“Tell me again why you don’t trust this James,” Patrice said when I’d finished.
Cara crossed her arms. “I’d like to hear this, too.”
“He broke into my home. He was standing over me in my bedroom. I have no idea what he intended to do.”
“Mom, that’s ridiculous.”
“Is it? Cara, he did not come in on that airplane at National—the car with Colorado tags convinced me of that. For all I know, he’s been in the Washington area since we buried your father. He may have been the one who stole his body. Somebody close to your father murdered him, someone he thought he could trust.”
“Still, if that’s all James wanted,” Cara began, pointing to the envelope, “why not give it to him and be done with it? Then we’d be out of it.”
“Would we? And what will happen if the person who killed Stephen gets this information?”
“You think James killed Daddy?”
“I’m saying I don’t know who killed him.”
“Do you know what these photos are all about?” Patrice asked.
I shook my head.
“What about the book?” Patrice asked.
Cara picked it up and flipped through it again. “I don’t see any writing or marks on any of the pages. It looks like an ordinary collection of maps. Why would he send it to you?”
I shrugged. They expected answers and I had none to give them.
“So, if you’re not going to give these photos and this book to this James, just what do you plan to do with them?” Patrice asked.
Again, I shook my head.
“Who are they?” Patrice asked as I rose to leave the table. “The men in the photos. You know them. I saw the recognition in your eyes.”
I did. So did Cara. And so would Patrice if she owned a television set or subscribed to a newspaper.
“Edward and Will Donovan,” I told her, sitting back down. “Will’s the young one.” I tapped my finger on his image.
“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”
“Are you serious?” Cara asked. “Three months ago the entire D.C. police force tore the city apart looking for him. Dateline, 20/20—you name it—all had profiles on him.”
Patrice’s eyes narrowed. “A fugitive, then.”
“No,” I said. “Just a young man who went missing.”
“What makes him so special?” she asked. She swallowed hard. They’d tried to find her son, Marc, too.
“His father is Edward Donovan.” Cara drew out the syllables of Donovan’s name.
Patrice still looked blank.
“He’s a judge in Denver. He’s presiding over a huge witness intimidation and bribery trial out there. It’s on every newscast.”
“No TV,” I reminded Cara.
“The young man’s dead, then,” Patrice said. “With that kind of clout, surely they would have found him if he were alive.”
“The family refuses to give up hope.” I touched Patrice’s hand but she shook it off. I could see the pain in her eyes. She knew all about hope and how cruel it could be. So did I and I had no idea how to comfort her.
“What could Donovan have to do with Dad?” Cara asked.
“I have no idea.”
“I’d say we’ve had more than enough missing persons in our lives,” Patrice stated. “I don’t think your mother wants to take on another. All it leads to is questions that never get answered.” She threw me that look of hers, the one that pierced right through me.
“If you’re referring to my sister Josie’s disappearance, I have no more questions. Josie’s dead,” I said. I’d spent so much time, all those years ago, insisting she wasn’t. If Patrice needed to hear me say it, there it was.
“Aunt Josie died in an accident before I was born,” Cara interrupted.
Patrice turned to me. “Is that what you told her?”
I didn’t need this. Not now. I’d tucked Josie away in some dark part of my heart and built a wall around her. I had more than enough to deal with at the moment without adding Josie to the mix.
“She has a right to know. We all have a right to the truth,” Patrice insisted.
“Ah, but there’s the rub.” There was a catch in my voice. “We don’t know what happened to Josie.”
“What are you two talking about?” Cara asked.
“Your mother’s sister, Josie, was two years ahead of us in college,” Patrice said. “A year or so before your mom and dad married, Josie married a man named Nicholas Ackerman.”
“Ackerman? The Nicholas Ackerman?” Cara asked.
Patrice frowned at me.
“It’s his trial Edward Donovan is presiding over,” I explained.
“You mean they finally got that bastard on something?”
“Not yet,” I said, “but they’re working on it. He’s got his finger in every pie in Denver—car dealerships, restaurants, theaters, hotels, you name it. He’s been brought up on charges before, but nothing’s stuck. Drug trafficking, money laundering—”
“Murder?” Patrice suggested.
I felt my heart stop.
“Would one of you please let me in on this conversation?” Cara demanded.
Patrice swallowed. “On a bright summer’s day, a few months before your mom and dad married, Nicholas Ackerman’s wife, your aunt Josie, disappeared.”
Cara’s eyes flared and then narrowed. “You said—”
“What I thought you could handle. Hell, what I could handle when you were young,” I said.
“When, exactly, did you plan to tell me?”
“It hasn’t come up,” I insisted.
“Well, it’s come up now. First Dad and now Aunt Josie. How many other family secrets are you keeping from me?”
“None,” I said evenly. “That’s my whole inventory.”
“Okay, you two,” Patrice said. “None of us is the bad guy here. Cara, no one knows for sure what happened to Josie.”
“Says you. That son-of-a-bitch husband of hers murdered her,” I stated flatly.
“There was never any proof of foul play,” Patrice explained. “The police did a thorough investigation.”
