“She had a boyfriend,” Casey said.
“She did not,” he drawled.
“His name was Pete,” Casey insisted.
The waitress clicked her tongue. “Pete. The guy on a motorcycle. I do remember that. Only no one met him. No one saw him. No one ever heard the bike.”
Casey had a sudden thought. It had to do with a woman who was desperate and a man who was too good to be true.
The woman on her left distracted her. “Do you really think she’s still alive?”
“Yes,” Casey said impulsively.
“Then you need to talk with Edmund O’Keefe. He’s the chief of police. He was there.”
“Edmund? Not Dan?” Dan O’Keefe was the one in the journal.
“Edmund’s the father. Dan’s the nicer of the two, but he’s gone.”
Casey pulled back. “Gone?” If it was another alleged death, she didn’t want to know.
“Quit, swore off law enforcement, left town,” clarified the man on her right, letting Casey relax.
“Too bad,” mused the man two stools over. “Dan was the best. Big loss, his leaving. Good luck with the chief, little lady. He’s tough.”
Chapter Eighteen
The police station was located in the garage of a small house on a side street off Main. The house was white with pale blue shutters. It had a small porch, and no rocker, but there were rose bushes out front. They were actually quite beautiful, if a bit leggy and lean.
Pulling in beside a cruiser, Casey crossed the pebbled driveway to the side door of the garage. A vine climbed the walls here— not quite the wisteria on her own pergola, but something pretty and green— an ivy, she would bet.
Opening the screen, she went inside. The place was quiet. Maps were tacked on one side of the wall, “wanted” posters on another. There were two doors, one of which, at least, she figured led to a holding room of some sort. Behind the lone desk, a young man was reading the paper. He set it down when she came in, but said nothing.
“Hi,” she said brightly. “I don’t think you’re Edmund O’Keefe.”
“No. I’m his deputy. Can I help you?”
Casey guessed that seven years ago, when the drowning had allegedly taken place, this young man hadn’t been old enough to vote, much less serve as a police officer. “I think I need the chief. It’s kind of personal,” she added more softly, even in a bit of a conspiratorial tone, because second-guessing the outcome of a suicide investigation conducted by the chief of police was personal indeed.
“Personal?” repeated the deputy. “Well, he’s gone home for lunch. If it’s personal, you could go there. Know where he lives?”
Casey scratched her forehead. “Uh, I think I remember…which street is it?”
“Go back to Main, turn left for two blocks, then right. They just repainted the house, so you may not recognize it. It isn’t blue anymore. It’s taupe. Taupe. There’s a new one. Dot is still trying to decide if she likes it, so tell her how pretty it looks.”
“I will,” Casey said with a smile, and left before the deputy could ask any questions. In no time, she was back on Main Street. Turning left, she drove for two blocks, then turned right. The newly taupe house had cream-colored shutters and trim, and was the first one on the left. It was a Victorian. Casey thought it looked quite handsome.
Parking by the berm, she went up the cement walk, up four wood steps, and across the porch. The rocker here was a two-seater that swung from a frame of its own.
Peering through the screen, she called, “Hello?” She had to call again before an attractive woman appeared. Early sixtyish, she wore jeans and an ironed blouse, had dark hair, wide-set eyes, and fine features. She opened the screen door with a smile. “Hello.”
Casey liked her looks and her lack of pretense. “Hi. I’m Casey Ellis. I’m a pyschotherapist looking for information on MaryBeth Clyde, the daughter. I understand that your husband led the investigation into her death. I was wondering if he’d be willing to talk with me. I’ve come at a bad time, I know. You’re having lunch. But I’ve driven up from Boston, and probably should be heading back before long.”
“Boston?” Dot said, brightening even more. “We have a son in Boston.” More softly, she added, “He’s an artist. My husband doesn’t love that, but I’m pretty proud.”
Casey liked her all the more. “I’ve always been in awe of artists. My mother was something of one.”
“Oh? What did she do?”
