Close Call

by Laura Disilverio

  36

  Sydney

  Although her experience with senators’ homes was admittedly limited, Sydney was expecting something grander than the modest house they found at Emma Fewell’s Carroll County address. Set back from a quiet residential street, it was a two-story Cape Cod–style home with weathered wood siding and gleaming white trim. Towering blue spruces blocked neighbors’ sight lines. A door painted coral added a pop of color.

  “You’re sure you got the address right?” Reese asked, echoing Sydney thoughts.

  The door opened and a woman, presumably Emma Fewell, beckoned them. “Yep,” Sydney said, waving to Mrs. Fewell.

  “I’ll take the lead,” Reese announced as they walked toward the waiting woman. “It’s not exactly my first go-round with grieving widows.”

  Sydney let her silence be acquiescence. There was no harm in letting Reese steer the conversation; in fact, she was glad she didn’t have to ask Fewell’s widow if his death might really have been murder.

  “You must be Sydney and Reese,” the woman said when they were within earshot. “Now, which is which?”

  Sydney and Reese identified themselves, and the woman said, “I’m Emma. I insist you call me that. I’ve been ‘Mrs. Fewelled’ to death ever since Armand got elected to the Senate thirty years ago.” Her drawl revealed her Alabama origins.

  Sydney instinctively liked Emma Fewell. Seventy-two, according to the bio Reese had given her, she wore her years lightly. She’d put on some weight, perhaps, and laugh lines made her face interesting, but her spine was straight and she moved with only a slight hitch in her step. Her face was makeup free, but strong brows brought the focus to her dark eyes. She wore a yellow cotton tunic and knit leggings with muddy knees, and no jewelry other than a modest diamond on her ring finger. Her graying hair spiraled in long dreadlocks, à la Maya Angelou, to mid-back.

  “Come in, come in,” she said, holding the door wide. “I’ve got a pitcher of tea on the back patio, if that’s all right with y’all, and I thought we’d sit out there. I’ve been gardening. It’s such a lovely day.”

  It was sweltering, but Sydney raised no objection. As they traversed a cool hall lined with family photos, and a kitchen that hadn’t been updated since Jimmy Carter was president, she tried to figure out what made Emma Fewell so appealing. She was comfortable in her own skin, Sydney finally decided. Content with who she was and what she had. She reminded Sydney a little of Nana Linn.

  “We’re very sorry for your loss,” Reese said when they reached the back patio, a brick semi-circle surrounded by lush gardens that testified to the love and hard work Emma Fewell poured into them. A pitcher sweated on a wrought-iron table with three acrylic glasses stacked beside it.

  Sydney was afraid reference to her husband would make the recent widow tear up, but she replied calmly, “Thank you, dear. I haven’t lost Armand, though; he’s waiting for me on the other side, in the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ. He’s at peace.”

  Something in her voice suggested he hadn’t previously been at peace. Reese must have caught it, too, because she asked, “Was he worried about something before the hunting trip?”

  “You don’t mind if I work while we talk, do you?” Emma asked. She crossed to where two dozen small plastic pots, the disposable kind, held six-inch-high seedlings with toothy green leaves. A foot-wide dirt border that wound in front of a glorious display of ferns and hostas showed where the new plants would go. “If I don’t get the Serbian bellflowers in, they’re going to croak in this heat.” Sinking heavily to her knees, she said, “Help yourselves to tea. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind handing me the pots one at a time?” She smiled up at Sydney.

  “Of course not.” Awkwardly, Sydney lowered herself to the ground. She handed Emma one of the bellflower pots, thankful that they were in a corner shaded by a Japanese maple tree. She exchanged a look with Reese, who shrugged and went to pour three glasses of tea.

  Crumbling the dirt around the seedling’s roots, Emma said, “I was hoping that some time with Jermaine would do him good. He always enjoyed hunting, especially turkeys—he said they were awful wily for such a dumb bird—and he didn’t get to do it as much as he liked, but … ” She shook her head. Using a trowel, she dug a hollow into the dirt and inserted the plant, tamping loam around it when it was positioned to her satisfaction.

