by Jen Blood
“You two should get back,” Finnegan said. “Behind the line, if you don’t mind. Diggs will come find you when there’s news, but you really can’t be going through things over here.”
Juarez nodded. “You’re right—I’m sorry, just habit. You guys will let me know if there’s anything I can do?”
“We will.”
Juarez took my arm. He attempted a smile and failed miserably, looking once again toward the crowd. “Come on, there’s nothing we can do here. We’ll catch up with Diggs later.”
Once we were out of earshot of the police, I turned to Juarez. “Did you get a chance to check out Hammond’s phone?”
He nodded. “Yeah—I checked both ingoing and outgoing calls.”
“And?”
“According to caller ID, the last call he made and the last he received were from the same person.”
I waited. I had a bad feeling I knew where this was going.
“Who?”
“Dr. Katherine Everett,” he said, watching me closely.
I nodded. I reached for my cell phone, resigned at last to the one thing I’d been hoping to avoid since I’d started this investigation.
I called my mother.
Chapter Twenty-One
Kat answered on the second ring. She was asleep when I called, but woke quickly—a skill perfected after years working in emergent care. When I told her about Hammond and the fire, there was a pause on the line before she said she’d drive up from Portland and be there shortly. No argument, no tears, no questions. I hung up feeling like we’d just sealed a not-terribly-significant business deal.
Juarez and I returned to his car, where I let Einstein out to water a few unsuspecting shrubs. The spectators had thinned as the fire died down, though the volunteer fire brigade had come en force and wouldn’t be leaving any time soon; a long line of pickups with red lights on the dash were parked along the side of the road, with others still arriving as the night wore on.
Juarez walked with me, though we both remained silent. When his phone rang just as we were returning to the car, we both started. I took small comfort in the fact that at least I wasn’t the only one running on pure adrenaline these days. He checked the caller ID and apologized to me before he turned his back and answered.
I was left to listen to the heavy, dull thud of wet timber falling as the fire crew brought down the last of Hammond’s house. I surveyed the scene, stopping at sight of a man standing beside a decrepit red pickup. He wore an orange hunting cap pulled low over his eyes, but even from a distance I knew who it was: Joe Ashmont. He climbed back into his truck and drove away before I could do anything—not that I had a clue what the hell that might be. I couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d wanted me to see him there.
Juarez returned with his boxers clearly in a bunch, forehead furrowed and jaw tensed. So far, I’d only seen one person who had that effect on him.
“Matt?” I asked.
He nodded. “He’s not at Togus—they don’t know when he left, or how he got out.” He rubbed his stubbled chin. He looked as tired as I felt.
“You should go—try and help find him.”
“I can give you a ride back to Diggs’ place…”
“No, that’s all right. I’ll just wait for him to finish up, we’ll be fine.”
He still didn’t move, though. I took a step closer. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but then all of a sudden I had my arms around him and my head on his chest. I’ve never been the hugging type. Juarez, on the other hand, returned the embrace without hesitation.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. “Try to get some rest tonight?”
“You’re one to talk. Thanks for…everything. Really. You don’t know me, yet you keep showing up to dig my ass out of some of the most god-awful messes.”
He leaned down and kissed me on the mouth, then pulled back so quickly I had no time to respond one way or the other.
“It’s no trouble—it keeps me from dwelling on my own mess. I’ll give you a call when I know what’s going on with Matt. Stay safe.” He squeezed my hand, climbed into his car, and drove away.
Einstein and I stood abandoned in the middle of the road for a couple of minutes while I tried to decide my next move. Kat was on her way, but it would take her at least a couple of hours to get to Littlehope from Portland. Hammond’s house was just a hulking, blackened frame, the inside unrecognizable. I spotted Diggs standing beside the wreckage. He’d taken off the helmet the fire crew had loaned him; now, he stood there with blackened face and tired eyes, the cover boy for our most recent tragedy.
I tugged on Stein’s leash, and the two of us met Diggs as he walked toward us.
