His head jerked back as if she’d slapped him. Obviously he hadn’t seen the photos or read the report.
“And your father may have been a cheater, but did he deserve to be shot three times and bleed to death on a barroom floor while your mother watched?”
His voice rose for the first time. “You’re full of shit. She wouldn’t have watched my father die.”
If he hadn’t told her she was full of shit, she would have spared him, no matter her own anger. “Her bloody footprints were all over the bar. And she didn’t get up and walk around after she shot herself.”
His mouth clamped shut.
“Alice Jones had a child too. Did she deserve to lose her mother? Did she deserve to be made an orphan?” Maddie placed her hand in the center of his chest and pushed. “So don’t tell me that your mother was just some sad housewife who’d been pushed too far. She had other options. Lots of other options that didn’t involve murder.” He took a step back out onto her porch. “And don’t come here and think you can tell me what to do. I really don’t give a damn if you like it or not. I’m going to write the book.” She tried to shut the door, but his arm shot out and kept it open.
“You do that.” With his free hand, he took his sunglasses from the top of his head and slid them in place, covering the anger in his blue eyes. “But you stay away from me,” he said and dropped his hand from the door. “And you stay the hell away from my family.”
Maddie slammed the door and pushed her hair from her face. Damn. That hadn’t gone well. He’d been angry. She’d gotten angry. Heck, she was still angry.
She heard him start his truck, and out of habit, she locked her front door. She didn’t need him or his family in order to write the book, but realistically, it’d be nice if she had their cooperation. Especially since she needed to get into the lives of Loch and Rose.
“Well, that sucked,” she said and walked into the living room. She would have to write the book without their input. Her mother’s photograph sat on the coffee table. She’d been so young and filled with so many dreams. Maddie picked up the photo and touched the glass above her mother’s lips. It had been sitting on the table the whole time while Mick had been there, and he hadn’t noticed.
She’d planned to tell him that she was more than just an author interested in writing a book. That his mother had left her an orphan too. Now he wanted nothing to do with her, and who she really was just didn’t seem to matter anymore.
Mick pulled his truck to a stop in front of the Shore View Diner where Meg worked five days a week waiting tables and pulling in tips. He was still so angry he felt like hitting something or someone. Like picking Maddie Dupree up by her shoulders and shaking her until she agreed to pack up and go away. Like forgetting she’d ever heard of the Hennessys and their messed-up lives. But she’d made it really clear she wasn’t going anywhere, and now he had to tell Meg before she heard it from someone else.
He turned off the truck and leaned his head back. His mother had watched his father die? He hadn’t known that. Wished he didn’t know it now. How could he possibly reconcile the woman who’d killed two people with the mother who’d made him peanut butter and strawberry jelly sandwiches, cut the crusts off, and sliced the bread at an angle just as he’d liked it? The loving mother who bathed him and washed his hair and tucked him in at night, with the woman who’d left footprints in her husband’s blood all over his bar? How could that even be the same woman?
He rubbed his face with his hands and slid his fingers beneath his sunglasses to rub his eyes. He was so damn tired. After Jewel had given him Maddie’s business card, he’d gone to his office in Hennessy’s and locked himself in. He’d searched the Internet for information about Maddie, and there’d been a lot. She’d published five books, and he’d discovered head shots of her and photos of her at book signings. There was no mistaking that the Maddie Dupree whom he’d been planning to get to know better was the woman who wrote about psychotic killers. The Madeline Dupree who was in town to write about the night his mother had killed his father. He opened the door to his truck and stepped outside. And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to stop her.
From as far back as he could remember, the Shore View Diner had smelled the same. Like grease and eggs and tobacco. The diner was one of the last places in America where a person could have a cup of coffee and a Camel or Lucky Strike, depending on his or her poison. As a result, it was always filled with smokers. Mick had tried to talk Meg into working someplace where she wasn’t likely to get lung cancer from secondhand smoke, but she insisted that the tips were too good to work anyplace else.
It was around two in the afternoon and the diner was half empty when Mick entered. Meg stood behind the front counter, filling Lloyd Brunner’s cup of coffee and laughing at something he’d said. Her black hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she wore a bright pink blouse beneath a white apron. She looked up and waved at him.
“Hey, there. Are you hungry?” she asked.
“No.” He took a seat at the counter and pushed his Revos to the top of his head. “I was hoping you could get off early.”
“Why?” Her smile fell and she set the coffee carafe on the counter. “Has something happened? Is it Travis?”
“Travis is fine. I just wanted to talk to you about something.”
She looked into his eyes as if she could read his mind. “I’ll be right back,” she said and walked into the kitchen. When she returned, she had her purse.
Mick rose and followed her outside. As soon as the door to the diner swung shut behind them,
she asked, “What is it?”
“There’s a woman in town. She’s a true crime writer.”
Meg squinted against the bright sun as they walked across the gravel lot to his truck. “What’s her name?”
“Madeline Dupree.”
