Cynthia Hamilton - Madeline Dawkins 01 - Spouse Trap

by Cynthia Hamilton

  A sense of frustration settled on her, making her want to scream at the top of her lungs. She fairly shook with rage as it hit her once again how she was paying for Steven’s greed and maniacal need to control. She was filled with an intense desire for revenge. She almost didn’t care what happened to her if it meant getting even with him.

  As riled up as she was, it was still hard to imagine what she could possibly do to him that would settle the score. She had a vision of getting on the next plane back to L.A. and driving up to her former home. She could see the startled faces of Hughes, Erma, Steven and whatshername as she stormed through the front door, screaming accusations of rape and blackmail, embezzlement and fraud. What she would give to tear down the sterling image of Steven Ridley: suave, cultured man with the golden touch. Few people knew how calculating, heartless and cruel he was underneath the perfect exterior.

  A knock at the door startled her out of her resentful reverie. She let the waiter in, suddenly mindful of the inconvenience she was putting him through. Just because they offered 24-hour room service didn’t mean a staff stood like soldiers at the ready around the clock. She added a tip that exceeded the bill and thanked him as she led him to the door.

  She poured a cup of coffee with a splash of cream and drank it down. The instant jolt she received told her this was not the smartest move. Now she was hyper-aware, as if she hadn’t been keyed up enough already. She took a bite of the toast, but chewing it nearly made her gag. She wasn’t ready for food; what she needed was to work off her anger before it became poisonous to her. She traded her tunic for a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and went to the hotel’s 24-hour gym.

  Madeline sat on her balcony, staring out at the ocean. She had both phones on the table next to her, willing one of them to ring. She picked up her iPhone and checked the time converter, though by now she had it pretty well figured out. 7:45 a.m. Sunday, February 28th was 1:45 p.m. Saturday, the 27th in Santa Barbara. Even if Burt needed to sleep sixteen hours straight, she had given him ample time. She picked up his phone and called him.

  “Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and try again.” Irritated, Madeline checked the number she had been redialing for over a week. She knew there couldn’t be anything wrong with the number, because it was Burt’s phone and only one number had been dialed on it since he gave it to her.

  The call log showed no deviation, so chalking it up to a satellite glitch, she tried again. Same message. She tried a third time. When that didn’t work, she manually pressed the numbers. Same result.

  A quiver of worry started in a remote part of her brain and quickly turned to real panic. Oh my God—what if there’s been an earthquake? She jumped up and retrieved her laptop. Within a minute, she had the local Santa Barbara television station online.

  It was obvious from a glance that no seismic trembler had interrupted telephone service. Everything looked to be business as usual. It struck her as odd that she had jumped to that conclusion in the first place.

  She sat back as she tried to come up with the most logical answer. It took five seconds to start fearing the worst: if Burt’s phone was out of commission and he had not made contact with her in… She counted the hours since their last phone call. It had been Friday morning, his time. Almost two full days had passed. Madeline felt her throat and heart constrict simultaneously.

  For one confused second, she thought she was experiencing an earthquake. But the only thing shaking was her laptop, balanced on two legs that were jiggling uncontrollably. She was about to close her computer and get up when a headline under “Breaking News” stopped her cold:

  Body Found on Beach ID’d as Local P.I. She stared at the headline, unable to breathe. The cursor shook erratically as she tried to move it to the link. As soon as she clicked on it, a photo of Burt Latham materialized. Madeline felt all the blood drain from her head. She sat the computer down on the table just before losing consciousness.

  When she opened her eyes several minutes later, her mind was blank. Other than the pain in her left shoulder and hip, nothing alarming registered, except for the fact that she was lying on the balcony instead of sitting in a chair.

  But as she pulled herself up, the reason for her collapse hit home again. Panting, with tears obscuring her vision, she jiggled her mouse pad, bringing the shocking news of Burt’s death back crystal clear. She staggered to the bathroom where she threw up what little was in her stomach. She slid away from the comforting coolness of the porcelain toilet bowl and wailed.

  FORTY

  The persistent ringing of a cell phone woke Madeline. She looked around as she raised herself off the bathroom floor. Shaken and disoriented, she came to life in short bursts as she pieced together the memory of what had leveled her.

  She lurched out of the bathroom and staggered to the balcony, a wild hope spurring her forward. She grabbed Burt’s phone, her heart sinking again as she discovered it was not the one ringing. By the time she realized this, her iPhone had gone silent.

  She clutched both phones to her chest as she stumbled back inside. She bumped against the bed and sank onto it, the expression on her face that of disbelieving fear.

  Slowly, she lay down on the bed and inched her way toward the head, where she traded the useless phones for a pillow. She buried her face in the thick loft and began sobbing.

  She had almost fallen into a merciful sleep again when her phone rang, jolting her to alertness. She hesitated a moment before answering.

  “Hello.”

  “Hey there,” Mike said in his oddly jocular and languid tone. “Sorry I missed your call earlier…” It crossed Madeline’s mind what had prevented him from answering her call, but only as an observation. She found that she cared about nothing. It was as though she had passed the point of feeling and entered a state of permanent apathy.