“Did they look into Ackerman as a suspect?” Cara asked.
“He reported her missing the next morning, after he got back from some binge with his friends,” Patrice said. “He had eyewitnesses who accounted for most of his time that night.”
“I don’t care,” I insisted. “Josie was afraid of Nick. He was the last one to see her alive. He got away with her murder and everyone knows it. That’s why he moved back to Denver.”
“Daddy must have hated him, too,” Cara said.
“Almost as much as I do,” I agreed.
“That’s our link,” Cara said. “Ackerman connects Daddy to Donovan.”
Chapter 8
It took us all a while to calm down. I felt drained, but having something to focus on had reenergized Cara. She was intent on discovering how Stephen was involved with Ackerman’s trial. He’d given us a lead. Right or wrong, we had our connection: Stephen’s hatred of Ackerman and Stephen’s death in Denver. How that related to Ackerman’s trial and what the judge’s son had to do with anything was still a matter of speculation. There had to be something that linked Stephen to Will, as well. We needed that link. All we had available to us in York was the public record and we intended to use it.
We found the public library exactly where Patrice said it would be, in the heart of downtown. It was the only place she knew where I could get on the Internet with no questions from anybody.
I logged on to a computer in a back corner of the main room, and Cara pulled up a chair next to mine. I typed Will Donovan’s name into the search engine and pressed enter. It came back with dozens of hits, most of them accompanied by his photogenic image.
“Hot!” she declared.
“He’s dead,” I reminded her.
“Can’t help it, Mom. Look at his hair! And that smile! It’s just that much off center. You gotta love it. Besides, I
’d prefer to think otherwise—that he’s alive and well somewhere, maybe the victim of amnesia.”
I threw her a sidelong glance. She’d seen the news coverage just as I had. Will Donovan was a Georgetown law student who’d made a splash in Washington. He’d been featured in The Washingtonian magazine as an up-and-coming young bachelor. Smart, quick-witted and gracious when it suited him. If he hadn’t been so appealing, would they have cared so much when he vanished? Charm. It was a dangerous, seductive thing.
“They say that when the camera wasn’t on him, he was arrogant,” I told her.
“Bad-boy charm. Why do you think I like him? Besides, most of that can be fixed,” she assured me.
If he had lived long enough. And if he’d found a woman willing to devote herself to his salvation. Why were some women—like Josie—so naive?
“Why are you so certain he’s dead?” she asked.
“They say—”
“I don’t care about ‘they.’ Why do you think he’s dead?”
“His belongings—his clothes, his furnishings—they were all left behind.”
“Yeah, but you and I walked out of our houses last night and what did we take with us?”
“Our driver’s licenses. Our wallets. Some clothes. His were still in his apartment. So were his keys. So were his cornflakes swimming in milk.”
“Maybe we had more time than he did,” she said.
“There were no bank withdrawals. He left his car.”
“So he had help and the food was staged. Would his father have helped him?”
“Possibly. But why, and if he did, do you think the family would have insisted on the kind of manhunt the city launched?”
“Okay, so it wasn’t his family. Mom, he’s only two years older than I am.”
“I know.” I looked back at the screen. I didn’t want her to see the fear in my eyes. Death had an equal-opportunity policy. And if it was easier for her to think of Donovan as alive, I had no right to discourage her. I’d willed Josie to be alive when I was Cara’s age.
We scanned as many of the shorter articles as we could before I hit the print button. I wanted copies of the three longest ones that had appeared in the Washington Post.
Cara pulled them from the printer, then put them in front of me. “Look. January 21.”
“So?”
“That’s the date Will disappeared. When was Dad last in town?”
It had been about three months ago, shortly after the spring semester started.
“I got back from that trip to Virginia Beach, remember?” Cara said. “I missed him by one day.”
“Do you remember the date?”
“January 20.”
It couldn’t be coincidence. I knew it in my gut. But which side of this did Stephen come down on?
“Mom, do you think—”
“Yes.” I grabbed the pages from the printer and stuffed them into my bag. We could look at them later when we had more time, not that I expected them to be of much help. As far as the police could tell, Will Donovan had walked out of his upscale apartment in Cleveland Park and vanished off the face of the earth.
But I knew something the police didn’t know. I knew Stephen Larocca. I knew that, whatever else he might have been and whatever I might have said about him in anger, he wasn’t a killer. Had he tried to save Donovan? Did he know who had killed him? Had he gone after his killer? And if so, why?
“Cara, let’s check the atlas again.” I handed it to her from my bag. “See if there’s anything at all marked on either the D.C. or the Denver maps.”
She flipped through the pages, lingering first on one and then the other. “Unless it’s in some kind of invisible ink, there’s nothing.”
Frustrated, I slipped the book back into my bag with the printouts.
We’d get no more answers today. Cara and I needed to get back to Patrice. We’d been gone far longer than I’d intended. Maybe she’d have some insight into Stephen that had escaped me. Maybe she had some idea as to who might have recruited him. When he graduated, he’d gone to work for the forestry service. He was also in the reserves, doing one weekend a month. Or was he? Did it go back that far? Stephen and Peter had served in the navy together before going back to school. Had Peter said something to Patrice? Could he have known what Stephen was involved with?
