“Or heads off any honest answers.”
Delaney sat back in his chair, contemplating him. “That your impression of her?”
Matt was ashamed of how little impression he actually did have of Linnea Sorensen. “No,” he said finally. “But it stands to reason she’d want to defend her brother.”
“Maybe.” His eyebrows pulled together. “I saw her when she arrived at the house as Mr. Sorensen was being taken out in handcuffs. She didn’t exactly rush over to hug him, and he talked to her like she was the family maid. Not real warm and fuzzy.”
Matt thought back to those Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners when they’d all been in that ugly, ostentatious house that was Tess and Finn’s pride and joy. Offhand he couldn’t remember brother and sister ever talking; in fact, he’d seen her quietly slide from a room when Finn entered it.
Okay, maybe she didn’t like him, either. That would be a point in her favor.
“I don’t know how they feel about each other. His parents think he walks on water, I can tell you that.”
Another note.
“When did you last see your sister?”
“Thanksgiving a year ago. I was here for a week. Finn was midtrial and hardly home. Tess took the week off and she and Hanna and I did tourist things. Rode the ferry, went up the Space Needle. We’d intended to ski, but there wasn’t enough snow for even Crystal to open.”
Delaney nodded. The previous winter had been wet but warm, a disaster for winter sports businesses.
“Finn was cordial enough when I saw him. We both…tried. For Tess’s sake.” Finn, Matt sometimes thought, disliked him in part because he felt obligated to be on his best behavior when his brother-in-law was in residence. Tess told him he was imagining things.
“I’d like a few answers, too,” he said, voice implacable. “You say Tess hit her head on the coffee table. What makes you think she didn’t stumble and wham into it wrong?”
“The medical examiner says there was too much force applied. Her skull was shattered.”
God, Matt thought. I didn’t want to know that.
He frowned. Yeah, he did. He owed it to his sister to find out the worst. He hadn’t been able to protect her, but he could be sure justice was served.
“He’s going to bring in an expert to testify that if she was hurrying when she stumbled she could have flown forward and hit hard enough.”
“Uh-huh, but here’s the compelling part. If you fell, you’d hit the top edge.” Delaney ran his hand along the rim of the conference table. “Right?”
“Yeah,” Matt agreed.
“Your sister didn’t. Tissue and hair embedded in the wood shows that the force of the blow was along the side and the sharp edge at the bottom of the tabletop rim. The only way that could happen is if she rose up from beneath the table and hit her head—”
“In which case there isn’t enough force.”
“Right. The alternative…”
“Is if somebody lifted the whole coffee table and swung it at her,” Matt finished softly.
Tissue and hair. Goddamn it.
“You got it.” The two men looked at each other, and Matt saw pure determination in Delaney’s eyes. He wasn’t going to let Finn walk.
Reassured, Matt held out his hand. “Thank you.”
One shoulder jerked. “Just doing my job.” But they shook, and Delaney walked him out. “Where can I reach you?”
“The Silver Cloud on Union Bay. I’m going to look at rentals today, though. I figure I’ll be staying in Seattle, at least through the trial. I intend to have Hanna with me.”
Those eyebrows rose again, but Delaney didn’t comment. “I’m going to ask you to stay away from Mr. Sorensen.”
“I have every intention of doing so.” Matt’s tone hardened. He’d been furious to find that Finn had walked out on bail within twenty-four hours of killing Tess. “Unless he tries to take Hanna home with him.”
Matt had been relieved by Linnea’s phone message, which made it clear that she still had the six-year-old. He was annoyed at himself for apparently sleeping through the ringing phone last night, but God knew he’d been exhausted. He’d see Hanna tonight. With a little luck, he’d have a house to move into within the week.
Normally if he’d planned to be in the area for a few months, he’d have gone for a condo. Why take on mowing and weeding? But a child should have a yard. A swing set, a playhouse, someplace to kick a ball. His ideas were vague. He didn’t actually remember seeing Hanna play outside in the yard in Laurelhurst. When he and she kicked around a soccer ball, they’d walked down to a nearby park.
