by Donna Ball
He hesitated. “Well, that afternoon. Monday afternoon. She went shopping or something and when we hooked up again, she put it around my neck. Later she said something about some admirer, or some shit, giving it to her.” He looked embarrassed. “I remember thinking at the time that she probably copped it, but what did I care? Anyway...” Suddenly he slipped the thong over his head and thrust the necklace to Guy. “I don't want it. It creeps me out. Maybe, I don't know, maybe you could give it to her folks or something.”
Guy took the necklace. “Sure.”
“Thanks, man. You're an okay dude.”
That almost made Guy smile. “So I've been told.”
When he was gone, Guy looked down at the odd little pendant in his hand, turning it over, testing its weight, trying to remember what was so familiar about it. But the only thing that occurred to him was what a convenient weapon that sturdy leather thong would make for strangulation. And he hoped he had not just made a mistake.
~
Chapter Twenty-eight
Ken Carlton said he had just been calling to check on her, which Carol found rather sweet and a little embarrassing. The police had indeed talked to him last night, for which Carol apologized profusely. Ken brushed it aside.
“We're neighbors,” he reminded her. “Anything I can do to help.” Then, “Listen, I know you've got a lot on your mind right now, but I've been thinking about your sales pitch—about St.T. being the resort of the future and the perfect showplace for an innovative architect.”
“I'm glad to see you were paying attention.”
“Oh, I was. The trouble is, you weren't selling the right thing.”
“Oh?”
He chuckled. “All right, I confess. I've been taking advantage of your good nature when, as you've probably guessed, I'm far too tied up with this development deal to have any time left over for private investment.”
Figures, Carol thought dryly.
“But maybe it won't be a complete loss. I'll have to talk to the other partners, of course, but right now I'm inclined to offer you the exclusive listing on all our properties, and we expect to get underway within the year.”
Carol's heart skipped a beat. Jesus, she thought. A Ken Carlton exclusive listing. She felt like a child on Christmas morning, full of awe and disbelief, and wondering far back in a corner of her mind what she had done to deserve this. Exclusive. Jesus.
With all the self-discipline she possessed, she managed to keep her voice casual yet businesslike. “Where, exactly, is the development going to be?”
“Little Horse Island,” he responded promptly. “I couldn't tell you before because we hadn't closed on the property and you know how quickly a great deal can go sour once word gets out.”
“My goodness,” murmured Carol, stunned. Her heart was still racing. In the midst of all this horror, was it possible something this incredible could actually happen to her? And because she was all too familiar with the eccentricities of life's dark humor, the answer had to be yes. It was possible.
“I didn't even know it was for sale,” she added when she recovered her voice. “I don't think any of the realtors around here did. What a coup.”
“We bought it directly from the state of Florida. It pays to have partners in high places. At any rate, that’s what I'm doing here this summer, and I can tell you that I'm very excited about what we're going to be doing over there. I'd like to take you over and show you the plans.”
“Well, of course. Let me just find a time...”
“Couldn't you get away this afternoon?”
Damn, she thought. And again, Damn. Of all days for her to be alone in the office. But she really had no choice.
“I'm really sorry, but my partner is out of the office and I don't know when she'll be back. I don't like to leave the office without an agent if I can help it.” She added hopefully, frantically flipping through her book, “How about Thursday?”
It was an instinctive technique—never appear too anxious—and she used it automatically. Only after the words were out did she stop to wonder whether, for a Ken Carlton listing, a little anxiety might not have been appropriate.
He hesitated a moment, as though checking his calendar ... or wondering why she was not displaying more enthusiasm for the opportunity he had just offered her. “Eleven o'clock?”
“I'll meet you at the marina,” she said quickly.
“See you then.”
Carol hung up the phone with a long suppressed sigh of relief, and she thought, Wait until Laura hears this. It would almost, if not quite, make up for all she had put her friend through the past couple of weeks.
Almost.
***
Guy studied the photograph on his desk then withdrew the necklace from his pocket. The snapshot was too small to see the details of the necklace Kelly was wearing, but he remembered it clearly now. The figurine of a bound and blindfolded girl. He had questioned Kelly when she first acquired it, which was less than a week, maybe only a few days, before she disappeared. He hadn't liked the symbolism, or the vaguely S&M nature of the pendant, and he'd been afraid Kelly was hanging out with the wrong kind of crowd. When he tried to discuss it with Carol, though, she'd gotten defensive and taken his concern as a threat to her parenting skills, accusing him of paying more attention to Kelly's needs now that they were divorced than he ever had when they were married. And the significance of the necklace, if ever there had been any at all, was lost beneath the fight that followed. Now, all these years later, a young girl gives her boyfriend a necklace just like it right before she's murdered.
Guy hated coincidence.
Probably there were hundreds of little figurines like this, thousands. Probably it had some kind of special significance in the teen world, probably it was as popular today as ankhs and peace symbols had been in his time. Just because he didn't know about a trend didn't mean it didn't exist.
