Woof at the Door

by Laura Morrigan

  I looked over the roof at Jennifer. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  It wasn’t a long walk, but by the time I reached where Kai stood waiting, I was drained. I wasn’t sure my brain could handle another round of questions. Or more accurately, handle coming up with plausible answers.

  Kai led me a few steps into the courtyard. I could see past him through the glass of the front door. Officer Parsons was moving around inside, checking doors and windows to be sure they were secure. I was glad I’d taken the time to relock the door in the bedroom.

  “Grace, please tell me the truth.”

  So I was Grace again, instead of Miss Wilde. Okay, was this the good-cop part? If so, he’d have to do better. Especially if he was going to ask me for the truth. We’d been down that road. I hadn’t enjoyed the ride.

  “Sorry, but you’ll have to be more specific.”

  For several seconds, he didn’t say anything. He looked like he was trying to decide what approach to take. “Jake has told me you’re a straight arrow. You have no connections to the thugs LaBryce hangs out with. No drugs. Not even any traffic citations. But then I find out you’ve gone to the Clarke estate, and now you’re running around with Mark’s ex in the middle of the night. What’s going on, Grace?”

  I felt my eyebrows arc up in disbelief. “Wait a second. You’ve been investigating me? You really think you’ll be able to solve this murder by looking to see if I have parking tickets?” I realized something in that moment that hadn’t occurred to me before. “Have you been following me?”

  He didn’t reply so I assumed the answer was yes. But if that was true, he would know my story about coming to Mark’s house with Jennifer was bogus.

  “I’m not following you.” His voice had dropped to a low rumble. “I needed to talk to you. I called your cell and didn’t get an answer.”

  “How did you know where I was?”

  “I’m an investigator.”

  I waited, but it was clear he wasn’t going to elaborate. “Okay, so talk.”

  “Why did you go to the Clarke estate?”

  “Gardenia Richardson wanted me to promise I’d let Bo Bishop adopt Jax.”

  “And she didn’t ask you to do anything else?”

  “Like?” I wasn’t about to bring up Gardenia’s demand that I find out what Jax knew about the murder. Or her offer of payment.

  “I don’t know, Grace—like helping Jennifer do whatever you’re really doing here tonight? Maybe lie to the police. Suggest you go find a dead body . . .”

  “You think Gardenia Richardson is involved in her son’s murder?” I hoped the eagerness in my voice could be interpreted as shock.

  Kai gazed into my eyes as if he was literally trying to see into my soul. “It’s difficult to investigate a family with so much power. Buck Richardson is almost untouchable.”

  “But you’re looking into the possibility that one of them is involved?”

  “There have been some developments with the case. We finished going over the security tapes. LaBryce’s car was only seen entering the neighborhood once. So unless he came back in another car, he’s in the clear. We still have to run all the tags.”

  I felt an immense wave of relief, and I let out a long sigh. LaBryce was going to get out of jail. I didn’t have to try and extract anything else from Jax. I smiled at Kai. It was the real Grace smile, the one that comes from deep inside and is reserved for friends and family. I was so relieved, I didn’t even say, “I told you so!”

  Kai’s expression shifted from scrutiny to expectation. I didn’t understand what he wanted from me. “What?”

  “I thought you might tell me . . .” He let the rest hang, and suddenly, I got it. I knew what this little talk had been about. Kai wanted me to admit I’d lied about having a psychic ability. He was hoping that giving me the news that my friend was on his way to freedom would inspire me to recant.

  I felt the smile flicker. The idea of rewinding to the moment before I had so clumsily confessed the truth was tempting. But now that I’d taken the step, I wasn’t going to backtrack. No one ever got very far doing that.

  For some unknown reason, the idea that Kai preferred Grace the Liar to Grace the Psychic hit me in the gut like a mule kick. It made me angry and sad at the same time. Unaccustomed to those mixed feelings, I chose to simply turn and walk away from the source.

  “Grace.”

  I stopped and did an about-face. My jumbled emotions hadn’t taken long to polarize. I was pissed. “Is this why you hunted me down in the middle of the night? To ask me to admit I lied about my ability?”

  “Your phone pinged off a tower near here. I knew if I showed up, I’d find you.”

  “Find me doing something nefarious, you mean?”

  “I want to know the truth.” He looked like he was almost desperate to understand me. Like I was the only puzzle piece left and none of my edges were shaped right.

  The thought rankled. “I’ve told you the truth. You don’t get to ask me to lie to you so you can stuff me into some pigeonhole. I am not a piece of evidence to be analyzed and categorized and filed away. If that bothers you, tough.”

  I turned and walked back to Jennifer’s car. She had cranked up the engine, and the AC was blasting. As I slid into the leather seats, I let out a slow breath, turned to her, and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  • • •

  Women know things. Intuition, or whatever you want to call it, is stamped into our double X chromosomes.

  Jennifer shot me a sideways look as she drove out of the neighborhood. We parked less than a mile away in a dark construction site to wait. Within sight of the main road but with the headlights out, no one would notice us.

  After a respectable amount of time, she shifted in her seat and asked, “Is he your ex or something?”

