SEVEN
CHIEF Walter Clegg stared out his office window at
the tree-lined, flag-draped streets of his town, his hands clenched
behind his back.
He couldn’t argue with
the results of the autopsy. Or with Burke’s carefully prepared
affidavit for a warrant to search the Ellis home. That didn’t mean
he had to like them.
At this moment, Walt
wasn’t feeling any too warmly toward Burke, either. Steve Burke was
a good cop, dogged, honest, and imaginative. But the very qualities
that had led Walt to hire him also made him a pain in the
ass.
Walt fumbled for his
handkerchief and mopped the sweat from his forehead. Once the media
learned the contents of the warrant, they would know the police
were looking for a murder weapon. And once that happened, interest
in the case—and in Ellis and in his books—would
explode.
Damn writer deserved
what was coming to him, poking around where he didn’t belong. But
once the media was let loose on a story, they might sniff out even
an old, cold trail. A trail Walt had believed buried twenty years
ago.
Walt turned away from
the window, folding his handkerchief back in his pocket. It
couldn’t be helped now. Steve Burke would do what he had to
do.
And so would
Walt.
REGAN rode the
escalator down to baggage claim, her mind reeling and her stomach
churning with grief and caffeine. She shouldn’t have drunk a Red
Bull for breakfast. She should have bought a bagel at the airport
instead. She shouldn’t have taken a plane at all. I-85 was a bitch
around Charlotte, but if she’d tackled the six-hour drive from
Atlanta to Stokesville she’d at least have her car. She’d have
control. She wouldn’t be stuck waiting for a ride at the fucking
airport, the way she had every Christmas holiday from seventh grade
on.
Slinging her purse
over her shoulder, Regan stalked to the carousel. The other
passengers got out of her way.
“Help you with your
bag?” offered a middle-aged guy in a suit.
Regan narrowed her
eyes and he backed off.
“Regan?” A woman’s
voice, almost unaccented, like one of those newscasters on TV.
“Regan Poole?”
So she didn’t have to
wait after all. Regan grabbed her Louis Vuitton bag off the moving
belt and turned.
The voice belonged to
Paul’s dweeby secretary, Bailey something, standing there wearing
an uncertain smile and really awful clothes—a black T-shirt and
totally boring khaki slacks. Honestly, you’d think living in New
York would have taught her something about fashion.
Regan raised her
eyebrows coolly, pretending not to recognize her.
“Yes?”
Dweeb girl flushed.
Her gaze was dark, direct, and insufferably kind. “Bailey Wells. We
met in New York. I’m so sorry about your mother.”
I
just bet you are, Regan thought.
“Where’s Paul?” she
asked.
“He couldn’t get away.
Can I take your suitcase?”
Regan gripped the
handle tighter. “I can manage. Where’s the car?”
She was being a bitch.
So what? She was entitled. Somebody should be as miserable as she
was right now. Paul wasn’t here, Richard wasn’t coming, and her
mother . . . God, her mother was dead.
Bailey made an obvious
and convenient target. Helen used to make fun of her. And while
Regan made a point of never seeing eye to eye with her mother,
adopting Helen’s dislikes now that she was dead seemed an excellent
way to demonstrate her loyalty.
Bailey’s smile faded.
The pity in her eyes didn’t. “I parked in the hourly lot. It’s not
far.”
“I know how far it
is.”
Flying to and from
boarding school for six crappy years, Regan had learned her way
around fucking Raleigh-Durham airport.
Only the airport had
changed. Everything changed. Regan glared when Bailey touched her
arm, silently redirecting her steps, and waited in sullen silence
as her stepfather’s secretary fed a dollar into a new, automated
parking kiosk.
“All set.” Bailey
reached again for Regan’s suitcase, and this time Regan let her
have it. It was hot, and she was sick of lugging the damn thing
anyway. “Right this way.”
The rattle of luggage
wheels and the clack of Regan’s heels echoed through the dim,
cavernous garage.
Bailey fished in her
purse. A keyless entry code bleeped from the line of cars along one
wall.
Regan stopped dead,
staring at the parked silver Lexus. “That’s my mother’s
car.”
“Paul thought you
would be more comfortable in this than in my mother’s car.” Bailey opened the trunk and
hefted Regan’s suitcase inside. “And having driven my mom’s car
around for the past couple days, I can tell you he’s totally
right.”
