The rolling pin dropped from her fingers and clattered to the floor. “Danged arthritis. Can’t hold onto a thing.” She retrieved the rolling pin and turned to the sink to wash it, hiding her face from Tom. “How would I know who it is?”
She sure as hell knew something. “Mrs. Turner,” Tom said, “we need to sit down and talk about the people in your daughter’s life.”
Drying the rolling pin with a towel, Mrs. Turner returned to the table. “I told your daddy everything. He wrote it in his notebook.”
“We might find something that didn’t come out the first time.”
“You gonna round up all the suspects?” Holly asked.
Tom almost smiled, at the question and Holly’s quick recovery from her grandmother’s bullying. “We might have trouble locating some of them after all this time.” He said to Mrs. Turner, “Maybe you can help us. The two handymen who worked at Pauline’s house—”
“Troy Shackleford and Rudy O’Dell,” Holly said.
“Right.” Tom eyed the girl with interest. “You know them?”
She looked about to answer, but her grandmother didn’t give her a chance. “Holly don’t know nothin’ about it. She wasn’t but a young’un when it happened.”
Holly’s face screwed up with vexation, and she opened her mouth as if to protest. A sharp glance from Mrs. Turner kept her silent.
“Do you know where I can find Shackleford and O’Dell?” Tom asked Mrs. Turner.
“Couldn’t tell you.”
“Does Holly’s mother live here with you?” he asked. He wanted to talk to both of Pauline’s sisters.
“Jeannie?” Mrs. Turner said. “Lord no, she’s been gone a long time.” Before he could ask, she added, “Ain’t got the least idea where she is.”
Again Holly started to speak, but a look passed between her and Mrs. Turner and the girl changed her mind. Tom would have to get Holly alone sometime soon and find out what she was so eager to tell him. What her grandmother didn’t want her to tell him.
“Where can I reach Pauline’s daughter? I have to notify her as quickly as possible.”
“Mary Lee don’t keep in touch with her poor relations. We’re not good enough for her.” Mrs. Turner said this in a matter-of-fact tone.
“Maybe the McClure family can tell me where she’s living now.”
“Yeah, they probably keep track of her so they’ll know how much McClure money she’s spendin’. Or wastin’, is how they see it. That bunch would skin a flea for its hide. And they hated my daughter. You talk about suspects, well, there’s your suspects. Go ask them your questions.” After this deluge of words escaped, Mrs. Turner clamped her lips together in a thin line. Her hand shook as she jabbed the rolled dough with a cookie cutter.
Tom doubted he could get anything useful from her today. He didn’t believe her obstinacy had anything to do with grief. Maybe, he thought wryly, he was seeing the fabled Melungeon penchant for intrigue. More likely, this family had real secrets its matriarch didn’t want the cops to discover. He was about to tell her he would come back another time when a large gray goose walked into the kitchen.
Brandon gave a startled laugh. The bird waddled to Holly and honked, and the girl scooped it into her arms.
“Holly,” Mrs. Turner said, “you know she’s not supposed to come in the kitchen.” She spoke with the exasperation of someone who has repeated a reprimand too many times with too little effect. “You need to scold her when she does, so she’ll mind.”
“I don’t want to scold her,” Holly said. “You don’t like to be scolded, do you, Penny?” The goose wiggled contentedly in her arms.
“Go put her on the porch.”
Holly carried the goose to the back door, which Brandon rushed to open for her. She flashed a quick smile before she took the goose onto an enclosed porch.
Mrs. Turner said, “I don’t know why the girl can’t be happy with cats and dogs.”
Tom joined Brandon at the door and watched Holly fill a bowl with chicken feed. She spoke softly to the goose, and the bird tucked into its meal. Four homemade wire cages, all empty except for straw bedding in one, occupied the porch.
“You enjoy looking after animals?” Tom asked. “Do you take in orphaned babies?”
“It’s not against the law, is it?”
“No, don’t worry about it.” Technically, she was breaking state law if she didn’t have a rehab license, but she probably wasn’t doing any harm. “Just don’t let yourself get bitten.”
“I raised a litter of baby coons after their mama got hit by a car.” Holly added with a brilliant smile, “I let ’em go, but they come back to see me sometimes.”
Brandon grinned as if her smile had been meant for him. “You ever thought about studying to be an animal doctor?”
Holly burst out laughing. “I can think about it, but I sure couldn’t pay for it.”
“Do you have a job?” Tom asked.
She shrugged. “I work afternoons at Rose’s place. You know it? The diner on Crow’s Nest Road?”