Patrice was just about the most intuitive person I have ever met. I remembered her looking at me on our wedding day while she helped me fix my veil. She’d brushed back the netting and taken my face in her hands and asked me if I was sure I wanted to marry Stephen. She told me I didn’t have to go through with it. I’d laughed at her, but some part of me knew she wasn’t teasing.
She’d been married to Peter for six months by the time Stephen and I wed. What had she known?
We stopped at a mall we passed on the way home. Cara insisted that two days of the same underwear was one day too many. A third was unthinkable. I gave her fifteen minutes in the Express so she could get what she needed, including some jeans and a couple of tops. She took thirty. Then we picked up a pepperoni pizza so Patrice wouldn’t have to cook.
It was almost eight by the time we turned into the driveway. I was thankful I hadn’t hit anything on our outing. When we’d left the house, Patrice had suggested we take the van and leave the Jeep in the shed, just in case someone might be watching for us in town. Not likely. I was certain we hadn’t been followed last night.
Driving the van was like driving a semi. I pulled it under the carport. Cara continued chatting as though yesterday and this morning had never happened, as though we were on holiday visiting an old friend, as though I didn’t have a bag full of articles about a young man who had disappeared, as though she’d actually forgiven me for not telling her about Josie. As if I didn’t know all her forced perkiness was for my benefit. Cara wasn’t the perky type.
I noticed immediately that the house was dark and the security lights that had bathed the yard so brightly when we’d rolled in during the wee hours of the morning had not been turned on. A single pole light with a sensor illuminated a section of lawn beyond the drive. The only other light shone from the windows of Patrice’s studio out back. Was she working late, making up for the disruption we’d caused?
Cara opened the door and hopped to the ground, grabbing up the pizza in one hand and her bags in the other. I was out of my door just as quickly, blocking her path. It was obvious she was on her way around back. “Let’s go into the house first,” I suggested.
“But there’s no—” she began.
I grabbed her elbow and pulled her across in front of the large living room windows. The drapes were open, but I saw no movement inside, not even a glimmer from the kitchen.
I opened the screen and my sleeve caught on a tear in the mesh. I ran my hand over it. It was a ragged hole. I hadn’t noticed it earlier and I would have. I tugged at the door, but it was locked and I didn’t have a key.
Odin wasn’t barking. He could be out back with Patrice. If I were her, I’d keep him with me. But wouldn’t he have heard the van drive up? Shouldn’t we hear him barking, even from that distance?
“Mom, Patrice isn’t—”
“You’re right,” I said, cutting her off. “Let’s go around back.”
I took the pizza from her, jerked open the passenger door of the van and dropped the box onto the seat. Then I stuffed her bags onto the floorboard. We headed to the corner of the house and stopped. From that angle we could see Patrice and a good part of the center of the room through the large windows of her studio. She sat facing us at her potter’s wheel, her head down, her hands cupped around a spinning mound of wet clay. She looked fine.
Then I heard it. A soft, distant whimper, coming from the shadows near the shed that housed the Jeep. I grabbed Cara’s arm and practically dragged her across the grass.
“What are you doing?” she demanded, trying to struggle out of my grip. “I’m not two years old.”
I shushed her and, closer now, she hea
rd it, too.
“What is that?”
I pulled her down as I knelt. In the tall grass at the shed’s corner, I felt something warm and furry. It whimpered.
Cara jerked back. “What the hell…”
“Odin,” I explained, stroking the dog’s fur. “Something’s wrong with him.” My fingers explored his fur. I found something lodged near his shoulder. A dart. I pulled it out and tossed it on the ground. “He’s been drugged. They must have dumped him here.”
“What are you saying?” Cara whispered.
I didn’t have time to answer questions. “They’ve been here for hours or Odin would still be out of it.” The dog whined and I rubbed his neck. “It’s all right, boy. You just hang in there.”
I turned back to Cara. “They heard us drive up. We need to make them think everything’s all right.”
“Who are they?” she asked. “You think it’s James, don’t you? Mom, he wouldn’t do something like this.”
“I don’t know that and neither do you,” I said evenly.
“Do you think Patrice knows they’re here?”
“Yes. The tear in the screen. There must have been a confrontation at the front door.”
“But she looks—”
“I know. They can’t see us in the dark, but they’ll get antsy if we don’t show up at the studio soon.”
“They may have night-vision glasses. Jeez, I sound as paranoid as you.”
She couldn’t see my smile in the darkness. “No. There’s only one or two of them.”
“How do you know?” she asked.
“Because if there were more, we wouldn’t be here talking,” I assured her.
“Get back into the van.” I thrust the keys into her hand and forced her fingers around them. “Wait until I’m within a couple of yards of the studio window and they can see me before you crank the engine. Then get the hell out of here. Call the police. Do you understand?”
“Mom, I can’t—”
“Yes, you can,” I assured her.
“Come with me,” she begged.
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