There was no mistaking the visitor’s identity because of the striking resemblance to Mary Margaret. Swallowing a knot of nervousness in her throat, Sandra composed herself and opened the front door for Malloy’s ex-wife.
“H—”The word stopped, severed at the throat. God, not now.
Recognition—and then suspicion—dawned on the woman’s face.
“H—yes, hello,” Sandra finally managed with a burst of air.
“Hiya, Mom.” Kevin sped out onto the porch. “Check it out—we gave Zeke a haircut.”
“That’s nice, sweetie.” At close range, Angela was more than attractive. She was quite beautiful in a polished, honey-haired fashion. She wore a dark cashmere coat and thin leather gloves the color of butter.
Sandra tried not to think about her own appearance— an old sweatshirt and jeans, soiled from the dog’s bath. “How do you do,” she said. “I’m Sandra Winslow.”
“Angela Falco. “ The words were clipped off, just short of rude. She looked past Sandra. “Mike?”
“Hey, Angela. What are you doing here?”
“The meeting ended early, so I thought I ‘d pick up the kids, save you a trip to Newport. I stopped at the harbor, and someone said you were here.” She said
here
as though it were one of the inner rings of Dante’s inferno. “Come on, kiddos. Get your coats and let’s go.” She turned to Sandra. “Good to meet you.”
Both kids thanked Sandra without being prompted and waved good-bye. Mike walked them out to the car, kissing them both, then giving Kevin a high-five. He and Angela spoke briefly while Sandra watched from the doorway with Zeke tucked under her arm.
She studied the way Angela looked up at Mike and leaned in close, putting her hand on his forearm, the gesture both possessive and intimate. Sandra wondered if it was her imagination, or if some sort of sexual energy leaped between them. The two of them had been married a long time. Even divorced, they probably still remembered their private lovers’ shorthand, the unspoken communication that passed between long-married couples.
After they drove away, Mike returned, glancing at Zeke and shaking his head. “He doesn’t even look like himself.”
Sandra set down the dog and shut the door. “That was awkward,” she said.
He took one look at her face and pulled her into his arms. “Don’t sweat it.”
“I can’t help it, Mike. I’m no good at this.” Her words were muffled against his shoulder.
He pulled back. “At what?”
“At—I don’t know. Whatever
this
is. Dating. Is this dating?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“You have this whole other life on another planet, at least that’s how it seems. Your ex, the kids, your friends and family. I have no idea how to be in your life.”
“We’ll figure it out.”
“Will we?” She paused, running her hand down the hard length of his arm as though to erase Angela’s touch. “Should we?”
“Why not?”
“There are a million reasons. You’re living on a boat.
I ‘m moving as soon as the house sells. You can’t leave Paradise and I—I can’t stay.”
“Why not? Because of the lawsuit?”
“Because of a lot of things.” She pressed her forehead against his chest, listening to the gentle thud of his heart.
He tilted her face up to look at him. “You love this house, this place.”
And you.
She didn’t say it aloud. Their love was as uncertain and new as a flash of sunlight on quicksilver ice. Maybe that was why she couldn’t settle on exactly where she would go, once she was free to leave. “It’s only a place to live. I’m just passing through.”
“You could choose to stay. Or is that too hard for you?”
She pulled back, challenged by his question and posing one of her own. “Is that what you want? Are you asking me to stay?”
He hesitated. In that hesitation, she tasted defeat. He knew the score as well as she did.
“What if I did?” he said.
“I don’t know, Malloy. I don’t know a damned thing anymore.”
A
re you nuts, Malloy?” Loretta Schott’s voice shrilled through the cell phone and he held it away from his ear. “Have you absolutely lost your mind?”
Sitting in his boat, drumming his fingers on the table, Mike said, “What have you heard?”
His lawyer took an audibly deep breath. “That you’re letting your kids hang around with a murderer. It’ll look so impressive on your next custody evaluation.”
Damn Angela, he thought. She must have gone straight home with the kids and called her attorney. And it had been such a good day. He’d liked seeing his kids running around Blue Moon Beach, hanging out with Sandra. It all seemed so right at the time. He’d loved seeing the kids chasing the dog, Sandra fixing them lunch and catching his eye from time to time, the look on her face a sweet reminder of the night before. The memory caused his heart to constrict with a deep knowledge of what he needed, a feeling of longing.