Tom exchanged a glance with Brandon. The diner was a drug market, the center of illegal dealing in Mason County. Tom had trouble seeing this girl in a place like that. He was about to suggest she call Mountainview Animal Hospital about a job, but he didn’t want to raise her hopes. Better check with Rachel Goddard first. “It was nice meeting you, Holly. What’s your last name, by the way?”
“Turner, like my grandma.”
So the girl’s mother and father hadn’t been married.
Behind Tom, Mrs. Turner said, “Anything else I can help y’all with?”
“Not today. But we’ll be talking again.”
“Next time, call first.”
Tom and Brandon headed for the front door, trailed by Mrs. Turner. Tom had the feeling she was making sure they left, rather than politely seeing them out. “I’m sorry about your daughter,” he said.
She didn’t answer, didn’t meet his eyes. He and Brandon barely cleared the door before she shut it.
Tom was unlocking the Explorer when the front door of the house flew open and Holly darted out. She hurried down the front steps and trotted across the yard, as light and surefooted as a fox in the snow. Pressing a folded piece of paper into Tom’s hand, the girl said, “She’s livin’ in McLean. Her name’s Scott now, and she—”
“Holly!” Mrs. Turner yelled from the porch. “Get yourself in here!”
The girl dashed back to the house, disappeared inside. Mrs. Turner slammed the door.
Tom assumed Holly had written down a number or address where he could reach her mother. In the vehicle, he unfolded the paper, which turned out to be an envelope. It was addressed to Mrs. Turner and postmarked a month earlier.
In the upper corner was the return address of Pauline’s daughter, Mary Lee, the granddaughter Mrs. Turner claimed she never heard from.
“Dr. Goddard! Help!”
Rachel heard the girl’s cries even with her office door closed. She charged down the back hallway, her athletic shoes squeaking on the tile floor, and followed the screams to the kennel room at the rear of the animal hospital.
“Dr. Goddard!”
The plea rose to a panicked wail.
Rachel slammed open the kennel door to find Daphne, a young assistant, cowering against a wall. Tom Bridger’s bulldog sat in front of the girl, panting and slobbering and grunting.
“What?” Rachel brushed back the hair that had fallen into her eyes during her mad dash. With unobstructed vision, she still didn’t see the problem. “What’s wrong? I thought you were hurt.”
Daphne, a freckled blond, spread her arms against the wall as if bracing for assault. A leash dangled from one hand. “He tried to bite me!”
The brown fireplug of a dog tilted his head to show Rachel an expression of pure innocence. Saliva dripped from one corner of his mouth. “Daphne, Billy Bob doesn’t have a mean bone in his body.”
“Then you walk him!” The girl hurled the leash to the floor.
Rachel debated whether to reprimand her. This wasn’t the first incident of its kind. What sort of person took a job in a veterinary clinic and revealed her terror of dogs only after she started working?
The sort who desperately needed a job and couldn’t find one anywhere else. Rachel sighed and scooped up the leash. Phobias couldn’t be reasoned or scolded away. Her psychologist mother had taught her that. “Help Shannon finish up on the desk, then you can go home. I’ll take charge of this vicious beast.”
The girl edged along the wall, never taking her eyes off the dog until she shot through the door.
Billy Bob planted his feet on Rachel’s shoes and snorted.
“Yeah, I know, sugar. It’s a bum rap. Not a word of truth to it.” She crouched to scratch his ears. Why hadn’t Tom picked him up yet? Maybe she should drop the dog off at the Sheriff’s Department when she left work. “I could steal you and take you home with me. Would you like that?”
Billy Bob hoisted his feet to her knees and swiped his tongue across her cheek. When she averted her face, he got her on the other side. Rachel yelped and laughed. “Oh, you are a sweetheart, aren’t you?”
In a fit of pleasure the dog bounced his muscular body up and down, back and forth like a teenager on a dance floor. Rachel grabbed his paws and swayed with him, singing to the accompaniment of snorts and grunts, “Jeremiah was a bulldog…”
The sound of clapping made her swing around. Tom Bridger leaned in the doorway, grinning. Rachel lost her balance and plopped onto her butt. Scrambling to her feet, she tried to hide her embarrassment with a laugh. “Clients are not supposed to know how silly I can get when I’m alone with an animal.”
“If I was a real jerk, I could say you’re cute when you’re surprised.”
Rachel straightened her lab coat. “And if I were the kind of feminist who resorts to violence, you’d get clobbered for a line like that.”
Listen to yourself. He probably thinks you’re flirting with him.
