If Jeff was in the gathering room she couldn’t see him, but then again shadows lay everywhere and the silvery moonlight didn’t quite reach the corners, which made them as dark as the end of the hall. She really didn’t scare easily but right now, under these particular circumstances, she discovered that she was . . . uneasy. She didn’t like having her stomach flutter, or her pulse quicken. She didn’t like having her heart pound like it knew something she didn’t.
She didn’t like being here, period.
“Jeff?” Now that was loud. Her voice bounced off the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the resulting echoes putting her even more on edge than before. No answer, either, which ratcheted up her annoyance to a whole new level.
This is the last time I go running after you, she promised her ex-husband silently, on the verge of doing what she knew was the smart thing: turning around and leaving him to sort out his own damned mess.
Instead, lips tight with impatience, she scanned the shadowy corners. Could he be passed out on the floor in one of them? Narrowing her eyes and focusing on the darkest part of the room, she pressed the redial button on her phone so it would call him back and pinpoint his (or the phone’s) location. At the same time, she stared hard at one corner in particular, on the left side of the fireplace well beyond the reach of the moonlight. She got the jittery-making feeling that someone was there, and directed her phone/flashlight beam toward it accordingly.
Her voice was sharp. “Jeff! Are you—?”
She broke off abruptly as, behind her, Jeff’s phone rang, so close it startled her. Doing a quick about-face, she saw nothing but moonlight and shifting shadows.
Puzzled, she peered into the gloom, the words Damn it, Jeff just about to fall from her lips.
Then his phone rang again, making her look up. One of the shadows resolved itself into a pair of bare masculine feet dangling limply in the air a little higher than her head.
Riley blinked. The feet were still there.
Her throat tightened.
Long, slim feet. Slightly crooked toes.
She knew them.
Oh, God. She knew them.
Riley stopped breathing. She stopped everything. Time seemed to stretch out into an eternity between one heartbeat and the next. She stared at the feet while her stunned mind did its best to reject what she was seeing.
The ringtone blared once more. The sense of being caught in a moment out of time shattered. Riley sucked in air. It was Jeff’s ringtone. From Jeff’s phone. Following the sound, her gaze slid up over lean bare calves. He was wearing black gym shorts, a black tee: exercise clothes. The phone was there, probably in the waterproof pouch he clipped inside his shorts for exercise or swimming, on the lifeless body that hung motionless not ten feet away.
Jeff’s lifeless body.
Riley’s heart lurched. Her stomach dropped straight down to her toes.
There was no mistake: the moonlight streaming in through the French doors touched on Jeff’s blond hair. Fine and pale, it was one of the first things she had noticed about him when he had swept her off her feet in Philly all those years ago.
She must have made some kind of strangled sound, because her throat ached like something wild and fierce had just torn its way out of it. She didn’t remember inching forward, but suddenly she was close enough to discover that what she smelled was the ammonialike odor of pee: he had wet himself.
Jeff. My God.
Limp and pale, he hung suspended in midair.
Unable to believe what her eyes were telling her, Riley touched his leg. It was solid, all muscle and bone. Of course it was: Jeff was a runner. The fine hairs on it felt silky. His skin was warm. Did that mean . . . ?
She tried to call out to him, but no sound emerged. His wrist was out of reach. Frantically she grabbed his ankle, felt for a pulse.
Nothing. No beat. His leg was heavy and inert.
She let go, and his whole body moved, but not in a good way. He swung a little, back and forth, from where she had tugged on his leg.
Horror surged through her in an icy tide.
Holy Mary, Mother of God . . .
In this moment of extremis, the teachings of her childhood took over: the Catholic prayer for the dead unspooled with frantic urgency through her head.
Hands shaking now, Riley drew back a step and ran the light from her phone over him.
His head was tilted at an odd angle. Something narrow was wrapped around his neck, digging into the skin beneath his jaw.
