A Case of You

by Pamela Burford

  He stared at her a long moment, his expression unreadable, then turned and slowly made his way toward the stone fence. Kit waited until the darkness had claimed him. Even then she didn’t follow him, but stood chafing the gooseflesh from her arms and staring at the spot where she’d last seen him. Only when the fireworks display culminated in an earsplitting finale that turned night to day did she will her feet to move.

  *

  THE PAPERS WERE spread out on the floral bedspread, fax transmittals of newspaper articles and police and hospital records. Kit sat cross-legged in the middle of it all, having just reread it for the third time.

  Sal Merino had come through for her. At her request, he’d asked his buddy Jimmy Stark, a P.I. who’d been a detective with the Chicago police department until his retirement last year, to look into Noah’s background. She knew he’d grown up in Roswell, Georgia, attended Columbia University in Manhattan as an undergraduate, and returned to his home state for med school at Emory.

  She also knew that after his residency, he’d somehow ended up in Pratte, Vermont. During one of their long, lazy chats on his back porch, she’d asked him about that, and he’d given some throwaway answer about having traveled around until he found the spot that just kind of felt right.

  Kit had spent the better part of the day in faculty meetings at the Powell School, whose fax number she’d given to Jimmy along with a request to warn her before faxing anything so she’d be the only one to see it. According to Jimmy, Noah’s youth in Roswell had been uneventful—no hint of incipient criminal behavior. During high school he’d played football and practiced with his rock band, the Puny Earthlings. Her stomach had done a little flip when she’d learned he’d almost died as a result of some kind of diving accident when he was sixteen. He’d never mentioned it.

  The real excitement had come a few years later. She reread the first headline, from the New York Daily News. Brooklyn Man Stabbed to Death. Columbia senior Noah Stewart had been arrested in the homicide of Rick Anders, an unemployed electrician and the father of a fourteen-month-old girl. The stabbing had occurred at the apartment of Anders’s ex-wife, Tiffany. A note from Jimmy explained that immediately after the killing, Tiffany Anders had disappeared with her little girl. Less than a month later a grand jury had determined that Noah had acted in self-defense. Thus the case had never gone to trial.

  He’d killed a man. It was there in black and white. Kit didn’t know how much faith to put in the grand jury’s finding. Maybe Noah’s upper-middle-class family had hired some whiz-bang lawyer to influence the district attorney to withhold evidence from the grand jury. Maybe Tiffany Anders, the only witness, had been “persuaded” to flee so she couldn’t testify against him. So many maybes.

  Maybe Noah had acted in self-defense.

  A part of her wanted to believe it—the part that had spent those few delicious days getting close to Noah. The gentle, funny, sexy Noah. But when she thought about her last encounter with him four days earlier—the soul-numbing horror of having him turn on her like that—she had no trouble believing he’d gotten away with murder eleven years ago. She thought of the victim’s baby daughter, fatherless now because of Noah, and felt sick.

  She’d called Tom Jordon as soon as she’d digested what Jimmy had sent her. Pratte’s police chief, it turned out, already knew about Noah’s “troubles” in New York. Doc had told him about the incident himself during the interrogations following Jo’s murder. A tussle over some woman, Tom had called it. These things happen, especially in the Big Apple. Thank goodness the mess got cleared up without a trial. And what the hell was Kit doing prying into the citizens’ private lives?

  She’d opted not to tell Jordon about the strange case of Dr. Stewart and Mr. Hyde in the town cemetery on the Fourth. She could just hear what he’d have to say to that. You went in there with him willingly? Stayed after dark? Started fooling around and things got a little rough for your taste? Hey, can’t arrest a guy for trying, right?

  A sound had hovered at the edges of her awareness for the past twenty minutes, only now registering. A power tool of some sort. She rose and went to the window, to see a familiar head of dark copper hair tied back in a ponytail. The Bad Seed had on a shirt today. If an undershirt with the sleeves ripped off qualified as a shirt. From the second floor she could just make out the hawk quivering on his right biceps as he applied the electric hedge trimmers to Etta’s boxwoods.

