He narrowed his eyes to squints as his face showed his confusion. “What do you mean you know?”
I took a deep breath, and finally after all this time, I confessed the truth. “I was so jealous she was with you that I wasn’t a very good friend to her when you two were together. I’ve been thinking a lot about that since I saw her sitting in that car. I feel terrible about it. I know what you saw in her. What everyone saw. She was fun and so full of life. And I wasn’t like her and I was so jealous that she got to be with you and all I got was to work with you.”
Now it was my turn to look away. As good as I was at being strong for others, when I had to admit my own failings, that strength disappeared and I was left with my insecurities for all the world to see. I felt so open, so vulnerable in a way that I’d never been comfortable with.
“I never knew, Poppy. If I had…”
I turned back to look at him and shook my head. “You never needed to know that. My feelings were my own, and just because you didn’t share them doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. Bethany didn’t either. You two had every right to be together. You were two single adults, so why not? I don’t want us to feel awkward about acknowledging the fact that you were together.”
“I’m sorry, though. I wish I knew how you felt back then.”
“Why? Would it have changed anything? You liked her. Maybe even loved her in some way. What I felt had nothing to do with that.”
Alex hung his head and quietly said, “I didn’t love her. Now that she’s dead, I wish I could say I did, though, especially since she felt something like that for me.”
Squeezing his hand, I brought it to my lips to kiss. “Not every relationship we have in life has to be love. Sometimes two people just feel better being with each other. Whatever you two were together, it gave you something you both needed. There’s no shame in that.”
I didn’t admit that part of me was still jealous of Bethany, no matter how twisted I knew that was. She had known him in a way I hadn’t yet, and although I didn’t think about it all the time, I couldn’t deny that his lack of interest in sleeping with me had made me wonder why.
“She made me feel like I could take a chance again, but it wasn’t her I wanted to take that chance with. That’s why I can’t help feeling a sense of regret when I think about the two of us together. She wanted more than I could give her, and for that, I’m sorry.”
Even as the urge to know if it was me he’d wanted to take that chance with made me want to ask him, I didn’t. It felt wrong to press for that information as we sat there trying to figure out who had killed her.
I grabbed my glass of soda and stood from the couch to take it into the kitchen, even though I didn’t need to refill it. Something about telling him how I’d felt made me feel more exposed than I could handle, and in that moment as I knew he sat there watching me walk away from him, why we hadn’t slept together yet became all too apparent.
Unlike Bethany, who always made him and everyone else feel like they were the center of her world every minute she was around them, I spent much of my time around Alex keeping him at arm’s length. Still haunted by my own past, I was as broken as I’d always believed him to be.
Walking up behind me, he slid his arms around my waist. He rested his chin on my shoulder, so I felt his newly sprouted stubble brush up against my jaw and whispered low in my ear, “I’m sorry if I said something wrong there. It’s not the same with you as it was with her. You know that, right?”
I did, but that didn’t matter. My jealousy had come out of my own insecurities, not anything he or Bethany had done, and it wasn’t his job to take the blame for it.
Turning around to face him, I looked into those deep brown eyes and knew what I saw in them was something she hadn’t, no matter how much she wished she could. And I understood why her diary entries sounded so full of love for him.
“I know. It’s okay, Alex. You don’t have to make excuses for not wanting to be alone. Bethany was the kind of woman men loved to be around.”
“You don’t have to feel bad, Poppy. Bethany and I didn’t break up because of you. She knew that.”
I didn’t want to keep talking about this because there was no escaping the rest of that answer—that he’d stopped seeing her because he was haunted by the love he still had for his wife. Even though he’d told me he loved me, I wasn’t a fool. Just as he’d been unable to give Bethany what she wanted, it was just as likely he’d never be able to give me what I wanted either.
And as much as I loved him, I didn’t want to think about that on top of everything else this case had brought up. So I let it go for another time.
“I remembered that Bethany mentioned to me that she was seeing some guy from Baltimore. She regretted it when she broke up with him too.”
Curious, Alex asked, “Why? She wasn’t really a regrets kind of person.”
“Because he was married and had kids. She said he didn’t take it well when she broke things off either.”
“When was that?”
I thought about that day she came into my office to talk about the problems she was having with the man. It had been right before spring the year before. “Around nine or ten months ago. Maybe March of last year? Bethany’s job was to bring in more advertisers, and part of that included working with a firm in Baltimore that the paper used on a freelance basis. The guy worked at that firm.”
“What did she say happened?” he asked as he headed back into the living room.
Following him, I sat down on the couch and took another sip of my drink. “She got some weird phone calls a few times at work, and one time she told me that she realized too late that she’d made a mistake dating him. She didn’t go into it, but I figured she understood that dating a married man was a road to nowhere, but now I wonder if the mistake was something less with offending her ethics and more with danger.”
“How can we find out who this man is?”
There was only one way to find that out. I had to go to work, where hopefully my boss wasn’t since I hadn’t checked in for days even before all this terrible business with Bethany’s death.
“I can check her office at The Eagle for anything that could point us in the right direction.”
