by Nancy Bush
“Yes,” Hawthorne said somewhat tersely.
“You can’t miss her place. It’s the one with the pink door.”
He hadn’t expected this investigation to be a trip down memory lane, but Hawthorne knew the development well: He and Laura had shared their first and only home there,
“Want to take her car to her, Detective?” Barkeep asked. “I’ve got the keys.”
“Sure,” Hawk said. This was the kind of task expected of the police department in Woodside, Washington.
He drove Lora Lee’s blue Subaru through the streets of Herrington Heights, the lofty name given the sprawling development. It had expanded in the sixteen years since Hawk had lived there, and now dead ends connected to more housing. Trees, skinny and small, had grown into deciduous monsters in the intervening years and Hawthorne almost drove past his old house without seeing it.
Almost.
He glanced at it quickly, as if too much sight might actually wound his eyes. No more gray cedar. No more navy door. It had been painted a dull brown and trimmed in white. He was inordinately glad. His gaze touched the mailbox. Solid gray with stick-on letters that spelled Johnson. No more flowers. No first names. The wave of sadness he’d braced himself for didn’t materialize, and he drove past with only a hint of memory tagging him.
Lora Lee’s house was on a newer street. It was small and tidy and bounded by a chain-link fence. A sluggish-looking mixed breed shepherd lifted one brow as Hawthorne headed to the front door but showed no other interest.
The bells chimed in cheery, tinny trills. Hawthorne threw a glance at the sky. Slate gray but breaking up. Maybe they were finally in for a spate of decent weather.
The door creaked open. A woman of perhaps forty peered out. Her face was lined and right now devoid of cosmetics. Weariness emanated from her, as if it were a physical force. Her eyes were faded blue and full of some inner torment or sadness.
“Lora Lee Evans? I’m Detective Hawthorne Hart from the Woodside Police Department, and I’m here to—”
He didn’t finish. Her blue eyes watered with sudden tears and she hiccupped against a sob. The weariness was sorrow, he realized belatedly, and the cause was plainly the death of one Barney Turgate.
“Come in,” she invited.
Her house was furnished in early garage sale, but she’d done a nice job of it anyway. The chair she gestured for him to take was a burgundy plush with discreet embroidered arm protectors. It was comfortable and clean. He handed her her car keys and she gazed at them for several moments, as if committing them to memory. Apparently, she hadn’t missed her vehicle much.
“Someone murdered him, didn’t they?” she asked, swallowing.
“Barney Turgate was shot several times,” Hawthorne agreed.
“How many times?” Her voice was small.
“Five, ma’am.”
She winced and turned her head. She wasn’t beautiful by any stretch of the imagination and probably never had been, but she was the kind of woman who epitomized solid loyalty and responsibility. Good wife material. Not someone to have an affair with. But by all accounts, Lora Lee and Barney had conducted an on-again-off-again affair for twenty years. “She waited for that ring,” the barkeep had told Hawthorne. Tess Trueheart to Barn’s Dick Tracy.
“He finally struck it rich,” she said bitterly, repeating what the barkeep had said. “All that talk and he finally did it, and it killed him.” More tears, falling unheeded to the hands clasped rigidly in her lap.
“How did he strike it rich?”
“I don’t know. He wouldn’t say.” She lifted a trembling chin and stared to the side, anywhere but at Hawthorne. “You could check with Manny Belding.”
Manny’s name was on a list the barkeep at the Elbow Room had supplied Hawthorne, but in the interest of discovering more information, he asked, “Who’s Manny Belding?”
Her lip curled. “A lowlife. He was thick with Barney lately. I never saw him anymore because of Manny. I called him, but he was too busy setting the ‘deal.’”
“You have no idea what this deal was?”
“Who cares?” Lora Lee gazed directly at him. “Barney’s gone. Who cares?” she repeated deliberately.
“Do you happen to know how I could get in touch with Manny Belding?”
“Hang out at any tavern in town and follow the smell. That’ll be Manny.”
Hawthorne considered, feeling empathy toward this unhappy woman. “Can you think of any other reason someone might want to kill Barney?”
