Back Against the Wall

by Janice Kay Johnson

  Beth sighed. “Dad might have gotten interested in chess, or math problems, or...or if Matt wanted to learn to speak Russian.”

  “Intellectual pursuits.”

  She nodded.

  “What about you and Emily?”

  “Emily had Mom.”

  Understanding and, damn it, that compassion softened his face. “Are you saying you didn’t?”

  “No, it wasn’t—Well, it was, but—”

  A rumble of amusement helped untangle her. “Is it that hard to say?”

  Beth scrunched her nose at him. “I loved my mother, and I’m sure she never intended to make me feel inadequate, but she did. Dad didn’t. I was more of a reader than Emily or Matt, too. More introspective, I guess.”

  “More like your father.”

  She had to nod. “I understand him better than they did, which I suppose is why I have more patience with him.”

  “Hmm.” Tony studied her for a minute. “Any new thoughts about the drawing?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing.” Which wasn’t a lie, except she was still conscious of something. It was like catching movement out of the corner of her eye, but whenever she really looked, there was nothing there.

  “I talked to Matt again today,” Tony said suddenly. “Maybe an hour ago.”

  “Really?” she said in surprise. “He hasn’t called me.”

  “Would he?”

  “Well... I’d have thought so.”

  “Have you had your phone with you?”

  “Yes...” Her head turned. Where was her purse? And...when had she last used her phone? “It must be in the car.” Gee, darn. She’d missed Matt’s latest furious tirade. She might delete any message from him unheard.

  “Ah. Well, he’s not happy with me. I asked him some hard questions.”

  She eyed him. “Like what?”

  “I wondered if he might have found the drawing, back then. Confronted your mother.”

  “And killed her?” she said incredulously. She’d known in one way that Tony had Matt on his radar, but she hadn’t realized how seriously he took the possibility.

  “If it helps, I think it unlikely.” The ghost of a smile crinkled the skin beside his eyes. “Matt’s face is almost as expressive as yours, for one thing.”

  “As mine? What are you talking about?”

  “You’ll never make a good liar,” he said gently.

  “Humph.” And if that wasn’t childish.

  “That was a compliment, by the way.”

  Wonderful to think she was completely transparent to this man. Did that mean he was well aware of all her conflicting, and way too strong, feelings about him?

  Probably.

  “Telling me you can read my every thought is not a compliment,” she grumbled.

  “You know I can’t do that. It’s more...what you’re feeling that shows.”

  “Great.”

  “Beth...” He sounded unusually tentative, for a man whose confidence seemed deep-rooted.

  She looked up in surprise.

  “Matt said something that bothered me. He...seemed to believe you knew your mother was having an affair.”

  “What? I didn’t!”

  If he relaxed, it was subtly, but Beth realized she was getting better at reading him, too. Which he’d hate.

  “He said you’d asked him something once that made him think you knew.”

  “Asked him...” A few times since finding Mom’s body, Beth had had odd flickers of remembrance that slipped away before she could catch them. But this particular memory didn’t dodge out of sight. She stared right at it. “Wait. Oh, no. I’d forgotten...” She wanted to curl into a ball.

  But his hand had closed over hers, immensely comforting, as was the deep timbre of his voice. “What, Beth? Things frightening to you then can’t be so bad now.”

  No. Her mother had been murdered, and her body squished behind a new sheet of wallboard in the garage, to stay there hidden all these years. Not much rated, compared to that.

  “No. You’re right. Um, I got sick one day. My English teacher—” now, why did she remember what class she’d been in? “—gave me a pass to go to the office and call home, but Mom didn’t answer. I didn’t want to be stuck with the nurse, so I claimed I felt better and...just left. I knew I’d be in trouble later, but I didn’t care. I threw up partway home, right in someone’s flower bed. I tried to cover it with bark, but...”

  The humor in Tony’s eyes would have made her laugh at her young self, if the rest of this memory wasn’t so hateful. “What a dumb thing to have been so humiliated about.” She huffed out a breath. “Well, I made it home—it was only about a mile—and then realized that, without my key, I couldn’t get in with Mom gone. Except her car was there. The door wasn’t even locked, so I went in and called, ‘Mom!’ I heard this weird thud. She...she half opened her bedroom door, and I could tell she didn’t have any clothes on, except she was sort of clutching her bra to her front. She said she was just getting out of the shower. She told me to hop into bed, and she’d be there as soon as she finished getting dressed. So that’s what I did.” She fell silent, realizing how incredibly naive she’d been for a teenager. Mom hadn’t even looked damp. “I suppose she pushed him off the bed so she could head me off. I didn’t really suspect, except later I got to thinking.”

  “What did you ask Matt?”

  “Just...whether he’d noticed Mom being kind of strange lately. And he made me tell him what I was talking about.”

  “She took some serious chances.” As he thought, Tony rubbed his jaw in that way he had. “With three kids and a husband who must have had lots of breaks during the day. Professors don’t teach more than, what, three or four classes a quarter?”

  “If that. Even if he only had a couple of classes in a day, Dad didn’t usually come home between, though. I mean, he had office hours, too, and he could write or plan his next lectures there as easily as at home.” She grimaced. “Probably better. Given the three kids.”