“First of all,” he said, “Angela asked me to take them for an unscheduled day. I was more than happy to do it, but I’m in the middle of a big project. Second of all, Sandra Winslow is not a murderer. She is the victim of an accident, and I’m sick of hearing otherwise.”
“That doesn’t matter. She’s poison—she’s facing a wrongful death suit, and I guarantee that’s not going to endear her to the custody evaluator. And what’s this about these controversial books she writes? Angela said Mary Margaret has been reading them, and they’re so full of in-appropriate material that the library keeps them behind the counter.”
“They’re stories for kids. Even the librarian was embarrassed to admit they were challenged.”
“For God’s sake, Malloy, give the kid
Pollyanna
to read. You’ve got to play it safe, my friend, or you’ll have your visitation rights cut back faster than you can
say family values.”
“Damn it, Loretta—”
“Don’t damn-it-Loretta me. So what are you, dating the woman, banging her?”
“Don’t go there, Counsel.” His voice was low, calm and deadly serious.
“Then don’t you go where I think you’re headed. If you need to get laid, maybe you should steer clear of accused murderers. Judges tend to frown on people like that.”
He clenched his jaw until it hurt. Goddamn Angela. She couldn’t let him go. She was terrified he would love someone more than he’d ever loved her. He ought to call her bluff, expose the affair—but then he thought of the kids, and knew he’d never do that.
Every cell of his body screamed for him to break something—and to fire the bitch on the other end of the phone. But he focused on the photograph propped by the computer—a shot of him and the kids laughing together, his arms draped around them. For their sake, he had to keep his temper in check.
He took a deep, steadying breath. “Look, Loretta. Your job is to make me look like Captain Kangaroo for the family court.”
“Then quit making my job impossible. At least be discreet until the next evaluation. Don’t give Angela anymore ammunition, okay? Make sure they see your mug in church every Sunday. Get yourself a nice house, something with a nice yard, maybe even a white picket fence. It’ll be one fewer issue for Angela to raise. Have you found a place yet?”
“I’m working on it.”
“Work harder.”
“Ditto, Loretta.”
He hung up and raked a hand through his hair. He didn’t understand why Angela was trying to stir up trouble for him. Or maybe he did understand. She was a good mother, but apparently she wasn’t above using the kids to jerk him around. He was out of her control now, but she’d found a way to manipulate him.
Maybe.
Angela objected to Sandra’s reputation; she didn’t want the children under the cloud of suspicion that shad-owed her. And Mike kept thinking maybe, just maybe that suspicion was misplaced.
He made a couple of phone calls, then changed out of his work clothes. This was not the way he had planned on spending his evening, but a nagging pressure had been building inside him for a long time now. He’d been doing a lot of research, trying to fill in the blanks about the accident. His hunches were starting to harden into reality, and to dovetail with his suspicions. Sandra might hate him for it, but he knew he wouldn’t rest until he probed into her secrets.
He pulled up at the county annex just as twilight was coming on. The cramped and sleepy front office huddled at the end of Bay Street. Its single storefront window had the blinds pulled halfway down like a large eye in the middle of a blink. In a place where two panty thefts from a clothesline constituted a crime wave, there was not a lot of activity for the local law enforcement agency.
Mike hesitated before stepping inside. This was the only way to put his questions to rest—or to find the answers he needed. Stepping inside, he found himself at a reception counter littered with forms. Beyond that was a workstation with two desks facing each other. At one, a woman in a khaki uniform was talking on the phone and playing computer solitaire. At the other sat Stan Shea, whose father had run the icehouse at the docks when they were boys.
Stocky, balding and cheerful, Stan stood up. “Mike Malloy. Jesus, it’s been a coon’s age. I’m glad you called. So what’s up? You got trouble?”
“Some questions, like I said on the phone. About Victor Winslow ‘s accident.”
Stan folded his beefy arms on the counter. “Hell of a thing, wasn’t it?”
“I want to take a look at the case file.” He’d already read or viewed all the newscasts, articles and documents archived on the Web, but they raised more questions than they answered.
Stan shrugged. “It’s a public document. I pulled the stuff from the files after you called.” He led Mike down the hall to a room filled with files and forms. Dragging open a heavy drawer, he lifted out a stack of thick files. Finally, he gave Mike a disclosure form to sign. “Mind if I ask why the interest?”
“It’s been nagging at me. Vic and I go way back.”
“I remember that. The two of you were like Mutt and Jeff.” He shook his head. “Hell of a thing,” he said again.
