Family Skeletons (23 page)

“Okay,” Ryan said, rubbing his chin. “Keep going.”

“No,” Sunny said. “Let me.” The answer to a
long-standing question had occurred to her, and it made her both angry and sad.

“Matthew is about ten years younger than I am. When
Bev became pregnant, she would’ve told Franklin if the child was his. If he
refused to accept the baby as his, that would’ve started the ball rolling
toward his act of disowning me. If he’d ever had the slightest glimmer of
mistrust—and why wouldn’t he? He could only judge others by himself—that could
have been the final straw.”

Neither man said anything.

“What a cold-hearted, hateful bastard.” Her
fingernails were digging into her palms. “He didn’t deserve to live. Two
children, and look what he did to both of them.”

“You don’t know that for certain, Sunny,” Ryan cautioned.

“Of course I don’t. But you’re going to be as
surprised as I am if I’m wrong. It fits too well.”

“We need to talk to Tim Joyce,” Jonathan said. “The
sooner, the better. It has suddenly become vital that he finds and talks to
Howard Wilkes.”

“But this poses more questions than it answers,”
Ryan said. “If Matthew was Franklin’s son, why didn’t Bev also file a paternity
suit? Especially after it was proved that Franklin wasn’t sterile?”

“She was still married to Howard,” Sunny answered.
“Matthew has his name. No one ever questioned that.”

Absently, she put her bowl on the ground instead of
stretching to place it on the table. Cat leaped for it but Jonathan quickly rescued
it and put it atop the table. Then he patted his lap and the animal jumped up, made
three complete circles, then settled down for a nap.

“And it answers as many questions as it raises,”
Sunny continued. “Bev said Howard hadn’t been thrilled with fatherhood. And she’d
sounded both resigned and bitter. If he’d suspected it wasn’t his child, he
wouldn’t have been jumping with joy.”

“But she kept it to herself,” Ryan mused, “for all
these years. That doesn’t make sense. Unless she wasn’t sure herself who had
fathered the child.”

In the long silence that followed, Sunny stared into
space. Then she said, “I’m reminded of what my mother said, about this being a
hellish mess. And what a mess each of them had made of their lives. It’s so sad
that it’s frightening.”

“Yep,” Ryan agreed. “It’s downright scary. Man and
woman are unique on this earth. They are capable of immeasurable love,
relentless hate, and amazing stupidity.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

“Hi, Sunny,” Roberta said at the other end of the
phone line. “I’m glad you called. You’ve been on my mind since I left up
there.” She’d evidently recovered from the strain she’d felt at the memorial
service because the bounce was back in her voice. “When are you coming home?
Soon, I hope.”

“I was planning on following Ryan home tomorrow. You
know, it’s hard not to salivate when I think about exchanging that clunker for
my own car.” Sunny laughed, and was relieved she didn’t have to force it.

But as more small talk followed, Sunny heard her
voice growing tight. She’d stayed up half the night with Jonathan and Ryan,
discussing their suspicions. They were well aware of the hurt their theories
could inflict, and Sunny hadn’t yet figured out a way to ask her mother what
she wanted to know without Roberta guessing why she was asking.

Come on, Sunny, the only way to do it is
to do it.
“By the way, Mom, that update from Tim Joyce has started me wondering about
Louise and Howard. Who they were, what they looked like, their personalities...”

After a short silence, her mother asked, “What are
you after, Sunny?”

Damn. How can she zero in like that?
“I’m curious,
Mom. We all are. These are major players we’ve heard about, but never met.”

“Well, okay, I guess I can understand that. But I
can’t help much. Louise, I know very little about. She entered the picture
after I’d left it, and all I can remember is that she was on the quiet side.
I’d met Howard, of course, but wasn’t impressed with him. He was self-centered,
self-important. The truth is, he wore on my nerves.”

“What did he look like?”

She could almost hear her mother’s shrug. “He was
dark-blond, blue eyes, I think. He was physically attractive, I guess. He
wasn’t a big man, either, but strong, very athletic. He played some minor
league baseball, and at one point was even considered for the majors. But he
never made it that far.”

Sunny froze in mid breath. Her gaze became
unfocused.

“Oh, for...I just heard what I said.” Roberta’s
words rushed together. “Baseball bats! Sunny, call Tim Joyce. He may already
know about Howard’s baseball history, but maybe not. Tom certainly knew it. But
it could’ve slipped his mind, too.”

“Yeah, I’ll call Joyce right now. Bye, Mom.”

But after replacing the telephone receiver in its
cradle she stared at it, marveling at what people knew yet didn’t know they
knew. Tom had remembered Franklin’s military stint, but somehow Howard’s
baseball past had escaped him, as well as Mavis, apparently, and even Bev.