“What?”
“Another motive? Other than this big deal he was involved in.”
“Like what?”
“Personal problems. Financial trouble. Passion?”
Her lips quivered. “What do you mean?”
“Did anyone hate him enough to kill him?” Hawthorne asked, feeling foolish. He suspected Barn’s number-one fan was sitting right in front of him.
“Nobody hated Barney.” Fresh tears welled. “He had his faults, but he was good.”
Hawthorne nodded. He’d gotten about all the information he was going to get.
“I loved him,” she added, as if that truth weren’t painfully obvious already. “I can’t believe he’s gone.”
Awkwardly, Hawthorne waited as she bent her head and cried and cried. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said softly.
She nodded, silent tears mourning the death of the man she loved.
* * *
The sun had nearly set by the time Hawthorne returned to his house, a small log cabin down a long, wooded drive. There were two bedrooms and a loft. Hawthorne checked both his and Jesse’s bedroom and then the loft, but Jesse was nowhere to be found. No note either. For some reason this pissed Hawthorne off more than usual, and in a fit of restlessness, he climbed back in his Jeep and went in search of his errant son.
He wasn’t at Brad’s, but Mrs. Barlow gave him the name and address of one Tawny Fielding, the object, apparently, of his son’s affections. This was news to Hawthorne. He couldn’t decide whether it was a positive sign or not. An interest in girls could be bad or good, depending on who the girl was and what the circumstances were. He hoped with little hope that this Tawny person would be a good influence on Jesse, but the likelihood was that she was just one more headache to add to the growing list.
The Fieldings lived in a modest ranch-style home about a half mile from Hummingbird River, accessed down a curving driveway. Pulling his Jeep up behind a black Miata convertible, ragtop closed against the threatening rain, he suddenly gasped when the Miata’s backup lights flashed on and the damn driver threw it into reverse without looking.
“Hey!” Hawk yelled, laying on the horn.
The loud blast caught the driver’s attention and the Miata screeched to a jerking halt. Muttering beneath his breath, Hawk jumped from the car. The driver of the Miata did the same, and Hawk watched one denim-clad leg—definitely female—slide out of the car. Tawny? he thought dimly. But no, this brownish-blond woman was closer to thirty.
And then he looked at her face and his jaw slackened. He stared. “Shit,” he muttered in shock.
Those aqua eyes. That uncompromising stare. Those pink lips.
Liz Havers.
Jesse’s mom.
“Shit.”
Chapter Seven
Liz was in a vortex. Down, down, down to a distant, ever-smaller core where she would be squeezed into separate atoms and flung into a distant galaxy.
Hawthorne Hart.
Her stomach flipped. Her heart thundered. A rushing in her ears deafened her. Looking at him made her eyes hurt.
He was poleaxed. He stared. The only word passing his lips was “shit.” She was so numb this seemed the height of conversation. Absurd. Ridiculous.
“I’m going to throw up,” a voice said from far away. Her voice. She staggered two steps, rested a shaking hand on the hood of the Miata, and lost her lunch in deep, retching spasms.
Hawthorne was beside her in an instant. A cool han
d on the back of her neck. Humiliating. Deeply, deeply humiliating.
She couldn’t do anything but vomit.
“Relax,” he told her. The voice was too familiar. But strained. He was suffering, too.
Relax, she thought half hysterically. Relax!
It felt like an eternity before she could lift her head. Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she wanted to cry with embarrassment. She couldn’t turn around and face him. Jesus. Hawthorne Hart. God Almighty. She’d known it would be bad but hadn’t expected to feel so completely annihilated.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
Liz inhaled and exhaled several times, screwing up her courage. With a monumental effort, she managed to twist enough to meet his eyes. Their blue-gray depths seemed to swirl with unspoken accusations. She couldn’t stand it. She just couldn’t stand it.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
“Are you Mrs. Fielding?” he asked.
“What?”
“Is this your house?”
“Oh.” Liz laughed half hysterically again. For a moment, she’d thought he didn’t recognize her, but of course he did. He simply thought she was the owner of the house. It made perfect sense. “No, I’m . . .” What was she? Liz shook her head. “You’re here to see Kristy.” For some reason, Liz found this incomprehensible. “She just got out of the hospital. Major surgery. What do you want?”
