Over Her Head

by Shelley Bates

  “His name is Jed.”

  “Yes. Same one.”

  “I’m having a hard time trusting my little girl’s emotional health to a guy with a stud in his eyebrow.”

  “Apparently he relates really well to the kids. Gail Burke is on one of my committees, and she says he’s gold.”

  Her spirits lightened a little. “Really? I’m glad I have some good news to give Colin, then.” She lowered her voice. “Between you and me, it’s turning into a power struggle.”

  “I bet it is. But as long as she’s talking to the grief team, I really believe she’ll be in good hands. They didn’t have help like this when I was in high school, and goodness knows some of us could have used it.”

  Their friendship was too new and green for Laurie to jump in as she might have done and ask for details. “Thanks for the encouragement, Janice. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.”

  “Keep your chin up. I need to get back to making dinner before Barrett and Kyle get home. Just remember, God is still in charge. He’ll see that everything turns out for good for those who love him.”

  Laurie said good-bye and hung up the phone. Truth be told, she wasn’t as sure about that as she might have been, say, a couple of weeks ago.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Tanya, Nick saw when he picked her up, had dressed in her best for Thanksgiving dinner at the Hales’ house. She wore a navy-blue dress that wrapped across the front and tied with a bow at the waist. On a lot of women this would have been fatally boring, but Tanya’s skin seemed even more soft and fragile, and her reddish-blonde hair glowed. Instead of tying her hair up in a bun or scraping it back in a ponytail, she’d allowed it to curl loosely around her face.

  It took ten years off her. And the dress didn’t hurt, either. Nick had been so busy seeing her as the victim’s bereaved parent that he’d completely missed the attractive woman . . . until now.

  He opened the door of his truck and helped her into it, noting with interest how slender and shapely her calves looked. Where had his eyes been all this time?

  In her daughter’s case file, the thinking part of his brain answered. Right where they should be, until you get this mess straightened out.

  And while he was on that subject . . .

  “Are you okay with this?” he asked. “Going to the Hales’, I mean.”

  She looked at him curiously. “I hope you’re not having second thoughts after I wrestled my way into panty hose for the first time in two years.”

  The image produced a quick grin, and then he got serious again. “I just thought that you might have changed your mind after that article in the paper.”

  “It was a shock.” Her skin paled, and her fingers tightened on her handbag in her lap. “But it’s not true, of course, what Kate said. That paper should be ashamed for printing stuff like that, even if they didn’t name the juvenile in question. Like that helps.”

  “You know who the juvenile was.”

  “Oh, sure. Debbie and Maggie got it from Kate’s mother, who’s been broadcasting it far and wide.”

  “So we’re okay?”

  She smiled at him, but it wasn’t the kind that meant dimples. It was a sad smile. “As okay as it gets.”

  That was good enough for him, all things considered.

  At Laurie and Colin’s, he gave a peremptory knock on the front door and opened it. “Happy Thanksgiving! Two hungry people, incoming.”

  “Nick.” Colin came out of the living room with a hand extended and a cordial smile. “And Tanya. We’re so glad you came.”

  “Thanks for having us,” he answered, while Tanya murmured the same. “Where’s Laurie? And the kids?”

  Colin took Tanya’s navy-surplus coat, which didn’t go very well with her dress but was evidently the only one she had that would do the job of keeping her warm in late November. “In the kitchen, scarfing appetizers. Better hurry.”

  The only one doing any scarfing, though, was Tim. Laurie stood in front of a double oven, checking a bubbling pan of sweet potatoes flavored, by the smell of it, with orange and brown sugar.

  “My favorite,” he said.

  She pushed the pan back into the top oven, closed the door, and shook her mitts off her hands and onto the counter. “I know. Along with dressing, brussels sprouts, cranberry salad, and mashed potatoes. You are so predictable.” She leaned in and gave him a hug, then turned to Tanya. “Welcome,” Laurie said with a smile that didn’t quite reach her shadowed eyes. “We’re so glad we get to have you to ourselves today.”

