Third Degree (15 page)

“Max, this is not the time.”

“Oh, this most certainly is the time. What is wrong with you?”

“How much time do you have?”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.” I leaned against the kitchen counter and picked absently at a banana in a bowl of fruit that had seen better days. “Listen, I want this to work as much as you do. I just don’t know if I’m ready to make that kind of commitment. Or maybe I am. I don’t know.” I forgot that I was talking to someone who had married her husband after weeks of courtship, broken up with him months into the marriage, and had taken him back—all in the same calendar year. I asked a question I should never pose her, under any circumstances. “What should I do?”

“The first thing you should do is set that house of yours on fire for the insurance money so I never have to look at that hideous Crate and Barrel coffee table again. Or your selection of horrific St. Thomas T-shirts. Then, I think you should crawl on your hands and knees to Crawford and beg him to take you back.”

“Great solution, Max.”

“Seriously. Marry the guy. You love him. He loves you. What else do you need?” She gasped audibly into the phone. “This is about your mother!”

“It is not.”

“It is. It’s August. You go crazy in August. That doesn’t account for the rest of the summer, but this is always when you go crazy.”

She was right, something I’m always surprised to acknowledge when it happens, say once every five years.

“If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.”

“What?” I said.

“Never mind. Listen, marry the guy or let him go. This is getting really annoying.”

I was still mulling over this advice as I changed into one of my “horrific” St. Thomas T-shirts and a pair of jeans. At the thought of marriage, my stomach lurched and I found myself hugging the toilet bowl in the bathroom, unable even to commit to throwing up. I finished dressing and lay on my bed, not sure how any of this was going to turn out but knowing that whatever did happen was going to be my fault alone. And wondering why I felt as if I were going to throw up all of the time.

I wanted to touch base with Jane but didn’t know when she’d be back from the funeral and the afterparty, which is the only way I can think of the gathering that takes place after the ceremony. I waited a few hours before checking in with her to see how things had gone after I had left and had contributed to
l’affaire
Stop & Shop. I’m sure the bus ride back to Leisure Village had been exciting, with everyone giving their version of what they had seen transpire in the store between me and Ginny Miller.

I put Trixie on her leash and walked outside, noting that Jane’s car was in the driveway. I knocked on her front door and let Trixie sniff around the boxwood hedges while I waited for her to answer. “Hi!” she said, surprised to see me. She opened the door wide to let us in.

“I hope I’m not getting you at a bad time.”

She was still dressed in the outfit she had worn to church: black pants, a black sleeveless top, and kitten-heel pumps. Her blond hair was pulled back into its usual low ponytail and her makeup was expertly applied. As is often the case when I’m with Jane, I felt like a slob, and my jeans, St. Thomas T-shirt, and flip-flops did nothing to counter that feeling.

“No,” she said. “It’s a good time. Come on in.”

We walked back toward the kitchen, and settled in at the breakfast bar. Jane grabbed two Diet Cokes from the refrigerator and two glasses from the cabinet. “Soda?”

I guessed it was too early to ask for a martini, so I accepted the soda. Trixie flung herself into a sunny patch by the back sliding doors and let out a long sigh. Things hadn’t turned out the way she had expected when I had put her leash on. For me, either, I wanted to remind her.

Jane handed me a cold glass of Diet Coke. “Your eye looks better,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said. “It was kind of scaring people, so I was hoping that it would start improving.”

“And the wrist?” she asked, pointing at my Ace bandage.

I flexed it back and forth. “I fell down, or maybe it was up, the stairs at school and sprained it. It’s better, too, though.”

“You’re like a walking accident,” she said, smiling.

“I guess I am.” We moved on to the memorial service. “Lydia seems to be holding up well,” I said.

“She’s doing better than I would be under the same circumstances.”

I waited a few seconds before asking the question that I had come to ask. “Do you know Ginny Miller?”

Jane blanched. “Why do you ask?”

Interesting reaction. “Well, I’ve run into her a few times over the past few days, so I was wondering if you knew her at all.”

Jane looked away and toyed with a corner of the newspaper on the counter.

Oh, good. There’s a story to tell, I thought.

She looked up, her blue eyes steely. “Let’s just say that Lydia does not have any fond feelings for that woman, nor do I.”

I waited a few more seconds for the rest of the story to come out, my mind reviewing the horrible pictures of Ginny Miller taking out the garbage in sweatpants and posted on Carter’s blog. “What did she do?”

Jane laughed but it was not a happy sound. “I don’t know why I’m trying to protect him. He’s gone. And Lydia can move on.”

“What is it, Jane?”

“She slept with him.”

I gagged on the sip of soda that I had drunk. “Ginny Miller? And Carter Wilmott?” The thought of it was too bizarre to consider. I grabbed a napkin from the holder on the counter and blotted the front of my T-shirt.

“I know. Right?” Jane said. “Hard to believe.”

“When?” I thought of the unflattering pictures on the Web site; I didn’t know when they had been posted but I remembered thinking that they hadn’t been in the too-distant past.

“George Miller went to Iraq for an eighteen-month tour about three years ago.” Jane looked up at the ceiling, trying to piece together the time line. “Yes. Three years ago. So that’s when it was.”