“Well?” The men spoke in unison, one voice inquiring
and the other impatient.

“Howard was a baseball player. That was his bat.”
Grabbing her phone index that rested next to the phone, she rifled through the
cards. “No proof it was his, of course, at least not yet. But like you said,
Jonathan, we’ve got way too many coincidences to continue calling them
coincidences.”

She found the number of the Deputy Sheriff’s office
and punched it in. Tom’s recorded voice told her to call nine-one-one in case
of an emergency, and then recited the number of the Cullen County Sheriff in
case one wanted to call there instead.

And they’d refer me right back to
Chester Beach. Come on, come on, come on...

Biting her lip as her gaze darted impatiently around
the room, she waited for Tom’s voice to run down, then for the beep, and then
she said, “This is Sunny. Call me ASAP.” She started to hang up, caught
herself, brought the receiver back up to her mouth and recited her number into
it.

Dummy.

Ryan gave her an incredulous look. “You had to leave
a message?”

“Yeah. I don’t like it either, but it’s Sunday. And
this is Chester, not San Francisco.”

“But this is the communications age. Haven’t they
heard? Everybody’s got a cell phone, a beeper, a pager, but you had to leave a
message for the deputy sheriff?”

“You want Hendricks?”

“Who’s he?”

“You don’t want Hendricks,” Jonathan said. “He’ll
tell you to take two aspirins, go to bed, and call someone else tomorrow.”

Sunny again reached for the phone. “Sunday’s a busy
day for Mavis, but Tom might be home.”

This time, Mavis’s recorded voice invited her to
leave a message.

“We found the owner of the bloody bat,” Sunny said, and
then she hung up and massaged the bridge of her nose. “I could try calling
Joyce, but I don’t have his home number. And I’m a little tired of disembodied
voices anyway.”

Then her fingers stilled, and she scrunched her face
up. “Idiot,” she muttered. Out of deference to Jonathan, she bit back stronger
words. Her gaze traveled sheepishly from one man to the other. “I got
sidetracked with the bat and forgot to ask Mom if Franklin had a crooked
pinkie.”
And what would she have read into that question, I wonder?
“But
Howard was blue-eyed, dark-blond, and close to Matthew’s size. So they could be
father and son after all.”

The three people stared at one another, and then
each set of eyes looked elsewhere. A sense of anticlimax lay over the room like
a heavy blanket.

Leaving the men to hash it out, Sunny headed for the
kitchen and rummaged through the refrigerator. It was early for lunch, but she
had to have something to do. She filled a plate with tomato sandwiches, emptied
a bag of chips into a bowl, lined a plate with macaroons and then called her
companions.

Ryan sat at the table, appearing preoccupied, picked
up a sandwich and then came to life. “A vegetable sandwich?”

“Tomato and onion,” she explained unnecessarily,
since he’d already removed the top piece of bread and was frowning at what he’d
found under it. “Give it a try. It’s not bad.”

“A vegetable sandwich?”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake. Eat a cookie, Ryan.”

“Vegetable sandwiches,” he muttered, replaced the
top slice of bread and bit off a small piece of sandwich. “Hmm.” He held it
out, gave it a longer look, then took a bigger bite. “Okay. Pass the plate. I’m
going to need another one.”

The phone remained silent. But the men suddenly
realized that since it was Sunday, there would be a football game on TV, and
that took care of them. Sunny went upstairs and dragged out her suitcase, put
it atop the bed and opened it, and then stared at it.

Don’t even think about changing your
mind. You’ve got car payments to meet.

 
Her gaze traveled between the closet and
the dresser.

Not to mention those two guys
downstairs. Ryan will start yelling at you, or even worse, go all patient and
preachy, and Jonathan will look at you like you said a bad swear word
.

Her eyes caught her reflected image in the dresser
mirror.
So when did you start making decisions based on what someone else
wants you to do instead of what you want to do?

She turned her back on the suitcase and the mirror
and went downstairs to sort laundry. Whether she stayed here or went home,
sheets weren’t going to wash themselves. As she worked in the utility room, she
overheard the men in the backyard hosing down their vehicles, a job they’d
shared every day. So she figured the game was over, it was halftime, or the
picture tube had blown up.

“Much better looking truck without that big dent in
it,” Ryan said.

“Yeah, they did a good job.”

“But I hope you realize it’s twice the size and work
of my coupe.”

Jonathan sounded unfazed. “I hope you realize that
you’ve got two vehicles to my one.”

“The Reviler isn’t my responsibility. Sunny’s
driving it.”

