by Beverly Long
“Lou can’t stand Bobby,” Charity said, still looking at her phone. “She thinks he’s stupid.”
She. “So Lou is short for Louisa?”
“She’s been Lou since second grade,” Charity said, finally looking up.
“Does Lou live in Vegas?”
Charity didn’t acknowledge the question but she did put her phone down.
“I guess I’m grateful then that you chose to stay here with me rather than crashing at her place.”
“She doesn’t have her own place. She lives with an old lady and takes care of her. The woman’s son stops by like twice a day to check on them.”
Charity and Lou had grown up together. Under different circumstances, JC would have known Lou. “Good that you’ve kept in contact even as adults.”
“We’re like sisters.”
JC again felt a chill. Charity had said it innocently enough.
Was JC reading into the tea leaves too much?
“My mother never really liked her.”
This was her chance. She knew the answer to the next question she was going to ask, but there was no way for Charity to know that. “How did your mom die, Charity?”
“She and her boyfriend were on his boat. They did that on the weekends. Would take it out all day and then anchor it and sleep on it at night. It caught fire. They didn’t make it off.”
The story had made the front page of the Charleston paper. The private investigator had produced a copy. She wondered if it was any consolation to Charity that the coroner believed the couple had been sleeping in the hull and had died of smoke inhalation before the flames had gotten to them.
The fire had occurred eight months ago, just two months after early rumors started circling that her father intended to announce his candidacy for the Senate. And regardless of the news coverage, the death of two strangers hundreds of miles away would have gone totally unnoticed by her if she hadn’t found her mother’s diary four months later and started looking for Linette White.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Yeah, it sucks,” Charity said. She stared off into space. “You know, I didn’t like my mom all that much when I was a teenager. We fought a lot. You know, about stupid rules and other stuff. Sometimes about Lou. But the last couple years, it was better.”
The young woman’s dark eyes filled with tears. “We would talk and sometimes go shopping and—” she swallowed hard “—and I wish I’d told her that I loved her more. I think she knew it but I should have said it more.”
JC’s throat was closing up. She’d traveled much the same path after her mom had died, but she’d been processing it with the brain of a fourteen-year-old. Charity had the benefit of being ten years older.
But perhaps age was irrelevant in these circumstances.
A mother’s death was hard, so hard, regardless of maturity. “I’m sure she knew how much you loved her,” JC said. Others had said the same to her. It had been some comfort.
“I think so. I hope so, anyway.” A tear ran down Charity’s cheek. She wiped it away with the back of her hand. “You know, she loved butter pecan ice cream. I ate a half gallon of it the day we buried her.”
JC smiled. “Sounds like a fitting tribute.” They’d waited to have her mother’s funeral until JC was out of the hospital. But she’d had very limited mobility. After the funeral, nobody had said much when she’d crawled into bed with a picture of her mother and hadn’t left her room for four days. Even then, the picture had remained under her pillow for years.
“I was a little surprised to see you at the session this morning,” JC said, not wanting Charity to be upset.
Charity shrugged. “I didn’t know what to expect. But it was interesting. Although those stories about the superbugs are kind of gross.”
JC smiled. “Agreed. Wash your hands. Often. That’s my motto.” She hesitated. “You know, it was good to have support in the audience. My good friends Barry and Eileen Wood also came.”
She watched Charity carefully, looking for any reaction. But the girl was busy rubbing Hogi’s belly.
“I spent a lot of time with Eileen after my mom died,” JC said.
“Yeah,” Charity said, as if she knew she was supposed to say something but didn’t know what. “I’ve got to feed Hogi.”
Twenty minutes later, there was a sharp knock on the door. Royce shot out of the bedroom. “Where’s Charity?”
“In her room, feeding her cat.”
“I thought she wanted to have lunch with you,” he whispered, when they heard Charity’s door open.
“Let’s make that happen,” JC said.
Like before, Royce checked the peephole first, then opened the door. A woman wearing the standard black pants, white shirt, and periwinkle blue and olive green cummerbund and bow tie pushed a cart in, with three covered dishes. It took her a few minutes to set everything up on the table. Charity picked up the remote control for the television and started flipping through channels. She had the sound all the way down so JC assumed it was more something to do rather than something she was really interested in.
Once JC had signed the slip and the attendant had left, she handed Royce a plate. “I ordered you some chicken quesadillas. Just in case.”
Royce took the plate. He glanced at Charity, who still sat on the couch, her back to JC. “Everything okay here?” he asked softly.
“Fine,” she said. “Really,” she added when he didn’t seem inclined to move.
“Let me know if you need me,” he said.
“I will,” she said, grateful that he wasn’t pushing the issue. “Don’t spill salsa on my bedspread.”
Chapter 14
He’d spilled red wine on her dining room rug. It had been a week after the Fourth of July. She’d invited him over for dinner and when she’d offered him a glass of wine, he’d accepted even though he wanted a beer.
