“He doesn’t need to go on-line to have an affair. Not with that little Wells girl living right upstairs.”
Tension gripped the back of Steve’s neck.
Wayne’s ears turned red.
In his gut, Steve didn’t believe Bailey was guilty. Of an affair or anything else.
But his gut wanted to have sex with her. He couldn’t trust his gut any more than he could trust her.
“I’m looking into it,” he said. “You find anyone yet who saw her on her walk?”
“Martha Grimes was out watering her roses that night,” Wayne volunteered. “She saw Bailey cross the street.”
Steve had been gone too long to know Martha Grimes. “Which street? What time?”
Wayne fumbled for his notebook, flipping through the pages. “Church Street. Right around the corner from the Ellis place. About nine o’clock.”
“Kind of late to be watering flowers,” Steve observed.
“Less evaporation. Saves water,” Wayne said.
“Plus, Martha was probably out sneaking a cigarette,” Darian said. “Her husband’s been after her to quit.”
Steve nodded. “So, Bailey would have gotten back . . .”
“A little after nine.”
That matched her story. Plenty of time for her to return to her room and do some reading before she came downstairs to fix herself some ice cream and discover Helen’s body.
Or to hit her employer’s wife over the head, dump her body into the pool and sneak upstairs.
He looked at Darian, who had volunteered to do follow-ups with the neighbors. “Anybody remember seeing anything after that?”
“You mean, like a murder?” Darian shook his head. “Nope. Fellow across the street let his dog out about eleven. Thinks he saw lights on in the front bedroom window and in the study. That’s about it. You get anything else from that lawyer?”
Two days ago, Steve had gone to Helen’s executor to question him about the Ellises’ financial affairs. The lawyer, Macon Reynolds, informed him Helen Stokes Ellis had taken out a four-million-dollar life insurance policy as part of her prenup—enough to convince Steve her husband had a motive for murder, more than enough to convince the judge Steve had probable cause for a warrant.
“Just that the insurance company won’t pay out as long as the manner of death is ‘pending.’ ”
“He told you that?” Wayne asked. “Isn’t that, like, breach of confidentiality or something?”
“Not if he doesn’t represent Paul Ellis. Helen was his client.”
“But she’s dead.”
“He still has to act in her best interest.” Steve smiled thinly. “I just convinced him her interest was best served by cooperating with the police.”
Which hadn’t been hard. Reynolds claimed to remember Steve from high school, so Steve had played the home-town connection. Despite her years away, Helen had been One Of Our Own. Ellis was a Yankee interloper who didn’t deserve his dead wife’s fortune.
Steve picked up the carton that housed the flat-screen monitor and cables, all tagged and labeled, hoping Wayne would take the hint and grab the computer box.
“So we dump all this with the state crime lab and wait for them to tell us why Ellis suddenly needed money?” Wayne asked.
“We don’t have to wait. Most criminal investigation isn’t rocket science. We have bank statements. Bills. Correspondence. Let’s start there.”
Wayne’s eyes lit as he saw his opportunity to be involved in something more exciting than lost dogs and public disturbances. “I can help. When I get back.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Steve asked.
The younger man’s face fell as he remembered. “Funeral at eleven.”
Darian looked at Steve. “You got traffic duty, too?”
Steve bared his teeth in a smile. “Not yet.”
REGAN heaved behind a headstone. Another stream of coffee and bile arced to the grass, spattering her black $275 Kate Spade pumps.
Fuck, fuck,
fuck.
Tears leaked from her eyes. She sagged against the back of the marble headstone where she had taken refuge, fighting the buzz in her head. The hum of mourners leaving her mother’s grave site blended with the whisper of leaves and the rising whine of the cicadas. Despite the sun beating down on her unprotected head, she felt flushed and cold. She should be out there now, a brave little smile on her face, accepting the condolences of people she barely knew and couldn’t care less about, inviting them back to the house. Her house.
She doubled over, her stomach rebelling in fury against an overload of uncertainty and grief, of tranquilizers and caffeine.
Fuck them all
.
Something white fluttered at the corner of her vision like a ghost. Regan’s heart crowded her throat along with what was left of her stomach contents. But it was only Bailey coming to check up on her.
“Tissue?”
Regan snatched it, pressing it to her mouth. “Go away,” she ordered.
But maybe dweeb girl had some spine, after all, because she didn’t leave. Not right away. She rummaged in her monster purse—like Mary Poppins’s, only uglier, big and black with gold zipper teeth—and came up with a mini-bottle of water and a packet of Tic Tacs.
“Here.” She unscrewed the bottle of water. “Rinse, don’t swallow.”
Leaning weakly against the tombstone, Regan reached for the water. She rinsed and spat on the thick green grass. Rinsed and—ignoring Bailey’s instructions—swallowed. Her stomach lurched, but the water felt so good against the parched tissues of her mouth, against her hot, tight throat.
“Are you all right?” her stepfather’s assistant asked gravely.
“What do you care?”
Bailey shrugged. “I just . . . Your mother . . .”