His face was dark. Purplish. His handsome features were hideously contorted.
His eyes were open. They gleamed dully as the beam hit them.
He didn’t blink. His pupils were fixed. Unseeing.
It hit Riley then like a thunderclap: Jeff was hanging by the neck from the gallery railing. He was dead.
Agony exploded inside her chest.
Oh, God. Oh, God.
A scream ripped into her already aching throat, where the constriction of the muscles there strangled it before it could escape.
Everything seemed to blur. The room spun. Her phone fell from her suddenly nerveless fingers. Realization merged with grief merged with fear, combining into a deadly lance that stabbed her through the heart.
Jeff. Oh, God. Jeff.
Her knees gave out abruptly, and she crumpled to the floor.
* * *
THE CLATTER of her phone hitting marble was unexpected. The sharp sound made Finn stiffen. But there was no threat to him, and his mind recognized that even as his body responded instinctively to the unexpected noise by reaching for his gun.
Chill out. Wait.
His hand dropped.
Still concealed by the darkness that she had almost breached with her makeshift flashlight, he watched her sink to her knees, watched her head drop forward to meet them, watched her shudder and shake. He knew who she was, of course. It was his business to know all the players in the game. Even before moonlight had touched the bright flame of her hair, even before he’d gotten a look at the beautiful, fine-boned face and slender, shapely figure that had prompted the only son of a billionaire to marry Little Miss Nobody from Nowhere (which was what Houston’s catty female upper crust called her behind her back), he’d recognized her voice.
After all, he’d been listening in on her phone conversations with Jeffy-boy for the last couple of days.
Riley Wozniak Cowan. With her blue-collar Philly roots and her matching Yankee accent, which by itself was enough to make her voice a stand-out in this world of the slow Texas drawl.
Watching her now as she huddled there on the floor, clearly in the grip of strong emotion, he felt nothing, no pity, no concern, only a mild impatience as he waited for the shock to wear off, for her to start to cry, to scream, to run away.
She did none of those things. After a long moment, she picked up her phone. Then she got to her feet, stuck her phone down inside the small purse that hung from her shoulder, and stepped close to the corpse. She was wearing a snug little white dress with a short skirt and sky-high heels, and Finn couldn’t help but notice the long, slim line of her legs as she went way up on her toes and her hemline rode up her thighs almost to the curve of her ass.
Stretching, she reached up, holding on to the corpse, fumbled around with it doing something he couldn’t quite make out, and came back down with—he squinted—Jeffy-boy’s phone, in some kind of clear plastic pouch that seemed to have been clipped onto the waistband of his shorts. She said something—her murmur was too low to allow Finn to make out the words—presumably to the corpse. Then she touched Cowan again—a quick, caressing slide of pale fingers against the equally pale skin of his leg—and turned and headed for the door, head high, those sexy high heels click-clacking purposefully over the floor, moving way faster than she had when she’d come in.
The speed with which she left was the only sign of agitation she now showed.
Having taken Cowan’s phone, she was walking away, leaving his dead body hanging just the
way she’d found it.
Not what he’d been expecting.
A cool customer. He hadn’t pegged her as that.
Finn found himself wondering why she wasn’t screaming the roof down, or phoning for help.
Along with what was on that phone.
Bottom line, she wasn’t behaving the way a woman who’d just found her ex-husband dead ought to behave.
Intrigued, he followed her, careful to keep out of sight.
— CHAPTER —
TWO
The funeral was a nightmare. Not that Riley had been expecting anything else.
“Rest eternal grant to him—”
The final words of the funeral service resonated through the still air, rising over the shuffling of feet, the rustling of the paper programs, the buzz of insects and twitter of birds, the distant drone of traffic. They couldn’t have made less sense to Riley than if they were being spoken in Swahili.
Jeff killed himself.
The thought looped endlessly through her mind, tearing her up inside. But her automatic reaction to the idea was even worse, because it was terrifying: No way in hell.