Her dry tone invited
Regan to share the joke, but Regan didn’t want to share anything.
Certainly not with the dweeb. She had no right to drive Helen’s
car.
Regan flung herself in
the front seat, flipped all the air-conditioning vents in her
direction and dropped her head against the headrest.
Bailey eased the Lexus
out of its slot, exiting the parking deck so slowly Regan wanted to
scream. Sun slammed through the windshield. Outside, the landscaped
curves and staked-out trees withered in the heat as the car picked
up speed.
“So, how was your
flight?” Bailey asked.
Like she
cared.
Regan turned her face
to the window. She didn’t have to talk to Bailey. Bailey was
nothing. Nobody. A glorified geek who’d gone to the public school
with every other hick in town. She’d escaped on some kind of
scholarship, but she couldn’t be that smart, or she wouldn’t be
working for Paul.
For almost an hour,
they drove in silence. The sun glittered on the concrete median and
glared on the road. Regan’s head pounded from an overload of
caffeine and not enough sleep. She closed her eyes.
“We’re
here.”
Regan started.
Blinked.
Bailey cut the engine
and turned to face her, cheerful and falsely confident as a
substitute teacher in middle school. “I’ll take your bag to your
room. Can I get you something to eat?”
Regan dragged herself
together. “No.”
All she wanted was
sleep.
And for her father to
be alive, and for her mother to be lying out by the pool nodding
off over a drink and a cigarette, and for this nightmare to be
over, but none of those things were happening. She might as well
nap.
Paul acted exactly as
expected, lots of deep, tragic looks and fake paternal hugs. Regan
leaned in from the shoulder to keep him off her boobs and stepped
back.
“Dear girl,” he kept
saying.
The dweeb had the
decency not to stick around while Paul acted all grateful and
relieved Regan was here for her own mother’s funeral. She heard the
secretary tromping upstairs lugging the bag and then in the kitchen
talking to some other women. The church ladies must have been in
and out all day, delivering the covered dishes, plates of ham,
Co-cola cake and cheese straws that accompanied death in
Stokesville. Regan knew she should go out there and thank them, but
just the thought of all that food made her want to hurl. Let Little
Miss Efficiency deal with it.
“I’m going to lie
down,” she announced. “See you at dinner.”
Paul gave her a small,
sad smile. “Whatever you want, dear girl. We’re just family
tonight.”
Family, my ass. He
wasn’t her family. She didn’t have family anymore, except for
Richard, and he wasn’t here. She should have told her brother he
didn’t get any money unless he showed up.
Regan stopped at the
top of the stairs. Now there was an idea. Maybe she could sell it
to the lawyer.
She shoved open the
door to her old room and dropped her purse on the bed. A splash of
color on the dresser caught her eye: flowers, fresh garden flowers,
in a tiny silver bud vase beside a pile of magazines. Tears sprang
to her eyes. Ah, shit.
The last few times
she’d visited her mother in New York, Helen had done the same
thing, left flowers and fresh towels, a bottle of spring water and
the latest magazines beside her bed. Her mother had never been big
on the kissy-face stuff, so the gesture had really meant
something—a sign of her mother’s love, a tacit acknowledgment of
Regan’s new, grown-up status. She touched the flowers’ petals.
Thumbed through the magazines. All her favorites were there,
Cosmo, People, Us, just like
before.
Her head pounded.
Exactly like before.
Which meant . . .
Which meant . . .
Her chest tightened.
The magazines hadn’t been her mother’s doing. Hadn’t been her
mother’s idea. The magazines, the water, the flowers, everything,
were from fucking efficient Bailey.
Heat swept Regan. She
stormed out of her room and down the stairs, her rage and grief
boiling inside her.
Bailey had left the
kitchen and was talking quietly with Paul in the hall. Something
about the way they stood—too close, heads bent together in easy
intimacy—hit Regan in the gut.
“What is she still
doing here?”
They looked up at her
with nearly identical expressions of controlled patience. Like a
couple. Like a unit. That was wrong.
Bailey hesitated, as
if waiting for Paul to speak. When he didn’t, she said gently, “I’m
just helping with the funeral arrangements.”
