by Nancy Bush
“Yes. Of course,” September said, then added, “Listen, I admit I don’t know exactly why I’m here, but it feels like there’s been some kind of a setup.” She frowned a little, thinking. “Is it? I don’t know. But I want to know. And I don’t have a job. Not right now, and I want to ... this is going to sound wrong, I can already tell. . . .”
“What?” Lucy asked, not following.
“I want to make a difference, I guess. Does that sound corny?”
It did, but Lucy had the presence of mind not to say so.
“I guess I want to fill my time making a difference.” September set down her wineglass and exhaled.
Lucy finished her wine and studied the bottom of the empty glass. She felt kind of sad because she didn’t know if she wanted to make a difference, and you should; you should want to make a difference. All she wanted right now was ...
Dallas Denton.
Nope. No. That wasn’t true. Well, it was a little true, but she really wanted peace. Relief. For the horrible last month to go away and never return, God, everything was such a mess. She eyed the bottle and said, “I’m gonna have another glass of wine. I shouldn’t,” she wagged her finger at the detective, “but I will.”
* * *
Hours later, Lucy woke up on a gasp, dry-mouthed, every cell in her body screaming for water.
Where was she?
The family room couch.
She lifted her head and squinted at the television, which was on low, flickering images and mumbling voices. Her mouth tasted gross and her head was heavy and starting to ache.
She got up slowly and walked carefully to the kitchen, dragging down a glass from the cabinet, filling it with tap water, gulping it down.
September Westerly. What had she told her?
Her heart started pounding and she leaned against the cabinets for support, setting down the near-empty glass with a clatter. Oh. Shit.
“. . . if the police come, call me. I want to be there when they interview you. . . .”
She’d gone against everything Dallas had warned about. She’d talked to the police. Okay, the ex-police, but was there really a difference? Once a cop, always a cop?
What had September said?
I want to make a difference.
Well, okay. That was okay. That sounded okay....
Yeah, but what if she finds something that makes it look like you’re guilty? What if she gets on the wrong track? What if she’s really undercover, lying to you, trying to entrap you?
Lucy moaned and tried to talk herself out of the irrational fears that were gripping her. What time is it? she wondered, glancing at the clock. One thirty-seven. Had Evie found her way to bed? She’d been in her room when September and Lucy were talking, but had she stayed there?
She turned out the lights and checked the doors, glad to see she’d had the presence of mind to lock everything up after September left. She kind of remembered the detective leaving, but the three—or was it four? Or, God forbid, five?—glasses of wine had definitely done their job. Carefully, she headed up the stairs, holding on to the rail, turned in to every step because it sure felt like she could stumble.
Evie was fast asleep, a book teetering on the edge of her bed. Lucy scooped it up before it fell to the ground and placed it on her dresser before heading to her own bedroom.
The bathroom light was on and she drifted toward it, looking at herself in the mirror. Shit. Scary. She looked pale and wide-eyed, like, yes, like she’d seen a ghost.
Fear. Fear for her own safety and that of her daughter, because if anything happened to her, what would happen to Evie?
Where was her cell phone? Downstairs.
She stumbled back down and found it on the kitchen counter, next to her purse. She yanked out her wallet and the business card she’d stuffed inside it. Dallas Denton, Attorney. She called the office number, which invited her to leave a message.
“This is Lucy Linfield. I may have . . . I made a mistake. . . I talked to September Westerly.... She was with the Laurelton PD and she came by . . . and I probably shouldn’t have talked to her, but I did. . . .” She left her cell number and then hung up.
In bed, she reviewed what she’d just done and started feeling stupid.
She fell asleep with her arm flung over her face, warding off the world.
* * *
Dallas jogged along the edge of the small man-made lake near his Laurelton home. The whole area was a developer’s vision: healthy living with homes nestled into the hillside on one side, the lake on the other, though it was really little more than a large pond. Didn’t matter. It did the trick. A clubhouse with an indoor pool and an exercise room was situated near the gates to the exclusive community. Dallas had purchased the house when he and Monica had gotten engaged. It was only after he’d looked inside himself and realized the knot building in his stomach was more than premarital jitters, it was actually from a growing dread about marriage to a woman he had relatively little in common with, that he’d pulled the plug on the engagement.
