His fingers tightened around the phone, and the pizza suddenly seemed the weight and size of a boulder in his stomach. He dropped the rest of the piece in the trash can in the utility room, then wiped his fingers on his shirt. “There must be—”
“No mistake. Ellen Chase, born thirty years ago in Atlanta, died sixteen years ago in a pile-up on I-20, same city. Then, five years later, same name, same Social Security number, began attending the University of South Carolina, working at a posh restaurant in Charleston, then running a restaurant in Copper Lake.” The triumph in Kiki’s voice made it more annoying than usual. So did the distrust. “Find out who she is, Tommy, or bring her in. Better yet, forget asking and I’ll bring her in. In handcuffs and leg irons.”
“You know what you can do with your handcuffs and your leg irons. I’ll call you back.”
He shut the phone too hard, then turned to look at Ellie. She’d rinsed the dishes and stacked them neatly in the sink, thrown away the dirty napkins and pizza crusts and wiped the counters and the table with a damp cloth. Now she squirted lotion from the bottle beside the sink—her brand, her bottle—into her hands and waited for him to say or do something.
He wanted to believe Kiki was wrong, but running a name and Social Security number was simple enough for a monkey to do. If the computer said the Ellen Leigh Chase belonging to that number was dead, she was dead.
So who the hell was standing in his kitchen? Who the hell had he been in love with all this time?
More lies. Bigger lies.
He’d thought she wasn’t capable of murder, but how could he know that when he didn’t even know something as simple as her name?
But Martha Dempsey had known. Martha had known her name, her past, all the secrets she’d done such a damn good job of hiding. Martha had been a threat to those secrets, and now she was dead.
Ellie rubbed the last bit of lotion into her skin, then hugged her middle. “I take it that was bad news. Is Kiki on her way to arrest me?”
He began walking toward her, his steps measured, his muscles taut. “She may not have to. I may do it myself.” In as conversational a tone as he could manage, he asked, “Who are you?”
She didn’t blush like most people. Her cheeks turned a delicate shade of rose that, rather than guilt or embarrassment, damn near screamed out innocence. Any rational person would look at her—her blond hair, big brown eyes, that pretty little flush—and know she couldn’t possibly have any deep, dark secrets, certainly none that could lead to murder. Any discerning person would trust her in all the things that mattered, and all the things that didn’t matter, too.
But she’d been lying since the day she’d come to Copper Lake. I’m Ellie Chase. Her first words to virtually everyone she’d met, including him, had been a lie.
When he came near, she took a step back, continuing to retreat as he advanced. The counter stopped her; she could go no farther, but he kept moving until she was trapped, his prisoner, cabinets at her back, his body in front, his arms at her sides. His face was so close to hers that she blinked, having trouble focusing, but that just made him move a breath closer.
“Ellen Chase is dead,” he said in a low, angry voice. “Who in God’s name are you?”
Chapter 7
Oh God.
Ellie had dreaded this day for so many years, from the very first time she’d ever said the words: My name is Ellen Chase. She’d been alone with Randolph Aiken that first time, when he’d given her the documentation—birth certificate, driver’s license, Social Security card—that changed her from Bethany to Ellen. The real Ellen, he’d told her, was dead. From that moment on, she’d convinced herself that the real Bethany was dead, too.
Tommy was so close, but too angry to touch her. She wished he would. Wished he’d lean his body against hers. Wrap his arms around her. Pull her head onto his shoulder. Tell her everything would be okay because he was there.
But that wasn’t going to happen. She had only herself to get through this mess.
And she finally had to share the secrets that had gotten her into it in the first place. Some naive part of her had hoped they would die with Martha, but her realistic side had known that wasn’t going to happen. She knew it had only been a matter of time before the police would have found out that Ellie Chase was a liar and a fraud. They would run her fingerprints and discover her real name, her real connection to Martha, her real past. Tommy could hear it from Kiki or from her.
She uncurled one hand from the other and gently touched his arm. He flinched, his muscles knotting, his jaw clenching, and with an inward flinch of her own, she drew back. “Can we talk outside?”