A slow smile crept onto Alex’s face. “If it was me investigating this case, I would have been over that office with a fine tooth comb already.”
I chuckled at the truth of his comment. “Then I guess we should be happy Derek is the one doing the investigating this time.”
Alex stood from the couch and moved to get his coat. “I guess we should. Let’s go then. We don’t want to end up running into him if it ever dawns on him to check there.”
I stood to stop him and kissed his lips to soften what I had to say. “I think it might be better if you stay here while I head over to The Eagle to see what I can find out. On the off chance that Derek shows up, I don’t think I can handle another confrontation between you two today, okay?”
As much as I knew he didn’t want to sit on the sidelines anymore, Alex begrudgingly nodded his head in agreement. “Okay. I want you to be careful, though, and if you have any problems, call me and I’ll be there in a heartbeat.”
“It’s my workplace, so I think I’ll be fine. I’m just going to do a little snooping and hope I don’t run into my boss since I’ve been slacking off on the job.”
Alex buttoned my coat, and smiling, planted a tiny kiss on the tip of my nose. “Then be careful with that too. Hurry back.”
As I turned my collar up to brace me from the winter cold I was about to run out into, I gave him a wink. “Aren’t I always?”
I didn’t wait for his reply.
Chapter Fifteen
The Sunset Ridge Eagle buzzed with people scurrying through the hallways like someone had gotten the scoop of the century. I quickly made my way through the crowd of my fellow writers to Bethany’s office and shut the door behind me to get some privacy for my investigating duties.
I looked
around and still felt her presence there like it had been for nearly five years. The smell of her vanilla scented perfume. Her half-empty pack of sugar-free gum on the desk right where she kept it near the box of paper clips. The pencil holder full of dry erase markers in a rainbow of colors for her monthly calendars she kept hung on the wall so she knew what was coming for the next quarter. Her favorite black scarf she wore to keep her warm in the office she claimed never got hot enough lay slung over the back of her desk chair.
It all felt like she’d walk through the door at any moment and announce some great thing had happened to her that she couldn’t wait to tell me all about. Suddenly, coming here seemed like a bad idea. It felt disrespectful, like grave robbing.
I couldn’t do it. I ran out of her office and met one of her advertising teammates, Erika Simpson, just outside the door. A beautiful blond with great cheekbones I’d long admired, her upbeat expression I was used to seeing so often around the office was nowhere to be found, replaced by a look of utter sadness.
“Oh, Poppy, what are we going to do without her?” she asked as tears filled her green eyes. “The place won’t be the same without Bethany.”
Nodding, I struggled to keep my composure as my tears threatened to come again. “I know. It’s terrible. I can’t imagine who would want to do this to her. What’s going on here today?”
Wiping the mascara that began to run under her eyes, Erika sniffled and shook her head. “I don’t know, but the bosses all came in about an hour ago. Whoever did this to Bethany, I hope they hang them when they find them.”
Gingerly, I probed for anything that might help to uncover the killer, even an office problem Bethany may not have thought much about. “Can you think of anyone who would have hated her so much? I’ve been racking my brain since I found out. Who could have done this? Everyone here loved her.”
Erika’s eyes grew wide, and she leaned in close to me. “Not everyone. I never had a problem with Bethany professionally, but she could be cutthroat when it came to getting an account, and more than once I heard her and one of the other ad execs arguing in her office. It got so bad that the woman left in a huff a few months back after telling the bosses that Bethany should be fired for how she conducted herself.”
This was all news to me. Bethany had never mentioned anything about problems she was having with anyone at the newspaper. “Who? She never told me about this.”
Grimacing, Erika whispered the name. “Samantha Cooper. She’s a real barracuda. I didn’t mind one bit when she left, and I’m not the only one. But she and Bethany had it out a few times because she claimed Bethany poached an account of hers.”
“Really? What happened to this person?” I asked, suddenly wondering if that visit to Bethany’s office wouldn’t reveal yet another possible suspect.
“I have no idea, but it was good riddance to bad rubbish as far as I was concerned when she left in November. I better get back to my office, but if you hear about a memorial service for Bethany, let me know, okay? I’ll want to be there for her.”
With all the investigating of the case and dealing with my own guilty feelings about our friend, the idea of a memorial service had slipped my mind. She deserved to be remembered as the person those of us who cared about her knew.
“I will, Erika. Thanks.”
When she and everyone else had gone to their offices, I quietly returned to Bethany’s and began searching for anything on the married man and this new person I’d just found out about who sounded like she had an ax to grind with her. In the back of the top drawer of her desk, I found five envelopes with Baltimore listed on the return address and postmarks from last June. I stuffed them into my purse without even looking at the letters inside, and finding nothing else of note, hurried out of her office directly into a woman with long black hair and blood red lipstick coloring her harsh looking mouth.
And when she spoke, I knew I hadn’t judged that mouth incorrectly.
“Who the hell are you? What are you doing in my office?” she snapped as she pushed past me through the doorway.
“This is Bethany Lewis’s office,” I said defiantly, wanting whoever this intruder was to know where she was and who had occupied this space until a few days ago.
