly removed so the dents
and nicks of centuries showed in a patina that only age could give.
    'Beautiful,'
she whispered, twirling about and looking at everything.
    She
wanted to see the rest of the house, but she was sure that Brad was going to
show up at any minute, so she got her cell phone out of her bag, then called
the local electric company and told them she wanted her electricity and
McBride's billed separately. 'But it is,' the girl at the electric company
said.  'Mr. McBride had all the electricity put in his name when he rented
the house.'
    'Our
two houses aren't on the same circuit?' Eden asked.
    'No,
ma'am.'
    'Thank
you,' Eden said, then hung up.
    She sat
down on one of the couches and looked at the beautiful molding around the room.
Mrs. Farrington had had every bit of it restored. Brad had said that he believed
Mrs. Farrington had had the house restored for her, for Eden. Yes, Eden could
believe that, but she also knew that Mrs. Farrington had left the house to Eden
so she could protect it. She went into the living room. Paneling covered the
wall from the chair rail down, all around the ceiling. The fireplace was
especially beautiful; even Thomas Jefferson would have liked it.
    Eden
leaned against the wall for a moment. What in the world was going on? she
wondered. Brad had seemed to believe McBride completely, even to making Eden
the butt of all the jokes. Dumb woman used to living in the city gets freaked
out because a man is snooping around in her house in the middle of the night.
'Let's see one of them find someone snooping around and see how he reacts,'
she said out loud, then pushed away from the wall with a moan of pain. It would
take days to get over her soreness.
    It
seemed that the police had contacted someone, been told that Mr. McBride was
one of them, and that was the end of it. No one had questioned his story. To
them he was a man who'd   been   innocently  
using   his   table   saw
    — male
bonding there! — and when he'd seen that he'd blown out his female
neighbor's lights, he had tried to repair them. Take care of the little lady,
so to speak. Only Eden had thought it was odd that two separate houses were on
the same circuit.
    Trying
to calm herself, she walked into the kitchen and saw that it was much as she'd
left it all those years ago. She'd been the one to remove all the papers from
the cabinets and the countertops. She'd read each piece, then carefully ordered
them in one of the many file cabinets that Mrs. Farrington had purchased.
Whenever Eden had found dishes buried among the papers, she'd washed them, then
put them into the cabinets with the glass doors. As Eden looked around, she saw
that the Wedgwood was missing. The expensive set. Mrs. Farrington's son had
probably sold them.
    Slowly,
with each muscle aching, Eden went outside to her car. The groceries she'd
bought the day before were still in there. Some of them were spoiled, but she
could save most of what she'd bought. Limping, she managed to carry the bags
inside. When she opened the side-by-side refrigerator, she saw that Brad had
had his housekeeper fill it. There were three pounds of stewing beef inside, so
Eden set to work making a pot of soup.
    As