I picked up the clipping to get a closer look.
A chill went through me, a sort of prescience that meant my deeper mind was already cataloging data, adding things up, subtracting and multiplying. The conclusions might come to the surface immediately, days later, or not at all. That part was a crapshoot.
Tucker got up to turn the steaks over on the grill. He’d seen the headline, too, of course, but he offered no comment. I was pretty sure he’d read the article, probably at a glance, and now he was digesting it.
I squinted at the report; there was plenty of light coming through the patio doors, but the print was small, old and a little smudged.
“Frederick Severn, 57, was rushed to a Kalispell hospital on Tuesday night, by ambulance, the victim of an apparent stroke. According to his wife, Alice, he fell ill while having supper on the Severn family farm, on Route 2, outside Shiloh. He has not regained consciousness….”
Tucker came back to the table, and I handed him the clipping and went on to the next, dated a few days later. The headline shouted Poisoning Suspected, but I could barely concentrate on the body of the article. I kept thinking that I’d been nine when Frederick Severn fell ill; it was the same year Lillian and I met Greer in that Boise bus depot.
What was I to make of all this?
Was Beverly Pennington trying to tell me that Greer had had something to do with Mr. Severn’s illness?
I refocused on the article, but reading it was like wading through something gelatinous. My headache was suddenly a lot worse, and hungry as I was, I didn’t think I’d be able to force down so much as a bite of that steak.
Tucker finally took the clipping out of my hand and read it aloud, in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice. What it all boiled down to was that, though Severn had survived, he was essentially a vegetable. Routine blood tests had revealed traces of a common garden insecticide in his system, and the elder of his two stepdaughters, Molly Stillwell, sixteen, who had run away from home soon after her stepfather was hospitalized, was being sought for questioning.
I did something terrible when I was young, I heard Greer saying that night in the guesthouse kitchen, when she’d come searching for the stolen tamale pie. Someone knows.
“Oh, God,” I murmured.
“What?” Tucker asked.
I swallowed. “Did I happen to mention, in all the excitement, that Greer is being blackmailed?”
Tucker stiffened. “Yes,” he said. “Last night, after we listened to the voice mails. But you were a little sketchy with the details—and you took your sweet time getting around to it. How long have you known?”
“Yikes,” I said, stalling.
Tucker did not look appeased. He was leaning toward me, his eyes narrowed, his voice low and gruff. “‘Yikes’? Two people are dead. Your sister and her housekeeper are officially off the radar. If you know more about this than you’re telling me, spill it. Now.”
My steak was burning; I could smell it. Tucker didn’t take it—or me—off the heat. I felt skewered by his gaze, like a shish kebab, and I was starting to char.
I swallowed again, hard. “I’ve known for a while,” I admitted. “Jolie and I tried to get some answers, but Greer would never tell us anything. Alex said she’d almost emptied his bank accounts, paying somebody off. She’d taken out some credit cards in his name and maxed them, getting cash advances. He hired detectives and found out she’d lived in Shiloh, Montana, but if he knew more about it than that, he didn’t say.”
“You think she’s Molly Stillwell, and she poisoned her stepfather,” Tucker said.
“It’s possible,” I said glumly. “She told me she’d done something terrible, but that was all I could get out of her. And when I got that call on her cell phone, whoever was on the other end said, ‘Tell Molly she’s a dead woman.’”
“Lacing somebody’s supper with bug killer would qualify as doing something terrible,” Tucker said, forking the charred steak off the grill and onto a paper plate, then setting the works down on the patio stones for Dave.
I nodded, my throat tight. I was afraid to look at the two other clippings I hadn’t examined yet—there are times when ignorance really is bliss. I forced myself.
There was a picture accompanying the third article, showing a slender, harried-looking woman in a cheap cotton dress, standing stalwartly beside a slack-jawed man in a wheelchair. The woman looked so much like Greer that it took me few extra moments to get past that, and read the headline.
Longtime Shiloh Family Enduring Hard Times.