He shook his head, as if the conversation was moving too fast. Small wonder. It was moving too fast. Liz felt slammed back in time. Hawthorne looked older, yet at the same time he appeared exactly the same. Even the underlying pain that had been so evident then—a result, she now knew, of his wife’s death—was still there at some level. And his magnetic attraction, she realized unwillingly, was as powerful as ever as well.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I’m a friend.”
“I didn’t know you were in Woodside.”
“I moved here this summer.”
“Moved here?” He seemed to shake himself from his reverie. His gaze sharpened on her face, and suddenly Liz felt naked. She saw herself through his eyes: jeans, blue cotton shirt, white sneakers, no socks, no makeup. Thirty-four years old with less sense of style than when she’d been a teenager.
Tough.
“You’re living in Woodside?” he demanded, as if he could scarcely believe it.
“I’m the resident school psychologist.”
He swore bitterly beneath his breath. “Like hell.”
That did it. “I want to meet my son,” she told him baldly. “Hawthorne Hart, Jr.,” she added with a trace of bitterness. “I know you work with the department and I’ve been planning to make an appointment with you.”
“You wanted to abort him.”
Liz sucked in a shocked breath. How unfair! It wasn’t true. She hadn’t wanted the abortion. She never would have gone through with it. She’d just been swept along the crest of her parents’ tidal wave.
But to bring it up now. As if that were the only thing that mattered sixteen years after the fact. Bastard. Did he have no soul? No concept of what it had been like for her?
No. He just didn’t care, that’s all.
“I don’t give a damn what you think,” she told him heatedly. “I’m going to meet my son, and hopefully have some kind of relationship with him, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it!”
“Oh no?”
His soft threat only strengthened Liz’s courage. “No,” she whispered, meeting his gaze. To hell with attraction. She hated him. Lots of attractive people were worth hating. Hawthorne Hart was one.
“You think he’s going to really want to know you?” Hawthorne posed.
He was hitting all her worst fears. She could imagine how she’d been portrayed; how he had portrayed her. She was the vile, wicked killer of offspring, the nastiest villain of all. No fairy-tale monster could compete with her pure evilness.
“Yes, he’s going to want to know me,” she told him in a remarkably controlled voice. Remarkable when you considered how her insides were gooey mush.
Hawthorne’s lips twisted. “You don’t have any idea,” he said softly.
“When can I see him?”
It was as if she brought a new question to his mind, His eyes widened a bit and he threw a sharp glance toward the Fielding house. Liz’s gaze followed his. What? she wondered vaguely.
As if on cue, the front door suddenly opened and Jesse and Brad sauntered out, Tawny shadowing them. The three teenagers stood on the porch for a moment; then Jesse, as if his radar had suddenly switched on, jerked around to regard Liz and Hawthorne. His posture changed to instant insolence. He narrowed his gaze, flipped his hair, then separated from the pack, slowly ambling to where Liz and Hawthorne stood by the Miata.
Liz shifted her gaze to Hawthorne, perplexed. Did Jesse think she’d gone to the police? Hawthorne didn’t wear a uniform, but maybe they’d connected when he and Brad had gone to see Chief Dortner.
“Looking for me?” Jesse asked belligerently.
Liz opened her mouth to respond, then was stunned when Hawthorne answered, “I heard you were here.”
“Who told you?”
Liz stared. The build. Those eyes. The quicksilver déjà vu that passed over her every time she saw him again. Her breath tore into her lungs. Now she really was going to pass out. Jesse? Jesse was Hawthorne Hart, Jr.?
“So, you’ve already met,” Hawthorne uttered bitterly.
“Who?” Jesse stared at his father in bafflement. He glanced around, his gaze touching on Liz. “Oh. Yeah.”
“It’s all a big secret, isn’t it?” Hawthorne added, throwing a cold look Liz’s way. “You could have told me.”
“No, I—” she began, realizing he thought she and Jesse had already learned each other’s identity. But Jesse cut her off.