  “Are you okay?” Mike asked after the lengthy pause.

  “Burt’s dead,” she said flatly.

  “Burt? Your P.I.? What? Dead? How do you know?” he asked incredulously.

  “I found out online,” she said, as she forced herself into a semi-upright position against a clump of pillows.

  “Where?” She gave him the URL and listened as he tapped on his computer keys.

  “It’s the first story on the right, under ‘Breaking News.’” Mike mumbled as he read the report to himself. “Read it to me,” she said hoarsely. She hadn’t gotten past the headline and the photo of her now-deceased private eye.

  “‘The body found on Hendry’s Beach has been identified as Burt Latham, a local private investigator. His body was discovered by a parks department maintenance crew. Detective Michael Driscoll of the Santa Barbara Police Department says the death is being treated as ‘an accidental death by drowning’ pending an autopsy. “From the injuries to the body, it would appear Mr. Latham fell to his death from a height of approximately forty feet, which is consistent with the height of the bluffs at the Douglas Family Preserve. That scenario fits with the direction of the current and the timeframe in which the victim was last seen,” Det. Driscoll commented. He added that they do not suspect foul play at this time.’”

  Mike waited for Madeline to say something. He could hear the rustle of tissue and faint whimpering. He didn’t know how to comfort her from a distance. He was also still absorbing the implications of what had happened. It slowly occurred to him that Madeline was feeling more than a sense of loss; the fact that her P.I. was now dead boded badly for her personally.

  “I’m flying to Guam,” he announced, eliciting a wheezy, fatigued laugh out of her.

  “No you are not,” she said, drying her swollen eyes. She took a deep breath and expelled a cloud of sorrow. She went limp with exhaustion and fell back against the pillows.

  “I’m not going to let you stay there all by yourself,” Mike said assertively. His attempts at chivalry w
ere as ludicrous as they were comforting.

  “Don’t be silly. By the time you got here, it’d be time to turn around and go back.”

  “There’s a flight leaving tomorrow morning—looks like the same flight you were on. Gets into Tamuning at 8:45 p.m. Tuesday night. What…?”

  “See what I mean? You’d get two days of 18-hour travel for barely a day here on Guam. That’s not happening, so forget about it. I’ll be fine. Nothing’s going to happen to me. Steven can’t get to me here.” Even as the words left her mouth, she began to wonder if that wasn’t just wishful thinking.

  “I’m coming. I don’t care about jetlag—I can’t stand the thought of you dealing with this all by yourself.” Madeline let out a long, weary sigh.

  “I appreciate the offer, Mike—”

  “It’s not an offer, it’s an announcement,” he said. Madeline recognized that implacable tone in his voice. She hung her head as she listened to him drone on.

  “No, Mike—listen to me!” she said more forcibly than she had intended. “Think about it…the last guy who stuck his neck out for me is now dead. I can’t be worrying about your safety as well as my own.”

  “But that’s my point. You need someone to protect you—”

  “And who’s going to protect you?”

  “I can handle myself,” Mike said defensively. Madeline laughed harshly.

  “Right. You’ve got more experience with the criminal element than a recently deceased ex-Marine, ex-cop, private investigator. Sure, I believe that.”

  “Maddie, this is not okay. I’m going to be worried sick until you get back here. And by the way, you are not going back to S.B. now that your P.I. is dead. That’s non-negotiable. You’re staying with me until you get the goods on that mother—”

  “But Mike, how can I do that if I’m down in L.A.? I have to go back…I have to find another detective to take over…” Madeline’s voice trailed off as the synapses in her brain started firing again. She didn’t have Burt anymore, but she had to have someone pick up the trail he’d been on.

  She got up on unsteady legs as Mike continued to assert himself as her protector. She opened her laptop and began searching for private investigators. It occurred to her that she did not exactly fit the bill of an ideal client, having a P.I. die during the course of an investigation on her behalf.

  “Okay?” Mike asked.

  “I’m sorry, I was thinking about something.” She heard a long, frustrated wheeze on Mike’s end.

  “I was saying the best thing for you to do under the circumstances is stay the hell away from Dodge. Comprende? When you lay it all out, you’ve got to realize you’re ahead at this point. You’re alive and well and you’ve got half a mil, plus the eighty I’ve got for you. This is good. It’s enough to start a new life with. I know you’re not interested in picking up where we left off—I totally get that. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be here for you emotionally, or financially, for that matter.”

  “Mike…” Madeline sat back from the computer and tried to put everything in perspective. “Look, I need your emotional support—I’m not trying to reject that. Believe me, you’re all I’ve got now, and I’m so grateful that you’re here for me, figuratively speaking. I’m not going to commit to any plan right now. I’ve got way too much to sort out. And really, even though I’m completely devastated by Burt’s death, I know I have to get my head together.”

  “I just wish I could help you,” Mike said, his voice low and raspy.

  “You can. You can help me brainstorm. We can do this over the phone. We’ll just go through it piece by piece until we have a timeline of all the events that have happened since the night of the fundraiser. I’ll take notes and once we have it all laid out in front of us, maybe some clues will surface. Can you help me with that?”

