Authors: Kassandra Lamb
Mrs. Hartin dabbed again at her eyes with a tissue. “I kept pushing her, thinking I could make her stronger.”
“She was strong, in her own way, and courageous.”
Unfortunately, the latter trait probably got her killed.
Another thought that Kate kept to herself.
She changed the subject. “Josie didn’t go to high school at Bryn Mawr, did she? Why did you move her again?”
“Because she rebelled, in eighth grade. Said she hated Bryn Mawr, all the pressure and emphasis on academics.” Mrs. Hartin’s voice rose, became sharper. “I pointed out…” She trailed off, then sighed. “We fought about it repeatedly. She wanted more time to spend on her artwork, said the local public high school had a really good art department. We ended up compromising, when she refused to go to school completely. I agreed to her transferring to the Catholic high school, and getting her private art lessons.”
Her eyes went wide. “She
was
strong, wasn’t she? Otherwise she wouldn’t have bucked me so much. She would’ve caved into my demands years ago.”
Kate gave her a wry smile. “Exactly.”
Mrs. Hartin chuckled softly, then her face sobered again. “I really was proud of her,” she said in a low voice. “But I was afraid if I told her that, then she’d think it was okay, the way she was living. But living that way made her happy.”
The tears started up again. “There were so many things I should have said to her.”
Kate leaned over and patted her hand. “That’s one of the hardest parts of the grief process, the shouda, woulda, coulda’s. Tell me, do you believe in heaven?”
Mrs. Hartin’s eyes went wide. “Of course I do.”
“Then you know that Josie is there now, and that she’s forgiven you.”
Another startled look. “How could she be in heaven? She killed herself.”
Crap! Forgot to tell her about the note.
Hadn’t Father Sam contacted them about burying Josie in hallowed ground? Maybe it had slipped his elderly mind.
Or maybe he’s the one who sent the note.
Kate suppressed a shudder. “I seriously doubt she did kill herself,” she said out loud. “I received a note a couple days ago, threatening me if I didn’t stop investigating her death.”
Mrs. Hartin stared at her. “You’ve been investigating?”
Double crap!
Kate hadn’t thought through how to handle this. She didn’t want to say too much and maybe get Judith in trouble, or have the Hartins start confronting people prematurely.
“At first, I was just trying to figure out why Josie would kill herself when she seemed to be doing so well. But I’ve found some indicators that it wasn’t suicide. Only circumstantial stuff so far. My husband’s a private investigator. He’s helping me look into it. When we have something more concrete, we’ll take it to the police.”
Mrs. Hartin nodded. “And the note confirms that she didn’t kill herself.”
“I think so.” At least it confirmed that someone had secrets they didn’t want revealed. “I’d prefer that you not tell anyone that we’re investigating.” She was tempted to add,
not even your husband.
But she hated to ask a woman to keep something from her husband, even though she suspected it wouldn’t be the only secret in their relationship.
Mrs. Hartin nodded again. “So you really think Josie’s forgiven me?”
It was the first time Kate had heard her use her daughter’s preferred nickname.
“Yes, I do.” She gave the woman a warm smile. “Especially if she’s been listening in on this conversation.”
Mrs. Hartin gave her a small smile back. She gathered her purse and jacket, then rose from the loveseat and offered her hand.
Kate stood and shook it, giving an extra squeeze before letting it go.
Josie’s mother’s face sagged. “Now all I have to do is forgive myself.”
~~~~~~~~
There were no messages on her office voicemail for a change, but her cell phone had two. The first was from Manny. “Hey Kate, the janitor claims he doesn’t remember back that far. I think he’s lying through his teeth, but I doubt we’ll get him to admit to anything. I’m headed back to your office now.”
The second message was from Skip. “Hey darlin’, I was looking over your list again. I’m gonna follow up with that nun.”
A warm feeling washed over her. Skip had offered to help from the beginning. Why had she stubbornly resisted? She’d let her guilt and grief isolate her.
Well no more of that!
She remembered she was supposed to call Rob.