  She shoved the faxes into a drawer and went downstairs. Bryan was just finishing up as she came out the back door.

  “I thought you only came here Wednesdays,” she said.

  “For the lawns, yeah, but Etta needed her hedges done. Where’ve you been?” he asked.

  “Right upstairs.” But she knew what he meant. He gave her a look that said he knew she knew. She’d seen Bryan at Noah’s off and on for several days while poring over Ray’s things in the attic, but naturally she hadn’t been back there since before the Fourth, four days earlier.

  Four days during which she’d kept busy preparing for her students... and making subtle inquiries around town regarding Dr. Stewart. These had proved less than fruitful. Pratte had been doctorless for four long years before he came along, and the townspeople offered nothing but praise for their savior, Saint Noah.

  “You guys have a fight?” Bryan joined her at the redwood picnic set, where she sat on a bench. He set down the hedge trimmer and perched on the edge of the table.

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “Yeah, I figured. He’s wound up pretty tight. Even old Max is keeping his distance.” He unknotted the green bandanna at his throat and wiped his sweaty face.

  She knew Bryan spent a good deal of time at Noah’s, sifting through his grandfather’s possessions when he wasn’t getting the neglected grounds in shape. She worried about the boy’s safety. If Noah was as agitated as he’d said, it might not take much to unleash his violent side.

  “Does he have a temper?” she asked.

  “No way. I’ve never seen him, like, whacked out, if that’s what you mean. Always calm, the doc, no matter what.”

  “Till now.”

  He grinned. “Yeah. I’ve known the guy for over a year, and I’ve never seen anyone get under his skin like this.” He reached over and twisted a strand of her hair around his finger. Kit didn’t know whether to be amused or insulted by this pup’s cocksure posturing. Ah, the arrogance of youth. “I knew it right away,” he said. “It’s the hair. You’re a wild lady, Kit. Noah doesn’t know what to do with you.”

  Part of him knows what to do with me, she thought, recalling that heart-stopping moment when she was sure the good doctor was going to rape her right there on Grandpa Whittaker’s grave.

  “Was Joanne a wild lady?” she asked.

  His eyes glowed with a sudden intensity. “You going to ask me next if I knew what to do with her?”

  She sighed. “Help me out, Bryan. I’m not very good at dancing around stuff like this.”

  “I wanted Jo to move in with me.”

  “In your rented room?”

  “No, not that pit. I thought her and me would, like, get an apartment, you know? Our own place.”

  “She didn’t want to?”

  “She laughed at me.” His jaw worked and he looked away, but not before Kit saw the sudden frost in his gaze.

  “Because of the age difference?”

  He turned that icy look on her. “Age difference? Ask the old man she was getting it on with about age difference. You think that geezer could keep up with her?”

  “Did you keep up with her, Bryan?”

  “Yeah.” That youthful arrogance was back with a vengeance. “You want to know the truth, I was the best she ever had. That’s what she told me. The best.”

  So she was right. Jo had been “gettin’ it” from two guys.

  It came to her unbidden then, more a physical sensation than a memory: the heat of Noah’s mouth, of his ravening tongue, searing her through her blouse.
r />   Maybe three guys.

  “Jo used to meet Henry in the cemetery,” she said, intentionally goading him to gauge his reaction. “Did you know that?”

  His face twisted in mingled pain and hatred. “No,” he said quietly. “I didn’t know that.”

  “But you knew she was seeing him.”

  “I guessed it, and she didn’t even try to deny it. Like it was nothing. Like it was her business who she chose to—” He broke off, obviously trying to compose himself. His arms were ropy with tensed muscle, as if he were poised to spring off the edge of the table at any moment. “I told her Henry was just using her.” A mirthless bark of laughter then. “But what the hell, she was using him, right? Me, too, it turns out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was all about that damn book of hers. Right from the beginning. Jo didn’t give a damn about me, or Henry. It was research. She turned herself into a whore just to get the information she needed.”

  “About your grandfather.”