  “So Jermaine Washington was there when it happened? He saw the whole thing?” Reese asked. She was still standing, and her angular shadow draped over Sydney.

  Emma apparently caught the edge in Reese’s voice because she leveled a long look at her before saying, “Another one, please.” Sydney handed over another bellflower, and then three more, feeling sweat trickle down her back. “Jermaine is a life-long friend and I have total faith in his integrity,” Emma said, tucking the plants into place. “He’s a man of good will. That’s not a term you hear much anymore, is it? A man of good will. But that’s what Jermaine is.”

  “So there’s no chance at all that it wasn’t an accident?” Reese prodded. “That Jermaine Washington might have been mistaken, that the bullet came from anywhere besides your husband’s gun?”

  Emma rocked back on her heels and looked from Reese to Sydney, a sad smile lurking in her eyes. “Well now, dear, that’s two different questions, isn’t it?”

  Sydney’s brow creased. What was the woman getting at? Reese apparently saw an opening because her voice sharpened. “So there is some doubt? The bullet might not have come from your husband’s gun?”

  “Why are you so interested in Armand’s death? You know it’s because of Armand’s passing that Fidel is getting his shot at becoming a Senator—it’s my husband’s seat this election’s meant to fill.” Emma paused. “Fidel Montoya said it was important when he called, but he didn’t say why.” The easygoing timbre of her voice hadn’t changed, but it was clear she wasn’t continuing the conversation until she understood why they were there. “There’s no crime involved here,” she said, eyeing Reese in a way that made it clear she knew exactly what she did for a living. She thrust the trowel, blade down, into the dirt.

  Jumping in before Reese could answer, Sydney said, “I—we—think it’s possible your husband was murdered, and that the person who did it may be after another politician.” She didn’t name Montoya, knowing he’d deny any involvement if Emma asked him. She gave the woman a five-minute summary of the past week’s events.

  “My, my,” Emma said slowly when she finished. “That’s quite a tale.”

  Sydney couldn’t tell if she believed her or not.

  “So,” Reese put in, crouching slightly, “you can see why it’s important that we know if there’s any way, any way at all, that your husband’s death wasn’t an accident.”

  Emma blinked once, heavy eyelids shuttering her gaze. When she reopened her eyes, they brimmed with grief. “His death was definitely no accident,” she said.

  “What?” Reese peeled off her sunglasses to get a better look at the woman. Sydney could feel her sister’s astonishment.

  Emma stuck up a hand, her tunic sleeve sliding up to reveal a fleshy forearm. “Help me up, would you, there’s a dear. The rest of these will have to wait.”

  Reese locked hands with her and helped haul her up. Sydney stood and brushed grass off her jeans.

  “You don’t believe your husband’s death was an accident?” Sydney tried to rein in her excitement, her conviction that they were edging close to Jason’s killer.

  “I know it wasn’t.” Emma looked from Sydney to Reese and back to Sydney. “My Armand committed suicide. Jermaine, good friend that he is, made up that story about the rattlesnake so no one outside the family ever need know. I hope you won’t feel the need to tell anyone; I wouldn’t want Jermaine to get in any trouble with the police. He was only being the best friend he knew how to be, to Armand and to me.”

  Suicide! Sydney’s hopes collapsed
like a card house.

  “Why would your husband kill himself?” Reese asked. Sydney hoped Emma didn’t hear the thin edge of doubt that she did.

  “He’d been heading toward suicide these twelve years and more,” Emma said quietly. “Ever since we lost our son. A drunk driver took his life. Let’s sit.” She walked with weighted step to the iron table and lowered herself onto a chair. Reese passed her a glass of iced tea and she drank half of it before swiping the back of her wrist across her brow. Sydney and Reese sat on either side of her.