It was Thursday afternoon, just after 4 p.m. Blazingly hot. The endless, perfectly groomed green acres of exclusive Glenwood Cemetery seemed to shimmer beneath the cloudless blue sky. The leaves of the single tall oak mercifully shading those closest to the grave from the sun hung motionless, dusty and limp from the prolonged drought that the area had been experiencing. The sickeningly sweet perfume of flowers permeated the air, overwhelming enough to make Riley sick to her stomach. The last time she’d smelled flowers in such profusion had been, Don’t think about it.
She thrust the unwelcome memory out of her mind before it even had a chance to fully form. But, like the heat, there was no escaping that perfume. And that would be because flowers were everywhere. Chrysanthemums. Lilies. Roses. Carnations. Gladiolas. Wreaths, vases, baskets, and sprays of them, massed in undulating drifts of brilliant color behind Father Snyder, the white-robed Episcopal priest who was officiating.
So many flowers. As if by sending them, lifelong friends could make up for the way they had abandoned the Cowans in droves in the nine months since George’s arrest. George was the only one who had committed any crimes; but the rest of the family had paid the price, as well, becoming pariahs virtually overnight.
We’re sorry now? Is that what the flowers were supposed to say? If that was the message, it was, in Riley’s opinion, too little, too late.
The fury that was the reverse side of her grief flamed like a blowtorch through her veins.
Today there were hundreds of people gathered around despite the fact that the funeral ostensibly was private. The shuffling, staring arc of them crowded in among the monuments, covering the sea of grass and spilling out onto the service road bordering this section of graves. Columns of them threaded between the parked cars lining the service road before solidifying into a mass again on the next section of grass on the other side of the road.
The suicide of George Cowan’s only son was international news. The TV channels had been talking about it for days. The funeral was the latest chapter in the spectacular downfall of one of the state’s most prominent families. Amazing how many people wanted to get an up-close-and-personal look at that.
Most of the onlookers were standing in the full sun. They had to be broiling alive. It was a small, petty consolation, but at the moment it was all she had.
Jeff didn’t commit suicide. Riley thrust the conviction out of her mind. She couldn’t allow herself to think about that, not now, not until her grief-numbed brain was fully functional again. To know even as much as she thought she knew was scaring her to death. And if her suspicions were correct, it was dangerous, too.
Despite the heat she felt cold all over. Her fingers tightened convulsively around the cool, smooth stems of the bouquet of white carnations she held. Their spicy scent wafted up to her nostrils: not good. Her stomach gave a warning heave.
She’d shared her suspicions about Jeff’s death with the cops, for all the good that did. Nobody took her seriously. Nobody wanted to know.
They killed him, she wanted to scream at the assembled company. But she had no proof, nothing to back it up. Nothing except Jeff’s own suspicions, which up until she’d found him dead she, too, had firmly dismissed.
Oh, God, why hadn’t she paid more attention when he’d told her that he thought people close to his father were being murdered? This faceless they he’d kept talking on and on about—she had only the vaguest idea who he might have meant.
There were three new, weird photos on his phone. She’d seen that much, before she’d had a panic-inducing epiphany and taken the phone apart. A couple of men, snapped in the dark, the images blurry, their features indistinct and impossible to identify in the quick look she’d taken before the possible ramifications of what she was seeing burst upon her. They were the last pictures on Jeff’s phone: were they of his killers, captured as they’d closed in on him?
Even now, her blood ran cold at the thought.
Of course, they could have been of anybody. His drug dealers. Loan sharks he’d owed money to. Goons hired by the enraged husband or boyfriend of some woman he’d messed with to beat him up. With Jeff, she’d learned never to discount any possibility.
Which was why she hadn’t said a word about the pictures to anyone.
Once she’d had a chance to go through everything that was on that phone—Jeff kept his life on it—she might share those pictures with the cops. Even though they’d made it abundantly clear that they didn’t want to know.
