by B. J Daniels
Curtis let out an oath. “You think a cop like your father would let Marcella’s murderer go free?”
“Maybe there was a reason Dad didn’t go after the real killer. Or couldn’t.” All Slade had was a gut instinct, one that had told him years ago that the wrong man had died for the crime.
Curtis shook his head. “You’re opening up a can of worms here. Have you thought at all about Shelley and what this is going to do to her?”
“I always think of Shelley,” Slade snapped.
Curtis raised a brow as Shelley called from the other room.
“What’s keeping you two? No work! It’s Christmas Eve!”
Curtis reached for the glass of wine Slade had poured for Norma. “Isn’t it bad enough that your mother was murdered? You want to murder her reputation as well? And for what? Roy Vogel killed her.”
“Then you think she was having an affair,” Slade said.
Curtis swore. “If she was, I for one don’t want to know about it.”
Slade fell silent, thinking about what Curtis had said as he followed the chief back into the living room. The conversation turned to the holidays and food and parties.
He stared at the fire, the bright hot flames licking up from the logs, and tried to follow the conversation. But he couldn’t quit thinking. About his mother’s murder. About the young woman who’d come up to his office. He wondered what she was doing tonight and if she was all right. If she’d ever been all right. And if it was possible she’d given birth to his baby.
He couldn’t help but remember in detail how it had been between them and wonder…what if her memory of him were to come back—
He reminded himself that she was a thief and, more than likely, a liar. She’d stolen more than his money and his files. She’d stolen his heart.
Maybe that’s why he couldn’t get her or the Santa bell-ringer out of his head. Or completely forget about the damned letter in his pocket—and its possible ramifications.
“Don’t you think so, Slade?”
He jerked his head up. “What?”
“I asked if you thought this was our best tree yet?” Shelley turned to the others. “Slade and I went out and cut this one ourselves.”
He nodded. “The best ever.” But he could feel his sister’s worried gaze on him. She knew him too well. It would be hard to keep his concerns from her, let alone the letter. Especially once he started asking around town about their mother.
When Chief Curtis got up to clear the snack dishes, Slade offered to help, following the cop into the kitchen.
“Now what?” Curtis asked, only half as put out as he pretended, Slade suspected.
“Any chance you could get a license plate run for me tonight?”
“Tonight?” the chief asked in disbelief.
“It’s for a missing-person case I’m working on.” He gave Curtis the license number from the SUV the alleged Holly Barrows had left his office in. “I need a name and address. It’s important and I have a feeling it can’t wait until after Christmas.”
The chief grumbled but stuffed the number in his pocket. “I’ll have someone at the DMV call you. I’m trying to enjoy the holiday.” As annoyed as he sounded, the cop seemed glad that Slade had given up on his investigation into Marcella Rawlins’ possible infidelity. At least temporarily.
After all these years, Slade thought, his mother’s murder could wait another day. Maybe the woman who called herself Holly Barrows couldn’t.
CHAPTER THREE
Christmas Day
The next morning, after opening presents and eating Shelley’s famous cranberry waffles with orange syrup, Slade followed the snowplow over the pass to Pinedale. It had snowed off and on throughout the night, leaving the sky a clear crystalline blue and everything else flocked in white with a good foot of new snow on the highway.
Pinedale was a small mountain town, forgotten by the interstate, too far from either Yellowstone or Glacier parks and not unique enough to be a true tourist trap.
He wondered what Holly Barrows was doing here—if indeed the woman he’d met yesterday in his office really was the same Holly Barrows the Department of Motor Vehicles reported lived at 413 Mountain View and drove a blue Ford Explorer.
Pinedale was smaller than Dry Creek, set against a mountainside and surrounded by dense pines. The entire town felt snowed-in and deserted, caught in another time. It had once been a mining camp, some of the scars of its past life still visible on the bluffs around it.
He found Mountain View and drove up to 413. The sign on the lower level of the building read: Impressions Art Gallery. He got out of his truck and glanced in the gallery window, not surprised to see a typical Montana gallery with bronze cowboys and horses, oils and acrylics of Native Americans, and watercolor scenics. He spotted a nice acrylic of a sunny summer scene along a riverbank. The name in the right-hand corner was H. Barrows.
Off to the left of the gallery was an old garage and tracks in the snow where a vehicle had been driven in within the past twenty-four hours.
He stepped back to look up at what he assumed was an apartment on the second floor. The sun glinted on the large upstairs window but not before he’d glimpsed the dark image of a woman there, not before he’d felt a chill.
Rounding the corner of the building, he found a stairway that led up to the apartment. He stopped at the foot of the stairs and glanced around the neighborhood. A handful of kids were dragging shiny new sleds up the side of the mountain a few doors down. A dog barked incessantly at one of the boys. A mother called from a doorway to either the dog or the boy, Slade couldn’t tell which. Neither paid any attention.
He didn’t see a Santa bell-ringer, but then he hadn’t expected to. He figured the man in the Santa suit already knew where to find Holly Barrows. The Santa had been waiting for Holly to show up at Rawlins Investigations as if he’d either feared she would—or had been expecting her. Why was that?
