I heard it in her voice. “He called again, didn’t he?” I said.
She let out a long breath. “I was asleep. He said, ‘If you know what’s good for you, you’ll tell your boyfriend to turn in his badge.’”
“Was that all?”
She nodded. “I said, ‘Who is this?’ But he hung up.”
“Was it—?”
“The same voice, yes. It sounded the same.”
I reached for her, and she rolled to me. I lay down on top of the covers and held her head against my chest. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have gone.”
“He would’ve called anyway,” she mumbled. “It’s okay. I’m not afraid.”
“It’s okay to be afraid.”
“Well, I’m not.” She tilted her head back. “Brady, who knows you’ve got that badge?”
“In this town? By now, everybody, probably.”
She nodded. “I want to go to sleep now.”
“Okay.” I stood up, shucked off my clothes, then slid in beside her. I kissed her cheek, and she rolled onto her belly.
A few minutes later her breathing slowed and deepened. I stared up through the skylight for a long time listening to the quiet rhythms of Alex sleeping beside me.
The ringing of the telephone interrupted a muddled dream, which I forgot instantly. As I climbed out of sleep, I became aware of Alex muttering, shifting her position, groping for the phone, then saying, “H’lo?”
I sat up quickly and watched her face. She was nodding at the telephone and running her fingers through her hair. It was somebody she knew, I realized.
I slumped back onto my pillow. Through the skylight I saw that the sky overhead was pewter, the way it is just before the rising sun turns it blue. I glanced at my watch. It was a little after six. I yawned, rolled over onto my side facing away from Alex, and closed my eyes.
I felt her shifting, hitching herself up against the headboard. Then she murmured, “Oh. Oh, my God, no.”
I felt the tension in her body, and I turned to her. She was sitting straight up, but her head was bent so that her hair bracketed her face. She was gripping the phone so hard that the veins on the back of her hand stood out. She was holding her free hand over her mouth, and her eyes were full.
I touched her arm and mouthed, “What?”
She met my eyes, and at that moment hers brimmed over. She gave her head a small shake, then looked down. “What can we do?” she said into the phone.
She listened, then nodded. “Of course.” She glanced at me, then said into the phone, “Yes, he’s right here… No, it’s all right. Hold on.”
Alex looked at me, then held the phone out to me. “It’s Susannah.”
I took the phone from her and held it for a moment, trying to read Alex’s expression.
All I saw was sadness.
Fragments of my lost dream flashed in my head. It had been a guilt dream.
I put the phone to my ear. “Susannah?”
I heard a quick exhale. “Oh, Brady…”
“What is it?”
She hesitated for so long that I glanced at Alex and arched my eyebrows. She turned her head away.
“I’m sorry,” said Susannah, in that husky soft voice of hers. “It’s Noah. My father, Brady. Shit. I can’t… Damn him… I found him. He’s… he died.”
CHAPTER 24
“WHAT HAPPENED, SUSANNAH?” I said. “Can you talk about it? Where are you?”
“I’m here,” she said. “Home. It’s—I’m all alone now. They came and took him away, Brady, and now it’s terribly empty here. Alex said you’d come over. The two of you. Can you? I don’t think I could stand to be alone right now.”
Alex had slipped out of bed and gone into the bathroom. “Of course,” I said. “We’ll be right there.”
On the ride over to Susannah’s, Alex said, “It’s flattering, isn’t it? That she called us, I mean.”
“She told me she couldn’t think of anyone else to call.”
“She must know a million people,” she said. “I mean, there’s Paul, for God’s sake. Wouldn’t you think…?”
“Maybe she tried him.” I shrugged. “You don’t expect someone to act logically under those circumstances. Hell, she just found her father’s dead body. Anyway, my impression is that she and Paul are not exactly…”
“In love?” said Alex.
I nodded. “I don’t sense much passion between them.” I was thinking of what Susannah had said about Paul while we were lying on a blanket beside Cutter’s Run, the passion I had felt between us, the passion she’d denied feeling for Paul.
