Quiet as the Grave
Kathleen O'Brien
WHEN DESIRES BECOME DANGEROUS, LOVE CAN BE DEADLYWhispers of foul play circulate through an upscale community when beautiful Justine Milner disappears. But only when her body is discovered more than two years later is her ex-husband, Michael Frome, accused of murder.Portrait artist Suzie Strickland learned firsthand how manipulative and cruel Justine could be when they were rivals for Mike's affection in high school. She believes in Mike's innocence and suspects she's found a chilling link to a darker side of Justine's privileged life. How deep was her involvement with a mysterious group called The Mulligan Club and their seductive, dangerous games? The answers may come too late. Because the truth about what happened to Justine is proving just as deadly as the secrets she kept….
Praise for KATHLEEN O’BRIEN
“If you’re looking for a fabulous read, reach for a Katheleen O’Brien book. You can’t go wrong.”
—New York Times bestselling author Catherine Anderson
“Darkly gothic and disturbing, Happily Never After is a thrill ride reminiscent of V.C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic, with the added appeal of a robust romance and an unnerving mystery.”
—Terri Clark, Romantic Times BOOKclub on Happily Never After, 4?-Star Top Pick
“Any book written by the talented Ms. O’Brien is a good excuse to leave all your troubles at the bathroom door as you spend a couple of hours relaxing in your tub.”
—Diana Tidlund, Writers Unlimited
“Ms. O’Brien has definitely made it to my ‘must read’ list.”
—Bea Sigman, The Best Reviews
Quiet as the Grave
Kathleen O’Brien
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Dear Reader,
When you first met Mike Frome and Suzie Strickland, back in Firefly Glen, they were just impetuous teenagers, full of attitude and hopeless longing. They took foolish risks, as so many of us do when we’re young, trading a sensible tomorrow for a thrilling today.
A special thanks to all the readers who wrote, asking for more. What happened to those two grouchy, mismatched kids? Did they ever find contentment? Did they ever find their way back to each other?
I know how you felt. They were special kids, and they deserved a happy ending. But, as we all know, happiness isn’t handed out to the most deserving, like a merit badge. Sometimes you have to wait a long time, and trudge through a lot of tough times.
Quite simply, sometimes you have to fight for it, tooth and nail.
Now, ten years after their beginnings in Firefly Glen, Mike and Suzie are ready to meet that fight head-on. Mike’s divorced from the glamorous Justine, sharing custody of his son, Gavin. Purple-haired, fiery-tempered Suzie has reinvented herself as a cool, collected beauty, and is even building a career as a portraitist.
But the calm is an illusion—the eye of the hurricane. Justine has turned up dead, and the authorities are only a heartbeat away from arresting Mike. If he’s going to save himself, he’s going to have to find out what really happened to his beautiful, toxic wife. He’s surprised to learn that his strongest ally is the feisty girl he left behind in high school. The girl whose heart was too strong to be broken then—or daunted now.
I hope you enjoy their story.
Warmly,
Kathleen O’Brien
www.KathleenOBrien.net
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
BONUS FEATURES
CHAPTER ONE
EVEN AS THE DREAM played out, the man knew he was dreaming. Except…how could dream be the right word for anything so real? It was more like time travel. While his body lay there, helpless on the bed, twitching and whimpering and trying to wake up, his mind flew back to the cave and lived it all again.
Lived the stink. The air in the cave was wet. It had rained all day, and moisture clung to the slimy, pitted walls. Now and then a pocket of algae grew too heavy and popped from its secret pore. It slid across the gray rock slowly, an insect leaving behind a shining trail of ooze.
Everyone had come tonight, which was rare—but they must have heard that this would be special. Too many men crowded into the space, so the wet, stinking air was hot. He felt light-headed, as if the oxygen levels were too low. He wondered if they’d all die here, breathing foul air until they collapsed where they stood. How long would their bodies lie in their black robes before anyone discovered them?
Maybe they’d never be found, and they’d rot here. Poetic justice, surely. They were already rotted on the inside.
His mask was too tight. He couldn’t breathe. He adjusted the cloth so that the eye and mouth holes lined up better.
When the girl was brought in, it was obvious she’d been drugged. The man practically had to drag her through the opening. Her head kept dropping. She made small sounds that weren’t quite human, more like a puppy whining in a cage.
From there the dream went black. No sight. All sounds. The sound of metal against metal. Metal against rock. Metal against skin.
And always the puppy sound, begging. Struggling to find its way out of the cage. Sometimes the noises escalated a little, but they never got very loud. The cage held. The puppy had almost given up hope.
The cave seemed to come alive then, as if it was being sucked into an auditory whirlwind. Weeping and low moans. Wet noises, as if someone gargled fear. Heavy breathing that rode the naked back of animal grunts. Babbling, strangely religious, from the blind trance of terror.
And then, finally, at the very end, one heartbreaking human word. The word to which everyone, even the dreamer, could be reduced, if things got bad enough.
“Mommy,” the girl cried, though God only knew where her mother was. Not here, not in this wet stone room full of infected air and sweating men. The girl hadn’t been more than a child when she came in, but she was a baby now. They had peeled fifteen years from her in fifteen minutes.
“Mommy, help me!”
And it was at that moment—every time, no matter how hard he prayed it wouldn’t happen—that the dreamer felt his body jerk and release, spreading shame all over his pajamas, his sheets, his soul.
THE TUXEDO LAKE Country Day School Open House was the highlight of the elementary school season, and the Tuxedo Lake mothers knew it. They spent the entire morning getting ready. Manicures, pedicures, facials, eyebrow waxing and a hundred other little rituals Mike Frome had never known existed until he married Justine Millner.
Though he and Justine had been divorced two years now, he would never forget what an eye-opener the six years of their marriage had been. Her sunshine-colored hair, which used to mesmerize him the way a shiny bell on a string mesmerizes a cat, apparently was really an ordinary brown. Without its makeup, her face seemed to have different contours entirely. At home, he rarely saw that ivory skin. It was almost always buried beneath green cream and hot towels. Sometimes, when he turned to her at night—in the early days, when he still bothered to—he found her hands encased in gel-filled gloves that slid and squished when he touched them.
He would have been able to live with all that. It was called growing up, he supposed. Like discovering there’s no such thing as Santa Claus. He could have coped, if only she hadn’t been such a sick bitch. If he lived to be a million years old, he’d never understand why he hadn’t seen sooner what a bitch she was.
Still, he’d put up with it for Gavin’s sake. Gavin, who had been conceived when Mike and Justine were only teenagers—and who had been seven months old before his parents made things legal—loved his mother. So Mike had tried to love her, too.
He’d tried for six whole years that felt more like six hundred. Then he just couldn’t pretend anymore. He had to get out, or he’d die. He figured Gavin was better off with a part-time dad than a dead one.
Since then, he’d worked hard to make this split-parenting thing a partnership. For the past two years, he and Justine had attended every single one of Gavin’s Little League games together, and the kiddy birthday parties and, of course, the deadly dull PTA functions.
To attend this one, he’d stopped right in the most critical stage of a job. The Proctors’ boathouse was almost finished, and he should be there. But he’d told the carpenters to take the afternoon off—which surprised the hell out of them, since ordinarily at the end of a job he was hyperfocused.
The Open House was more important. The fourth-graders were staging a musical play to welcome the parents to a new school year. Learning Is Fun featured historical characters who had demonstrated a love for education. Apparently Gavin’s role was as the teacher in a one-room country school—a fact Justine had only this minute discovered.
“This must be a mistake,” she was saying to Cicely Tillman, the mother of one of Gavin’s friends. Cicely wore a small name tag shaped like a bow tie that read Cicely—Volunteer Mommy.
“No,” Cicely, the Volunteer Mommy, said. “It’s not a mistake.”
“It must be,” Justine said again, and Mike recognized that tone. Volunteer Mommy would be smart to back off. “Gavin was supposed to be the narrator. He was supposed to be Abraham Lincoln.”
“I know, I know, it’s a shame, but he said he didn’t want the part,” Cicely explained, her voice brimming with the fakest sympathy Mike had ever heard, even from Cicely. “He wanted something smaller.”
Justine scanned her program. “But this…this farmer isn’t even a named part. What about Socrates? Or even Joseph Campbell?”
“We’re five minutes from opening curtain, Justine.” Judy Stott, who was the principal of Tuxedo Lake Country Day School, and also Justine’s next-door neighbor, had noticed the fracas and joined the two ladies.
“But Judy—”
Judy reached out and patted Justine’s arm. “Some children just aren’t comfortable in the spotlight,” she said. “I’m sure Gavin shines in other areas.”
Oh, brother. Well, even if Cicely and Judy didn’t have the sense to get away, Mike did. He found a folding chair fifth row center and claimed it. While the ladies’ drama continued, he watched the stage. Someone new must be running the spotlight. The glowing circle lurched all over the blue curtain, leaped to the side and hit the American flag, then slid down the stairs, only to pop up again on the curtain.
When the overhead lights flickered, warning that the show was about to begin, Justine finally arranged herself next to him with a waft of Chanel. She hummed with fury.
“Did you hear that? Not comfortable in the limelight! Did you hear that? Can you believe how rude?”
Mike rolled his paper program into a cylinder and kept his eyes on the stage, where the curtains were now undulating with restless lumps. The kids, no doubt, trying to find their places.
“No, I didn’t hear it.” He didn’t want to get into this. “I was too busy wondering what exactly it means to be a ‘volunteer mommy.’ Do you think they’re implying that—”
But he should have known Justine wouldn’t respond to any satirical attempt to change the subject. Justine didn’t have a sense of humor at the best of times. And this was definitely not the best of times. She could really be like a dog with a bone, if she thought she’d been slighted.
“That self-important little pencil pusher,” she whispered sharply, leaning her head toward his. “Just because she’s the principal, she thinks she’s God around here. She’s a glorified babysitter. And her fool of a husband sells thumbtacks, for God’s sake.”
Mike set his jaw. He liked Phil Stott, who was kind of a wuss, but a damn nice guy.
“And she has the nerve to say Gavin isn’t comfortable in the limelight. Right to my face.”
Mike sighed and looked at his ex-wife. She was gorgeous, of course. She never ventured out of the house without looking perfect. But someone really should tell her that if she didn’t stop disapproving of everything, her lousy temper was going to gouge furrows between those carefully waxed-and-dyed eyebrows before her thirtieth birthday.
“Gavin isn’t comfortable in the limelight,” he said, deciding to ignore the non sequitur about the thumbtacks. “Why would it be rude to say so?”
Justine glared at him a minute, then, flaring her elegant nostrils, turned her head toward the stage and tapped her program on the palm of her hand.
“For God’s sake, Mike,” she said under her breath. “Don’t play stupid. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Frankly, that’s the case about ninety percent of the time. No, make that ninety-nine.”
She whipped her head around, but he got lucky. Taped music filled the air, the curtains began to open, two jerky feet at a time, and a pint-size Abraham Lincoln, complete with beard and top hat, stepped forward. It took the spotlight a few seconds to find him, and when it did Justine growled quietly.
“See? See what I mean? That’s Hugh. Cecily took the part away from Gavin so she could give it to her own son. And Judy let her. You can’t tell me it’s not deliberate.”
He didn’t answer. He had spotted Gavin in the background, on the small risers that had been set up on either side of the stage. Mike had been to enough of these performances to know that, one at a time, the students would climb down and take center stage for their two or three lines. Ms. Hadley, the music teacher, was careful never to leave anyone out entirely. She knew all about Volunteer Mommy Syndrome.
Gavin looked nervous as hell. Mike stared at him, sending it’ll-be-okay vibes. He hadn’t liked this kind of thing much, either, when he’d been in school. He’d been tons happier on the football field, and he had a feeling his son was going to take after him. Which would, of course, piss Justine off in a big way.
About halfway through the play, her cell phone began to vibrate. These folding chairs were close enough together that, for a minute, he thought the rumbling against his thigh was his own phone. But he’d turned his off completely. He gave Justine a frown. Why hadn’t she done the same?
To his surprise, she had stood up and was getting ready to edge her way down the aisle. She glanced back at him, holding her phone up as explanation.
God, she was absolutely unbelievable. Gavin was due up any minute—he was one of only about two or three kids who hadn’t performed yet. He reached out and grabbed her arm. He must have squeezed too hard, because she let out a cry loud enough to be heard up on stage.
“Sit down,” he whispered. He jerked his head toward the stage. “Gavin.”
He ought to let go of her forearm. He knew that. She was obviously strung out. She was humiliated because her son had a piddly part in the school play. She was mad at Mike for not caring. Plus, she’d had to repress all that resentment against Cicely Tillman, and self-control wasn’t her strong suit.
She was probably as hot and high-pressure as a volcano ready to blow.
But he didn’t let go. He was pretty damn angry, too. He knew who was on the other end of that cell phone. Her new boyfriend. The one she was going to be spending a month in Europe with, starting tonight. The guy was welcome to her, but, goddamn it, couldn’t she at least pretend to put her son first, for once in her life?
“Let go of me, Michael,” she said. Her whisper was so shrill it turned heads three rows away. “You’re hurting me.”