But he had the house.
The air was still thick with moisture, but it wasn’t falling from the sky. It dewed on his face as he ran. To the east, there was a crack of gray light, opening to dull amber surrounded by lines of clouds. He inhaled the sharp spring air, felt its coldness in his lungs. Winter hadn’t lessened its grip yet, even though it was almost April. He didn’t much care. He almost welcomed the icy bite in the back of his throat, the wet cold that made him feel like he was alive.
Back at the house—two stories, three bedrooms up, a den down, stainless-steel appliances in the kitchen, a laundry room off the double car garage—he took the stairs two at a time, breathing hard from his exertion, stripped down and stepped under the shower, letting steaming hot water run over his skin.
Twenty minutes later, he was heading out of the house to his office. Billie would already be there. She seemed to think it was expected of her to beat him to work and was appalled when he showed up early and got there before she did. He’d taken to stopping at a local diner, Lucille’s, that was near the Laurelton police station, to collect breakfast and give her time to get to the office. The diner had the added advantage, sometimes disadvantage, of allowing him to see some of the city’s finest and exchanging a few words with them. He was often on the opposite side of the police in the courtroom, so he tried to make friends with them when he could. Not that it always worked. As a rule, they thought he defended scumbags, and yeah, he did. No question. But less and less. He’d grown intolerant of miscreants and liars, and if that meant he was having a crisis of conscience job-wise, well, fine.
He walked into Lucille’s, greeted by the bong-bung of an annoying arrival bell. He swept into a booth and waited for a server to drop a mug and a menu in front of him. It didn’t take long. One of the oldest old-timers, a woman who looked like she’d spent decades in a yellow uniform holding a pot of coffee, came by, upended a mug, dropped a perfect pour of coffee into it, slapped a menu down, and moved on. He’d thought she might be Lucille, except everyone called her Del, short for Delores.
The menu stared up at him. Lucille’s name was written in a large, flowing, and curly scroll.
Lucille . . . Lucretia . . . Lucy . . .
He drank his coffee black and thought about Lucy Linfield. He knew her. He’d met her. He just wasn’t sure where. Or, for that matter, when. Was she one of Luke’s friends? His brother had had lots of girlfriends, romantic and otherwise, during his growing-up years, whereas Dallas had made himself less approachable.
“My friends call you Grandpa. You know that, right?” Luke had said to him once.
“Yes,” he’d answered, though it had kind of taken him aback.
“You gotta loosen up, man.”
Luke, who’d become a cop and had quit his job in solidarity with his mentor when the older man had been accused of wrongdoing. Luke, whose own sense of responsibility had waxed while Dallas’s had waned a bit. Well, maybe that was pushing it too
far. It was more like he was tired of wearing the mantle of respectability, while at the same time being treated like dirt on someone’s shoe for defending people accused of crimes.
“The Only Omelet,” he ordered, when Del swept by again.
“You got it, hon.”
The Only Omelet was, in fact, the only omelet on the menu. It was fully loaded, and if you wanted something different, you had to take away from the ham, sausage, cheddar and cotija cheeses, tomatoes, onions, spinach, and mushrooms. The only extra you could ask for were jalapeños. That was a bridge too far in Dallas’s mind.
The Only came fast, and Dallas was finished with breakfast by eight o’clock. The restaurant was filling up with patrons and the noise that came with them. Conversation waxed and waned over the clatter of silverware. The entrance door opened and closed, musical notes over the shuffle of feet and the rush of a breeze that slipped inside, where the smell of brewing coffee and sizzling bacon filled the interior. He let his mind wander some more on the mystery that was Lucy Linfield. Had he seen a picture of her with Layla? Something to do with the Crissmans?
