by Leslie Caine
“Steve didn’t kill her, Mr. Smith,” I said firmly.
“Yeah?” He rose. “That’s just what my wife said about her brother. For the longest time. Kept insisting some stranger had broken into the house, done all those murders. Didn’t matter how many expert witnesses they called in to look at the evidence or Laura’s testimony about what her own father had done.” He shoved his chair in with such force that the whole table shook. “You women . . . you listen with your damn heart. There’s a reason our ears are right next to our brains, you know! That’s the way it’s supposed to be. We’re supposed to listen to what our brain’s telling us!”
“But I was with Steve that night, and I know he’s innocent,” I insisted, on the verge of tears. Mrs. Smith lost the battle with her own emotions and began to sob.
As though he hadn’t heard me, he snarled, “That little girl didn’t stand a chance. Soon as she was old enough to take off, she stayed way away from us. We just reminded her of her terrible past. Begged me, she did, to stay away, to let her live her own life. I kept hoping she’d come back home to us. But who knows what it would have taken to get her back there? I figure if she’d been given the choice between our family farm and prison, she’d have opted for prison.” He crossed behind my chair as if to leave, but then rounded and stopped long enough to wag his finger in my face. “Your friend, Mr. Sullivan, he’s the one who belongs behind bars!” He stormed out the door, still grumbling to himself.
I shot a glance at the other occupied table. Everyone was staring agape at us. Mrs. Smith said through her tears, “Don’t mind my husband. He’s grief-struck. We couldn’t have kids ourselves. But Laura was so beautiful. Somebody killed our baby. Our beautiful baby.”
I gave her a quick hug around the shoulders and whispered, “I’m so sorry.”
John crossed the room. He bent a little at the waist and said gently, “Mrs. Smith? I’m John Norton. I’m sorry for your loss. Laura was a beautiful person.”
She showed no signs of recognizing John’s name. She hiccuped a couple of times, then dried her tears and said, “Thank you.”
“Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked. “Can I get you something to eat or drink? Do you and your husband need a ride back to your hotel or anything?”
At his solicitous offer, she squared her shoulders. “No, but why don’t you take your lady friend someplace nice now?” She got unsteadily to her feet, waving off his attempts to help her rise. “Richard and I are used to being alone.”
She shuffled out of the room in the direction her husband had gone. “Oh, dear God,” I murmured. I felt heart-broken for the woman.
“Should we leave?” John asked quietly.
I nodded and rose. John took my hand. We left by way of the opposite exit. Although the sky was a beautiful azure and the air felt crisp, I remained on the edge of tears. “This is about as depressing as a day can get,” John said under his breath.
“Knock wood,” I muttered.
“Guess I can’t blame Steve for not being able to take it. And I suppose seeing me was the last straw. If he honestly thinks I had anything to do with her death, though, he’s gone off the deep end.”
I felt myself tense. I couldn’t stand this; even while we were leaving Laura’s service, John was telling me that Sullivan was crazy to suspect him. Although Steve had bolted without a word, I felt compelled to defend him. “I’m sure your arrival just gave him the excuse to stand up, and once he did, he fled.”
I stopped walking, only then realizing we were heading away from my van. John’s bright red Audi was in the second, small parking lot, straight ahead of us. “I’m parked on the other side of the building.”
He turned toward me and took both my hands in his, lacing his fingers through mine. “I’ve got to get back to work. We have an open house next week, so I’m working all weekend. Otherwise, I’d offer to take you out for drinks. Like Mrs. Smith said, we should go someplace nice. We haven’t seen much of each other lately.”
I nodded and said, “So I’ve noticed.” He gave me a smile, kissed me softly, then we parted company, muttering vague salvos about things getting better soon.
When would they get better? How? All this animosity and cross-accusation was hard to bear. If this murder wasn’t solved very soon, I was going to lose my mind.
As I rounded the building, I spotted Hannah Garrison standing near my car. “Hannah. Hi.” I glanced back at the funeral home. “Were you waiting for Dave?”