He hesitated one more second, and then he dropped his hand, aware that, in their section of the audience, they were now more fascinating than what was happening onstage. She rubbed her arm dramatically and then, with a hiccuping sob, made her way down the row.
Mike stared hard at the stage, ignoring the curious faces that were still turned in his direction. Gavin, who had just put on an old-fashioned hat, came forward.
“Our schoolroom is small, but it has to hold us all,” he sang in a horribly off-key soprano. “My students walk for miles, and I greet them with a smile.”
That was probably where Gavin was supposed to smile, but he didn’t. He finished his tiny part, and then he scurried, head bowed, back to his spot on the risers. Mike felt his stomach clench. Was this just stage fright, or had Gavin actually heard his parents squabbling?
Justine didn’t return even when the show was over, and Mike was fuming, though he managed to hide it fairly well, he thought. He ate cookies and drank fruit punch with the other parents until the kids joined them, enduring the awkward silences while everyone tried to figure out what to say about Justine’s absence.
Finally Gavin came racing out, beaming. He barreled into Mike, trying to knock chests like the professional sports figures, but instead hitting Mike’s ribs with his nose. Mike forgot Justine and his heart pounded a couple of heavy thumps of typical proud-daddy love. The kid was growing like crazy. In a year or two, that chest-bumping thing just might work.
Best of all, Gavin looked ecstatic now that his ordeal was over. He grinned up at Mike with those knockout blue eyes that were so like Justine’s. “It’s over!” He laughed. “I sucked, huh?”
Mike smiled back, relieved that the episode with Justine apparently hadn’t reached the kids’ ears. “Yep, you’re pretty bad, pal. You’re definitely no Pavarotti.”
This was the kind of candor that would drive Justine nuts. She had the theory that admitting any inadequacies was bad for the boy’s ego. But Mike knew that Gavin’s ego was perfectly healthy. Maybe too healthy. Gavin was as gorgeous as his mother, he lived in a six-thousand-square-foot mansion with his own boat and plasma TV, he pulled down straight As, and he boasted the best batting average in his Little League conference.
It would do him good to face the facts: Hugh Tillman was a better singer.
“I know,” Gavin agreed happily. “I can’t ever get the tune. Mrs. Hadley hates me. Where’s Mom?”
Mike felt the eyes of the other parents once again.
“She’s outside,” he said as casually as he could. “She got a phone call.”
“Oh, well, tell her I love her, okay? I gotta go.” Gavin and his buddies had plans to celebrate the success of the play with a pizza party at the Tillmans’ house. “Hugh’s mom is already waiting in the minivan for us.”
“Go tell her yourself,” Mike said. He knew if he let Gavin leave without saying goodbye, she’d carp about it all the way home.
The boy flew off, with Hugh and about four other boys trailing behind him like a pack of puppies. Mike grabbed a napkin, wiped cinnamon sugar off his hands and tossed his empty punch cup in the big trash bin.
“Three points,” Phil Stott, Judy’s husband, said with a smile. Mike appreciated that. He knew that Phil, a nice guy who didn’t have kids but was here to support his wife’s school, was trying to bridge the embarrassment gap.
Gavin was back in a flash. “Found her! She says to tell you she’s waiting for you in the car.” He held up his hand for Mike’s goodbye slap. At home it would be a hug and a kiss, but with Hugh and the other “dudes” standing by, a high five would have to do.
Mike obliged, and then did the same for all the other boys, who were accustomed to parading by him this way after every Little League game. He’d coached these boys since they were in T-ball. They were good kids. But he couldn’t help thinking his own smart, silly son was the best.
He wished Gavin were coming home with him right now, but he realized that was pretty cowardly. Yeah, the ride home would be a bummer, with Justine pouting or ranting, but he could handle it. He didn’t need to use his son as a buffer.
By the time he got to the car, Justine wasn’t speaking to him. Good. Pouting was ridiculous, but it was easier to ignore than the ranting.
She’d rolled back her silk sleeve and was rubbing conspicuously at the discoloration just above her wrist. He checked it out of the corner of his eye, just cynical enough to wonder which way the finger marks were facing. He was pretty damn sure he hadn’t been rough enough to bruise anything. She’d probably done it herself, while she waited for him to come out.
He considered trying to make conversation, but it seemed like too much trouble. Woodcliff Road was kind of tricky, with a twenty-foot drop through wooded slopes on the passenger side. He needed to concentrate.
Let her sulk. She loved that anyhow.
Finally, though, her resentment simply had to bubble out in words. She swiveled in her seat and glared at him. “So? Don’t you have a single thing to say for yourself? After what you did to my arm?”
Damn. He’d almost made it. They were only a couple of miles from Tuxedo Lake. He negotiated a curve through some overhanging elms, which were just beginning to go yellow. He glanced at her face, which looked slightly jaundiced in the glowing light. The shadows of the trees passing over her made it seem as if her mouth were moving silently, though he knew it wasn’t. It was a disagreeable sight.
He turned away and shrugged. “Sorry,” he said. “I just couldn’t believe you were actually going to leave right when Gavin’s part was coming up.”
She waved her hand. “You call that a part? I can’t believe he dragged us all the way out there for that. He made a fool of me, that’s for sure.”
Clenching the steering wheel, Mike tried not to react. This was pointless, and he knew it. He’d tried for years to make Justine think about any situation, anywhere on this earth, without viewing it through the prism of her own self-interests, but she simply couldn’t do it. He’d looked up sociopath once, and it fit perfectly. It was kind of scary, actually.
But, like an idiot, sometimes he just couldn’t stop himself from responding. He accelerated, whipping the passing trees into a batter of lemony green.
“He made a fool of you? Sorry, but you’re going to have to explain to me how Gavin’s school play can possibly end up being all about you.”
She didn’t answer right away, and he knew that was a bad sign. She was lining up her ammunition, which meant this wasn’t going to be just a skirmish. It was going to be war.
“That’s just so like you,” she said. “The perfect Mike Frome can’t make mistakes. If anyone dares to point out that you’ve done something wrong, like rough up your own wife, you just launch a counterattack, trying to change the subject. Well, I won’t be put on the defensive. You manhandled me, and I ought to go to the police.”
“You’re not my wife,” he said. That was stupid, too. That wasn’t the point. But she did that to him. She made him so mad his brain shut off.
“I’m your son’s mother. I think that is just as important, don’t you?”
“No. I think it’s tragic.”
“God, you’re so melodramatic.” She narrowed her eyes. “Tragic? Because I took a call on my cell phone? I’m sorry to tell you, but that doesn’t make me a bad mother.”
He’d had enough. “No,” he said. “What makes you a bad mother is that you’re a raging bitch. You’re the most self-centered, foul-tempered bitch in the state of New York. That’s what makes you a bad mother.”
He half expected her to slap him. He definitely expected her to start yelling epithets at him. But she didn’t do either of those things. Instead, she did something that shocked the hell out of him.
She opened her car door.
“Justine—”
“Stop the car.”
“Damn it, shut the door.”
“No. Stop the car. I’m getting out.”
He was already applying the brakes, but he had to be careful. She had one leg out. He didn’t want to fishtail on these narrow, curving roads. He was mad as hell at her. He might wish he’d never met her, but he didn’t want her to get hurt.
He maneuvered the car to a safe spot. His heart racing, he turned to her. “Are you insane? Do you want to kill yourself? Shut the damn door.”
She didn’t answer. She just picked up her purse and got out of the car, slamming the door shut behind her.
He rolled down the down the window. “Justine, for God’s sake.”
“Go to hell,” she said without looking at him. “Just go straight to hell where you belong.”
He looked at her, so messed up with contradictory, heart-racing emotions and adrenaline that he couldn’t even decide what he felt. It was about five o’clock, and the trees behind her were already full of shadows. She had on high heels, the better to impress the other Volunteer Mommies with, but no damn good at all for walking along an uphill cliff road.
“Justine. Okay, look. I’m sorry. Get back in the car.”
She didn’t even answer. She just began to walk.
He trolled along behind her for a few yards, leaning over to beg her through the window and steering the car with one hand. He felt like a fool, which was bad enough, but when another car came up behind him and honked impatiently, the embarrassment of it was just too much.
“Justine, get in the car right now, or I’m going to drive away, and you’re going to have to walk the rest of the way home. It’s nearly a mile.”
No response, except another short toot from the car behind.
“Justine, I mean it. It’s getting cold. I’m not coming back to get you.”
She didn’t even turn her head. She shifted her purse to her other shoulder and kept walking. The people behind him probably thought he was a stalker, or a serial killer.
Honk…
Well, screw her, then. If she wanted to walk all the way home in a snit, fine. She logged about five miles on the treadmill in the home gym every single day of her life. He figured she could handle half a mile out here.
He rolled up the window and hit the gas. He watched her in the rearview mirror, getting smaller but never once looking his way or acknowledging her predicament by the slightest twitch of a muscle.
Finally he came to a curve, and when he looked in the mirror again she was gone.
That was the last time anyone—except perhaps her killer—ever saw Justine Millner Frome alive.
CHAPTER TWO
Two years later
“HOLD STILL. You’ve got a spot of green paint on your face.”
Suzie Strickland waited while the man in front of her reached up and teased the bridge of her nose with his fingernail. She didn’t believe for a minute that she had any paint there. Ben Kuspit just wanted to touch her. He’d been flirting with her ever since she arrived an hour ago to take pictures of his son.
He was paying her four-and-a-half thousand dollars for a painting of Kenny, the youngest of his four kids. It was the largest commission she’d landed yet, and she needed it. Still, if they’d been alone, she would have made it very clear that the price didn’t include groping rights.
Unfortunately, nine-year-old Kenny was still in the room, and she was reluctant to embarrass Daddy in front of his kid.
And, to be fair, maybe Ben wasn’t inventing the speck of paint. She had been using viridian paint this afternoon as she finished up her current project, a pair of adorable two-year-old twins with green eyes, green dresses and green ribbons in their hair.
She’d come a long way since the early years, when, after a day’s work, she’d find splattered color everywhere. In her hair, under her fingernails, even on the soles of her shoes. She still painted with passion, but she’d learned how to harness that intensity. Today, her sunny workroom on the third floor of her Albany townhome was the cleanest, best-organized space in the house.
Still, paint was paint, and it had a way of insinuating itself into some pretty strange places.
“Thanks,” she said, smiling politely at Ben, though her voice was tight. He needed to back up. He was seriously violating her personal space. And that smile was gross. The man was fifty, for God’s sake. His kid was staring right at him.
She lifted her camera up between them and moved to the far side of a gold chair, the kind of fragile, frilly thing Mrs. Kuspit apparently loved. The huge room was full of them.
“I’ll just get two or three more shots, and then I think I’m done here.”
“Great.” Ben looked over at Kenny, who stood next to the living room mantel, where trophies were arrayed like a metallic rainbow, catching light from the overhead chandelier and tossing it onto the flocked ivory wallpaper in little oblongs of silver and gold. They didn’t match the frilly gold chairs, but apparently Mrs. Kuspit didn’t make all the decorating decisions.
“Hey, I’ve got an idea,” Ben said, snapping his fingers. “Kenny, pick up the football. Make like you’re getting ready to toss a long one.”
Kenny grimaced, but he bent down and retrieved the football at his feet. He lifted his arm awkwardly, glancing sideways at his father. “Like this?”
Ben made a disgusted sound. “Damn it, Kenny, why are you flashing us your armpit?” He strode over to the boy and began twisting his skinny elbow into a better position. “If you think I’m paying four-and-a-half thousand dollars to have you look like a geek, you’ve got another think coming.”
The boy flushed, but he didn’t protest. He just stared at the floor while his father adjusted him like a mannequin. Suzie lowered her camera and tried not to hate the man. Throwing a football in the formal living room? Come on. His ego had to have some limits, didn’t it?
She didn’t say anything, though. She’d had weirder requests, like the woman who wanted her parakeet’s picture painted as if he lived inside a genie’s bottle. She’d like to meet the psychiatrist who could figure that one out.
She had taken that commission, too. She needed every job she could get. If the Kuspits liked her painting—and she could already tell she’d have to add about ten pounds of muscle to the little boy in order to please Daddy—they would hang her picture where their rich friends could see it.
Their rich friends would then decide that their own little darlings deserved to be displayed in a big, beautiful rococo gold frame, too.
And voil?! Suzie could pay the mortgage on her town house, and everyone was happy.
Except Kenny.
Poor kid.
Ben was big and beefy, a good-looking former athlete. Kenny was scrawny and appeared to have about as much athletic ability as a scarecrow. Most of the trophies on the mantel were inscribed with phrases like Most Improved or Best Sportsmanship.
“Okay, that’s good, hold that. Don’t move.” Ben gestured impatiently toward Suzie. “Get one of him like that.”
Suzie lifted the camera, although the image she saw in the viewfinder was hardly inspiring. Kenny looked like he was being tortured.
He must hate football, but Ben obviously didn’t care. The three older Kuspit offspring were girls. Suzie would bet that, the minute Ben saw the little manly splotch on the ultrasound, he had scrawled “live vicariously through my son, the awesome high school quarterback” into his engagement calendar. He wasn’t going to let the dream die easily.
