Authors: Laura DiSilverio
After a moment standing beside the door, I moved to block his view of the television.
He gave me that long-suffering look from under his brows. “What?”
“Where’s your car? The Beemer?”
“Since I only have the one car, you don’t need to specify ‘the Beemer.’” He craned
his neck, trying to see around me.
I found myself wanting to slap him and was so horrified I gripped my hands together
behind my back. “Were you in an accident? Is that it? Don’t be afraid to tell me.”
Images of crumpled fenders and repair bills I couldn’t afford bebopped through my
head.
Dexter snorted, but I couldn’t tell if he was snorting at the idea of being afraid
of me or at my suggestion that he’d been in an accident. A dreadful thought snuck
up on me. “You weren’t in a hit-and-run, were you?”
“No!”
He looked offended, and I took a deep breath. “Then what?”
He pushed buttons randomly on the remote and mumbled something.
“What?”
“I said I loaned it to someone.”
My mouth dropped open. Pretty much the only rule Les laid on Dexter when he gave him
the car was that no one else drove it ever. Up till now that hadn’t been an issue
since Dexter was never into sharing.
“It’s my car, okay?”
“Your dad bought that car, and I pay for the insurance, which isn’t cheap for a teenaged
boy driver, so—”
“You don’t need to make a federal case out of it.”
Something about the way he wouldn’t look at me and the way he fussed with the remote
made me uneasy. “Who did you lend it to?”
More mumbling.
“Not Milo? He’s already had three speeding tickets and a DUI, his mom tells me. I
know they took his keys away. Please tell me it’s not Milo. Or James! He crashed his
dad’s Lincoln through a fence and into someone’s pool. It cost the Mickelsons over
twenty thousand dollars, counting the vet bill for that poor cocker spaniel.”
“It wasn’t Milo or James. If you must know, I loaned it to Dad.”
The news hit me like an elbow to the throat at a Black Friday sale. I put a hand on
the entertainment center because my knees felt wobbly all of a sudden. “What?”
“Dad. Short guy, mustache, used to live here, remember?”
“Dexter—”
“I knew you’d go all whoo-whoo on me”—he waggled his hands—“so I didn’t tell you.”
I tried hard to slow my breathing and not get all whoo-whoo, whatever that was. “How—?
Where—? When did you see your dad?”
“He called last night, said he needed a car for a few days, and asked to borrow mine.
I didn’t really think I could say no. He’s my dad, you know, and he bought it for
me, as he was quick to remind me. So I dropped Kendall at school today and drove to
Castle Rock to meet him. He drove me back to the house, but we spotted the po-po from
a block away.”
“Po-po?”
“The cops. The police car. Dad freaked out. So he dropped me back at that Denny’s
near I-25 and Academy, and I walked down to your office, you know, to hitch a ride
home with you. You weren’t even there.” He sounded aggrieved.
I couldn’t think what to say, so I just stared at him. Les had called him. He’d met
Les without telling me. We might never see the BMW again, and I’d have to take the
kids to and from school every day, unless Carla Leach would carpool, and I didn’t
want to do that because her two high schoolers both smoked and the Hummer stank for
half a day after they’d ridden in it. “Did he have anything to say?” I finally asked.
“Dad, I mean.”
Dexter shrugged. “Not really. He was upset about Heather-Anne, which makes sense,
I guess, since he was screwing her.”
“Dexter!”
“Well, he was. He said he’d seen you in Aspen and wanted to know if you were dating
anyone yet.”
“He did?” Could Les be jealous? “What did you tell him?”
Dexter gave me a look that said he thought a world-ending meteor would land on the
city before I found a boyfriend. “Duh.”
“Did he say why he was here? Where he was staying?”
“Business. He didn’t say what kind, and I didn’t ask. Probably something crooked,
like usual. I didn’t ask for an address, either; it’s not like I think we’re going
to be all buddy-buddy just because he borrowed my car. I’m not that dumb.”
The cynicism in Dexter’s voice broke my heart. “Hon—”
“Can you move, please? I can’t see the television.”
As I slowly left the room, the television sound blared on: “Whooo lives in a pineapple
under the sea?”
* * *
I called Charlie immediately to tell her that Les had been in the area and that he
had borrowed Dexter’s car. I started to tell her how inconvenient it was going to
be to have to chauffeur the kids to and from school, but she interrupted me.