“Do you want to make a deal with her? You can cook
dinner, and she and I can wash the Reviler.”

“You can forget about the Reviler,” she muttered.
“It’s going for a ride.” After putting the basket in the backseat of the car,
which was parked in the front yard, she hollered at the men from around the
corner of the house. “Laundromat. Give me an hour.”

Jonathan looked up with a frown. “Give me a minute
to finish up here, Sunny. I’ll go with you.”

But she ducked back around the side of the house as
if she hadn’t heard him.
I swear. You guys are gonna give me a complex.

The Laundromat was deserted. She filled three
machines and was inserting coins in the last one when she felt a presence
looming behind her. She whirled.

Tim Joyce jumped back a step. “Hey! I’m one of the
good guys.”

Her heart started beating again. “Criminy. You’re as
quiet as Cat.”

She turned back around, plunged in the coins and got
the machine started. He dumped the contents of one of the bags he carried into
the machine next to hers. Her eye caught a white shirt among the dark uniforms,
jeans and sweats. That shirt wasn’t going to stay very white for very long if
that was his usual sorting style. Was it thrown in there for expediency’s sake,
or did he really not know any better? He filled the next machine with blue-and-white-striped
sheets.

“Have you checked your phone messages?” she asked.

He gave her a sidelong look. “At home or the
office?”

“Office.”

He eyed the wall telephone. “Shall I check now, or
will person to person suffice?”

“Howard Wilkes used to play baseball.”

He studied her, eyes narrowing, and then his gaze
shifted to the list of Laundromat rules tacked on the wall as if vital
information was stored there. “Well, now, how about that.” With thoughtful
lines creasing his forehead, he pulled a metal chair out from under the table
that was used for folding clothes and sat down.

Sunny was glad. Her neck felt strained from looking
up at him. “How tall are you?”

She was still standing and he looked up; he didn’t
have to look up far. “Six-three. You?”

“Almost five-two.”

He grinned. “In cases like this, spike heels make
sense.”

She sat in the other chair. “Tell me how far you’ve
gotten in tracing Howard?”

“Guess it can’t hurt. It’s not classified.” He
clasped his hands behind his neck and slumped in the chair. His legs stuck out
from under the other side of the table. “He and Bev didn’t make a clean break
of it. They were on again, off again for several years, and finally they filed
for divorce when Matthew was about a year old. Nice guy. Left her flat with a kid
and never paid a dime in child support. He’d worked for a logging firm over
near Grizzly Camp, but then he moved on to Oregon and got on with a company
there. Trouble is, that place folded, and so did the next one he went to. We
ran into a blank, and it’s been a lot of years, but we got people on it. It’s
just a matter of time.”

“So, as far as you know, he hasn’t been around here
in...what? Fifteen years or so?”

“So Bev tells us.” He was staring at the machines.
He seemed to think best when focusing on inanimate objects. “And nobody else
remembers seeing him around, either. But I’ll be talking to her again. Today,
in fact. I’m not much of a believer in coincidences, and this one is a biggie.”

He folded his arms across his chest, leaned back,
directed his gaze straight ahead and crossed one huge sneaker-clad foot over
the other. It appeared he was falling asleep with his eyes open. She settled in
with her paperback. When she became aware that the deputy’s attention had
shifted back to her, she looked over at him and instantly recognized the look
of male to female interest. It was universal, needing no translation in any
language.

“I get the impression you and Jonathan are an item.
That so?” His eyes, not exactly brown, closer to hazel, were partially
concealed behind lazy, half-closed lids.

Sunny simply nodded. Though she wasn’t interested in
Joyce’s attention, she was flattered by it. The deputy sheriff was a prime
example of the male species. Cupid had really engaged his funny bone with this
one—the uninhibited Tim Joyce was more Sunny’s type than Jonathan, yet the
staid Jonathan was the one who turned her on.

“Too bad,” Joyce murmured. “Personally, I have
nothing against spike heels, short women and spunk. In fact, I like spunk. If
it doesn’t work out with you and Jonathan, I hope you’ll look me up. I
guarantee that if I hear about it, I’ll look you up.” He gave her a slow grin.
“Agreed?”

She couldn’t stop her lips from curving in response.
“Nothing shy about you, is there?”

He held the lazy but gorgeous grin. In self-defense,
she turned back to her book.

That smile you’ve got could melt hearts
by itself, Deputy Joyce.
Inwardly, she smiled.
John Grisham comes in
second, but you’re a close third.

Ryan was sitting on the front porch steps with Cat
on his lap when Sunny returned home. He rose when she walked around to unlock
the trunk, and Cat settled in the corner of the step to give herself a bath.