  Tony chuckled. “Okay. Still.”

  Beth bit her lip. “You’re thinking that it would have made more sense for them to have sex at his place. Unless...”

  “Unless he was married, too. That’s my guess.”

  She nodded unhappily. That made sense.

  “What kind of clients did your mother have at work? Do you know? Did she handle businesses or individuals?”

  “I think both. I know she did Dr. Schuh’s clinic—he was in with a family doctor and a nurse practitioner—as well as his and his wife’s personal taxes. So there might have been others like that.”

  “Was in? Did you not continue going there?”

  “No, even Emily was old enough to start seeing our family doctor, whose office is by the hospital.”

  “Back to your mother’s clients. Doctors, lawyers, other professionals, not to mention the wheat farmers or early vineyard owners, all would have had more money than your parents did. Would that have appealed to her?”

  It made Beth really uncomfortable to dissect her mother this way, but it wasn’t as if she could ever know. Or...deserved her children’s loyalty? Hadn’t she been betraying them as much as she was her husband, in a way? As it turned out, the betrayal had killed her and left all of her kids damaged, too.

  “Maybe,” she said finally. “Dad didn’t care about money at all. Mom never would have overspent. You have to understand that. She was really meticulous paying bills and keeping records.”

  “You’ve looked?”

  “I took over the bill paying after she disappeared.”

  Tony shook his head. “A fifteen-year-old girl. Of course you did.”

  “It wouldn’t have made sense for Matt to do it, given how close he was to leaving home,” she protested.

  Sounding irritated, he said, “Maybe your f
ather skated on his responsibilities because first your mother and then you let him. Did you ever think of that?”

  She looked away. “I...sometimes.”

  He clasped her hand again and squeezed. “I’m sorry, Beth. I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t mean that to sound like I’m criticizing you. You were a kid, doing your best to keep your family going. Obviously, you did just fine. They were lucky to have you.”

  Beth focused on his hand, strong, so much bigger than hers, and chose not to say anything. Only she knew how much resentment Emily and Matt felt. That didn’t suggest she’d done such a fabulous job, did it?

  Then she lifted her gaze to his. “You give really mixed messages, you know.”

  His jaw muscles flexed. “You know as well as I do why that is.”

  She wished she could believe she was so amazingly irresistible. Not believing made it a lot easier to pull her hand free and say, “Well, stop.”

  Chapter Nine

  HE’D DESERVED BETH’S ACERBITY, Tony reflected. And probably more.

  At the station, he sat with his chair back, his feet stacked on his desk, and brooded.

  After leaving her at the house, he’d stopped at her mother’s old tax and accounting firm, where he had spoken with one of the partners. Trish Senyitko hadn’t known Christine well at all; they had only overlapped for about a year. Keith Reistad would remember her best, but he wasn’t in right then.

  And she had declined to provide a list of Christine’s clients. He would need a warrant for that, she had said, with a definite chill.

  He’d just gotten off the phone with Lucy Jimenez, an assistant DA, who had submitted the warrant request to a judge.

  He still needed to talk to any neighbors of the Marshalls who had lived there thirteen years ago. Once he did that, though, the cat would be out of the bag. The gossip, the questions, wouldn’t be pleasant for any of the Marshalls.

  Tony frowned. He should head out to the community college and talk to John’s colleagues who had been there long enough to have met Christine at faculty functions, too.

  Another thing to ask Beth: names of her parents’ friends. Not that the lover was necessarily one of them. But, if nothing else, Christine might have confided in a female friend.

  Tony was a lot happier to have an excuse to call Beth than he should have been.

  You give really mixed messages, you know.

  Trouble was, his feelings weren’t mixed at all. If it hadn’t been for the job, he’d have been after her from the minute they’d met.

  He glanced up to see Troyer escorting someone to his desk for an interview. Another detective in the department, Jack Moore, had fallen in love with a woman who was a suspect in a teenage girl’s disappearance. At the time, Tony had been too busy to pay much attention, but he knew nobody had come down on Jack.

  Beth wasn’t even a suspect. The problem was that her loyalties lay with her father and brother, both of whom were suspects.

  Uh huh. What if you end up arresting her father? Remember that little glitch in your campaign?

  No, he hadn’t forgotten, but his instincts told him John Marshall hadn’t killed his wife, that Beth was right; her father simply wasn’t capable of that level of rage and violence.

  Who could object if he took her out to dinner and they didn’t talk about the investigation?

  Except he did have those questions he needed to ask.

  Wait until tomorrow.

  A glance at his computer told him five o’clock had come and gone. He’d probably wasted a good ten minutes waffling here, on top of the earlier, useful things he had accomplished. She might have stayed to make dinner for her dad.

  Didn’t mean she had to stay and eat with him.

  Tony did some internal swearing, reached for his desk phone...and put it back down. He needed to go somewhere else to make this call. He had to draw a line between on the job and off the job. He grunted. Too bad he’d already irrevocably blurred that line.