  “Sure, absolutely. You want to do it now?”

  “Yeah. The sooner the better. I won’t be able to rest until I can make some sense of what’s happened, and what I should do next.”

  FORTY-ONE

  Ninety minutes into their conversation, Madeline had a comprehensive outline of events that occurred over the last two weeks—by any measure, the worst fourteen days of her life. She had four pages of notes on her computer and had sent a copy to Mike’s email so he could analyze it, hopefully finding hints to what Steven’s next move might be.

  “You know, there are a couple things here that are still unknowns,” Mike said as he read over the summary. “The big one is that we don’t know for sure if Burt was killed or if he did accidentally fall to his death. If the latter is true, then we might be able to assume Steven is satisfied with the quick, uncontested divorce and that you won’t get any more trouble from him.”

  “I’d really like to believe that, especially since it would be my fault if he was murdered.”

  “Not necessarily,” Mike said. “You don’t have any idea what kind of vendettas Burt might have racked up against him over the years. It could just be a terrible coincidence that someone offed him in the middle of your case… It could happen,” Mike argued as Madeline rejected the idea.

  “Too coincidental.”

  “It’s good to look at this set of facts from all angles. It was your idea and it’s a good one. So, you can’t go dismissing a theory out of hand without some fact to back it up.”

  “You’re right, you’re totally right. Whew. I think we need a break. I’m exhausted and half-deranged from hunger and grief. Let’s knock off for now and talk it over again later. What time is it there?”

  “Quarter to seven.”

  “Saturday night, right?

  “Right.”

  “And it’s quarter to one Sunday afternoon here. Okay, finally I’m on a reasonable schedule. I’ll get some lunch and…well, maybe we should just wait until tomorrow to talk,” she suggested.

  “We don’t have to talk about this, but I definitely want you to check in with me later, before I go to bed.”

  “Are you sure I won’t be interrupting anything?” she asked mischievously.

  “Are you sure you don’t care if you were?” Mike asked, eliciting a groan of protest from Madeline.

  “Don’t be silly…”

  “I think you care more than you want to admit…” Mike teased her. Madeline laughed. There would always be a murky, grey area between them, romantically speaking. But Mike could always be counted on to lift her spirits.

  By the time Madeline undid the damage of her emotional breakdown, she barely made it to Prego before the lunch service was over. The wait staff didn’t seem to mind, so she gratefully luxuriated in the peacefulness of the nearly empty restaurant.

  She ordered a glass of red wine, a mixed greens salad with a caprese salad on top, and a prosciutto and goat cheese pizza. It struck her as unseemly to have such a ravenous appetite after just learning of Burt’s death, but she knew grief could manifest itself in strange ways. She was also glad she wasn’t repulsed by the thought of food; she could already tell her bizarre hours and lack of regular meals had knocked a few pounds off her already lean figure.

  The wine came, and not a moment too soon. She took several sips and felt the alcohol do its job. She was almost feeling the return of her equilibrium when snippets of the last conversation with Burt flooded her thoughts.

  Why didn’t I tell him to drop it? Why did I tell him to get those statements? He so much as admitted it was a dangerous move. Why the hell did I let him walk into that danger?

  She reached for her wine glass with a shaky hand. Her aim was off and the glass toppled, spewing red wine all over the white tablecloth. The waiter was at her side in seconds, quickly swapping out the soiled linen with a fresh one.

  “I’m so sorry,” Madeline said, mortified by her clumsiness. But the waiter wouldn’t hear of it. The hostess appeared with another glass of wine as
another waiter brought her double-decker salad. They were overly solicitous before making themselves scarce so she could enjoy her lunch in private. Madeline figured she probably wasn’t the first unhinged customer they’d encountered on a tiny island that specialized in divorces.

  The food and wine were such treats, she almost forgot her dire predicament. But she was still in trouble up to her neck. She had to come to grips with the truth or she would never make it to safety.

  As she sipped her second glass of wine—or third, depending on how you were counting—she made a silent pact with her former private eye, promising him she’d find out the truth about his death in exchange for some otherworldly guidance. She sealed the deal with a prayer for his soul and an entreaty for the strength it would require to continue her battle without Burt Latham, may he rest in peace.

  When the waiter offered her coffee and dessert and assured Madeline she was not keeping the staff overtime, she ordered a cappuccino. She appreciated the quiet buzz of the restaurant in transition mode; it was a good environment for marshaling her thoughts and determining what her priorities were. A calm settled over her that she felt certain was heaven sent.

  Despite the alcohol, or maybe because of it, her thoughts were now clear and orderly. She would retire to her room and do some research on other private investigators in her area. She would have to be careful how she approached prospective replacements for Burt; it was hardly a glowing endorsement that the last guy who attempted to help her was now undergoing an autopsy.

  But as Burt had said, Santa Barbara was a small community, especially in his line of business. That, and his apparent cooperation with other P.I.’s in different cities, led her to believe one of his peers might be inclined to find out the truth about his demise.