“I wondered that for years, but when I was old enough my grandmother told me he didn’t know. She wouldn’t say who told him, but it wasn’t my mother. She always knew how much her father hated my dad, so she kept things from him.”
“Is he still alive—your father?”
I nodded. “He’s in a rest home in Bakersfield. I’d be surprised if he ever gets any visitors.”
Giovanni gripped the steering wheel a bit tighter with his hand. “As it should be.”
“I read an article in a magazine once that I’ve never been able to forget.”
He raised a brow. “What did it say?”
“Girls grow up to marry men just like their fathers. And I did.”
“Would you say I’m like him?”
I pondered the possibility in my mind. There was more than a fair to midland chance in Giovanni’s line of work that he gave the order to make someone pay, and not in cash. But I couldn’t imagine him laying a hand on me or any woman for that matter. I shook my head. “No, you’re not like him at all. But you do remind me of my grandfather.”
The next morning Giovanni left me to tend to some business he had in L.A. for a couple days which was fine—I got more done on my own. It was a shock he’d shown up in the first place, but a pleasant one, and I was starting to get used to his affinity for surprises.
I turned my attention to the grey building towering over me. Heather Masterson exited through the revolving door a little after one pm. I was leaning up against her car, waiting.
She jumped an inch or two when she saw me. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to see you.”
“About what?”
“Both Doug and Rusty were stabbed with a knife, and you work at a hospital. Something you failed to mention when we were together before.”
She shrugged. “It shouldn’t matter what I do—I’d never hurt Doug, and I barely knew Rusty.”
I whipped out my cell phone, found the photo I’d taken of the scalpel and shoved my phone in front of her face. “Ever seen one of these?”
She shook her head. “I don’t use that kind. Mine are disposable. Why all the questions?”
“Why’d you go to AA if you weren’t really a drunk?”
She scrutinized the parking lot, looking in all directions and then lowered her voice to a whisper. “You can’t say things like that out here—at my workplace.”
“What—Alcoholics Anonymous?” I said with a raised voice. “Why? You’re not an alcoholic, so it shouldn’t offend you.”
She tapped her white plastic Crocs shoe on the ground. “Who is filling your head with all these lies?”
“You told me you became Doug’s sponsor because he asked you.”
“I wasn’t lying—he did.”
“I’m curious,” I said, “did he ask you because you pretended to be someone you’re not? And while we’re on the subject of questions, here’s another one. How many lies did you have to tell Doug before he was weak enough to hop in bed with you?”
Her face flushed, first a reddish color and then a pale white. She darted over to the passenger door of her car and got in. I opened the driver’s side and sat down.
“What are you doing? This is my car—get out!”
“Where to?” I said.
“Excuse me?”
I smiled. “This can work one of two ways—one, I stay in the car and we drive around together until I get some answers. Or two, I get in my car and follow you around until I’m satisfied you’re not the person I’m after. It could take days, weeks…”
She gulped a swig of something that looked like water in a clear plastic container she held in her hand and shouted, “Okay!”
I leaned back and crossed my arms.
“I met Doug when I went to open an account at the bank last year. I remembered him from high school, but hadn’t seen him around much since then. Every time I went in to make a deposit or something, he was so nice to me.”
“Wasn’t that part of his job?”
She shrugged. “I guess so, but there was something about him that drew me in. He seemed so perfect. And happy. It wasn’t until I followed…”
“You mean stalked him?”
She shook her head. “It wasn’t like that, I swear. After work, he wouldn’t go home. He went to the bar. It didn’t take long for me to realize he had a drinking problem. And then one night I overheard a guy at the bar tell him about AA. Doug said he would start going.”
“So you joined?”
She nodded.
“And you didn’t feel bad about being around all those people who were trying to get help for their real problems?” I said.
“I thought I was doing him a favor.”
“He had a wife for that—and a family,” I said. “It wasn’t your place to interfere.”
“Trista was popping pills, how the hell was that helping!”
“You don’t have any idea what Trista’s life has been like living with an alcoholic for so many years—don’t judge her.”
Heather smirked. “What, she’s your friend now so you have to stick up for her?”
“There it is,” I said.
“What?”
“Candice rears her ugly head at last.”
“Candice and I are friends, so what?”
“The more you talk, the more you sound just like her,” I said. “Don’t let her fool you—she has a bad reputation around here.”
“Had.”
I laughed. “You don’t think she lost the title because she moved do you?”
She crossed one leg over the other and glared at me, and I wasn’t sure whether it was because I’d slammed her friend or knew her secrets or both.
“Did Candice push you to make a move on Doug?” I said.
“It was more of a challenge. She told me I couldn’t, and I knew I could. And I did.”
It was one of those moments where you looked at a person but no longer saw the same thing you did the first time. Heather’s exterior facade vanished, and I was left with a grueling image of what kind of person she was beneath her hardened exterior. It disgusted me.
I opened the door to her car, got out and closed it behind me. She crossed over to the driver’s side and pressed the button to lower the window.