“I think he feels strongly for her,” said Alex. “But, yes, she seems to be tolerating him. She bosses him around, and he obeys her like a little puppy dog, almost too eager to please.”
When we pulled up in front of the Hollingsworth Orchards farmstand, Susannah was sitting on the porch steps holding a coffee mug. Alex and I got out of the car, and she got up and came toward us.
Alex met her halfway and opened her arms, and they hugged each other. Susannah was several inches taller than Alex. She laid her forehead on Alex’s shoulder, and Alex patted her back and murmured to her.
After a while, Alex gave her a squeeze and Susannah kissed Alex’s cheek. They stood apart, and Susannah came to me and put both of her arms around my waist. I hugged her against me. “I’m sorry,” was all I could think of to say, and she held on to me and said nothing for what seemed like a long time.
Finally Susannah broke away and said, “The coffee’s hot.”
The three of us walked around to the back of the house and climbed up onto the deck. “I’ll get the coffee,” said Alex.
She slipped in through the sliding glass doors. Susannah and I sat at the table, gazing out toward the orchard. The early-morning sun was burning through the fog, and the low-angled light painted it in blurry shades of green, yellow, and red and caught droplets of dew on the grass. It looked like a field of diamonds.
“This is where it happened,” she said.
“Here? On the deck?”
She nodded.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I really do.” She took a deep breath and gazed out at the orchard. “He went to bed earlier than usual. Around nine. Said he was tired. He went out on Arlo yesterday afternoon, after—” she looked up at me and gave me a quick smile—“after I got back.”
I nodded. After she got back from her encounter with me, is what she meant.
“He hadn’t done that for a long time,” she said. “After my mother died, he seemed to lose all interest in riding Arlo or checking out the orchard. But yesterday, for some reason, he did. Anyway, I guess it tired him out. I’d hoped to talk to him about—about what you and I talked about. But he went to bed. I figured, okay, I’d confront him tomorrow, make him talk to me, find out what’s going on with him.” She smiled quickly and shook her head.
“He was dying,” I said. “He told me he had maybe eighteen months.”
She nodded. “Yeah, well, that’s pretty much what I figured. But I didn’t want to guess. I wanted to know. I wanted him to tell me.” She shrugged. “Anyway, I went to bed around eleven, read for a while, and went to sleep. Sometime later I heard him get up, so—”
She looked up. I turned. Alex was standing on the other side of the glass door holding a tray. I got up and slid it open for her.
“Thanks,” she said. She put the tray on the table. It held a carafe and three mugs. She poured the mugs full, then sat with us. “Sorry to interrupt,” she said.
I reached for her hand. “Susannah had just started to tell me what happened.”
Alex gave my hand a quick squeeze, then let go. She picked up her mug in both hands.
Susannah took a sip of coffee. “Daddy gets up two or three times a night. He clomps around, bangs the sliding doors, and goes out on the deck to relieve himself. Even in the winter he insists on peeing off the deck in the middle of the night.�
�� She glanced at Alex and smiled quickly, as if to say, “Men, you know?”
“He wakes me up every time,” she continued. “And I always lie there until he comes back inside, bangs the sliders shut, and then slams his bedroom door. Then I go back to sleep. Well, this time—last night—he didn’t come back in. I lay there, and I was thinking maybe I’d dozed off and didn’t hear him. But I knew I wouldn’t get back to sleep until I was sure he was back in bed. So I went downstairs. His bedroom door was open. I peeked in, and he wasn’t there. So I went into the kitchen and looked out on the deck, figuring I’d see him standing there in his long johns, peeing off the edge.” She smiled. “He wore those red flannel long johns to bed every single night, right through the summer.” She shook her head. “Anyhow, I didn’t see him. So I went out there. The sky was full of stars last night, and the moon was about half full, and my first thought was how bright and pretty it was, and maybe Daddy had decided to go for a little stroll in the moonlight. Which was dumb. He wouldn’t do that. But it’s what I was thinking. Anyway, I walked over to the edge—right over there.” She pointed at the place Noah had called his “pissing platform,” where he could aim at an old rusty harrow that lay in the weeds. “And then I saw this—this red on the ground.”