“Not anymore. There’s a new sheriff in town, so if you don’t mind, perhaps you can take all of this junk out of MY office now.”
Stunned at her rudeness, I asked, “Who are you?”
Snapping her head to look at me so her long hair flew around her head like a fan, she shot out her left hip and announced, “I’m Samantha Cooper, the person who should have had this office in the first place.” She threw a box from the floor at me and said, “Now if you want any of this junk, I suggest you take it now before I have maintenance clear it all out so all traces of her are gone.”
I couldn’t believe how heartless she was! “Her name was Bethany and she’s dead. A little respect for her wouldn’t kill you.”
Samantha looked sideways at me as she sat down in her new office chair and sneered. “You have two minutes before I have whoever you are escorted out of here.”
There was no point in continuing to speak to her since she was possibly the rudest person I’d ever met in my life, so I quickly gathered up Bethany’s things into the box as she told someone on the phone how happy she was to be back at work where she belonged.
“Of course, this entire office will have to be changed around since the bitch who had it before me had no taste or class at all, but knowing that I’m back in my rightful place again makes what I’ll have to deal with until it gets fixed at least bearable.”
The word she used was the right one, but just not for the correct person.
I left her a few minutes later without another word as I promised myself if I ever had the chance I’d see her put in her proper place for being so awful to Bethany’s memory.
As I drove back to Alex’s with the box of her belongings, I had to wonder if that venom Samantha Cooper obviously had in ample supply meant she could do more than just verbally attack someone. She hadn’t even tried to hide her hatred for Bethany, so maybe she had done more than just taken her office.
Maybe she’d gotten her revenge first.
I opened the front door to Alex’s house and saw the surprise on his face when he saw the box of things in my arms. Hurrying to my side to take it from me, he carried it over to the coffee table as I sat down on the couch next to him.
He picked up the scarf from the top of the pile of things and held it up in front of him. “I didn’t think you’d be bringing back a whole box of things, Poppy. It looks like you cleared out her entire office.”
Sighing, I tried to push my encounter with Samantha Cooper out of my mind. “Pretty much. I didn’t really have a choice, to be honest.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
I sat back against the couch cushion and sighed again. “It seems that the big bosses hired Bethany’s replacement. I ran into her at her office when she ordered me to remove all of Bethany’s things or she’d throw them out as junk. Alex, she was so rude. It was awful. The woman is dead for just a couple days and she acted like she was happy about it.”
“I’m sorry, Poppy. I should have gone there with you.”
“No, that would have only made it worse. This woman was perfectly wretched. She called Bethany a bitch! Talk about disrespecting the dead!”
“If she’s her replacement, why would she be so nasty about the person who had the job before her?” he asked as he turned back to the box.
“She is her replacement, but Samantha Cooper used to work at The Eagle. One of Bethany’s friends said she had a problem with her and she was the reason this Cooper woman left in November. Now that Bethany’s gone, she’s back and she’s pretty smug about it.”
Alex reached for his notepad on the table next to the box and opened it to a new page. Grabbing a pen, he began to jot down what I’d just told him and smiled. “I’d say she’s our first suspect then. She certainly sound
s like she had motive. Revenge.”
“Make her suspect number two. Mariah Lewis is still top on my list. I know you aren’t really sure about that, but until she’s found, I think she’s definitely a suspect.”
He nodded his agreement and wrote down Mariah’s name in the notebook. “Well, we have at least two suspects. Did you find anything on the married man Bethany told you she was having problems with?”
I pulled out the letters from the Baltimore address and showed them to him. “I found these. I don’t know if they’ll tell us anything about him, though, but if they don’t, maybe something in that box will.”
“Let’s take a look.”
I opened up the envelope dated first and began reading the letter as Alex looked over my shoulder. I didn’t get through the first two lines before he said, “I think we’ve found our guy.”
Aloud, I reread the line that had caught my eye. “I won’t let you do this to me without making you pay.”
Turning to look at Alex, I saw him pointing further down the page. “It gets even better or worse, depending on how you look at it. Take a look at the line where he comes right out and threatens her.”
“What do you do? Speedread?” I asked as I returned to reading the part of the letter his finger pointed to.
“We’re meant for each other, Bethany. I gave up everything for you. Your life can’t go on like this was nothing but a few months of sex. I won’t let you live that life.” I stopped reading and looked to the bottom of the letter to see the name Michael.
The words made my stomach hurt. Had this person finally stopped waiting to fulfill his threat and murdered her Sunday night? Had she been going to meet him when she got into her car?
Alex took the letter out of my hand as the thought of Bethany having her life taken by some crazy boyfriend settled into my mind. “Let’s keep reading, Poppy. I know it’s hard, but we have to find out all we can about this guy.”
We read the other four letters, but they all said basically the same things until the last one. At the very end of that letter, I read his words and knew he was obsessed with her. “I’ll make you pay for the pain I suffered by losing my wife and children over my relationship with you. I lost everything to be with you. Now you’re going to lose everything too.”
The Darkest Hour Page 14