His guess was that Hanna hadn’t had many opportunities to hang out during the day at home. Both her parents tended to work six days a week minimum and, except during the summer, probably picked her up from after-school care and got home after dark. She’d told him once that she was practically always the last kid picked up. She had sounded wistful, but when he tried to talk to Tess about it, she rolled her eyes and said, “Have you seen her day care? It’s an amazing facility with great teachers. Saturdays they go on field trips, and the rest of the time they do art and put on plays. She’s learning to speak Spanish and about architecture from walking tours and…”
She’d gone on and on, extolling the virtues of this Rolls Royce of day-care centers. His guess was that a kid who’d been in school all day probably didn’t want to then go straight to language lessons or be organized to put on a play or do anything else supervised. That was not how he and Tess had grown up. They’d had a stay-at-home mom. Sometimes they’d been in organized activities—Little League for him and dance lessons for her. But mostly they’d been able to get off the school bus, have a snack then go to a friend’s house or read or watch TV. Their entire lives hadn’t been organized the way Hanna’s was.
But he also knew that Tess’s interior-design business had been her dream. It was important to her. What was she supposed to do? Close it down until Hanna was a teenager? She’d actually gone to part-time Hanna’s first year and had sounded restless the entire year, Matt remembered thinking. When he asked her once if she and Finn intended to have another baby, she’d shaken her head emphatically.
“We adore Hanna. How can we not? But look at us. We both love our jobs. We thrive on pressure, on being busy. Especially Finn. He was next to no help when she was little. And did I tell you how much I hated being pregnant?”
She had, although he’d forgotten.
“No.” Another shake of the head. “Hanna’s going to be an only child.”
He’d been dismayed, maybe because he remembered how important he and Tess had been to each other after their parents died in a car accident. He’d been in college and his sister a sophomore in high school, but he had managed to keep her with him. He hated to think how much more devastating the loss would have been if he hadn’t had her.
His jaw tightened at the realization that she was gone now. She’d been the one person in the world he knew loved him, always and forever. Until Finn Sorensen’s temper got the best of him.
Was the bastard even sorry? Did he wish he could call back the burst of rage that had him lifting the whole coffee table and slamming it into his wife’s skull?
Or was he self-serving enough to blame her because she’d provoked him? Or even to convince himself it had happened the way he was trying to tell police, that Tess was ultimately to blame because she’d somehow slammed her own head into the table?
Despite having been related to him by marriage for eight years now, Matt had no idea how Finn really thought. Despite Tess’s exasperation, they’d both resisted playing a round of golf together or even sitting down with a beer. Eventually, he’d thought, she’d become resigned to the fact that her husband and her brother would never be friends without really understanding how deep the chasm was.
Matt bought a Seattle Times in front of the station and took it to his car. He’d look at online classifieds later, when he got to his hotel, but he could start with what
was in the newspaper.
Sitting in the parking garage, he worked his way through the rental section, making a few appointments to check out places.
By dinnertime, he’d seen a dozen, but nothing that struck him as perfect. He wished he had a better idea how important staying in the same school was to Hanna. Did she have good friends? He’d have to ask her tonight.
At five-fifteen, he called Linnea’s and a woman picked up. “Hello?”
“This is Matt Laughlin.” He’d pulled to the curb and set the emergency brake, even though he hadn’t expected her to be home quite yet.
“Oh,” she said softly. “You didn’t call back last night.”
“I’d had a long flight. I conked out and didn’t hear the phone ring.”
“Oh,” she said again. “Matt, I’m so sorry about Tess.”
He forced out a thank-you. “How is Hanna handling this?”
There was a small silence. He wished he could see her face. “I’m not sure. She’s so quiet. I’ve been trying to keep her busy, even though I don’t know whether that’s the best thing to do or not. Maybe I should be encouraging her to grieve. I just don’t know,” she said again.
“Busy sounds smart to me.”