The Anderson girl's parents had released a photograph of their daughter—a graduation picture—smiling, happy, healthy, which the paper would run alongside the story of her murder tonight. She didn't really look like Kelly, Guy kept telling himself. Except for the long dark hair and the honey-colored skin and the dark lashes and the slim lithe figure and maybe a little in the smile. He had sent the photograph over to composing without looking at it more than once, perhaps twice.
He turned the little figurine over in his hand, frowning. He wondered what it meant, if anything, and why any young woman would be attracted to it. And why two young women, almost three years apart, had worn it and met with misfortune.
Coincidence. It was making his head throb with a blinding blue pain.
He looked up at a tap on his office door. Rachel came in with a file in her hand. “These were just faxed in for you. It's the information on that Little girl you wanted.”
Guy moved too fast to grab the file and the pain was explosive. He determinedly ignored it. “Rachel, you're a genius. May the sun shine on you forever.”
“Yeah, that's why they pay me the big bucks. Is that it for the day? Are you going home now?”
Guy waved her away absently. “Soon as I read this.”
He opened the file. The top fax was a copy of a newspaper article from the Panama City Herald, and Guy saw immediately why the name had sounded familiar to him. He hadn't covered the story, but he had followed it, just as everyone in the news business had. local girl found dead was the headline.
The mutilated body of a girl found in a cypress swamp Friday has been identified as eighteen-year-old Tanya Little, who has been missing from her Panama City home since last September. The girl had been dead less than a week, according to police.
The medical examiner reports that the girl had been sexually assaulted before her death by strangulation.
Guy stared at the words without reading them for several long moments. Then he drew in a breath and closed his eyes. “Shit,” he whispered.
It was a long time before he could finish reading.
~
Chapter Twenty-nine
Guy smiled in the dark as he watched her come down the pier toward him. He shouldn't have smiled. She had no business running around after dark with all that was going on, and the marina was neither well lit nor well patrolled. Yet he wasn't surprised, and he wasn't angry. Carol had always done exactly as she pleased, and she could take care of herself as well as anybody he knew.
The night was mild and he was sitting on a lawn chair on the deck of his boat, trying to put things together in his head. The effort was made somewhat more difficult by the cooler of beer he had brought up with him, but his headache had in fact eased. It was quiet tonight; the sea lapped gently and the breeze was light and no one else was around. A yacht was docked at the other end of the pier, but the only sign of its presence was the occasional whiff of something tantalizing and expensive being prepared for dinner. Otherwise, he was alone.
Carol came aboard with only a slight assist of the guide rope for balance. She was carrying something in one hand.
“Chinese takeout, I hope,” he said.
“Chicken soup. Don't worry, I didn't make it. Your friend Sal from the Seafood Shack sent it.” She set the container on top of the beer cooler.
“He couldn't have sent fried clams?”
“I'll be sure to give him your complaints. How're you feeling?”
He tilted the beer bottle toward her. “Better.”
“You're probably not supposed to drink that in your condition.”
“Probably not,” he agreed, and drank.
She pulled a waterproof cushion from one of the storage bins and sat down on the deck at his feet. She was wearing loose-fitting jeans and a long-sleeved knit cotton shirt with tiny buttons down the front, and she looked about twenty years old. She drew up her knees and encircled them with her arms. “It's nice out here tonight.”
“Yeah. It will be for another couple of months, then the tourists start coming in and it's party central.”
They were quiet for a while, enjoying the night. Then Carol said, with very little change in tone, “That girl they found this morning—they think Saddler's involved, don't they?”
He glanced at her as he brought the bottle to his mouth. “What makes you say that?”
“Your article in the paper.”
“I didn't mention anything about—”
“I've been reading between the lines for over twenty years, Guy. I've always learned more from what you don't say than from what you do.”
There was something oddly comforting in that. He said, “They don't have any evidence. Naturally, Case is worried. The girl was sexually assaulted and a known rapist is on the loose.” He felt her tense, but her voice remained even. “So it was definitely him in the house yesterday.”
“One good thing about convicted felons: Their fingerprints are on file. And his matched the ones on the poker to a tee.”
“Careless of him.”
“Keeping his identity a secret was never a priority with him,” Guy reminded her.
“Too bad he doesn't feel the same way about where he's located.”
Guy dropped a hand to her neck, giving it a light reassuring caress. The muscles there were like cable wire. “He's on his way back to prison as we speak, sweetie. It's just a matter of time. And if they can link him to the Anderson girl's murder, it'll be a long time before he sees daylight again.”
Carol said, “She looked like Kelly a little, didn't she?”
Guy said, “No.” He finished off the beer and put the bottle aside.
Carol didn't comment.
After a moment, he reached into his pocket and drew out the thong pendant. “Have you ever seen this before?”