  I sighed. “No. That plane was grounded before takeoff.”

  “Because he’s a cop?”

  “Because he’s an idiot.” Not charitable, but I wasn’t in the mood to give Kai a pass. I glanced at Jennifer; her lips were turned up in a wry grin.

  “Guys can be clueless.”

  “And yet we’re surprised by it every time.”

  “So, maybe we’re the clueless jerks?” She was smiling in earnest now, and I was struck by how young she looked. At the most, I was only five years older, but tonight I felt like I was pushing eighty. Worn out physically and mentally from lack of sleep, battling inner demons and midnight excursions, I wanted to close my eyes and sleep for a week.

  The only bright spot was the knowledge that LaBryce was soon to be cleared. I no longer had to scale fences and creep into canine dreams in an attempt to identify a murderer.

  I thought about what Kai had said about the governor and his wife and wondered if Jennifer knew they had come under suspicion. Wes had said she was being supported by them. Had she been at Mark’s, riffling through drawers looking to destroy some sort of evidence? Trying to make sure her bread was buttered?

  Only one way to find out.

  “So, what were you really looking for?” I asked.

  Her smile morphed into a closed-lip line. She shook her head.

  “Were you looking for some scrap of proof you missed when you killed Mark?”

  “What? No!” She looked truly shocked. “I loved Mark.”

  “But you weren’t in love with him.” I knew it was true from the way she said it. That intuition thing again.

  She sat for a long time looking at me. Then I saw a flicker of some decision in her eyes. “You first.”

  “Me first what?”

  “Tell me why you were in Mark’s house.”

  I had already come up with an excuse, in case I got busted. I just hadn’t expected to get caught with someone else. My well-crafted lie was still in my pock
et. I took it out and presented it to Jennifer.

  “I lost my phone. I was at Mark’s house earlier today to get some of Jax’s things. I figured maybe I dropped it while I was in the backyard picking up tennis balls. So I came to look for it.”

  Jennifer gave me a dubious look.

  Okay, so maybe it wasn’t so well crafted. I tried embellishing a bit. “I could have waited, but my phone is how I run my business. I was afraid it might rain. I can’t afford to lose all my contacts.”

  “Then what were you doing inside?”

  “I couldn’t see in the backyard. It was too dark. I started looking around for a way inside to turn on some lights. One of the back doors was open.”

  “The lights weren’t on.”

  Clever little thing. “I got inside and decided it would be easier if I just called my phone. I went into the office and you came in the door.”

  “Why didn’t you tell the cops that and let me fend for myself?”

  Now we were getting into unrehearsed territory. “I kind of panicked. After having a gun aimed at me and seeing Kai . . . well, my brain wasn’t working right.”

  “Kai, that’s the guy who’s into you?”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  She looked at me as if I was beyond dense. “He is. I met him the other day. He didn’t seem nearly as”—she paused, looking for the right word—“passionate.”

  That was a surprise to me. Kai always seemed animated by an inner fire when I’d seen him. “You met him at the sheriff’s office?”

  She nodded. “He was there when they questioned me. He’s pretty cute. Like that hot carpenter guy who models for Nautica.”

  I had no idea who she was talking about, but I agreed that Kai was cute and he probably could model for Nautica. Or maybe Rip Curl. “He’s a surfer.”

  “Really? Then he’s double-hot.” She grinned, and I found myself returning it. There was something in the way she tilted her head, in the curve of her lips, that felt familiar. She shifted toward me in the seat and asked, “So, what happened?”

  “I made a bad choice, for a good reason.” Telling Kai the truth about my ability had been a rash attempt to help LaBryce. “And it didn’t matter in the end.”

  “That sucks.”

  I shrugged. “That’s life.”

  “Yeah. You’re right about that.”

  “So—your turn. What were you doing going through Mark’s things?”

  Jennifer nibbled at her bottom lip and looked away. “I know who killed Mark . . .”

  There was a moment of suspense where I thought she might whip out a gun and finish her sentence with “me.” But instead she let out a deep sigh. I could see the tension leaving her shoulders, as if knowing that she was about to tell her secret was lifting a physical weight.

  “His name is Alexander. Alexander Burke.”

  To say I was shocked would be an understatement. “How do you know that?”

  “He was stalking Mark.”

  I wondered if Jennifer knew Burke was dead. Had it been on the news? It seemed like a week had passed, but I had found his body only the day before. Maybe the police hadn’t released his name.

  “How do you know Burke was the person stalking Mark?” So far, all anyone knew was that Mark had gotten hang-up calls.

  I could see she was considering how far to go with our conversation. I waited.

  “If I tell you, you have to promise not to let it get out. I mean, you can’t talk to the press or anything.”

  “Okay. I promise.”

  “He would listen to you, right? Kai? If you told him something?”

  “Right,” I lied. Mostly because she’d made me so curious I didn’t think I could take much more suspense.

  “Mark and I weren’t really together.”

  “Okay.” The confession was not exactly newsworthy.

  “Mark was gay.”

  That, however, was.

  “Gay?” I stared at her, disbelieving.