If he only knew what a mistake he was making. Look at Mike Frome, the most “awesome” jock in Suzie’s high school. At seventeen he’d landed Justine Millner, the prettiest girl in Firefly Glen. By eighteen, he’d been forced to marry Justine—because she’d had his kid—though he no longer even liked her. By twenty-five they were divorced.
Not that Suzie was keeping tabs on his life or anything. She knew all that only because, right after the divorce, Justine had hired Suzie to paint her son Gavin’s portrait.
It had probably merely been Justine’s way of spending Mike’s money as fast as she could, but Suzie didn’t care. She would have taken a commission from the devil himself to jump-start her career. And Gavin had actually been a pretty neat kid in spite of having been scooped out of a scummy gene pool.
“Suzie?”
She focused again, and saw both Ben and Kenny in her viewfinder. Ben was frowning. “Suzie? Is everything okay?”
Darn. It had been a long time since she’d let thoughts of Mike Frome distract her.
She pressed the camera’s button automatically, forgetting that she’d now have both father and son in the picture. No big deal. She often picked up all kinds of extraneous people and things. She could drop them out with her photo program.
“Yeah, fine. I think that’ll do it.” She smiled at Kenny. “You did great.”
Kenny looked skeptical, but he smiled back and shrugged. He turned to his father. “Okay if I go? I’ve got homework.”
Ben patted him on the shoulder. “You bet. Gotta get those grades up.”
God, could the jerk put any more pressure on this kid? Suzie began packing away her camera and supplies, reminding herself to schedule the sittings when Ben Kuspit was at work. He did go to work, didn’t he? Surely plaguing the hell out of your family wasn’t a full-time job.
“Ready?” Suddenly Ben Kuspit’s voice was very close behind her.
Oh, rats. She’d forgotten that she’d agreed to let him drive her home. Her twelve-year-old Honda, which she’d named Flattery because it wouldn’t get you anywhere, had hunkered down in her driveway and refused once again to start. She’d taken a cab over here, but Ben had insisted on driving her home.
Suddenly she didn’t like that idea at all.
“You know,” she said, turning, her camera still in her hand, “I think I should get a cab back. This took longer than I’d expected, and I know you have things to do.”
“No, no,” he said with a smile. That smile. He caught his full lower lip between his teeth in a way that would have looked stupid even on a man half his age. “There’s nothing I’d rather do than take you home. Honestly.”
Oh, yeah? Well, honestly, the idea of getting in a car with you makes my skin crawl.
Somehow she kept the smile on her face, though she was getting downright sick of this guy.
She thought of the Sailor Sam’s Fish and Chips uniform she’d hung above her easel as a reminder of what life used to be like. A reminder that she was always just a couple of blown commissions away from having to wear that blue sailor jacket, tight red short-shorts, kneesocks and jaunty red-ribboned cap.
She took a deep breath. “No, it’s okay. I’d really rather take a cab.”
“Don’t be silly.” He reached into his pocket and jingled his keys suggestively. “I insist.”
“Mr. Kuspit, I don’t think you understand. I want to take a cab.” She smiled to soften it. “I’m going to take a cab.”
He must be really rich, she thought. He looked as if he’d never heard the word no before. He gave her a playful scowl and came even closer, so close it made the hair on her arms stand up and tingle.
Cripes. Maybe she should go back to the Goth style she’d adopted in high school, the unflattering, chopped-off purple hair and the black, slouchy clothes. Passes from boy-men had never been such a nuisance back then.
“But I’ve been looking forward to it,” he said in a throaty voice. “I’m eager to get to know you better, Suzie. You’re such a talented young woman.”
Oh, man, she really, really didn’t like people invading her space, and this guy was so close she could see the tiny broken veins around his nose. If she were painting his face, she’d need a whole tube of cadmium red.
A drinker. Great. She needed that.
She tried one last time to be smart, to remember the mortgage payments. Would it kill her to ride in the car with the guy one time? Her town house was only ten minutes away. She thought of the red short-shorts and the screaming kids who puked up tartar sauce on the tables. She thought of the way she had come dragging home every night, too tired and angry to paint.
He touched her arm. Still smiling, he ran his index finger slowly up, until it disappeared under the little cap sleeve of her T-shirt. She shivered in disgust, and she saw his gaze slip to her nipples.
Oh, no, you don’t, buddy. Waaay over the line.
She narrowed her eyes.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Kuspit. I guess I didn’t understand exactly what you wanted. The portrait is forty-five hundred. But if you’re expecting to have a thing with me on the side, that’s going to cost extra.”
He blinked once, but then his grin twisted, and his fingers crept up another inch. They found her shoulder and cupped it. What an incredible sleazeball! He thought she was playing games.
“Oh, is that so?” He raised one eyebrow. “How much extra?”
She scrunched up her mouth and made a low hum of consideration. “Let’s see,” she said. “I’d say…oh, about…no…well, let’s see…”
She looked him straight in the eye. “Oh, yeah, now I remember. There’s not enough money in the world.”
His brows dived together. His hand tightened on her shoulder and pulled her in, and his other arm started to come up. She didn’t stop to find out what he had in mind. She swung out with the camera as hard as she could.
He was so close she couldn’t get much leverage. Still, the camera connected with his cheek and made a nice little thump, followed by a grunt of shocked outrage.
“Shit,” he said, recoiling. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”
She didn’t bother to answer. He was holding his cheek, looking at her as if she’d broken his jaw, which she definitely had not. She knew what that sounded like. She’d broken a bone once, the left radius of a university teaching assistant who’d thought he could teach her something more than algebra and had to be set straight the hard way.
This guy wasn’t hurt. He was just a big baby.
She reached out, lifted his hand from the cheek and eyed it calmly, pleased to see she’d drawn at least a little blood. He’d have a nice colorful bruise there tomorrow.
She felt like blowing smoke from the tip of her camera, gunslinger style. But that would have been gloating.
Still, she was pleased to discover that, even after ten years of learning to play nice and conform, she hadn’t lost her touch entirely.
It wasn’t until she was halfway home in the cab that she realized what she had lost.
She leaned her head against the cracked vinyl seat and let out a groan.
Blast it. She’d lost four-and-a-half thousand dollars.
DEBRA PAWLEY DECIDED to go over to the Millner-Frome mansion a couple of hours early so that she could make sure everything was spiffed up and gleaming for the open house at noon.
She was by God going to sell this house today.
Tuxedo Lake was one of the most desirable communities in this part of upstate New York. It was about thirty minutes northeast of Albany, just close enough to be considered a bedroom community…if you didn’t plan to sleep late.
The lake itself was big and elegant, with sandy shores you could get away with calling a beach in your brochures. A picturesque ring of low granite cliffs nearly circled the lake, and if a sailboat drifted by at the right moment, your brochure illustration looked dynamite.
The mansion itself was gorgeous. A 6,462-square-foot French ch?teau jewel, complete with marble vestibule, formal library, swimming pool with central fountain and Jacuzzi. Nanny quarters over the four-car garage.
Debra didn’t often let herself envy the houses she listed. But she envied this one.
When she sold it, she’d make a bundle in commission.
If she sold it. The house might be perfect, but the house’s history was a mess. Justine Frome had mysteriously disappeared two years ago and had never been heard from since. The police suspected foul play, and so did her parents. Justine’s father had dragged the lake and jackhammered up the swimming pool looking for her, but no body had ever been found.
That was the problem in a nutshell. Debra didn’t mean to be insensitive, but who wanted to pay a couple of mil for a beautiful lakefront home if they were always going to be wondering when a body might bob out of the lake, or start stinking up the basement?
She left her car out on the street, planted her Open House sign in the most visible spot and then hiked up the long, showy entry to the mansion. She liked to let the buyers drive into the main portico. It tempted them. They loved the look of their own cars under that elegant, shady arch.
Please, God, let there be buyers today. Her last open house had brought in half a dozen gawkers and only two legitimate lookers who had scurried out of the house like cartoon mice when they heard the Where’s Justine? story. Legally, she had to tell it.
Debra propped her bag of cleaning and cooking supplies against her shin while she fumbled with the front door keys. Off to the right, she heard the growl of Richie Graham’s hedge clippers. He was probably shaping the boxwood hedge, which surrounded a glorious garden of White Persian Lilacs. They probably would be in full bloom thanks to all the rain.
Richie…well, that was a good news–bad news situation. Richie had been the gardener for this house, and many of the Tuxedo Lake mansions, for about ten years now, and he created some spectacular lawns. He’d lived in the nanny quarters, serving as caretaker for the mansion ever since Justine’s father, Alton Millner, had moved out a few months ago.
He was as scruffy, rugged and sexy as Lady Chatterley’s lover, which was the good news. Debra had watched the female prospective buyers watching Richie, and several times she’d been tempted to hand them one of the Chinese lacquer bowls to catch the drool.
The bad news was that he was terrible about tracking mud all over the marble floors, especially when the weather was as soupy as it had been lately.
The hedge clippers stopped just as she got the dead bolt to turn. In a matter of minutes, as she was arranging her supplies on the kitchen’s granite counter, she felt a shadow fall into the room, and she knew Richie had arrived.
“Hey, there, gorgeous,” he said in his husky voice that always seemed to be laced with amusement.
He might well be amused by that comment. Debra knew she wasn’t gorgeous. She wasn’t even really pretty. She was, as her mom put it, “acceptable.”
It had been a hard lesson to learn, but she’d learned it. She’d even learned to compensate for it, though good makeup and a flattering haircut could go only so far.
“Hi, Richie,” she said, twisting her head to smile at him.
Now he was gorgeous. He was wearing his regular uniform, a pair of white jeans that somehow managed to cup his butt and practically fall off his bony hips at the same time. Work boots. And nothing else.
She wondered if he picked white because he knew that, on him, smudges of earth were paradoxically sexy, making you think he might grab you and make painful, thorny, but ecstatic and perfumed love to you in the rose garden.
Or did he just know that the white set off his tanned torso to perfection? Once, hiding here in the kitchen and looking out the window, she’d watched him hose off his dirty chest, the clear water finding that fault line down the center, the one that bisected the pectorals and ended at the navel….
She wiped her flushed brow with the back of her hand and wished that she weren’t always, always attracted to bad boys.
“You showing the place today?”
She nodded, pulling herself together. She already had one bad boy lover. She didn’t need two, not even in her fantasies.
“Yes. It starts at noon. I hope you haven’t tracked mud all over the foyer.”
“I might have.” He rubbed his chest lazily, still grinning. “It’s rained every day for two weeks. It’s like a swamp out there.”
She sighed, reached over and grabbed a damp sponge.
“Here,” she said, tossing it to him. “You can clean it up, then.”
He caught the sponge with one hand. He looked at it a minute, then squeezed it hard, until water oozed between his fingers. He rubbed it slowly over his face, and then, when it was gray with dirt, he tossed it back to her.
“Can’t,” he said. “The boxwood is only half-done. Gotta get back to it. I’ll help you with that gingerbread when you’re done. Just leave it in the stove.”
She made a face, but she wasn’t really mad. She didn’t mind if he wanted the gingerbread. She made it only to fill the air with the comforting scents of cinnamon and nutmeg during the open house.
And she didn’t even mind that he wouldn’t clean up his own muddy footprints.
That was her problem. She simply didn’t know how to get mad at a sexy rascal like that, even when he deserved it. It was, as her mother was fond of pointing out, her Achilles’ heel.
Turned out Richie had been pulling her chain anyhow. The house was spotless, and the little touch-cleaning she did was largely unnecessary. She opened a couple of windows to let the fresh spring air in. Then she dusted a couple of picture frames. Finally, she vacuumed the library’s Persian rug and the plush wall-to-wall in the master bedroom.
Done. And still an hour to go before anyone showed up. She was going to sell this house, she told herself again. Her mom had called last week and offered to let her come home to live if things got too tough up here in New York.
No way in hell was she going back home. She’d sell this house today.
Still in the master bedroom, she gazed through the lake window that led onto a small, circular overlook. From up here you could see the entire lawn. Richie was still taming the boxwood, his muscular arms hoisting the heavy clippers as if they were made of feathers.
On the other side, the west side of the house, she could just glimpse Phil and Judy Stott’s yard. They didn’t use Richie, and it showed. They were out there now, fertilizing a bulb garden that was just about played out for the season. Debra and Judy were friends, but she was glad you couldn’t see much of their yard from the ground. It wouldn’t be a selling point.
The glistening blue lake was, though, especially on a clear morning like this, when half a dozen sailboats floated out there, as white as scraps of fallen clouds.
Thank God the torrential rains had ended. Debra had been here in bad weather, and it gave the lake an eerie silvery-green cast. On stormy days, you could imagine poor Justine lying there on the mucky bottom, small fish camouflaging themselves in the waving strands of her faded hair.
What had happened to her?
This tiny balcony, for instance… The wrought-iron railing was too low. If she’d been standing here, and someone had come up behind her, it wouldn’t have taken much. One push, and she could easily have lost her balance.
But who would have pushed her? The most obvious answer, of course, would be her husband, Mike Frome. And Debra knew that wasn’t possible.
Her boyfriend, Rutledge, worked for Mike. Mike was one of the good guys.
At least she had always thought he was….