He realized as he glanced up the stairs, that he had more questions than answers. And one big question he needed answered above all the rest. Had Holly given birth to a baby—his baby?
He noticed fresh footprints in the snow on the steps to the apartment. The boot print looked small, like a woman’s, and since this was the address Holly Barrows had given as her home on her car registration, he figured the tracks were probably hers and was relieved to see that there was only one set of prints and they ended at the bottom of the stairs.
Someone had come down, it appeared, to get the newspaper and had then gone back up. The newspaper box was empty, the snow on top dislodged. With any luck, Santa hadn’t been here and Holly Barrows was home. But was the person he’d glimpsed in the window the woman he was looking for?
He climbed the stairs, finding himself watching the street. The dog was still barking. One of the kids squealed as he and his bright-colored sled careened down the hill and into the street. Kids.
Slade knocked at the door at the top of the stairs and waited, more anxious and apprehensive than he wanted to admit. He expected a complete stranger to open the door, figuring the woman in his office yesterday had lied about everything, although he had no idea why. Maybe she’d borrowed the car. Or even stolen it.
So, when she opened the door, it took him a moment. He stared at her in surprise. And only a little relief. She hadn’t lied about her name. Or her occupation. But did that mean she hadn’t lied about the rest of it either?
She stood in the doorway, a paintbrush in her hand and a variety of acrylic colors on her denim smock. She wore a sweatshirt and jeans under the smock, but she looked as good in them as she had in the skirt and blouse last night.
“You’re the last person I expected to see,” she said, not sounding all that enthused about the prospect.
“Yeah.” He glanced to the street again, then back at her. “Mind if I come in?”
She opened the door farther, motioning him inside. The place was small, but tastefully furnished, the colors warm and bright, the furniture comfo
rtable-looking. Homey. Except there was no tree. No sign at all that it was Christmas Day.
“Don’t you celebrate Christmas?” he asked, curious.
“Not this year.”
He followed her through the living area to her studio on the north side of the building. The room, bathed in light, was neat and orderly. He watched her, wondering if the woman he’d come to know this time last year was the true Holly Barrows or if this woman, who seemed to be as dazed as a sleepwalker, was the real one.
She moved around an easel in front of a huge picture window and stopped, seeming startled by what she’d painted.
Not half as startled as he was as he stepped around the easel and saw what she’d been working on. He’d expected something like the idyllic summer scene he’d seen in the gallery downstairs. The two paintings were so different no one would have believed they were done by the same artist.
He stared at the disturbing scene on the canvas, feeling ice-cold inside. He didn’t need to ask what the painting depicted. It could have been the birth of Satan, it was so foreboding and sinister. Three horrible creatures with misshapen grotesque faces and dark gowns huddled at the end of a bed waiting expectantly for the birth.
While he couldn’t see the patient’s face in the painting, he could feel her pain and confusion—and fear in the angle of her body, the disarray of her wild dark curly hair and the grasping fingers of the one hand reaching toward the ghouls at the end of the bed, toward her baby.
The painting was powerful and compelling, and seized at something deep inside him. Sweet heaven.
“We need to talk,” he said, even more convinced of that after seeing what she’d been painting.
She nodded and washed her paintbrush, the liquid in the jar turning dark and murky as she worked. He watched her methodically put the brush away, wipe her hands on the smock, then take it off.
“Why did you wait so long to start looking for your baby?” he asked.
She looked up, her eyes the same color as the Montana winter sky behind her. “Mr. Rawlins—”
“Slade.”
“Slade.” She seemed to savor his name in her mouth for a moment as if she’d tasted it before, then, frowning, continued as she led him into the living room. “I believed that my baby had been stillborn. I had no reason not to.” She waited for him to sit, then perched on the edge of a chair, her hands in her lap. “I woke in a hospital. The nurse told me. I thought at first that my belief that the stillborn wasn’t my baby was nothing more than denial. It wasn’t until I started having these memories—if that’s really what they are—” She shook her head. “Before that, I just assumed my sister-in-law was right. That my grief over losing the baby was causing my…confusion about the birth.”
Sister-in-law? “You’re married?” he asked, unable to hide his surprise—or dismay.
She shook her head. “Widowed. My husband died a year ago.” She looked away. “Are you going to take my case, Mr. Rawlins?”
He didn’t correct her. He was still mulling over the fact that she’d had a husband. And the man had died a year ago. Just before Slade had met her? He felt as if she’d sucker punched him. “There are a few things I need to know.” That was putting it mildly.
“I will tell you everything I can.”
An odd answer, he thought, all things considered. “I’ll need you to agree to an examination by a doctor.”
“To prove that I recently delivered a baby.”
He nodded.
She didn’t seem offended. “What else?”
“I’ll need the name of your doctor during your pregnancy, and I’ll want to talk to the doctor at the hospital who allegedly delivered your baby.”
“I didn’t have a doctor during my pregnancy. I was seeing a midwife.”
