by Debra Webb
“Ma’am, we have reason to believe the victim was a young girl we’ve been trying to find for nearly thirty years.”
Rowan frowned. Apparently there had been some breaking news. “Again, I’m sorry I can’t help you. I have no idea to whom those remains belong. I’ve been here all evening and I haven’t heard any news. If there’s been a breaking development in the find, I’m not aware of it.”
“You know Dr. Julian Addington,” he countered. “Quite well, I believe.”
She wanted to snap a response at him for being so insensitive, but she had a feeling his statement had nothing to do with insensitivity and everything to do with some fact of which she was unaware.
“I’m certain you are well aware of my relationship with Julian Addington.” She refused to respect the bastard who had killed her father by using the title Doctor.
“Were you aware he had a wife and a daughter in Los Angeles?”
Surprise flashed on Rowan’s face before she could school the reaction. “I am under the impression he has never been married.”
“Well, he did and he was until his former wife divorced him twenty-five years ago,” Barton assured her, “and he had a daughter. She disappeared when she was seventeen years old.”
Inside, where this stranger couldn’t see, Rowan stilled, went oddly quiet as if the very blood in her body had ceased to move. “Disappeared?”
He nodded. “She’s been missing for twenty-seven years. Since about the same time your sister died.”
“You think those bones belong to her?” Rowan’s head spun. How was that possible? Why in all those years she and Julian were so close had he never told her about his family? She had shared everything about hers with him.
“I think maybe you need to sit down, Dr. DuPont.”
Rowan thought maybe he was right.
Five
Rowan watched through the front windows as Billy and the detective from Los Angeles argued in the parking lot. Billy had walked in just after Barton made his big, stunning announcement.
Julian Addington had been married.
He’d had a daughter.
Rowan reminded herself to breathe. It wasn’t that this notion was too far-fetched or even that it sounded unreasonable. It was the idea that he had bemoaned the sacrifice of a personal life to his career with such seemingly genuine regret. He always reminded Rowan that the two of them had this sad state in common. There had never been the proper time for devotion to spouse and family.
“Of course there wasn’t, you son of a bitch, you were too busy murdering people.”
Next to her, Freud, her German shepherd, rubbed against her leg. Rowan shook herself and turned away from the window. She rubbed his head. “It’s okay, boy.” Freud wagged his tail but didn’t look any more convinced than she felt. He could sense her uneasiness.
Billy had practically dragged the detective out of the lobby. In a sort of shock, Rowan had wandered back to the parlor and finished storing Mr. Whitt’s delicate flowers. Once she was satisfied the family hadn’t left anything behind, she had closed up the parlor. Housekeeping would come through first thing in the morning to clean and to prepare the chapel for the afternoon service.
When she was finished, rather than go outside to join whatever discussion was going on between the West Coast detective and the Winchester chief of police, she came upstairs to wait for Billy. She preferred to hear this theory about Julian’s family from him. It was a protective instinct. Rowan understood the involuntary coping mechanism.
Frustration and the slightest inkling of anger stirred inside her. As much as she preferred to hear the whole story from a trusted friend, she also intended to tell him exactly how she felt about his having kept this information from her for several hours. He should have told her when he called rather than put it off until he could tell her face-to-face as if she were too fragile to hear the news over the phone.
Yes, it was true that her life had been devastated with the murder of her father and the stunning secrets Julian had been harboring. But she was a grown woman. A highly trained psychiatrist. She understood how these things worked and was certainly capable of handling the news.
She shook her head, attempted to tamp down the irritation.
While she’d waited she had taken Freud down the back stairs that led to the private corridor beyond the viewing parlors. After he’d run around the backyard for a few minutes, they’d made their way up the stairs once more.
Rowan still found the news hard to believe. The monster had a daughter. Before Billy had arrived and hauled the detective outside, Barton had explained that Alisha Addington had been seventeen years old when she’d disappeared. What in the world was she doing running away from home and coming here? It made no sense whatsoever. Rowan and her sister certainly hadn’t known her; they were only twelve at the time. She remembered vividly introducing her father to Julian when she was a sophomore in college. The two men had never met before; they had not known each other at all.
The idea that Raven had somehow known Alisha was ludicrous.
Movement in the parking lot below drew Rowan’s attention there once more. Detective Barton strode to his car and drove away. Rowan wanted to feel relieved, but somehow she didn’t. A few seconds later Billy bounded up the stairs and knocked on the front door of the living quarters. She took her time making her way there.
While the funeral home’s preparatory work took place in the basement and the formal services on the first floor, the second and third floors were home. The third floor was actually not that large: two bedrooms and a Jack and Jill bath. The second floor, however, was quite expansive with a family room, kitchen and dining room as well as another bedroom and two more baths, one nothing more than a powder room. This had been home for the first eighteen years of Rowan’s life.
And here she was again. Freud had adjusted well. He was only too happy to remain curled up near the sofa while she attended to viewings and funerals downstairs. He seemed to understand that barking was off-limits during those times. He was a good dog and she had never been more grateful for his companionship.
