TEN
“WHO invited Officer Grumpy?”
Regan’s loud voice
attracted glances, scandalized and indulgent, from the funeral
crowd surrounding the buffet table. Paul wondered how many of
Stokesville’s senior citizens were there for the free food and how
many had come for the gossip.
Bailey stood beside
him, tray in hand, doing her best to keep the food
flowing.
And Regan, it seemed,
was doing her best to add to the gossip.
“He’s staring at me,”
she continued petulantly.
His stepdaughter liked
to imagine everything revolved around her. Just like
Helen.
It was true Burke kept
looking in this direction.
It was even possible
he was attracted by Regan’s big breasts, blond hair, and overstated
makeup. Slut Barbie.
But Paul suspected the
detective’s true target was Bailey.
Or Paul
himself.
Paul brooded and
drank. They’d arrived together—Bailey and Burke. She had told him,
of course, she’d found another ride. She hadn’t told him with
whom.
What else hadn’t she
told him?
And what had she and
Burke talked about on the fifteen-minute drive home?
“It is an open house,”
Bailey said, balancing her overloaded tray. “Anyone who showed up
at the funeral could come.”
“Beautiful service,”
Macon contributed heartily, helping himself to a deviled
egg.
Regan tossed her head.
“I’m so glad you liked it.”
Bailey, of course,
said nothing about her own part in the arrangements. She never
claimed credit for her work. Paul found that very
useful.
He allowed himself a
small, sad smile. “I think Helen would have been
pleased.”
“Nice turnout, too,”
Macon said.
Regan swallowed the
contents of her wineglass. “I think they all came to see if Paul
would be arrested.”
Vicious little bitch.
Paul felt the rage surge inside him, the blood drain from his
face.
Macon laughed
uncomfortably.
“Does anyone want
coffee?” Bailey asked.
It would take more
than coffee to shut up his stepdaughter. More than Bailey’s pitiful
attempts at distraction to counteract Regan’s poison, allay Burke’s
suspicion and get public opinion to Paul’s side.
“It’s the police’s
fault,” Paul said. “But I suppose I can’t expect them to be
impartial. They’re just looking for ways to discredit
me.”
Regan rolled her eyes.
“Oh, please.”
“It’s true,” Paul
insisted. “This fuss over Helen’s accident is all some absurd
payback because I wouldn’t drop my investigation of the Dawler
case.”
Macon put up his
eyebrows. “Seems to me there’s not much to investigate. That boy
confessed.”
“Which is all the
police based their case on,” Paul said.
“Are you saying he
didn’t do it?”
“Let’s just say the
case was far more complicated than Chief Clegg wants people to
believe. Or bothered to find out at the time.”
Macon’s face creased.
“Now, I don’t know. Family like that . . . Bound to be trouble.
Billy Ray didn’t have an easy time of it. Whore for a mother. Tramp
for a sister. Folks around here figured he just finally had
enough.”
“She wasn’t a tramp,”
Bailey said.
“Excuse
me?”
“Tanya Dawler. She was
only fifteen.”
“Old enough to get
into trouble,” Macon said.
“Literally,” Paul
said. “She was three months pregnant when she died.”
“Did you know her?”
Bailey asked Macon.
He smiled down at her.
“I was in school with her brother. Same as everybody else. But I
hadn’t heard she got herself knocked up.”
“It was in the autopsy
report,” Paul said.
“Nobody gets pregnant
all by herself,” Bailey said. “Somebody had to be the
father.”
Macon shrugged. “Sure.
But in that family, it could have been anyone. Including her own
brother.”
“Eww. Didn’t the cops do, like, a paternity test or
something?” Regan asked.
Her question caught
Paul by surprise. He hadn’t expected his stepdaughter to be paying
attention. Or to ask an almost intelligent question.
“This was nineteen
years ago,” Bailey explained. “DNA testing was just being
introduced.”
“So I guess we’ll
never know,” Macon said.
