Icing Allison

by Pamela Burford

  And yeah, I’m pretty sure he was counting on that. The man was devious and endearing in equal measure.

  Sophie gave a brisk nod. “Okay, that’s settled. No more hospital talk. Long as you’re here,” she said to Dom, “I’ll leave the patient in your capable care and get a little work done. Just have a couple of calls to make, then I’m finished for the day.”

  She’d installed herself in the guest room at the end of the hall, which Irene had turned into a beautifully appointed home office. I never could concentrate in that room, distracted as I was by Irene’s ghostly, hovering presence. And no, I don’t believe in ghosts, but just for the sake of argument, if Irene was now a ghost, her old home office was where she hung out.

  No, it does not have to make sense. My house, my rules. Anyway, I felt more comfortable working in the little maid’s room near the kitchen.

  As Sophie was leaving the room, I heard a phone vibrate. “Is that mine?” I asked. She’d commandeered it so she could run interference. So far she’d fielded dozens of phone calls, many from the press, and about a million texts. I’d let her put a few concerned friends through, including Jim Manning.

  In addition, she’d turned away a bunch of well-meaning visitors who assumed I’d be thrilled to have them waltz in unannounced and set a spell. The only people I’d allowed inside were Sophie and Dom.

  The advantage to having her deal with my would-be callers and visitors is that, whereas I would have felt obligated to humor each one, she was no slave to diplomacy. With few exceptions, her side of these conversations went something like this: You won’t be getting past me, it’s nonnegotiable, sayonara.

  An exception had been Leonora Romano, who’d started leaving voice mails the instant the story broke that morning. Once I’d been able to form a coherent thought, I’d told a surprised Sophie to hand me the phone next time she called.

  She looked at my phone’s screen now, and grimaced. “Nina Wallace again. I’m not answering it.”

  “I’d question your sanity if you did,” I said.

  She stabbed a finger at the screen, dumping the call. “She just wants to pump you for all the juicy details. See you in a few,” she added as she started down the hall.

  Dom sat on the bed next to me. He stroked Sexy Beast, who sniffed him avidly, no doubt detecting traces of Bonnie’s prizewinning standard poodle, the urbane and charismatic Frederick. SB snorted in disdain.

  I started to scoot over a little to give Dom more room, only to wince in pain at the sudden movement.

  He was instantly alert. “Is it bad?”

  “It’s... just a little sore.” A lie, but if he started in again about the hospital, I’d seriously have to get Sophie to kick him out. And she could do it.

  “When’s the last time you took something for it?” he asked.

  “About an hour ago.”

  “Where’s the prescription? Let me see.” He looked at the floating nightstands, crafted from the same rich mahogany as the sleigh bed. The bed’s headboard and footboard were upholstered in ivory leather. He picked up the bottle of ibuprofen. “What, just this over-the-counter stuff? Didn’t they offer you something stronger?”

  “I don’t need something stronger.” Okay, maybe I did, but I had no desire to drift on back to la-la land. I’d spent enough of the day there already. I snatched the bottle out of his hand and placed it on the nightstand. “The bullet grazed me, Dom, it didn’t penetrate. It just kind of...” I made a skating motion with my hand.

  The wound was about three inches long and located on the outside of my left buttock. I couldn’t help thinking that if I hadn’t taken a cue from Allison and zigzagged just as Brenda pulled the trigger, the bullet might very well have severed my spinal cord.

  “I talked to the doctor,” he said. “You lost a chunk of flesh. You needed stitches.”

  “Yeah, like I can’t stand to lose a little back there. Wait.” I frowned. “The doctor talked to you about my medical stuff? What about privacy?”

  He nibbled his lower lip, a sure sign he had something to hide. “He might have, uh, thought I was your husband.”

  I stared at him. “Really. And where would he have gotten an idea like that, Dom?”

  “Well, I was your husband.” He gave me the charming little smile he knew I couldn’t resist.

  I resisted it. “Doesn’t your fiancée mind that you’re spending the whole day with me?”