She moved away from the window. None of that. She needed to fill this house with good vibes, with optimism and promise. She spied an empty cachepot beside the bed. Yes, that’s what it needed. Flowers. Nothing said “home” like flowers fresh from your own garden.
She grabbed a basket and a pair of gardening shears from the mudroom just beyond the kitchen, and then she wandered out into the yard. Richie hadn’t been kidding. It really was swampy. But it was as if the rain had intoxicated the flowers, eliminating their inhibitions, making them dress in gaudier colors, spread their lush, ripe petals wider than was prudent.
The larkspurs were the most spectacular. They dominated a multicolored patch of blooms down near the cliff edge, flanking the small stairway that led to the beach. Debra decided she had time to go that far and still wash her shoes when she got back to the house. So she settled the basket over her arm and made her way down the sloping lawn, enjoying the way the sun warmed her hair and painted lime-gold patches on the grass.
Once she stood among the larkspurs, the muddy ground giving underfoot, the lake was so close its sunny sparkles almost blinded her. When a motorboat went puttering by, someone called and waved, though she couldn’t identify the shadowy figure. Was everyone around here that friendly? She didn’t live on this lake. She couldn’t begin to afford such a snazzy address.
She squinted into the sun, wondering if it might be Rutledge, who was supposed to be doing some bookwork at Mike’s office today but who always preferred to be out on the water if he had a choice. She sure hoped he hadn’t ditched work again. There were limits even to nice Mike Frome’s patience.
When the boat curved and turned away, for several minutes she could still hear the lake lapping against the shore in nervous eddies.
She went back to cutting flowers, long purple-blue stalks that were going to look gorgeous in the white bedroom. She filled her basket to overflowing, and then stepped carefully through the mud to the other side of the stairs. She didn’t want to leave the garden lopsided.
Over here the rain had really pummeled things. The mud had run down, out of the bed, onto the grass beyond. She wasn’t sure she could find many stalks that weren’t bruised and spattered with dirt.
She bent, searching, sifting with her fingers….
Suddenly she straightened and backed up a step, her blood running cold, shrinking in her veins.
What the hell was that?
She made herself look again. She made herself stand there, her feet sinking into the cool mud. She reached out numbly and parted the tall stalks of larkspurs. She must have been mistaken.
But she wasn’t wrong. There, half-exposed by the spring glut of muddy rain, were the elegant and bony fingers of a human hand.
“SO…YOU FEEL LIKE maybe taking the boat out this afternoon?” Mike looked at Gavin, who was slumped on the passenger seat, fiddling with the strap of his backpack. “Ledge is minding the office, so I could get free if you’re in the mood.”
Gavin shrugged. He had hardly spoken ten words since Mike had picked him up from a birthday-party sleepover at Hugh’s house.
Well, okay. He didn’t have to talk. It was okay if he wanted to just stare out the window, watching the roadside flowers rush by in a smear of color.
Mike wasn’t usually the hovering type. He allowed his kid the right to a few grumps and sulks, and he didn’t try to jolly him out of them. Sometimes life just sucked, and he wanted Gavin to learn to fight his own way clear of a crummy mood.
Gavin had been blessed with a cheerful nature, and so he usually did just fine.
But this felt different. The air in the truck was dark, though it was a bright spring Sunday. And Gavin’s face, caught in a stream of light from the window, looked oddly pale. Mike had even felt his forehead, a real no-no since Gavin had been about six.
But no fever.
Then he’d probed gently into the usual suspects…teachers, tests, girls, playground scuffles.
But no hits.
He wondered whether Gavin might have wet the bed at Hugh’s, which would naturally have been mortifying. Why would Gavin have reverted to that, though? He’d wet the bed for about six months after Justine’s disappearance, but not lately.
Still…something about this mood reminded Mike of that terrible time.
Shit. His hands tightened on the steering wheel, his heart aching.
He’d thought Gavin was doing so well. But maybe that had been naive. It had been two years, a long time in a ten-year-old child’s life, but maybe not long enough. Gavin seemed fine most of the time, but their psychiatrist had warned Mike that losing Justine this way might function like post-traumatic stress disorder. Despair and grief could strike without warning, with the slightest of triggers.
Especially since there had never really been any closure. Mike knew why Gavin was always jumping up to answer the phone, or the door. He knew why, when Gavin saw a blue Mercedes like Justine’s, he went rigid and followed it with his eyes until it disappeared.
He thought every car might be the car that brought his mother back to him.
Mike didn’t. In his heart, Mike knew Justine had to be dead. She’d been a bitch on wheels, and he wasn’t going to sugarcoat it—he’d hated her. But she had loved Gavin in her way. If she’d been alive, she would have been in touch with her son.
Mike parked the truck in front of the boathouse office and killed the engine. Gavin started to open his door.
“Gavin, wait.”
Mike fought the urge to put his hand on that silky gold head. “Buddy, I’m sorry, but you’re making me nervous. Please give me a hint what’s going on here.”
Gavin might look like his mother, but he had a much softer heart. He obviously heard the anxiety in his dad’s voice. He frowned, took a deep breath, then let it out heavily.
“It’s nothing, really, Dad. It’s just—”
Mike forced himself not to push. If Gavin only knew how many demons could run through his dad’s mind during even a three-second pause. What? Had someone told Gavin that his mom ran away because she didn’t love him? Had they told him that Mike himself must have killed her? Had they invented ghoulish fictions about what happened, just to see if they could make him cry?
If the little bastards had done any of that, Mike would go over there and shake them until their pea-brains rattled.
“We’re having this thing at school,” Gavin said finally. “Lunch With Mom Day, they call it. It’s super dumb, really. But it’s this Tuesday, and…”
Mike’s first thought was, thank God. That was all? Just Lunch With Mom Day?
But then he saw the tears shining in Gavin’s blue eyes, and he realized how dense that was. Lunch With Mom Day mattered. The tough stuff, the nasty, bullying stuff, Gavin could probably handle. He could punch out a bully. He could fight back.
But how did you fight back against Lunch With Mom Day? How did you fight back against the thousands of little losses, the subtle moments in every day when you were simply different? When you were somehow…less?
Mike felt himself getting mad all over again. What insensitive Volunteer Mommy had thought up this stupid idea? In any elementary school classroom, there would be kids whose moms had jobs they couldn’t leave. Moms who had divorced daddy, or even moms who were dead.
But in this particular elementary school, everyone knew there was at least one child whose mom was cruelly missing.
By lifting his chin and breathing deeply, Gavin had managed to keep his tears from falling. Damn, Mike thought. He loved this tough little kid, and he’d do anything to keep him from hurting.
But there was nothing he could do. The world didn’t revolve around them. They couldn’t deny the other families the fun of Lunch With Mom Day just because it made Gavin feel bad.
“They said we could bring some other woman, if our moms couldn’t make it. But the only lady I could think of was Miss Pawley, and everybody knows she’s Ledge’s girlfriend, not yours.”
Mike nodded. “Yeah, I see the problem.”
But darn it, was there no way to get this mess right? After Justine’s disappearance, he hadn’t even considered dating. He didn’t want to confuse Gavin, and he certainly didn’t want to give the police or Justine’s dad any more ammunition against him. They already thought that, jealous of her new lover, he’d strangled Justine and dumped her in the lake.
Millner had even paid teams to drag the lake. Mike had taken Gavin away while they did it, up to Firefly Glen, where Mike’s parents fussed over him and kept him distracted.
And besides, who would want to date Mike anyhow? A black cloud of suspicion followed him everywhere he went. No woman in her right mind would voluntarily join him under there in the shadows.
“Still, you could ask Debra,” Mike suggested. “She’s fun. She’s pretty.”
Gavin looked at him. “Not as pretty as mom.”
“I know. But—”
Mike stopped there. What else was there to say? Gavin wasn’t ready yet to learn that beauty wasn’t everything. Hell, it wasn’t anything.
“I know,” he said again, lamely.
Gavin smiled a little. “But maybe I’ll ask her anyhow. She knows how to make a spitball, and Hugh will think that’s cool.”
Mike rolled his eyes. “Gavin…”
“I’m just kidding.” Gavin gathered up his portable video game and once again put his hand on the door handle. “Come on, let’s go. You’ve gotta tell Ledge we’re taking the boat out.”
But when they entered the cool front office, Rutledge was nowhere to be seen. Damn it, Mike thought, trying to keep his face expressionless. Had the son of a bitch gone missing again? He wanted to help an old buddy, but not if it was going to cost him his business.
“Maybe he’s in the back,” Gavin said as he moved toward Mike’s office, where there was an armchair he liked to plop on and play his video game.
Mike heard a strange noise. A thumping noise.
Gavin looked up from his game. “What’s that? Is he busting up boxes or something?”
“I don’t know.” Mike listened a minute. Then he narrowed his eyes. That noise sounded disturbingly rhythmic. Disturbingly familiar.
He turned to Gavin. “Wait for me in my office, okay?”
Gavin’s brows tightened, and he started to move back toward Mike. “Why? Is it something bad? Is it a burglar?”
Mike smiled and shook his head. Gavin had never been fearful before Justine’s disappearance. Once, when he was only five, he’d caught a large, hairy spider under a glass and sat guard over it until morning because he didn’t want to bother Mike and Justine, who were sleeping.
Now the slightest noise in broad daylight had him as tense as a guy wire.
“No, it’s nothing. It’s just Rutledge, being a dork. I’ll take care of it.”
“Okay.” Gavin headed into Mike’s office, the little dinging and chiming sounds of his video game already audible.
Mike headed back to the receiving area, where the thumping noises had just reached a crescendo and died away. He rapped roughly on the door, though he felt like busting in and letting the damn fool get caught with his pants down.
This wasn’t the first time he’d heard those thumping noses. Not the first time Rutledge Coffee had used Mike’s business as a by-the-hour motel room.
It was beginning to piss him off.
Worst of all, Mike knew that the thumpee wasn’t Rutledge’s girlfriend, Debra Pawley. Debra was handling an open house at Justine’s mansion this afternoon. Ledge must have found some other poor fool to join him in a little afternoon delight.
Mike’s knock had brought thirty seconds of scurrying and scrabbling noises. When they stopped, he opened the door. Sure enough, there between the cabinets that held pens and pencils and spare paper was Rutledge.
He grinned at Mike, though he was flushed and disheveled. He sucked in his belly, which had just a hint of beer bloat, while he put the finishing touches on his belt buckle.
Standing behind him was a curvy redhead who looked familiar. Mike noticed the smell of melted cheese, and then he remembered. Bonnie, the girl who delivered their pizzas when they had to work late.
“Hi, Bonnie,” he said.
“Hi, Mr. Frome,” she responded shyly. She swiped at her hair, which was decorated with tiny Styrofoam packing peanuts. They must have been using the mail table. “I’m sorry… I mean I brought Mr. Coffee a pizza and—”
Rutledge gave her a look. “And you were just leaving.” He shook his own hair with his fingers. “Right?”
“Right.” Bonnie slipped by Mike carefully, as if it would be rude to touch him. “Goodbye, Mr. Frome.”
When she was gone, Mike turned to Rutledge. “You stupid son of a bitch.”
Rutledge had decided to brazen it out. “Why? She’s got great tits, and we got the pizza for free.” He held up a slice and bit into it. “Want some?”
“No. My kid’s out there, Ledge. What I want is for you to stop treating my business like a brothel.”
Rutledge chewed a minute before responding. “A brothel?” He grimaced. “You sound like my Victorian uncle. You know, I think you may be hungrier than you think. What’s it been, two years? You’re starving, my friend, and you just don’t know it.”
For a minute Mike wanted to punch him. What the hell did he know about the two years Mike had just been through? What did Rutledge Lebron Coffee III, who had spent his life taking, whether from the pizza girls or from his parents, know about real loss? He thought that because he’d run through his inheritance and had to work for a living, he had really suffered.
And on top of that he was idiot enough to cheat on Debra. Sure, they’d both done crap like this in high school, but they were grown men now, supposedly. And Debra just might be the best thing that had ever happened to a jerk like Rutledge.
“Get out,” Mike said. “Go home and don’t come back until you’re ready to work for your paycheck, not sit around eating pizza and screwing the delivery girl.”
Rutledge frowned. “Come on, Mike. You know I was kidding. I—”
But just then Mike’s cell phone rang. He tugged it out of his pocket roughly and answered without looking at the caller ID.
“Yes,” he said tightly. “What is it?”
“Mike? It’s Debra.”
Debra? She sounded stuffy and wet, as if she’d been crying. Had she somehow found out about Rutledge and the pizza girl already? Mike tightened his grip on the phone.
“Hey,” he said. “What’s wrong?”
“I—” She began to cry in earnest. “Oh, Mike—”
“Honey, calm down. What’s wrong?”
“I found her,” she said. “In the garden, in the larkspurs. I saw something and—” She couldn’t go on. She was crying so hard she was hiccuping.
Saw something? That wasn’t much to go on, but Mike’s blood was already running cold. He knew he still held the phone, because he could hear Debra crying, but he couldn’t feel his fingers. Rutledge had gone very quiet, too, and was watching him carefully.
“What? Debra, try to tell me. What did you see?”
