“It was the very first time we took the boat out. It was a beautiful afternoon. The kids were so excited. Alexa, too, but I could tell she was a little nervous. I wanted to show off a bit, but I was still somewhat unfamiliar with the boat. I had some trouble; I stalled it.” He paused for a moment, his shoulders hunched against the pain of what he was telling. “There was a teenage kid in another boat with a friend water-skiing behind. He didn’t see that our boat was stopped, he was looking back, watching his friend...”
Thea felt her own body tense with anticipation at what she sensed was coming.
“It wasn’t his fault,” Bob said. “We shouldn’t have been there, right in his path. He sliced across the back of our boat. The three of them never knew what hit them, at least that’s what the coroner told me. The poor kid got hurt pretty bad, too. His friend and I—we weren’t hurt—we dove into the water, trying to find Alexa and the kids.
“We found them, all three of them. By then help had arrived but there was nothing they could do for my family. The boat’s propeller had cut through their life vests, their bodies. They were gone, all gone.” He let out another one of those gut-wrenching sighs.
Thea let his words fade away before she spoke. She knew that any response she might give would seem totally inadequate, so she decided to shift the subject ever so slightly. “Is that when your aunt stepped in?”
He blinked at her and then nodded. “Yeah. It was Aunt Peg to the rescue. I was a basket case. My own parents were dead; I had no siblings. She was the only one. She coddled me at first, just to help me get over the worst of it and then, little by little, she started to push me, to make me get up, to eat, to take care of myself.
“Even then, even with her help I still had a rough time of it. I went into a hospital for a while. She consulted with my doctors and when everyone agreed that I was ready, she packed me up and moved me here. Even put me up at their house for a time. Then she made Uncle Fred give me a job; I think he was pretty dubious about it at first, but when he saw that I was coming around he gave me more and more responsibility.”
He gave her a quick glance. “That’s when I got to know George, through work.”
“Ah. How did that go?”
“Fine, in the beginning. He knew about my history, of course. He was one of the few, and he was sympathetic toward me. But as I got healthier, he and I started butting heads. Over little things at first, and then I could tell that he was getting tired of putting up with me, making allowances for me. He started sabotaging me, undercutting me in ever so minor ways, but enough that I knew what was going on and I knew who was doing it.”
“In what kinds of ways?” Thea asked, her tone clearly skeptical.
“Oh, things like reports that I was supposed to sign off on that never made it to my desk. So I would look unprepared in meetings. It was never traceable back to him because staff was always blamed, but I knew it was George who was responsible.”
Shocked, Thea tried to absorb his words. Was there a darker, more devious side to George that she had never seen? Hesitantly, she asked, “Are you positive? There was nobody else you suspected?”
He shook his head. “Look, I’m sure to you he was always a good guy. But in business, well, he was a whole other person.”
“I can’t believe it.” Thea protested.
“It was him. I confronted him about it. He admitted it, but he let me know that if I told anybody else about it that there would be one hell of a fight—a fight that I might win because of my family connections—but that he would take down a lot of other people, including my Uncle Fred, if I insisted on carrying things that far.”
Thea was stunned. “He actually said this to you?”
Bob nodded. “Oh, yes. And I believed him.”
“But why?” Thea wasn’t buying this. “Why did he have such animosity toward you?”
He shrugged. “I’m not sure. Maybe it was resentment over the whole nepotism thing. But in point of fact I was just as qualified for the job as he was. Maybe even more, because I had all that international banking experience.”
“Were you a threat to him?”
“Maybe he saw it that way. But I wasn’t, not really. I was so grateful to my Aunt Peg that I would never have done anything to hurt her in any way.”
“But George didn’t get that?”
“No. And then when we both got on the SOD committee, well, we were in two different camps from the onset. George wanted to be chairman and he campaigned for it, so it was a real blow to him when I was elected.”
“What about your alliance with Dan Biggs?”
He shifted in his chair. “Hmm, well, that’s kind of an alliance of convenience for me. I can’t honestly call Dan my friend because, to tell the truth, I don’t approve of everything he does.” He glanced pointedly at Thea. “But he and I usually end up voting along the same lines, and Dan wields a lot of influence in this town.” He smirked. “Or at least he thinks he does.”
Thea pressed her lips together, then said, “Well, as you may have guessed, Dan is not a particular friend of mine either.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“Well, Dan was pretty adamant that George was staring daggers at you after that SOD meeting.”
“Sorry, I really don’t know what that was about.”
“Then maybe there’s something else you can help me with?”
“What’s that?”
“Is the path along Rivercliffs where you usually jog?”
“Pretty much. It’s about a mile up and a mile back, so I can get in a two-mile run on my lunch hour—or whenever I have a spare twenty minutes in my schedule.”
“Were you out there the day George...fell from the cliff?”
His eyes went evasive for a split second, and then he shook his head. “No. It was a really bitter, windy day. And I had a meeting.” He frowned. “I remember my secretary bursting into the room to tell us about George.”
They both fell silent for a moment, then Thea asked, “Did you ever see someone hanging around the overlook?”
“You mean a stranger—or a homeless person?”