Mike hoped Stan wouldn’t probe further. Rules required that he stay in the room, but he was a quiet sort, working a crossword puzzle in a chair by the door. Mike felt out of his depth, paging through reports, statements, diagrams and official forms —this was not his line of work. The stark photographs touched his nerves with ice. There was the bridge, its railing ripped away at the point of impact. The car, with its mangled front end and smashed mosaic windshield, had been dragged up from the bay a few hours after the incident.
Each object in the vehicle and trunk had been tagged and catalogued: tire iron and spare, a box of Kleenex,
Phantom of the Opera
in the CD player, two pairs of sun-glasses, papers from the glove box, a map of Rhode Island, a Boston city map and one of South Florida. The usual items commonly found in anyone’s car. Except this one had belonged to Victor and Sandra.
He came across photos and medical assessments of Sandra, and his heart skipped a beat. The unforgiving black-and-white photographs portrayed a woman pasty with shock, her eyes dark and huge in her bloodless face. Medical jargon and shorthand covered the papers—everything had been screened, scanned, scrutinized.
There were close-up shots: a hole in the dashboard, the shattered windshield, the driver-side airbag a limp, mud-stained object wadded on the seat, a woman’s stained winter coat.
He must have made some involuntary sound, because Stan looked at him. “Hard to believe they couldn’t make a case, eh? Her lawyer made it out like Victor was wounded in the accident and then was sucked out to sea. While she swam to safety.”
But she can’t swim.
She had disclosed that fact the day they’d gone cruising on the
Fat Chance.
Sandra couldn’t swim. But Victor had once been a distance champion in the eight-hundred-meter freestyle.
Mike said nothing to Stan. He needed to do some serious thinking. “She was unconscious when they found her,” he said, reading from a transcript he’d already viewed a hundred times on the Internet. “And no one followed up on the witness who called in the wreck.”
“Nothing to follow up. The transcript of the call’s there.”
Mike had already read the brief exchange.
A car just went over the bridge . . . Yeah, the Sequonset Bridge. It was headed west. . . Jesus, just send someone—he’s going to drown—
The dispatch operator, who logged the call into the police computer, reported that the exchange, with an adult male, had ended abruptly. The first emergency vehicle arrived thirteen minutes after the call came in.
“Why do you suppose the caller said
he’s
going to drown? Why not
she
or
they?”
Stan spread his hands, palms out. “Who can say?
He
might be a generic term. Or the guy might’ve been confused. A wreck like that—it’s not something you see every day, eh?”
“Where’s the car now?” he asked.
“In the boneyard over on Yancy.”
“Mind if I have a look?”
“Fine with me.” Stan told the clerk he was stepping out and they walked together across a nearly empty parking lot to a fenced yard littered with vehicles in various stages of disrepair. A fine, cold rain hissed from brooding skies.
The Winslows’ Cadillac STS hunched amid the rusty ruins, a sad, crumpled monument to the tragedy, splotched with neon orange paint from the investigation. Bracing one arm on the roof, Mike peered inside at the broken steering wheel, the buckled dashboard, airbag, and seat belts lying stiff and twisted on the seats. The liner hung from the warped ceiling, caked with silt and salt.
He spent a long time going over the car, hating every minute of it as he pictured Sandy at the wheel, Vic uncharacteristically drunk, yelling at her. Yelling what? He tried to see what they’d seen that night, even tried to feel what they’d felt at the point of impact.
He sat in the ruined leather seat, stiff with ancient salty sand and sludge. Tiny darts of sleet pelted him through the empty hole where the windshield had been. Old houses had a way of talking to him, revealing the past with coy whispers, elusive clues. But the car seemed impenetrable; the ghosts that haunted it guarded their secrets.
As he got out, he glanced at the dome light, then did a double take. The battery was long dead, of course, but the light switch on the passenger side was in the
ON
position.
“Hey, Stan,” he said. “Why do you suppose this was switched on?”
Stan stuck his head through the window. “Beats me. Could’ve been tripped during the wreck, or maybe during the investigation. Whole team swarmed over it.”
As he drove back to Paradise, Mike kept playing the scenario over and over in his mind; he imagined the car breaking through the high bridge, tried to feel the jarring impact when the car hit the water. On a dark winter night, with the vehicle sinking fast, would he have reached up to turn on the light?
The detail was insignificant—the investigators had noted and dismissed it. But Mike was pretty sure they didn’t know about the things hidden in Sandra’s attic.