From the doorway Kara announced, “Dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes, Mrs. Browning.”
Anna kissed the top of the heads of her children. “Okay, guys, let me get into some comfortable clothes. I’ll be right back,” she promised. She made it upstairs to her dressing room to change into jeans and a sweater and pulled her long hair into a loose ponytail at the nape of her neck.
Peter had spent the late afternoon in his home office. She stopped there to tell him she was home. He stood up and gave her a quick kiss. “I like you in jeans,” he said approvingly.
“It feels good to be in them, but Peter, I’m worried. Do you think we made the right decision today? I mean, to get involved with that program?”
“I don’t think we had any choice,” Peter said, his voice troubled. “If we don’t give our side of the story, Ivan could make up anything he wanted, and we’d be left having to respond after the show aired. At least this way, we’ll have a chance to shoot down what he says during the actual production.”
Anna nodded. They’d run through the same calculation this morning after their meeting with the producer and her assistants. “What if my mother really was planning to cut us out of the will?”
“As her executor, wouldn’t she have told me that?” Peter asked. “After all, she went over the terms of her will with me after your father died.”
Peter had refused to discuss his mother-in-law’s plans for her will with the police, citing client confidentiality. He had taken the same approach with the television producers this morning. But he and Anna had no secrets from each other. “If Virginia had been planning to change her will, she hadn’t even mentioned it to me. On the other hand,” he said, “she did assure me that if she ever decided to marry Ivan, she would have him sign a prenuptial agreement.”
“But did she ever say anything about leaving money to charity?”
Peter took her hands in his. “Why are you so worried about this, sweetheart?”
“Suppose she talked to her friends about leaving everything to her favorite causes? How will it look if word gets around that we inherited all this money that was supposed to go to charity? It makes us look, I don’t know . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“Annie,” Peter said soothingly. “You work hard. You’ve earned this.”
She shook her head. “I haven’t done anything that comes close to what Dad accomplished. We live off his work, not ours.”
“We live on the business he built. You’re the one who has been maintaining it and making it grow,” Peter said vehemently. “You don’t have to be embarrassed just because your father left you a wonderful legacy.”
Anna nodded, but her expression must have betrayed her true feelings. Peter hesitated, then his voice softened, “This is about Carter, isn’t it?”
“Remember that the day before Mother died, Carter told us that he was worried that she was going to change the will. He asked us point-blank if we knew anything about that. We both thought that he was being paranoid about Mother’s financial plans, especially given the situation with Ivan.”
Anna’s voice was trembling. “After the murder, when the police started asking questions about Mother’s will, no one could have sounded more distraught than Carter. Neither one of us spoke about that conversation to the police. But if my mother was going to cut us off and Carter found out—” Anna couldn’t bring herself to finish the thought.
“That didn’t happen, Annie. You’re talking about your own brother.”
“Who, to this day, pays more attention to chasing women and having fun than working for a living. Maybe he was drunk or something—”
“We saw him that night, right after we realized it was your mother who’d fallen. He wasn’t drunk. He was in shock.”
“Well, maybe it was an accident. Maybe they got into an argument on the roof and she stepped backwards—”
Peter put his arms around her to calm her down. “That is not what happened,” he said firmly. “Ivan Gray killed your mother. And this show might be able finally to prove it.”
“I want to believe it happened that way. But Carter did ask about Mom’s will the day before the murder.”
“We are the only ones who know that, and we’re not going to tell it to anyone, ever. Now, let’s go to dinner.”