“Are you okay?”
He looked like he might cry. Instead, he stepped closer and reached into my coat pocket, fishing around for something. He smelled like smoke and sweat and exhaustion. I wasn’t sure what he was doing until he pulled my cigarettes from the pocket, extracted one, and lit it without ever taking a step back. One deep inhale and a shaky exhale, careful to blow the smoke away from me, and only then did he say a word.
“I’m okay,” he said.
“I called Kat. She’s on her way.”
“I’m sorry.”
I wasn’t sure whether he was sorry for the fire or Hammond’s death or the fact that my mother was coming. Probably all of the above. I managed what I hoped was a brave smile, and held his hand as we walked away from the shell of Hammond’s home.
My mother showed up about an hour and a half later, as promised. Diggs and I were back at the Trib, Diggs writing up some late-night copy on the fire, Einstein curled up with me on an uncomfortably overstuffed sofa in Diggs’ office. I’d just dozed off when I heard a door on the other side of the building open and slam closed.
“Shit,” I said.
Diggs didn’t even look up from his keyboard. “You’ll be fine.”
Easy for him to say. Another two minutes of suspense, and Kat found us.
“Sweet Jesus,” she said as soon as she’d laid eyes on me. “What the hell happened to you?”
“I told you—there was a fire.”
She came closer. “What’d they do, put it out with your face?”
In the chaos, I’d completely forgotten about the attack. Kat took my head in her hands, tilting my face this way and that, pressing none-too-gently on my bruised cheekbone. There would be no hugs, no tearful reunions, with my mother. Just the palpating of battered bones to prove she cared.
“Nothing’s broken,” she announced.
I pulled away. “Thanks. I know.”
Kat’s coal black hair was pulled into a ponytail, a couple of curls hanging daintily at her ears. She wore jeans and a black cashmere sweater that set off her fair complexion well. The best Hollywood costume designer couldn’t have chosen a more appropriate outfit for someone coming to see the wreckage of an old lover’s home in the middle of the night.
“You look worse than she does,” she said to Diggs. He looked up from the computer. He hadn’t bothered to change after the fire, choosing instead to head straight to his computer to get the story up on the paper’s online site, since he couldn’t make the morning edition.
“I sincerely doubt that,” Diggs said.
Kat looked back at me. “Yeah, you’re right. Not even close. Come on—I’m taking you both wherever it is you’re shacked up these days.”
“I have to work,” Diggs said. “You’re welcome to stay at my place as long as you’re in town, though. Erin knows the way.”
Einstein’s tail wagged ecstatically as he turned himself inside out at Kat’s feet. She always had that effect on dogs—growing up, we always had at least a couple of rescued mutts who trailed her at the clinic and slept by her side at night. I always imagined she’d end up retiring to a big mansion with fifteen hounds and no contact with humanity save late nights in a chat room, thrilling the masses with her most gruesome surgeries.
She scratched Stein’s ears and chin.
“He’s yours?”
“He is,” I said. “Einstein.”
“Come on, Einstein,” she said. She turned and left with my turncoat of a hound on her heels, without bothering to say goodbye to Diggs. There was the implicit expectation that I would follow behind. I shot a last pleading look at Diggs.
“Come home soon,” I said.
“Yeah, right. Between your mom and the Greatest Cuban-American Hero, I’m thinking of having a shower installed here.” At the look on my face, he changed his tune. “I’ll wrap up in an hour or so—you’ll be fine. Very few mothers eat their young once they’ve hit maturity.”
With that questionable reassurance, I grabbed my coat and Einstein’s leash and headed for the door.
My mother drove a vintage cherry red VW Beetle convertible. Stein hopped in the back and settled down immediately. I took the front, directing Kat along roads we’d traveled together back sixteen or seventeen light years before.
“How’s Maxwell?” she asked, shortly before we reached the turnoff to Diggs’ place. I looked at her blankly.