Paul allowed himself a
smile. “Investigative journalism isn’t like an episode of
CSI. It isn’t all about the science.
It’s about people. And people talk.”
Regan emptied her
wineglass. “Well, this girl—Tanya, is that her name?—can’t tell you
anything. She’s dead.”
“Her brother isn’t,”
Paul said.
Macon’s face relapsed
into that smooth, grave expression most people assume at funerals.
Quite appropriate, under the circumstances. “You didn’t
hear?”
“Hear what?” Bailey
asked.
“It’s all over the
sheriff’s department. Billy Ray was murdered in
prison.”
Paul froze, genuinely
shocked. His heart seized. Billy Ray couldn’t be dead. Paul needed
him.
Macon was wrong, that
was all. He must be wrong.
“You’re mistaken,” he
said stiffly, his heart galloping again. “Someone would have called
me.”
He’d certainly spent
enough in charm and in bribes over the past few weeks to warrant a
goddamn phone call.
“No mistake. My firm
represented him, you know. Well, my father’s firm. We got the call
this morning.”
“But I spoke with him
last week. He was fine.”
Better than fine. The
inarticulate Billy Ray was finally beginning to trust him. It
happened with every book, when writer and subject forged a
symbiotic bond. The killer relied on Paul to give him a voice. And
Paul depended on Billy Ray to give him a story.
Everything was finally
falling into place. One more interview, one more twist, and he
would have the sensational revelation that would take his book
beyond the common criminal-done-wrong story and launch it onto the
best-seller lists.
To get it, he had
dangled the promise of understanding in front of Billy Ray like the
prospect of salvation, skillfully playing on his subject’s need for
approval. Twenty years ago, that need had driven Billy Ray first to
murder and then to confession. Now it would drive him to tell Paul
the whole story. The true story.
All he needed was one
more interview.
“Well, he’s not fine
now. Killed in the shower.” Macon lowered his voice. “Sheriff said
it was likely some sexual thing.” He drew the word out.
Sex-you-all. “I don’t know the details
and I don’t want to know. You spoke with him, you
said?”
Paul drew a shaking
hand over his face. “Frequently.”
What a waste. What a
loss. Not a loss to society, of course, or even to him personally.
Billy Ray had been an undereducated, overreligious boob. But . . .
what would happen to his story now?
“Does this mean you
have to give the money back?” Regan needled Paul. “If you can’t,
like, finish the book?”
Oh, God, the money. He couldn’t possibly pay it
back. Not until Helen’s insurance paid out. How was he going to
salvage this?
“I’ll finish,” he
said. He had no choice but to finish. Somehow.
He watched the doubt
dawning in Bailey’s eyes and swore silently. He needed her loyalty.
What had she and Burke talked about on the ride here? Goddamn it,
did he have to worry about everything at once?
“What all did that boy
tell you?” Macon asked. “Exactly.”
“I can’t tell you.
Exactly,” Paul said. “It will all be in the book.”
Macon hesitated. “You
know, I wouldn’t put too much faith in everything Billy Ray said.
He never was quite right.”
“The police put enough
faith in his confession,” Paul said. “I’m just going to set the
record straight.”
“Who cares?” Regan
asked, slurring her words slightly. “He’s dead, isn’t he?
Everybody’s dead.”
Macon patted her arm.
“Let me get you another glass of wine.”
Across the room,
Burke’s dark gaze fixed on their little group.
Let him watch, Paul
thought. Let him wonder. The police got everything wrong anyway.
They had in the Dawler case. Clegg’s fault, that time, for rushing
to bring charges in the notorious deaths of the town
prostitutes.
Paul sipped his drink
thoughtfully. Of course, Clegg might have had his reasons for
wanting the case wrapped up so quickly. Pressure from the mayor,
maybe, or the media, or other, personal reasons of his own . .
.
It was worth thinking
about. Paul was not above blackmail.