Exasperated, she said, “Wait—where are you going? Are you going to follow me?”
I didn’t look back.
After spending time with Heather, I wasn’t sure she had what it took to butcher someone. On the whole, she was a snake of a person, but more of a gopher than a viper where murder was concerned. Candice, on the other hand, was another story. One I’d deal with later. At the moment I had a much older woman I needed to reacquaint myself with in Stallion Springs.
A text popped up on my phone from Trista saying dinner had been moved to tonight. Alexa had come home a day early as a surprise. I glanced at the time on the dash; I still had a good four hours before I needed to be there, and I wanted to make the most of it.
I stopped at the local gas station before heading out and wasn’t surprised when I looked over and spotted Jesse in his patrol vehicle next to me. The only difference was, when I got out to pump the gas, he didn’t even look in my direction, not even a glance, and I refused to believe he hadn’t seen me. His Sloane radar was state of the art.
He shifted his head around and looked at something in front of me, but I couldn’t look away. My eyes were riveted on his face. His red, bruised, swollen face. I tapped on his window but he jerked his head in the opposite direction.
“Jesse, I know you can see me,” I said. “What happened to your face?”
He let the window down a crack. “Go away, Sloane. You said you never wanted to see me again, so why are you talking to me?”
The area below his eye was puffy, like he’d been skewered by the horn of a bull and let it sit for a while. I reached my hand through the opening, turned his face toward me, and gasped. “Who did this to you?”
He shook his head. �
��Oh, that’s good…real good.”
“What?”
“Like you don’t know.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He leaned back and squinted his left eyelid at me. The other eyelid didn’t look like it was capable of moving. “You really don’t know, do you? I tell you what, why don’t you call your boyfriend and ask him what happened after you went inside the hotel last night?”
I shrugged. “It wasn’t Giovanni—he was with me all night.”
“I never said he was the one who did this to me.”
“Then you’re implying he knows who did.”
He grabbed my hand, shoving it out the window in one powerful thrust and then slammed his car into gear and peeled out.
Thirty minutes later I arrived at the estate of Rosalind Ward, Doug’s mother. She was known as the woman in town who had her hands in everything from city ordinances to simple street names—Tehachapi had both a Rosalind Drive and a Ward Avenue. Rosalind also took pride in the fact that she owned the property next door to the late Jack Palance, an actor I’d once served dinner to when I was a clumsy no-name waitress in high school.
The moment I drove up the long, windy road I felt her eyes glaring down at me from her second-story window, much like an eagle sizing up its prey. As the sparrow in the situation, I exited my car and approached the front door with caution, but before I had the chance to crunch up my hand and knock, she’d opened the door and looked over every last inch of me. I obliged her by doing the same. She wore a white rayon shirt with a white cami underneath and white polyester slacks. Her short hair was curled to perfection in a short coif like Elizabeth Taylor wore in 1952. Every lock was in place, and her skin, albeit milky and smooth, looked as though it had gone through a facelift or two. Maybe even three, she certainly had the money. No woman her age looked that good naturally, did they?
Rosalind tapped her fingers on the glass panel of the door. “I don’t like surprises. There’s a reason God invented the telephone.”
“Huh,” I said. “I always thought it was Alexander Graham Bell.”
She wasn’t amused.
I stuck my hand out. “You probably don’t remember me. My name is Sloane Monroe. I was a friend of Doug’s.”
She shook my hand like she was afraid I’d transfer some of my germs onto her and then folded one arm over the other. “I wish people would stop coming out here. I get it. Everyone feels bad. Everyone wants us to know about the time he pulled to the side of the road to help them fix a flat tire or when he held the door open for some old lady with a bag of groceries in her hands. It’s like no one gets it. He was my son. I raised him. Of course he was all those things.”
I slid my hands in my pockets and met her gaze. “I was on the boat when he was killed.”
“Good for you.”
It occurred to me now wasn’t the best time to let her know I was overseeing my own investigation. “As a friend, I’m just trying to sort out what happened.”
She gave me a sideways glance. “That won’t be necessary. We are working with the authorities to recover his body. It’s handled. Is that all?”
I stood there, unsure of what to say next.
She squinched her beady eyes at me. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
“Sure I do—everyone knows who your family is in this town.”
She smiled, pleased with my comment of flattery. “And I’m familiar with yours.”
Of course she was—who was I to think time would make everyone forget a father who made the front page of the town paper for all the wrong reasons.
She gave her comment ample time to sink in and then continued. “I’m the one who alerted your grandfather about your ahh, situation with your father. Your grandfather was good friends with my own father, you know, before he retired and ran off to Park City. I figured it was the least I could do to help your poor mother out. It was obvious she wasn’t going to do anything seeing how she didn’t want anyone to know what was really going on, but when I saw you and your sister running up the street that day, I knew my tongue had been stilled long enough. I wasn’t placed on this Earth to stand idly by like some kind of ninny.”
I wanted to speak, but couldn’t find the words. Why couldn’t I remember seeing her that day?
She frowned. “Well, I suppose if I was in your shoes, I would have blocked my childhood out too.”