“The professor.”
“Michael,” I corrected her. “He’s fine. We got a divorce.”
For a second, she looked thrown. “I didn’t know. When?”
“Not long ago. You never liked him anyway.”
“He was too old for you. And clearly sleeping with every willing coed in greater Boston.”
Ah, the unbridled charm of Dr. Everett. Since I couldn’t argue either of her points, however, I chose not to comment.
“I want to talk to you about Noel Hammond,” I said instead.
She drove too fast on Diggs’ dirt road, sending the Beetle flying up over the final hill before his house came into sight. She didn’t say anything until she’d stopped the car.
“Go inside and get cleaned up first. I’ll make some tea. We’ll talk then.”
There was no point in arguing. Instead, I let her put her bag in my room and showed her to the kitchen.
The shower did little to reenergize me. In fact, it did the opposite; I found myself dozing with my forehead against the tiled wall halfway through, and ended up curled up naked on the shower floor while the pulsing spray rained down on my weary head. Kat knocked on the bathroom door.
“Are you still alive in there?”
I managed to revive myself enough to get out, towel myself dry, and put on semi-clean pajamas. Einstein had crashed out on his dog bed. He didn’t even stir at the promise of tea and crumpets. I left the bedroom door open in case he changed his mind, and went to face my mother.
A cup of steaming chamomile tea was waiting for me, along with a toasted English muffin that I pushed aside without a thought. The tea was more bitter than I’d expected, but it was hot and the smell of chamomile was a nice alternative to the smoke that still lingered in my nostrils. I drank half of it without waiting for it to cool.
“You’ve lost weight—and not in a good way. You should eat something.”
“I’m not hungry. Tell me about Noel, Kat.”
“Why don’t you tell me about Noel? You got pretty chummy with him toward the end.”
The turnabout wasn’t unexpected, but it still annoyed me. “You slept with him to keep him quiet after he saw you destroy evidence out on the island the day of the fire. You lied to police, blackmailed a detective…”
She looked bored. “It sounds like you have it all figured out. Is there some kind of confession you’d like me to sign?”
“I want you to tell me the truth for once in your life!” I heard Einstein stir at my tone, his toenails clacking on the hardwood floor before he appeared at the kitchen door. Actually, two dogs appeared at the kitchen door. Neither of them were in focus. I closed my eyes.
“Why did you lie?” I asked. My voice sounded small, that of a child instead of a thirty-three-year-old woman with degrees and awards and a recent divorce under her belt. My eyes were still closed, my head spinning.
“I think you should get some rest. You don’t look well,” she said.
I shook my head in an effort to clear it. Opened my eyes. My mother was closer now, peering interestedly at me.
“Shit. You…” My voice faded. “You drugged me.”
“You’re so dramatic. I’m a doctor, Erin—I medicate people, I don’t drug them. You need to sleep. This should help.”
She pulled me to my feet and led me down the hall. I’d already told her she could take my room, and I’d take Juarez’s for the night. His bed was a mattress on the floor that seemed much lower than I suspected it would have if my mom hadn’t slipped some kind of elephant tranquilizer in my tea. I crashed onto it like a tree felled in the forest. Kat pulled the blankets up around me. I couldn’t remember her ever tucking me in like this as a child.
“Where’s Dad?” I asked.
She looked sorry for just a moment—a flicker of regret that touched her pretty green eyes for an instant before it vanished.
“Your father’s dead,” she said. There was no emotion in her voice. “Go to sleep, Erin. We’ll talk in the morning.”
I was dimly aware of her leaving my side. Einstein’s cold nose nuzzled my neck before he settled down beside me, his body warm against mine. The bed smelled like Juarez. It wasn’t familiar per se, but it wasn’t unpleasant, either. I closed my eyes.
And slept.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Iwoke up an indeterminate number of hours later to blinding sunlight streaming into windows devoid of drapes or dressings. It took a few seconds to reorient myself to my surroundings: strange bed, cardboard boxes sealed with duct tape against one wall, a table lamp and a dog-eared copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude on the floor by my head.