Thea nodded. “Anybody. A stranger or someone you knew...”
He rubbed a hand along his chin. “Now that you mention it, I did see a guy out there maybe a few days before George died. At first, I thought he was a bum, but when I got closer I recognized him.”
“Who was it?”
“Well, I realized I knew him from the office. He used to work there.” He paused, then added, “It was that alcoholic cousin of George’s.”
CHAPTER 27
Thea felt like leaping up from the table and running outside with her cell phone to call Detective Jerry Anderson. Nyah-nah-nah-nah-nah, she’d say. I’ve got a witness who says that George’s deadbeat, drunken cousin was hanging around on the Rivercliffs overlook.
But, as her excitement quickly subsided, she could hear him saying back to her, “Doesn’t prove a thing. It’s just another interesting coincidence.” And she could practically see the smugness on Jerry Anderson’s face.
Eager to get away, she started to make noises to Bob Rutledge that she really ought to be getting back, but he gave her a hurt-puppy-dog look. “You haven’t told me anything about yourself,” he said.
She cocked her head at him. “But you must have heard some of my history from the local grapevine. Don’t tell me that’s not true.”
“Touché,” he said with a smile. “I admit that after I met you on the overlook I did ask around about you.”
“But you’d rather hear it from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.”
He grinned. “I wouldn’t put it that way, but yes.”
She let out a breath and started in on the Cliffs Notes version of her life: She’d been born and raised in Rockridge and then went to college at Northwestern, where she majored in journalism. After college she’d followed her Theatre Major boyfriend to Hollywood, where he dumped her almost immediately for a blonde bimbo actress. But she’d been
grateful to him for changing her name from “Dot” to “Thea,” which she felt suited her much better. And he’d gotten her to California, which she loved, but where she struggled at first to find the kind of work in investigative journalism that she’d trained for—until she started to catch on with doing celebrity interviews. It hadn’t been what she really wanted to do, but she got to be pretty successful at it, and it had eventually led to her meeting “Sam” (real name Stewart) Browne, her stuntman husband.
“Actually,” she continued, “when I met Sam, he gave my career an even bigger boost. He’d worked with a lot of major stars as a stuntman, and he gave me an even greater entrée. When we first got married, I used to travel with him when he went on location—I got some great exclusives from the stars of the movies he was working on.”
She paused, remembering. “Then a few years later, Sam became a stunt coordinator, and the money was good enough that I started to taper off with the writing. I wanted to be around when Sam wasn’t off on location.”
“Oh, you weren’t going on location with him anymore?”
She shook her head. “No. He had an increased workload, so it got harder and harder for him to spend any time with me, and in the meantime we had acquired a ranch.” She gave him a sheepish smile. “Well, Sam called it a ranch because he’d always wanted one. It’s really nothing more than a couple of acres. We got some dogs and then a horse for him and, after I’d learned how to ride, a horse for me. And the animals needed to be taken care of, so...” She shrugged. “I stayed home with them.”
“Was that okay with you?”
“Yeah, it was. There’s nothing like animals to bring you back to the real world. And I was getting bored with all that celebrity stuff by then.”
Bob leaned toward her, his posture strangely intimate. When he spoke, his voice was low, tentative. “There’s more, I know. About your husband….”
She took a moment to react. “Something we have in common, I’m sorry to say.” She shot him a glance.
His eyes held hers for several beats. “Yes.”
She lowered her gaze. “Do you want to hear the details?”
“Only if you want to tell me.”
“I might as well.” She looked up at him. “Did your source tell you anything?”
“Only that he died in a fall. A broken neck, I think.”
“That’s right. It was a fall from his horse, Bart. Full name: Black Bart. I thought about getting rid of Bart afterward, but I couldn’t do it. Sam loved that horse so much.” She paused, marshaling her memories. “It was a September afternoon. Very hot and dry. That’s often the hottest time of the year in the Valley—”
“The Valley?”
“Sorry, the San Fernando Valley. Our ranch is in an area in the West Valley called Hidden Hills. It’s a gated community, quite exclusive, very horsey. We bought our property when it was a lot cheaper than it is now.”
He nodded. “Sorry I interrupted. Go on.”
Thea leaned her elbows on the table with her hands together, and then realized that she was mimicking Bob’s posture when he had told her about the deaths of his wife and children. She pulled her hands apart, feeling the predictable pang of guilt about telling this story, because some of it was a lie.
She took a deep breath and began, “Sam was restless that day. It was so hot outside I didn’t want to do anything, but Sam hated being cooped up. He told me he was taking Bart out for a ride. I said it was a bad idea, that it would be too hard on the horse, never mind his own welfare. But Sam just laughed at me and told me he’d ridden in much hotter weather on various shoots. So I gave up and just let him go.” She pressed her lips together, girding herself for the next part.
“An hour or so later, I looked out the back window and was surprised to see Bart wandering around the yard. His reins were dragging on the ground and his saddle was askew; I knew immediately that something had happened to Sam. I gave Bart some water and then I saddled up my horse, Paloma, and grabbed Bart’s reins and let him take the lead. He led us straight to Sam.”