She hesitated a moment at the door, then opened it. “Is it true?”
“Can I come in?”
Billy looked tired. Rowan should have been ashamed for making him ask. He’d had a long day, too. But she was frustrated with him for not telling her the whole story when they spoke on the phone earlier. Clearly, this was what he’d wanted to stop by and speak with her about, only Audrey Anderson and Detective Barton had beaten him to the punch.
“You couldn’t have warned me when you called?” She stood her ground in the doorway.
Hat in hand, he shrugged. “I wanted to tell you in person. I wasn’t trying to keep anything from you, Ro.”
She sighed. “Come in.” She opened the door wider and then closed it behind him. “Would you still like that beer?”
He laughed. “I might need several after the way this day has gone.” Freud rushed over to greet him and Billy scratched him behind the ears. “Hey, buddy.”
“Have a seat. I’ll grab a cold one.” Rowan moved the jacket she had discarded from the back of the sofa and grabbed the heels she’d kicked off. “Then I expect the whole story,” she warned.
“You got it.”
She draped her jacket across the banister of the staircase leading up to the third level, and set her heels on the bottom step. She could take them up when she went to bed. Right now she was simply too tired. Two beers were sounding better all the time. Billy’s company was always good, current circumstances notwithstanding.
As she opened the fridge, the light pooled around her. She grabbed two longneck bottles and nudged the door closed with her hip. She blinked, considered the kitchen in the near darkness. It looked better this way. Her father had never renovated any part of the living quarters. The kitchen was very early seventies or maybe lat
e sixties. Either way, she needed to tackle this project.
It would keep her mind off the manhunt for Julian and the questions about their relationship still making the rounds in the media. And now there was a daughter. A dead daughter.
She trudged back into the family room, which was just another word for living room with a cased opening at one end that featured the dining room. This part of the house was old, old and in need of updating. Her father hadn’t noticed all the little things that screamed for a touch of TLC. He had been the sort of man who could be happy in a cave as long as he had a sleeping bag and the means to prepare a hot meal. Freud sat next to Billy as if he sensed the chief of police needed his allegiance and protection more than Rowan.
“Tell me everything.” Rowan handed one of the sweating bottles to Billy. She sat down on the sofa facing him. He’d taken her father’s favorite chair. Her dad wouldn’t have minded and she certainly didn’t.
“Lincoln, one of my detectives—”
“Do you mean Clarence Lincoln?”
Billy nodded. “Besides me, he was the best quarterback in this part of the state.” He grinned. “The only one who ever kicked my butt, but then, I was having a bad night.”
Rowan remembered that night and the other star quarterback. “He went to Moore County, right?”
“He did. The Gazette ran a feature article on the two of us back in the day. One of us usually dominated the headlines anyway.” He shook his head. “Some people tried to make it about race, but it wasn’t. Clarence and I never looked at each other that way. Still don’t. We’re cops. Color has nothing to do with it.”
“Clarence is Herman’s nephew,” she reminded Billy. “He used to come to the funeral home and play with me and Raven sometimes when we were really little kids. Then his daddy died and he never came again. Bad memories, I guess.”
This was off subject, but her nerves could stand the momentary reprieve. Besides, she was still a little annoyed that Billy hadn’t told her this news hours ago. As a matter of fact, a dig at his history would make her feel loads better.
“This must be the day for old friends from other schools.” She sipped her beer. “Another of yours dropped by the Whitt visitation tonight.”
“Oh yeah?” Unlike her, Billy didn’t sip. He guzzled a long swallow.
“Sherry Lusk.”
He coughed, almost spewed beer across the coffee table. “Sherry?”
Rowan nodded. “She said I was the reason you and she never worked out. Imagine my surprise.” Taking another sip of beer kept the smile tugging at her lips from appearing.
Billy wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I guess blaming you was easier than facing her own faults.”
Rowan had no intention of following up on that statement. “So tell me.” She leaned forward, placed her bottle of beer on the coffee table and clasped her hands in her lap. As much as she wanted to pretend that nothing Julian had done in his life, besides killing her father and all those other people, mattered to her one way or another, that wasn’t possible. Somehow he had made this missing, possibly murdered daughter about her and her family. The motive was what Rowan could not fathom.
“I asked Lincoln to look for any missing person cases that had not resolved during the past thirty years, but there was only one and it really wasn’t our case. Twenty-seven years ago...”
She flinched at the time frame. The same year her sister had died.
“In late June,” he went on, “the mother called Chief Holcomb looking for her daughter. She claimed her daughter had run away to visit a pen pal here in Winchester—a pen pal named Raven DuPont.”
Another wave of shock quaked through Rowan. “A pen pal?”
Billy nodded. “According to Holcomb’s notes, he stopped by the funeral home and talked to your father. Both Edward and Raven insisted there was no pen pal and that they hadn’t seen the girl whose picture Holcomb was flashing around.”