  “I loved my Armand, Lord knows I did—do—and it about killed me that I couldn’t help him. After Michael died, he was never the same. I’m sad about Michael every day, but I let joy back into my life after a year or so, mostly through my garden. I couldn’t overlook the gift of a rose in bloom, or marigolds’ bright happiness. And then there were the grandbabies, Michael’s twins, and they were so full of life and energy, buzzing around, asking why and how, growing up so fast.” She smiled, brown eyes sparkling, but then the liveliness drained out of her face. “But Armand … Armand, he kept himself closed off to joy. He still worked for his constituents, but it was out of duty, not passion, after Michael died.

  “The first year, he focused on the trial, and after the conviction he campaigned for stiffer penalties for drunk drivers. He still went to church, but I could tell it wasn’t the same for him. He loved Michael’s kids and spent a lot of time with them, telling them stories about their dad, but he once said something to me about seeing Michael in them, especially little Colin, and it made me worry that he didn’t love them for their own sakes as much as because he felt they were a link with Michael. From the start, he visited Michael’s grave four or five times a week—got mad at me when I refused to go so often. It was one of the few times he was ever ugly to me.” She looked pensive and was silent for a long moment. “He kept his grief alive, took it out and polished it every day.” She mimed polishing as if she had a dust cloth folded over two fingers, rubbing them back and forth. “He had the shiniest, brightest grief you ever did see.”

  Her gaze drifted to the middle distance, and Sydney wondered what she was remembering. She shifted on her chair. She felt sad for Emma, but edgy, too, uncomfortable with the woman’s expansive forgiveness, her seeming acceptance of death and her husband’s depression. She compared Emma’s grief to Connie’s—their husbands had died not long apart—but it was apples and oranges. Or maybe not. Connie had lived with a husband physically disabled by a series of strokes, who’d needed nursing and care for almost two decades. Emma had lived with a husband crippled by grief. Were their cases so different? She put the thought aside to consider later.

  “So, you see,” Emma said in the voice of one reaching her conclusion, “there’s no connection between Armand’s death and what you’re looking into.”

  “We’re sorry for disturbing you,” Reese said, gathering herself in as if she were ready to leave.

  “I’m not disturbed.” Emma smiled again. “I don’t suppose I can talk you into helping with the rest of these bellflowers? I don’t seem to have the stamina I used to.”

  Sydney and Reese left ninety minutes later, sweaty and coated with mulch dust after planting and mulching the bellflowers and moving a few heavy planters Emma wanted repositioned. As Reese backed out of the driveway, she muttered, “I know why she agreed to see us—she needed slave labor.”

  “I like her. Can I be like that when I’m seventy?”

  “Black and fat? Probably not.”

  Sydney laughed long and hard and felt her muscles loosening and her stomach unknotting. It dispelled some of her disappointment that they hadn’t made any progress toward ID-ing the killer by talking to Emma Fewell. “Not that. At peace. Finding joy in little things. Not trying so hard anymore.”

  Reese favored her with a long, thoughtful look before turning her gaze back to the road. “Like I said: probably not.”

  Sydney punched her shoulder.

  “Hey, not while I’m driving.” But the corners of Reese’s mouth turned in like she was holding back a smile.

  37

  Sydney

  Sydney felt restless when they got back to the townhouse that evening, something in her stirred up by listening to Emma Fewell. When Earl yapped at them and ran toward his leash, she grabbed on to the idea of a walk with relief. She didn’t want to sit, didn’t want to think or contemplate. A walk would be just the ticket. She was half irritated when Reese insisted on coming along.

  “What kind of bodyguard would I be if I let you wander around outside alone?” Reese asked, cocking a brow. She slung her purse over her shoulder. So she’d have the gun, Sydney realized. “Besides, he’s my dog.”

  Resisting a sharp retort, Sydney leashed a happy Earl and the three of them turned right on the sidewalk with Earl taking the lead. One big happy, Sydney thought sourly. With twilight settling in and a breeze blowing, the temperature was more comfortable and Sydney gradually relaxed again. It was the heat making her snappy, she told herself. When they’d walked for fifteen minutes in a silence that Reese showed no inclination to break (not getting very far since Earl had to whiz on every tree, shrub, sign, lamppost, and hydrant they passed), Sydney said, “You researched Montoya’s wife. Tell me about her so I know what we’re walking into tomorrow.”