“Originally. But he already left.”
So who’s she waiting for now? Me?
She frowned. “He didn’t even see me, I don’t think. He looked terrible. I felt sorry for him . . . even though he’s feeling this way due to the”—she drew finger quotes in the air and continued—“ other woman.”
I sighed, determined to rid my immediate thoughts of the pain of Laura’s adoptive parents. Hannah obviously needed someone to chat with, so, just to be kind, I suggested, “Want to go get a cup of coffee or something?”
“That’d be nice,” she replied with a smile.
Minutes later, as we sipped our coffee, I tried to let the quiet, stately ambience of the restaurant restore me. Hannah said, “You know what, Erin? Even though I would never actually go through with it myself, there were times when I would pray for Laura to die a hideous, mutilating death.”
That statement was a major ambience killer if ever there was one. “Are you still in love with Dave?” I asked impulsively.
“No, but I’m no longer in hate with him, so that’s good. It took me a while to forgive him. Really, he’s just this sweet guy that Laura led around by the nose.”
“You couldn’t have thought so kindly of him when you were still ‘in hate’ with him.”
She peered at me over the rim of her scuffed-up white ceramic cup, then set it down in its saucer. “I’m sure that he felt like he’d hit the jackpot when Laura came on to him.” She motioned as though she were displaying a banner headline in the air and continued, “ ‘The Geek Lands the Sexpot.’ I’m sure he knew Laura just wanted him for his money, but he didn’t care. And what chance did I have . . . his equally geeky high school sweetheart.”
And yet, according to what Sullivan had told me, Dave and Laura had originally linked up before Dave had struck gold in the business world. Pointing out that discrepancy to Hannah would be like pouring salt in her wounds, so I merely asked, “You two were sweethearts back in high school?”
She nodded. “And while we were both going to college at CU.”
“Steve Sullivan told me that when he first met Laura, she convinced him that Dave was physically abusive to her.”
She furrowed her brow. “That was a ridiculous lie. Dave and I had some doozies of fights, believe me. Especially when our marriage was breaking up,” she added bitterly, “thanks to Laura. But, even so, he never once raised a hand to me.”
“Did you notice his black eye?”
“Dave’s got a black eye?”
“Hidden behind his dark glasses.”
“Laura must have clobbered him.”
“He claims he tripped.”
She scoffed, “Even if she came at him with a baseball bat, he’d kill himself before he’d have harmed a hair on her head. He worshiped the ground that conniving bitch walked upon. He was too love-blind to see what she was, so in love with herself that there was no room in her shriveled heart for anyone else.”
I frowned, but held my tongue. In spite of Laura’s extreme shortcomings, I resented Hannah’s speaking so scathingly of her on the day of her funeral. Hannah took another sip of coffee, then said, “Actually, I’m kind of sorry she’s dead. In a weird, sick way, I owe her. Laura Smith gave me a reason to get up in the morning. I wanted to prove that I was somebody, too, that Dave had made a terrible mistake in leaving me.”
“You once said he tried to win you back, when Laura dumped him for Steve Sullivan.”
She raised her chin and perked up a little. “He tried to, yes, b
ut I wouldn’t take him back. I might have, eventually, but I made it clear he had to prove that he was home for good. And, of course, he went crawling back to Laura the moment she returned to town.”
She looked at her watch and sprang to her feet. “Oh, dear. I should have been at work ages ago.” She swept up her purse, which she’d hooked on her chair, then rounded the table, patting my shoulder just as she headed for the door. “Sorry, but I’ve got to run. Thanks for the coffee, Erin.”
“You’re welcome. Take care.”
Maybe I’d been hanging around Sullivan too long, but I, too, was starting to become skeptical. Hannah’s tale of rejecting her husband struck me as false. A weird theory popped unbidden into my head: What if Hannah had conspired with Laura to rip off her ex-husband?
My thoughts were in turmoil as I made the short drive home. To shore up my flagging spirits, I told myself to take in the soul-warming grace of Audrey’s home as I made my way up the walkway.