  Sexy Beast chose that moment to yawn, and I could swear it sounded like, Oh, snap!

  His mouth tightened. “It’s not up to Bonnie how I spend my time. And anyway, why would she have a problem with it? It’s not like I’m slipping around behind her back.”

  “She doesn’t know you’re here, does she?” I asked. “She thinks you’re at work.”

  He sighed in frustration. “Why are we talking about her?”

  “You told that doctor we’re married.”

  “Okay, I admit I crossed a line,” he said, “but I was worried about you, Janey. You’d have done the same thing in my place. Admit it.”

  “No,” I said. “I wouldn’t have.”

  “You’re saying that if it were me lying in some hospital bed, wounded, disoriented, you wouldn’t have pulled out the stops to find out my condition? Even if it meant stretching the truth a little?”

  “That’s a pretty big stretch,” I said, “considering our marriage ended nearly two decades ago.”

  “You’re exaggerating,” he said.

  “Not by much. It’ll be eighteen years next month, Dom. Do the math.”

  He did. “Wow,” he said softly. “It doesn’t seem that long.”

  “Not to you,” I said. “You’ve been busy.” We both knew what I meant. Busy with two subsequent wives and a fiancée. Busy raising three children. For my part, I’d keenly felt every day of those eighteen years we’d spent apart.

  After a moment he said, “Bonnie’s getting antsy. She’s been trying to pin me down. About a wedding date.”

  “Can you blame her?”

  “I’m just not ready to commit to a date.”

  “Okay, for the record, you committed the day you proposed to her,” I said. “The rest is detail.”

  “But this time it feels so final somehow,” he said.

  “This isn’t like you, Dom. You’re the Marriage Guy. When you don’t have a significant other, you get hives. Are you telling me it doesn’t feel right with Bonnie?”

  “It feels fine.” He shrugged.

  “Try to restrain your enthusiasm,” I said dryly. “Listen, if you don’t love her—”

  “I love her,” he said quickly. Too quickly.

  A few months earlier I’d spied Bonnie in the Rose Bookshop perusing wedding-planning books. She might not be my favorite person, but no woman deserved to start married life—in her case, for the first time—with a spouse whose commitment was lukewarm at best. I said, “It sounds like you have to ask yourself some tough questions.”

  “I told you, I love her,” he snapped, then took a deep breath and shoved his fingers through his dark, curly hair. “I shouldn’t be laying this on you after what you’ve been through today.”

  “After what I’ve been through today?” I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t help myself. “Try what I’ve been through the past eighteen years.”

  Dom studied my face, his expression uncharacteristically sober. This was the thing we never spoke about, never acknowledged, although, to my shame, I knew he was well aware of it: my continued emotional attachment to him, my pain watching him fall in love with a series of other women, settle down with them, make children with them.

  A year ago I would have shied away from his searching gaze. Now I met it unflinchingly, baring it all. The longing, the loneliness. The emptiness I’d been so certain only he could fill.

  He squeezed my hand, held on to it. I let him. Neither of us spoke for a long minute. When at last he broke the silence, his voice was raw. “When I heard what happened to you today, how it almost end
ed...” He shook his head, at a loss for words.

  “It was your spike that saved me,” I said.

  “My what?” One dark eyebrow rose. “That sounds vaguely dirty. Okay, not so vaguely.”

  “You know, that self-defense thingy you gave me for my key chain. I used it to stab the ice and haul myself out of the water. If I hadn’t had it on me...” I let the rest go unsaid.

  “It’s a sign,” he said. “About you and me.”

  “Since when do you believe in signs?”

  “Since I almost lost you,” he said.

  I made myself say, “You can’t lose what you don’t have, Dom.”

  Slowly he nodded. “I blew it last summer, asking you to marry me again and then not giving you enough time to think it over.”

  “I hope you’re not angling for a do-over,” I said.

  “I know I don’t deserve one.”

  “You got that right.”

  It wasn’t what he’d expected to hear, I could tell. After a few moments he said, “What if I were a free man?”

