A Man for Clair: Secret of the Widow Mulvane (Mystery loves Romance Book 2) Read online

  A Man for Clair

  Secret of the Widow Mulvane

  Guy Bailey

  Mystery loves Romance Book 2

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to real life persons or situations is coincidental and unintended by the author. The places described in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.

  Copyright © 2013 Guy Bailey

  Kindle Edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this eBook may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or

  transmitted, in any form, without the written consent of the copyright holder.

  Many thanks and much appreciation to Simone, Sandra and Jilly for their help in putting the polish on this story.

  NOT RECOMMENDED FOR CHILDREN

  Moderate Level Erotic Scenes

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  November 1986

  Chapter 1

  The guy looked out of place. He was dressed in jeans and a white, collared shirt with the buttons neatly done-up. He didn’t appear touristy, and his unshaven face and coarse looking hands suggested he hadn’t wandered in from a business lunch. Clair imagined he was freshly separated from a long-time wife and was at her strip-club in the middle of a winter Wednesday because he felt it was the thing to do when your wife leaves you.

  She often made up stories to go with the faces—with the ogling eyes and stares of wonderment or lust.

  It wasn’t exactly Clair’s strip-club, though at twenty-seven, she was the longest serving dancer and felt a certain sense of ownership. She had something of a relationship with the son of the owner too, but that was only casual.

  The out-of-place guy was the only customer, so Clair danced for him. He was sipping a beer and watching her with a light smile. He didn’t seem sleazy at all, and she liked that about him. Her set ended and another girl took over. Clair gathered her top and clipped it back on as she approached and took a seat on the stool beside her one patron, slipping her pink, sparkly cowgirl hat off the back of her head

  “Hi, I’m Candy Weston. Where are you from?”

  “Adelaide.” The guy offered a smile and a look of nervousness shimmering in bloodshot, green eyes.

  “Oh, wow! Long way from home, huh?”

  “Yeah. A long way. I’m here for the week—the beach and that.”

  Clair checked back to the bar for the manager, who was reading the paper. She should have been trying to entice the guy to buy a lap-dance, but he didn’t seem the type. Another two men had set up at the other end of the stage. Ness, Clair’s co-worker, was dancing for them and, as per policy, not distracting Clair’s mark.

  “So, in town alone, are you? Where’s the gang?”

  The guy was chewing on his grin and looking at his beer. “No. No gang. Just me this time.”

  “I figured recently separated,” Clair ventured. “You look kind of unsettled. Like you don’t know where you’re supposed to be.”

  He cocked an eyebrow and looked at her.

  She smiled. “Sorry… I’m just saying.”

  He chuckled, his shoulders slumping. He extended his hand. “Robert Mayer.”

  “Hi, Robert.” Clair accepted his handshake. “I’m supposed to be asking if you want a lap-dance, but you don’t want one, do you?”

  “Sure! Why the hell not?” he replied with a shrug, surprising her and somewhat returning her to her place.

  Clair’s job, after all, was to strip naked while either pole-dancing up on stage or squirming around on a stranger’s lap. It was what she did to pay her rent there on the sunny Gold Coast of Australia, though such was done in bars all over the country by girls needing to pay rent.

  ***

  In a bar in a small town some fifteen hundred kilometres south of where Clair worked was a girl about her age right then serving drinks and clearing tables, dressed in a see-through blouse and being ogled by fifty or so drunken fishermen.

  There was also a table of young non-fishermen. They were a group of guys and girls out on a Wednesday night, celebrating a birthday. The birthday boy, David Barrett, was swaying over a microphone stand singing his favourite Nirvana song.

  “Go, Davey!” a couple of his friends cheered.

  He was on the karaoke stage, but karaoke was Saturday nights.

  He was singing reasonably in tune and only a verse or so out of sync with the same song playing in the background. When one of the hotel staff took the microphone stand from David and ushered him off the small stage, he grabbed his friend Cynthia and started dancing with her.

  “Hey, show Annie the ring,” Geoffrey called out. “Show her, man.”

  David ignored the calls to show the ring he had bought his girlfriend, but Cynthia sat back down and left him dancing alone. Then he tripped on a step and fell over, and he dragged himself up to sit in his chair, laughing.

  “Come on, show us,” the two girls in the group went on, pleading together.

  David had the ring in his jacket pocket. He took out the felt box and placed it on the table. “It’s nothing.” He was blushing a little.

  Cynthia opened the box with Annie at her shoulder. They both gushed.

  “Is that a real emerald?” Annie asked. “It must have cost a fortune.”

  David shrugged and closed the box back into his pocket. He had only picked up the ring that afternoon and hadn’t gotten around to wrapping it yet.

  “Cassie’s going to love it,” Annie went on encouragingly.

  “Yeah, way to suck up.” Justin topped up David’s beer from the jug on the table.