That instruction to myself backfired. There was nothing soul warming about what I was seeing as I neared the house. I kept thinking my eyes were deceiving me. By the time I’d reached the front steps, there was no denying the sight.
A knife had been stabbed with tremendous force into the center of Audrey’s oak door.
Chapter 16
Audrey seemed unable to stop pacing as Linda Delgardio and her partner interviewed us. Three months ago, Audrey had told me that she wanted an “old-world Italian feel” to this room, and I’d applied sunny yellow Venetian plaster to the walls, replaced the ugly parquet floor with terra-cotta tiles, stained the wood trim a deep, rich brown, and installed filigreed crown molding and a matching ceiling medallion, from which I’d hung an elegant chandelier. We both loved the results, but then she’d told me that she wanted to select the furniture herself. She had yet to do so. Instead of “old-world Italian,” we now had a time-traveling, continent-hopping hodgepodge— the kind of interior space that a tactful designer terms “eclectic.”
Officer Mansfield, Linda’s partner, kept making gentle suggestions that Audrey “might be more comfortable” if she took a seat. Linda had met Audrey a couple of times: she already knew that Audrey did precisely what she wanted to do.
“You always use the back door when you come and go?” Linda asked her.
“Yes. There’s a one-car garage back there. It used to be the carriage house, when the home was first built.”
“You didn’t ever open the front door today?”
“No.” She continued her path from the west wall to the east and back again.
“Not even to get the mail?” Mansfield asked.
“No. There’s a slot for mail next to the sidelight. Although I would think that if the knife had been there at the time of delivery, the mailman would have rung my doorbell and asked whether or not I had intentionally stabbed a six-inch knife into my front door.”
He made a notation in his notepad. “Yeah. That’s probably a safe bet, but we’d better locate your carrier and ask him straight-out, just in case.”
“The mail’s always here between two and two-thirty. And before you ask, nobody came to the door today and, no, I didn’t hear any suspicious noises or notice anything out of the ordinary.”
“No strange cars idling their engines, or suspicious-looking passersby?”
“That would fit into the general category of ‘out of the ordinary,’ ” she said, donning her patient smile, which was actually an indication she was losing her patience.
Linda rose, and her partner followed suit. “The lab will examine the knife. And we’ve already put in a call for CSI to dust the door for prints. We’ll let you know what we find out.”
“Thanks, Linda,” I said.
“You do realize that this is a not-too-subtle message to Erin that her life is in jeopardy, don’t you?” Audrey asked them.
“We’ll do our best to catch whoever’s done this, Ms. Munroe,” Mansfield responded.
“We’re going to canvass the neighborhood now,” Linda said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and find an eyewitness.”
“Keep us posted,” Audrey replied as she ushered them out the marred door. That too-patient smile was back on her lips, but had faded by the time she returned to the room.
I massaged my neck and tried to make my escape. “What a long, horrendous day this has been! I’m going to turn in early and—”
“It’s quarter after seven. Not even infants or nuns go to bed this early.” She snatched off the ottoman cum coffee table the small loose-leaf notebook she used for grocery lists and, finally, took a seat in the sleek, black-leather-and-chrome Barcelona chair across from my mahogany-and-velvet Martha Washington chair. “I want the name of each and every person you’ve met who is even remotely connected to Laura Smith.”
“Why? The police are—”
“We’ll give your police-gal friend the list later, if there are any surprises on it. In the meantime, I’m not taking any more chances with your well-being, and you shouldn’t, either.”
“But what good would a—”
“What’s the name of the man she was living with?”
I gave myself another self-massage. Now I really did have a pain in my neck—both literally and figuratively. “Dave Holland.”
She wrote that down, then looked at me expectantly.