  “Thanks, Laurie.” Tanya didn’t seem to be aware that there was anything amiss. And there was obviously going to be no further discussion of newspaper articles or anything connected to them. “I don’t know what I would have done if Nick hadn’t invited me. Gone and had a burger somewhere, I guess.” A spasm flickered across her face.

  “No burgers here, I’m afraid, much to Tim’s relief. He prefers brussels sprouts.” Tim stuck his finger in his mouth and mimicked throwing up. “All right, you. Remember the rules. You have to eat one single sprout. As in, two halves.”

  “Aw, Mommmmm,” he whined.

  “Cheer up, bud,” Nick said. “They’ll build your muscles so you can play pond hockey with the big kids.” He turned back to Laurie. “Where’s Anna? She might not be a big fan of brussels sprouts, but she’s like me. She can scent a pan of sweet potatoes in a lead-lined bunker sixty feet underground.”

  “Up in her room, sulking. She’s grounded for two more weeks.”

  “Through Christmas break?” Tanya asked.

  “That’s the first thing she said.” Laurie pulled a can of whole cranberries and one of cranberry jelly out of the fridge and dumped the contents of both into a cut-glass bowl. “But if she’s going to disobey us, her social life will just have to suffer.” As she mixed the berries and the jelly together, the clang of the spoon on the glass sounded like a miniature alarm.

  “Can I do something for you?” Tanya asked. “Make a salad? Put out pickles and olives?”

  “No, I have it handled.” Laurie smoothed the top of the pulverized mixture. “You can put this on the table, though. Everything’s nearly ready.”

  Laurie was the most together person Nick knew. Whether she was making spaghetti for her family or organizing a potluck for the entire church, she went at it armed with her lists and an unshakable belief that everyone would support her. The problem was, sometimes that kind of efficiency was formidable, and once in a while, if she was having a bad day, she took an offer of help as an insult, like maybe the person thought she wasn’t doing a good enough job.

  He hoped this wasn’t that kind of day.

  Tanya took the cranberry sauce into the dining room with a meekness that, for some reason, caused a little twist of pain in the region of his heart. He consoled himself with the thought that the two women had been in the same Bible study group for months. Tanya knew Laurie well enough to know she wouldn’t deliberately set out to hurt her.

  Tim leaned into the open fridge. “Hey, Mom, are we having pumpkin pie?”

  “Of course. The pies are sitting out in the garage. Don’t even think about touching them.”

  “Where’s the whipped cream, then?”

  “We have to make it. After dinner.”

  “But there isn’t any cream.”

  “What?” Laurie checked the fridge herself, and sighed. “I knew I’d forget something. Tim, take a couple of dollars out of my wallet and run to the store, okay?”

  “I can do it,” Nick offered. “Take me five minutes.” The Stop-N-Go was on the other side of the river, but it was still closer than the supermarket, which had probably closed at noon anyway.

  “No, Tim can go,” Laurie said. “He needs to work off some energy.” Tim already had his coat and boots on. “And no stopping, either. Straight there and straight back, or no pie for you.”

  “Bye, Mom, back next year!” The door slammed behind him and Laurie rolled her eyes.

  “You
should have sent him after dinner,” Colin observed. “If he gets distracted, we could be eating cold turkey.”

  “If he’s more than ten minutes, I’ll walk down and fetch him,” Nick said. “But I bet he won’t be. He’s pretty serious about his food.”

  “KeShawn lives close to where the walking path goes over the river,” Colin pointed out. “He’s been sucked into the vortex before. Meantime, where’s my other offspring? She needs to get down here and say hello like a civilized person.”

  “Anna!” her mother called. “Time to come down.”

  There was a mumble from above that didn’t sound very promising.

  “Anna Catherine Hale, you come down. Now.”

  No response.

  Nick spread his hands. “Was it something I said? Suddenly I’m not her favorite cousin?”

  “You’re a cop, and everyone thinks she’s a suspect,” Tanya said, coming back into the kitchen. “She’s hiding.”

