by Robyn Carr
“I’m Emma,” she said. “And I’ve been alone and sad, too. But I’m not right now so I can talk to you. Except I’m not allowed to use my phone during work—during the day. I’m off at five. And on weekends.”
“This weekend is Christmas,” she said sadly. “It’s a little harder at Christmas.”
“I know, honey.”
“I need to go,” she said. “I’ll call you sometime.”
“Okay. And you can leave a message if I’m working. Or in the shower or something.”
“Or text?” Bethany asked.
“Sure. But hey. Let’s talk. Okay? It’s what you want to do.”
“Yeah. I think. Don’t tell them, okay?”
“I’m not telling them.” I hope. I might have to, but let’s see.
* * *
“This Emma seems like an interesting character,” Logan said.
Riley smiled. They were at the restaurant, chatting about nothing at all. “You made it all the way to the antipasto,” she said.
“What? Did I say something wrong?”
“Not at all. I’ve been expecting you to say something. You kind of came to life when Emma showed up.”
“Did I? I think I came to life when she recognized me but I didn’t really remember her. Could the world get any smaller?”
“This is a small place. And Emma is very pretty,” Riley said. “Unforgettable.”
“She did the right thing, you know,” he added.
“When there’s trouble of some kind, I like it if they go through me. Or Nick. Nick is brilliant with situations like that. He’s not a big guy—he’s a short, stocky Italian—but he manages to seem six foot six if he has to. To the women who work for us he’s a sweetheart until they push him too far, try to take advantage of him, then he’s great at getting serious and making his point firmly. Not meanly, but firmly. With the men, he’s one of the guys until they try to take advantage and then he’s clearly the boss. No one wants to mess with Nick. He’s got a look. A scrappy look. Often a potential client will get an estimate from Nick and then come to me, looking to sweet-talk the lady boss into a better, cheaper deal.” She laughed and shook her head. “It hasn’t worked even once.
“I’d have liked it if Nick had been there when the police came,” she went on. “I’d have liked it if Nick and I were both there when the police confronted Mr. Andrews, but that’s asking for a miracle.”
“I’m sure they found him,” Logan said. “He’ll turn up at work or a bar or come to the hospital to try to offer up some lame excuse for beating the shit outta his wife.”
“What will happen to him?” she asked.
“He’ll go to jail,” Logan said, spearing an artichoke heart with his fork.
“His wife might think to make peace by denying—”
“There was a witness and evidence of a beating. You think the police don’t know what she’s up against? They know what she’ll say, what she’ll do and they’ve heard it all before. By now she’s as messed up as he is. There are two lawbreakers who can’t make bail—battery domestic violators and drunk drivers. They get to spend the night. In the first case so their victim has time to get away if he or she will do so and in the second case, to sober up.”
Riley thought about that. “That’s very clever of the police,” she finally said. “Here I thought abusers and drunks could get away with stuff all the time.”
“They do, even with all the stops in place. But we’re awful smart. We know how they think and act.”
“You are smart,” she agreed with a laugh.
“So tell me about Emma,” he said.
“Why do you want to know?” she asked.
“Because you’re friends,” he said.
Riley scooped some more greens from the salad on her plate, focusing on the antipasto and not him. “We’re not friends, actually. I’ve known her for a long time but she has only recently come back to Santa Rosa after being away for years. She needed a job. That’s pretty much it.”
“Oh, no, it’s not,” he said, laughing. “You two have some kind of important relationship that goes beyond work.”
“Is that so? And how would you know that?”
He shrugged. “Experience. Body language. Tone of voice. Eye contact. The way you two respond to each other. There was a lot of chemistry in your office for a little while.”
“Sassy,” she said, lifting her eyebrows. “You’re a smarty-pants, aren’t you? We were friends, in younger years.”
“I thought so.”
“We went to school together. But Emma went away to college, moved away after college, got married and just recently returned. After the death of her husband.”
“Aw,” he said, chewing. “She’s young. That’s sad.”
“I gather it was a bad marriage.”
“Abusive?”
“Why would you ask that?” Riley wanted to know.
“It would explain her sensitivity to that woman being abused.”
“Huh,” she said. “And I thought I was intuitive. But I don’t know if the marriage involved that kind of abuse. Her husband was not a good man, I hear. And he killed himself. As soon as she buried him and sorted out her affairs, she came back here. I suppose she feels comfortable here where she still has a few friends.”
Logan whistled. “Suicide. That’s ugly.”
“I suppose that would be hard to deal with even if you hated the guy.”
“Yeah. I hope he left her something...”
“I doubt it. If he’d left her anything, would she be cleaning houses?”
“Were you and Emma close friends in younger years? Because even though you’re the boss and she’s the employee, I detected something—like an element of familiarity. Intimacy.”
“Intimacy?” she asked, aghast.
“Not sexual intimacy. Or maybe it was trust.”
“From her?” Riley asked, a bit incredulously.
“Well, from both of you. If you looked anything alike, I’d make you out to be sisters. There was that familial give and take, like sibling love/hate. You know what I’m talking about, we all have it. I can call my sister a bitch but no one else can. There was... You know each other very well.”