  “Yeah. I found out by accident. A few weeks ago. Slipped into her room one day when I was here mowing. I’d swiped one of Etta’s fancy roses and I figured I’d leave it on her bed and she’d come in later and it’d be, like, a nice surprise, you know?”

  “You picked the lock on Jo’s door?” Kit knew she wouldn’t have left it open.

  He shrugged. “What can I tell you? I’m a man of many talents.”

  “And you saw what she was working on,” Kit guessed.

  “I saw, like, her notes, and some copies of articles and stuff. I figured it out pretty quick.” His voice broke. “I loved her. And all along she was just using me.”

  “That’s what you meant by betrayal,” she said. “That’s what you two argued about right before Jo died.” Not jealousy, as she’d first assumed.

  “That’s right. Jo betrayed me.” His tone was suddenly calm.

  Jo had been afraid of a man she was seeing, a man who’d found out about her book in progress. And then stole it. Two men now fit that description. No, three, she reminded herself.

  Suddenly Kit felt more than grief and guilt over Jo. She felt anger at the friend she’d loved since infancy. The friend who’d taken a no-holds-barred attitude toward her work—her “research.” The friend who’d played fast and loose with the lives of others, and her own safety. It didn’t have to happen. She didn’t have to die like that.

  Bryan continued, “Jo didn’t tell me about the book herself ‘cause she knew I wouldn’t want her writing that crap about my grandfather. Bringing up the past, all those old lies. She was no better than the rest of them. Just out to make a buck, and to hell with the truth.”

  She already knew he had his own personal version of the Whittaker-David affair. I’m not going to say anything else till I have the proof. Then I’ll show everyone.

  “I want to know the truth, Bryan.” When he just stared sullenly, she said, “I want you to tell me what really happened.” What you think happened, she silently added.

  After a moment he said, “Think about it. Why would my grandfather kill Anita David?”

  “They said it was because he was having an affair with her, and she threatened to blow the whis— “

  “He was having an affair with half the women in Pratte. Why kill Anita?”

  “Henry said she’d threatened to report Ray to the medical board. He’d get in trouble for abusing his practice that way—seducing all those patients.”

  “Aha. Henry said.” His tone was that of a professor guiding his pupil through deductive reasoning.

  “You think Henry David killed his wife.” Kit forced her expression to remain neutral. “Bryan, she died when your grandfather gave her a shot of—”

  “Don’t you get it? His good pal planted the curare in Grandpa’s vial of epinephrine. Before he went out of town. Henry planned it all out. He knew Anita got these asthma attacks all the time. He was going to make her next one her last one. And at the same time pay back Ray for getting it on with her, by framing him.”

  Kit was about to ask why when she remembered something else Bryan had said during their first meeting. “And you hold Bettina responsible.”

  “No, I hold Henry responsible for what he did, but she’s the reason he did it.” Bryan absently twisted the bandanna and yanked it taut a few times, as if testing its strength.

  “He wanted to be free to marry her... for her money?” she said.

  Bryan cocked his finger like a gun and touched it to the tip of Kit’s nose. “Give the girl a gold star.”

  “And Ray’s confession to Henry...?” she prompted.

  “Totally bogus. Grandpa always said he was innocent.” He looped the twisted bandanna around his sweaty neck and loosely tied it. “I figure he must’ve known it was Henry that did it. So Henry makes up, like, this story that Grandpa confessed, and gets him arrested.”

  “And then Grandpa comes after Henry when he’s out on bail.”

  Bryan’s expression was too cool, too reasonable. “Wouldn’t you?”

  She bit back her automatic denial, hesitating.

  “Yeah,” he said, watching her. “You would.”

  “Because I’m a wild woman?”

  A slow smile tilted up the corners of his mouth. “You and Grandpa would’ve gotten along.”

  “The way you talk, I could almost believe you knew him.”

  “I feel like I’ve known him all my life, like he’s a part of me. In here.” He tapped the sweat-dampened spot in the center of his chest.

  She took in his copper hair, his Ray-like features. Just how closely did the grandson take after the grandfather? She didn’t believe his theory about Henry. It was too pat, and all the evidence thirty-two years ago pointed straight to Ray.

