Carolyn G. Hart by Death on Demand/Design for Murder Page A

and help me. But I wouldn’t suggest pretending to be a lawyer. You’ll end up in jail.”
    “It would take Saulter a hell of a long time to do a fifty-state check to see whether I’ve passed the bar.”
    “But one phone call to the American Bar Association would take five minutes. Max, this isn’t a laughing matter. Although, I’d bet he’s a lot more interested in putting me in jail than in running checks on you.”
    “Right.”
    Anger glinted in her eyes.
    Max could have kicked himself. If she got mad again—
    “Look, our job now is to figure out what the hell’s been going on before either of us ends up in jail. We need to check up on your uncle. Why would anybody murder him?”
    The catamaran tilted a little, and Max adjusted the tiller.
    Annie steadied herself. There was something nice about the delicately cut white swimsuit that emphasized the tawny richness of her skin.
    Mmm. Mmm. Mmm. Max wanted to …
    “Uncle Ambrose murdered—It’s absurd!”
    The catamaran lifted on the port hull. Spume rose over them like a gauzy curtain. They hung between sea and air, skimming the water like a hungry pelican, until Max moved the tiller, and the sail eased down.
    Beads of water clung to Annie like seed pearls. Max knew just how it would feel to slide his hand gently over her soft skin.
    “If somebody killed Uncle Ambrose, that same person killed Jill and Elliot—and Saulter’s convinced I did all of it. So we’ve got to solve it ourselves.” In her excitement, she scrambled up on her knees.
    He shoved the tiller out of the way. The cat jerked, whipped, then started to tip.
    Max reached out for Annie as they began to fall, and he felt her long, warm length against him. It was, he discovered, quite possible to choke on salt water and smile at the same time.

“H ow old were you here?” His finger rested on the black-and-white picture of a scrawny, pigtailed girl standing in front of a palmetto.
    “Eleven. That was my first summer on Broward’s Rock. See, here’s Uncle Ambrose.”
    Oh, and she remembered that magical summer so well, the way the hot sand felt on her bare feet, how it smelled sitting on the end of a dock with her first pole in her hands, not expecting a thing to happen, the excitement when something yanked on her line, and her delight when Uncle Ambrose helped her haul out a toadfish.
    The photograph of Annie and her toadfish was on thenext page. It had curled a little with time, but it clearly showed the slimy brown, large-mouthed fish and Annie, grinning through a filigree of braces.
    “Mouthwise, you and that fish were neck and neck.”
    But she was looking at the pictures of Uncle Ambrose. His hair was still a chestnut brown then, only lightly touched with white. Uncle Ambrose, who taught her so much more than how to cast a line or dig for clams. Because she never knew her father, she felt shy and uncomfortable around men until this gruff old curmudgeon given to long silences took the time to spend his summer days tramping the beaches with his niece and summer evenings pointing out the constellations that glittered in the southern sky like diamonds against black velvet.
    “He made all the difference in my life,” she said simply. “When mother died, he helped me with school, and he always made it clear I had a home with him.”
    She flipped to the last page of the album, then reached out and gently touched the photograph of a distinguished-looking elderly man standing on the deck of a sailboat, the
Sleuth
. The aquiline face looked amused, skeptical, fiercely intelligent.
    “A hell of a guy, huh? So why would anybody kill him?”
    “He was a hell of a guy—to me, to his friends. But there were people who would have feared him at one time. Remember, he was a prosecuting attorney for years in Fort Worth, and he hated crooks. He had a passion to catch lawbreakers. He called them renegades, and he had no pity for them. He said pity should be for victims, not abusers.”
    “So somebody