After Lily left, Hal had not lacked for female companionship himself even though he worked many twenty-hour days until the greenhouse began to prosper. He hired a full-time nanny for Palm until he was four, when he enrolled the boy in nursery school.
Hadn’t one of the nannies been Vicki’s mother, while she attended business school at night? But Vicki had not stayed there with her mother. Royce seemed to recall that Vicki lived with her mother’s sister.
Royce was outside one day chatting idly with the two women who lived in the Sage house at the time. One had wondered why Hal let a woman like that care for his son. The other woman’s laughing response allowed that it must be convenient for Hal. A live-in for himself who also cared for his son. Was that arrangement one of the things Vicki could have told Palm about his old man? And did she resent the fact that her mother took care of Palm and left her with her aunt?
With the success of the greenhouse and Palm in school, Hal shortened his workdays. He was seen with a wide range of eligible, and it was rumored, some ineligible, ladies in Fall Creek. Evenings when a strange car stood in the driveway, she and Eddy sometimes heard lighthearted sounds from the softly-lit greenhouse. High-pitched squeals of laughter and a lower masculine rumble.
While Palm was growing up, Hal had been discreet with his liaisons. But when Palm reached late high school and then went away to college, it was not unusual to see a strange car overnight next door at least once a week. Only one of the latest liaisons had lasted more than a few months. Last summer and fall, Royce had seen a small yellow sports car in the Woodstone drive several times a week.
Now that she thought about it, she’d seen that same yellow car pick up Chrys once or twice when she was house-sitting next door. Did it belong to Brenda at the pharmacy? Royce remembered how she’d flirted with Hal on Friday. But she didn’t remember seeing the little car parked in the Woodstone driveway since New Year’s.
Royce walked through the house, trying to come up with a plan to save Palm and yet keep Eddy’s secret. Revealing Palm’s true paternity couldn’t help him, could it? Mightn’t it just make his situation bleaker? Especially after the dead woman’s identity was made public. The police could say Palm hated his mother for leaving him behind, those years ago. Did he? She realized she’d never actually discussed Lily with Palm, or how he might feel about her.
Passing her desk, she picked up the drugstore bag that held Devon’s flea medication. She dumped the bottle out and a piece of paper fluttered to the carpet. Picking it up, she noticed the letters at the top of the cash register receipt. BAB. Must be Brenda’s initials. Where had she seen those letters? It didn’t feel like a recent memory. But maybe she was just remembering previous receipts from the pharmacy with Brenda’s initials on them. With a shrug, she dismissed the small mystery and crumpled the paper, dropping it into the wastebasket next to the desk.
She continued her pacing and Jared Granite’s words, as his flint hard eyes met hers, echoed in her mind. “I have to warn you again not to leave town, Royce.” He’d seemed to pay little attention to her story about the passport mixup.
She knew her own eyes had been filled with disbelief. Did he actually suspect that she was capable of such a brutal crime? And against the woman who had once been her neighbor?
If Jared knew the secret Royce was so loath to reveal, he would probably arrest her immediately on suspicion of murdering her long-ago rival. If Palm didn’t know about his true paternity, he had no motive to kill the mother who had deserted him as a baby. And the only way he could know was if the man he called dad had told him. That left only Royce herself as a suspect.
Royce found herself standing before the glass of her kitchen door, staring through it at the redwood deck, dark and wet. Devon chuffed from the corner where he lay on his padded bed. Soft rain still fell through the glow of the landscape lights and on the spring blossoms of her garden.
Flowers on a dead woman’s ankle. The subdued lights outside abruptly grew even dimmer as the full truth crashed into Royce’s mind. She put out a hand, reaching for a chair back. Instead she touched Devon as he pushed against her thigh. He had padded across the floor to stand beside her, keenly attuned to her need before it came.