Juarez’s room.
Einstein was nowhere to be found. My cell phone was on the kitchen table and the house was spotless, dishes washed and stacked neatly in the strainer. There was no sign of Diggs, Juarez, or my mother. I dialed her cell while waiting for my coffee to brew, disoriented and pissed off. The clock on Diggs’ microwave read 1:20.
Kat answered on the fourth ring, her voice clipped and professional.
“Where the hell are you?” I interrupted, before she could finish her greeting. “And please tell me you have my dog.”
“He’s spreading a little cheer—I thought he could use an outing, and you clearly weren’t getting up anytime soon.”
“Because you drugged me, you psychopath.”
“And again with the drama. I’m at the clinic—I figured since I was in town, I should make some time to check the place out, make sure they’re still doing my name justice. I’ll just be another hour or so. You can meet me here if you’d like.”
I suppressed the urge to reach through the phone and strangle her. “No, that’s all right. Just come by the Trib when you’re done. An hour, right?”
I hung up and drank my coffee, no doubt in my mind that I wouldn’t see Kat before four o’clock.
At the Trib, Diggs was still weeding through conflicting reports from the cops about Hammond’s death. I retired to my office to sort through my own evidence, in a vain attempt to make sense of the latest bizarre developments in the case. My wall looked like one of those creepy serial killer shrines they have on all the primetime cop shows: charred bodies, medical reports and newspaper clippings, a sketchy timeline written in washable marker on the wall below.
As expected, there was still no sign of my mother when four o’clock rolled around. Diggs came in with coffee and a sandwich, and took his customary seat on the edge of my desk.
“So, what have we got here?”
I broke off a corner of his sandwich and popped it in my mouth, then grimaced when I realized it was some kind of that tofurkey crap he was always eating.
“That’ll teach you to steal my food.”
“Probably not.” I considered his original question. “I think whoever attacked me had to be the one who killed Hammond.”
“Makes sense. Any idea who that could be, though?”
I went through the list of suspects. Matt Perkins was missing now, but as far as I knew he had been safely tucked away in a hospital bed during my attack. Joe Ashmont, on the other hand…
“You’re sure it wasn’t Ashmont who jumped you?” Diggs asked, reading my mind.
“I think so. I can’t really explain why, but I just don’t think it was him.”
“’Cause he’s too sweet?”
I laughed. He took a sip of my coffee without asking, and pushed the rest of his sandwich toward me. I picked at a scrap of crust.
“No, I just—I would have known if it was him. I saw him at Hammond’s last night after the fire, and I just…” I stopped, trying to figure out how to verbalize what so far was nothing more than a gut feeling. “I feel like he wants to tell me something, but he can’t. As much shit as he’s given me, I’m not sure he’d actually hurt me.”
Diggs didn’t look convinced, but he didn’t argue.
“What about you?” I asked. “What’s the word so far on Hammond and the fire?”
“Officially? Undetermined. Unofficially—arson, and Noel was killed before the fire. It seems we have a killer with a conscience, though.”
I looked at him curiously.
“The cats,” he explained. “Whoever blew up the house took the time to get them out first—a neighbor found them prowling around the wreckage this morning.”
“So, a killer who doesn’t mind beating the crap out of girls or murdering an ex-cop with tow-headed grandbabies, but gets squeamish about torching the family feline. Bizarre.”
“Very,” agreed Diggs. “What did Kat have to say on the subject?”
“You mean before or after she slipped me a mickey and stole my dog? Precious little. She doesn’t actually deny any of it, but she’s definitely reticent about sharing her motives. As soon as she gets here, we’re gonna have a conversation.”
Since he had no response for this, I took the time to study my graffiti timeline. It was beginning to shape up in terms of names and dates, the ink still wet on the latest addition: July, 1990—Rebecca Ashmont joins Payson Church.