“She was the one who talked me into reporting the body, okay? Don’t be pissed off at her. She’s Brad’s shrink,” he added by way of belated introduction. “He just wanted to talk to her first, so we—wouldn’t get in trouble.”
Silence pooled around them. Jesse, picking up the vibes, merely kept frowning, as if there were undercurrents here he’d been missing, which indeed there were. Hawthorne stood in utter silence and immobility, as if movement would somehow give him away. Liz, reeling from information overload, simply waited like a convicted murderer for the death sentence to be read.
It was a bitch all the way around.
“Hey . . .” Jesse murmured.
She stared at him. Her son. Her son! The familiarity she’d felt was really the connection of mother to child. Flesh of my flesh. My God. She couldn’t take it in. Knees buckling, she sank against the car.
“Hey,” Jesse said again, reaching a hand out to steady her. His fingers closed around her upper arm as Hawthorne swept in a sharp breath. “Are you okay?”
Liz nodded.
“Jesse,” Brad called. He and Tawny were walking their way.
Jesse swiveled around, long hair swinging. He kept a hand burning into her arm, steadying her. My son. Jesse is my son.
“We’re going to my house,” Brad yelled.
“You and Tawny?”
“Yeah, just for a while. You coming?”
Jesse nodded, then gazed searchingly at Liz. The color of his eyes was a shade or two off from Hawthorne’s, closer to Liz’s own greenish-blue shade. And his nose was more like hers, but that lantern jaw was all Hawthorne Hart. “What the hell’s going on here?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Hawk bit out.
“Are you harassing a citizen?” Jesse asked his father with a touch of humor.
“Come on!” Brad waved at him to join them.
“I’ll be fine,” Liz told him, and with a last puzzled look he released his grip on her arm and fell in line with Brad.
“See ya later,” Tawny told Liz, then she swiveled back to get a good look at her. “You sure you’re all right?”
&nbs
p; “Yeah.” Liz’s voice was squeaky.
“Nothing’s wrong?”
“No. Is your mom still—resting?” she struggled out.
Tawny nodded, throwing a wary glance Hawthorne’s way. “I’m just going for a few minutes,” she warned, as if Hawk might think less of her for leaving. “I’m coming right back.”
“I’ll stay.” Liz swallowed hard. “Take your time.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t go,” Tawny said, glancing, and then glancing away, at the remains of Liz’s lunch lying on the ground.
“What?” Brad and Jesse demanded in unison.
“Go,” Liz urged. With an effort, she reached out and touched Tawny’s shoulder. She managed a quavering smile. “I’m just—tired.”
Tawny’s concerned gaze traveled from Liz to Hawthorne, who’d remained remarkably silent up to that point. As if her look started his engine, he flicked a glance at his son and said, “What’s the chance of finding some time to talk to you?”
“What do you mean?” Jesse was cautious.
Liz drew a breath.
“I mean, I came looking for you to bring you home. There’re a couple things I’d like to talk about, one of them being Barney Turgate’s death.”
“You think I’m involved?” Jesse was indignant.
“No.”
Jesse gazed at him through narrowed lashes. “I’ll be back later,” he said abruptly, then took off in long, ground-devouring strides up the crooked lane to the road to Brad’s. Tawny and Brad followed.
And Hawthorne and Liz were alone.
“I want to talk about this later,” Hawthorne said tautly.
“Fine.” Rotely, Liz opened the door of the Miata and pulled a card from her purse.
With a snort, Hawthorne accepted the tiny white card. “Elizabeth Havers, teen shrink.”
“Yep.”
“Is this a way to ask me to stop by your office?”
She shook her head. She’d only given him the card as a means to buy time. “There’s a little coffee place, The Coffee Spot.”
“I know it.”
“We could meet there after you see—Jesse,” she pointed out, diffidently saying his name. He’d always been Hawthorne Hart, Jr. to her. And he’d always been an infant in her mind, even though she’d known he’d grown up. Now she had to face that he was a flesh-and-blood boy—no, man—and it made her feel strange and incredibly used up. “It stays open ’til nine.”