Alice Severn had personally undertaken the care of her disabled husband, refusing to “park him in some institution,” as she told the Bugle reporter. She prayed every day for her missing daughter’s return and continued safety, and depended on her remaining daughter, Tessa, and stepson, Frederick “Rick” Severn Jr., for moral support. Members of her church had been “helpful,” as had various community service organizations.
I wondered how long it had been before the casseroles and other donations had petered out—if Tessa had gone on to marry and live a normal adult life, or if she was still at home, helping to look after her stepfather. And what about Rick Severn?
The fourth and final article answered that question. Rick Severn had gone to prison three years after his father’s poison-induced stroke, convicted of vehicular homicide. He’d been driving drunk, collided with a van on an icy Montana road the day after Thanksgiving and wiped out a family returning from a visit to Grandma’s.
While I was absorbing all this, Tucker went into the house, came out with a fresh steak and plopped it on the grill. He set a salad in front of me, along with a bottle of Thousand Island dressing, my favorite.
“Eat,” he said.
“I can’t.”
“Try.”
I picked up the fork, stabbed a cherry tomato. “What do you make of all this, Tuck?” I asked, referring to the clippings.
“Beverly Pennington could be the blackmailer,” Tucker answered, thinking out loud. “Though it doesn’t seem likely that she’d risk prison by cluing you in.”
“Alex told me he’d hired investigators to look into Greer’s past. He might have given Beverly this stuff, or she could have swiped it from him at some point.” I put down the fork, with the cherry tomato still speared on the tines, and gnawed at my lower lip. “I believed him, since he was dead and everything, but maybe he lied.”
“Maybe,” Tucker said with a note of glum wryness.
“He seemed—well—sincere,” I said. “He thought Greer would be blamed for his murder, and he wanted to clear her.”
Tucker upended the dressing bottle, squeezed Thousand Island all over my salad and put the fork back in my hand. “Eat, Sherlock,” he said. “You’re going to need your strength.”
“I have to go to Shiloh,” I said.
“Not,” Tucker replied.
I wished I hadn’t mentioned the embryonic plan, or even showed him the contents of that envelope. He’d try to stop me from going to Montana, for sure. At the very least, he’d pass the information on to the local authorities in Shiloh and probably to the Feds, too.
I wasn’t sure Greer had been taken to Shiloh, but I knew I had to start there.
I began to eat salad. Tucker was right. I was going to need my strength.
I had one advantage. Allison was gone, and that meant Tucker couldn’t tail me to Montana, because he’d have to leave his kids to do that.
And I had one disadvantage. Dave. I couldn’t leave him with Jolie, because Sweetie might eat him. And I couldn’t put him in a kennel, because then he might think I’d dumped him at the pound and wasn’t coming back.
I’d have to take him with me, which ruled out flying; he was too big to fit under a seat, and I wasn’t about to let him ride in the cargo hold.
At some point, I’d started caring about Dave.
Now I was stuck with a four-legged partner who was bound to put a crimp in my style. Yikes.
I smiled as he trotted out of
the house, following his nose, and zeroed in on the cremated steak.
“Mojo,” Tucker said suspiciously, “what’s going on in that bruised head of yours?”
“Do you think you could grease the tracks and speed up my liquor license?” I asked. “I’d like to open Mojo’s for business as soon as possible.”
He blinked. Whatever he’d been expecting me to say, it wasn’t that.
“No,” he said. “I don’t have that kind of influence, and if I did, I wouldn’t use it.”
That darned honor of his. I shrugged. Went on munching salad.
Daisy stepped outside and approached me shyly. “Are you my daddy’s girlfriend?” she asked for the second time that night.
I almost choked on a cherry tomato. Looked to Tucker for help, but he was turning my steak over on the grill, with his back to us.
“No,” I said.
“Yes,” Tucker said.
“Do you want to see my room?” Daisy asked, her eyes big as she studied me, probably wondering about the troweled-on concealer, which suddenly felt like a mask on my face.
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
She took my hand when I stood up, and that did something peculiar to my heart. “Did you know my friend Gillian went to heaven?” she inquired as she guided me across the living room. Danny was lying on the couch, reading one of the early Harry Potter books.