Tom strode over, lanky and loose-limbed in his brown uniform, and dropped to one knee to greet the dog. “Hey, pal. Did you think I wasn’t going to show? Let me see your choppers.”
He pulled back Billy Bob’s lip to examine the teeth that had been cleaned, then reduced the dog to rapture by vigorously scratching his neck and dewlaps.
Rachel watched Tom’s face, fascinated as she always was by his striking features. If she weren’t afraid he’d catch her staring, she could study him endlessly, identifying the different bloodlines that had converged to produce such an intriguing result. She’d read that Melungeons believed they were descended from shipwrecked Portuguese or Turkish explorers of the sixteenth century who settled in the mountains and took Native American wives. Rachel could see a Mediterranean heritage in Tom’s olive complexion and black hair. But Indian blood must have given him those high cheekbones and near-black eyes and that strong blade of a nose.
Why on earth did this attractive man keep asking her out, knowing she would turn him down? He must have women throwing themselves at him.
He gave the dog a last pat on the back and stood. Rachel shifted her gaze.
“Sorry I didn’t keep my appointment,” Tom said. “Something came up at work.”
“I’ve been hearing rumors about that all day. What’s going on?”
“We found some human bones up on Indian Mountain.”
“Oh, my God. Do you know who it is? Was?”
“We think it’s a local woman who’s been missing for ten years. You might have heard of her—Pauline McClure.”
“Yeah,” Rachel said, her interest piqued. “The poor girl who married a rich banker, then vanished without a trace. The stuff of local legend.”
“The marriage and the disappearance happened twenty years apart, but yeah, that’s the one. From the look of the bones, it wasn’t a natural death. We think she was—” Tom broke off, wincing. “You don’t want to hear this stuff.”
One more person tiptoeing around her fragile emotions, afraid she couldn’t endure the slightest reminder that the world was a dangerous place. She told herself this had nothing to do with her and forced herself to ask, “You think she was shot? Murdered?”
“Not shot, but— I’d rather not talk about it, okay?”
Smiling to soften her words, she said, “You know, every friend I’ve made here tries to protect me from bad news. I’m amazed somebody hasn’t told the paper carrier to skip me when
The Herald
has a story about a crime.”
“I considered that, but I decided it might be going a little too far.” Tom laughed when she did, and added, “People don’t want to upset you because they like you so much. And in a small community like Mason County, everybody’s going to know…”
“My history,” she finished.
The part that’s on the record. About the rest, you have no idea.
“It’s very considerate, but I hate the feeling that everybody’s watching their words around me.”
Tom nodded. “I can understand that. I’ve got the same problem when it comes to certain subjects.”
His family. Of course he understood. “It keeps people at a distance, doesn’t it,” she said, “when they’re afraid to talk freely around you.”
He smiled and said, “The last thing I want to do is keep you at a distance.”
Rachel was groping for a response when Tom pulled a handkerchief from his pants pocket and wiped her cheek with it. “I apologize for my dog’s bad manners,” he said.
The intimacy of his action startled her. Every time she was with him—and she seemed to encounter him a lot these days—Tom trespassed on her personal space in some small but crucial way that left her off-balance.
While he stuffed his handkerchief back in his pocket, he kept his gaze on her. “You have beautiful eyes, Rachel.”
Oh, don’t do this.
She said as lightly as she could, “I’m covered in cat fur and dog drool, but I have beautiful eyes. I’ll hang on to that. By the way, Billy Bob’s just had a meal, so don’t let him tell you different. And he might seem tired tonight from the anesthetic.”
“I’m going to leave him with my nephew for the next few hours. I have to get back to headquarters and go over the case file. I’ve already given Pauline’s mother the news.”
“That couldn’t have been easy.” Rachel didn’t know how anyone could bear a job that required him to go out in a snowstorm and tell a mother that her daughter’s bones had been found.
“Tomorrow morning I have to go see her daughter. She lives in McLean. That’s where you’re from, right? Maybe you know her. Mary Lee Scott.”
“Oh, my gosh. No, I don’t know her, but I know who she is.” A vague memory came to mind of a woman in a newspaper photo—young, beautiful, arriving at a White House dinner with her much older husband. “She’s married to one of the major developers in the Washington area. Small world, huh?”
“Yeah. I went to elementary school with her,” Tom said. His mild tone didn’t match the haunted look that settled into his eyes.
“So you know the family?” Wait a minute. The dead woman had been Melungeon. That was part of the story the locals told about her. “Are you related?”
He shook his head. “No, nothing like that.” He paused and stared into space, his gaze unfocused. “It was my dad’s case. His biggest regret was that he never found out what happened to her.”