He had a strange sense about her, a tickling of memory that was both intriguing and unsettling. She wasn’t the one who . . .
“Mr. Denton?”
He looked up to see an attractive young woman in jeans and a rain jacket. She pulled a hood from her auburn hair and thrust out a hand. “September Westerly, formerly Rafferty, formerly of the Laurelton PD.”
“You worked with Luke on the Wren case,” Dallas recognized.
“That’s right. I’m just heading to the station to meet someone. Thought I’d get a coffee.”
“But you’re no longer with the police?” He gestured for her to sit down and she slid into the booth opposite him.
“Not currently.” She gazed at him through squinted eyes.
“What?”
“I . . . well ... it’s fortuitous that I ran into you because I wanted to talk to you.”
Dallas lifted his brows. “Huh. Okay.”
“I’m looking into the Linfield poisoning and I met with Lucy Linfield last night, at her house. She said you were her attorney.”
“I told her not to talk to the police unless I was with her.” He could feel a knot of anger forming in his chest. One more time a client hadn’t listened to him.
“She said that, too. I’m not the police. That’s not what I’m trying to do. But I want to follow their investigation. I plan to go to see the Wharton County sheriff and follow up on that tip they got.”
“Are you friends with Lucy?” His voice was clipped, and he glanced around to ensure that no one in a nearby table was listening in. The only person nearby was a young mother with a three-year-old who was refusing to take one bite from the stack of pancakes she’d ordered.
“I met Lucy at the benefit,” September was saying. “I helped her husband to their car after he was sick. If John Linfield was poisoned at the benefit, then it happened early. Only a few people were there. Somebody brought in the mushrooms and doctored his food. I also plan to look into Linfield’s background. Does he have an enemy? I just don’t believe it’s Lucy.”
Dallas cooled off a bit. Was surprised how quickly he’d reacted to this news. Not like him. “You sound like you’re doing police work.”
“I am, in essence. But I guess I’m working your side on this.”
“And you’re doing this out of the goodness of your heart?”
She reacted to his sardonic tone by jerking to attention. “I’m not asking for a job, if that’s what it looks like. I just wanted to be clear with you.”
He wasn’t sure what he thought of her. “My brother’s coming to my office at nine. You have time to meet with us?”
She lifted her brows, thought a moment. “Okay.”
They exchanged information. She gave him her cell phone number and he gave her the number of his office as she was ordering coffee from the server who’d cruised by. As he left, Dallas wasn’t quite sure what to make of her, but he decided to give her the benefit of the doubt. Luke was actually showing up at eight-thirty, so he’d have a few moments to debrief him about September before she arrived.
A few minutes later, Dallas walked into his office. Glancing away from her computer screen, Billie looked at him over the top of her glasses and said, “There’s a phone message for you from Mrs. Linfield.”
Her careful tone suggested there was something Dallas definitely ought to hear, so he told her, “I’ll check it out.”
At his desk, he listened to Lucy’s early morning message and decided September Westerly was right: It was fortuitous that she’d caught him at Lucille’s. Lucy Linfield was unstable, and that made for a dangerous client.
* * *
What time was it?
Lucy shot straight up, glancing in panic at the alarm clock. Eight! Jesus! She threw back the covers, groaned at the thick feeling in her head, and stumbled toward her closet. She threw on a tan blouse and black slacks, pulled on a pair of black socks, and squinched her toes into black leather mules. Then she furiously brushed her teeth, shooting surreptitious glances at herself in the mirror, encouraged at least that she didn’t look as bad as last night. She applied face makeup a little heavier than usual to give herself some color, a bit of eye shadow and mascara, and brushed her hair.
Back through the bedroom, she called, “Evie? You up? We gotta go.”
“I made myself some toast,” Evie called back from the kitchen.
Lucy could smell the peanut butter as she hurried down the stairs. “Oh, good. Good. How’s the homework?”
“Done.”