“B-bones,” she spluttered out. “A hand. A human hand.”
“Oh, my God,” he said in a stranger’s voice. He felt dizzy. It was as if he’d been holding his breath for two years, waiting for this call.
For a minute, he saw the slim white bones against the black mud, in the blue shadows of the larkspurs.
But then a more terrible image took over his mind’s eye. He saw Gavin, sitting innocently in his office, playing video games, never guessing that the blue spring sky had exploded and was already falling around them.
“Mike? Did you hear me? It’s— It’s—”
“I know who it is,” he said. And then, in his head, he heard the cruelest words in the English language.
It’s my son’s dead mother.
CHAPTER THREE
JUSTINE’S MANSION WAS every bit as overblown and pretentious as Suzie remembered from her visits here four years ago. Suzie stood in the center of the great room and shook her head. All this sprawling marble, frou-frou Louis-something furniture and cherubs grinning down from celestial ceilings.
Ridiculous. Marie Antoinette might have been comfortable here, but Suzie darn sure wasn’t.
But Mayor Millner had asked her to come. And considering that his daughter’s dead body had been found buried in the yard just two weeks ago, she hadn’t been able to say no.
She picked up a millefleur glass bowl, which was the only truly pretty thing in the room, lots of red and blue and yellow and green coils of glass captured inside it like a field of wildflowers. It must have been a wedding present. Justine would never have picked out anything so sweet.
Deep in the recesses of the house, a thump sounded. Then a whispering shuffle, as if someone dragged something heavy over the marble.
Suzie set the bowl back down carefully, replacing it in its same circle of dust. She looked over her shoulder toward the circular staircase. A shadow lay on the checkerboard marble floor, and it had a watery quality, as if something or someone just out of sight was stealthily moving.
“Mayor Millner?” Suzie walked to the edge of the room and looked out.
There was no answer. The shadow was perfectly still now, bisecting one white and one black square. She scanned the hall and realized that it came from a door, which was propped half open and cut off the light from the etched-glass front entry.
“Dork,” she told herself, and went back into the room.
She twisted her watch on her wrist and looked at the face. Where the heck was Millner? She didn’t like being down here all alone.
At least she hoped she was all alone. A half-naked gardener, who clearly believed he had come into the world gift wrapped and labeled To Women, From God, had opened the front door. He had licked her all over with his eyes, and then, when she’d given him her best no-way-in-hell look, he’d deposited her in this room and ambled out the back door.
He’d told her he needed to put out some poison for the rabid raccoons, which she had to admit was pretty funny as a response to her rejection. She did have on a lot of eye shadow today.
But who knew what he was really doing? Any dude who liked to strut his six-pack and his five-o’clock shadow at nine in the morning simply couldn’t be trusted.
He was probably the murderer himself.
She shivered. That didn’t come out as funny as she’d meant it to.
She looked out the big bay window toward the lake, which shimmered so violently under the bright morning sun that it seemed to be on fire.
And then, for the very first time, she realized that this wasn’t a scary story; it wasn’t a dream. And it wasn’t a joke.
Justine was really dead. Her body had been found right out there, between the marble house and the fiery lake.
There really was a murderer.
Suzie’s stomach tightened, which made her mad at herself. When did she get to be such a bundle of nerves? No one was after her. At any given moment, there were probably a hundred people in Justine’s life who might have been driven to murder. Ten years ago, Suzie could have been one of them. It wouldn’t necessarily follow that those people would ever kill anyone else.
Justine had always been a law of her own.
Suzie sat on the piano bench, her legs oddly weak. Back in Albany, when she’d heard about Justine’s body being found, she’d thought, oh, poor Mike. And then, poor Gavin. And then, though she wasn’t proud of this, good riddance.
But never once had she truly assimilated the reality. A real, breathing woman, a woman with laughter and dreams and passions and fears, was dead. All her possibilities for good or bad were extinguished.
And a son was motherless.
Much as she’d disliked Justine, Suzie wished that the beautiful blonde would saunter into the room, tossing her wavy hair and laughing through her full red lips at what a gullible dork Suzie Strickland was, falling for yet another of Justine’s mean practical jokes.
But it would never happen.
Suzie flipped open the sheet music and hit a few keys, thinking the noise might chase away the image of Justine’s red lips rotting in the garden just a hundred yards away.
The piano was so out of tune it made her ears hurt. She wondered whether Justine had been tone-deaf. Mike had been musical, she remembered that. Probably, after Mike moved out, no one had touched the piano at all.
“Suzie?”
She looked up at the sound of Mayor Millner’s voice. He stood in the entryway, and for a minute they just stared at each other, as if neither one could believe their eyes.
“Suzie Strickland?” He squinted. “Is that really you?”
She stood, smoothing her long hair, her blue cotton skirt falling around her shins. She was used to this stunned double take when she saw people who’d known her back in Firefly Glen. Sometimes it annoyed her. Had people really been so blinded by her purple hair and black glasses that they didn’t recognize her without them?
But it didn’t annoy her today. She was too shocked herself. The last time she saw him, Mayor Millner had been black haired, bold and big chested, in his prime and enjoying it. Exuding importance.
The man she saw now looked fifty years older, not ten. His hair was thin, unkempt and the color of unpolished silver. His shoulders were rounded, sloping in, like a person carrying a boulder on his back.
She flushed with instinctive shame, remembering her callous “good riddance” when she’d heard of Justine’s death. How could she have been such a bitch? To Suzie, Justine was little more than a bitter memory, a cartoon caricature of aggressive breasts and predatory lips.
To this man Justine had been life itself.
“Hello, Mayor,” Suzie said, about ten times as gently as she’d intended to. Mayor Millner had treated Suzie like dirt in the old days, and she’d been looking forward to a little payback. But that was unthinkable now.
He came into the room. His left arm seemed to be trembling, and he held it close to his side.
“Thank you for coming,” he said. “I wouldn’t have recognized you. You look lovely.”
She ignored the barb. Though she knew it hadn’t been intentional, it was true. She hadn’t been exactly “lovely” back in her high school days. She’d gone out of her way to avoid it. She’d been making a statement, or so she’d thought.
Mostly, she knew now, she’d just been hiding behind it.
“I know this must be a terrible time for your family,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you.” His eyes, watery from the beginning, glistened in the light from the bay window. “It’s been a two-year nightmare, but in my heart I’ve always known she was dead. She would never have put her mother through this.”
Suzie nodded, though she wasn’t quite as certain about that. In the past, Justine had rarely seemed to concern herself with the fallout from her outrageous behavior. But she had to allow that perhaps Justine’s parents knew her better than Suzie did.
“Why did you want to see me, Mayor?”
She couldn’t imagine calling him anything else, though he wasn’t the mayor of Firefly Glen anymore, she’d heard. When Justine disappeared, he had resigned that job and come to live alone here, in this house, for eighteen months, looking for his daughter and waiting for her to come home.
She wondered if that haunted him now, knowing that, every time he walked down to the lake, he had passed within feet of Justine’s dead body.
If Suzie had ever needed proof that there was no such thing as ghosts, this would be it. Surely Justine’s ghost would have called out to her father as he tromped by, supervising the divers who dragged Tuxedo Lake.
“I need you to help me,” Mayor Millner said with more force than Suzie had seen yet. “I want justice for my daughter.”
Something invisible skittered down Suzie’s spine on tiny cold feet. What was he talking about? Did he think she had done something to Justine? Exactly how crazy had grief left this guy?
“Justice?”
“Yes. I want that bastard Mike Frome arrested, but the police say they don’t have enough evidence.”
Suzie frowned. “Mike? You think Mike killed Justine?”
“I don’t think he did. I know he did. And I’m going to make him pay for it, if it’s the last thing I do. I need you to help me.”
“Mayor Millner, I don’t think—”
“He did it, damn it. He never loved her. He just used her, and then, when he got caught, he had to marry her. He never gave a damn about her except as a plaything.”
The tears she’d seen in his eyes a minute ago had been replaced by a fanatical gleam. She had a cowardly urge to just turn and get the heck out of here, but she forced herself to remain calm. Maybe she could make him see reason.
Mike hadn’t loved Justine when he married her, that much was definitely true. Suzie had been with Mike the night he found out Gavin was his son, and that he would have to marry Justine. A sheltered Firefly Glen teenager, Mike Frome had been faced with the first problem so big his rich, loving family couldn’t fix it, and it had damn near broken his heart. He’d sat on the floor of her kitchen and cried like a child.
She had thought back on that night often, and wished she had been more sympathetic. But her own heart had been a little cracked, and at the time she hadn’t been very good at tenderness or compassion.
Still…Mike Frome, a cold-blooded murderer? Not until penguins ice-skated in hell.
“But why would he kill her? Even if he didn’t love her, they were already divorced.”
“That’s what the police said. But that doesn’t matter. He killed her. She had a new lover, did you know that? She was going to spend a month with him in Europe. Mike couldn’t stand that, so he killed her.”
“But…” She tried again to be logical. “If he hadn’t ever loved her, why would a new lover bother him?”
Millner shook his head roughly. “It’s not like that for a man. It’s not about love. It’s about…territory. Men get crazy when other men try to take away what belongs to them.”
Okaaaay…so logic was out. This guy had crawled out of the Dark Ages. He thought women were chattel, and he assumed all other men agreed.
“Well, assuming for a moment that you’re right, that he did kill her, how could I help you? I haven’t seen him in ten years.”
Millner’s eyes began to glow again, sensing hope. “But you saw her. You saw Justine, back when you painted Gavin’s picture. She told me about that. You must have heard something. Seen something. Maybe you heard them fighting.”
“No. I didn’t.”
“Not even on the phone?”
“No.”
“What about bruises? Was there ever any sign that he’d hit her, or pushed her around?”
Suzie scowled. “No,” she said firmly. “Mayor Millner, I’m sorry, but—”
He frowned, but he didn’t look defeated. “I thought for sure—well, no matter. You can always say you saw things.”
Good grief. She was through being gentle and logical.
“Are you out of your mind? You want me to lie?”
Millner didn’t seem to understand why she was so upset. “Not lie. You know what he was like. He toyed with you, too, didn’t he? Everyone says he broke your heart. Surely you’d like to see him pay for all the people he’s hurt.”
“Actually, you’re wrong on so many counts I can’t cover them all. I would not like to see him go to jail for a murder he didn’t commit. For God’s sake, Mayor. Would you pin a murder rap on an innocent man?”
His face was turning red. “An innocent man? You think Mike Frome is an innocent man? He didn’t love her. He used her. He broke her heart.”
“But that’s very different from—”
He looked at her through wet, bulging eyes. She wanted to look away, but the intensity of the gaze was mesmerizing.
“Did you know he left her alone that day, that last day? He pushed her out of his car and left her alone in the dark, all alone on the side of the road. If he didn’t kill her with his bare hands, at the very least he delivered her, helpless, to the man who did.”
Suzie stared at him. He was so red he was almost purple. She wondered if he had heart trouble. She thought of that trembling arm, and she wondered how long he had to live.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I can’t help you.”
He began to cry openly. They were harsh tears, torn out of him. Tears of frustrated fury, not simple grief. It was a horrible sound.
“You could help me,” he said raggedly. “You just won’t. And I know why. You still hate Justine. You hate my poor baby girl because she has everything you wish you had. You’re willing to let a man get away with murder because you won’t let go of your petty high school jealousies.”
She couldn’t even find the heart to refute it. How could she tell this man that high school jealousies died as soon as you hit the real world and discovered how big and rich and exciting it was—and that it definitely did have a place for you, after all?
Envy Justine? How could she tell him that she wouldn’t live in this expensive marble mausoleum for anything on earth? That she would rather paint than get a manicure, that she’d rather read a book than go to a party? That she’d rather have a child when she was old enough, when she was ready. That she’d rather have no husband than one who hated her?
Or the most unspeakable truth of all. That she’d rather be alive than dead.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. She meant it. “I’m sorry you’re so unhappy. I hope you’ll come to terms with that before you destroy an innocent man.”
He didn’t answer. He sank onto the Louis XIV chair beside the piano and put his face in his hands. The morning sunlight found a few black strands remaining in his silver hair, but it was like the echo of something sad. You knew it was already dying away even as you listened.
She let herself out the front door, her heart heavy.
When she heard footsteps, at first she thought it might be the gardener, and she took a deep breath, ready to breathe fire if he dared to get smarmy.
But, as she rounded the pillar to the portico, she saw a woman walking toward her. About forty, maybe. Pretty in a completely unglamorous way, but a nice face.
“Hi,” the woman said. “Is Mr. Millner in there?”
“He’s in there, but he seems a little distraught at the moment.”
“Oh.” The woman looked toward the house, looking concerned. “He asked me to come see him at noon, but I can’t. I wondered if he could maybe make it earlier.”
Suzie hesitated. She should leave, but…
“Do you know why he wants to see you?”
The woman shook her head. “Not exactly.” She held out her hand. “I’m Judy Stott. My husband and I live next door. I got the impression Mr. Millner wanted…well, that he was wondering if we might have…seen anything. You know, the night his daughter disappeared.”
Suzie’s jaw felt tight. “Did you?”