His breathing shallow and controlled, he took a few steps back, then gestured toward the door and the deck beyond.
The wood of the deck was silvered and worn, with wide steps leading down into the yard. Ellie sat down on the top one. The wood was warm against her feet, the sun shining down on her bare arms. Tommy’s idea of yard work consisted of mowing. There were no flower beds to soften the edges of the deck, leaves were scattered across the grass and the azaleas that bordered the yard on three sides hadn’t been pruned in years. In bloom in the spring, they were a gorgeous sight.
He walked past her to stand in the grass below, hands on his hips, a scowl on his face. “Should I call Robbie for the great reveal?”
His sarcasm hurt, but she hid it. She knew so much more about hiding than revealing.
Of course Robbie would know. Everyone would. By now, she was the latest topic of gossip all over town. Conversations would stop when she came around, or whispers would start. Did you hear…Do you know…Can you believe…Then the snubs and the cold shoulders, until one day she would leave town and no one would care.
If Kiki didn’t put her in jail first.
“No.” This first time, this hardest time, she would tell only Tommy. Lacing her fingers together tightly in her lap, she said, “Once upon a time—”
“It’s not a damn fairy tale,” he growled.
No. More like a horror movie.
She nodded and adopted a more fitting somber tone. “I grew up in Atlanta, an only child, in a house on Fairfax Street with my mother and father. They didn’t choose to be parents, neither before I was born nor after. I was an accident, and they did the least they could to deal with it.”
You had a roof over your head, food to eat and clothes on your back, Martha had pointed out last week. What more could a kid ask for?
“My parents weren’t strict. They weren’t interested enough to be. As long as I didn’t cause any problems for them, they didn’t care what I did. As I got older, I went to school, I hung out with my best friend, Cheryl, and I did my best to minimize the time I spent at home. My father worked and drank, and my mother stayed home and drank.
“One evening I went to Cheryl’s house to study for a mid-semester exam—at least, that was the plan. But she had been invited to a party by her boyfriend, and she persuaded me to go. I didn’t even know she had a boyfriend.”
Smiling faintly, she stared at a thin spot in the grass. She’d thought she and Cheryl shared everything. Her friend was the only one who knew the details of Ellie’s life at home; she knew about all the fights Cheryl had with her parents. But she didn’t know Cheryl was seeing a twenty-one-year-old man with whom she was having sex on a regular basis.
She’d been so naive.
“Everyone at the party was older. There was a lot of alcohol, a lot of drugs, and a fight broke out. Someone called the police, and when they came, someone slipped some meth into my purse. No one believed me when I said the drugs weren’t mine. We were at a party with all these older people, known drug dealers, everyone with arrest records except Cheryl and me. They looked at where I was and who I was with, and they assumed I was guilty. You know how cops are.”
Tommy’s tension ratcheted up a notch with the comment.
“I got arrested, the police called my parents and they refused to pick me up. I spent the night in jail, an
d when I was finally released the next morning, my mother wouldn’t let me in the house. By the time I got out of jail, she’d already removed every sign of me from the house—my clothes, my books, the photographs of me. She’d boxed everything up and watched the trash guys haul it off. She told me they’d never wanted a kid, and they damn sure didn’t want a kid who got into trouble with the cops. And then she closed and locked the door in my face.”
She dared another look at Tommy and saw sympathy in his dark eyes.
“I went to Cheryl’s house, but she wouldn’t let me in, either, and she couldn’t look me in the eye. I finally figured out she was the one who’d stashed the drugs in my purse. I begged her to tell the truth because it was destroying my life, and she said…” Her voice faltered. She’d expected nothing from her parents and hadn’t been surprised to get it. But Cheryl had been her best friend. She’d been the one person Ellie had thought would never let her down. “She said, ‘Better you than me,’ and she went back into the house and just left me there, with nowhere to go, no money, no family, no friends.”