  The eight-hundred-pound gorilla that everyone was determined not to talk about landed in the middle of the kitchen with a thud. Silence fell as the three of them looked anywhere but at Tanya.

  Laurie was the first to find her voice. “What do you mean?”

  “Hiding? That’s ridiculous,” Nick said. “We’re family.”

  Tanya addressed herself to Laurie. “You know what I mean. I’m just telling the truth. What have I got to lose? It’s my daughter who’s not here to have turkey and cranberry sauce.”

  “Anna’s not responsible for that.”

  “She was there that night.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Lor.” Colin put a hand on his wife’s arm. “This isn’t easy for Tanya.”

  “Of course it isn’t.” Laurie shook him off. “But no one seems to be thinking about us. Or about a young girl who is completely innocent. And you haven’t answered me, Tanya.”

  Both women faced off over the marble breakfast bar. “Okay, so I don’t believe Anna would have pushed Randi’s face under, like people are saying. But she was there. She could have done something to help. I’d give a lot to know why she didn’t.”

  “She was not up on that bridge,” Laurie hissed, her face white, her skin stretched over her cheekbones. “You should be saying these things to Kate’s mother, or Rose’s, or Kelci Platt’s.”

  “If she was close enough to run under that bridge and look, she was close enough to go up on it and stop them.”

  “She couldn’t have—” Nick began.

  “My daughter is not responsible for your daughter’s death.” Now dark blood flooded Laurie’s cheeks in a rush, and she bit off the consonants one by one.

  “Why didn’t she stop them, then? Why didn’t someone stop them? All it would have taken was one kid to say, ‘Wait, this is nuts,’ and Randi would still be alive.”

  Again, Nick tried to intervene. “It might not have been as simple as—”

  “And you think my daughter should have been that kid?”

  “Well, aren’t you the church leader around here? Sophie Dayton might be the pastor’s wife, but everybody knows you really run the show.”

  “That’s not true!”

  But Tanya was relentless. Her face was so pale that the freckles stood out on it like measles spots, and her eyes were wide with unshed tears. Nick looked at Colin and tried to signal that maybe he ought to step in and separate them.

  “Everyone says so. So what I’d like to know is, why won’t she come forward and tell the truth even though it’s too late? For that matter, why won’t she come down here and look me in the face? Do you know what that says to me?”

  Again, silence fell like a rock—the kind of appalled silence that was too hard to break and inflicted injury on every soul it touched.

  Into it came a young, frightened voice. “Does anyone know where Tim is?”

  Nick turned to see Anna standing in the kitchen doorway. Automatically, he glanced at his watch and part of his mind recorded the fact that Tim had been gone for twenty minutes. Twenty agonizing minutes that he wished had never happened.

  “I’ll go get him,” he volunteered. “Tanya, want to come? I think maybe a break would do us all some good.”

  “It doesn’t sound like Tanya has anything to be thankful for where we’re concerned.”

  “Lor—”

  “She’s right,” Tanya said. “I’ll go with Nick, but it’s probably better if I don’t come back.”

  “Isn’t he here?” Anna said.

  “Who?” her father asked, looking from his wife to Tanya as if he couldn’t believe two Christian women could speak to each other this way.

  “Tim! Isn’t he here?”

  “For heaven’s sakes, Anna, he went to get whipping cream.”

  “And he’s not back yet? Dad, we have to do something.”

  Nick felt as though he’d stepped into an alternate universe. People were saying the unspeakable. Getting upset about the trivial. No one was reacting the way normal people were supposed to.

  He latched on to concrete action. “Fine. Tanya, get your coat. We’ll go find Tim and send him home. Then we’ll go get some supper somewhere else.” And maybe I’ll step back through the looking glass tomorrow and find out I dreamed the whole thing.

  “Fine.” Laurie’s face, which he hardly ever saw without a smile, was set and expressionless. “Thank you.”

  Nick hustled Tanya out the door and down the sidewalk. He had three blocks before they came to the walkway over the river and KeShawn Platt’s house—and he intended to use every step.