  Michael laughed. “Be down on one knee next. Then down on two knees after that.”

  David knew he would be in for a lot of teasing from his friends when he bought the friendship ring, but he had been with his girlfriend for over a year, and he loved her. He wanted to make a statement about that—to indeed lay a platform from which to propose a further commitment in the near future.

  For that Wednesday night at the Bar & Grill, it was a matter of surviving the onslaught from the guys while, as it turned out, enjoying some moral support from their girlfriends. By ten o’clock, though, the get-together had to end in favour of some sleep for work the next day, and David was left to stagger up the hill to his house alone.

  He stopped, swaying against a light pole in front of the office where Cassie worked. He wondered why her car was still there. It was the only car in the parking area, and there were no lights on in the building.

  He stood trying to imagine why she would have left her car at work. Maybe it wouldn’t start again and she got a lift.

  ***

  At that same time, Clair Wells had changed out of her stripper get-up and was ready to go home. She saw her co-worker off with the first cab to pull up outside the club. The next cab to come along contained her current boyfriend, Miles, who
pulled her into the back seat with him and gave the driver his own address.

  Clair was then kissed and groped for five minutes, then led along to an elevator and kissed and groped some more until she was virtually dragged into her boyfriend’s apartment and made love to.

  Though it wasn’t love, Clair understood as she lay awake in the middle of the night with Miles snoring and grunting beside her. At least it was not love from her point of view.

  Clair had not experienced any feeling in her life that she had been able to identify as romantic love. She had been with a lot of men. She had been involved in serious, monogamous relationships with three men—each for long enough to do birthdays and New Year. But she had never felt like a piece of her was being ripped away when those relationships ended. It was as if she couldn’t be touched deeply enough to form any real bond.

  Clair read romantic books and watched the movies. She could cry easily enough.

  She rubbed at a burgeoning tear right then and shook off something silly that was welling up inside. It’s all bullshit, anyway, she decided as she buttoned her blouse, standing at the side of the bed looking down at the contented face of her current man. “And at least you’re up-front about wanting nothing more than a screw,” she whispered, kissing his cheek.

  Clair liked Miles. He slept with lots of women and made no secret of it. He was arrogant, self-centred, and entirely in love with himself, and he was pretty good in bed. He offered Clair simplicity and a physical release, and that’s what she liked about him.

  She left his apartment with the sun just tipping the Pacific horizon and a cold sea-breeze snapping at her. It was a half a kilometre walk to the bus stop on the Gold Coast Highway where she huddled inside the clear plastic shelter, choosing not to sit on the freezing metal seat. She had on a short skirt and no stockings. Her legs were turning blue with goose bumps. There was hardly any traffic at that hour on a Thursday morning, and it was a good twenty minute wait for her bus.

  Once seated in the big, cosy vehicle with warm cloth seats, she rubbed some circulation back into her thighs.

  “Cold, isn’t it?” the driver offered sympathetically, meeting her eyes in his rear-view mirror.

  “Freezing!” Clair’s chin had numbed and she almost slurred.

  She was the only passenger, but as the bus rolled along she watched out the window, deliberately avoiding the gaze of the driver and not wishing to invite conversation. Apart from the tiny skirt, she was also wearing a see-through blouse and a short, open jacket. She felt the driver checking her out, though it was six in the morning, and she probably looked like that girl who had failed to make it home from the party, she imagined.

  “Thank you,” she offered cordially as the bus pulled up at her stop.

  The driver nodded. “Take care, miss.” His fatherly tone caused Clair to glance and catch a flash of something caring in his eyes after all.

  She hurried along home and found her neighbour arranging pot plants ready for the morning sunlight.

  “Morning, Eloisa… I’m going to the shop later if you need anything.”

  Eloisa was about eighty years old. She used a walking frame and moved slowly. Clair often picked up her milk and bread or took her to the supermarket for a big shopping.

  “You’re going to freeze—silly child,” the old woman pointed out.

  “I know… What’s with the frigging Antarctic blast this morning?”

  Clair was checking the plants.

  “That’s why I bring them inside for the nights now,” the old woman explained. “Been damn cold this winter!”

  “Okay. I’ll check with you before I go to the shop.” Clair left her and fumbled the key into her door, pulling on a dressing gown as soon as she got inside.

  Her apartment was basic. It was a long way back from the coastal high-rise strip in a run-down old single level building. It was cheap rent, though, and she had savings.

  She fiddled with a satin flower bouquet she was working on as an assignment for college. She was enrolled in several courses on-line and filled her days quite easily trying to keep up with them. After making a coffee and a piece of toast, she sat at her small kitchen table and opened the file she had built on the twenty years’ unsolved murder of Charles Mulvane. All of the information she had been able to find led to the conclusion he had been murdered during a robbery in his home on Point Bleak in the small town of Everly Cove. He had been found by his wife with his head beaten in and with his safe left open and looted of a collection of family heirlooms.