She took it from him and held it up to the faint yellow light that was coming from the cabin before she said, “It's Kelly's.” She turned a look on him that was half accusing, half afraid. “Guy, where—”
“It's not Kelly's,” he told her. “The Anderson girl—apparently it belonged to her. She gave it to a boy just before she was killed.”
Carol's eyes were big and worried, as though she dreaded to voice what she feared. The good thing about being married once was that she didn't have to.
She said, “That man she was last seen with, the one who said he was a director ... was anyone able to give a description?”
Guy shook his head. “We don't know that she was actually with him at all. She just told her friends about him. The sheriff asked me to put that in the story in case someone did see her with a man.”
“No chance it was a real director?”
“No one has applied to film here since last September. But it would make a good line to lure young girls.”
Carol swallowed hard. “He was going to take her to Hollywood, make her a star...” Her voice was barely above a whisper.
Guy couldn't reply.
Carol turned the pendant over in her hand. “I hated this thing,” she said slowly. “When I think back on these days right before she disappeared, I always remember this, and it seems like a symbol of everything that went wrong. She wore it just to defy me, because she knew it annoyed me. I remember we argued about it, you and I.” She returned the necklace to him. “The reason we argued about it was because I didn't want to admit to you how little control I had over Kelly.”
“I always thought it was because you resented my interference.”
“No. What I resented was your being right. You were right a lot more than you knew, Guy.”
“I think I always suspected that.”
“God, we made some awful mistakes, didn't we? And I blamed you for most of them.”
“Just like I blamed you.”
“Do you ever wonder, sometimes, how we got so far off the track?”
“Every waking moment of every day of my life.”
“Any answers?”
“Do you want a list?” He began ticking off his fingers. “You were always shutting me out....”
She looked up at him. “I never meant to. I always thought you were pushing me away.”
“Of course, I was. I thought it was self- defense.”
“You made your life seem so much more important than mine, as though reporting the news were morally superior to selling real estate.”
“And you never lost an opportunity to point out I would never make a fraction as much money as you did.”
“As though you cared. You were so damn stubborn and independent—”
“Like you weren't?”
She looked up at him, her smile sad and gentle and filtered by starlight. “I really miss you sometimes.”
“Yeah.” His voice sounded a little husky when he said that, and he let the silence fall. The night was filled with the sound of water slapping the side of the boat, wind sighing far away. Sometimes in quiet such as this, he remembered how her heartbeat sounded against his ear. He almost told her that.
She said, “Did you ever notice how our lives have always been a study in extremes? Extreme poverty, extreme comfort, extreme happiness, extreme discontent...”
“Extreme longing,” he said, “for something neither one of us seemed to be able to give the other.”
She said softly, “I feel like I'm walking on the dark side of the moon right now, Guy. And it's scary.”
He let his hand rested atop her head, stroking her hair. “You're not walking alone, babe.”
She reached up and caught his fingers, turning her cheek into his hand. “I wish,” she said after a moment, “I could reach back in time and make everything different.”
“Me, too.”
But after a time she released his fingers and turned away. He knew the real topic could not be avoided any longer.
“The Littles still live in Panama City,” he said. “They agreed to see me tomorrow.”
“Did you ask them about... ?”
“I didn't want to say too much over the phone. It was hard enough to get them to agree to see me.”
Carol nodded. “I don't think
it will help. I mean, I don't think it will make any more sense or seem any more real ... or be any easier to understand. What time?”
“He works until four.”
“Pick me up at three.”
He hesitated only a moment. “Sure.”
They sat together, and listened to the sound of the waves, and after a time she rested her head on his knee. But they didn't talk much after that.
~
Chapter Thirty
The Littles lived in a Spanish-style house with a bougainvillea arbor providing shade over half the screened courtyard and a pool, tiled in deep Mediterranean blue, filling the other half. The double doors were paneled with stained glass, and the woman who opened them was slender and neatly groomed, but she looked fifteen years older than Carol had imagined her to be.
She dismissed their introductions and Carol's proffered hand with a nervous gesture, running her fingers through her short, tailored gray hair. “I'm Sandra Little,” she said a little distractedly. “Come in, I suppose. Although I don't know what help we can be to you. My husband just got in. He's having a drink in the family room. It's just this way.”
Her sentences were clipped and her voice thin, as though great reserves of energy were required for her to speak. As they followed her across the cool, Mexican-tiled foyer to the great room, Carol's eyes met Guy's and their thoughts were the same: How would they feel if two strangers invaded their life asking painful questions about their lost daughter?
The foyer gave way to a cathedral-ceilinged room with plush carpet and lemon silk- upholstered furniture. A set of glass doors looked out onto the pool courtyard, and the man who stood in front of them held a highball glass more than half filled with what might have been scotch, straight.
He turned when his wife said, “Henry, this is—” And then she faltered, turning to them with a faintly puzzled look, as though surprised by the fact that she could have forgotten their names so quickly.
“Guy Dennison, Mr. Little,” Guy said, stepping forward and offering his hand. “This is my wife, Carol.”
Carol did not correct him about their marital status.