  She said, “You told me Jo was killed by the same person who killed Anita.”

  “Henry knew about me and Jo. It made him crazy.” Bryan grinned wickedly.

  “Crazy enough to commit murder?”

  “Nah. It was the book. I figure he thought Jo was gonna spill the beans about him in her book.”

  “Tell the world he killed his first wife,” she clarified. He nodded. “But you said you thought she was just going to publish the same old lies about your grandfather.”

  “That’s what I think, but I don’t really know, ‘cause the stuff I saw, her notes and stuff, it didn’t say. And she wouldn’t tell me.”

  Kit thought about Bryan’s passionate convictions, about his love-hate relationship with Joanne and his bitterness over her involvement with Henry. Was he capable of violence? And not the losing-it-in-a-moment-of-blind-rage kind, either, but the cold-blooded, meticulously thought-out kind. Joanne’s murder was, after all, premeditated. Presumably someone went to a lot of trouble to snare curare and a hypodermic. And the timing! You couldn’t do much better than a garden party crammed with a hundred or more potential suspects.

  “We may never know what conclusion she came to,” she said.

  “Not unless her backup disk turns up.”

  Kit looked at him sharply.

  “What?” he asked. “You didn’t know she backed it up?”

  “Well, I knew, but...”

  Again that loose-jointed shrug. Kit wondered if Ray had shrugged like that. “Jo was too careful not to. I mean, she was, like, out of control in some ways—” his eyes glowed with appreciation “—but with her work, you know, she’d never take a chance like that. She had to have a disk stashed somewhere.”

  Bryan knew Jo better than Kit had imagined. Did he also know, firsthand, that the disk wasn’t in Jo’s room or her car? “Well, I tore apart Etta’s basement and her attic and crawl spaces during the last few days,” she said. “I was going to search the garage today.”

  “I’ll help you. I’ve finished with Noah’s attic, and it’s not there.”

  Kit’s mouth dropped open. “That’s why you spent all that time up there? Looking for Jo’s disk?”

  “That and anything I could find about Anita’s
murder.”

  “And you came up empty on both counts.”

  “So far. Come on. Let’s do the garage while we still have light.”

  Together they began exploring Etta’s garage, a barn actually, complete with a hayloft, sans hay. To Kit’s chagrin, there was even a basement of sorts under the floor where, Bryan informed her, booze had been hidden by rumrunners during Prohibition. It now held the remains of Etta’s late husband’s wood shop. Decades worth of furniture and equipment was stored on all three levels. It would take days to pick through everything.

  “Let’s start upstairs,” Bryan said, and Kit was relieved he hadn’t suggested they split up and work on different rooms. She wanted to keep an eye on him. A flat three-and-a-half-inch computer disk could easily fit in his back jeans pocket.

  She could only assume his plans for the disk depended on its contents. If Bryan was right and Jo’s book toed the party line by agreeing that Ray was guilty, chances were he’d want to destroy the disk. If, however, it pointed the finger at Henry, Bryan could use these findings to bolster his own pet theory. Now she wished she hadn’t mentioned a search of the garage. She couldn’t very well keep him from joining her, and what would she do if he found the disk and refused to hand it over?

  “Oh, wow,” he said in awestruck tones. “Check it out.”

  She turned to see him wielding an enormous rusty scythe that would have done the Grim Reaper proud. This boy was a magnet for hair-raising implements of annihilation. It was a gift of sorts, she supposed.

  “Too cool,” he decreed, replacing the thing on the wall. They threw themselves into the task and worked steadily for two hours. When Malcolm called up to the loft’s open window urging Kit to come in to dinner, she declined, saying she’d grab a bite later. Now that she was up to her eyebrows in dust and cobwebs, she was loath to abandon the project, and even more disinclined to leave Bryan out there on his own.

  She was glad she’d changed into jeans and a loose, cropped T-shirt after work. This was one grimy job. “My hair’s making me crazy,” she said, lifting the heavy mass off her damp neck. She sat on the floor in a crowded corner near the window, methodically emptying a plastic milk crate filled with old tools.