Read Online Cooking Up Trouble by Joanne Pence - Free Book Online

group. Angie sat in a large wing chair watching Running Spirit pace back and forth across the room like a caged animal. His wife, Patsy, and Reginald Vane still had not been heard from, and the Baymans had retired for the night.
    Paavo stayed in the kitchen, saying he’d join Angie in the library soon. As a homicide detective, he just didn’t know what to do with a natural death, Angie guessed, and instinctively treated it as a murder.
    At the side table, Moira poured herself a goblet of blood-red wine. Her black clothes disappeared into the darkness, and her white face, hands, and unbraided golden hair seemed to float, disembodied, in the room.
    “Angie,” Chelsea called from the back of the library. “Come over here. You’ve got to see Jack Sempler’s portrait.” Her gaze turned lovingly upward to the portrait that hung over the mantel.
    A handsome young man stood on the cliff near Hill Haven. He wore tan riding britches and a white shirt with wide, billowing sleeves and a high stand-up collar unbuttoned at the top. His thick auburn hair was slightly tousledby the wind, and his large, intelligent hazel eyes stared off into the distance. The man looked so real, Angie’s heart lurched. It seemed as if he could step from the painting and join them, full of life and telling of his adventures.
    “So that’s Jack Sempler,” Angie said. “He’s the one Elise loved, right? He went away to sea and she killed herself by jumping from the cliffs near the house.”
    “Yes,” Chelsea said with a sigh. “It’s easy to understand, isn’t it? He’s so handsome. So wonderful.” She reached up and lightly touched the gold frame. “If only I could touch him this way,” she whispered, then blinked back sudden tears.
    “Who’s the older man in the portrait in the dining room?”
    “That was Ezra, the father. The man who built Hill Haven.”
    Angie couldn’t stop looking at Jack. “You’re right—Jack Sempler was very handsome.”
    “Wasn’t he? This was made when he was young. About the time Elise came to live with the Semplers. He was only twenty-two, Elise eighteen, and Susannah twenty-five. You can see why Elise fell in love with him.” Chelsea faced Angie. “There are no pictures of him after he returned home from sea. He was only thirty-four when he died.”
    Angie shivered. That was Paavo’s age. “Do you know what happened to him?”
    “No one knows,” Chelsea said softly. “All we know is that he died in this house.”
    Like Miss Greer, Angie thought. And Finley? The idea had come unbidden, and she forced it away. Gazing up at the painting once more, she could almost feel Jack Sempler’s presence, could almost imagine what it would be like to have those intelligent eyes meet hers.
    “I’m staying in his room,” Chelsea continued, “and at night I can feel his presence there with me.”
    “You’re giving me goose bumps, Chelsea. Stop it!”
    Chelsea’s story wasn’t all that was making Angie’s skin prickle. Someone was watching her. She turned. A dark form filled the high-backed wing chair behind her. She couldn’t quite make out who it was. Stepping backward, she bumped into Chelsea.
    “Be careful,” the man’s precisely accented voice said. Angie started, then felt decidedly foolish as Reginald Vane leaned forward into the light.
    “Mr. Vane, you startled me,” she said, then laughed. “Too many of Chelsea’s stories, I guess.”
    “Miss Worthington is rather taken with the boy in that portrait, isn’t she? He was quite the young Romeo, I understand.”
    With his black suit, white shirt, black tie, and thinning hair slicked straight back, Vane looked even more like the quintessential English butler than he had the first time they met.
    Angie sat once more, unsure of the propriety of a situation like this. Miss Manners never covered what one should say or do when there was a dead body in the house. Or when one’s host was missing. She waited for someone else to make the first