“Wait. George Miller was in Afghanistan?”

“Yes. He was working for some contractor before he became head of the DPW. Something with munitions.” Her distaste for the Millers was obvious. “You didn’t know?”

“How would I know?” I asked. “I lived across the street from you for five years before making contact. I have no idea what goes on in this village and wish that I had never heard of the Millers or the Wilmotts.” I grimaced. “Yikes.”

I thought back to my first conversation with Ginny and when I had asked her if George had ever been to war. She had said no, which technically was true. But he had been in Afghanistan, a war-torn country, and was obviously familiar with explosives. She was asking me to lie while at the same time lying to me. That was even more curious to me than the fact that Ginny had slept with Carter. And that was an extremely odd pairing. The spandex-wearing gym rat and the hoity-toity yellow blog journalist. Takes all kinds.

It seemed to me that George Miller had been planning to kill Carter all along. He certainly had the means; he had explosives experience presumably if he worked for a munitions company who outfitted American soldiers and their Iraqi counterparts. He certainly had motive. His wife had slept with Wilmott. And he had opportunity. One needn’t look any farther than Beans, Beans and what had probably been a chance encounter. The fight was just a sideshow diversion that ended tragically before Carter would have blown up in a bomb-rigged car.

I downed the rest of my soda and grabbed Trixie’s leash. “I’ve got to go, Jane. Thanks for the soda.”

Even though the day was gorgeous and I should have been in good spirits, a lot of things weighed heavily on my mind. I thought things couldn’t get any worse. I was wrong.

I was taking that information to my grave along with a few other items.

I called the number on the note again and listened to the phone ring and ring again. What kind of organization and/or psychopathic killer puts a phone number on its intimidating notes only to let the phone ring? I fingered the note, taking a deep whiff of the lavender, which had the opposite effect of the note’s intent: it made me relax. I didn’t know who sent the note or what they were referring to. The only thing I did know for sure was that if I spent any more time away from Crawford, I certainly would die. I stuffed the note into my jeans pocket, deposited Trixie in the house with an admonishment against eating anything that wasn’t actually a food product, and got into my car.

If you’re trying to win your boyfriend-slash-fiancé back, it is probably a good idea to look a little bit better than I currently did. But what the hell? He already loved me, warts and all, despite the fact that he was a bit perturbed with me at the moment. I knew it was a long shot that he would even be in the precinct but I figured it was worth taking a drive.

I rehearsed what I was going to say to him once I got to the precinct. I didn’t think that blurting out “I love you!” in the middle of the detectives’ squad room was the right course of action, but it was approaching dinnertime and I was hoping that we could sneak away for a drink or even something to eat so I could explain to him why I was the way I was. I went over all of my concerns in my head ranging from “how will your daughters feel about this?” to “my closet isn’t big enough for your giant clothes,” realizing how inane all of these objections sounded. I didn’t want to go to the lying, cheating husband well again—Crawford was right, he wasn’t Ray—but I had to get it all out.

And then, answer his question once and for all.

The precinct was its usual beehive of activity or den of iniquity, depending on how you looked at it. I had found a parking spot that seemed like three miles from the building, so by the time I jogged through the front doors, I was sweating, disheveled, and more than a little ripe. Any of the makeup that I had put on earlier in the day had melted off. It wasn’t exactly the way I wanted to begin my “Please Forgive Me” tour but it would have to do. I walked up to the front desk and spoke to the sergeant on duty.

I tried to catch my breath. “Um, hi,” I said, realizing, too late, that I was more out of breath than I originally thought. “Is Detective Crawford here?”

The desk sergeant, one Sergeant Tierney, a florid fellow reaching retirement age, stared down at me. “Um, hi,” he repeated, obviously getting a kick out of my attempt at a greeting. He looked sideways at another police officer who was pretending, unsuccessfully, to be engaged in typing a form on a computer.

I took in a stale gulp of police station air. “Let me start over.” I smiled. “Is Detective Crawford available?”

“Are you here to report a homicide?” he asked.

If you call murdering a relationship a “homicide,” well, then, yes. “Uh, no.”

Sergeant Tierney looked at me expectantly. “Then who should I tell him is looking for him?” he asked, taking in my sweaty St. Thomas T-shirt and wrinkled jeans. “The flip-flops are a nice touch,” he said.

I ignored that. I already knew that I looked a mess. “Tell him it’s Alison Bergeron. “ I smoothed down the front of my T-shirt. “Is he even here?”

“Well, we’ll just see,” he said. He snickered a bit with his cohort at the computer but I wasn’t in on the joke. He picked up a phone and turned his back as if he were privy to the Pentagon’s secrets. After a few seconds, he turned back around. “You’re in luck! He’s here,” he said, and waved his arm toward the flight of stairs that I knew would take me up to the detectives’ squad room. “Right this way.”

I left the main area and trotted up the stairs wondering if the job made you crazy or Sergeant Tierney was just somewhere on the manic spectrum. I stepped behind the flimsy partition that separated the hallway from the squad room and looked toward Crawford’s desk, trying to judge his mood from twenty feet.

When he saw me, he smiled. That was a good sign.

And he held up a sheet of paper with both hands and proclaimed, “I know where Kevin is.”