Cathy greeted us at the door with a wide smile. “Come in. Oh, you brought more of those wonderful cookies!”
Harold came up behind his wife, hair the same shade of white as hers, blue eyes twinkling behind thick glasses. “Come in, come in. Cathy even cleaned house because you were coming.”
Cathy punched him playfully. “Stop that!”
We entered the sunny, cheerful apartment that reflected the personality of its inhabitants.
“I’ll be right back with something to drink,” Cathy said, heading toward the kitchen.
Fred and I sat on the muted rose sofa and Harold sank into a chair.
“Have you been playing golf in this heat?” I asked.
“I get up early every morning before it gets hot.”
“I’ve seen him play when the temperature was over a hundred,” Cathy called from the kitchen. “He’s obsessed.”
Harold grinned. “It’s true. I’m making up for all those years when I had to spend my days in an office instead of on a golf course.”
Cathy returned with a large tray holding three cups of coffee, one Coke and a plate heaped with the cookies I’d brought.
“Now,” she said, setting the tray on the coffee table and taking a seat in the other chair, “tell me what’s been going on. Are you still dating that nice policeman?”
“I am, and now that Rick’s almost out of the picture, we’re having a lot more fun.”
Cathy’s forehead beneath her white curls wrinkled with a frown. “Almost? Your divorce was final, wasn’t it?”
I sighed, took a long drink of my Coke and launched into an abbreviated story of how I had come to babysit my ex-husband’s son for two days. Fred sipped his coffee and waited patiently while I finished with the trivia. Actually, while he appeared to be waiting patiently, I could feel the tension vibrating from him. He’s not big on chit-chat.
“If that ever happens again, you just bring the boy over here and let Harold and me babysit,” Cathy offered.
“I would never do that to you. Rickie is a demon child.” Of course, I was talking to the couple who continued to believe their grandson George would one day come home from prison, go to college and become a model citizen.
Cathy gave a tinkling laugh. “All kids seem like that from time to time. They just need love and guidance.”
I couldn’t deny that Rickie had received very little of either of those things. Would he have been a different child if he’d been raised by someone like the Murrays?
We talked about the dances and dinners the Murrays had gone to, how much they’d won the last time they went to the casino, new desserts I’d created at Death by Chocolate, and how Paula and Zach were doing. I didn’t tell them about the possibility of Paula having a man in her life. The Murrays would love to hear that. They wanted everybody to be as happy as they were. But Paula’s love life could wait until I was certain how it was going to turn out.
At a lull in the conversation Cathy folded her hands in her lap and exchanged a smile with her husband. “We have some exciting news.”
My lips automatically moved upward to form a smile, expecting to hear they were going on a cruise or buying a new car or getting a dog.
“George just had a parole hearing, and it looks like he may get to come home.”
George, their drug-dealing grandson whose activities had almost got me killed a year ago. My smile froze in place.
“The new attorney we hired,” Harold said. “Guy’s really good. He got some evidence overturned and showed the parole board that George is trying to turn his life around.”
“When he gets home, he’s going to get his GED and go to college.”
“That’s great,” I said. “Does he have any idea what he wants to be?” Though he was pre-qualified to be a pharmacist, he’d probably have a little trouble getting licensed in that field.
Cathy shrugged and reached for another cookie. “He’ll figure it out after he takes a few classes.”
“We know it won’t be easy,” Harold said, “but we’ll do all we can to help him. George has had some problems, but the boy has a good heart.”
I thought of the angry man Fred and I had visited in prison, of the darkness that lived in the back of his eyes. But he had sounded sincere when he said he loved his grandparents. Anything was possible. If the Murrays were able to rehabilitate George, maybe even Rickie could become an upstanding citizen.
“When he comes home, we’re going to have a party for him, and we’d love for you all to come.”
It took a couple of heartbeats for me to catch my breath and respond. “Of course we’ll be there.”
Fred was silent. I elbowed him.