“Do you think so?”
For God’s sake, wasn’t that what he’d just said? He reached up and kneaded the back of his neck, where tension had gathered. “Yeah. I do.” He paused. “I’d like to see her.”
“I assumed you would.” He could all but feel her gathering herself. “I’m going to ask you not to…to say anything negative about her father. Not right now. I…haven’t even told her he’s been arrested.”
“How the hell are you explaining his absence, then?” Oh, shit. “She isn’t seeing him, is she?”
“No.” The single word was firm enough that he momentarily pulled the phone away from his ear and gazed at it in surprise. Interesting. Maybe Delaney was right that she didn’t much like her big brother. “Finn hasn’t even called,” she said. “Mom tells me he’s out on bail. He must know he isn’t in any state right now to be comforting Hanna.”
Uh-huh. What father wouldn’t want to be the one to explain to his small daughter what happened to Mommy? To hold her and dry her tears and do his damnedest to make her world feel safe again? Matt couldn’t imagine that not being his first priority.
“Maybe,” he suggested, every word dropping with a distinct clunk, “the bastard has enough conscience that he can’t look Hanna in the eye.”
Crap, he thought immediately. That wasn’t the way to assure Linnea’s cooperation.
But after a very long silence, she said only, “I doubt he’s figured out what to say to her.”
Huh. Did that mean she believed her brother was guilty?
“Have you had dinner yet?” he asked. “Can I take you and Hanna out?”
The offer was an impulse; he wanted to spend time with Hanna, not Linnea. But it made sense. His niece hadn’t seen him in almost a year. Despite their e-mails and phone calls, they always had to ease into their friendship. Besides…he found himself more curious than he’d expected to be about this sister he’d scarcely noticed in the past. What was the saying? Still waters run deep. Did hers, or was she the mouse he’d guessed her to be?
After another discernible pause, she said stiffly, “Yes, if you mean it. I haven’t started dinner yet, and I know Hanna would love to see you.”
“Have you told her I called last night?”
“No, I wanted to talk to you first.”
Tone silky, Matt said, “To make sure I wouldn’t rant about her daddy.”
“Um…something like that.” She sounded embarrassed, but had enough spine to add, “I don’t really know you.”
“No. We never bothered, did we?”
“You didn’t seem very interested.”
So. She had teeth. Maybe saying we never bothered wasn’t quite accurate. He’d automatically extended his dislike of Finn to Finn’s family. So no—he hadn’t bothered.
“You may have guessed that your brother and I didn’t much care for each other.”
She didn’t comment.
After a moment, Matt said, “Is this too early? Can I come by now?”
“Now is fine. We eat early. Um…do you need directions?”
“I got them off the Internet last night.” He couldn’t even remember why he’d had her address. Presumably Tess had given it to him, God knew why.
“All right,” Linnea said. “We’ll be ready.”
The drive took him longer than he expected. It was interesting, he thought, that she’d chosen to live so far from either her brother or parents, without having actually left Seattle. Maybe deliberate, maybe a job had determined where she rented or bought. He knew from what Tess had said that she worked at a library. Obviously, from her phone message, she had some kind of petsitting service, too.
Her house turned out to be a tiny, midcentury bungalow in a blue-collar neighborhood in West Seattle. It was on a fairly steep side street, the single-car garage essentially in the basement beneath the house. He pulled to the curb, cranked the wheels and set the emergency brake before turning off the engine. He got out and surveyed Linnea Sorensen’s tidy home. Rented, he presumed, but she did maintain it. Leaves on the Japanese maple in front had mostly fallen and been raked up. Grass was sodden but carefully mowed. The house had been painted a warm chestnut-brown and trimmed with deep rose, a surprisingly warm and cheerful combination. The front door was seafoam-green.
No doorbell, he discovered, but a shiny brass knocker made a deep thudding sound when he lifted and dropped it.
The door opened immediately and he had a moment of sharp surprise. His first sight of the woman who’d answered the door disconcerted and unsettled him; funny, she didn’t look like he remembered. It hadn’t been that long since he’d seen her.