  “Mind telling me what that was all about?” he asked.

  “I’m not going to apologize.”

  “I’m not asking you to. I just asked what it was all about. I always thought Laurie was good to you.”

  “She was. Is. I know she’s your cousin and you love Anna. I thought I could handle it. Obviously I made the wrong decision.”

  Two blocks.

  “I hope you meant what you said about Anna not pushing Randi under. I’ve interviewed a dozen kids at least twice each, and Kate is the only one who brought it up. It still needs to be investigated.”

  “But the mayor’s boy said he saw Anna standing in the water. His mother said so yesterday at Bible study.”

  “Sure. And the place where Randi went in is a good thirty or forty feet away. The current isn’t strong enough to have taken her over to the bank in those few seconds.”

  “Then why did Kate say what she said?”

  One block.

  “I’m guessing it’s a diversionary tactic. We’re bumping up the heat on those three girls, and when you’re cornered, your first reaction is to lash out or throw up a distraction. A smoke screen. It’s just unfortunate that that reporter happened to be in the waiting room when she did it, and went public with the story before we could prove whether it was true or not.”

  Tanya sighed, and with the Platt house and the river walk in sight, she slowed her pace. “Anna still could have done something.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. But speculating or dwelling on the what-ifs isn’t going to get us anywhere. And neither is hurting Laurie and Colin.”

  “It hurts me, Nick.”

  Inside, he felt himself shift from cop mode to protector mode. Almost before he could think about it, he’d slipped an arm around her shoulders, right there on the sidewalk.

  “I can’t imagine how much it must hurt. I’m not a parent, so I don’t have much room to talk. But Tanya, I swear to you, we’re closing in on a resolution. I’m doing everything I can, and Gil, my partner, is working on it today. This case is the department’s highest priority.”

  “I know.” She turned so that her next words were muffled in the front of his jacket. “And I’m going to regret saying what I said to Laurie. But there she was in her beautiful house with her perfect kids and her husband, who is my boss, and what do I have? Nothing. No house, no husband, no daughter. Sometimes I think I can face it, and then a day like today happens,
and I know I never will.”

  “You have me,” he blurted, then felt like smacking himself on the forehead. He wasn’t ready for a relationship. His job was too demanding. And she was a Christian—and he’d already made up his mind that wasn’t the path for him.

  “Do I?” she asked in a hopeless way that gripped his heart and wrung it like a sponge.

  “I’m your friend, Tanya. And even if it wasn’t my job to find out what happened, I’d do everything I could to get you an answer.”

  Her friend. That’s all he could be to her right now, because of the investigation, and in the future, because they were just too different.

  But despite that, time seemed to stop and his surroundings faded as his consciousness spiraled in on this woman, this moment. He felt the dense wool of her coat under his hands. Smelled the flowery scent of her shampoo. Realized for the first time that the top of her head came exactly to the level of his nose, so she wasn’t as small as he’d thought all along.

  She tipped her head back and looked him full in the face. He fell headlong into her eyes, those eyes that had seen far more pain and disappointment than he had ever experienced.

  Those eyes could make him doubt the wisdom of his decision to avoid her. They could—

  “Nick!”

  Tim’s reedy voice sounded from far away. A couple of seconds drifted past while Nick swam out of the bubble he and Tanya had created. Then sound and movement resumed all around them.

  “Hey, Nick!”

  Tim, KeShawn, Kate, and Kelci waved at them from the halfway point of the footbridge. Beside him, Tanya sucked in a breath and stiffened. She jammed her hands into her pockets as if she were preventing herself from reaching out for the older girls and shaking the truth out of them.

  Or maybe that was just how he felt.

  “Hey, bud, you are in deep with your mother. Don’t you know what straight there and straight back means?”

  Tim laughed and grabbed at the carton of whipping cream, which Kate held just out of his reach.

  “Don’t be mad at him, Deputy,” Kate said as they joined him and Tanya. “We all walked over together, and Kelci took some pictures with her new digital camera.” She handed him the cream with a grin over her shoulder at Tim.