“Yes,” he said. “We’ll be there.”
“I’ll bake a chocolate cake for him,” I promised. That would be the easy part of that event.
Cathy beamed. Harold smiled. I got the feeling he wasn’t quite as certain as his wife that George was going to become the perfect grandson.
Then we got to the subject of our new neighbor.
“Do you remember Sophie Fleming?” Fred asked. “She lived across the street about twenty-five years ago.”
Cathy poured more coffee for Fred. She must make really good coffee for him to go beyond the polite first cup. “Of course we remember the Flemings,” she said. “Sophie was the cutest little thing with those big brown eyes and all that dark, curly hair. She was a live wire. Never met a stranger. We babysat her a couple of times, but the Flemings didn’t go out often. They were young and struggling. What happened to them after they moved to Nebraska was so sad.”
Cathy’s description of Sophie as a bubbly little girl presented a contrast with the adult Sophie. Of course we all grow up and change, but I suspected Sophie’s early losses had a lot to do with her change. “Did you know the family was planning to move?” I asked.
Cathy shook her head. “No, it was all very strange. He had a decent job, possibility of moving up in the company. They loved the house and had some kind of arrangement where they could buy it for no down payment if they did enough improvements. They seemed perfectly happy and settled one day. Then the next, they were gone.”
“That was the year we had all the big floods in Missouri,” Harold said. “It rained almost every day, so we didn’t get outside as much as usual, but still, we’d see them in their yard in between showers, go over and talk. Everything seemed fine. Then one morning when I was leaving for work, I saw the moving van pull up to their door.”
“I went over to talk to them,” Cathy said. “They seemed different. They were usually friendly and relaxed. Very nice people. But that day they seemed tense. When I asked why they were moving, Bob said he got an offer he couldn’t turn down. Jan didn’t say anything. In fact, she barely looked at me. She just kept packing. I asked what kind of job it was, and he wouldn’t say.”
“How did Sophie handle the move?” Fred asked.
Cathy shook her head. “I don’t know. She wouldn’t come out of her room. I assumed she was devastated because she’d have to leave her home and her friend. You know how attached kids become at that age. I wanted to go in and talk to her, but they wouldn’t let me.”
Fred and I exchanged glances and both sat forward. “Her friend?” I repeated. “She had to leave her friend?”
“Yes, the little girl who lived in your house, Fred. Little blonde-haired beauty. I think her name was Carolyn.”
Chapter Fourteen
Carolyn was real, not imaginary. She had lived and died in Fred’s house, and Sophie had seen her friend murdered.
I looked at Fred. He looked at me.
Thick silence filled the small room, broken only by the raspy song of cicadas calling from the trees outside and the ticking of the Murrays’ grandfather clock over in the corner.
I didn’t realize how long we’d been quiet, assimilating what it all meant, until Cathy spoke again. “Did I say something wrong?”
“No, of course not,” I assured her. “It’s just that
, well, Sophie thinks Carolyn was only her imaginary friend, that she didn’t really exist.”
Cathy set her cup on the coffee table and looked up. She wasn’t smiling anymore. “That poor girl. Losing her best friend and then her parents, I suppose it’s only natural that her life before that would seem like a dream. Maybe that’s the only way she could deal with everything that happened.”
Harold sat forward in his chair, reached over and took his wife’s hand. “That’s sad, not to remember a friend. She doesn’t think her parents were imaginary too, does she?”
I bit my lip. I didn’t want to tell them the Flemings, people they’d liked, had lied to their daughter. That was something they probably didn’t want to hear.
“No, she remembers her parents.” Fred had no such emotional compunctions. “It’s just Carolyn. The reason she thinks the girl is imaginary is because that’s what her parents told her.”
Harold frowned. “That’s strange. Why would they do that?”
A very good question, one to which I had no answer.