Like she’d “helped”
with the flower arrangement in Regan’s room?
“I can do that. She
was my mother. You can buzz off.”
“No, she can’t.” Paul
sounded cool, almost amused. “She lives here, too,
Regan.”
Which made it worse.
How much worse, Regan wasn’t sure yet. She only knew she didn’t
want another woman in her mother’s house, taking her mother’s
place.
Bailey hadn’t lived
with them in New York.
“That’s bullshit,”
Regan said.
Paul drew himself up
in displeasure. “I know you’re upset, dear girl, but you can’t talk
that way in front of Bailey.”
The dweeb frowned at
him. “Actually, I think—”
“I’ll fucking talk any
way I want,” Regan interrupted.
“Not in my house,”
Paul said.
“This isn’t your
house. It’s mine,” Regan said, pulsing with misery and triumph. Her
gaze cut from her stepfather to his secretary. “And I don’t want
her here.”
“THIS isn’t your
house.” Gabrielle’s chin stuck out. “It’s Grandma’s. And Grandma
said I could paint the chair.”
The chair in question,
now a lurid reddish purple, glowed in the dim garage, its feet in
tiny puddles of paint. Bright, graffiti-like whorls decorated the
scattered newspaper. Discarded cans of spray paint—two of them—bled
and rolled on the cement floor. A fine purple spray misted the
handles of Eugenia’s garden tools and the nearby lawn
mower.
Steve shook his head.
What was his mother thinking?
His daughter was
easier to figure. Steve surveyed her from her paint-streaked hands
to her miserable, defiant eyes, and realized it was payback time.
She still hadn’t forgiven him for skipping out on the movie the
other day.
If Teresa were here .
. . But she wasn’t.
If he’d spent the
morning at home . . . But he hadn’t. He’d gone in early to prepare
an affidavit for a search warrant of the Ellis house.
“I told you to wrap
things up,” Walt had complained.
“You told me to do my
job,” Steve had replied.
And damn the
consequences.
So in two hours, when
the magistrate returned from lunch, Steve had to go back to
convince him he had probable cause to search for a weapon. He only
hoped the judge would be less hostile than the chief.
Or
Gabrielle.
So did he give his
daughter the talking-to she deserved or the attention she so
obviously needed?
“The chair, fine,” he
said evenly. “Not the garage.”
Gabrielle’s chin
wobbled. “I tried outside. But the wind blew the newspaper, and it
stuck to the paint.”
“I can see that would
be a problem,” Steve acknowledged. “But now we’ve got another
one.”
Her gaze slid from
his. He watched her shoulders slump as she took in the purple
carnage. “I’m sorry,” she muttered.
That always helps, she’d said to
Bailey.
Well, she had him
pegged.
He rubbed his jaw.
“Need a hand with cleanup?”
She bit her lip.
Nodded.
She was a good kid,
Steve thought. A great kid. She deserved a father who spent more
time with her. “Let’s move this onto the driveway so it can
dry.”
“Do you like it?”
Gabrielle asked as he slid the chair onto a piece of cardboard and
dragged it outside.
“It’s very . . .” The
paint blazed in the sun. “. . . purple.”
Gabrielle scowled.
Wrong answer. “It’s not purple. It’s
fuchsia.”
“Fuchsia, huh? It’s
bright.”
Teresa had loved
bright colors.
“But do you like it?”
his daughter asked.
He liked anything that
made her happy. He shook out a trash bag. “Yep. You pick out the
color yourself?”
“Uh huh. Grandma said
I could. And she gave me the chair from the attic.”
Steve hunted paint
thinner on the cluttered shelves. “Where are you going to put
it?”
“In my room. To make
it more . . .” Kneeling, Gabrielle busied herself bundling
newspaper.
Steve glanced at his
daughter’s bowed head. He knew when a subject was holding back on
him. “To make it more . . . ?”
“Like home,” she
said.
Steve felt sucker
punched. “Honey . . .”
“It’s okay,” she said,
not looking up.
It wasn’t. But for
once Steve wasn’t sure how to make it right.
“We won’t always live
with Grandma,” he said. “As soon as we sell the townhouse, we’re
going to buy a nice house here. And you can paint your room any
color you want.”
“I don’t want to sell
our house in D.C.,” Gabrielle said, her voice muffled.