Casey might have given a hurried answer and moved on, if she hadn’t sensed that the woman was genuinely interested. “She wove all sorts of things. Her specialty was Angora fur. She raised the rabbits, harvested their fur, dyed it, spun it, and wove it.”
“Angora is from rabbits? Funny, I’d have said it was from goats. Or sheep.”
“Rabbits,” Casey confirmed with a smile, but the smile quickly faded. “They’re sweet little things. It took me a while, but I found a weaver in the Midwest who had other Angoras and was willing to drive out for these.”
Concerned now, Dot asked, “Did your mother die suddenly?”
“She was in an accident three years ago. She’s still alive, but only in a way. She isn’t aware.”
“I’m so sorry. That must be devastating for you.”
Casey took a breath, swallowed, forced a smile. “It’s almost a relief to focus on other things, even MaryBeth Clyde’s disappearance.”
“Most around here would call it a suicide,” Dot cautioned. “My husband certainly would.” She gestured. “Come in. Please. He’s eaten enough of his lunch. How about you? Can I get you a ham sandwich?”
She shook her head. “You’re kind to offer, but I had an omelet at the luncheonette not long ago. I’m fine, thanks.” She was barely into the front hall when a man came from the back of the house. He was tall, with thick gray hair and sun-lined skin. He wore khaki pants and a short-sleeved white shirt. Casey saw neither a badge nor a gun.
“Ed, this is Casey Ellis,” Dot said. “She wants—”
“I know what she wants,” he interrupted in a voice that was gravelly and deep. He stopped with his feet slightly apart and put his hands on his hips. “She wants information on MaryBeth Clyde, but there isn’t much that wasn’t in the report. It was a suicide. The. End.”
Casey was fearing that the interview was over before it had begun, when Dot took her elbow and guided her right past the police chief and into the parlor. It was a pretty room, sunny and stylish in the way of the woman of the house. Both had a country feel— simple and straightforward, with charm and a quiet intelligence. In the woman, that intelligence took the form of sensitivity. In the room, it took the form of art that hung on the walls, elegant frames holding family pictures, current best-selling biographies on lamp tables, and exquisite needlepoint pillows on chairs.
Casey lifted one of the latter. It was a floral design drawn with artistic license. “Did you do this?”
“I stitched it. My son did the design for me.”
Casey looked at a pair of paintings high above the hearth. A diptych, they captured a farm in a snowstorm. They had the same freehand feel as the pillow. “He did those also?”
“Yes.” In a stronger voice, clearly meant for her husband, she said, “He’s become quite successful. His work is being shown in galleries in Boston and New York. He makes a handsome living at it, which is more than most artists can say.”
“She didn’t come to hear about Dan,” Edmund said as he joined them.
“No,” Dot replied patiently, “she came to ask about MaryBeth Clyde, but Dan felt for the girl, so it’s perfectly appropriate to talk about Dan.”
Casey was confused. “Dan is the artist? I assumed there were other sons.”
“No other sons,” Dot said. “Two daughters, but only Dan.”
Casey glanced at the frames that held family photos. Even from a distance, she could see there were grandchildren.
Dot was with her here, too. “Five grandchildren to date from the girls.
Dan has yet to meet his dream girl.”
“He’s a bleeding heart,” scoffed the father. “He was too compassionate to be a cop. You have to make tough decisions sometimes.”
That brought Casey back to her cause. “Like knowing when to call off an investigation?”
“Why is it,” cautioned the chief of police, “I’m getting the feeling you disagree with my conclusion? You know, it wasn’t just me. There were others involved— even my son, the bleeding heart. He was right up there sayin’ it was suicide, pure and simple.”
Suicide was not pure and simple. Casey was in a profession that knew that. She was also experienced enough in that profession to know that a woman who was as desperate as Jenny Clyde might, indeed, kill herself.
But Casey was desperate, too. Her father had asked her to help Jenny. She couldn’t do that if Jenny was dead. Granted, she hadn’t read the ending of Flirting with Pete, didn’t even know if there were any more pages of it.
Ed O’Keefe hadn’t moved. “What makes you think she isn’t dead?”