“But you met Carolyn?” Fred moved closer to the edge of the sofa and set his cup on the table beside Cathy’s. He was as intent as I’d ever seen him. Still about two on a scale of one to ten, but for Fred, that was pretty intent. “You actually saw her?”
Cathy looked at me questioningly as if she didn’t understand why Fred would need verification of what she’d already told him. I shrugged. I wasn’t responsible for Fred’s eccentricities.
“Yes,” she said. “We saw her. Lots of times. She was a quiet little blonde girl. Sophie’s opposite in all ways, but the two were best friends. She was very real. Not imaginary, I assure you.”
“How about her parents? Did you know them?” Fred leaned forward, hands on his knees. Extremely intent, relatively speaking.
Cathy and Harold exchanged glances and Harold made a noise that almost sounded like a snort. “They were a little unusual.”
Coming from the people who contended their drug dealer grandson was a good boy, that could only mean Carolyn’s parents had been very unusual.
“Carolyn’s mother stayed pretty close to home most of the time,” Cathy said. “I tried to talk to her several times, but she never had much to say. She was kind of shy but seemed like a really nice person, a good mother. But the father—” She looked at Harold.
Cathy wasn’t the type woman who looked to her husband for permission to say something. I waited for them to tell me the father had horns and a tail.
Harold shook his head and compressed his lips. Off the top of my head I’d say they really disliked Carolyn’s father. “He wasn’t there a lot.”
“She said he traveled.” Cathy arched an eyebrow as if to say she did not for one minute believe the man travelled.
“He visited a couple of times a week.” Harold lifted his hands, palms up. “I admit, when he was there, everything seemed to be fine. He took them places, played with Carolyn. From what we saw, Sarah and Carolyn both adored him.”
“Her name was Sarah?” I asked. We had a name for Carolyn’s mother. That made her real too. But where was she? Murdered along with Carolyn? Or was she the murderer?
“Yes,” Cathy affirmed. “Her first name was Sarah.” She hesitated and again looked at her husband.
“She never gave us her last name,” Harold said. “We don’t think she was married to Carolyn’s father. We do think he was married to somebody, just not her.”
Cathy nodded in agreement.
Now we were getting somewhere. Dr. Dan Jamison had owned the house, and he was married to somebody, somebody with enough money to keep him in medical school and take care of his younger brother, somebody he wouldn’t want to discover he had a mistress on the side. Would he kill his mistress and his daughter to keep that wife with all the money?
“Do you know the father’s name?” Fred asked.
I gulped the last of my Coke and set the can on the table, all my attention focused on the Murrays.
Harold looked at his wife. “Do you remember his name? Sarah always referred to him as her husband, and Carolyn called him Daddy. But one day when I saw them in the yard, I strolled over to introduce myself. Made him look me in the eye and shake my hand even though it was pretty obvious he didn’t want to.” Harold frowned. “Now what the heck was his name? Something simple. Ben? Jim? Tom? Dave?”
“Dan?” I suggested. Okay, I was putting words in his mouth, but it wasn’t like we were on a quiz show and he was required to figure out the answer all by himself.
Harold snapped his fingers. “Dan! That’s it. But he wouldn’t give me a last name.”
“This Dan, what did he look like?” Fred asked.
“He was quite good looking,” Cathy said. “Tall, brown hair, brown eyes.”
Dr. Dan, the Plastics Man.
“What did Sarah look like?” I asked.
“Blond hair, blue eyes, fair skin, just like Carolyn. She was a pretty little thing.”
“Did she work?”
“No. She was proud to be a stay-at-home mom.”
I thought of the picture in Dr. Dan’s office. His wife was blond, but my mother’s description of Natalie Jamison did not fit with the image of Carolyn’s mom. Shy, proud to be a stay-at-home mom? Besides, Natalie would never live in an old house in my neighborhood. No, definitely not the same blonde.
“When did they move away?” Fred asked.
“It’s hard to say exactly when since we didn’t see them very often, but it was the same year the Flemings moved, the year we had all the flooding.”