His heart wrenched.
“We talked about this, Gabby. It’s better for us to live in
Stokesville now. It’s nice here, right?”
Unless you have kids whose horizons stretch farther than
the town limits, Bailey had said.
“I know it’s tough
without Rosa. But there are people here who can take care of you,”
he continued doggedly.
“I don’t need a nanny
anymore. I can take care of myself.”
“Not according to
Child Services.”
“Well, you take care
of me.”
Not well enough, he thought.
“Sometimes I have to
work,” he said. “And then it’s good your Grandma is
here.”
“Grandma says she
won’t always be here.”
His chest squeezed.
Hadn’t his daughter had enough experience with death and dying
without Eugenia sharing her fears of her own mortality? “Well . .
.”
“She said she’s going
to Asheville on Friday with her book club group.”
He breathed again.
“But she’ll be back Saturday night.”
His daughter watched
him from the corners of her eyes. “Grandma says what I really need
is a mother.”
“Your grandmother
talks too much,” Steve said grimly.
Gabrielle ignored
this. “You could get married again.”
Jesus.
“I don’t think that
will work,” Steve said gently.
She sat back on her
heels, giving him her full attention. “Why not?”
He didn’t have the
time or energy to invest in another relationship. He didn’t have
the heart. Or the guts.
“Well . . . I don’t
really know anybody.”
Gabrielle cocked her
head.
Steve felt uneasy.
He’d seen that look before when Teresa wanted something. It used to
presage a shopping trip. But Gabrielle couldn’t go shopping for a
mother.
He tried to clarify.
“Before two people can get married they have to do a lot of other
stuff first. Like go on dates.”
“Oh.” Gabrielle
sighed. “Yeah, I guess you wouldn’t be good at that.”
“Right,” Steve said,
relieved. But curiosity wouldn’t let him let it go. “Why
not?”
Gabrielle grinned.
“Because you’d make your date leave the movie.”
He
laughed.
“I think that’s
everything,” Bailey told Paul, desperately upbeat. She popped the
flash drive from his laptop’s USB port. “I’ve backed up all your
files and the documents folder. I can work from my parents’
house.”
As long as she could
persuade her dad to stay out of his office and her mother to leave
her alone.
Dorothy, who preferred
even the TV to her own company, had never understood or approved of
her younger daughter’s desire for solitude.
What are you doing up there? she would call up the
stairs when Bailey used to escape to her room after school.
You’re not doing anything.
Nothing but reading or
writing or dreaming.
Nothing her mother
considered worthwhile.
And leave your door open! she’d say, as if she
could save her daughter from the perversion of privacy that
way.
How can you expect to get anywhere if you spend all your
time in your room?
Well, maybe Mom was
right on that one.
Because here Bailey
was, almost twenty-seven years old, unpublished, unmarried,
slinking home to escape the scandal of an unconsummated love affair
and an ongoing murder investigation, moving back under her parents’
roof and driving her mother’s car.
As a career
development, it pretty much sucked. As personal achievements went,
it was an all-time low.
Paul slouched against
the corner of his desk, stretching out long, elegant legs in
perfectly pressed khaki. “I want you to stay.”
Bailey ignored the
lick of longing and dropped the lipstick-sized flash drive into her
purse. “My being here makes Regan uncomfortable.”
He held her gaze, a
smile touching the corner of his mouth. “And you’re being gone
makes me uncomfortable.”
She resisted the lure
of that long look. Being needed was one thing. Being stupid was
another. “I can’t stay. Regan thinks—”
“Regan’s opinions are
hardly my biggest concern right now.”
“What Regan thinks,
other people will be saying.”
Paul shrugged. “Small
town, small minds.”
“Big mouths,” Bailey
said. “People talk.”
“So what? As soon as I
finish this book, we’ll be gone. Back to New York, where we
belong.”
That “we” should have
thrilled her. Wasn’t that what she wanted? Paul and New York. She
didn’t belong in Stokesville. She never had.
And yet . . . Her
family lived here. Her father owned the hardware store. Her sister
belonged to the Junior League. Her mother . . . How would her
mother hold up her head in church if the whole congregation was
whispering about her daughter’s relationship with her famous
boss?
Didn’t Paul see that?
Or didn’t he care?