He was in an emergency meeting with a client, his admin assistant informed her. She asked Fran to tell him she’d call him that evening. She stuck her head out into the waiting room.
Mac jumped up from a chair. She walked over to him. “Sorry for the boring duty, Mac. Manny’s on his way back here to relieve you.”
“Don’t mind being bored.” Mac grabbed her hand before she could turn away. “You okay?”
She studied his weathered face. His eyes were full of worry.
I sure have been putting those who love me through the wringer lately.
She gave him a peck on his leathery cheek. “I’m okay. Thanks for caring.”
He took a step back. “Now ya don’t have to go all mushy on me.” The glint in his baby blues said he was teasing.
She smacked his shoulder, then realized she’d been neglecting him and Rose lately. “Hey, why don’t you guys come over for dinner tonight?”
He flashed her a grin. “Sounds good.”
“See you then.” Kate went back into her office and glanced at the wall clock. She only had ten minutes left before her next client was due. Grabbing her lunch bag out of her bottom desk drawer, she plopped down in her chair.
While munching on her sandwich, she called up her personal email account. Skip had copied her when he’d sent the list to the others. She clicked on the attachment and read the list through again.
There were little lines on the scanned image, indicating the edges of the sheet of paper she’d written the list on–from a pad smaller than the standard eight and a half by eleven inches.
Something nudged at her memory. She’d seen lines like that before. Where?
She looked at her watch. She was out of time. Closing her email, she stood and went out to fetch her first afternoon client.
.
Halfway through her three o’clock session, her brain coughed up the connection. It was all she could do to concentrate on her clients for the rest of the afternoon.
Once her last client had left, Kate pulled Josie’s latest journal from her briefcase. It took a few minutes of leafing through it to find what she was looking for.
A very thin edge of a page that had been cut out. She realized there were actually several pages missing, cut cleanly from the book, probably with a razor blade. The page before ended in a complete sentence. The page after started with a new entry–three days later.
She pulled out the file from her briefcase that contained the information related to her investigation. Extracting her copy of the suicide note, she found what she had expected. There were faint lines around the edges.
Judith had said the sheet in the case file was a copy of the note. Kate would bet her brokerage account that the original was on a smaller piece of paper, say about the size of a journal.
She re-read the entries before and after where the pages had been removed. The entry before talked about coming out of a depression. In the one after, three days later, Josie was bemoaning the beginnings of a new manic episode.
Then she skimmed through the note. Viewing it not as a suicide note but as part of a journal entry, it fit neatly between the other two entries. Josie had often waxed introspective about her disease in those short periods of normalcy as she swung from depressed to manic.
The killer hoped no one would make the connection to the journal.
It had almost worked.
So why had this journal been left behind when the others, the older ones, had been taken? Was the killer afraid that others knew Josie kept a journal?
That had to be it. If there was no journal in the apartment, that might have raised questions about the suicide.
The hair stood up on the back of Kate’s neck. The killer had calmly sat in that apartment and read through the journal, searching for a believable ‘suicide note’–while Josie’s body was shutting down from the overdose cocktail she’d been given. Then the killer had thoroughly cleaned the place to remove any forensic evidence of his presence.
She wasn’t just looking for a murderer, she was looking for a cold-blooded one.
Feeling ill, Kate stuffed the journal into her briefcase and gathered the rest of her things to go home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It was a beautiful spring evening, warm and dry, the sky glowing to the west, and Rose was in the bosom of her adopted extended family. But she was having trouble relaxing.
She wasn’t nearly as confident as Skip was that Kate would take this well. She exchanged a look with her husband, standing next to Skip at the grill.
Mac shook his head slightly and took a swig from the beer can in his hand.
Rose huffed out a sigh.
He’s right. Not our business.
Her cousin headed toward the back door of the house. Rose followed her into the laundry room and through the living room. In the kitchen, Maria handed her a big bowl of potato salad.
Rose had carried it out to the table and was coming back through the squeaky screen door, shooing the dog out of her way, when she heard Kate greeting Maria in the kitchen. By the time she got around the corner, the master bedroom door was closing.
“She changing clothes,” Maria said as she gave Rose two more bowls to carry outside.