Rachel saw the shadow pass over Tom’s face when he mentioned his father, sensed the sadness his memories brought, and she had to snap up a barrier to keep it from invading her. Tom’s arm brushed hers. She took a step back to put some distance between them.
“You can give them closure, at least.” What a dumb thing to say. She sounded like some shallow idiot spouting feel-good psychobabble.
“I’m not so sure about that,” Tom said. “We have to reopen the case. Stir up a lot of bad feeling. To tell you the truth, I…”
The uncompleted thought hung between them, and he seemed to wait for her to prompt him. Maybe he needed somebody to talk to, outside the official circle at work. But she had enough worries without taking on his. “I don’t envy you your job,” she said.
Billy Bob gave a deep-throated bark and tugged on the leash in her hand. “He needs to use the facilities, then he’ll be ready to go.”
Pushing open the door to a dog run, she let the bulldog out. He halted abruptly when he discovered snow on the ground and more falling, but after a loud snort he sallied forth with a rolling gait. Rachel and Tom stayed inside and kept an eye on him through a window in the door.
Rachel pulled a grim face. “I’m afraid he’s been terrorizing my staff today.”
Tom watched the dog plow through the snow in search of the ideal spot to lift a leg. “He’s a menace, all right.”
Laughing, Rachel said, “I’ve got an assistant who’s afraid of him, if you can believe that. Him and dogs in general. I don’t think she’s too comfortable with cats either.”
“You’re kidding. Why do you keep somebody like that around?”
“I can’t fire Daphne. Her father’s out of work and the family needs her salary.”
“You’re too kindhearted, you know that?”
Tom was looking at her the way he often did, with an intensity that made her acutely self-conscious. Her hair was probably a mess. Running her tongue over her lips, she detected no remaining trace of her only makeup, the lipstick she’d applied that morning. She knew she was reasonably attractive, tall and slim, with good features, but Tom’s admiration made her feel uncomfortable and vaguely guilty. The last man who’d looked at her that way had been Luke Campbell. Her former boss. Her former lover.
She pushed her hair off her forehead and said, “Daphne does the rest of the job reasonably well, which is more than I can say for some people I’ve tried out.” A sigh escaped, and before she could stop herself she blurted, “Maybe moving here and buying the clinic was a mistake. I didn’t realize half the staff would quit because an outsider was taking over. I’ll lose my clients if I don’t get this place humming again.”
Why are you telling him your problems?
“Come on, be honest,” Tom said. “No matter how much trouble it is, I’ll bet you love walking in here every morning and knowing it all belongs to you.”
“Yeah, well, there is that.” Her clinic, her business. And as hiding places went, it wasn’t bad. “I just wish staffing was somebody else’s worry.”
“I’ve been spreading the word that you’re hiring. In fact, I might have found a prospect for you. No training at all, and she’s not what you’d call polished, but she’s good with animals. I wrote down her name and number.” He pulled a slip of paper from his jacket pocket. “I’m pretty sure she’d be interested.”
“Great. Tell me about her.”
A slight frown puckered his brow. “She’s the murdered woman’s niece.” He gave Rachel a searching look. “Would that bother you?”
“Of course not.”
“And she’s Melungeon, from Rocky Branch District. How do you feel about that?”
Rachel’s mouth fell open. “Is that a serious question? I realize you don’t know me very well, but—”
“Okay, okay.” He held up a hand to stop her. “Sorry, but I’ve learned you never can tell about people. Sometimes you get an unpleasant surprise.”
He was right about that, unfortunately. “Let me give you a pleasant one. Her being Melungeon has nothing to do with anything. I just want somebody who’s willing to work.”
What had happened to Tom that made him assume people were biased until proven otherwise? Rachel had always believed the opposite, but she was lily-white, so how could she know what discrimination felt like? An awful thought occurred to her: Did Tom believe she’d turned down his invitations because his skin was darker than hers? How could she clear that up without embarrassing him? She couldn’t very well say,
Oh, no, I rejected you for other reasons.
“Tell me about her,” she said.
He described a shy girl named Holly Turner who loved animals and had some experience with injured and orphaned wildlife. “She’s been working at a diner that’s a drug market, and I’d like to see her get out of there.”
Rachel tensed, her hands curling into fists in the pockets of her lab coat.
“The diner’s owned by a woman called Rose Shackleford,” Tom went on, “but Rose’s cousin Troy runs the drug business in this county, and he sells out of the diner. He also happens to be the prime suspect in the Pauline McClure case. Has been from the beginning.”