“Nothing,” Casey said, easing up. “I just wondered about the lack of a body. I know about the river, and I know about the quarry creature. But isn’t it possible that MaryBeth climbed out of the water and got away?”
“Where would she go?” the chief asked. “She had no friends. She had no money. She had no experience outside of Walker.”
“Would she have gone with Miriam Goodman?”
He crossed his arms on his chest. “First off, Miriam was right here in town when MaryBeth disappeared. She didn’t move west until several weeks later. So I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that she went somewhere else and then met up with Miriam later?” He shook his head. “I checked it out. Darden made me. He was thinking the same thing you are. Loony man.” The last was muttered under his breath.
Casey tried a different angle. “Supposing, just supposing she was still alive; were there any other relatives she might go live with?”
“No.”
“Any she might have contacted in the years since she disappeared?”
“No.”
“No boyfriend?”
“No.”
“Any follow-up of any kind?”
“Only Miriam. I told you, I only did that because Darden nagged. Why do you want to know all this anyway? Are you writing a book?”
Had it not been for Dot O’Keefe standing right there, she might have given the same answer she had given the newspaperman. But she couldn’t lie in front of Dot. “No,” she said quietly. “No book. I read a case study. That’s all.”
She regretted having said that when the police chief dropped his arms. “What case study?”
“Maybe not a case study. A journal. It could have been fiction, too.” Discouraged, she looked at the diptych above the hearth. Snow and all, it was a positive thing, because the farmhouse was a misty red lure, beckoning in the storm. “Probably fiction,” she murmured, approaching the hearth. Her eye fell on the smaller framed family photos that stood on the stone mantel beneath the diptych. One was of a daughter, her husband, and two kids. Another was of the other daughter, her husband, and three kids. There was a photo of all of them, plus Dot and Edmund, plus what might have been other relatives. And there was one showing both daughters, Dot and Ed, and a man Casey assumed was the son, Dan.
She gasped. “Omigod.” She pressed her chest. “Omigod!”
Dot came to her side. “What is it?”
It was Jordan. Her gardener. The man who had worked for Connie for seven years. Who often seemed too wise to be only a gardener. Who hadn’t found his dream girl yet. Whose father was a cop. Whose last name was nowhere in Connie’s files. Just Daisy’s Mum.
“Omigod,” she cried again, involuntarily this time because she had thought of something else, and in its wake her mind was racing, trying to connect the dots, trying to grasp the ramifications.
“Is something wrong?” Dot asked.
Casey managed a feeble, “Uh, no. Not wrong. He just looks like someone I know.”
The proud mother smiled at the picture. “Handsome guy, isn’t he?”
*
Casey couldn’t get to her car fast enough. After just a minute of fishing in her overnight bag, she pulled from the pocket of yesterday’s slacks the business card she had stuffed there when she was leaving Daisy’s Mum. At the time, she had admired the logo but merely glanced at the rest. Now, driving away from the taupe Victorian with its pretty cream shutters, holding the steering wheel for dear life with the card propped between her forefinger and the leather, she looked more closely. At the bottom were a phone number and the name of the proprietor.
D. O’Keefe. No red flag yesterday. There were scores of O’Keefes in the Boston phone book. She had also assumed that the D was for Daisy. Oh boy, had she assumed wrong.
She had assumed that Dan was for Daniel. Wrong there, too. And what else had she assumed wrong?
Dozens of possibilities crossed her mind as she drove south, and the slowness of the first stretch of road didn’t help. She accessed more voice mail from friends and talked with the nursing home. She was increasingly impatient, too annoyed to wait passively behind leisurely Saturday drivers, so, eyes on the road the whole time, she did honk and pass a couple of cars on that two-lane road, then many more once she hit the highway. She wanted to be back in Boston, and she wanted to be there now.
*
Four and a half endless hours after she left the O’Keefes, she crossed the Tobin Bridge and entered Boston. It was late afternoon. Traffic slowed her some, but she held a course for Beacon Hill, and not for the townhouse. She went straight to Daisy’s Mum, squeezed the Miata into a small parking spot, and strode across the street.