“It’s going to be
difficult to leave town if—” You’re arrested
for murder. She gulped. “—if the police decide to listen to
gossip,” she finished weakly.
“Let them. You of all
people know I was faithful to Helen.”
Bailey flushed
guiltily. Yes, she did.
“I loved her,” Paul said dramatically.
Bailey winced. But a
small, cold kernel held aloof, observing, as if she were watching a
mediocre actor in a very bad play. She didn’t much like her own
role, either.
“Unfortunately, the
police are more interested in your dry-cleaning than your
feelings,” she said.
“The police are
incompetent.”
Bailey didn’t think
Steve Burke was incompetent at all. But she said, “All the more
reason for you to be careful.”
“I am being careful. I
spoke to my lawyer. And I revoked that consent to
search.”
After she’d told him
Steve Burke had confiscated his best black suit to test for blood
stains.
“Are you sure that was
a good idea?” Bailey asked.
“I’m under no
obligation to cooperate with Barney Fife. Besides, as you pointed
out, I could hardly host Helen’s funeral from my hotel
room.”
He’d picked a heck of
a time to start listening to her. “Yes, but now the police might
think you have something to hide.”
“I don’t care what
they think. They can’t prove anything, and I don’t have to let them
in my house.”
“Regan’s house,”
Bailey corrected without thinking.
Paul
glared.
She
flushed.
“It’s ridiculous.”
Lines of temper marred his lean, handsome face. “She’ll want me out
next.”
“I’m sure she’ll calm
down,” Bailey said soothingly. “Once I leave—”
“How am I supposed to
get any work done?”
Had he always been
this self-absorbed? Or was she simply more aware of it since the
move back home? In New York, she had been dazzled by his notice and
blinded by her own loneliness. Now, without even her little studio
to provide escape, she saw too clearly how dependent she had
become—financially, professionally, and emotionally.
The thought made her
wince.
Paul depended on her,
too, Bailey reminded herself. That’s why he was so
upset.
“If you need anything,
all you have to do is call,” she reassured him.
He studied her, his
head angled to one side. “I suppose you could take the evidence
boxes with you.”
Bailey blinked, sure
she hadn’t heard him correctly. “What?”
“I’ll be far too
distracted to work. You might as well use your little time away to
go through the evidence boxes.”
After Billy Ray
Dawler’s conviction, the evidence from his trial had been packed
away into heavy cardboard file boxes. The police didn’t want to
keep them; the department had a storage shortage. The district
attorney’s office didn’t want to destroy them; the DA worried about
the possibility of appeals. So for twenty years, the boxes sat
forgotten in the DA’s property room. The current DA had been only
too happy when celebrated crime writer Paul Ellis expressed an
interest in the old case and offered to take them off his hands.
But as far as Bailey knew, Paul had never touched
them.
“What do you mean, go
through them?”
“I want you to
inventory the contents.”
Okay, that made sense.
Paul was already reading the trial transcripts, hundreds and
hundreds of pages. He had begun setting up interviews with Billy
Ray and his jurors, his high school teachers, and the chief of
police. Sooner or later, Paul would want to review the actual
physical evidence.
But couldn’t he wait
to play detective until after the funeral?
“You want me to do
that now?” Bailey asked.
Paul looked pained. “I
suppose you think I should do
it.”
She felt hot and
uncomfortable. Angry, and that made her even more uncomfortable.
This was to be her punishment, she thought, for abandoning him. “I
don’t even know what you’re looking for. Everything’s
disorganized.”
“So organize it.
That’s what you do.”
The implication was
clear. That’s what he paid her for.
Bailey drew another
deep breath.
“Right. Can
do.”
Paul smiled, appeased.
“I’ll help you take the boxes out to the car.” She must have looked
surprised, because he added, “They’re heavy.”
She expected he’d
forget his offer by the time she came back downstairs.
But her own packing
didn’t take that long. Her apartment furniture—the stuff she didn’t
sell, the rose wing chair with the velvet worn in spots, the 1920s
steamer trunk she’d used as a coffee table—was still in storage.
She planned to move her clothes in stages. Maybe by the time she
emptied her closet, she’d have found a way to tell her mother she
was moving home for good.