  “Then you’d be miserable,” I said. “It’s in your nature to be in a relationship, like I said.”

  “You know what I mean. Would you give me a second chance? If Bonnie and I weren’t together?”

  “I think we’re on third chances at this point,” I said. “Maybe fourth.”

  “Why are you being so difficult, Janey?” he said. “I’m opening myself up to you here.”

  “What you’re doing,” I said, as I reclaimed my hand, “is hedging your bets. Asking for a commitment from me before you break things off with her.”

  He opened his mouth to object, then closed it again. With a sigh of resignation he said, “I can see how it might look that way.”

  “It looks that way because it is that way.”

  It probably hadn’t occurred to him that while he’d just professed his love for his fiancée, albeit unconvincingly, he had yet to tell me he loved me. I lifted Sexy Beast and cuddled him close to my chest, needing something, someone, to hold on to. Pushing Dom away felt so wrong, after all those years needing him—or thinking I did.

  “You’re not yourself,” he said. “It’s still messing with your head, the hypothermia.”

  “I’m not—”

  “The aftereffects,” he said. “You know what I mean.”

  “Let me be clear, Dom.” I locked my gaze with his. “And this is me speaking, not the hypothermia or exhaustion or any of that. If breaking up with Bonnie is right for you, then that’s what you should do. But don’t assume I’ll be waiting to take her place.”

  He took that in. I could tell he wanted to press me, to extract some kind of quasi-promise. Finally he muttered, “Fair enough.”

  Sexy Beast abruptly sprang off the bed and raced across the room, barking in welcome. Martin stood in the open doorway, a pair of cut-crystal snifters dangling from the fingers of one hand, a brand-new bottle of my favorite añejo tequila in the other.

  How long had he been standing out there in the hallway? Had he overheard any of our conversation? Certainly the padre would have removed himself from earshot once he realized Dom and I were having a private conversation.

  That’s a joke.

  He said, “Bad timing?”

  “No, it’s fine,” I said. “Come in.”

  “How did you get in the house?” Dom demanded. The doorbell hadn’t rung, and Sophie hadn’t gone downstairs to open the front door.

  The look I gave Dom said, How do you think? Before he could work up a head of steam on the subject of dangerous men and their lock picks, I turned to Martin and said, “You better not have swiped that from the pub.”

  “Would I do such a thing?” He sauntered to the night table and set the bottle and glasses next to the ibuprofen.

  “If you could get away with it?” I said.

  He didn’t challenge me on that point. “It just so happens I came by this bottle legitimately, as in I spent my own hard-earned cash. Maxine only buys one at a time for the pub, and only for the single patron who drinks it.”

  Meaning me. “But I never order it,” I said. “It’s too expensive.”

  “Yet the level in the bottle keeps dropping,” he said. “It’s an enigma.”

  I gaped at him. “Are you telling me Max knows you’ve been sneaking me high-end booze and charging me for the cheap stuff?”

  Martin shrugged. “She likes you. And it’s not like you’re in there every night guzzling it.” He knelt to give Sexy Beast some love. My dog was doing his I-am-unworthy thing, bowing and crawling toward the padre, begging for a scrap of attention from the alpha male. I’m always a little embarrassed by SB’s self-abasement, but I suppose it’s better than him thinking he’s in charge. Martin gave the little poodle a final pat before rising and uncorking the bottle.

  Dom edged a little closer to me. He placed a hand on my thigh over the comforter. “Janey can’t have any of that. She’s on medication.”

  The padre poured two fingers of tequila into both snifters, and told my ex, “I would’ve brought another glass if I’d known you were here. You can run and get a bathroom cup.”

  “Did you hear me?” Dom said. “She shouldn’t—”

  “I’m not on any narcotics,” I said, perhaps a bit too testily. “Chill, Dom.”

  “To happy endings.” Martin clinked his glass against mine and we sipped.

  Sophie ambled into the room, her sharp gaze zeroing in on the newcomer. “Thought I heard you in here. Afraid I wouldn’t let you through the front door?”