On the heels of his surprise came disappointment because Hanna was hovering shyly behind her aunt, peeking out at him as if he were a stranger.
He smiled at her. “Hanna Banana.”
She whispered, “Uncle Matt? I thought…Mom said…” That made her look stricken. “You were coming for Christmas.”
Keeping his gaze on her small, distressed face, he said gently, “When I heard about your mom, I came right away. You and she are my only family, you know.”
Not are—were. Now he had only Hanna. He wanted to hug her. To lift her up into his arms and take her away.
“Oh,” she breathed, sounding alarmed, and buried her face in her aunt’s leg.
Ease into her life, he reminded himself, tamping down his frustration.
He lifted his gaze to Finn’s sister, ready to figure out why he’d felt that odd shift inside at first sight. Damn it, he’d remembered her as colorless, washed-out, her hair and skin pale, her eyes—who knew?—her body so slight she could fade into the woodwork.
Either she’d changed, or he hadn’t looked at her before. Or, hell, she had been cast into shadow by her brother and his sister, both vivid personalities, both larger than life and impossible to ignore. Even so, he liked to think of himself as observant, which meant there was no way he should have failed to see that Finn’s sister was beautiful.
Because what he saw now was a lovely woman. Slight, yes, but in a leggy, slim-hipped way. She could have been a dancer or a runner. Although her breasts, he was jolted to realize, were generous enough to have been a nuisance for either. How had he escaped noticing breasts so lush and perfectly sized to fit a man’s hands?
Her hair was a pale, ash blond—moonlight where her brother had rich gold hair. Straight instead of wavy like his. His eyes were bright blue, hers a softer blue-gray. Her features were fine, even delicate, as was her bone structure in general. The hand that squeezed her niece’s shoulder was long-fingered and slender. With deft use of makeup and the right clothes, she could be stunning.
Feeling stupefied, he was also angry at himself. What was he doing, evaluating her as a woman? She was Finn’s sister. Enough
said.
Frowning slightly, he realized that she was assessing him in turn. Had she ever really looked at him before, either? He couldn’t help wondering. Or, in her case, was this more of a review?
“Ready for dinner?” he said. “You’ll have to suggest a place. Anything from pizza to gourmet French is fine by me. Except—” he smiled at his niece again “—I seem to remember that Hanna Banana was a little bit picky the last time I saw her.”
She squeezed tighter onto Linnea’s leg. Linnea laughed. “Well…definitely nothing gourmet. All six-year-olds are picky.”
Finn, of course, had been irritated by her refusal to eat mushrooms, broccoli, anything new, anything too mixed together to separate into components. Tess had laughed and said pretty much the same thing Linnea had.
“Then how about that pizza?”
Now Linnea smiled at him, lighting her face. “I take it somebody wants pizza.”
A soft, sympathetic smile didn’t change anything. Except—damn, he was pretty sure he’d never seen her smile before.
He heard himself admitting, “Yeah, it’s the one food I miss when I’m abroad. I can find it, but it’s never quite the same.”
“Then pizza it is. Let me grab my purse.” She gently disentangled herself from Hanna, who froze in place, her gaze darting to his face before she ducked her head.
“Thank you for e-mailing me,” he said quietly. “I liked hearing from you.”
She whispered something. He hoped she’d liked getting e-mails from him, too, and, even though she’d needed Tess’s help with spelling, hadn’t been sending them under her mother’s orders.
A sharp stab of pain reminded him of Tess. The truth that she was gone hadn’t really hit him yet. Mostly he still felt anger. But because he saw her only intermittently, for a week here or there, her absence didn’t yet seem real. For Hanna, though, it must be very real.
Or was it? he wondered, troubled. She hadn’t seen her mother’s body, hadn’t talked to her dad. She had probably, in the past, stayed with her aunt Linnie for a few days. Did she really grasp the fact that her mom was gone for good?
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