Susannah took a deep breath. She looked at Alex, then at me. She blinked a couple of times, then bent to her coffee mug.
“Susannah,” I said. “You don’t have to—”
“No,” she said quickly. “I want to. It was Noah, of course. Noah in those dumb red flannel long johns. He was so still. The minute I saw him, I knew. That he was dead, I mean. And you know what my first thought was?” She looked at me.
I shook my head.
“My first thought was, ‘You old bastard. You went and died on me without talking to me first. You talked to Brady, but you didn’t talk to me.’ That seemed so unfair.” She gave her head a quick little shake. “Anyway, I went down and poked at him and yelled at him, and he didn’t move. He wasn’t breathing. I finally had enough sense to check for a pulse, and I couldn’t find one.” She picked up her coffee mug, took a quick sip, and put it down. “So I sat there beside him in the goldenrod and milkweed, me in my nightie and him in his red flannels, and I told him it wasn’t fair for him to die like that, out there in the weeds at night while I was upstairs. After a while I went in and made my phone call. They sent an ambulance, and one of the EMTs checked him and said he was dead, and they put him on a stretcher and loaded him into their wagon. They said I could go with him if I wanted to, and I said, ‘Why?’ And they just shook their heads, because there was nothing I could do. So they drove away with him, and I sat here on the deck, and after a while the birds began singing and the sky started to get light, and finally I figured it would be okay to call you.” She smiled. “The only thing I could think of doing was calling you guys.”
“You should have called right away,” said Alex. “We would have come over.”
“It was okay,” said Susannah. “I had some thinking to do. Things I had to settle with Noah. It was good. I think I’ll be okay now.” She smiled, first at me and then at Alex. “I really appreciate this. You’re good friends. Listen. How about some breakfast?”
“Let me get it,” I said.
Susannah started to speak, but Alex reached over and touched her arm. “Brady makes a good breakfast, if you’re into cholesterol.”
“I really don’t know what we’ve got,” said Susannah.
I stood up. “I’ll forage.”
I went into the kitchen. I found some eggs in the refrigerator and a bag of raisin bagels in the freezer and a big cast-iron skillet in the drawer under the oven. Further exploration yielded a wedge of cheddar cheese, orange juice, margarine, and milk.
I scrambled the eggs and cheese, toasted the bagels, and poured three glasses of orange juice. Then I went to the sliding doors. Alex and Susannah were leaning over the table toward each other, talking intently. I slid open the door and cleared my throat. “Come and get it,” I said.
“Smells great,” said Susannah.
“The trick to gourmet cooking,” I said, “is to be sure everybody’s really hungry.”
Alex came in, loaded her plate, and took her eggs, bagel, and juice out onto the deck. Then Susannah helped herself.
“You okay?” I said.
She nodded. “Yes. Alex is pretty special. You’re lucky.” She broke off a piece of scrambled egg with her fingers and put it into her mouth. “Delicious,” she said. “You’re a bundle of surprises, Brady Coyne. I guess Alex is pretty lucky, too.”
“Alex is a good cook,” I said. “We generally take turns.”
“I wasn’t really talking about your cooking,” she said.
We sat at the table on the deck. Susannah took a couple of small bites, then put down her fork and stared out at the orchard. After a minute, she shook her head, picked up her fork, and began eating again, and just about the time we were dabbing our mouths with our napkins and patting our stomachs, we heard a car door slam out front.
“Oh, shit,” mumbled Susannah. I glanced at her. Her eyes were wide and watery. She was shaking her head. “I don’t think I can…”
I stood up. “I’ll see who it is.”
“I don’t want to talk to anybody,” said Susannah. “Tell them to go away.”
I nodded, then went around to the front of the house. Sheriff Dickman was standing on the porch. “Hey,” I called to him.
He turned and came to me. “I heard about Noah,” he said.
“You were friends?”