I wanted to shrink down until I was small enough to fit inside my handbag.
She cocked her head to the side and curled her lips into a snarly smile like we were playing war of the words with each other and she’d just won. “Why else did you come here, Sloane?”
Manipulation 101 at its finest. I forced myself out of her head and back into mine. “Why didn’t Doug go to college?”
She shrugged. “It wasn’t the path he was meant to take in life.”
“But he had a scholarship—I’m curious about why he gave it up to get married. Couldn’t he have completed school and then married? Wasn’t that what you wanted for him?”
She looked over her left shoulder for a moment like she wanted to be sure whoever was inside the house couldn’t hear and then she stepped out onto the porch and slid the door closed behind her.
“What did Trista tell you?”
“It’s more of what she didn’t tell me that I’m interested in,” I said.
“Such as?”
“Why’d Doug have a drinking problem?”
“Excuse me?”
“I know he was in AA.”
She turned her palms up like ‘so what’ and said, “Lots of people go there.”
“So you weren’t aware how big his problem was or how many years he’d been like that?”
She averted her eyes and gazed out at an empty field overrun with wild poppies and sagebrush. “I’m not comfortable with your questions.”
It was nice to turn the tables for a change.
“Something drove him to drink, Mrs. Ward, and I don’t believe it has anything to do with Trista.”
She thrust her hand over her chest. “I never said it did.”
“What happened while he was in high school? There was an event, something that caused Doug to give up his football scholarship, what was it?”
I stood back and waited to see if she had the courage to mention Alexa. From the way her lips tightened into a circular ball, I’d hit on something big. She braced her body against the door and stood like a statue for several seconds, and then folded one hand over the other and tried to act like I was a neighbor who came over to bum a cup of sugar.
“I’d like you to go now,” she said. “All your questions have made me tired.”
I glanced down at my phone and noticed the time. “That’s all right,” I said. “I’m late for dinner with Trista anyway.”
She lifted a brow at me. “Oh?”
“Trista invited me over to meet Alexa—I guess she’s home from college for the weekend.”
The look on her face before I turned to walk toward my car was something I never thought a woman such as Rosalind Ward was capable of: Fear.
Since I was already in the area and still had three hours to kill, I thought I’d take a moment to visit my old friend Nate before going to Trista’s house for dinner. Of the Rat Pack bunch, we had been the closest. My junior year we’d even attended the Sadie Hawkins dance together. My mom never had much money once she became a single parent, and since it was up to the girl to spring for matching shirts for the event, the most I’d been able to provide at the time was a pair of red sweaters on blue light special at the Kmart in Mojave. The best thing about Nate was he didn’t care. He wore it with a pair of acid-washed jeans and Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses and practically started a new trend. It could have been a shirt made of cellophane wrap—it didn’t matter. If Nate wore it, everyone assumed it was cool, and the next week at school, a new fad was born, all thanks to The Natemeister.
Nate lived on a ranch passed down to him by his parents when they retire
d and left to travel the world in their Winnebago. Of course, once they moved out, he bulldozed the ranch-style home and replaced it with a shiny new bachelor pad that towered over all the other homes in the valley. He was a lot of flash and flare all balled up into one giant kid who refused to grow up and face adulthood.
The gate to the ranch was open when I arrived, but I still took a moment to admire the oversized letter N welded into the center. A shiny silver BMW sat in the driveway with a dealer plate attached to the back window. I parked beside it, and when I walked by, I noticed the driver’s side of the car was dented in like it had been in a recent collision. Interesting. Since he had the top down, I poked my head in and wasn’t surprised to discover a pair of black Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses on the dash. Some things never changed.
I ascended the twenty-something steps to the second-story front entrance and rang the doorbell. No answer. I jiggled the handle. Locked. I walked back down the stairs and around the side of the house and spied a sliding glass door leading to the backyard. It was open. I peered in and saw no one, but what my eyes couldn’t make out, my nose made up for in the form of an overwhelming stench that smelled like a slaughtered cow.
I cupped my hand over my mouth, squeezed my nose with the other and yelled out, “Nate? You here?”
Silence.
I stepped inside, and as I neared the kitchen, I located the cause of the odor. Several packages of hamburger had been left out on the counter like he was preparing for a party, except it looked like they’d sat there for days. They were brown, and dried blood had seeped out and was fused to both the packages and the countertop. Wherever Nate was, it couldn’t have been anywhere near a smell like that.
I started to head out the door when something barked. In the doorway down the hall, a cute little pug dog appeared. It looked at me, turned around and vanished. I followed. When I reached the room the dog was in I was overtaken once again by an odor far worse than anything I’d ever smelled in my life. I leaned my head inside the room and let out a scream that rivaled Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween. Flattened on the master bed was the decomposing body of a man I wished was anyone other than Nate. A knife protruded from his chest. I took one baby step closer which proved to be a big mistake and then whipped my body around, fled outside and vomited into the hedges.
I Have a Secret (A Sloane Monroe Novel, Book Three) Page 8