CHAPTER SIX
Outside the north entrance to Seattle
Central Community College, she blended in with a few other students
who had stepped outside for a smoke. But she didn’t talk to them.
She was too focused on what was happening across the street in
front of Bonney-Watson Funeral Home.
Chris Dennehy was wearing a tie and
some nice khaki pants. In all the times she’d followed him, she
hadn’t seen him this dressed up before. She’d had a feeling he
would be here today.
Chris hadn’t noticed her at all, and
neither had anyone else.
He seemed to be having a heated
discussion with his stepmother. “Leave me alone!
God!” His voice boomed over the traffic noise.
His stepmother said something to him
and then walked away. Chris stood there on the sidewalk, rubbing
his forehead. He’d certainly gotten his wish. His stepmother had
left him alone—and maybe even a bit stranded.
She smiled.
It was just how she would get to
him—when he was all alone.
Chris paced back and forth under the
funeral parlor’s awning. He didn’t know why he’d gotten so mad at
Molly. Mostly he was disappointed. After coming all this way, he
hadn’t even had a chance to see Mrs. Corson.
There had been only Mr. Corson’s sister
making him feel horrible.
Despite everything she’d said, he still
wanted to talk with Jenna Corson. Part of him wanted to apologize
and explain his side of things to her. But mostly, he needed to
connect with someone else who grieved for Mr. Corson. Maybe he
could even help her somehow. After all, wouldn’t she want to know
how important her husband had been to him?
Chris took off his sunglasses and
stepped back inside the funeral home. At the doorway of the viewing
room, he scanned the crowd for Mr. Corson’s niece, Serena. At the
same time, he kept an eye out for her mother. He dreaded another
run-in with her.
For a few moments, he found himself
just staring at the bronze casket at the far end of the room. It
was hard to fathom Mr. Corson lying inside it. Chris imagined the
three bullet wounds in him, now plugged up by some
mortician.
He went back to looking over the crowd
and finally spotted the Goth girl with an elderly man. She nodded
at something the old man said, but still had a bored look in her
heavily madeup eyes.
Threading through the crowd, Chris made
his way to her. She glanced at him and let out a little laugh. Then
she looked at the elderly man again. “Really nice talking with
you,” she said loudly.
Turning toward Chris, she rolled her
eyes. “Shit, there are so many old people here, and all of them are
close talkers—with bad breath. And I’m stuck here until seven, too.
Please, kill me now.” She sighed, then looked him up and down. “So
you’re the one who caused all the fuss. Well, I heard you were
cute. That’s certainly true.”
Chris shrugged. “Thanks, I guess. Where
did you hear—”
“I have a friend at James Monroe, and
she has a blog,” Serena explained before he finished asking the
question. “I see you didn’t let my mother, the Wicked Bitch of the
West, scare you away. What happened to the woman you were with?
She’s not your mother, is she? She looked too young.”
“She’s my stepmother,” Chris explained. “She’s on her way home.”
He spied Mr. Corson’s sister across the room and pulled Serena into
a corner. He hoped a potted palm by the wall blocked the woman’s
view of them. “You said something about your aunt getting ready to
leave your uncle before he was killed,” he whispered.
She nodded. “More than ‘getting ready.’
She actually moved out, took my bratty three-year-old cousin, Todd,
and went to her sister’s in Yakima. Uncle Ray had to drive to
Yakima to visit Todd. But he didn’t complain. In fact, he renewed
his life insurance and kept Aunt Jenna on as the beneficiary. My
mom’s still pissed off about that.”
“But you said your aunt was back again.
. . .”
“That’s right. While she was in Yakima,
she had movers take her stuff from the house to this apartment she
rented in Kent. I guess she wanted to be closer to Seattle in case
my crazy cousin, Tracy, ever decides to come home. Aunt Jenna’s
there now, only my mother wants everyone to think she’s still in
Yakima, crying her eyes out or something like that. Todd’s in
Yakima with her sister, but my aunt’s at her new apartment in Kent.
She just didn’t want to come to Uncle Ray’s wake.”
“Why not?” Chris asked,
frowning.
Serena shrugged. “Beats me. And Aunt
Jenna’s paying for this thing. You’d think she’d want to put in an
appearance. I heard my mother on the phone with her last night,
begging her to come, saying ‘How do you think it’ll look if you
don’t show up?’ and shit like that. If you ask me, Aunt Jenna just
didn’t want to be a hypocrite.” She squinted at Chris. “Why are you
so anxious to see my Aunt Jenna?”
“I want to tell her that I’m sorry,”
Chris admitted. “Maybe explain things to her, set the record
straight.”
“You mean, about you and Uncle
Ray?”
He nodded.
“I heard he was trying to fuck you,”
she said.
“You heard wrong,” Chris replied
soberly. “Was that on your friend’s blog, too?”