Chapter Eighteen
Hand on the dog’s back, Royce reached her desk chair and fell into it. She tried to bring some order to her chaotic thoughts. Jared Granite said the woman who had been beaten to death at the motel—Fern Rock—had been identified as Heather Forrest, also known as Lily Woodstone. Palm’s mother. He’d also said the tattooed flowers encircling her ankle were daisies. That was the thing he’d said that nagged her after he left.
And Chrys had told her on the phone just that afternoon when she called while Royce was at the pharmacy about the tattooed daisies on her missing mother’s ankle. Royce knew Lily had no tattoo on her ankle while she lived in Fall Creek, but that was years ago.
Had Chrys ever mentioned her mother’s name? Royce had no memory of it, if she had. Was it really possible she and the dead woman were one and the same? Royce recalled her devastation when her own mother had died. Chrys would be back from Atlanta in the morning, to possibly face the fact of her only parent’s death.
If this chain of reasoning was true, who would tell her that her mother was dead, a victim of murder? That she and Palm were half siblings? And both had now lost their mother. How much did Palm know? Had he talked to his mother? If so, had she told him about Chrys?
Incredible as it seemed, Royce realized she was now accepting that the murdered woman, Lily Woodstone, and Chrys’s mother were the same person. Who, then, was her father? Almost immediately, as if in answer to her mental query, another long-ago conversation came back to her.
She and Chuck Brand’s twin sister, Charlotte, sat in lawn chairs at the city park. The occasion was the end-of-summer picnic for Fall Creek city employees, and a few prominent residents were invited. Charlotte nodded toward Bert Morrell and his wife, Thelma, just arriving at the open shelter.
“She took him back, I see.”
“Took him back? Did he leave?” Royce asked, not really interested, wanting only to be home. To concentrate on trying to come to terms with her husband’s infidelity and the fact she would never be a mother. She had come to the picnic and was staying a decent interval for the sake of Eddy’s career.
“The rumor mill has it he left with Lily Woodstone. He and Hal almost came to blows at the Springfest street dance. Hal accused Bert of touching his wife in a too-familiar way when they danced.”
Springfest. The Saturday night she lost her last hope of motherhood. Did Hal beat Lily when they got home, as Eddy suspected he had in the past? And while he was gone to the farmers market on Sunday, did she go next door, seeking help? Instead of advising her to seek police or legal help, Eddy provided a different kind of aid and comfort.
No, she wouldn’t think about that. She studied Thelma, five inches taller than Bert, wearing a shimmery cocktail dress and high-heeled gold sandals which dug into the dry September grass. The woman had come a long way in a couple of years. She’d been a clerk in the admitting office of the hospital when Royce was rushed to the hospital after her fall. Hal had followed them, feeling responsible, she supposed. He must have met Thelma that day, too. They’d dated for a short while after that.
Eddy was so livid when he finally got back to Royce in the ER cubicle, he didn’t see her tears at first. “Either that dumb clerk is totally incapable, or she pretended she couldn’t find my name with the department’s insurance company.”
Royce was drowsy from a shot she’d been given but still awake enough to tell him. While Thelma had kept Eddy hanging, she’d lost the child she hadn’t known she carried.
“Honey, honey. We’ll have another baby. I’m sorry I wasn’t here. The witch could see me standing there in my uniform.”
“I think she’s new in town.”
“It’s okay. Jared arrived and vouched for me. She finally processed the paperwork.”
The scenario was repeated months later when the bleeding Royce was brought to the hospital again by ambulance.
“I threatened to report her to her supervisor. She still claimed she couldn’t find the records.” Thelma’s incompetence provided an outlet for Eddy’s disappointment. Royce drifted in and out, trying to deal with her own pain. She caught a few more words.
“She said, ‘You cops. You don’t enforce the law. You’re no better than the criminals. Let the supervisor find it.’ And got up and walked away.”
Eddy told Royce later that a fellow cop who’d had the same thing happen to him learned that Thelma was fired. “And good riddance.”
Thelma was so obvious in her disdain for all police. Why? Until she met Eddy, Royce had preferred to have no contact with policemen either. Even though the young officer who came after her mother’s death had been kind.