Judy Stott looked a little wary. After all, she didn’t know who Suzie was, and she probably wondered how much she should say.
“Never mind,” Suzie said. She beeped open the door to her Honda, and said a prayer that it would start. She couldn’t wait to get out of this place.
“Just promise me you won’t lie for him.”
Judy Stott smiled uncertainly. “Lie for him? I can’t imagine he’d ask me to.”
Suzie climbed in her car. She rolled down the window and poked out her head.
“Still. Promise me,” she said. “He’s not right in the head. Two wrongs don’t make a right, you know. And they damn sure won’t bring Justine back.”
Judy Stott backed away, clearly uncomfortable.
Hell, Suzie thought. She was acting as crazy as Millner. Besides, nothing was going to stop him. Even if this Judy Stott person had enough character to tell him no, he’d just move on to the next person.
What about that trashy gardener? He looked as if he’d tell a few lies for the right number of zeroes.
She turned the key to her car, which started up with a nice thrum, as if it understood that they were now on a mission.
She knew exactly where she had to go next.
MIKE AND GAVIN were playing paintball in the big empty Tuxedo Lake lot that he’d bought four years ago, intending someday to build a house. With one thing and another, someday had never come. He and Gavin were still living in the boathouse.
But the wooded lot made a great paintball field.
Today was the first time in two weeks that Gavin had expressed any interest in playing paintball—or anything else, either. When Justine’s body had been found, Gavin had simply shut down. He must have known Justine was dead. God knows Mike had talked to him about it often enough.
But “knowing” it and knowing it were two different things.
So when Gavin had suggested they play a little paintball, no matter how odd the choice sounded, Mike had said yes with enthusiasm. Maybe they could both work off some of this pain and anger.
Mike stood sideways behind a fifty-year-old hemlock and tried to peek around the trunk without getting nailed by a yellow paintball. Gavin’s aim was lethal. He’d hit Mike in the kneecap ten minutes ago, and those suckers hurt.
His mask didn’t fit quite right, and he considered taking it off, but he darn sure didn’t want a paintball in the eye. He could never be a bank robber. He didn’t like being all bundled up. He liked the sun on his skin and the wind in his face.
Maybe he’d ask Gavin if he wanted to move to Malibu and they’d become a couple of beach bums. As soon as the police would let him move anywhere, that is. Murder suspects weren’t allowed much mobility, as he’d learned over the past two years.
“I see you!”
He heard Gavin’s footsteps running toward him. He lunged out from behind the hemlock and, dropping to a squat to provide a smaller target, he pointed his gun in the direction of the sounds.
But the body he pointed at didn’t belong to his son. It belonged to Mrs. Cready, his ninety-year-old neighbor who had put her house up for sale the day they found Justine’s body. She told everyone who’d listen that she had no intention of living next door to a murderer.
Mike had considered warning her that comments like that wouldn’t exactly help her find a buyer, but then he thought, to hell with it. She’d treated him like a leper ever since Justine disappeared. If she liked the adrenaline rush of believing the guy next door was a murderer, who was he to spoil her fun?
She must be loving this, standing here at gunpoint. She let out a shrill “eeek” and threw her hands into the air, a move she learned on television, no doubt.
He lifted his mask and propped it on his forehead.
“Hello, Mrs. Cready,” he said. “You can put your hands down. I’m not worried that you might go for your six-guns.”
She frowned. “You’re the one with the gun. I don’t have any guns.”
He smiled wryly. “I think that’s my point.”
Slowly she lowered her hands, but she still looked terrified.
He wiggled his gun. “It’s not real, Mrs. Cready. It’s a toy. Gavin and I are playing paintball.”
She drew herself up, and her scowl deepened, as if the fact that it wasn’t real was somehow an insult. “A fine thing to be teaching your son.” She ended with a sniff.
He sighed. Was there some law that said a man’s next-door neighbor had to be an old bat?
“Well, anyway,” she said haughtily, “I wouldn’t have come down here at all, except that you have a visitor. A woman. She’s trying to find your house and got confused. Perhaps because you don’t have one.”
Yeah, that had always ticked Mrs. Cready off, too. Clearly, she thought, only a hopeless degenerate would live in a boathouse. She didn’t seem to think it mattered that, at 2,100 square feet, the boathouse was as big as most regular houses.
Not the Tuxedo Lake houses, of course. And that’s what snobs like Mrs. Cready considered the standard of respectability.
“Okay, thanks, just send her on down.” Mike would have asked who it was, but he didn’t really care. It was probably a reporter, or maybe a lawyer looking for business, or maybe even a plainclothes police officer.
Mrs. Cready sniffed again and walked away, her back as erect as a pylon. Mike called Gavin and explained that the game was over. They began pulling off equipment.
When he again heard footsteps and looked up, he saw a young brunette walking toward him. An eye-catching woman, who moved with a natural, unaffected grace. She wore a simple blue skirt and brown hemp sandals. Her glossy brown hair bounced on her shoulders.
Not a policewoman. Way too feminine, in spite of her thin, boyish figure. Her body language too open and free to be a cop. Too casually dressed for a lawyer, too outdoorsy for a reporter.
Still…he had a fleeting sense that he knew this woman, but before he could catch it the wispy image was gone.
He stared at her as she picked her way across tree roots and fallen branches. He realized suddenly that the perfect paintball field might actually look kind of scruffy as a lawn.
But she didn’t seem to mind. She didn’t tiptoe in exaggerated horror and scrunch up her nose, as Justine would have done.
Who was it? Even when she got close enough to see her features, he had no idea. Whoever she was, he decided he liked her. She had great cheekbones, a jaw that said she didn’t take any shit, and a mouth that knew how to laugh.
Finally, when she got close enough for him to see her eyes, he knew.
It was impossible. This graceful, good-looking woman was…
Mike’s heart began to race, and then it skidded in his chest, as if he were trying to throw on the brakes. He didn’t want this pretty woman to be Suzie. He wanted Suzie to stay geeky and smart-mouthed and purple…and permanently pissed at the world.
He needed her to stay the same. Something in this godforsaken world ought to.
Gavin didn’t have any such ambivalence. He threw down his paintball gun and began to run toward the woman, laughing.
“Suzie,” he said. “It’s me, Gavin. Do you remember me?”
Mike watched as the woman bent over and hugged his son. He waited until she lifted her gaze over Gavin’s head and met his eyes.
“Hi, Suzie. It’s me, Mike.” He tilted his head. “Remember me?”
“Yeah, I think I do,” she said, laughing, and when her eyes crinkled like that his heart stopped thumping quite so hard. It was still Suzie. In spite of the long, glossy hair, the contact lenses and the mind-boggling sexiness, the old Suzie, the real Suzie, was still in there.
She’d been a good friend to him once. Maybe she still could be.
He smiled. “How can you be so sure it’s me? You’ve changed. Haven’t I?”
“Not a bit,” she said. “You’re still the only dork dumb enough to be roaming around at a time like this holding a goddamn gun.”
She whisked her hands up over Gavin’s ears. “Ooops. Sorry.”
Mike laughed out loud.
“Don’t be,” he said. “I’m not. Come on, let’s go inside. I think I’m about ten years overdue for a good Suzie Strickland thrashing.”
CHAPTER FOUR
SHE KNEW IT WAS CONSIDERED bad form to speak ill of the dead, but Suzie had always thought Justine Millner was trash, and she hadn’t ever disliked her as much as she did right now.
Look what Justine had done to Mike. Suzie didn’t know whether it was marrying Justine or losing Justine that had done it, but Mike Frome was a different man.
Ten years ago, he’d been one of the most infuriatingly smug boys in their high school. He’d also been one of the most attractive. Just being around him had been like chugging caffeine. He gave off this exciting zing of vitality that was addictive, even for Suzie, who ordinarily avoided the preppy crowd like poison.
The zing was gone.
Of course, he was still too handsome for his own good, she thought as he politely led her on a tour of his boathouse. On the outside, it was charming, white trim over dark wood, with dormers that overlooked the lake. Inside, it was large and surprisingly homey for a bachelor pad.
Following behind him, she realized that he still had the sexiest back she’d ever seen, though now she looked at it purely with an artist’s eye. If she were to paint it, she’d start with a long triangle—she always reduced a face or body to its underlying geometric basics first. Then she’d add finely cut, fluid musculature, no artificial steroid bulk here, just a genetically blessed body that worked for a living.
“That’s about it. The bedrooms are on the second floor, well, third floor if you count the boat slips beneath, but they’re both too disgusting to show anyone right now.” Mike lifted one eyebrow. “I think we’re going to have to fire the upstairs maid.”
He winked at his son, who grimaced back. Must be a running joke.
They had made it to the kitchen, an efficient space, not too big, but somehow airy and comfortable. Suzie caught Mike looking at her speculatively as she admired the cabinets. Under his polite exterior, he must be wondering what the heck she was doing here, after all these years.
She smiled back and cut a subtle glance toward Gavin. She couldn’t explain herself until they were alone.
She didn’t know whether he actually got the message, or if it was just a coincidence, but Mike immediately turned to his son.
“I’m going to show Suzie the porch. Any chance you could toss in a load of towels and fold the ones in the dryer? We’re just about out.”
Gavin looked as if he’d like to complain, but he didn’t. “Okay,” he said. He turned to Suzie. “You won’t leave right away?”
“I’ll be here a few more minutes,” she said. “If you’re not back when I’ve got to go, I’ll come say goodbye.”
Gavin grinned, and for the first time Suzie could see Mike in the boy. “Well, better not actually come into the laundry room,” he said. “Our downstairs maid isn’t all that great, either.”
Mike dismissed Gavin with a shooing motion. He grabbed a plastic container of store-bought cookies from the counter, and then he led Suzie through a pair of large, glass-paned French doors.
As she stepped out onto the porch, she caught her breath. It was absolutely gorgeous, a wraparound deal with an amazing view. Out here, with water on three sides, you were intensely aware that this house was actually built right on the lake.
Mike held out one of two white wicker armchairs, and she took it, appreciating its soft old cushions, and the companionable creak when she leaned back.
Mike sat, too, and for a minute they were silent, just watching the afternoon sunlight play on the water. It bounced off and danced against the walls of the porch, too. It would be a challenge, she thought, to capture this living light on a canvas.
It probably had been a happy place, once. Mike and Gavin had probably spent hours out here, watching the breeze ripple the blue lake. But it was clear that they had pretty much forgotten what happiness tasted like.
God only knew what they saw when they looked out at the water now. Somewhere on the other side of that lake was Justine’s mansion. And the muddy spot where her body had been buried.
She glanced at Mike, and she realized he was smiling at her, a hint of that old smile. She couldn’t quite meet it. It was still strong stuff, and even after all this time she wasn’t completely immune.
“God, Suzie-freaka, it’s good to see you. It’s been a long, long time.”
His voice, and his smile, were strangely unsettling, like haunted echoes from the past, from way back when she hated herself almost as much as she hated him. Suddenly the air felt tight, even though the breeze was cool and fresh, fingering her hair and ruffling the sleeves of her dress.
She was irked with herself for reacting like this. The past wasn’t the issue, damn it. She wasn’t here to reminisce about the bad old days. She was only here out of common humanity. She was here to give an old friend—no, an old acquaintance—a heads-up.
Mike held out the cookies. “So, want to tell me what’s happening?” He pulled in one corner of his mouth, creating that annoyingly attractive dimple. “Somehow I don’t think you just woke up this morning and said, ‘hey, I wonder how that obnoxious boy I hated in high school is doing?’”
The boy she hated in high school… He must have read her mind. But was that all he was? Maybe. She had definitely hated him. Even when she…didn’t.
“No,” she said, waving away the cookies, which were hard and sandy, typical grocery store pseudo food. “It’s something more serious, I’m afraid. It’s about Justine. Well, about Justine’s father, anyhow.”
Mike set the container down slowly. “What about him?”
“He asked me to visit him this morning, at Justine’s house.”
She watched Mike’s face, wondering how he could stay so impassive. Where had all those quicksilver emotions gone? The easy laughter, the twitching frown, the worried squint, the sarcastic eyebrow? The restless, young-animal body.
The zing.
He was so still now. So controlled. It was like looking at a picture of Mike instead of the real thing.
“Oh, yeah?” Mike flipped a cookie between his fingers, keeping his eyes on the water. “What did he want?”
She took a breath. This was it.
“He wants me to help him pin Justine’s murder on you.”
That got his attention. But it didn’t completely surprise him. As he slowly faced Suzie, she saw anger but not shock behind his dark brown eyes.
“Pin it…how would you be able to do that?”
“He hoped I might have seen something while I was painting Gavin’s portrait. Something between you and Justine. An argument, maybe.”
“But you couldn’t have. I was never at the house when you were there.”
“I know.” She chewed on her lower lip, wishing she could stop herself from asking the next question but knowing she probably couldn’t. She’d never had very good impulse control. “I always thought I might run into you, but I never did. Was that deliberate? Were you avoiding me on purpose?”
“Yes.”
She frowned. “Well, that’s a hell of a note,” she said. “Just ‘yes’?”
“Well, what do you want me to say? Yes, it was deliberate. Yes, I was avoiding you on purpose.”
“Why?”