She smiled at him. “We were good friends as kids. But that was a long time ago. We haven’t even been in touch in over fifteen years. Don’t you love the Riviera antipasto? Isn’t it the best there is? We should have gotten the bruschetta, which is also the best there is.”
He put his elbows on the table, leaned forward and smiled at her. “If there’s something you’d rather not talk about, you can just say so.”
“When I’m on a date, which I so rarely am, I’d rather not talk about another woman,” Riley said. “Besides, if your secret motive is that you’d like to date her, I believe she’s taken. And I’m not one bit happy about it, either.”
His eyebrows shot up and his eyes were as round as saucers. One look at him and she knew he wasn’t going to let that one go.
“Do not be a tease,” he said.
Riley sighed in defeat. “I suspect she’s seeing my brother. Adam said he ran into her, that it was really great to see her again after so many years. They went out for a glass of wine and he passed on one of my business cards. I said she’d never call me for a job, never work for someone she’d felt kind of competitive with when we were kids. Not nasty competitive, not rivals, nothing like that, but still... Adam’s been curiously busy and stupidly happy lately...”
That made Logan smile. “Why Riley, you little witch.”
“Well, she works for me! Do you think I want to see her at every family function? That would be a little complicated, don’t you think?”
The waiter was just passing by and tried to snatch the antipasto platter and Logan stoppe
d him. “We’re still working on this, but I’ll have another beer and I think the lady will be ready for more wine in a few minutes. Thanks.” Then to Riley he said, “I think there’s more to it than that, but I don’t want to screw up the rest of our date. I like the way our dates end—slowly with lots of personal contact. So... How about those Lakers?”
“I didn’t want to give her a job and my brother,” she said.
He reached for her hand. “I thought she was a good-looking woman and have absolutely no interest in dating anyone but you. You’re a showstopper, Riley. And I want to make out with you like mad.”
“I might be falling out of the mood,” she said.
“Drink more wine,” he urged. “We’re going to be on hiatus over Christmas and by the time we get to— Hey, should we make plans for New Year’s Eve?”
“Maybe,” she said. “Can I check with my daughter first? I want to be sure she’s not on the loose while I’m partying with you.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “Here comes dinner. And save a little room for the tiramisu. Damn, does that look good or what?” He gave her hand another squeeze. “Come on, baby. Let’s get in the same canoe here. Tonight’s about us. I want to impress you with my manners, good taste, brilliance and sexual allure.”
She laughed at him. “I don’t want to hear another word about your sexual allure. Especially in front of the waitstaff.”
“Killjoy. Some women find the spectacle of a man willing to make a fool of himself in public very titillating.”
“Do they, now?”
“You know they do, Riley.” And he winked.
* * *
Logan had learned something tonight, like what an idiot he could be. First of all, a detective with a working brain would have waited for her to bring up Emma before homing in on her and their friendship. And second, whatever was in their past was enough to take Riley to another place and nearly ruin the evening. Maybe he wasn’t smart enough to balance a budding relationship and a case because he was hot for Riley. He liked her in a way he hadn’t liked a woman in a long time.
By the time the conversation got around to Emma possibly dating Riley’s brother, she was shutting down, moving away. Riley didn’t seem to mind talking about the fact that Emma was pretty, that she’d had a bad marriage, but she didn’t want to talk about Emma and her relationships with men.
After dinner he managed to persuade her to do a little kissing beside her car. He even talked her into getting in the car for a little more. But when he asked her to come to his place for an hour or so, she was too smart for him. “I’m afraid not, Logan,” she had said. “I’m not ready for that next step.” And he said he was ready whenever she was and she replied, “I know. I can tell. I’m so smart that way.”
So now they were driving home to their own houses in their separate cars and he had the feeling something had changed. Instead of going forward, they were moving back. And this had something to do with Emma even though Riley had no idea of his interest in Emma.
His cell rang and the number popped up on the dash screen in the car. Georgianna. He pressed the connection for the hands-free. “What?” he said.
“Hello, dear,” she said. “You’re late for dinner again.”
“What do you want? What if she’d been in my car?”
“Didn’t you say you’d be meeting for dinner? Why would she be in your car?”
“Because she drank too much wine and I had to drive her to my house, which I very much tried to do. But she left most of her second glass and declined my invitation. And I’m a little unhappy so why don’t you just leave me alone.”
“Did you learn anything?”
“No. Not anything useful.”
“Why don’t you go ahead and tell me, huh? I’m much more objective than you are.”
He took a breath. She was right. “There’s some significant history between the girls but it’s obviously complicated. When I started to ask about their history, using all of my brilliant detective skills, she mentally moved away from me. That’s when I lost her. She was fine talking about Emma coming back here, needing a job, getting over a bad marriage—generic on the bad, no details—but when I asked what their relationship was like when they were young, she shut down. Oh—and she thinks Emma might be seeing her brother.”
“She doesn’t know?” George asked.
“Not for sure, I guess. How firm is that?”
“Every night.”
“How do you know?” he asked.
“The only conversations they have are about what’s for dinner and when will you be here.”