Rowan took a moment to absorb this information. It was possible her father hadn’t associated that long-ago visit by Holcomb with Julian when Rowan first introduced them. Neither her father nor her sister had ever mentioned the incident to her. Of course, at that time, Raven wouldn’t have. She had loved her secrets, especially those she kept from her mirror image.
She shrugged. “I can only assume my father forgot about the incident. I’m sure there’s a lot from that year he didn’t recall.” God knew she had tried to block out as much of it as possible.
“Understandable,” Billy agreed. “A week or so later there was a follow-up call from Detective Barton and that was the end of it. Since this was the only case on our books that wasn’t solved, Lincoln called LAPD to see if the girl had been found, and the next thing we knew, Barton was here. Only he didn’t tell us he was coming. He just showed up at your door. I chewed him out but good for that, Ro. I can assure you he won’t bother you again without going through me first.”
As much as she appreciated his determination to shield her from the unpleasantness of all this, it was simply not something he could do. She had to be involved. Had to know how this related to her family. Why would Julian lie to her about his family for all those years?
He was a psychopath! She had to remember that point.
Whatever his motives, Rowan needed the truth and she intended to find it.
“How long will it be before the medical examiner releases Mrs. Phillips’s body?” Rowan considered that Woody would be back on Monday. As long as she had taken care of Mrs. Phillips by then, Rowan would feel comfortable leaving for a couple of days. A quick trip to the West Coast and maybe she would find some part of the truth that would help solve this puzzle.
“Now, wait a minute, Ro.” Billy held up his hands, apparently recognizing where she was going with the question. “I know what you’re thinking.”
“I can fly out to LA one day and fly back the next.” All she needed was the name and address for Julian’s former wife. Rowan had questions for the woman. Starting with, had she been fooled by Julian for all those years, as well?
“You can’t just go flying across the country and demanding answers from a total stranger—one whose husband murdered your father.”
Rowan squared her shoulders. “She might not answer, but there is nothing stopping me from asking.”
He shook his head. “You worked with Metro long enough to realize this has to be handled by the book, step by step. The task force is already involved. I briefed Dressler right before I called you.”
This was another facet of this case that blew her mind. How could the FBI not know about Julian’s ex-wife and daughter? If anyone could have ferreted out that secret, the task force should have been able to do so. “You called Dressler first.”
It wasn’t really a question. Obviously he had.
“I did. Dressler flew out to LA this afternoon to interview her. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that anything you do might in some way hamper the investigation.”
God, he was right. Rowan slumped back against the couch. She didn’t know what she had been thinking. Any family Julian had would be questioned, perhaps even put under surveillance once the task force became aware they existed. They damned sure kept tabs on Rowan. Josh Dressler himself had questioned her mercilessly and repeatedly. She didn’t mind doing all within her power to help the task force find Julian, but she did mind being made to feel like the bastard’s accomplice or that she knew one or more of his vile secrets.
Why had he never taken trips to the West Coast? “In all those years that we were friends, he never once mentioned having any sort of connection to California.” She shook her head. “Was Addington even his real name?”
“So far there haven’t been any aliases found connected to him. From what Dressler told me, Addington never lived in California. That’s where his wife was from originally, so when they separated, she took their daughte
r and returned.”
Rowan’s gaze met his. “I’m still reeling at the concept that he was married and had a daughter. How could I not know that?”
Billy shrugged. “I don’t know the details, but Barton said they were divorced.”
She nodded. “He mentioned that they had divorced twenty-five years ago.” This made no sense whatsoever. Rowan tried not to read too much into the idea that the divorce occurred only a few years before she and Julian met. “I’m stunned.”
Billy leaned forward, propped his forearms on his knees. “Ro, that detective claims Mrs. Addington believes her daughter came here looking for your family—for Raven. Is there any way your father might have been unaware that Raven was writing to her?”
Rowan frowned. “What?” She shook her head before he could answer. “I don’t think so. But then, Raven had changed so much that year. She kept lots of secrets from me. I can’t be certain of all she did or didn’t do. She probably kept secrets from our parents, too.”
“Is it possible your mother or father knew the Addingtons?”
“You know that’s not possible,” Rowan argued. “Mother died not long after Raven, and I introduced my father to Julian many years later.”
“You’re right.” Billy reached for his beer, drained it. “This makes no sense at all.”
“How old is she? His wife, I mean?”
“According to the DMV, she’s sixty-five.” Billy set his empty bottle on the coffee table.
He didn’t have to say that she was about the same age Rowan’s mother would be if she were still alive. “Did Barton mention what she’s saying about Julian? I assume she claims not to have any idea where he is.”
“That’s the story Barton gave me. Dressler will pass along whatever he learns in his visit with the wife.”
Rowan and Dressler had worked together on a few cases when she was in Nashville.
Billy turned up his hands. “Barton claims they haven’t seen each other since their daughter’s disappearance, and as far as the ex-wife is concerned, Addington was dead to her before that.”