“Do you have LoJack on the BMW?”
“Of course. Les insisted. We have it on the Hummer, too.”
“Then call the police and tell them the car’s been stolen. They’ll activate the LoJack
to locate it and, with any luck, pinpoint Les for us.”
“But it wasn’t stolen.”
“Gigi—”
I hung up and called the police. I hate lying, but I told them the Beemer had been
stolen. They promised to track it down and let me know when they recovered it. They
called back an hour later, to tell me the LoJack system had apparently been removed
from the car or was otherwise inoperable.
I called Charlie back to tell her.
“Would Les have known where the installers put the LoJack unit?” she asked.
“Of course. He watched them do it at the dealership.”
She sighed. “Then he took it out. Well, at least the police are on the lookout for
the car. Maybe some alert cop will spot it.” She didn’t sound optimistic.
19
I dropped the kids off at the high school Tuesday morning and was late getting to
work. I’d had to coax Dexter into going; he’d said that he could work on his GED from
prison. I didn’t want to encourage that kind of mopey attitude, so I told him that
if he graduated in June, as scheduled, he could work on his college degree from prison,
if it came to that. Kendall overheard us—sometimes I think my daughter eavesdrops
on purpose—and wanted to know why Dexter was going to prison. We hadn’t told her about
Dexter visiting Heather-Anne or the police’s suspicions.
“If they could put you in prison for being too mean and ugly to live, he’d have been
there long ago. Is it because of what happened at the bowling alley?”
Dexter shot her a “shut up” look and quickly filled her in. I didn’t ask what had
happened at the bowling alley; sometimes being an ostrich with your head in the sand
is the only way to survive motherhood.
“Murder?” she shrieked when he told her. “I’m not riding with a murderer.”
“I’ll murder
you
if you don’t shut up,” Dexter growled.
I couldn’t much blame him. “Kendall, honey, you don’t want to go saying anything about
this at school.”
“Don’t worry, Mom,” she said. “I wouldn’t want people to know I have a psychopath
for a brother. Although anyone who’s met him has probably already figured that out.”
She got in the front seat and slammed the door.
“She’ll blab it to everyone before the end of first period,” Dexter predicted, slamming
his book bag strap in the Hummer’s door and reopening it to yank the strap out. He
slammed the door shut again. I was getting a headache and it wasn’t even seven o’clock
yet. Arriving at work was a huge relief.
Charlie had beaten me in, and I said, “Welcome back,” as I shoved my purse under the
desk.
She grunted and took a drink from her Pepsi. Charlie’s always pretty surly before
her second Pepsi. “Was the doc okay with you returning to work full-time?”
She gave me a look from the corners of her eyes, which I took to mean she hadn’t asked
him. “Charlie—”
“Gigi.” She raised her head from the computer and said, “I’m not going to go vaulting
over fences chasing bad guys or have to sprint to get away from a bioweapon-wielding
terrorist. I’m going to sit here quietly, on my pillow”—she half stood and lifted
a striped pillow from her chair—“and surf the Net. I might even”—she paused dramatically—“make
a few phone calls. I’ll be fine.”
I knew when to shut up, so I did, but I knew that she’d be vaulting fences and tackling
bioterrorists in a split second if the need arose. The weather had turned cold again,
like it did here in Colorado Springs—fifty degrees one day, twenty the next—and I
took off my favorite parka and hung it on the coat tree by the door. “Did you see
the forecast?” I asked. “The weatherman says we might get a foot of snow.”
“You know how to tell when a weatherman’s lying, don’t you?” Charlie asked without
looking up. “His lips are moving.”
I laughed but said, “I don’t know. It feels like snow.” Tucking my angora-blend turtleneck
tunic under my hips, I sat and started making a list of all the places Les might be.
It was depressingly long. He was a social guy and he got around. Of course, some of
these people, the ones whose money he’d run off with, might not be happy to see him.
I crossed two names off the list. Then another three.
“How’s Dexter holding up?” Charlie asked, popping open another Pepsi. She took a sip
and brushed her bangs off her face. “Was it hard for him at the police station yesterday?”
“Oh, Charlie, your friend Tuck—that’s what he told us to call him—was wonderful. I
have to admit I was a bit nervous at first, his hair and all, but he talked to Dexter
and they talked to the police and everything’s fine for the moment, although Tuck
isn’t sure the police bought Dexter’s story about someone being in the bedroom while
Dexter talked to Heather-Anne. Still, they didn’t arrest him, so that’s good.”