He lifted a brow at her. She didn’t seem like the midwife type. “Was that your idea?”
She flushed. “Actually, my sister-in-law suggested her. The woman is highly regarded as one of the top midwives in the country. Her name is Maria Perez. She just happened to have bought a place near here and was on a sabbatical. I was very lucky to get her.”
He stared at her. Something in the way she said it caught his attention. It almost sounded rehearsed. And too convenient. “You have her number then?”
Holly came up with the number from memory. He wasn’t sure why that surprised him either.
“Something else. Why did you drive fifty miles over a mountain pass in a blizzard on Christmas Eve to hire a private investigator?”
“I went to Dry Creek to the last-minute-shoppers art festival at the fairgrounds to look for promising new artists for my gallery. I go every year.”
Again, the lines sounded rehearsed. Or as if they weren’t her own. Was the art festival where she’d been last year before she’d come stumbling out of the snow and into his headlights?
“Although, this year I almost didn’t go,” she added with a frown, a clear afterthought.
“So why did you?”
She shook her head. “My sister-in-law thought it would be the best thing for me.”
He wondered about this sister-in-law who knew so much. “And do you hire a private investigator every year?” he asked, the sarcasm wasted on her.
“Of course not. I never intended to hire anyone. I was driving by and I saw your sign through the snow and—” She looked up at him and shook her head. “I don’t know why I came to you. I just had this sudden need to know the truth and there you were.”
“No matter what that truth is?” he had to ask.
“No matter what you discover,” she said, but he heard a slight hesitation in her words. She sounded scared and unsure. He couldn’t blame her. He felt the same way.
He went for the big one. “What about the father of your baby?”
“I don’t see what that has to do—”
“If your baby really was stolen, the father of the baby seems the prime suspect.”
It was clear she’d already thought of this. She nodded. “I…” She licked her lips and swallowed. “I don’t…”
“You don’t know who the father of your baby is?”
“I know what you must be thinking.”
He doubted that. “Surely, you have some idea or can at least narrow it down.”
“Are you familiar with alcoholic blackouts?”
He stared at her. “You’re an alcoholic?” The only thing he’d ever seen her drink was cola.
“Let’s just say I don’t remember getting pregnant and leave it at that for now.”
He studied her for a long moment. Was it possible he knew more about the conception of their baby than she did? “When can you see a doctor?”
Relief washed over her features at his change of subject. “The sooner the better,” she said.
“No problem. I think I can get you an appointment this afternoon.” Dr. Fred Delaney had delivered both Slade and Shelley and had been a friend of the family for years. He would make time for this, Slade knew. Dr. Delaney was also on his list of people to talk to about his mother. “Is that too soon?”
“No.” She rose as he got to his feet.
He considered telling her about the two of them. That after doing the math, he figured the baby had to be his. But first he had to know if there really had been a baby.
He started to leave and stopped. “Last night, when you came to see me at my office…”
“Christmas Eve,” she said, then waited for him to go on.
“There was a Santa bell-ringer in front of my building. Maybe you saw him?”
She shook her head, frowning as if wondering what that had to do with anything.
“I think he had my office staked out. I saw him on a cell phone as you were leaving. I think he’d been waiting for you.” He saw her pale, her hand trembling as she grasped the back of the chair he’d been sitting in for support.
“Then they know I’ve come to you,” she said, fear making her blue eyes darken.
“They?” he asked, just to
clarify.
“The people who took my baby.”
The monsters in the painting.
If “they” existed outside this woman’s mind.
The Santa bell-ringer, on the other hand, had been real. He described the Santa as best he could, hoping she’d recognize the guy as someone she knew. But while the man hadn’t been hiding behind a monster mask—he had been hiding under a beard and hat and possibly a whole lot of padding. Like the monsters in her painting, real or not, Santa hadn’t wanted to be recognized either, it seemed.
“I can’t place him from your description,” she said.
He nodded, not surprised. “You just might want to be…careful.” He wanted to warn her, but he didn’t have any idea against what—or whom. The bottom line was: if those monsters in her painting existed, then Holly Barrows was in danger.
“You don’t have a phone?” he asked, remembering that he hadn’t found a listing.
“I have it listed under the gallery.” She rattled off the number.
He memorized it. “I’ll call you with a time. We can meet at the doctor’s office.”
He glanced back at the painting as he left and almost wished she really was crazy. The alternative scared the hell out of him.
* * *
DR. FRED DELANEY had grayed in the years since he’d delivered Slade and Shelley. He’d come to Dry Creek right out of medical school and ended up staying. Now in his sixties, he was semi-retired.
“You know my office is closed the week of Christmas,” he said when Slade called him.
“That’s why I’d like you to see this woman. I’d just as soon have this done…quietly.”
Dr. Delaney didn’t ask. “Three o’clock.”
Holly Barrows arrived a few minutes before her appointment. Slade had half expected her not to show and realized he was going to have to start believing at least some of what she said.
The checkup didn’t take long. Dr. Delaney came out of the examining room and motioned for Slade to follow him into his office.
“Close the door,” he said as he went around behind his desk.