They dined in candlelight with music in the background.
The filet had been a perfect medium rare.
The art on her walls had probably cost more than his parents’ house.
It was a night of disjointed thoughts and memories because halfway through dinner, about ten seconds after she asked him to pass the salad, she blurted out that she thought she might be falling in love with him.
He knocked over his wineglass in response. And she laughed and kissed him.
Prior to that night, he’d been afraid to say the words, afraid that he’d scare her away. But her admission gave him permission to tell her what was in his heart. And when he told her that he loved her, too, her eyes had filled with tears. I thought so, she said.
They made love, leaving the wonderful dinner cooling on the table. And hours later, when she slept and he scrubbed the beige carpet, he felt like a million bucks.
He’d been mostly successful but a small stain had remained. The carpet was perhaps not ruined but no longer what it had been. And during the few hours of sleep he got that night, his euphoria faded and he started to worry that Jules would regret more than simply offering him wine.
But the next morning, Jules had glanced at the stain and waved it away. She had left for work wearing her fancy clothes and expensive perfume, and he stayed behind. When he stared at the damage, he knew. She was too good for him. He was going to stain her life—maybe not ruin it, but certainly damage it.
He hadn’t confessed his concerns. Not that morning, not that next night when they’d been back in her very comfortable bed, nor anytime over the next weeks. She’d have told him he was wrong.
But he knew he wasn’t.
Now, as he returned to his leather chair in the corner of her room, there was no chance of spilling salsa on the bed. He sat down and balanced his plate on his lap.
When Jules had suggested he use her room for a nap
, he’d understood that she wanted some alone time with Charity. Fine by him. He could work in her room just as well as anywhere else.
Well, that wasn’t true.
She still wore the same perfume, and it was stronger in here. That interfered with his concentration, and the big bed in the center of the room didn’t help. There was no way he was lying down. It was too intimate, too much, to share the same space, even if he was fully dressed and she was nowhere in sight.
There was something going on between Jules and Charity that he didn’t understand. Jules was wound up tight. He’d been able to see it in the set of her jaw.
That bothered him because Jules was supersmart and very intuitive. If she was worried about Charity, or concerned about something that Charity was up to, then that put his anxiety off the charts.
His cell rang and he looked at the number. Detective Mannis. Good. Royce had left him a message fifteen minutes ago.
“Thanks for calling me back,” he said.
“No problem. You mentioned an incident.”
Royce told him about the bottle thrower. The man listened carefully. “Well, I’m glad Ms. Cambridge wasn’t hit,” he said. “Anything, even a bottle, thrown from a distance can have some stinging power.”
Yeah, but generally not deadly. “Maybe he’s playing with her,” he said. “I wanted to know if you’d be able to get the security tapes from the hotel and the conference center. I want to see if he was wearing a conference badge and I really want to know where he went after he disappeared back into the hotel.”
“I’ll make some calls,” he said.
“Thank you,” Royce said. He ended the call. In the meantime, he had plenty to do. He clicked to see if any of the background information he’d ordered had come back. He saw that the report for Charity was available.
Charity White. Born in Brooklyn. Moved to South Carolina when she was two. Her mother was Linette White and the two of them had lived in the same house until Charity was seventeen. She’d been a solid B student through high school.
She’d been arrested the summer after she’d graduated from high school for retail theft under $300. Pled guilty and successfully completed her six months of probation. Weeks after that ended, she moved to a different address than her mother. Still in Charleston but closer to the coast.
She got a job at a discount chain where they bragged everything was a dollar but it really wasn’t. Got a roommate, too. Her name was Louisa Goodall, a nursing student at the local junior college. Cable in Louisa’s name, electric and gas in Charity’s.
The rent on the apartment was $1,500 a month. The checks had been written by Louisa Goodall with no obvious reimbursement from Charity.
Nice friend to have.
Charity’s paychecks had all been cashed at the same grocery store. No record of a checking or savings account.
Maybe she paid for all the groceries. Maybe she bought drugs with her money. Hard to know.
But he couldn’t fault kids for attempting to spread their wings. After all, he’d done much the same, except that his escape had been to enlist in the air force.
She’d stayed at the job for more than four years. But then quit shortly after her mother had died eight months ago.
No record of her working after that. What the hell had she lived on? Her mother hadn’t left any trust fund. There had been $1,311 in her mother’s checking account the day the woman had died. No savings. No retirement accounts. No life insurance. Unpaid vet bills for her golden retriever.
It really was amazing how much information was readily available.
With a high school diploma, some work history and a relatively clean rap sheet, Charity should have been able to get a job. But unless she’d worked for cash, there was no record.
Three months ago, the lease on Louisa and Charity’s apartment had ended. And based off the cell phone activity, they’d picked up stakes and moved to Las Vegas.
But there was no record of utility hookup here for either of them. He knew Charity had somehow ended up with Bobby Boyd but had no idea where her friend had landed.