Because Jeff was George Cowan’s son, nobody in officialdom cared that he was dead. They weren’t going to investigate. Suicide, case closed, good riddance.
A fresh burst of anger shot through her.
Jeff’s father had ripped off friends, neighbors, business associates. Celebrities. Charitable organizations. Multinational companies. God knew who else. There were thousands of victims. Among the scammed were some pretty unsavory types. That’s what she knew for sure.
If they thought I could identify them, they’d kill me.
A hard knot of fear settled in her chest as she recalled a conversation she and Jeff had had less than a week ago.
“I believe Marilyn Monroe committed suicide. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe Princess Diana’s death was an accident.” Her flippant reply to Jeff when he’d asked her in exasperation if she was hearing what he was telling her haunted her now.
“Marcus Simms did not die in a hunting accident. Patty Hemming did not ‘accidentally’ fall down her basement stairs. Diane Schneidermann did not jump from her hotel room balcony. Tom Goodin did not hook up a hose from his car’s tailpipe to its front window and kill himself with carbon monoxide poisoning,” Jeff retorted. The people he named had worked closely with his father, Riley knew. Besides that, what they had in common was that they had all died from either accidents or suicide since George had been arrested.
Her response was impatient. “For God’s sake, Jeff, accidents happen. And Diane and Tom—they were under federal investigation. Maybe they were depressed. Maybe they were guilty. Maybe they were afraid of going to jail for the rest of their lives like your father. You don’t know what was going on with them.”
“They didn’t kill themselves,” he insisted stubbornly. “And Marcus and Patty—those weren’t accidents.”
Now Jeff was dead. A suicide? No. She would never believe it. Never. She knew Jeff. He would never, ever take his own life.
Standing beside Jeff’s open grave, refusing to allow herself to look down at his coffin, which had just been lowered to rest at the bottom of the shaft of raw red earth, Riley could feel the eyes of the mourners—and the reporters, and the gawkers, and the federal agents who made up a sizable contingent of the crowd—on her. The thought that they might be among them made her heart beat faster.
Jeff’s murderer might be watching me right now. The thought mad
e her skin crawl. She cast a hunted look around.
Everyone seemed to be looking her way. But then again, Jeff’s family was beside her. The priest was close. Where else were they going to look?
So much for sussing out the killer like that.
Thankful for the sunglasses that shielded her eyes from the multitude of avid gazes, she kept her spine straight and concentrated on ignoring everything except the progress of an intrepid ant that was making its way across the toe of Father Snyder’s shiny black shoe.
On her right, Jeff’s mother, Margaret, pressed close to her side, her thin frame shaking, her narrow, patrician face streaked with the tears that regularly trickled from beneath her sunglasses. On Margaret’s other side, Emma, Jeff’s seventeen-year-old sister, stood unmoving, her face a pale, expressionless mask. Devastated, the three of them in their funeral black dresses and pearls and pumps formed a small, isolated island of grief, united against what felt like the whole world.
Funny that those two should be her family now, but that was how things had worked out. Her marriage to Jeff hadn’t lasted. Her ties to his mother and sister had grown as strong as if they were her blood kin. They’d bonded in their mutual heartbreak over Jeff’s downward spiral of drinking and drug abuse, and Margaret and Emma had understood her reasons and supported her through the divorce, even as they had continued to love Jeff. In return, when their world had come crashing down, Riley had been there for them.
“Mrs. Cowan, would you like to drop your flowers on the casket now?” Father Snyder asked Margaret quietly.
Margaret shuddered. Her fingers closed almost painfully on Riley’s arm, the beautifully kept nails digging into her skin. But Margaret kept her outward composure, nodding jerkily once and then stepping forward. Besides the wet tracks of her tears—something Riley knew Margaret would have hidden if she could have—the only outward sign of distress she showed was the trembling of the bunch of white carnations in her hands.
Hush Page 2