A few months later, Royce saw the wedding announcement when Thelma married top luxury-car salesman, Bert Morrell. They bought the local Lincoln/Cadillac dealership, switched it to Lexus, and set out to make it the biggest in the state. She’d heard Thelma received some kind of inheritance which provided the operating capital. Since then Thelma often graced what passed for the society page in the Fall Creek Tribune. But why did Charlotte and the local rumor mill suspect Lily had left town with Bert Morrell?
“You didn’t know he left when she did?” Charlotte raised an eyebrow, wrinkling her broad forehead.
“No.” Royce didn’t mean her reply to sound short, but she was afraid it did.
Charlotte touched her arm, belated awareness in her kind, blue eyes. “I’m sorry, honey. Of course, you had other things on your mind. The battle between Hal and Bert broke out near the end of the dance. Next day, Bert packed a bag and left. Then word got out that Lily was gone, too.”
“So people assumed they’d left together?”
Charlotte nodded. “Thelma was fit to be tied. Stormed into the Club Grill telling everybody he better not come crawling back. She was going to file for divorce, take the dealership, and everything they had, it was hers anyway. She’d teach that bitch a thing or two at the same time.”
Was that the answer to Chrys’s paternity? Remembering the picnic conversation with Charlotte Brand, Royce considered the possibility that Bert Morrell could be her father.
If true, what might that fact imply for the investigation into the murder of Fern Rock/Lily Woodstone/Heather Forrest? Or for that matter, the murder of Bert, himself. For one, it widened the circle of possible suspects. How happy would Thelma Morrell or Bert be to find that Lily Woodstone was back in Fall Creek? Blackmail was certainly motive for murder.
Had Lily called either one from her motel room, demanding money to keep the girl’s paternity secret? Surely not, or Jared would know. He said he had telephone records. Maybe the chief was keeping some things to himself.
It was time he learned about the conversation between Thelma and Clupper that Royce had overheard. He might arrest her on the spot for withholding evidence, but so be it.
Before she knew she was going to move, or even considered the hour, Royce was standing by her desk with the telephone in her hand. She had punched in half the numbers to Jared Granite’s private line at the police station when a loud knock sounded on her back door. She dropped the telephone receiver, and it bounced noisily on the desk.
Devon padded beside her as she returned to the kitchen door to look out. Hal Woodstone stood on the deck. He waved to her. In his left hand, he held a large bouquet of spring flowers. Sighing, she opened the kitchen door. Devon gave a low growl, baring his teeth.
“Royce.” Hal ignored the dog and greeted her as though all the vitriolic words he had hurled at her Saturday night and twice today were a minor disagreement. He held the flowers toward her in both hands. “Peace offering. Can I come in? Got a vase?” Drops of water from the still falling rain glistened on Woodstone’s dark shirt. He looked around and spotted the two vases which sat on a small round table. He grabbed the tall clear one and carried the vase and flowers as she led the way into the kitchen.
Royce leaned against the open hutch near the door and stared as Hal went to the sink. He ran water into the vase, then carefully arranged the white Shasta daisies in it.
She searched for words that wouldn’t precipitate a repeat of his ranting. Pled weariness and a need for early rising on Tuesday, and he finally retreated to his own house through the dark backyards. Grabbing her keys and purse, she didn’t care if he saw her leave also.
Neither Chuck Brand nor the night desk sergeant were at his desk when Royce entered the police station a little after midnight. So she knocked on Chief Granite’s office door and entered. The chief kept his eyes on her without speaking until she was seated.
“You were just here this morning. And I was at your house a few hours ago. What’s happened since then, Royce?”
“It happened twenty-three years ago.”
“Twenty—What happened twenty-three years ago?”
“Lily Woodstone had an affair with my husband.” There. It was said. In a different situation, she could have taken wry pleasure in the shocked look that Granite was apparently helpless to prevent spreading across his face.
A moment passed. “Uh. When did you find out about—this alleged affair?”
“Not alleged, Jared. It happened. Twenty-three years ago.”