Her jaw dropped. “Madeline Dupree? She wrote In Her Place, the story of Patrick Wayne Dobbs. The serial killer who killed women and then wore their clothes under his business suit. That book scared me so much I couldn’t sleep for a week.” Meg shook her head. “What is she doing in Truly?”
He slid his sunglasses down to cover his eyes. “Apparently, she’s going to write about what happened with Mom and Dad.”
Meg stopped. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“Why?”
“God, I don’t know.” He raised a hand, then dropped it to his side. “If she writes about serial killers, I don’t know what she finds so damn interesting about Mom and Dad.”
Meg folded her arms across the front of her apron and they continued to walk. “What does she know about what happened?”
“I don’t know, Meg.” They stopped by his truck and he leaned a hip into the front fender. “She knows Mom shot that waitress in the head.” His sister didn’t bat an eye. “Did you know that?”
Meg shrugged and bit her thumbnail. “Yeah. I heard the sheriff tell Grandma Loraine.”
He looked into his sister’s eyes and wondered what else she knew that he didn’t. He wondered if she knew that their mother hadn’t killed herself right away. He supposed it didn’t matter. She was taking the news better than he’d expected. “Are you going to be okay?”
She nodded. “Is there anything we can do to stop her?”
“I doubt it.”
She leaned back into the driver’s-side door and sighed. “Maybe you can go talk to her.”
“I did. She’s going to write it, and she doesn’t care what we have to say about it.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“Everyone is going to start talking about it again.”
“Yep.”
“She’ll say bad stuff about Mom.”
“Probably about all three of them. But what can she say? The only people who know what really happened that night are dead.”
Meg glanced away.
“Do you know something that happened that night?”
She dropped her hand. “Just that Mom had bee
n pushed too far and she killed Dad and that waitress.”
He wasn’t so sure he believed her, but what difference did it make twenty-nine years later? Meg hadn’t been there. She’d been home with him when the sheriff had arrived at their house that night.
He looked up at the clear blue sky. “I’d forgotten that the waitress had a little girl.”
“Yeah, I can’t remember her name, though.” Meg returned her gaze to Mick. “Not that I care. Her mother was a whore.”
“That wasn’t the girl’s fault, Meg. She was left without a mother.”
“She was probably better off. Alice Jones was cheating with our father and didn’t care who knew. She flaunted their relationship in front of the whole town, so don’t expect me to feel sorry for some nameless, faceless orphan girl.”
Mick didn’t know if there’d been any flaunting, and if there had been, he figured their dad had to take the majority of the blame, since he’d been the married one.
“Are you going to be okay with this?”
“No, but what can I do about it?” She adjusted her purse on her shoulder. “I’ll survive, just like I did before.”
“I told her to stay away from you and Travis, so I don’t think she’ll be bothering you with questions.”
Meg raised a brow. “Is she going to be bothering you with questions?”
There was more than one way a woman could bother a man.
And don’t come here and think you can tell me what to do. I really don’t give a damn if you like it or not. I’m going to write the book. She’d been mad and obstinate and sexy as hell. Her big brown eyes had gotten kind of squinted at the corners just before she’d slammed the door in his face. “No,” he answered. “She won’t be bothering me with questions.”
Meg waited until Mick’s truck pulled out of the parking lot before she let out a breath and raised her hands to the sides of her face. She pressed her fingers into her temples and closed her eyes against the pressure building in her head. Madeline Dupree was in town to write a book about her parents. There had to be something someone could do to stop her. A person shouldn’t be allowed to just…just ruin lives. There should be a law against snooping around and…digging into someone’s past.
Meg opened her eyes and stared down at her white Reeboks. It wouldn’t be long before everyone in town knew about it. Before they started talking and gossiping and looking at her as if she were liable to go off at any time. Even her brother sometimes looked at her as if she were crazy. Mick thought he was so good at forgetting the past, but there were some things even he’d never been able to forget. Tears clouded her vision and dropped on the gravel by the instep of her shoe. Mick also mistook emotion for mental illness. Not that she really blamed him. Growing up with their parents had been an emotional tug-of-war ending in their death.
A second truck pulled into the parking lot and Meg raised her gaze as Steve Castle opened the door of his Tacoma and got out. Steve was Mick’s buddy and manager of Hennessy’s. Meg didn’t know much about him, other than he’d flown helicopters in the army with Mick, and there’d been some sort of accident in which Steve had lost his right leg beneath the knee.
“Hey, there, Meg,” he called out, his deep voice booming across the lot as he moved toward her.
“Hey.” Meg hurriedly wiped beneath her eyes, then dropped her hands to her sides. Steve was a big guy and shaved his head completely bald. He was tall and broad-chested and so…so manly that Meg felt a little intimidated by his size.
“Having a rough day?”
She could feel her cheeks get hot as she looked up into his deep blue eyes. “Sorry. I know men don’t like to see women cry.”
“Tears don’t bother me. I’ve seen tough Marines cry like little girls.” He folded his arms across the dogs playing poker on the front of his T-shirt. “Now, what’s got you so upset, sweetheart?”