But with any luck, the
police chief would be just as eager to resolve Helen’s case, and
Paul would be out of the woods. His wife’s death was tragic, an
unfortunate necessity. And if that damn detective, Burke, pushed
the matter, well . . .
Paul would make sure
someone else took the blame.
BAILEY couldn’t wait
to go home.
Okay, not home,
exactly. The feng shui hall and blue-flowered bedroom in her
parents’ house no longer felt like home, and her studio apartment
in East Village had been sublet to a massage therapist from Ohio
named Ken.
But away from
here.
The house was silent
now. The guests were gone. Regan was somewhere. Upstairs, Bailey
hoped. Dorothy had shown up with a covered casserole made with
Campbell’s cream of celery soup. She stayed the requisite
half-hour, finally leaving Bailey with a hissed reminder to reapply
her lipstick.
As if she should be
trolling for hookups at Helen’s funeral reception.
Her mother had also
given Bailey a hug and the keys to her car. Bailey appreciated
both, even though accepting the keys reminded her sharply that at
twenty-six she had nothing to call her own but a few pieces of
furniture in storage and a three-ring notebook with the rough draft
of her first novel inside.
She sprinkled powdered
detergent into the dishwasher door and slammed it shut to run
another load. She wanted better.
She wanted to matter.
Somehow. Somewhere.
Not here.
It was hardly a
choice. More a realization, whispering at the back of her mind,
coalescing, heavy and cold, in her belly.
She shook a dish towel
over the sink. She wouldn’t find what she wanted here.
She’d thought she had.
Or that she could. She did intellectually stimulating, well-paid
work for a man who professed to admire her mind and support her
goals.
And told her—again and
again—her work wasn’t ready to show to anyone but him.
Bailey twisted the
towel in her hands.
Steve’s dark drawl
joined the whisper at the back of her mind. It
wouldn’t be the first time an employer took advantage of an
employee. . . . Seems to me he does it all the
time.
No, she didn’t belong
here. Not anymore.
She draped the dish
towel over the bar of the oven to dry. But how could she leave so
soon after Helen’s death?
The heaviness settled
in her stomach. How could she stay?
She set the
coffeemaker to brew in the morning and propped the note for the
cleaning lady in its usual place by the phone. Flipping off the
kitchen lights, she made her way through the darkened first floor
to the front door.
“Bailey.”
Just her name, spoken
out of the darkness, stopped her at the base of the stairs. She
turned her head.
Paul slumped in one of
the big leather chairs flanking the fireplace, cradling a brandy
glass in his hands.
Bailey cleared her
suddenly dry throat. “I was just leaving.”
He didn’t say
anything. The light from the hall cast shadows on his haggard face
and hollowed eyes.
She should go. She was
going.
But habit and
compassion made her say, “Can I get you anything
first?”
“You left,” he
accused.
Bailey blinked. She
hadn’t gone anywhere yet. “It’s late.”
“Before,” he said, a
hint of impatience in his tone. “You didn’t ride home with me from
the funeral.”
Bailey was relieved,
both because he sounded more like himself and because he was making
sense now. Sort of. “I told you I got another ride.”
“And this offer, this
ride, from—someone—was more important to you than the fact that I
needed your support.”
Bailey’s heart
plummeted to join her stomach. Obviously, he’d been drinking. And
she’d had enough dates that began or ended in bars to know you
couldn’t reason with a drunk.
She tried anyway. “I
didn’t think it would look right, my being alone with you like
that.”
“And avoiding me
looked so much better.” Paul shook his head. “You drove off from my
wife’s funeral with the detective trying to frame me for her
death.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
Her voice sounded shaky. Defensive. Could he hear it?
“What did he want?”
Paul asked.
Bailey’s heart
pounded.
Maybe I wanted to warn you.
“To talk, I guess,”
she said.
“What did you tell
him?”
Did she really want to
blurt out her confession of misplaced devotion and thwarted hope?