  He ended up at the rear of the building, looking at the parking lot. Smokers sometimes gathered out here, but he was alone right now. Another hesitation, another go-around with his conscience, or at least his sense of self-preservation, and he mumbled a foul word and hit the green dial button. Maybe Beth would be less of a distraction if they actually got something going.

  The unanswered rings had him bowing his head. Why would she want to talk to him again, considering they’d spent all day together and ended on a lousy note? Four rings. Five. Should he leave a message, or call it quits for tonight, at least?

  “Hello?” She sounded breathless. “Detective?”

  Detective. She kept promoting, then demoting, him.

  “Can you make it Tony?”

  The silence could only be wary. Finally, “Why are you calling?”

  He leaned against the stucco wall. “Will you have dinner with me?” he asked baldly.

  Another pause. “You know, if you have questions, you can just ask them.”

  He squeezed the bridge of his nose between his forefinger and thumb until cartilage creaked. “I do have some more. But... I was hoping we could take the evening off.”

  More silence. This was one reason he much preferred face-to-face conversations.

  “What about your job?” she asked. “What about me flipping out when you arrest my father? Or won’t I be mad, as long as we stop shy of getting between the sheets?”

  He winced. “You’re not a suspect. We can...take it slow.” Begging, are you?

  “I should say no.”

  “Please don’t.” Yep, begging was about right.

  He heard the soft whoosh of air. “All right. I’d like to have dinner with you. But, Tony? If this is some kind of trick, or you back off again, that’s it.”

  “Understood. Uh...can I pick you up?”

  Her “Fine “sounded terse. “I’m home now.”

  They agreed on a time and to do something casual, and he ended the call on an astonishing burst of exhilaration.

  * * *

  WHEN THE DOORBELL RANG, Beth jumped six inches. Stupid. She’d been expecting him. And given that they’d had lunch together—was it only yesterday?—she didn’t know why she was so nervous.

  Except she did. She’d spent the past couple of days pining for him like some lovelorn teenager, when she wasn’t worried sick about Dad. This was undoubtedly a bad idea, but she was going to do it anyway.

  Tony stood on her doorstep, his appearance unchanged from when they’d parted this afternoon. Black boots, chinos and a tan polo shirt. “Sorry,” he said, glancing down at himself. “Something came up. I didn’t have a chance to go home and change.”

  “That’s okay.” She eyed his badge and weapon. “Do you wear a gun on all your dates?”

  His grin was wicked and sexy enough to bring her to meltdown. “Turns some women on, you know.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I bet.” There probably were cop groupies, even in a town this size. “Let me grab my purse.”

  When she came back, he nodded at her skirt. “Pretty.”

  “Oh.” Of course she was blushing. “Thank you. I was grungy from working in the garage.”

  “While I sat and watched,” he said ruefully.

  A moment later, they walked to the shiny red pickup truck he’d driven on Sunday, when he had admitted to coming straight from home, interrupted in the middle of mowing his lawn.

  “Where do you live?” she blurted. “I mean, obviously you have a house, since you were mowing, instead of an apartment, or...” She waved toward her townhouse, which had a minimal yard cared for by a landscape service hired by her landlord.

  He opened the door for her. “Only about a mile from your dad’s. I own a pretty ordinary rambler.”

  Once she’d boosted herself inside the truck’s cab and reached for the seatbelt, he c
losed her door and went around to get in behind the wheel. Before reaching for his seatbelt, he unclipped the badge and holster from his belt. “Just for you.” As he set it them in the glove compartment and locked it, he asked, “Anything special you’d like? I was thinking of pizza, but I can be talked into something else.”

  Pizza sounded good to her, too, and it turned out they both liked the same place, which made her wonder if they’d happened to walk past each other there. If so, he hadn’t caught her eye, and she obviously hadn’t caught his.

  The interior of the restaurant felt pleasantly cool. After some discussion, she and Tony decided to share a Margherita pizza, made here with fresh local tomatoes and basil leaves. They both filled their plates at the salad bar, got drinks and chose a booth.

  “My stomach is growling,” she admitted. “I wasn’t very hungry at lunchtime.” She took her first bite.

  “I wasn’t either,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I understood, you know.”

  She was glad he didn’t comment.

  The quiet felt peaceful as they both made inroads on their salads. She was the first to break it.

  “Matt left a couple of grumpy messages on my phone. Which I deleted after listening to him complain about me not answering when he calls.”

  “Great tactic to make sure you can hardly wait for his next call.”

  She laughed. “Exactly.”

  “Sounds like my mother, except she wields guilt expertly enough to get results.”

  Intrigued, Beth said, “Really? Does she have a hold over you?”

  “You mean, a deep, dark secret? No, thank God. But she raised us to live up to certain standards, and along the way I think we all internalized heavy-duty guilt as our punishment for falling short.”

  She set down her fork and studied him. “What kind of standards?”

  “God and family come first. I’m not sure in what order,” he said wryly. “This has not been a good week. She chewed me out Sunday for missing church—”

  “Because of my call?” Speaking of guilt.

  “No, the morning service had come and gone long before dispatch called me. I overslept, probably because I didn’t feel like going.”