Logan thought Adam Kerrigan was getting a lot luckier than he was. “I don’t get it,” he said. “They’re one nice big happy family. I saw Riley and Emma today, working through a tense situation, supportive of each other, friendly. The brother and the mother obviously like her. But Riley’s smart. She’s scary smart. You think she knows something and doesn’t want her family mixed up in it?”
“Possible,” George said. “If you don’t have anything interesting to tell me, I’m going to kiss the kids and hit the sack. Bruno’s on shift.”
Bruno was not his real name. Mr. Universe’s real name was John.
“Good. Don’t call me anymore.”
“You know it’s probably a good thing you didn’t get laid...”
“Shows what you know. That’s almost never a good thing.”
“Oh, I can think of a ton of circumstances when getting laid would be a really bad—”
He hung up on her.
Chapter Sixteen
Emma received her second phone call from Bethany two days after the first, again while she was driving home from work. She learned that Bethany’s mother had died from a freakishly terrible case of the flu almost two years ago. She got sick, then got sicker, was admitted to the hospital then to the ICU. It was the kind of thing that usually happened to the extremely frail, chronically ill or elderly, but it got Danielle Christensen, taking her life in a week. The family was, understandably, wrecked by it.
Then Olaf Christensen brought home a woman he had worked with for a long time, a CPA in his import-export company. There were many such businesses in the port city, the Bay Area, and the Christensens’ was successful. Danielle had only been gone a couple of months, but it seemed to help him a great deal to be seeing this woman. Liz was forty and had never married, had no children and before six months had passed, they were married. Everyone loved her—she was good at her job, active in her church, popular at work, laughed a lot and showered attention on Bethany’s father. But she never laughed with Bethany, only with Bethany’s father and other adults.
Before they even married, Bethany’s stepmother was taking over the house. She fired the cleaning lady who’d been with them for years and hired Riley’s company. She made every meal or ordered something she could pick up on the way home or booked reservations. The once comfortably lived-in house became spotless and sterile. Danielle’s clothes were moved to a guest room closet and chest of drawers, then little by little they moved back to the master bedroom. The family pictures were removed. Liz said, “They’re certainly not helping our situation, these constant reminders.” Bethany was told to clean her room to Liz’s specifications and if she didn’t, Liz went in her room, put things away and tidied up. In order to keep Liz out of her room, Bethany followed the instructions. When Bethany just wouldn’t stop acting depressed, Liz found her a therapist.
“I heard her saying I should be put in a hospital or boarding school but my dad didn’t agree. Maybe I should. I would be away from them.”
Bethany told Emma she took a bunch of drugs from Liz’s medicine chest and had to have her stomach pumped last Christmas.
Emma gasped. “Oh, sweetheart, how terrifying! Please tell me you’ll never do that again!”
“No, I won’t. It was horrid. It turns out Liz doesn’t have any good drugs,” Bethany said.
“Well, I guess that’s a point in her favor,” Emma said. “I know Christmas is hard, Bethany, but if you start to feel terrible will you please tell a school counselor? Or teacher? Or someone?”
“I could try, but I think I’m just going to ask my dad and Liz if I can be a foreign exchange student. My dad wants everything to be all right. But I think Liz would be happy to see me go.”
“Do you have pictures of your mother?” Emma asked. “Pictures you can look at to give you comfort?”
“I have some in my drawer.”
“Bethany, what about your grandparents?”
“My grandma is in assisted living. She was so good but when my mom died... She just got so old, so fast.”
“And what about your friends from school?”
“I have friends at school, but they don’t want to hang out anymore. I think I make them sad or something. And Liz makes them nervous. She’s too much.”
Emma was almost surprised to hear the sound of her own laughter. “Okay, I wasn’t going to tell you this but I have a stepmother. And she’s too much, too.”
“No way,” Bethany said.
“Rosemary. I remember when my adviser in high school told me I was so lucky to have a mother like Rosemary who was strict and made sure my homework was done and had a strong set of values. She said I’d appreciate it someday. Rosemary was kind of scary. Her smile was fake, if you know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean,” Bethany said. “My stepmother doesn’t like me. She pretends in front of my dad, but it’s not real. Sometimes I can hear her complaining and crying to him, saying I don’t appreciate her. Maybe it’s just because she’s not anything like my mother, I don’t know. It’s like we don’t live in the same house anymore.”
“Tell me about your mother,” Emma said.
“She was so sweet. Not that she couldn’t get mad—she chased me with a mop once, yelling her head off. But she couldn’t catch me and then she laughed her head off. She was kind of messy. She left her clothes on the closet floor all the time and our cleaning lady, Mary, she used to grumble and mutter and complain and my mother would laugh and say, “Come on, Mary! I’m such great job security!” But my mother could cook and bake! The house always smelled great. And she loved to go to my school things. She worked at my dad’s company, too, but she’d take off to help at school, to go on field trips, to watch my concerts and programs and stuff. And she used to...” Bethany’s voice slowed and stopped. Emma could tell she was crying. “We used to get in bed together and talk and rub each other’s backs and heads and laugh and fall asleep in a pile.”