My throat felt thick. I couldn’t speak, so I nodded.
“I miss her,” Daisy confided. “I miss my daddy, too. He’s gone a lot.”
I nodded again, and my eyes burned.
Daisy pulled me into a long hallway, pushed open a pair of double doors. “My mommy sleeps in here,” she told me solemnly.
I couldn’t look. Or talk.
“This is Danny’s room,” Daisy went on, like a little tour guide, a second or so later as we passed an open door. I glimpsed a lot of boy clutter inside—books, toy airplanes, a hand-held video game. “Daddy sleeps in here when he’s home,” she announced at the next doorway. “And my room is on the other side. That way, if any monsters come, Daddy’s in the middle. No monster would dare try to get us when Daddy’s around.”
“Right,” I choked out, ashamed, because through everything I was feeling ran a thin, sturdy thread of pure relief. Tucker hadn’t been lying to me when he said he wasn’t sharing Allison’s bed. Maybe the setup really was platonic.
Daisy’s room was the kind every little girl dreams of—or, at least I had when I was her age. Maybe a bit longer—like until last week. There was a white canopy bed, swamped in pink ruffles and piled with stuffed animals. The dressers and the nightstands matched the bed, the lamp bases were porcelain ballerinas and there were pictures pinned to a bulletin board on the wall.
I moved closer to examine them.
Tucker and Allison figured prominently in almost every shot. The Darrochs camping. The Darrochs at Disneyland. The Darrochs in front of a Christmas tree.
I wanted to cry, but that would have confused Daisy, maybe even frightened her, so I sucked it up.
“That’s Gillian,” Daisy said, standing on tiptoe to press a finger to the face in a school photograph. “I wish she’d come back, but Mom says she can’t. Not ever.”
I bit my lower lip. It was hard to look at Gillian’s image, alive, smiling for the camera, unaware that she’d never get the chance to grow up. I looked away, my gaze bouncing off more photos of Tucker and Allison, finally catching on a shot of four figures standing in the Darrochs’ swimming pool, on a sunny day.
Daisy, Danny and two girls in bikinis.
“That’s Chelsea,” Daisy said, pointing out the girl I’d met at Helen Erland’s. “She’s our babysitter. When she gets her new car, she’s going to take us for a ride.” Her finger slid to the other girl. “And that’s Janice. She’s Chelsea’s best friend. And she’s got tattoos.”
I became aware of Tucker’s presence even before I turned to see him standing in the doorway of Daisy’s room.
“Steak’s ready,” he said. “Daise, it’s bedtime. If you hurry, you can beat your brother to the bathroom.”
Daisy didn’t balk. She tugged at my hand again, though, and looked up into my face with an expression so innocent that it made me ache inside. “Which is it?” she asked. “Are you my daddy’s girlfriend, or aren’t you?”
“I guess I am,” I said, embarrassed.
“Okay,” Daisy replied in a that’s-settled tone. Then she turned to Tucker. “Can I sleep in Mommy’s bed tonight? I can brush my teeth in her bathroom.”
“Sure,” Tucker answered, sounding hoarse.
Daisy grabbed a pink nightgown out of one of her dresser drawers, took a stuffed unicorn from the fluffy menagerie on the bed and ducked past Tucker into the hall.
Danny was less amenable to the bedtime decree than his sister had been, and when Tucker stayed in the living room to argue with him, I went back to the patio to eat my steak.
Justin was sitting in one of the chairs at the glass-topped table, holding Dave on his lap.
I sat down in the chair I’d left earlier.
“Did you find Greer?” I asked, almost whispering.
“I think so,” Justin answered, putting Dave down gently. “But it was hard, because she’s not using her real name, and she doesn’t look all that much like the picture you gave me. That’s why it took so long.”
I glanced over one shoulder, saw Tucker hurl a now-laughing Danny over one shoulder and start toward the back of the house. “Where is she?”
“In some farmhouse, I think. She stays mostly in the cellar.”