“Hannah Garrison. She’s Dave’s ex-wife.” Audrey raised her eyebrows in surprise at this—she, too, knew Hannah from Paprika’s—but diligently jotted down the name. “Robert Pembrook, who was once Laura’s image consultant and who recently subcontracted me for a redecorating job. George Wong, who made Laura’s reproductions. And Jerry Stone. That’s the name of the dreadlocks guy Laura threw to the floor during your presentation.” The name “John Norton” popped into my brain, but I didn’t want to tell Audrey that my boyfriend had connections to Laura Smith. “That’s everyone.”
She peered at me. “You’re omitting someone, Erin.”
“John only dated her a few times, years ago,” I protested. “It’s not fair to put him on the same list as those others.”
“You mean John Norton used to date her? The man you’re currently seeing?”
I felt my cheeks grow warm, giving Audrey her answer.
“My goodness, but that woman got around!” She shook her head and sighed, returning her attention to compiling the list. “That makes two names you left off our list. You also failed to mention Steve Sullivan.” She rose and tore the sheet out of her notebook. “You’re going to be careful around everyone on this list. I’ll post it on the refrigerator, in case you forget.” She wagged her finger. “One of these people is trying to warn you that they’re willing to put a knife in your back, missy, and that ain’t happening. Not on my watch.”
She strode out of the room, and an instant later, I heard her slap a magnet onto her stainless-steel refrigerator. I sighed and tried to fight off the chill that crept up my spine. Thanks, Audrey. I feel safer already.
“At least one good thing is going to come from this insanity,” she called to me from her post in the kitchen. “I’m phoning Henry Toben and telling him that tonight’s date is hereby canceled. I’m not leaving you home alone for one instant.”
Sunday provided a much-needed break for me, and Audrey and I stayed home all day and played gin rummy and Boggle, basically pretending that nothing out of the ordinary had happened. She had ignored, however, my not-too-subtle hints that we could be restoring the parlor to a human—as opposed to a feline—abode by ridding ourselves of the excess sofas and tables.
Monday morning, Sullivan and I met at Henry’s house. Though it was petty of me, I decided that I wasn’t going to tell Sullivan about the knife in Audrey’s door unless and until he said something to me about his abrupt departure from Laura’s service, and he seemed to be in no hurry to do so. The movers arrived right on schedule. As the lead designer, I banished Sullivan to the second floor with gleeful relish, while I oversaw the main floor.
I vastly pr
efer that homeowners not be present while I install their rooms, but against my express wishes, Henry had taken the day off from work and was “here to help.” Ironically, that meant that while Audrey had deftly escaped spending time in Henry’s presence, I was boxed into spending time with both him and Sullivan. My client seemed to be on edge about something, trying to be the first to peer into every carton that the movers unloaded and, in the process, getting in the way and slowing us down. Thankfully, he finally said he needed to “grab a smoke” but was out of cigarettes, and he left us to our work.
I heard a noise outside and looked out the dining room window. A man darted around the corner of Henry’s property. I gasped. Could that be Jerry Stone? What the heck could he be doing here? I raced into the kitchen and peered out those windows, but couldn’t get a second look at him.
“Miss?” one of the moving men called as he tromped into the room, followed by his partner. “We got the heavy stuff unloaded . . . just need to make sure everything’s exactly where it’s s’posed to be. Your boss told us to start downstairs.”
“Actually, you got our roles backward; I’m Mr. Sullivan’s boss.”
“Okay. Sorry.”
I eyed him and his muscular partner. These men could crack the reedlike Jerry Stone in two. “I think it’d be easiest if you helped install the bedrooms first.”
“Suit yourself,” he replied with a shrug.
Both men thumped up the stairs. I weighed the risk of confronting a prowler against the possibility of gleaning valuable insight into Laura’s murder. The slightest peep from me would bring up to three men instantly dashing to my aid. Though scared, I slid open the kitchen door, slipped outside, and crept around the corner. The trespasser was shading his eyes, trying to spy through the dining room window. “Jerry!”
He jumped and clutched at his chest as he pivoted to face me. He flattened himself against the side of the house. His cheeks were flushed and his forehead was dotted with perspiration. His clothing reeked of sweat and cigarette smoke.