He shrugged, and it, too, held the echo of the old days. He always did have a large, infuriating repertoire of smug-jock mannerisms. “I thought you’d prefer it that way.”
“You thought I…” She frowned for a few seconds, feeling herself heating up, though she wasn’t sure why. Mike Frome had always been able to confuse her in world-record time, which inevitably ticked her off. “Why?”
“I thought seeing me might make you…” He seemed to search for a word. “Uncomfortable.”
Uncomfortable? Her temperature rose even higher. What the heck was that a euphemism for? Did he think she was still a geeky, untouched virgin who would blush at the memory of the night he’d copped a feel?
“Know what, Frome? That’s BS, and you know it. I haven’t got anything to be uncomfortable about where you’re concerned. Sixteen seconds of touchy-feely ten years ago doesn’t exactly require me to wear the scarlet letter for the rest of my life.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t mean that. I meant that seeing me might make you unhappy. You know, you might—”
Unhappy? Oh, this was even worse. Did he think she’d actually spent the past ten years carrying a torch for Mr. Most-Likely-To-Succeed? Oh, brother.
“Might what? Might turn to stone just from looking at your irresistible bod? Sorry, but that’s baloney, too. You may have been the king of the sandbox in Firefly Glen, but it’s a pretty small sandbox. Out in the real world, where I’ve been living for the past ten years—”
To her surprise, Mike began to laugh. He reached out and grabbed her hand. “Easy, Fang. You’re getting it all wrong.”
She forced herself to take a deep breath. Man, was she regressing. She didn’t do this anymore, didn’t fly off the handle, didn’t read insults into perfectly innocent comments. Her tendency toward irrational ferocity had disappeared the minute she left Firefly Glen, which in her opinion proved that Mike Frome must have been the problem all along.
However, there was such a thing as protesting too much. She inhaled one more time, just for good measure.
“Or maybe,” he said, “I’m putting it all wrong.”
“Probably both,” she said tightly. “We never did really communicate all that well. But, look, we’re getting off topic. This is serious. I’m trying to tell you that your ex-father-in-law wants to see you spend the rest of your life in jail.”
“Okay.” He gazed at her, the poker face returning. “So what did you tell him?”
“I told him I hadn’t laid eyes on you in ten years. That frustrated him, but it didn’t really slow him down much. He made it clear that if I’d just say I saw you shove Justine around or something he’d make it worth my while.”
The smile remained on Mike’s lips, but it was as if he’d simply forgotten to put it away. He still had hold of her hand, so she knew how tight his fingers were.
“And what did you say to his offer?”
She pulled her hand away. “What do you think I said?”
“I don’t know.” He shook his head slowly. “I think you said no. I hope you said no.”
“But you’re not sure?”
He stared at her a moment, and then, his body stiff, he rose from his wicker chair. He leaned against the railing, his back to the sunshine, which threw his face into shadow.
“How can I be sure? The Suzie I used to know—she would have told Alton to take his money and stuff it up his hairy ass. But I haven’t seen you in ten years. I don’t know you anymore. Not really.”
“You think ten years is enough to turn me into a liar?”
He hesitated again. “Ten years can do a lot of rotten things to people, Suzie. If you don’t know that yet, I’m happy for you.”
She stood up. “Let me get this straight. You think it could turn me into a woman who would send a man to the gas chamber for something he didn’t do?”
“Perhaps not.” He lifted one hand. The effort to look suave, indifferent, world-weary failed miserably. He was just plain tired. “But am I sure? No. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure of anything anymore.”
Her annoyance faded slightly in the face of his exhaustion.
“Well, you can be sure of this. Millner is going to try to frame you for this, Mike. He’s going to do any dirty thing he can to see that you pay for what happened to Justine.”
“I know.” He glanced toward the French doors, obviously wondering if Gavin was within earshot. “But frankly, Suzie, Alton Millner isn’t the only vulture out to get me. He isn’t even the most dangerous one. The D.A. has a bead on me, too. I guess it’s pretty standard for the cops, even if it feels outrageous to me. They always look at the husband first.”
She felt an upwelling of incredulous indignation. Was everyone around here insane? Mike Frome couldn’t kill anyone. Heck, Suzie herself was a more likely candidate. She’d hated Justine, and she was, after all, the one they called “Fang.”
But neither of them had done it. They just weren’t that kind of people.
“That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard,” she said. “Jeez. Shouldn’t you be a better judge of people than that if you’re going to be the D.A.?”
Mike almost smiled. “You’re so sure he’s wrong, then?”
Suzie rolled her eyes. “I’ve known you since you were about six, Frome. You can be a horse’s ass, and you do have an irritating tendency to think you’re God’s gift. But kill somebody? No way. Kill your own child’s mother? Not in a bazillion, trillion years.”
“Damn.” His half smile turned into a grin. “Why couldn’t you have been the D.A.?”
She shrugged, but she felt herself smiling, too. “Couldn’t have handled law school. Problems with authority, you know.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
Man, this was getting weird. A minute ago she’d wanted to punch him out, and now she had this stupid impulse to go over and hug him. She felt a disgustingly maternal urge—perhaps the first in her whole life—to help him hang on to that smile.
But she forced herself to stay where she was. “Well,” she began. “That’s all I had to say, so I guess I should—”
“Suzie.”
She frowned, just on principle. “What?”
“Thanks for coming by to warn me. It was very—very sweet.”
“Wow.” She found herself smiling again, and she made a few adjustments to make sure it was a sarcastic smile. Behind her, she heard footsteps approaching. Gavin must be coming back. “You’ve used a lot of words to describe me through the years, but I don’t think you ever used that one.”
Mike was still looking at her in that soft way that made her feel like squirming.
“No, I didn’t,” he said. “Just one of my many mistakes.”
SOMETIMES MIKE BELIEVED that if he hadn’t let Justine talk him into leaving Firefly Glen, everything would have been fine.
There was magic here. The Sunday after Suzie’s visit and her disturbing news, he went home for Spencer Fairmont’s sixteenth birthday party. And as he watched his son playing touch football on the front lawn of Summer House, he felt his whole body relaxing.
Though there were about two dozen Glenner children out there, Mike couldn’t take his eyes off Gavin. Look at that smile. He hadn’t smiled like that since his mother’s body had been discovered, almost a month ago.
Magic wasn’t an exaggeration.
And it wasn’t just the magic of “home.” Mike knew that, when faced with your first mortgage payment, your first endless, numbing workweek, or your first real personal crisis, it was easy to get all misty about the innocence of youth.
But Firefly Glen was more than that, and he’d always sensed it, even as a child. Firefly Glen was special. Nestled in a small Adirondack valley, the town was ringed by wooded mountains and spangled with flowers, waterfalls, rivers and birds. It was peopled by gentle eccentrics who argued constantly, and yet stuck together with a loyalty that seemed to belong to another century…or a fairy tale.
Many of those quirky townsfolk were Mike’s own kin. He was a fourth-generation Glenner, and his parents and grandparents still lived here. His cousin, Natalie Granville Quinn, had once owned Summer House, though the crazy old villa was now open to the public as a historic site—and rented out for parties, like this one.
“Can you believe how grown-up he is?”
Mike looked up and saw Natalie standing over him with a cup of punch in each hand. He wasn’t sure which kid she meant. Birthday boy Spencer had come to Firefly Glen as a scared little boy of six. And of course Gavin had left here, ten years ago, as an infant. Three of Natalie’s own four boys were out there, too—the fourth was still in diapers, too young to romp about with the big kids.
Mike took the punch. Natalie gathered her full yellow skirt under her knees and sat down on the step beside him. “Aren’t you glad someone else is mowing this monstrosity now?”
He glanced around at the smooth carpet of grass, which was glowing with gold highlights as the afternoon sun began to drop in the west. “You bet I am. Aren’t you glad someone else is in charge of the repairs?”
Natalie made a swooning sound and leaned her elbows back against the marble gracefully. “Giving this place up was the best decision I ever made.”
Just then Matthew walked by, their youngest son in his arms, and ruffled her hair. Both males made loud, wet kissing noises. Natalie kissed back, then grinned at Mike. “Make that second-best.”
Frankly, it was hard to believe that this happily sex-crazed blonde was now a thirty-eight-year-old mother of four. She hardly looked a day older than she had at Mike’s wedding ten years ago, while he felt about a hundred.
Guess true love really was the fountain of youth, he thought, trying not to be bitter.
“You make marriage look easy,” he said. He glanced around. Now that twilight had settled in, the band up on the balcony had begun to play slow songs. Couples were swaying together in little love pods all along the front courtyard. Spencer had a new girlfriend, and they looked so sweet, foreheads touching, hands folded between their bodies as if the dance were a prayer. Ward Winters, who was nearly ninety, was in a lip-lock with Madeline Alexander. Griffin and Heather Cahill were nuzzling like newlyweds. It just went on from there.
He turned back to Natalie. “You all make it look easy.”
Natalie’s brown eyes were gentle. “It is easy,” she said. “If you’re married to the right person. You can’t judge from your experience, honey. That was…well, it was like getting caught in a freak storm at sea.”
He noticed she didn’t say Justine’s name. As if there were a conspiracy to shelter him, whenever Mike entered the town limits, the problems of his “real” world dropped away. They had welcomed Justine back while the marriage lasted, and after the divorce no one ever said a word against her, especially not to Gavin. In fact, they rarely mentioned her.
Sure, occasionally crusty Theo Burke would begin to make some snarky comment, or maybe Ward Winters would start to grouch about Mayor Millner, but someone would always poke them hard, or stomp on their feet, and they’d swallow the words with a gruff apology, and the comforting cocoon would remain unbroken.
“Hurricane Justine wasn’t completely unexpected,” Mike corrected. “Plenty of people warned me. I just wasn’t listening.”
Natalie patted his shoulder. “That’s not entirely your fault, either. You just had a really bad case of TB.”
He gave her a curious look. Natalie had always been eccentric. All Granvilles were. You rarely had any idea what she’d say next. He was actually kind of glad that he was only one-sixth Granville. He had troubles enough.
“TB?”
She nodded. “Testosterone Blindness. It afflicts young men from the ages of twelve to about twenty. Its symptoms include bad judgment, night sweats, following some gorgeous girl around with their tongue hanging out, and—”
“Are you guys talking about Granville?” Parker Tremaine, the Glen’s favorite local lawyer, plopped down on the other side of Mike. “Because, much as I like your grandfather, Mike, I honestly think he’s too old to be having quite so much fun dancing with Suzie Strickland.”
Natalie made an excited sound and immediately began scanning the dance floor for her irrepressible great-uncle. “That old devil,” she said, chuckling. “I didn’t even know Suzie was coming. Is he really making a pass at her?”
“I might not go that far, but he certainly is enjoying himself.” Parker raised one eyebrow. “Can’t say I blame him. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve seen her. She looks amazing.”
Natalie glanced back at Parker irritably. “But of course she looks amazing, dummy. Didn’t you know she always was a beauty under all that goop?”
“No,” he said flatly. “I didn’t. I knew she was cuter than she wanted to let on, and of course she was always a work in progress. But this—”
“There they are! Hmm…oh, dear. This may be the beginnings of a Granville moment.” Natalie scrambled to her feet, dusting off her yellow skirt. “I’d better go throw some cold water over him. Later, boys. Be good.”
Mike had located his grandfather and Suzie, too. He watched her smiling up into the old man’s face, accepting his ridiculous flirtation with sardonic good humor. She was wearing red jeans and a halter top that had a surprisingly sexy updated-Grecian look, with ribbons crisscrossing her breasts, then falling with a seductive flare around her hips.
She still looked different from everyone else, but she didn’t look wrong anymore. She just looked special.
As the music swelled, Granville dipped her, in old-style ballroom elegance. He bent over her arched body, nearly putting his nose in her cleavage. Mike felt annoyance squeeze his gut briefly…Granddad, you dirty old bastard.
But when Suzie straightened up her eyes were sparkling with laughter, and her cheeks were almost as red as her clothes. She put her hand on Granville’s chest and pushed, removing him to a respectable distance. But she didn’t look mad. She looked…
Amazing might be an understatement.
Parker was watching, too. He looked over at Mike. “Did you know? Have you seen her lately?”
Mike nodded. “Actually, I saw her a few days ago, for the first time since I—left town. I was shocked. I’m like you. I knew she had something, but at the same time I didn’t know…this.”
Parker smiled. “Obviously she didn’t want anyone to know. I guess she wanted us to appreciate her deeper qualities.”
Mike laughed. “Like her sweet personality?”
“Well, no.” Parker laughed, too, and the two of them had a moment of silence, remembering just how little sugar Suzie had bothered to apply to life. “Like her brains, I mean. Her talent. And her spunk. I never knew anyone with more spunk.”
Both men watched as Natalie grabbed Suzie and spun her into a bear hug. The two women had always been great friends.
When Parker spoke again, Mike observed that the older man’s voice was carefully casual. “So you saw Suzie again for the first time just recently? That’s quite a coincidence.”