  Shifting the purse on her shoulder, Reese said, “Father a biochemist-turned-entrepreneur, mother a homemaker and sister of Matvei Utkin. A brother in Texas and a sister in North Carolina. Wellesley grad. Met Montoya at a fundraiser for a Democratic candidate and six months later they were married. He put her through grad school and she became an architect. After a few years, she branched out to become a builder—no one seems to know where the initial stake for that came from.”

  “Utkin?”

  “Could be. Several profiles I scanned say her company is one of the most successful in eastern Maryland. Custom homes. She’s rich in her own right, so why she sticks with Montoya, I don’t know. He began screwing around on her about twenty minutes after they married, and she’s put up with it all this time. I don’t get the political wife ethos of ‘stand by your man no matter what kind of pond scum he is.’ What self-respecting woman would do that?”

  Sydney almost felt Julie Manley’s presence and tripped on an uneven slab of sidewalk. George’s wife had told Sydney she was keeping their marriage together because she’d made a vow, that the church had joined them and no teenage slut with daddy issues was going to separate them. She’d said that George’s political career was a calling that transcended his lapse—that’s what she called the almost three-year affair, a ‘lapse’—and that she wasn’t going to let his sordid association with Sydney keep him from accomplishing everything she knew he could do for the American people. At the time, her words and disgust had devastated Sydney, but looking back, she wondered if Julie believed, really felt, what she was saying or if she’d scripted the speech and carefully chosen the dignified lavender suit for maximum impact. Shades of purple were mourning colors in Victorian times, Sydney knew, and she wondered if Julie was making a subtle statement about mourning her moribund marriage.

  Reese’s fingers snapping an inch from her nose brought her back. “Earth to Sydney. Where’d you go?”

  “I’m right here,” Sydney said, pulling Earl away from a fast-food bag he was investigating. He clamped it in his jaws and carried it with him. Her cell phone rang. She answered it, hoping it would be Montoya telling her one of his staff had located her car. Listening in disbelief to the voice squawking through the phone, she said, “Where?” and “Thank you” and hung up.

  “That was the police,” she told Reese. “They found my car.”

  “Superb. Let’s go get it.”

  Sydney shook her head. “Nope. Someone hacked it up and set in on fire in the parking lot of an abandoned warehouse in Anacostia.”

  Reese whistled. “I guess those KKK guys w
ere PO’d.”

  “Imminent Revelation.”

  “So they run around in camos instead of bed sheets.” Prying the fast-food bag out of Earl’s jaws and crinkling it into a ball, Reese shot it toward a rusted trash barrel. It swished in, startling a squirrel on the rim who fluffed his tail and chattered at them.

  “Show-off.”

  “If you’ve got it, flaunt it.” Reese grinned. “But I don’t need to tell you that—you’ve done plenty of flaunting in your day. Even at seventeen, you had it going on, baby sister. The dress you wore to senior prom … ” She eyed Sydney’s attire as if comparing it unfavorably with her former wardrobe. “You had it going on, but it looks like it got up and went.”

  Sydney’s hand shook slightly and the leash rippled. The media and blogosphere had been brutal about her looks when the story broke, with paparazzi sneaking photos that emphasized her cleavage and editors digging up photos of her in that low-cut, tight-fitting green prom dress and running them over and over with her date cropped out. She didn’t think Reese meant to be hurtful in this instance, and she wanted to preserve their soap-bubble-thin reconnection, but she couldn’t keep all the irritation out of her response. “I don’t need your fashion critiques, okay? My clothes suit me fine. They fit my job, who I am.”

  Reese let it go. “Who am I to judge?” She gestured to her camp shirt and khakis. “Whoever said ‘clothes make the man’—or woman, in this case—was full of shit. Earl, it’s time to go back.”