It hadn’t been the first time she’d been betrayed, or the last, but maybe the worst. She’d never trusted anyone the way she’d trusted Cheryl. Not her parents, not Tommy, not Randolph Aiken or Anamaria or Robbie or Jamie.
But she was trusting Tommy with this story.
Though not by choice.
“I was fifteen, and I was homeless. I slept the first three nights hidden between the trash cans in the alley behind my parents’ house. I shoplifted food and huddled in corners, and my parents lived their lives as if I had never existed. On the fourth day, I tried to get my mother to let me come home, and she threw an empty whiskey bottle at me.” Ellie fingered her left temple, imagining she could still feel the split skin and the trickle of blood. “So I moved on. I left our neighborhood—I was too ashamed to see people I knew—and eventually I met other kids who were on their own. They taught me what I needed to survive.”
Tommy looked as if he’d turned to stone, a scowl etched into his face, his gaze distant and dark. The only signs of life were the muscle that clenched in his jaw and the faintest movement in his throat when he swallowed. Clearly he’d had no idea what her great reveal was going to be, and just as clearly he didn’t like it. He didn’t want to hear more. Didn’t want to know her secrets, after all.
But now that she had started, she couldn’t stop.
“You’re a cop, Tommy,” she said quietly. “You know what I mean by ‘survive.’ I snatched purses. I picked pockets. I ran errands for drug dealers. And when none of that was enough, when I got desperate enough, I began having sex with them. With anyone who had the money.”
That muscle was so tight that it looked as if it might snap.
She drew a breath, straightened her shoulders and said aloud words she’d never imagined herself saying. “I was a prostitute, Tommy. My real name is Bethany Ann, and Martha Dempsey is—was—my mother.”
Tommy was sick.
Not just surprised or stunned, but churning-in-his-stomach, going-to-lose-his-lunch sick. He’d heard lots of sad stories. He knew the god-awful things parents could do to their kids, strong people could do to vulnerable people, but he’d never imagined…He’d never suspected.
Ellie.
Dear God.
His muscles on the verge of spasm from being too taut for too long, he stiffly turned and sank onto the third step, halfway between Ellie and the grass. She was barely a blur in his peripheral vision, but he could hear her shallow breathing. He could feel the tension radiating around her. He could damn near taste the coppery flavor of dread, nervousness, fear.
Ellie, Ellen Leigh Chase, the woman he’d fallen in love with practically the first time he’d seen her, the woman he’d wanted to marry and have kids with and grow old with, was Martha Dempsey’s daughter. Bethany Ann Dempsey. Teenage thief and hooker.
If he thought about that too hard, he really would lose his lunch.
He wished she hadn’t told him anything. Wished he’d never asked her questions.
Wished he’d never met her.
No. He would never wish her out of his life.
Though he’d wish a different life for her. A different past. One that wasn’t so…awful.
“So now you know—” Her voice wobbled, and she drew a sharp breath. “Now you know pretty much everything. I bet you regret asking, don’t you?”
He should turn around, look her in the eye and say, It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything.
But it gave her a motive to kill Martha Dempsey. She’d hidden from her past a long time—a new name, a new life, a fantasy upbringing that couldn’t have been more normal. If Martha had threatened to reveal everything…Why else would she have come to Copper Lake? Certainly not to make amends. Not out of motherly concern for her only child. She’d wanted something from Ellie—money, most likely; support—and she’d been willing to do whatever was necessary to get it. She’d deserved to die for what she’d done to her fifteen-year-old daughter.
He pictured the woman he’d spent too much time with the past few days—the gray hair, the unhealthy color, the stale stink of cigarettes and booze so pervasive that it had become a part of her. Smug, mean, calculating. Ellie’s mother.
Bethany’s mother.
The name didn’t fit her. She didn’t look like a Bethany, didn’t feel like one. He couldn’t imagine calling her that, or her answering to it. Bethany had died a long time ago, destroyed by indifference and betrayal and abandonment. The woman sitting behind him, waiting for a response from him, could never be as innocent and naive as a Bethany.