She cleared her throat. “I could see Sam on the ground; there was no blood, so at first I was encouraged by that. But when I dismounted and walked toward him, it became apparent that he wasn’t breathing. He was so still, and his head was turned away from me at such an odd angle. When I bent over him I expected him to turn and look at me, and say, ‘Fooled ya!’ But, of course, he didn’t.”
She put her hand to her mouth for a moment, then pulled it away. “I looked around and saw what I thought was the track of a snake nearby. Maybe that was what killed him. A snake startled Bart and he had thrown off Sam, and Sam had just fallen in a freaky way that broke his neck.”
Bob said something, but she wasn’t there with him anymore. She was flashing back to what really happened on the day Sam died. Very few people knew the truth—Annie was one of them—that the reason Sam died was because he had gone off half-cocked when she told him she’d seen a divorce lawyer.
She couldn’t tell people the truth, because they would have had questions about why she wanted the divorce. When Sam had asked her that very question on that hot, dusty afternoon she had told him it was because she was tired of hearing rumors about his various “location romances,” but the reality of it was that, after nearly thirty years of marriage, they had grown apart. So far apart that she sometimes felt as if they barely spoke the same language anymore. He lived in a world of machismo and bravado, where the surface was revered, and the glamour had paled for her long ago. Her world had become smaller, more interior, with her time spent with a few close friends, her animals and nature. Now, with her memories starting to retreat and fade, she wondered if she had been serious about a divorce—or had she only meant to shake him up? If that had been her intention, she had done a bang-up job of it.
As Sam raged at her she remained calm—and adamant—watching cautiously as he revved up his anger to a fever pitch. He had never been physically abusive with her, only with inanimate objects like doors or plates, but then he pulled on his boots and snarled, “I’m going for a ride.” They were the last words he spoke to her, and she said nothing back to him as she watched him jerk open the back door and stomp over to the corral.
The rest of the story was mostly true: she had let Bart lead her to Sam’s body, but she had made up the part about the snake. The coroner told her that Sam broke his neck riding pell-mell through a stand of trees with numerous low-lying branches. Had he been suicidal—or was he just so filled with rage that he didn’t look where he was going? Either way, she didn’t want people to judge him on this final action of his life. It was just easier to let them think it was an accident.
“Thea?”
Bob’s voice snapped her back into the present moment. “Sorry,” she said, but she wasn’t feeling apologetic. She couldn’t look at him anymore. She was feeling too exposed, raw—that he could look inside her and see she wasn’t telling the truth. And he was still a potential murderer. No way was she going to let him see her vulnerable.
CHAPTER 28
Making a point of looking at her watch, Thea blurted out, “It’s getting late. I really ought to go.”
But Bob’s attention had been drawn to the front of the store, where two women were waiting at the counter. One was dark-haired, tall and attractive, and looked to be in her late thirties or early forties. The other was younger and had her back to Thea, but there was something very familiar about the set of her shoulders, the way she held her head.
He said, “Oh, look, there’s Heather, Dan and Annie’s daughter.”
Thea felt her hackles rise, and she shot Bob an accusatory look. Had he arranged this meeting? Was there some kind of link between him and Heather? Had they possibly worked together to get rid of George, their common nemesis?
Bob was gazing back at her with a puzzled, guileless smile on his face, his eyes full of innocent inquiry. “Don’t you know Heather?” he asked.
Okay, maybe Thea was seeing a conspiracy where n
one existed. “I thought it might be her,” she said to cover up her momentary lapse, “but I haven’t seen her for several years.” Then she added, “Who’s that with her?”
A flush slowly spread across Bob’s face. “Uh, that’s Rachel McCue, she’s the executive assistant to the mayor.”
“Ah ha,” Thea stared at Bob, wondering what had caused him to blush so profusely. “Is she someone you’ve dated—or what?” She said the words half-jokingly, thinking that the man could probably stand a little teasing.
Instead, Bob’s eyes wouldn’t meet hers and he began to stammer, “No, not me. No, I didn’t date her—I mean it’s not that I don’t find her attractive, but I just...”
Thea narrowed her eyes at him. “What? Is she somebody else’s girlfriend?”
A look of consternation crossed Bob’s face, and it took several seconds for the light to dawn on Thea. Yes, she was somebody else’s girlfriend—she was Dan’s girlfriend, the latest in a long line.
Thea gasped. “You’re not telling me that...” She couldn’t finish the sentence. She looked down to the counter, where the two women had picked up their coffees and were turning around and heading for a table near them. Then they spotted Bob, and Thea sensed that Heather had recognized her.
“Auntie Thea,” Heather called out in an overly theatrical way. “Is that really you?”
Thea gave her a weak wave. “Hey, Heather,” she called out, longing to slide under the table.
She whispered to Bob, “Does Heather know about her dad and what’s-her-name?” When Bob didn’t answer her, she gave him a sidelong glance. “Well?”
As the two women were fast approaching, he muttered, “I’m afraid so. I think they’re best friends.”
Thea felt disgusted, but managed to give Heather a faint smile. “How are you?” she asked, all the while wishing she could wring the little traitor’s neck.
“I’m great,” Heather responded as she came to their table.
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