“Yeah,” she said, half
smiling.
“Terrific,” he grumbled. He glanced
over toward where her mother had been earlier, and she was no
longer there. Chris looked around, but didn’t see her. A panic
swept through him. He didn’t want another chewing-out from her. He
turned toward Serena again. “Listen, do you know where in Kent your
aunt is staying? Do you have the address?”
She shrugged. “Well, not on me. It’s
one of those new apartment complexes near Southcenter
Mall.”
Chris suddenly spotted Mr. Corson’s
sister emerging from a group of mourners nearby. She started toward
him and Serena.
“Oh, shit,” he murmured. “Listen, I got
to go, thanks a lot—”
Ms. Corson was pointing at him.
“You . . .”
Just then, a smartly dressed older
woman with silver hair grabbed her arm. “Sherry? Sherry, dear, I’m
so sorry about Ray. I remember when the two of you were just kids,
and you had those skateboards. . . .”
Ms. Corson stopped and talked to the
older woman. Her smile looked forced.
“Thanks again,” Chris whispered to
Serena. He almost knocked over the potted palm as he hurried out of
the room. He saw a sign on the wall between a tall grandfather
clock and the edge of a corridor: RESTROOMS, OFFICES.
Chris retreated down the hallway and
into the men’s room. It smelled like cinnamon-scented urinal cakes.
Ducking into a stall, he caught his breath and waited for a few
minutes. He figured Serena’s mother wouldn’t come after him in
there.
He stood by the toilet with hands in
his jacket pockets. He wondered why Mr. Corson’s wife hadn’t come
to his funeral. Did Mrs. Corson believe the lies broadcast on the
blogs?
More than ever, he needed to see her
and explain that her dead husband had never done anything
inappropriate—at least, not with him. He owed Mr. Corson that much.
He wished he could get her address somehow.
He took his hands out of his pockets,
and his sunglasses fell out. They landed beside the toilet. He was
about to pick them up off the floor, but he heard the bathroom door
squeak open, then footsteps. Chris froze. The person seemed to stop
just outside the stall. He tried to peek through the gap where the
door was hinged, but he couldn’t see anybody.
“Chris?” he heard someone whisper. It
was a girl’s voice.
“Serena?” he said, ready to open the
door. But when she didn’t answer right away, he hesitated.
“Serena?” he asked again.
“Chris, it’s about to start,” she
whispered. The voice didn’t belong to Serena, he could
tell.
“Who’s there?” He fumbled with the door
lock, trying to undo it. “What are you talking about?”
“The killing is about to
start.”
“What?” he murmured. A chill raced
through him.
There was no response, just footsteps
on the tile floor again, and the restroom door
yawning.
Chris twisted the lock another way and
finally pulled open the stall door. He raced out to the corridor.
It was empty. How could she have moved that fast? He knocked on the
women’s room door. There was no response, so he peeked inside at
the small lounge area with a settee, chairs, and a dressing
table—with two boxes of Kleenex on it.
He ventured through the next doorway.
He heard a steady drip from one of the sink faucets. The washroom
looked empty, but two of the three stall doors were closed. Chris
crouched down and peered at the openings between the floor and the
bottom of the doors. He didn’t see anybody’s feet. He straightened
up.
“What are you doing in
here?”
Chris swiveled around and saw a
middle-aged woman with stiff-looking platinum-blond hair gaping at
him from the doorway.
“Um, sorry,” he managed to say. “I was
looking for my sister.”
She just stared at him, a hand on her
pearl necklace.
“You didn’t—you didn’t happen to see a
girl run up the hallway a minute ago, did you?” he asked. “Maybe
she was in the lobby?”
Frowning, the blond lady shook her
head. “If you don’t mind, young man, I’d like to use the
facilities.”
“Sure, sorry, excuse me,” Chris
muttered, brushing past her, and then out the doorway.
He glanced down the corridor again,
thinking maybe Serena had ducked into an empty office. That must
have been her in the bathroom, playing a joke on him. She knew his
name. Who else could it have been? She’d done a good job disguising
her voice. But why would she say that? The killing
is about to start. Leave it to a Goth girl to think that was
funny.
Chris noticed a long window along the
wall farther down the hallway. The wooden venetian blinds on the
other side of the glass were slanted open wide enough for him to
look into an office. A pale, balding, thirtyish man with
black-rimmed glasses sat in front of a computer screen on one of
the two sleek mahogany desks. The small office was nicely appointed
with hunter-green walls, bookcases full of what looked like
catalogs, and a window overlooking Cal Anderson Park. In his black
suit, black tie, and dark blue shirt ensemble, the man at the desk
seemed to take his job in the funeral parlor very
seriously.
Chris knocked on the door, and then
opened it. “Excuse me, hi,” he said.
