But what if she’d said something to Michael on the way home? She knew Michael well enough to know that anything could make him suspicious. Cops were like that. Well, if she did, she’d just have to dismiss it as drunken rambling.
Amanda stared at her reflection in the mirror. Was she really prepared to thwart a murder investigation to protect her sister? She might not have to answer that yet, but she knew it could come to that.
She went downstairs to find Michael pacing restlessly around the living room. “I’m sorry you had to get involved in this, Michael,” she told him, then explained that she’d planned to meet Jesse for dinner and that Jesse had subsequently left a message for her on her machine at home, saying where she was and asking Amanda to come get her.
“She must have decided to call me when she couldn’t reach you,” Michael said. “You’re not angry with me for going to get her, are you? I didn’t want to let her stay in a dive like that.”
Amanda shook her head, touched by his concern that she would be angry with him. Which she was, of course, even though she had no right to be.
“What was she talking about?” Michael asked. “What didn’t she want to tell you? She said something like that on the way home.”
Amanda shrugged. “Who knows? The only thing I intended to talk to her about was her drinking.”
Michael was silent for a moment. She had to force herself to meet his gaze. It was so difficult to lie to him.
“She said, ‘I don’t believe it. I still can’t believe he did it.’ Then, when I asked her what she was talking about, she told me to stop grilling her, and that she wasn’t going to help me.”
“I have no idea what she was talking about—and neither will she, when she sobers up.”
Once again, he was silent as his dark eyes bored into her, and once again, Amanda met his gaze with difficulty. But if he didn’t believe her, he apparently had decided not to say so. Instead, he suggested that they’d better go back and get Jesse’s car.
“Leaving a Beemer out there is like dangling candy in front of a kid. It won’t last the night.”
Amanda hadn’t thought of that, but she realized he was right. So she followed him out to his car. Michael was silent for a few minutes, but she could almost feel him brooding. Then he asked her how old Jesse was when her trouble with drugs and alcohol began.
Amanda sighed, grateful for the change of subject. “The first I knew about it was when I was fourteen—and she was nineteen. But it might well have started before that We weren’t all that close and we each had our own friends.
“I found out about it the summer after her freshman year in college, but Lise Verhoeven says that Jesse was sneaking out of the house that spring, when she was home with a case of mono.”
Then, when she heard her words, she realized that she hadn’t gotten away from the subject, after all. But would Michael make the connection between that spring and the murder?
“Hmm,” he said thoughtfully. “That would have been the spring you had the accident—right?”
“Yes.”
“Where was she sneaking out to?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t paying much attention to her—or to anything, then.”
“I keep running that conversation through my head—about how she wasn’t going to help me. Is it possible that she was going out to the island herself—and she knows something?”
Amanda tried to ignore the cold, hard lump that was forming in her stomach. “I doubt that. Jesse never liked the island all that much—or at least not since we were little.”
“Still, it wouldn’t hurt to ask her when she sobers up.”
“Leave her alone, Michael! She has enough to deal with right now, and I’m sure she doesn’t know anything. If she did, she would have told me.”
“But she said she wasn’t going to tell you.”
“You’re really determined to involve my family in this, aren’t you?” she demanded coldly.
“I’m determined to solve the murder,” he replied calmly. “And my gut’s telling me that both John Verhoeven and now Jesse might know something.”
“I talked to my father about John. They’ve always been best friends. He said that John always went out there alone. He wanted to get away to think. And Father also said that John wasn’t having an affair with anyone.”
“With all due respect, Amanda, your father wouldn’t admit it even if he did know something.”
“How dare you say that? He’s a judge, for heaven’s sake! He wouldn’t lie to protect anyone!”
Michael turned to her briefly. “And you’re a district attorney and you wouldn’t lie, either.”
“And you’re a cop with a vendetta against my family—and the others. It isn’t our fault that you grew up the way you did, Michael.”
Neither of them said any more, but the air was filled with a tension that she knew he felt as strongly as she did. When he pulled into the parking lot of the Lakeview, she reached for the door quickly, but he grasped her arm and turned her to face him.
“You know what’s really going on here, don’t you? This isn’t about the murder. It’s about us. ”
She started to protest, then stopped. He was wrong, but not completely wrong. “It’s late, Michael, and I’m tired. Believe it or not, it’s...hard for me to see Jesse like that.”
His hand slid down her arm and covered her hand instead. “I know that Look, could we try to spend some time together without our jobs getting in the way? I was thinking about dinner on Saturday.”
It was his voice that did it—even more than the dark eyes that seemed to be devouring her. His voice now was like his kisses: soft and persuasive. But still she protested.
“It’s not a good idea for us to be seen together, Michael. You know that.”
“Then we’ll go somewhere else for dinner.”
She was wondering why she’d said it the way she had. What she should have said was that it wasn’t a good idea for them to date, period. But she was already nodding her agreement as she thought it.