Lucy looked around for Evie’s backpack, spied it on the couch with Lisa’s ears sticking out. “You’re not taking Lisa to school.”
“Can’t I?” she pleaded.
“No . . . no . . .” This was an ongoing battle, one Lucy had thought had ended the year before, but John’s death had created a new normal.
Glowering, Evie bit into the uneaten half of her peanut butter toast.
Lucy realized she’d left her purse upstairs and trudged back up, finding it on the chair in her bedroom. At least she’d had the presence of mind to bring it upstairs, even if she hadn’t charged her phone.
It was Friday. And she was determined to show up at the warehouse and find out what her job situation was, once and for all. Her father and Lyle had been so clandestine about the whole thing, she wasn’t sure where she stood.
She dropped Evie off at April Academy, just making it before nine o’clock, very aware that this might be Evie’s last year there. Two and a half months left of school she would pay for, by hook or by crook. Come fall, Evie would have to be enrolled in public school, which was just fine in Lucy’s eyes, even though she knew Evie would howl about leaving her friends. Fine. Lucy understood her daughter’s frustration. Lucy would’ve done the same thing when she was Evie’s age.
As she drove to the new Crissman offices, she thought about her conversation with September. She hadn’t said anything she shouldn’t have ... at least that she could remember. Vaguely, she recalled phoning Dallas’s office and leaving a message. A semihysterical message, she thought, which made her growl low in her throat at herself.
Shake it off, she told herself as she pulled into one of the spots outside the complex of warehouses. The offices of Crissman & Wolfe were located in a glass-and-concrete building positioned close to the parking area and in the front of one of the warehouses. A cluster of structures behind the offices made up the whole of their operation.
CRISSMAN was posted in large white letters across the front and most visible warehouse. She glanced up at the letters as she pushed through the front door. No Wolfe any longer. A good thing, in her estimation.
A girl she’d never seen before was behind the counter. She looked up at Lucy expectantly.
“I’m Lucy Crissman Linfield,” she said coolly.
“Oh. Yes. Of course. I’ll call Mr. Crissman.”
Lucy tried not t
o fume while she waited for the girl to phone either her brother or her father, which one she didn’t know. Eventually, she was allowed to pass through the door and into the business offices, where four people she’d never met were seated at desks, behind computers.
She’d been completely disregarded. Forgotten. Kicked out.
She was angry, hurt, and humiliated, but she’d be damned if she’d let her father see.
Abbott came through one of the doors, looking at Lucy with some surprise. “I thought you weren’t coming today.”
“No,” she countered, her eyes thinning. “I said I was coming in.”
He frowned, as if about to disagree, then caught himself. “Well, come on back, then.” He waved her to follow him. “We have a place for you, back here.”
Did he? Why did she suspect he was lying? Something was definitely off. He led her through the door, and Lucy swallowed back the hot, angry words she wanted to shoot out at him through a flamethrower. When she saw the glassed-in cubicle next to her brother’s, she calmed herself a bit. Maybe everything was okay. She’d almost convinced herself that she was imagining her father’s surprise at her appearance, but when she closed the glass door behind her and sat down at the desk, she inhaled a familiar scent. John ... her husband. His aftershave still lingered. This had been his office for the short time he’d been here before his death. Oh. God.
She felt her bones collapse and placed her hands over her face.
Damn it all!
Her cell phone rang. She squeezed her eyes shut tight and let it ring.
It finally went quiet, and then she heard the bing that meant she had a voice mail.
It took a few moments for her to pull herself together. Finally, she was able to stuff down her emotions. Sitting up, she squared her shoulders and picked up her cell. It wasn’t a number she recognized, but she listened to the message anyway.
“Lucy, it is Babette,” came the heavily accented voice of one of their local dress designers, a coup for Crissman & Wolfe, and now Crissman; Babette’s styles were incredibly popular, so much so that it was only a matter of time until she left them for a national chain. “I am having much trouble being paid. I am owing more than ten thousand. So I cannot give more product, you see? Please take care of immediately.”