“Did you see them move out?” I asked. “Did a van show up one day like with the Flemings?”
Cathy shook her head. “No. They just disappeared. One day we saw a For Sale sign in the yard. We thought maybe the father finally did the right thing, married her and maybe moved to another town. Why are you asking all these questions? Has something happened to Sarah and Carolyn?”
Fred leaned back in a semblance of his usual casual demeanor. “We’re not sure. We’d just like to find them. You never heard from them after they moved? A letter, a phone call?”
“No. Not a word. I often wondered what happened to them, but about that time we started having problems with George, so we really weren’t paying a lot of attention to anything outside our own family.” She looked from one of us to the other, concern obvious on her face. “What’s going on?”
I didn’t see any reason to keep the truth from her. They weren’t suspects and we weren’t pretending to be somebody like mold experts or stripper talent scouts. “Maybe nothing,” I said. “Or maybe something. Sophie keeps having a nightmare about Carolyn being dead.”
Cathy lifted her hands to the sides of her face. “Oh no!” She looked at Harold then back at us. “But it’s only a dream, right, a bad dream because living in that house has brought up memories of her childhood friend?” I could tell when she asked the question that she knew that wasn’t what I meant but Cathy and Harold are the ultimate optimists.
“No, we think she actually saw Carolyn die. When she was five years old. In Fred’s house.”
Cathy sucked in a sharp breath. “Did he kill her?”
I didn’t have to ask who he was. The father. Dr. Dan. “We don’t know. Maybe.”
“Did he kill Sarah too?” Cathy’s pleasant features were horror-stricken.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Lindsay, you’re speculating,” Fred protested. “We don’t know for sure that anybody was killed. All we have is Sophie’s dream.”
“Memory,” I corrected. “We have her description of that poor little girl being murdered and we have the fact that Sarah and Carolyn disappeared the same time Sophie’s family moved away followed by the death of her parents under mysterious circumstances.”
Cathy’s eyes widened. “I didn’t know the Flemings died under mysterious circumstances.”
“They died from a gas leak, and last night somebody tried to kill Sophie by creating a gas leak in her house.�
��
I had everybody’s attention, but not in a good way. The Murrays were upset and Fred was annoyed. For the second time that day I realized that attention is not always a good thing.
*~*~*
It was getting dark by the time we left the Murrays with promises to let them know what we discovered about Carolyn and her mother, to have them over one evening so they could meet Sophie and to attend a party at their place when George came home.
“Why didn’t you want me to tell them what we suspect?” I asked as Fred drove toward home, never exceeding the speed limit, poking along as if we had all the time in the world.
“Because we don’t know for sure that Carolyn’s dead.”
“How sure do you need to be?”
“A body would be adequate proof.”
“Fine. We’ll rip up the floorboards in your bedroom and see if we can find a body.”
He ignored me and turned a corner, keeping all four wheels on the ground. I’d driven that car once, and it had a lot of wasted power.
“Hey!” I turned toward him. “That’s not a bad idea!”
“Rip up my floorboards? It’s a terrible idea!”
“Not rip up your floorboards. I mean the other idea that occurred to me after I said that. We should get some luminol and test your floor and walls for blood.”
“Actually, that’s not a bad idea except I had the floors sanded and resurfaced and new sheetrock on the walls before I moved in.”
“Damn! Why do you have to be so fastidious? I don’t suppose—”
His gaze left the road long enough to shoot me a glare. “No, I did not save the old sheetrock or the sawdust.”
I folded my arms. “You picked a lousy time to ignore your OCD tendencies.”
“Do you want to go to Sophie’s with me to tell her what we learned tonight?”
I looked at him smugly. “So you admit we did learn something?”
“We learned that Daniel Jamison may be Carolyn’s father. We don’t even know that for sure, but perhaps we can use that information to spark Sophie’s memories. Maybe she’ll remember seeing him when we describe him.”
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