Rose hurried to get them on the picnic table, then hovered just inside the back door in the laundry room. The least she could do was warn Kate so that she wasn’t totally blindsided.
Kate came through from the living room in jeans and a loose cotton shirt. “Hey, Rose,” she said as she breezed past her.
“Brace yourself,” Rose said, then turned and almost collided with Kate’s back. The warning had come too late. Kate stood frozen in the back doorway, staring at her children sitting at the picnic table.
“Hey, don’t let that mutt out here!” Skip yelled from the backyard.
Toby was indeed trying to nose his way past them. Rose blocked him with one knee, then shooed him back into the house.
Kate’s movements were stiff as she walked toward the picnic table. She glanced back over her shoulder, her eyebrows arched in a questioning look.
Rose gave her a slight head shake. She wasn’t about to be the one to explain.
“Why don’t you want the dog out here?” Kate asked, her voice strained, her eyes flitting back to Billy’s scratched and bruised face.
“Toby stole one of the hamburgers,” Edie answered from her spot next to her brother.
Kate gestured toward Billy. “What hap–”
Skip raised a hand in the air. “Hold that thought. The burgers are ready.”
“Hey, sweet pea,” Mac called over. “You want a beer?” The corners of his mouth quirked upward.
Rose gave him a quelling look.
“No,” Kate said, “but I think I’m gonna have a glass of wine.” She turned and marched back into the house.
Rose joined her husband and Skip by the grill. “I’ll take a beer,” she said to Mac.
He leaned down and pulled one from the cooler at his feet.
Rose took the dripping can. She narrowed her eyes at Skip. “You two might think this is cause for celebration, but I doubt she’s gonna see it that way.”
Skip shrugged. “It’s a guy thing.”
Rose snorted and went to the table to sit down next to Edie. She popped the beer open and took a healthy sip.
Kate returned, a bouquet of wineglasses held by their stems in one hand, a bottle of red wine in the other. Maria followed, her hands full of several bottles of salad dressings.
They all settled around the picnic table. Kate poured wine for herself and Maria. She looked at her husband.
Skip held up his beer can. “I’m good.”
Kate very deliberately put the extra empty wineglass off to one side.
“I wanna say grace,” Billy yelled.
Kate opened her mouth. “Inside voi–”
“We’re not inside, remember?” Skip gave her a lopsided grin.
Kate glared at him, but she kept quiet as Billy said the blessing loud enough that God and all the angels were sure to hear him.
Everyone started passing bowls and loading condiments onto their burgers. From the way she was devouring her food, Kate’s normal voracious appetite had apparently returned, despite the current tensions.
Rose nodded slightly. A good sign that she was coming out of the funk she’d been in for the last few weeks.
Skip glanced at his wife’s plate periodically. When most of the food had disappeared from it, he said, “Billy, tell your mom what happened today at school?”
Rose started to take a sip from her can. Billy bounced up and down on the other end of the bench. She barely avoided inhaling beer.
“Those guys were pickin’ on me again, Mommy, but I did what Daddy told me. I told them they’d better stop or I was tellin’ the teacher. Then Freddie Perkins, he slugged me.” Billy stopped to shovel a forkful of beans into his mouth.
Kate gave Skip a hard look.
He kept his gaze on Billy. “What’d you do, son?”
“It really hurt. A lot more than I thought it would.” Billy touched his bruised chin. “But it also made me mad. So I slugged him back. We was whalin’ on each other when I remembered what else Daddy had told me, so I started hollerin’ real loud.”
“
Were
whaling. What’d you yell?” Kate said, but her gaze was not on her son. She was watching her husband, her eyes narrowed.
Rose glanced at Skip. The glint in his eye said he was enjoying the retelling of the story, which they’d already heard before Kate got home. But he was maintaining a neutral expression otherwise.
“Somethin’ like, ‘Leave me alone, you big bully.’ Freddie landed a couple more punches but I got him good a few times too. Then the teacher came runnin’ up and she said we were all in trouble.” Billy stopped, looked at his mother, his face puckered with anxiety.