  “Mark and Alexander Burke had been seeing each other for a few months. I think Alexander killed Mark. No, I’m sure of it.”

  I blinked at her in the dim moonlight, trying to get a grip on what she’d just told me. “Why didn’t you tell the police this?”

  “I haven’t had the chance. I needed to talk to someone privately, and Mr. Stein has always been with me when the police have wanted to speak to me.”

  Stein, the Richardsons’ lawyer.

  “Besides,” Jennifer continued, “I grew up in Emerson. I know cops. If I’d told them the whole story, they wouldn’t have believed me. Mark Richardson, the football player, gay?” She huffed out a short, derisive breath.

  I understood her point. “It would have been a hard sell.” I agreed. “But there has to be evidence. Macho guy crap or not, that should have spoken for itself.”

  She shook her head. “Mark was always really careful. No guys were allowed to come to the house. Mark would always meet them out someplace. Or I would drop him off.”

  “So you went along with it? Mark said, ‘Hey Jennifer, want to pretend to be my girlfriend?’ and you didn’t have anything better to do?”

  To my surprise, she didn’t seem offended by my sarcasm. “Close. We met at a male revue. I was still in high school. But I had a fake ID. Mark and his frat brothers had decided it was the best place to pick up girls.”

  “You met Mark at a male strip show?”

  “Some of the dancers are gay. One of the hottest guys kept looking at Mark. But Mark kept hitting on me. Overdoing it. The tension was so high between him and the dancer I was surprised no one else noticed. Finally, Mark dragged me out of there. We got in his car and I said, ‘Must suck being in the closet.’”

  “And he confided in you?”

  “We’d been drinking. Maybe that’s why. We talked for a while. I told him about living with my junkie mom; he told me about his life. How hard it was to go out with girls. Pretend he was someone else.

  “We sat in the parking lot ’til long after the show was over. When I saw the dancer who was so into Mark walking to his car, I dared Mark to drive over and talk to him. I told him if anyone saw us, he could tell them I wanted the guy’s autograph. The guy ended up giving Mark his number. And that was that.”

  “So you became his girlfriend publicly.”

  “I know what you’re thinking—a girl from the projects saw an opportunity and took advantage. But that’s not what happened. It was a fair trade. I got out of the ghetto and got an education. He got to be himself with me and sometimes find a guy he liked. I’d go with him, drop him off, or pick him up after a date.”

  She was right, the cops wouldn’t believe her. “So what changed? Why the big breakup?”

  “We’d always agreed that we would break up during my final semester of school. But I think the bigger reason was Alexander. He was jealous to the extreme. Even though Mark told him we were never physical aside from the expected hugs and hand-holding in public, Alexander couldn’t stand it.”

  She was quiet for a while. “I should have known. When you live in a place like Emerson, you have to learn to read people. If you can tell who is mean, strung out, or crazy, you can stay out of trouble. Some people try to hide who they are, some don’t bother, but if you know, it’s better. Safer.” In the last few moments her face had changed—aged. The skin around her eyes tightened, her lips thinning as they pressed into a frown. Yes, Jennifer Weston was younger than me, but her life experience had shown her things I never wanted to learn.

  She looked at me, and her face held a shocking amount of anger. “I met Alexander and I knew what he was like. He had that way about him. Open and friendly, except for his eyes. His eyes said he could do terrible things if you crossed him.” A single, fat tear slid down her cheek. “I sho
uld have seen it coming.”

  “You can’t blame yourself.” It was useless to say things like that. But it was all I could think of.

  She brushed the tear away. “You wanted to know how I got the bruises? Alexander gave them to me.”

  “What happened?”

  “A few days before the murder, Mark called me. He was really upset. He asked me to come over. He told me that things had gone too far with Alexander. They had talked about living together and planned ways for Mark to be honest about his life, maybe even leave the team if necessary. But to Mark, it had all just been talk. He had gone to Alexander’s place that day and saw that he was packing.”

  “So Mark realized he wasn’t ready.”

  “He realized a lot of things. He wanted to be himself. He wanted to be happy. But football was a part of him. He didn’t want to give that up, and he didn’t want to hurt his family.”

  “You mean Buck Richardson? Why, because he’s a Republican?”

  “Having an openly gay son would’ve complicated things. But I think Mark wanted to come out in his own time. When he was ready and not for someone else. Especially someone he didn’t love. I told him he didn’t have to do anything he didn’t want to. He could break up with Alexander and move on. Neither of us realized that Alexander had let himself in and was listening to the conversation. He was furious. He grabbed me and tried to throw me out.”

  “And Mark didn’t stop him?” It was hard to imagine Mark, a man built of well over six feet of lean muscle, would allow Jennifer to be roughed up. I also wondered where Jax was during this altercation.

  “He did.” She smiled. “Mark ended up telling Alexander to leave. That it was over. But Alexander lost it. He started begging Mark to reconsider. He said he’d do anything. That he couldn’t live without him.”

  “Did Mark take him back?”

  “No. But he didn’t make him leave. Mark promised Alexander they would talk about it. I left, but when I called Mark the next day, he said he was trying to let Alexander down easy. He shouldn’t have. It only made things worse.”