The man glanced up at him, thinly
disguising his annoyance. “Can I help you?”
“Yes, did you see a girl run down the
hallway here a few minutes ago?” Chris asked.
“No, I’m sorry,” he said. He slid a
printed sheet of paper inside an eight-by-ten envelope so the
address appeared through a little window. It looked like a
bill.
Chris stared at it. He remembered
something Serena had said: “Aunt Jenna’s paying for
this thing. You’d think she’d want to put in an
appearance.”
The man gazed at him over the rims of
his glasses. “Is there anything else?”
“Yes, sir,” Chris said. “My mother sent
me in here to get the address for Jenna Corson. She’s Ray Corson’s
widow. It’s a new address in Kent, and my mother wants to send Mrs.
Corson some flowers.”
With a pinched smile, the man reached
for a business card from a little silver tray on his desk. “Your
mother can send the flowers care of us, and we’ll see that Mrs.
Corson gets them.”
“Well, that’s just the thing,” Chris
said, taking the card with Bonney-Watson Funeral
Home and the man’s name on it. “See, the last time she did
that here, Mr. Decker, her friend never got the flowers, and my mom
was really ticked off. So she sent me in here for the address.
Corson. It’s a new address—in
Kent.”
Frowning a bit, the man turned to his
computer keyboard and started typing. Then he copied down the
address on a memo pad.
“And the phone number, too,” Chris
thought to say. “The florist is gonna want it.”
The man sighed and scribbled down the
address.
Five minutes later, Chris was near the
side of the Bonney-Watson building to get some distance from all
the traffic noise on the cross street, Broadway. He was dialing the
number for Jenna Corson on his cell phone. He wasn’t sure what he’d
say if he got her machine, or if he’d even leave a message. He
started to count the ringtones.
Someone picked up on the third ring.
“Hello?” It was a woman’s voice.
“Hello, is Mrs. Jenna Corson there,
please?”
“Speaking.”
Chris covered his free ear as a floral
delivery truck pulled into the driveway beside the funeral parlor.
“Mrs. Corson, this is . . .” He hesitated and glanced at the truck.
“This is Emerald City Flowers calling. We have a delivery for you.
Are you going to be home for the next hour?”
There was a pause on the other end of
the line, and Chris held his breath.
“Yes, I’ll be home,” she said
finally.
“We have you at 22013 Forty-second
Avenue in Kent, Unit 2-F, is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll be there within the hour, Mrs.
Corson, thank you,” he said.
“Thanks,” she said. Then he heard a
click on the other end.
Chris switched off the cell phone. He
had a strange feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach. It had
been stupid of him to pretend he was someone else on the phone; but
he’d figured she would hang up if she knew it was him. Now she’d be
even angrier once she found he’d lied to her.
He heard a door slam and saw a young,
heavyset woman with red hair unloading a blooming plant from the
back of the truck. “Excuse me?” he called to her. “Is that for
Corson?”
She hesitated, and then glanced at the
card on the plant. “Yeah,” she said.
“I’ll take it, thanks,” he said,
holding out his hand.
She gave him a crooked grin. “Wait a
sec. Who are you?”
Chris straightened his tie. Then he
pulled out the business card with Bonney-Watson
Funeral Home and the man’s name on it. He flashed it at the
woman. “We were expecting you an hour ago.”
“Oh, well, sorry.” The redhead handed
him the mum plant.
“It’s okay,” Chris said. “Mrs. Corson
will be glad to get it.”
Minutes later, Chris sat in the back of
a Yellow Cab, balancing the blooming plant in his lap. He was on
his way to Kent. The card on the little plastic holder read:
To Jenna—Thinking of you, with love, Dennis &
Debbie Gotlieb.
Chris felt inside his jacket pocket for
his sunglasses, but they weren’t there. Then he remembered—they
were on the bathroom floor in the funeral parlor. An
eighty-five-dollar pair of Ray-Bans, right down the toilet—or in
this case, right beside the toilet. He checked his other pocket
just to make sure. No, he had his cell phone in there, and nothing
else.
His cell
phone.
“Shit!” he whispered. He realized—after
thinking he’d been so damn clever with the funeral parlor guy and
the florist—he’d done something really bonehead stupid. He’d called
Mrs. Corson on his cell phone, pretending to
be someone else. She almost certainly had caller ID. She might have
forgotten to check it when she’d picked up the phone. But chances
were she would check it before he showed up at her door. Maybe she
already knew it had been him calling.
He felt that knot in his stomach again
and wished he’d just been honest with her. He expected his cell
phone to ring any minute—with Mrs. Corson on the other end, ready
to chew him out. And he would deserve it.
“Stupid,” Chris muttered to himself. He
adjusted the mum plant in his lap and pressed a hand to his
stomach.
He felt the knot
tightening.