AMANDA FULLED UP to the closed double-garage doors and glanced at the dashboard clock. She had exactly one hour to try to get the truth out of Jesse before she had to meet with her campaign committee. That meant she might have to push her sister harder than she’d prefer, but she couldn’t afford to have Michael get to Jesse before she did.
That Michael intended to follow up on Jesse’s drunken ravings of last night, Amanda didn’t doubt at all. But she didn’t think he could have gotten to her yet. She’d called Jesse’s shop, and her assistant said that Jesse had been there all day, but had left early, saying she had a headache. Amanda certainly didn’t doubt that.
Besides, she knew that Michael had been in court most of the day, testifying in a case she’d allowed to be pleaded down from first- to second-degree murder—to his noisily voiced disgust.
She got out of the car and peered through the windows in the garage door. Jesse’s car was in there. She breathed a sigh of relief. At least that meant she hadn’t decided to go out drinking again.
She rang the doorbell, and was about to reach for it again when Jesse answered with a big smile on her face that faded the moment she saw Amanda there. Whom had she been expecting: her lover? Or perhaps Michael?
Jesse’s expression had turned sullen, but she stood back to let Amanda in. “All right, so I’m sorry about last night. If you’ve come to lecture me, you can leave now. I already called Dr. Hollings. I’ll be seeing her tomorrow.”
Dr. Lynne Hollings was the long-suffering psychologist who had pulled Jesse through her other crises. Amanda considered it a good sign that Jesse had called the psychologist on her own.
“Michael called me this morning,” Jesse went on, talking over her shoulder as she walked back the hallway toward the big country kitchen. “For a man who doesn’t have any children, he can certainly do a good imitation of a father.”
“What do you mean?” Amanda asked.
“He’s a nag, that’
s what. ‘Jesse, you’ve got to get hold of yourself....Jesse, if you don’t get some help, I’m not going to get you out of trouble again. You’ll end up in jail.’”
“‘Jail’?” Amanda echoed, not certain what she meant.
Jesse turned to her. “So he didn’t tell you. He said that he hadn’t, but I didn’t believe him.” She shrugged.
“I bought some coke at the Lakeview last night. Michael found it in my purse and got rid of it.”
Amanda was stunned—and her expression must have shown that, although Jesse misinterpreted the reason for her shock.
“I didn’t use it. I don’t know why I bought it. In fact, I didn’t even remember buying it until Michael told me he’d found it.” She hesitated, and when she spoke again, her voice had changed. “That’s why I called Dr. Hollings. I don’t want to go through that again.”
Amanda reached out to take her sister’s hand. “I’m glad, Jesse—glad that you’re going to get some help.”
Jesse pulled her hand away. “There’s just too much going on right now.”
“You mean with Steve?”
“Steve—and other things.”
“What other things?”
Jesse stared at her for a moment, then turned away and picked up the teakettle to fill it. “Nothing.”
“Jess, you said some things last night—to Michael and to me. Something about not wanting to tell me and about not believing someone had done something.” Amanda hesitated, then plunged into it. “Were you talking about the murder on the island? Do you know something about it?”
Jesse’s back was to her as she put the kettle on the stove, so Amanda couldn’t see her face. But she saw Jesse’s shoulders hunch briefly, almost as though she were absorbing a blow. However, when Jesse turned to face her, her expression gave nothing away.
“How would I know anything about that?”
“I don’t know, but I thought that might be what you meant. Were you going out there that spring?”
“No. I don’t know anything about that body. Anyway, you said that they couldn’t be sure it was that spring.”
“That’s true, but Michael seems to think it was. He’s even suggested that my accident could be tied into the murder somehow.”
Jesse’s reaction was not what Amanda had expected. She saw no shock in her sister’s eyes, but rather a wariness, quickly covered as she turned to get some tea bags from the cupboard.
“What makes him think that?”
“Oh, you know Michael. He suffers from terminal suspiciousness. That’s part of what makes him such a good cop, but it’s also annoying. He seems to think that Trish might have been running away from the killer, and that’s why we crashed.”
“That sounds pretty far-fetched,” Jesse replied, now turning back to her.
“I agree, but I just wanted to warn you that he’s probably going to be asking you some questions.”
“Let him ask. There’s nothing I can tell him.”
THREE HOURS LATER, following her meeting with the campaign committee, Amanda’s thoughts turned back to her conversation with Jesse. She was still shocked at Michael’s action. What he’d done had to have been against all his instincts as a cop. But had he gotten rid of the drugs because of his friendship with Steve—or because of her? Part of her wanted to ask him, but another part didn’t want to know.
And then there was Jesse’s denial that she knew anything about the murder. Amanda wished that she had Michael’s built-in lie detector. She just wasn’t sure whether or not Jesse knew anything. It felt to her as though Jesse had been telling the truth when she said that she’d never gone out to the island that spring, but she wasn’t so sure about the rest of the conversation.
“HEY, MICHAEL! Long time, no see. You’d think we weren’t working in the same department.”
“Yeah, it has been a long time, Carla. You’re lookin’ good.”
“Save the blarney, Michael. I’m a married lady now.”