The thought made her
shudder. Or maybe she’d find another place to live. Someplace
close. Someplace cheap. In New York, she’d scrounged from paycheck
to paycheck, and she hadn’t been in Stokesville long enough yet to
save the security deposit for an apartment.
Paul carried the final
carton to her mother’s car and closed the trunk with a final
sounding slam. “I’ll see you tonight.”
She nodded. “Hobart
Funeral Home, seven o’clock.”
“Come by the house
first. I don’t want anything to go wrong tomorrow.”
She understood his
concern. The funeral of Helen Stokes Ellis was sure to be
well-attended. Helen might not have been well-liked, but she was
One Of Our Own. And every soul at the church would show up at the
house afterward, eager to eat and drink and talk in hushed tones
about the flowers, the music, and the circumstances surrounding her
death. Someone had to be on hand to see the silver was polished,
the donated dishes were listed and labeled, and the ice didn’t run
out. But . . .
“Is Regan going to
want me handling the arrangements for her mother’s funeral
reception?”
“I don’t give a damn
what Regan wants. I need you, Bailey.”
Her objections stuck
in her throat. She swallowed, unable to resist his appeal. “I’ll be
there.”
Paul’s tired smile
crinkled the corners of his eyes. “That’s my girl.”
Thawing, she returned
his smile. But when he reached for her, she stepped back,
uncomfortably conscious of the watching windows.
“So, I’ll see you at
six, then,” she said.
Which gave her barely
enough time to drop off her suitcase and change into a black skirt.
No time for dinner, which was bad. No time for explanations, which
was good.
No time to think.
Maybe that was best of all.
She let herself in
through the back door less than an hour later to find dirty dishes
in the sink and a scooped out casserole drying on the counter.
Bailey shook her head over the mess. For this she got her BA in
creative writing? But she was glad to see Paul and Regan had
eaten.
Rolling up the sleeves
of her good white blouse, she scraped, wrapped, rinsed plates and
wiped counters.
Most girls your age are driving carpool, her mother
had said. Or running errands for their
husbands.
Or doing dishes or
putting their kids to bed . . . Was she kidding herself, pretending
she was any different?
At least she got paid.
Bailey loaded the last glass into the dishwasher. At least she was
appreciated.
“What are you doing
here?” Regan’s hostile voice cut through the rush of running
water.
Bailey turned off the
tap and held on to her temper. The girl was grieving, she reminded
herself. Distraught. “My job.”
“Washing dishes?”
Regan sauntered forward, her face heartbreakingly young, her chic
black shift accented by her mama’s pearls and her very own diamond
studs. Big ones. Her gaze swept Bailey’s plain white blouse and
simple black skirt. “Well, at least you’re dressed for it. You look
like a waiter.”
Distraught, my ass. The girl was a
bitch.
“Thank you, Miz
Scarlett,” Bailey muttered.
Regan’s eyes narrowed.
“What?”
“Was there something
you wanted?”
“Yes. Your key.” Regan
held out her hand. “You don’t live here anymore.”
The doorbell rang.
Both women ignored it.
“But I work here,”
Bailey said.
The two notes chimed
again.
Regan held her gaze
and smirked. “Then I guess you can answer the door.”
It would have been
really satisfying to walk out at that moment. But not particularly
adult. Not responsible. Not helpful. The girl had just lost her
mother. Bailey couldn’t know what that was like. She couldn’t offer
Regan sympathy, couldn’t alleviate her grief or her rage. All she
could do at this moment was answer the damn door.
Steeling her spine,
she stalked past Regan into the hall and jerked open the
door.
“Lieutenant
Burke!”
He looked so big in
the lengthening shadows of the porch, big and solid and calm and
safe, a rock against the storms of emotion that had swept the house
all day. For one foolish moment, she was almost glad to see
him.
Of course he spoiled
it. “Is Ellis home?”
“I . . . He . . .” She
glanced past him to the curb, where his truck vied for position
with a black-and-white squad car and a dark blue sedan. This was so
obviously not a social call. Where was Paul? Why hadn’t he answered
the door? “He must be upstairs. The viewing is in half an
hour.”
“Who is it?” Regan
asked from behind her.
“Lieutenant Burke,
ma’am.” His hand slid into his jacket like a man reaching for his
gun. “We have a warrant to search these premises.”