He was willing to bet big money that Charity had been hanging with Louisa Goodall last night. But why so secretive? Why not just tell him that she was meeting a friend from back home?
He chewed the lunch he hadn’t wanted, but it tasted pretty good. Had it been a lucky guess or had Jules remembered his penchant for ordering Mexican food? Kind of like he’d remembered her love for dark chocolate.
Kind of like he remembered where she liked to be touched. Just so. And how her tight body had felt around him when she’d—
His cell rang. He looked at the number and felt almost embarrassed. He was acting like a seventeen-year-old with raging hormones, and Detective Morris was busy trying to solve the case. “Morgan,” he answered.
“I’m sending a video to your phone,” the detective said. “It’s actually three different videos that we spliced together. We found your bottle thrower. Have him from the minute he came into the hotel, took the escalator to the second floor, crossed over the walkway to the conference center and waited on the second floor. He was there for about ten minutes, just leaning over the railing, before he pulled the bottle out of his pocket. There’s people all around him but he’s not paying any attention to them and they’re not really noticing him.”
“Until the one guy shouted,” Royce said.
“Yeah. That might have rushed him and affected his aim. All I know is that once he let go of the bottle, there’s a couple-second delay before he runs.”
“Probably was seeing if he’d hit his target?”
“Maybe. Although he wasn’t being too careful about it. He was pretty much still hanging over the railing.”
Royce knew that. In fact, that’s why he’d gotten a pretty good look at the guy. “Then what do you have?”
“After he runs from the second floor, he uses the crosswalk to get back to the hotel.”
Royce knew that. He’d chased him that far. “Then?”
“He takes the elevator on the second floor up to the third floor, switches elevators in the lobby, takes the second one up to the sixth floor, and then immediately accesses the stairs.”
“I assume there are cameras in the stairways.”
“Of course. He goes all the way to the first floor and exits via a side door of the hotel. We lose him in sidewalk traffic then. I’ve got a technician trying to find him again but I’m not hopeful. Easy to slip away in that many people.”
Royce cursed all the people who visited Vegas. Why the hell couldn’t they just stay home and lose their money?
“Is he known to the police?” Royce asked.
“Not to me. But that’s why I want you to look at the video. Let me know if you recognize him.”
“Okay. I will. Thank you.” Royce hung up, and within seconds the video had arrived. He watched it twice. The man was white, wore a cheap-looking blue sweatshirt, blue jeans and red tennis shoes. He looked to be about thirty. His hair was brown. No visible tattoos. No jewelry, not even a wedding ring.
Royce didn’t believe he’d ever seen the man. He knew he needed to show it to Jules. And almost as if there was some telepathic connection, there was a knock on the door.
“Hey, it’s me,” she said.
Holy hell, he thought as he almost dropped his plate. He thought of the memories he’d been indulging in before Detective Mannis had called. If she really was able to read his mind, he was in big trouble. “Yes,” he said, already moving toward the door.
Once he opened it, she stared at him, then frowned. “Is everything okay? You look a little flushed.”
Well, of course he did. “It’s warm in here,” he said.
“Is it?” she asked, a frown on her pretty face.
“I got a video from Detective Mannis,�
� he said, hoping to divert her attention.
“And?”
He held out his phone, pressed Play. “Does this guy look familiar to you?”
She watched it once, then pressed Play to start it again. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know him.”
She sounded very disappointed. “It’s okay. We’ll figure it out,” he said. “Where’s Charity?” he asked.
“She went back down to the pool,” Jules said. “That’s why I came to get you. I wanted you to know you could come out.”
He walked over and picked up his dirty plate. “How was your lunch?” he asked.
“Good,” she said.
He stared at her. “I’m not sure I understand where you think this is going with you and Charity. Is this a onetime thing, or are you hoping to have a friendship with her?”
“Why is that necessary to define right now?” she asked. She walked toward the living room, giving him her back.
He stepped up his pace and got in front of her again. “Just stop it, Jules. I think it’s time for you to tell me the truth about Charity and why she’s so important to you.”
* * *
She desperately wanted to tell Royce everything. Desperately wanted someone else to be in on the secret, to help her think it through, to help her sort fact from fiction.
But it was possible that the truth had the potential to destroy her father. And Royce might want that very much. “Royce, I think you’re imagining things. I’m just trying to get to know her a little.”
“Did you tell her that you almost got hit in the head with a bottle earlier?”
“No.”
“Did you ask her where she was after your session?”
“No.”
“So what the hell did you two talk about while I was hiding in the bedroom?”
She wanted to smile. He was exasperated and it reminded her of the Royce she’d known eight years earlier, before he’d gotten so polished and professional.
“Rémoulade sauces and white bean chili.”
“Huh?”
Now he looked really confused. “Charity ordered the crab cakes. They came with a rémoulade sauce. She started talking about how she made a similar sauce. Then I told her how I make my famous white bean chicken chili.”