Damned if he knew what response to make.
“Please say something, Tommy.” Again her voice quavered, a plea from a woman who never pleaded.
He dragged his fingers through his hair, then shook his head. “I need to…” Think. Process it all. Look at it unemotionally, like a cop. Just the facts.
He needed time to absorb that Ellie-he’d-wanted-to-marry was a liar, a fabrication, a desperate kid who’d done desperate things. He had to look at just how desperate those things had gotten.
Did it matter to him that she’d been a prostitute? That the same great-sex stuff she’d done with him, she’d done with other men? With anyone who had the money.
Had she killed her mother?
And did that really matter?
Tommy shoved himself to his feet and turned toward her but couldn’t quite meet her gaze. “I can’t—I really need to—”
He sensed rather than saw her hurt. Damn it to hell, all she needed right now was meaningless words. It’s all right. We’ll deal with it. But he didn’t know if anything was all right, if they could deal with anything.
Pivoting, he stalked across the grass and jerked his cell phone from his pocket. Speed-dial number one: Robbie. “Get over here to the house,” he said sharply. “I’ve got to go out, and someone needs to watch—” Instead of saying either name, he hung up.
“Well.” The sound was more sigh than word, heavy with disappointment, and he knew he’d officially joined the long line of people who’d let her down.
Easing to her feet as if sudden movement might hurt, Ellie crossed the deck and went back inside the house. A moment later, he followed, hearing snatches of TV shows as she flipped through the channels.
It took Robbie and Anamaria five minutes to get there. Tommy waited in the kitchen, listening for the sound of the Corvette, trying not to hear the echo of Ellie’s words. Please say something, Tommy.
Anything would have done. Wow. I’m sorry. That was tough. That’s in the past. It’s okay. Like an idiot, he couldn’t manage even that.
By the time Robbie and Anamaria reached the steps, Tommy was halfway across the porch. Anamaria’s hand brushed his arm as he passed, but he didn’t slow. “I’ll be back later.”
“Hey.” Robbie spun around and trailed him to the SUV. “What’s going on?”
“I have to go somewhere.”
&nbs
p; “Where?”
Damned if I know. With a shrug, he climbed into the truck and slammed the door.
Robbie stood in the driveway, scowling at him, as he backed out, then drove away.
After too much aimless wandering, both physical and mental, he found himself sitting in the parking lot of the Morningside Nursing Center. Pops’s room was near the back, but he wouldn’t be in there on a day like this. Tommy cut through to the nearest rear exit, then headed for a quiet corner with a table and four chairs in the shade of a maple tree. Pops sat in one of the chairs, his walker to one side, a checkerboard folded up in its box on the table in front of him. He held the Sunday paper on his lap, but he was watching a group of blue-haired women a few yards away instead of reading.
When Tommy slid into the chair to his left, Pops grinned. “That Dorothy Abernathy is quite a looker, even as old as she is.”
“She’s younger than you are.”
“Yeah, but men age better.” Pops shifted his gaze to Tommy. “Present company excepted. You look like hell.”
“It’s been a long day. Where’s Dad?”
“Already been here and gone. I whipped him at checkers again.” He gestured to the set, then said, “We missed you at church this morning.”
“You haven’t seen me at church on Sunday in longer than either of us can remember.”
Pops shook one bony finger. “Your memory might be failing, but mine is as clear as ever. Father O’Rourke told us about that poor woman. Is that why you’ve had a long day?”
Poor Martha? Like hell. A better description would be poor excuse for a human being. “Yeah. But I’m off the case.”
“Why?”
Tommy leaned back in the chair, exhausted, and it settled an inch or two deeper into the earth. “Because it appears that the prime suspect is Ellie.”
Pops snorted in utter dismissal. “Ellie wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
She’d hurt him. To him, it had been so simple: they loved each other. Getting married was the next step, then having kids. Even though she’d never said it, he’d always believed she loved him. The way she looked at him, touched him, smiled at him, made love with him…
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