The barmaid arrived with Michael’s beer, and he asked Carla if she wanted another one. She shook her head, and the barmaid vanished. Michael studied his old friend and former neighbor. Carla did look good. Marriage—and maybe age—had softened her. She almost didn’t look like a cop anymore.
“So how do you like the community-relations thing?” he asked.
“I like it a lot. I feel like I’m really in my element, you know? Every time I go down to the Bottom to the youth center, I see myself all over the place, and it makes me work that much harder.”
Michael chuckled. “Did you ever think we’d both end up becoming cops?”
Carla laughed, too. “Not me, but I always kind of thought you would.”
“Yeah?” Michael was intrigued.
Carla nodded. “I know you got into some trouble, but you must have broken up more trouble than you got into.”
Michael frowned, thinking. “Maybe you’re right. I guess I’d forgotten about that.”
They reminisced for a while before Michael finally got down to business. “Carla, I need some information about Jesse Sturdevant. You were in her class, weren’t you?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Carla replied dryly, bringing a smile to Michael’s face at his unintentional double entendre.
“I know that Jesse got into some trouble at some point—drugs, running with a bad crowd. Can you tell me anything about that?”
“Not directly. I wasn’t part of either of her scenes, but I knew some of the kids she was hanging around with.”
“Do you know if they ever went out to the island to party?”
Carla frowned. “I don’t think so. If they had, I’m sure I would have heard about it somewhere. Why? Does this have something to do with that body you found out there?”
Michael nodded. “Did you ever hear anything about a ring of teenage hookers back then?”
“Yeah, I remember hearing rumors, but that was all. I never knew who they were. You’re not saying that Jesse—”
“No, I don’t think Jesse could have been mixed up with that, but there’s some indication that the body we found might have been one of them. Can you point me to anyone who might know?”
Carla shook her head. “I lost touch with most of my classmates long ago—or at least with the ones who might know something. But let me think about it. Maybe I can come up with someone.”
She frowned. “It sounds like you’ve got what they call a delicate situation there, Michael, what with Jesse’s sister being the D.A.”
“Tell me about it.”
“I like Amanda—a lot better than I ever liked Jesse. I don’t really remember her all that well from school, but we’ve served on a couple of panels together since she became acting D.A. She’s a lot more down-to-earth than she looks.”
Michael smiled. “Sometimes.”
“DOWN TO EARTH” was NOT exactly the way Michael would have described the woman who sat across from him at the small, candlelit table. She’d piled her hair up, with a few wisps curling around her face. And the power suits had given way to a softly patterned silk dress that brought out the green in her eyes.
Still, it felt weird to be out on a date with Amanda, even though he was glad he’d suggested it—and still kind of surprised that she’d accepted.
He guessed that they had gotten off on the wrong foot, even though he couldn’t bring himself to regret that night. And he wondered if it were possible for them to start over—or even to change direction now.
He’d brought her to an elegant old inn an hour and a half’s drive from Port Henry, and in addition to making dinner reservations, he’d also reserved a room upstairs—just in case. But he was already pretty sure he wouldn’t be needing that. She was trying hard to be easy with him, but it wasn’t working.
“Okay,” he said after their entrées had appeared. “What’s bothering you? I haven’t seen anyone I know.”
Amanda didn’t bother to hide a smile. This was the Michael she knew—not the man who’d been making polite conversati
on for the past couple of hours. Not that he was bad at that; in fact, she was surprised at the breadth and depth of his knowledge on a couple of subjects that proved he had interests beyond being a cop. But it had all felt false to her.
“It isn’t that,” she said. “I haven’t seen anyone, either.” She hesitated, then decided to tell him what was on her mind.
“Jesse told me that you found the coke she’d bought at the Lakeview—and that you got rid of it.”
He nodded. “I suppose I should have guessed that’s what it was. Look, that place is always filled with narcs, and I don’t know who all of them are. She could even have made her buy from one of them, for all I knew. She swore to me that she hadn’t been using again, and I believe her.”
“Still, it must have been difficult for you to do something like that, and I want to thank you for it.”
“You’re welcome. Did she go to see her shrink like she told me she was going to?”
“Yes. I talked to her briefly today, and she said that she’d kept her appointment.”
“But you still don’t like my getting involved with your family, do you?” he asked, studying her closely.
“I’m...not comfortable with it, but in this case, I appreciate it When I got Jesse’s message that evening, I even thought about calling you for help.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.”
“Didn’t it occur to you that you shouldn’t be in a place like that any more than she should?”
“Yes, I thought about that.”
“Amanda, what is it that I’m not hearing here?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t. There aren’t any easy answers where you’re concerned, Michael.”
He nodded. “You’re right about that.”
Amanda wanted nothing more than to escape from this dinner date from hell. Why had she ever agreed to it? Furthermore, it was now clear to her that Michael felt exactly as she did.
Well, she reflected, perhaps one good thing has come from this. Maybe now we both know that anything beyond a professional relationship is impossible for us.
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