Meg usually didn’t share her feelings with people she didn’t know, but there was something about Steve. While his size intimidated her, he also made her feel safe at the same time. Or perhaps it was just because he’d called her “sweetheart,” but she opened her mouth and confided, “Mick was just here, and he told me that there’s a writer in town and she’s going to write about the night our mother killed our father.”
“Yeah. I heard about that.”
“Already? How did you find out?”
“The Finley boys were in Hennessy’s last night talking about it.”
She raised a hand and chewed on her thumbnail. “Then I think it’s safe to assume the whole town knows, and everybody is going to be talking about it and speculating.”
“Nothing to do about that.”
She dropped her hand to her side and shook her head. “I know.”
“But maybe you can talk to her.”
“Mick tried that. She’s going to write the book no matter what we think about it.” She looked down at her shoes. “Mick told her to stay away from me and Travis.”
“Why avoid her? Why don’t you tell her your side of things?”
She looked up into his eyes and the sunlight bouncing off his shiny head. “I don’t know if she’d care about my side.”
“Maybe, but you won’t know that unless you talk to the woman.” He unfolded his arms and rested one big hand on her shoulder. “If there is one thing I know, it’s that you have to confront something head-on. You can get through anything if you know what you’re facing.”
Which she was sure was true and very good advice, but she couldn’t think past the weight of his hand on her shoulder. The solid feel and the warmth of his touch spread to her stomach. She hadn’t felt warmth from a man since her ex-husband. The men in town talked to her and flirted with her, but they never seemed to want more than a coffee refill.
Steve slid his palm down her arm and grasped her hand. “I’ve wondered something since I moved to town.”
“What’s that?”
He tilted his head to one side and studied her. “Why you don’t have a boyfriend.”
“I think the men in this town are half afraid of me.”
His brows lowered over his eyes and then he burst out laughing. A deep booming laugh that lit his face.
“It’s not funny,” she said, but at that moment, surrounded by Steve Castle’s laughter, it was kind of funny. And standing so close, with her hand in his, was kind of…nice.
Chapter 8
The fishing at upper Payette Lake had been so good, Sheriff Potter hadn’t returned until the following Tuesday, but once he’d been given Maddie’s card he’d called her immediately and set up a meeting for the next day at his house. If there was one thing in Maddie’s line of work that she could always count on, it was cops. Whether an LAPD detective or a small-town sheriff, cops loved to talk about old cases.
“I’ll never forget that night,” the retired sheriff said as he looked at the old crime scene photos through a pair of reading glasses. Unlike the stereotypical retired sheriff who’d gone to fat, Bill Potter was still quite thin and had a full head of white hair. “That scene was a mess.”
Maddie scooted the small tape recorder closer to the baby-blue La-Z-Boy recliner where Sheriff Potter sat. The inside of the Potters’ home was a fusion of floral prints and wildlife art that clashed on so many different levels that Maddie feared her eyes would cross before the day was through.
“I’d known Loch and Rose since they were kids,” Bill Potter continued. “I’m a few years older, but in a town this size, especially back in the seventies, everyone knows everyone. Rose was one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen, and it was a shock to see what she’d done to those two people and then to herself.”
“How many homicide cases had you investigated before the Hennessy case?” she asked.
“One, but it was nothing like the Hennessy case. Old Man Jenner got shot in a dispute over a dog. Mostly we get accidental shootings, and those are usually around hunting season.”
“The first officer on the scene was a�
��” Maddie paused to look at the report. “Officer Grey Tipton.”
“Yep. He left the department a few months after that and moved away,” the sheriff said. “And I hear he died a few years ago.”
Which was just one of the many hurdles she was always coming up against in this town. Either people weren’t willing to talk about what happened or they were dead. At least she had Officer Tipton’s report and notes. “Yes, he died in an ATV accident in 1981. Did the shooting have anything to do with him leaving the department?”
Sheriff Potter shuffled the photos. “It had everything to do with it. Grey had been really good friends with Loch, and seeing him shot like that haunted him so bad he couldn’t sleep.” He held up the photo of Rose lying beside her dead husband. “It was the first time any of us had seen anything like that. I’d responded to plenty of automobile accidents that were bloody as hell, but they weren’t personal.”
Since there would be no trial to write about, Maddie had to get as much personal information as possible. And since the Hennessys weren’t talking, she had to rely on other sources.
“Grey had such a hard time with it. He had to quit. Just goes to show you that you don’t know how you’ll deal with a situation until you’re knee-deep in blood.”
For the next hour, they talked about the crime scene. The photos and reports answered the who, what, where, and when, but the why was still fuzzy. Maddie changed the tape in the little recorder, then asked, “You knew both Loch and Rose. What do you think happened that night?”
In every case like this, there was always a catalyst. A stressor was introduced that pushed the perpetrator over the edge. “From what I’ve heard and read, Alice Jones wasn’t Loch’s one and only affair.”
“No. She wasn’t. That marriage had been like a roller coaster for years.” The sheriff shook his head and removed his glasses. “Before they moved into that farmhouse right outside of town, they used to live down by the lake on Pine Nut. Every few months I’d get a call from one of their neighbors and I’d have to drive over there.”
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