I shuddered. “Is she being held prisoner?”
Justin sighed. “No. But I think she’s scared. She acts nervous and won’t come out of the cellar unless it’s dark out.”
“Where is this farmhouse?” I thought I knew, but there was always a chance I was wrong. It happened, now and then.
Okay, it happened a lot.
“I didn’t check out the countryside—but there’s a calendar upstairs, in the kitchen, with a picture of a lake on it.”
Shiloh, of course. Greer’s hometown. It sat on the shores of Flathead Lake.
“Is she alone?” I was still hoping Carmen was with Greer. That would mean she was alive, at least.
“As far as I could tell,” Justin said. “She paces a lot and climbs up onto a box every once in a while, trying to see out the cellar window.”
Greer had left her car behind, which was one of the reasons I’d been so convinced she’d been abducted. Now I figured she must have fled instead, rented a car or borrowed Carmen’s and driven nonstop to reach western Montana as quickly as she had. But if that was true, why hadn’t she called Jolie or me to let us know she was safe?
“Are you going there?” Justin asked. His gaze drifted past me, and I knew Tucker was back. He wouldn’t see Justin, but he’d probably heard me talking to myself.
I nodded to answer Justin’s question.
He leaned forward, covered my hand with his. “Don’t,” he said. “There’s something really off about that place.” Then, without saying anything more, he disappeared.
Tucker approached. “Who were you talking to just now?” he asked.
“A dead person,” I said, very quietly.
“Gillian?”
I shook my head. “Justin Braydaven.”
“The drive-by shooting victim.” He pulled back the chair Justin had just vacated and sat down heavily.
“Right,” I said.
I didn’t like keeping secrets from Tucker, but I wasn’t about to tell him Greer was holed up in a farmhouse outside Shiloh—probably the very place she’d run away from, as a teenager, after poisoning her stepfather’s supper. I wanted to talk to her before the police did. I wanted to confront her with the information Beverly Pennington had given me, and demand an explanation. This time she wasn’t going to get away with the I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it routine. If I was going to help her, she’d have to level with me.
; “What did he say?”
There were moments when I wished I hadn’t told Tucker I talked to dead people, and that was one of them. I was in a position where I had to lie, and I didn’t like it. Not when it was Tucker I had to lie to.
“He wanted to tell me that his dog died,” I said.
“Look at me, Moje.”
I gulped, met Tucker’s gaze. “Why did you insist on telling the kids I’m your girlfriend?” I asked. It was partly a diversion tactic, but I really wanted to hear the answer. “They’re bound to repeat it to Allison, along with the news that I was here for supper and you gave me a present, and who knows how she’ll react?”
Tucker sighed, tilted his head back, stared up at the star-strewn sky. When he looked at me again, his expression was weary. I remembered that he’d missed a night’s sleep, too. “What would you suggest, Moje? Lying to them? Pretending there’s nothing going on between you and me?”
“They’re seven, Tucker. I don’t even understand what’s ‘going on’ between us. How could they?”
“Kids are a lot smarter than most people think. If you don’t tell them the truth, they start speculating. Making things up.” He paused, cleared his throat, watched as I tucked away another delicious bite of the steak. “You ought to stay overnight,” he said. “You can sleep in the guest room.”
“No way,” I said.
“Mojo, listen to reason, will you? A crazy woman tried to run over you with a four-wheeler today.”
“Tiffany’s out of commission.”
“And you probably have nineteen other mortal enemies waiting to take a whack at you.”
“I’ve got the Glock.”
“That is not reassuring. You don’t know how to shoot.”
I sat up a little straighter. “Actually, I had a lesson this morning.”
“Where?”
I gave him the name of the target range. I didn’t mention Max Summervale, though.
“One lesson,” Tucker pointed out, “does not make you Annie Oakley.”
I sat back in my chair. “I can’t stay here, Tucker. Not in Allison’s house.”
“Then at least go and spend the night with Jolie.”
“Her dog might eat my dog—or me. I once sat on top of a refrigerator for three hours, just to stay out of his slavering jaws.”
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