  “I didn’t want to make you run the stairs, Mayor,” he said. “I’m too much of a gentleman for that.”

  Her snort of derision told him what she thought of that claim. She eyed the drink in his hand. “Where’s mine?”

  Martin smoothly topped off his own glass and handed it to her. I’d seen him do this before, play the gentleman when the occasion called for it, and suspected it came more naturally than he was willing to admit. Those touches of civilization could be traced back to his grandmother Anne McAuliffe, whose efforts to civilize her bastard grandson had met with mixed success.

  Anne had had this very house built to her specifications decades earlier. She and her husband, Arthur, had lived in it for twenty years until Irene had broken up their marriage. Eventually Irene had inherited the house along with the bulk of Arthur’s other substantial assets. I knew Martin was still sensitive on the subject—the manipulative Other Woman ending up with his beloved grandma’s dream house and then leaving it to her poodle!—although he hadn’t brought it up in months.

  Sophie carried her drink to one of a pair of overstuffed armchairs set before the large windows overlooking the back of my property, their ivory silk drapes drawn against the darkening sky. The chairs were upholstered in pale green and separated by a round, padded coffee table covered in ivory leather. Not the most practical choice, perhaps, but again, it was Irene’s taste, not mine. I did approve of the muted coral walls. It’s not a shade I would have chosen myself, but I have to admit that Irene, or her decorator, had known what she was doing there.

  “Here.” I held my snifter out to Martin. “I can’t finish all this. You gave me too much.”

  “We’ll share.” He took a sip and handed it back.

  Dom made a show of ignoring this cozy little exchange. Turning to Sophie, he asked, “What’s the latest?”

  Nothing happened in Crystal Harbor that the she didn’t know about, and not just because she was the mayor. Sophie Halperin absorbed local news as if by osmosis. It was spooky.

  “Brenda was arraigned this afternoon,” Sophie said. “Bail set at a million bucks. Last I heard, she was still in jail.”

  “What did she plead?” I asked, as if I couldn’t guess.

  “Not guilty,” she said, “even with the evidence stacked against her.”

  Dom said, “What evidence do they have? I mean, besides Janey’s testimony.”

  “There’s the ballistics, for one thing.” S
he sipped her tequila.

  “I didn’t think of that,” I said. “The cops probably found spent bullets on the ice and, what, matched them to her gun?”

  Sophie nodded. “Dug a few slugs out of the trees, too, from when she was shooting at Allison. Gun was still in her car. They figure she was planning to ditch it somewhere after dark, maybe take it apart and put the pieces in dumpsters or something.”

  Dom said, “But why would she bother doing that now and not after Allison died?”

  Martin answered that one. “Because Allison hadn’t been shot. Brenda had known her death would be considered a drowning accident. No reason for ballistics testing.”

  “But I was shot,” I said. “She’d have figured that once my body was found, sporting a gunshot wound, the cops would be scouring the crime scene for bullets.”

  “And trying to identify the weapon they came from,” Sophie said.

  Martin said, “But the picture is what’s really going to sink her.”

  I jerked upright, and regretted it. “Ow. Picture? You don’t mean... The only picture I know of is the one Allison took right before she died, and that’s history. The camera got soaked.”

  “Yeah, so?” he said. “The memory card survived. The cops have a beautifully framed, time-stamped photo of Brenda standing in the woods, pointing a gun.”

  “Really? I just assumed...” I was grinning now. “I mean, Brenda was so certain the lake water would destroy the camera and every image on it. I just took her word for it.” Turned out she knew even less about this technical stuff than I did.

  “Can she afford to post bail, do you think?” Dom asked.

  “Yes and no,” Sophie said. “She has the money because, get this, Allison left a million-dollar life-insurance policy naming Brenda as beneficiary.”

  Again, I wasn’t surprised Sophie had the inside scoop. Years ago she’d worked as a paralegal for Sten Jakobsen, and the two of them were still tight. If anyone could get the closemouthed attorney to spill, it was her.

  “And she gets to keep it?” Dom said. “That doesn’t sound right.”