No shame in not coming right out with
it.
No. Bad enough Steve knew about her stupid crush.
Telling Paul would only make the situation worse. Not to mention
unbearably awkward. She couldn’t stand his pity. And she wouldn’t
know what to do with anything else.
She hedged. “Nothing
much. We talked a little about my work.”
“About me.” Paul rose
impatiently. “What did you tell him about me?”
Bailey took a deep
breath. “I said you were devoted to your wife.”
“Dear Bailey.” Paul
touched her cheek. “Always so loyal.”
She jerked her head
back. Was he mocking her?
“Look, it’s been a
long day,” she said. “I should—”
“It has been. A very
long, very difficult day.” Paul’s hand dropped, skimming her arm,
brushing her hand.
Bailey
started.
“A difficult week.” He
braceleted her wrist. “A difficult year.” He tightened his
grip.
Bailey backed into an
end table. “Uh . . .”
“It will get better,”
Paul promised. “Soon. When we’re back in New York.”
She could not believe
this. Did not want to believe this could be happening now, when he
was free and she was—literally, finally!—on her way out the
door.
“I don’t know how I
would have made it through without you,” he whispered. His breath
was warm and laced with brandy.
“Always happy to
help,” she said, insanely perky.
Oh, God, she wanted to go.
He smiled. “That’s
what I’m counting on,” he said, and lowered his head to
hers.
His mouth was hot and
wet. Invasive.
Shock kept her still
for one second. Two. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, while her
mind raced in panic.
He was grieving.
Drunk. He didn’t know what he was doing.
She didn’t know what
to do.
She felt the bulge of
his erection as he pressed against her, and revulsion rose in her,
sharp as nausea. She flattened her palms against his chest to push
him away.
“This is cozy.”
Regan’s voice rattled into the overheated atmosphere like
hailstones in July. “Are we celebrating something?”
Bailey stumbled back,
almost knocking over the table. Regan stood at the base of the
stairs, her blond hair blazing in the light of the chandelier, her
face contorted.
“No, I . . . it’s not
what you’re thinking.”
“Gee,
really?”
“I was just telling
Paul how sorry I was.”
“Sorry?” Regan’s voice
cracked. “You’re not sorry. You’re pathetic. He doesn’t get
anything, you know. Not if he killed her. And not if he remarries,
either. So you’re wasting your time.”
Unreality gripped
Bailey. “I’m not . . . It wasn’t . . . Paul, tell
her!”
But he looked at her
as if he’d never seen her before. “He didn’t get anything in a
divorce, either,” Regan said. “But I guess he told you
that.”
“No, he didn’t. We
never . . .” This was a nightmare. “Paul?”
He roused himself to
speak slowly. “Helen’s death was an accident.”
Under the panic, under
the disbelief, anger grew. “Of course it was.”
“She was in the pool
when you found her.”
“Yes!”
Oh, God, he didn’t
think . . . he didn’t suspect . . .
He did. He and Regan
thought she had killed Helen because she wanted Paul and Paul
wanted Helen’s money.
She was
screwed.
“I don’t believe you,”
Regan said. “And the police won’t, either. Not when I tell them
what I saw tonight.”
She could deny it,
Bailey thought. Steve might believe her.
Your mother told me you weren’t romantically involved.
Which is what you would have told her whether you were or
not.
She shivered. Or he
might not.
I’m keeping an open mind, he’d said.
But that was before
Regan went running to him with the news that on the night of
Helen’s funeral she’d caught her stepfather kissing his personal
assistant.
Bailey was the first
one to find Helen dead. It wasn’t that big a stretch to imagine she
was the last person to see Helen alive. That she was the one who
killed her.
“Regan.” Even as she
spoke, Bailey felt the hopeless-ness of her appeal. Except for the
hectic color in her cheeks, the girl’s face could have been carved
in stone. “You’re upset. We’re all tired. Maybe we should talk in
the morning.”