That’s exactly what Mike had been thinking. He’d been home to Firefly Glen frequently during his decade of exile. He’d brought Gavin here as often as possible, so that at least some of the magic would rub off. But he had never run into Suzie. Her parents still lived here, and he heard she was in town fairly frequently. Though they didn’t exactly run in the same circles, it was hard to believe they hadn’t ever bumped into each other—unless she planned it that way.
She might have needed to ask him whether he’d avoided her deliberately while she painted Gavin, but he didn’t need to ask her about this. Ten years of dodging him in Firefly Glen could not have been a coincidence.
And, hell, he didn’t blame her.
So why, all of a sudden, would she abandon that plan and show up at this party? She had to know he’d be here.
Somehow he dragged his gaze away from the dance floor. He couldn’t let himself get distracted by Suzie. He had something important he needed to say to Parker.
It wasn’t going to be easy. He liked the protective oasis the Glenners had offered him. It had always been such a relief to be able to pretend, even temporarily, that there was no Justine.
But, deep inside, he’d always known the oasis was a mirage. Now he had to give it up. He’d finally met a battle so big, so uniquely his, that no one else could fight it for him. Not even the entire town of Firefly Glen.
“Parker, I need your help,” he said. “I think I may be in some trouble.”
Parker was about fifteen years older than Mike, and had always been like an uncle to him. He had called Mike immediately after Justine’s body was found and offered to recommend a criminal attorney, just for safety’s sake. Mike had been naive enough to say thanks but no thanks.
Parker looked concerned now, but not shocked. “It’s Justine, I suppose. You’ve been questioned, I’m sure. Did it go badly?”
“I didn’t think so. But they’ve been back twice, asking the same things over and over. They asked if they could look at my car. The one I was driving the day she disappeared.”
“Did you let them?”
“Of course I did. I don’t have anything to hide.”
“Did you retain counsel?”
Mike shook his head. He had trusted that innocence was everything. He had believed in the system. He still believed in it, at heart, but…
“I didn’t think I needed one. I thought it would look bad if I got a lawyer.”
Parker sighed. “So many people make that mistake. But everyone needs representation. Even innocent people need help handling the system.”
He reached into his pocket. “Here—this is Harry Rouge’s card. I brought it today because I had a feeling you might need it. I knew Harry in D.C. He’s good, and he’s got some experience with murder trials.”
Mike felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. “Surely you don’t think this is going to get that far? To a murder trial?”
“Of course it will, with any kind of luck. She was murdered—there’s no getting around that.” Parker smiled grimly. “But Harry will make sure it doesn’t go to trial with you as the defendant.”
Mike took the card. It all felt like a bad dream. Even the card felt unreal. Or maybe it was just that his fingers were numb.
“Thank you,” he said. “I appreciate it.”
“You’re welcome. Now you do me a favor, okay?” Parker pointed to the back of the courtyard. “See my poor beautiful wife over there being bored to death by Bourke Waitely?”
Mike looked. Sure enough, Sarah was sitting next to Bourke, a polite smile plastered to her face like a bumper sticker. She looked desperate.
“Yes,” Mike said. “I do.”
“Well, go save her, would you? Ask her to dance. I’m going to see if I can pry the amazing Miss Strickland from your grandfather’s clutches.”
Mike stood, then held out a hand to help Parker to his feet, too. He looked over at Suzie, but he’d barely begun to formulate his idea even in his own mind before Parker began shaking his head.
“Bad idea,” Parker said softly. “The last thing in the world you need right now is to appear interested in another woman.”
Mike frowned. “For God’s sake, Parker, I’m not—I mean Suzie’s not ‘another woman.’ I’ve known her forever. She’s just a friend. She’s just…Suzie.”
“Wrong,” Parker said flatly. “She used to be just Suzie. Things are different now. Look at her, Mike. Now she’s a motive.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“OKAY, NOW…MAKE SURE you’re balanced, and that your legs are touching the wall, right?” Suzie, who was standing on her head, took a quick look over at Gavin, who had just arranged himself, also upside down, next to her along the wall of Summer House’s back porch. “You comfortable enough?”
Gavin wobbled, but steadied himself. “I guess so. This marble is pretty hard on my head.”
“Yeah, it helps if you have grass, or a pillow or something. But we’ll just have to make do. Now, the whole point is to stare at something interesting.”
She used one hand to fold up the loose part of her shirt, which was dangling down over her face, and tuck it under her chin. Good thing she’d worn jeans to this party instead of that skirt she’d been considering.
“How about the stairs that lead to the grotto?” She pointed. “Right over there, with the statues on each side.”
Gavin moved his hands for better purchase. “Yeah, the statues look goofy upside down. And look—there’s Cordelia, way out there. Hey, weird. I didn’t know she looks like her mom, but when you see her like this, upside down, you can tell. And she’s really got crazy hair.”
Suzie smiled, which was actually easier while you stood on your head. Gravity worked with you for a change.
She hoped it was making Gavin smile, too, or at least distracting him a little. When she’d run into him a few minutes ago, here in this secluded corner of the back patio where she’d come to hide from Granville, he had seemed upset. He hadn’t wanted to talk about it. He’d been willing to say only that one of the boys at the party had been a jerk.
But he had appeared on the edge of tears, so she’d pulled this old game out of her hat. It was the kind of crazy thing sensible people rarely did, so she hoped it would shock him out of his distress.
Her gaze caught on something nearer, something red and pointy. It was her fancy shoes, which she’d taken off before she’d stood on her head.
“Hey, look at my shoes. Man. I had no idea they were so plug-ugly.”
“Yeah!” Apparently Gavin was too young to know he was supposed to disagree. He laughed, which made his legs wobble again. “Those spiky heels look like knives, like weapons or something.”
Well, he was right. They did.
“I need new shoes, that’s for sure.” She brushed them aside. “But that’s the point, see? Sometimes, when things start to get you down, you need to step back and view the world from a new perspective.”
“Hey! There’s Dad! It’s like one of those movie tricks, where he seems to be walking upside down.”
Suzie watched Mike coming toward them, climbing the stairs with the physical grace that marked everything he did. Viewed this way, it was even more apparent. His body seemed to belong to him in a way hers had never belonged to her. She was always tripping on her own feet and flinging her elbows into things. He was a thoroughbred racehorse, and she was a just-hatched duck-billed platypus.
He was squinting, as though he couldn’t quite understand what he was seeing, and she saw his smile dawn as he finally comprehended. She briefly considered scrambling to her feet, but realized that would just look even dumber.
Better to brazen it out, even though she could tell that his gaze was locked on her bare stomach. Damn it, the blood had been flowing to her head for five minutes now, but he’d probably think she was blushing because of him.
“Hi, Dad,” Gavin said. “We’re getting a new perspective.”
“It’s a game we used to play in art school,” Suzie put in, trying to sound rational in spite of her bare feet and her hair pooled all over the marble. Also, with her lungs pressing into her throat like this, she sounded like Daffy Duck.
“Yeah?” Mike was still smiling.
“Yes. It helps you to start seeing what’s really there,” she explained, “instead of what you’re expecting to see.”
“Okay. So, what do you think, Gavin? Does the world look better from that angle?”
That was all it took. Gavin, who obviously had remembered his earlier distress, did a kind of backward somersault—just as gracefully as his father might have—and leaped to his feet.
“Dad, where’ve you been? I was looking for you. I want to go home.”
Oh, well. It had been worth a try. Suzie dropped her feet and stood up, too, though it involved a lot more undignified wriggling. She tugged at her shirt, trying to make it settle around her hips again, but one of the ribbons was stuck inside her bra. She had to drag it out like a long strand of red linguini.
“Can we, Dad? Can we go home right now?”
“We really ought to stay for the cake.” Mike hesitated. “Why would you want to go so soon?”
“It’s Spencer’s friend Joe. I don’t like him. He said—”
The boy cast a quick glance at Suzie. But then he decided that either she could be trusted, or his frustration was too intense to leave room for discretion.
“He said some really bad things about you, Dad. There’s a cop out at the edge of the driveway, and Joe said that’s because you’re here. He said the cop is following you to make sure you don’t—”
Mike’s face was suddenly dark, his jaw clenched. “Make sure I don’t what?”
Gavin stared at floor, but his jaw looked exactly like his dad’s.
“Don’t kill anybody.”
Oh, boy. Suzie thought about the crowd of kids they’d left behind on the front lawn. Which one was Joe? He must be a visitor. Apparently someone forgot to hand him the official Firefly Glen credo, thou shalt not poison paradise, as he passed through Vanity Gap.
And what about the even more universal law? Don’t be cruel.
Suddenly Matthew Quinn appeared, loping up the stairs toward them, looking worried and annoyed. This Joe kid must not be a very smart bully, Suzie decided. Obviously he’d let his comments be overheard by one of Gavin’s guardian angels.
“I’m sorry, Mike,” Matthew said. “Joe Streaker’s a brat. Parker’s over there scaring the crap out of him right now.”
The tension in Mike’s face remained. “Is it true?”
“What? That there’s a cop in the driveway?” Matthew kept his voice low. Suzie had to strain to be sure she heard every word. But she wasn’t the type to be a demure little female and pretend not to listen. “Yeah. An open tail, obviously. They’re sending you a message. They want you to know they’re watching.”
Mike peered across the grounds, though of course he couldn’t see all the way to the drive. Then he put his arm around Gavin. “You okay?”
Gavin, who clearly had worked himself back into an emotional stew, swallowed twice, as if his throat were too tight. Once again his eyes were shining with unshed tears. Tears of fury, no doubt.
Suzie had fought back about a million of those in her day. Matthew Quinn, who was watching Gavin with sympathetic eyes, probably had, too. He’d once spent three years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. That was probably why he was such an expert on things like “open tails.”
“Of course Gavin’s okay,” she answered for him, to give him time to get his throat under control. “He’s just ticked off. Frankly, I think he deserves a medal for not handing Joe Streaker his bloody nose on a platter.”
Gavin looked up at her. “I was going to, I was going to kick his ass. I don’t care if he is sixteen. But he ran away. He was laughing.” His hands folded into white-knuckled fists. “He thinks it’s funny that my mom is dead.”
“Oh, yeah?” Suzie felt her own hands tightening. “Well, come on. Let’s find this jerk. I’ll hold him down for you.”
“Suzie,” Mike and Matthew said at the same time, and both of them held out their hands, as if to restrain her from racing off in search of Joe the Jerk.
“Okay, okay,” she said. She turned to Gavin. “Grown-ups are such buzz-kills, aren’t they? It would have felt so good.”
Gavin smiled. “Yeah. It would have felt great.”
“Hey.” Mike bent down and took Gavin’s elbows. “What did I tell you about kicking people’s asses?”
Gavin screwed up his mouth, as if he were trying to remember. “Don’t?”
Chuckling, Suzie met Matthew’s amused gaze over the heads of the other two. Gavin really was a chip off the old block, wasn’t he? Served Mike right.
“Come on, Gav. What did I tell you?”
Gavin sighed. “You told me violence is for stupid people. You said smart people think their way out of trouble. But Dad, this guy is soooo—”
“Gavin, think it through. This guy believes we’re the kind of people who would hurt other people. Want to make him right?”
“No, but—”
“Then let’s go be civilized. Let’s watch Spencer open his presents, and we can drive straight home after that, okay?”
Gavin scuffed the ground with one heel. “Okay,” he said reluctantly.
Mike stood. He gave his son a forward nudge and Gavin started moving. Matthew went with the boy, his hand on his shoulder for moral support. Mike turned to Suzie. “Thanks,” he said. “That was a very creative diversionary tactic.”
“No problem,” she said. “I’ve always been willing to make a fool of myself for a good cause.”
He gave her a long look, taking her in from head to toe. She caught herself fiddling with the ribbons on her top, checking their status. Damn it, was she going to start blushing all over again?
“Oh, and by the way…” He paused.
“What?”
She wondered whether he might be going to ask her why she’d shown up at a Firefly Glen party, after all these years. She had her answer ready. Because she wanted to, that’s why. Because, now that she’d seen him once, she’d decided it was stupid to go on avoiding him.
But he didn’t ask. Three, four, five seconds ticked by.
She tilted her head. “By the way…what?”
He reached out and tugged lightly on the tip of a red ribbon.
He smiled. “Nice shirt.”
AS MARSTON COUNTY District Attorney Keith Quigley pulled his Audi up to the squad car parked in front of Summer House, he could see right away that the policeman behind the wheel was half-asleep.
He idled his engine for at least thirty seconds, waiting for the officer to notice him. Nothing. Fifty murderers could have danced across this road in top hats, and Officer—was it deLuca?—wouldn’t have noticed a thing.
Finally he tapped lightly on his horn. DeLuca jerked to attention, bumping his elbow on the edge of the window.
“Sir!” The cop, who probably was no more than about twenty-five, squeezed his eyes, trying to make them track in the same direction. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t see you there.”
Keith smiled, but he kept it cool. “Good thing we don’t believe Frome is a flight risk,” he observed.
The officer flushed, opened his mouth as if to make a defensive comment, then closed it. DeLuca didn’t report to Keith, not technically. But he reported to the sheriff, who knew better than to annoy the D.A. Keith didn’t believe in keeping a “hands off” policy in his investigations—especially murders. He got involved as soon as he had a body, and he stayed involved until he got a conviction.
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