He shrugged. “Not quite. Acquaintances would be more accurate. He was a curmudgeonly old bastard. I liked him better than he liked me. He once told me he’d never voted for me. Said I was a waste of taxpayers’ money.” He smiled. “Sometimes I think he was right. Anyway, I’ve got to talk to Susannah, and I do not look forward to it.”
“She’s doing pretty well,” I said.
“Yeah, well, she might not be doing so well when I get done with her. Gimme a smoke.”
I gave my pack to him. He fumbled out a cigarette and then I held my lighter for him. He lit up, blew out a long plume of smoke, and peered at me through narrowed eyes. “See,” he said, “I’m the one who’s got to tell Susannah that it looks like her father was murdered.”
CHAPTER 25
DICKMAN SAT HEAVILY ON the front steps, and I sat beside him. “The EMTs screwed up big-time,” he said. “Noah was dead when they got here. They should’ve left him there, called my office or the state police. Unattended death. Standard procedure.” He took a drag off his cigarette, then waved his hand at the smoke. “Whatever. It was dark, middle of the night. Old guy who keeled over.” He shrugged. “Still, inexcusable. Anyway, when they got him to the hospital, they needed a doctor to pronounce him dead. Doc Blanchard was there, and when he took a look at Noah he called me, woke me up—it was about four A.M.—told me I better haul my ass on over there. Taciturn old coot wouldn’t tell me anything more on the telephone. When I got there, he took me to where they had Noah’s body and peeled back the sheet. It wasn’t that apparent until Blanchard pointed it out to me.” The sheriff dropped his half-smoked cigarette on the ground and ground it under his heel. “There were red marks on his throat.”
I frowned. “You telling me he was strangled?”
He nodded. “We need an autopsy to make it official, of course. But I can’t wait around. I’ve got to talk to Susannah.”
“That’ll be hard for her to hear,” I said.
Dickman sighed. “No harder for her than for me,” he said. “I’m the guy who’s got to ask her the questions.”
“If he was strangled,” I said, “wouldn’t Susannah have noticed? I mean, wouldn’t his face be purple or his eyes and tongue bulging out or something?”
Dickman shook his head. “Doc Blanchard thinks he actually died of a heart attack or stroke.”
“Induced by being strangled,” I said.
“Something like that.” He
stood up. “It’s still murder. I gotta talk to her.”
“Want me to sit in on it?”
“Play lawyer for her, you mean?”
I shrugged. Noah had asked me to help Susannah with legal matters after he died. “Play friend for her,” I said.
“How’s about you play deputy sheriff for me,” said Dickman. “Pay attention and keep your mouth shut.”
We walked around to the back of the house. Alex and Susannah were sitting at the table. They turned to watch us as we approached. Dickman went up onto the deck, nodded and smiled at Alex, then turned to Susannah, took off his hat, and said, “I’m very sorry about your father, Susannah.”
He held out his hand, and she took it. “You came to extend your sympathies?” she said. “That’s very nice.”
“Noah could be an irascible old goat. Opinionated, hard-headed, and I don’t think I ever knew a man tighter with a dollar.” Dickman smiled. “I liked him a lot.” He pulled out a chair, sat at the table, and looked at Alex. “Any more coffee?”
“Sure. I’ll get it.” She glanced at me, then picked up the empty carafe and went into the kitchen.
I sat beside Susannah. Dickman leaned forward. “Susannah,” he said, “I’ve known your father for many years.”
“Yes,” she said softly. “You’d drop by on some pretext or other and Daddy would give you a bag of apples.”
“I always tried to pay for them. He’d never let me. I kept telling him I couldn’t accept handouts. Against my ethics. He told me not to be stupid.” Dickman smiled. “I ate a lot of apples while I was driving around York County.” He reached across the table and put his hand over Susannah’s. “Noah was murdered,” he said quietly.
Her eyes widened. “What did you say?”
“Somebody killed him.”
She hugged herself. Her eyes kept shifting between Dickman and me as if she was waiting for one of us to admit it was a joke. Then she shook her head. “But I saw him,” she said. “There was no …”
“He was strangled,” said Dickman. “There were marks on his throat.”
“I didn’t see any marks.”
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