The shop was closed for the day, but she had expected that. She was far more interested in the townhouse doors on either side. One said OWENS on the doorplate, so she went to the other.
O’KEEFE, the plate read. Furious by now, she rang the bell, then waited with her hands on her hips, her head bowed, and her mouth tight.
“Yes?” came a voice through the intercom. Not a voice. His voice.
“It’s me,” she said. “Let me up.”
There was only the briefest pause, but it was long enough to tell her he recognized her voice, too. The buzzer rang; the door clicked open. Within seconds, she was running up a flight of stone steps old enough to be worn uneven at the center.
He stood with his hands on his hips in an open doorway on the second floor. Backlit, he looked larger and more imposing than ever. The closer she got, the more detail she saw. He wore a tee shirt and shorts. His jaw was shadowed, his hair messed, his feet bare.
She stopped one step shy of the landing, struck by how handsome he truly was. His mother was right about that. Not that Casey had ever thought otherwise. Handsome, sexy, expert at gardening, expert at making love— that was Jordan. He was also agitated, if the set of his mouth meant anything.
She didn’t know what he had to be agitated about. She was the one who’d been taken for a fool.
Needled by that thought, she mounted the last step and marched right up to him. “I’ve just had a fascinating day in a town called Walker,” she said. “I drove around, saw the sights, had a fabulous hash-and-Jack omelet at the luncheonette. I had an even better visit with your parents.”
“I know,” he informed her tightly. “I just got a call.”
Refusing to be intimidated by what was clearly annoyance on his part, she barreled on. “They kept talking about their son Dan, but I didn’t make the connection until I saw a photo on the mantel. You let me think you were a gardener.”
“I am a gardener.”
“You sure looked it— scruffy beard, torn jeans, crusty boots. Disreputable— that’s what I thought you were. You didn’t tell me you were a cop.”
“I’m not a cop.”
“You were,” she charged. “I asked, and you denied it.”
“You asked if I’d ever wanted to be one,”
he corrected. “I answered no, and that’s the truth. I hated every minute of it. Why were you in Walker?”
“Enlightenment,” she said. “You’re a ‘bleeding heart,’ to quote your dad. Too soft. So you tried to help Jenny Clyde. You encouraged her to leave town before her father got out of prison, only she didn’t have the courage for that. So she stayed, and something awful happened.”
A muscle moved in his jaw. “You saw the journal.”
“I saw the journal. I wasn’t sure it was real, but I needed it to be, because my father had asked for my help with Jenny, and I wanted to please him. It was the first time he’d ever asked me for anything. Anything. But the pages I had stopped short of the end, so I went looking. Little Falls isn’t on maps anymore. It took me a while to find it. You couldn’t have told me?”
He held up a hand. “Hold on. You didn’t ask.”
“You were the gardener,” she cried, feeling betrayed by that on top of everything else. “I wasn’t supposed to ask you about Jenny Clyde. I assumed that the pages I saw were confidential.”
“If that’s so, why were you up asking people in Walker?”
“I didn’t tell them what I’d read. I wanted to locate her, that’s all.”
“Who’d you ask?”
“Does it matter?”
“Sure does. I need to know who you saw and what you said.”
He did sound like a cop now. Only he wasn’t one, not anymore. And Casey needed her own answers first. “Is Jenny dead?”
“Were you asking that up there?”
“They all think she’s dead,” Casey said by way of an answer.
Jordan inhaled, rolling his right shoulder. When he blew out the breath, his annoyance seemed to go with it. He pushed a hand through his hair and left it at the back of his neck. “Oh, Casey,” he said on a note of despair. “Did you have to race on up there?”
His tone took away some of her steam. “Yes,” she said in defense of the trip. “I didn’t know how else to get answers.”
He rubbed the shoulder he had been rolling moments before. “But you didn’t get them. You just stirred up trouble.”
Flirting With Pete: A Novel Page 30