“One of them told you?” Granite lifted the coffee mug in front of him and took a drink, looking at her over the rim, eyes narrowed.
“Not at the time. I found the evidence myself.”
“Royce. If this is some cock-eyed scheme to take the heat off Palm…” Granite put his hands on the desk and leaned forward. He gave her a hard look. “Don’t put yourself through it.”
“Believe me, Jared. If I could see any alternative, I wouldn’t be sitting here in the middle of the night telling you this. I can’t, and you’re going to listen. Even if you don’t want to believe it because Eddy was your partner.”
She stopped and heard the words she’d spoken echo in her head. The last sentence had come from some well of rancor deep inside that she hadn’t realized was there.
“Go on.” The chief’s mouth was a thin line, and all expression was blanked from his eyes.
She swallowed the painful lump that tried to rise in her throat. “I came home from the hospital after I lost our third baby and found Lily’s sandals under our bed. I never told Eddy. He confessed the affair in a letter with his will.” She stopped her recital of the facts and studied the face of the man sitting behind his desk. The shuttered eyes never wavered, but she saw a tiny muscle twitch at the corner of his mouth. The silence dragged on for a full minute.
“In the letter, Eddy also told me about a bank account he’d kept secret from me. He opened it for the benefit of the child which resulted from that affair. Why do I suspect that you knew about that account, and therefore about the affair, Jared?”
“If Palm knew the woman at the motel was his mother, it strengthens the case against him. Did he?” His eyes bored into her. “Did she tell you on the telephone that she’d talked to him?”
“I’ve told you about the call I received. Several times.” She wanted nothing more than to get up and walk out of that office. To never again have to look on the face of this man who had known of Eddy’s betrayal of his marriage vows. She’d known he would say what he had, that it made Palm appear even more guilty.
A knock sounded on the door, and it opened halfway. Seated in her corner chair, Royce was out of the line of sight of the person at the door. “Found it. She arrived by air Friday afternoon. Took a City Service bus, got off at the stop near the motel.”
Chief Granite slammed his hand on the desktop, and Chuck Brand peered around the door. “Oh, sorry, Chief. I didn’t know you had someone with you. Hello again, Royce.” He pulled the door closed.
“I’m thinking you already knew when she arrived, Royce?”
“I never talked to her. And how co
uld Palm possibly know a strange woman in a motel was his mother?” Her voice rose in spite of her efforts at control.
“She might have called him, too.”
“But you don’t have a record of it?”
“We’ll find out.”
“Have you found out if Thelma Morrell did hire a private detective?”
“We’re checking out everyone. We know our job, Royce. Is there anything else?”
“Yes.”
“I’m listening.”
“I have reason to believe Lily gave birth to another child some months after she left Fall Creek.”
“Woodstone’s or Eddy’s?”
“Neither.” She watched for a reaction, but the chief had his face under control now.
“Where and who is this supposed other child?”
“Chrys Wynter.”
Then for the second time that night Chief Jared Granite’s facial muscles overrode the rein he held over them.
“The hell you say?” He clamped his mouth closed. “Beg pardon, Royce. Are you talking about the girl who works in the Sages’ law office?”
“Yes.”
“Let me get this straight. You think this Wynter girl is the daughter of Lily Woodstone but don’t believe her father is Woodstone or Eddy?”
“Yes. And no. No, I don’t believe either one of them is her father.”
“Who, then?”
“Maybe her father is Bert Morrell.”
“Morrell? Where’d that come from?”
“They left town the same day. Everyone suspected they left together.”
“I remember that gossip. When Morrell got back a month or so later, he said he went to Vegas. Dropped a bundle, came to his senses, called Thelma, and begged her to take him back.”
“You believe that?”
“There’s reason. The dealership was far from solvent; Thelma controlled the purse strings; her inheritance set him up.”
Something about the chief’s reactions when she first mentioned that Lily might have borne a second child tugged at Royce. “You knew there was another child. Just not who or where. How?”
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