  Clair brushed a finger over the face of Charles Mulvane, nodding to herself. She then opened her travel map with the route planned for her drive at the end of the week.

  Chapter 2

  John Phillips rolled down the hill toward the marina in his well heated Ford Bronco wagon. The air outside was icy. The wind that morning was direct from the South Pole. The cove was usually sheltered to some extent, as the Point Bleak headland towered from the south and there was a rim of mountains to the west and north. Alongside Point Bleak was another, unnamed headland, known locally as Lighthouse Point. The inlet between the two towers of rock was narrow, but when there was a wind from the south-east, it sometimes shot straight through the gap and absolutely snap-froze the little fishing village of Everly Cove. On that Thursday morning the wind was from the dreaded south-east.

  “Hey, David. You okay?” John asked, pulling up beside where David Barrett was parked in the main street. Both men had lowered windows.

  David was in his work utility. It was just an odd place to park, in front of John’s niece’s work office.

  He closed his mobile phone. “Hey, John. I’ve been trying to call Cassie. Her car was here late last night, but it’s gone. I thought it mightn’t have started again. Her phone’s off, though.”

  “Cassie’s still asleep, mate.” John didn’t want to elaborate. He had heard her sneaking in around the back past his flat at about three o’clock in the morning, and he thought she had been with her boss again. He had suspected for some time that she was seeing her boss while perhaps leading young David on a bit, but it wasn’t his place to be interfering in any of that.

  “So, what time did she get home?” David asked.

  John lied. “Not sure, son… Try calling a bit later.” He drove on, powering up the window to shut off the icy blast of air.

  He cruised on past the marina and along the foreshore. To his left was a line of shops, not yet open at that hour. To his right the grey sea chopped at the pebbly beach. The headlands protected the cove from the ferocity of a winter swell, but the wind howling through the inlet had the small bay churning like a washing machine.

  John’s office was at the far end of town and required a drive all the way along the foreshore to the most northern point of the beach. At the base of the headland, the Everly Cove fish market and wharf were crawling with fishermen dumping and sorting their catch and buyers loading up small refrigerated trucks, bound for shops in the south-eastern towns of New South Wales and all over the eastern districts of Victoria as far as Melbourne.

  John made his way through the crowd of heavily-coated, plastic-aproned men nodding and calling out greetings, and he climbed an open metal staircase to a mezzanine where his glass-front office looked down over the fish market and beyond the weathered old fishing trawlers and out across the bay.

  John had spent his childhood on a fishing trawler and worked with his father and two elder brothers for a few years after leaving school. He then joined the Navy where he served until the age of twenty-six, spending most of that time at sea. It had been in the years following the Vietnam war, and he had mainly been assigned duties in the northern oceans securing border protection.

  While John enjoyed his time in the military, he much preferred the quiet small-town life he had grown up with. He’d had plans to return home and marry his childhood sweetheart and make lots of babies with her but had returned to find her already spoken for. He then settled for having an affair with her a
nd going to work for her husband—the owner of Everly Cove Fish Market.

  Twenty-five years then passed for John—twenty-five cold, bleak winters and gloriously warm summers right there in his beloved little home town. He had quickly progressed through the ranks to become manager of the market, a move accelerated by the death of the owner, with the business having been taken over by his widow—by John’s five years’ secret lover at that stage.

  “Yeah—nine-thirty, Mike,” John said in reply to his foreman waving a document in through the door while speaking to someone else on his mobile phone. The document was the minutes from an occupational health and safety meeting. John would be joining his foreman and other members of the committee to discuss outcomes.

  He tidied up some other paperwork for a few hours then attended the meeting downstairs in the lunchroom. Returning to his office, he drew the blinds on the windows and locked the door, as he always did at lunchtime on Thursdays. His crew knew he was not to be disturbed at that time, as he would be meeting with the strange, reclusive owner of the business, Susan Mulvane.

  Within John’s office was a door adjoining another room with its own entry at the back of the building. It was midday, and he opened that door to find Susan Mulvane waiting for him. She was standing there with her hands behind her back, leaning against the closed external door, and with a grin forming and lifting the corners of her mouth into a nice smile.

  “Hi, John.” She was eyeing him sweetly—teasingly, in fact.

  John started undoing his shirt and her smile broadened.

  “It’s cold out,” she said.

  Her coat was slung over the back of a red leather upholstered office chair. There was a stained wooden desk against one wall. Its drawers were empty of any business-related items, though. There was a divan they never reset for sitting. It was permanently pulled out for them to lie down on.

  “It’s cold in here too.” John pulled his lover close with one arm around her waist, and with her hands still behind her back, he intertwined his fingers with hers.