“I’m fine.” Regan closed her eyes. “You’ve done your little ministering angel bit. Now get the fuck away from me.”
When she opened her eyes, Bailey was gone. Regan’s chest squeezed.
Good.
She knew that caring act was a bunch of crap. She took another swig of water.
“Regan, honey, how you holding up?” That smooth baritone flowed like molasses, rich and slow.
She lowered the bottle. A guy stood on the other side of the grave. Blond hair, pocket square, expensive suit, polished shoes. She recognized him. Reynolds something. Her mother’s lawyer.
“How do you think?”
He smiled. “I think you look like a lady who could use a drink. And I don’t mean water.”
Regan considered. For an oldie, he was kind of a hottie. And he was on her side. He was the one who told that greedy bastard Paul he wouldn’t get a penny of her father’s money.
“What did you have in mind?” she asked.
He looked her up and down, and the cold inside her ebbed. “Well, now, that’s up to you. I imagine there’s sherry back at the house.”
She pulled a face. Sherry and a bunch of chattering old farts who would expect her to listen to their stories about her parents.
“Or we could go someplace quiet for a vodka and tonic,” he continued smoothly.
“Make mine an appletini,” she said. “And you’ve got yourself a deal.”
“How about a date?” he said, still smiling.
He wore a ring. Asshole. Married asshole. Unlike dweeb girl, Regan didn’t waste her time on married men.
But she deserved a little comfort, didn’t she? Or at least a drink. Her mother was dead. Her brother wasn’t here. And the hot male appreciation in the older man’s eyes warmed the edges of the cold void inside her.
Don’t do it,
her instincts whispered, but that little warning voice sounded annoyingly like Bailey.
Regan pushed away from the headstone. “Sure, why not?” she said.
SOUTHERNERS appreciated a good funeral.
His wife’s death thirty-one months ago had blunted Steve’s enjoyment of such events, but the folks around him, drifting away from the grave and toward their cars and the buffet line, seemed to be having a good old time. Maybe it was the weather, incongruously bright, decorously hot, cooperatively dry.
Teresa had died two days after Christmas, her spirit fading with the waning year. She was buried in Saint John’s churchyard in the short, bleak interval before New Year’s. Her parents flew up from Brazil for the funeral. Steve remembered holding Gabrielle’s small, damp hand, listening to Rosa’s soft sobs as the organist played “Ave Maria” to a nearly empty church.
People had packed the sunlit pews this morning at Helen Ellis’s funeral. The older ladies of the congregation counted the turnout, their lips moving silently. The service was beautiful and decorous: the flowers, the candles, the sedate, brief hymns, the even more sedate and briefer sermon. But Steve felt like he was watching a play. The tasteful, traditional ceremony in the packed church seemed more empty of real feeling than Teresa’s quiet, sparsely attended mass.
Who had loved Helen Ellis? Who mourned her?
Jamming his hands in his pockets, he strode towards his truck.
“Lieutenant Burke?” Bailey’s voice was slightly breathless, as if she’d hurried to catch him.
Steve felt the blip of sexual attraction, like the warning whoop from a squad car. Something about being pursued by an attractive woman, even if she was a person of interest in an ongoing investigation. . . . He turned.
She smiled apologetically, pushing her dark hair back from her face. “Sorry to bother you. But have you seen Regan? Regan Poole?”
“Why?”
She blushed, or maybe that was the sun on her face. “I thought . . . I saw you watching everyone, and I hoped you might have noticed where she’d gone.”
Steve shook his head. “Not why did you ask me. Why are you looking for her?”
“Oh.” This time she definitely blushed. “She’s supposed to ride back to the house with Paul. The limo’s waiting.”
Steve took his hands from his pockets. “She already left with the lawyer.”
Her brows drew together. “Macon Reynolds?”
“Yep.”
“You know him?”
She’d given him the name of Helen’s lawyer. Did she remember? “We’ve met,” he said. “Turns out he was a year behind me in school.”
“Right. This is Stokesville. Everybody knows everybody. So did you two have a little reunion party?”
“Not really. We didn’t exactly run with the same crowd in high school.”
“Which crowd was that?”
“Macon Reynolds,” he said carefully, “was one of those kids who drove their own cars and raided their parents’ liquor cabinets after school.”
A smile touched her lips. “And you didn’t drink and drive.”
Steve shrugged. “Not during football season. And the rest of the time . . .” He stopped. He wasn’t here to tell her the story of his childhood.
“The rest of the time,” she prompted.
This was Stokesville, he reasoned. Everybody knew everybody. What he didn’t tell her, she could learn from somebody else.
“I worked for my dad in the lumber yard.”
“Is he here?”
Steve looked out over the sunlit hill, his hands in his pockets. “He’s dead.”
“I know. Mama told me,” she added. “I meant, is he buried here?”
Memories of his father’s funeral crowded him like ghosts: his daughter’s warm weight, his mother’s drawn face, Teresa, slim and elegant in her good black coat . . .