“What’s their next step?”
“I don’t know.”
She picked up the phone and dialed a number from memory. “Montgomery, it’s me.”
I tried not to listen in on her conversation, but it’s kind of hard not to overhear
in an office that’s smaller than my closet with no doors except on the powder room.
From Charlie’s tone, it didn’t seem to be going well, and she hung up after barely
more than a minute, scowling. “He won’t tell me anything,” she said. “Says he doesn’t
know what Lorrimore’s thinking or doing. Says he got called out on an attempted murder
outside Cowboys last night and isn’t in the loop on the Heather-Anne case.”
“He probably isn’t,” I said, dismayed by her anger.
“He could be if he wanted to be.”
She plopped down in front of her computer again, winced, and tapped the keys so hard
they sounded like bullets. “Wait a minute … Look at this, Gigi. He lied!”
“Who lied?” I scurried around my desk to peer over Charlie’s shoulder. Her screen
showed a page from the
Mountain Press,
a paper that advertised itself as being for Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge, and Sevierville,
Tennessee. She was looking at what seemed to be the society page. An article about
a fund-raiser for the Heart Association showed a color photo of four smiling people
in evening wear, two women and two men.
“That strapless dress isn’t a good choice for her,” I said, pointing to the woman
on the far left who looked to be about my age and size. “She needs more support.”
Charlie stabbed a finger at the screen. “Not her. Him.”
The man she pointed at had a gray-streaked beard and a weathered face, and he was
seated in a wheelchair. “He looks kind of like Kris Kristofferson. What about him?”
“‘Sunny and Brian Wilcox, Lisetta Teegle, and Wilfred Cheney share a joke at the Have
a Heart fund-raiser at Gatlinburg’s Glenstone Lodge,’” she read from the caption.
“Wilfred Cheney! That’s Heather-Anne’s purportedly abusive husband. He’s in a wheelchair—he
couldn’t have strangled Heather-Anne at the Embassy Suites.”
“Maybe it’s her brother-in-law,” I suggested. “My sister May married a man with six
brothers, and she’s all the time getting calls from people trying to reach one of
her nieces and nephews or sisters-in-law.”
“I didn’t know you had a sister.”
“Three of them,” I said. “Two of them are still in Georgia, but Coretta and her husband
live in Houston.”
“It’s not a bad thought,” Charlie said, “except—” She tapped a few keys and a new
photo came up, this one from a newspaper wedding announcement. “Ta-da.” She leaned
back so I could see it better.
A young woman with her dark hair in an up-do, wearing a wedding dress so tight I could
practically read the label on her undies, had her arm tucked into Wilfred Cheney’s
arm. There wasn’t so much gray in his beard, and he wasn’t in a wheelchair, but it
was the same man. I leaned closer and studied the bride, who was younger and plumper
than Heather-Anne, and brunette, to boot.
“Do you think that’s Heather-Anne?” Charlie asked, eyeing the photo doubtfully.
The bride’s hand rested on the groom’s arm, and I could make out a flawless French
manicure, even in the black-and-white photo. “It’s her,” I said, pointing out the
manicure.
Charlie gave me an incredulous look. “First time I’ve seen someone make an identification
off a manicure. I’ll take your word for it.” She scrolled up to show the date: almost
five years ago. “The Heart Association fund-raiser was two months ago,” she said,
“so sometime after the wedding, Wilfred ended up in a wheelchair, and Lucinda ran
off and became Heather-Anne. What do you want to bet the two events were related?”
“Who lied?” I asked, going back to Charlie’s original statement.
“Alan ‘I Don’t Own a Shirt’ Brodnax. He said Cheney’s been after Heather-Anne, that
she was afraid of him, that he might well have killed her. You can’t tell me Brodnax—who
is a professional researcher, for heaven’s sake—didn’t know the man was in a wheelchair
and couldn’t have been chasing Heather-Anne all over the country, much less strangling
her at the Embassy Suites without anyone noticing.”
“Maybe someone did,” I said. “I mean, maybe someone noticed a man in a wheelchair.”
The thought excited me: Dexter wouldn’t be the prime suspect if Heather-Anne’s former
husband had been seen at the hotel.