She looked at Paul,
willing him to get involved, but he wouldn’t meet her gaze. His
face was strained and pale.
He could still say
something to support her. To protect her. All he had to do was tell
the truth.
Why didn’t he say
something?
“I don’t have anything
to say to you,” Regan said. “I want you the fuck out of my
house.”
Bailey struggled not
to fall apart. “Okay,” she said with as much dignity as she could
muster.
Which wasn’t much. Her
knees wobbled as she crossed the marble floor to the front door.
She tugged it open, her hands shaking.
She was never coming
back.
SHE had to go
back.
Bailey hugged her
knees and stared at the blue-flowered wallpaper and faced facts.
She couldn’t duck her responsibilities. She still had Paul’s backup
files and the evidence boxes. She had to give them
back.
She could go in the
morning, early, when she wouldn’t have to face her mother and her
questions, when there was a good chance Regan would be asleep. She
would stack the cartons in his office and leave her letter of
resignation on his desk.
Under the
circumstances, she didn’t think he would require two weeks’ notice.
And if he did . . . well, he wasn’t going to get it, that was
all.
No more half-measures.
No more going with the flow and hoping for the best and imagining
things would somehow work out if she didn’t ask for too much, if
she made other people happy, if she made them like
her.
She was quitting.
Tomorrow. And then she would get on with her life.
Assuming she wasn’t
arrested.
Okay, she couldn’t
think about that right now. Later she would figure out what to do
about what Regan saw and what she would say and whether to talk to
Steve or immediately hire a lawyer. Right now she just wanted every
vestige of Paul Ellis out of her life.
Scrambling off her
bed, she gathered an armload of loose papers, printouts of articles
and clippings of reviews, promotion schedules and sales reports,
notes and maps and lists. She hesitated over the notebook on her
bedside table, the one with the purple cover. Her fingers traced
the bold black words: TANYA DAWLER. MY DIARY. KEEP
OUT.
She flipped it
open.
The guys who have sex with you at a party on Saturday
night won’t even talk to you at school on Monday morning. But
they’ll talk about you. In the locker room, in the hall. You can
act like you don’t care. I mean, they’re assholes, right? But it
hurts! It hurts.
Bet they wouldn’t like it if I talked about them. Or their
daddies.
Poor Tanya, with her
dramatic exclamation points and defiant humor and desperate longing
to be loved. The girl didn’t deserve to have her words, her
feelings, thrust back into a dark box. Paul would never give Tanya
her due. But she was part of another life, the life Bailey was
getting rid off.
She swept the lid off
one of the evidence boxes, prepared to shove everything
inside.
And
froze.
This carton wasn’t
crammed with paper. This held labeled plastic bags and paper
bundles, crime scene evidence.
She could deal with
that. No problem. The problem was lying on top, a heavy, flat,
familiar object, a granite plaque on a wooden stand—last year’s
National Booksellers’ Optimus Award, presented to Paul Ellis for
Breathing Space.
Bailey felt queasy.
What was that doing here?
When—why—would Paul
have added it to boxes she was taking away to
inventory?
But she knew. She
knew. Hadn’t she read the search warrant? Toolbox. Bookends.
Trivet. Metal tray . . . Objects consistent
with injury on victim’s skull.
She pressed her hand
to her mouth. Oh, God.
She was so
screwed.
No, she wasn’t, she
told herself, swallowing panic. She couldn’t dump this on her
parents. Paul had let her down, betrayed her, in every possible
way. But there had to be something she could do. Someone she could
turn to.
Steve, she thought,
and lost her breath because she was so scared. And because he was
the right person, the only person, she could call.
She held the picture
of him in her mind, tough and solid and safe, those little lines of
impatience between his dark brows.
Maybe he wouldn’t
believe her, but he would listen. He was open-minded, and he knew
what to do.
Anyway, there was no
one else. Not in this town. Not in this life.
She jammed the lid
back on the box and scrambled for her cell phone.