A Case of You

by Pamela Burford

  Why she’d always imagined Ray Whittaker as a man in his middle years, gray-haired and age-thickened, she couldn’t say. The photos showed a young, slim man, shorter than Henry, perhaps five foot ten or eleven. But the full impact didn’t hit her until her host produced a color snapshot. There was Ray flipping steaks on a charcoal grill, with Anita and Ruby at his side, highballs in hand. All three were laughing into the camera. It was easy to imagine that Henry, behind the lens, had just told a wickedly funny joke, and managed to catch that charmed instant when the punch line kicked in.

  “He looks like a teenager!” Kit had said. Red hair. Freckles.

  Freckles, for God’s sake!

  “He was thirty-six in that picture,” Henry had responded, “four years older than me. It was taken a few weeks before he died.”

  A few weeks before he cold-bloodedly murdered one of the women standing there laughing with him. Anita David looked to be in her thirties, too, with a wavy blond pageboy and a full, womanly figure. Ruby Whittaker, on Ray’s other side, was darker and smaller than her friend. Kit wondered if she’d known about her husband’s extramarital activities.

  Ray’s youthful build and features were offset by intelligent brown eyes and a pockmarked complexion. The defect, rather than detracting from his looks, lent an interesting cragginess to his boyish face.

  Henry’s account of Ray’s death was succinct. Ray’s high-priced lawyers get him released on bail, and now he’s mad. That kind of ice-cold mad he’d get sometimes. That scary too-goddamn-calm mad. He comes out to the house—to talk, he says—and Henry takes one look at Ray and knows that new Walther of his, that slim .380 PPK, is tucked into his waistband somewhere, under his windbreaker.

  Was he drunk? Kit asked. Not this time, Henry said. And, sober, Ray was a dead-on shot.

  Seems odd, doesn’t it? she wondered aloud. Here Ray had painstakingly planned the “perfect” murder, even patiently waited for the victim’s next asthma attack. Why would such a man do something so rash, grab his semiautomatic the instant he’s out on bail and go after the guy who blew the whistle?

  That was Ray, Henry said. It was cold calculation or reckless passion with him, never an in-between. Nothing existed for him at that moment except the driving need to empty that .380 into his old pal.

  But the edge Henry had in size and strength, not to mention raw rage over his wife’s murder, made the struggle that ensued an uneven match. In the end Ray had bled to death, gutshot with his own weapon. Henry was held blameless in an indisputable case of self-defense.

  In downtown Pratte now, Kit found a parking space for Jo’s light blue Corolla in front of Ye Olde Video Shoppe. At Pratte Hardware Emporium next door she bought packing tape for the boxes she was mailing back to Sal. Rounding out the usual array of utilitarian merchandise were picture postcards, camera film, and maps, not to mention mugs, bumper stickers, key rings, gimme caps, and T-shirts all sporting the green Pratte, Vermont, logo for those requiring tangible proof that they’d been to a Quaint New England Town.

  She strolled the main drag, watching the tourists and scoping out the layout. At the heart of town, like the hub of a wheel, was the requisite white, steepled church. Staring at it, Kit could only marvel at the stark contrast between this sweet, simple town and the rough neighborhood where she’d grown up.

  But then, Jo had survived the rough streets of Chicago. She’d had to move to this sweet, simple town to get murdered.

  Kit turned away from the soaring steeple and made a beeline for the Corolla. She needed answers, and God help the good doctor if he tried to pull the kind of evasive crap he’d ladled out the day she arrived.

  Kit negotiated Pratte’s hilly, twisting residential side streets and turned onto an overgrown uphill driveway marked by a rural mailbox on a post. Noah Stewart, MD, Family Practice. Gravel rattled around in the Corolla’s undercarriage as she pulled in next to Noah’s dusty black Cherokee. Two other cars were parked near the side entrance to his practice. Patients, no doubt.

  Kit checked her watch as she climbed out of the car: 11:20 a.m. She had no intention of waiting out the next forty minutes or so under the watchful eye of Noah’s trained pit bull, Alice. Besides, the day was too sunny and warm to spend even one minute of it sitting in a doctor’s waiting room with sick people hacking in her face.

  She looked around, more attentive to detail than she’d been two days earlier. The house appeared to be in decent repair, but the grounds of the onetime Whittaker homestead had a look of calculated disorder, as if the days of meticulous landscaping were long gone.

  From behind the house came the whining roar of a gasoline engine. The sound rose and ebbed at intervals, disabusing her initial impression that it was a lawn mower. She began walking in that direction.

  As she passed the open window of an examination room, a toddler’s high-pitched wail drowned out the roar of the motor. Vaccination time, no doubt. She peeked in and saw a young woman cuddling and crooning to her daughter, whose squalling dropped off to a tear-streaked scowl punctuated by hiccups. Noah’s back was to Kit as he disposed of the syringe, then deftly affixed a Band-Aid to the girl’s arm and commended her bravery.

  She caught herself smiling as she rounded the house. She’d always been a sucker for displays of male tenderness toward children. Probably, she figured, because she’d never had a dad, though God knew Sal Merino had tried his hardest to fill that particular void.

  The large backyard was as unruly as the front, choked with untrimmed trees and shrubbery, as if the nearby woods were intent on reclaiming it. She looked toward the source of the racket and saw, about thirty feet away, a squat paper birch studded with dry brown leaves. Small branches littered the ground at the foot of a folding ladder.

  Someone stood behind a large lower limb, which began to separate from the tree at its base. The branch fell away and Kit stumbled to a stop, gaping at Ray Whittaker.

  Ray wore only cutoffs and held a rumbling chainsaw in his right hand. He stepped back to study the tree, sparing her barely a glance as he selected his next target.

  “Doc’s office is over there.” He gestured with the saw. “The door with the big sign on it.”

  She commanded herself to breathe. The freckles were there, but not the pockmarks. Ray Whittaker probably hadn’t worn his coppery hair in a long ponytail like this young man, and he almost certainly didn’t have a tattoo of a hawk in flight on his right biceps.

  “I’m not looking for Noah. I mean, I’m waiting for him to break for lunch,” she said.

  This earned a second look. His eyes flicked over her and returned to the tree. He was much younger than Ray, too, she now saw, with the lean, sleekly muscled build of an athletic youth. Fine sawdust clung to the light mat of russet hair on his chest. She’d enjoyed quite a rousing display of male flesh today, and it wasn’t even noon.

  The saw yowled to life and he began severing a huge branch in front, his biceps popping, the hawk twitching as he worked.

  She ambled closer, shouting to be heard. “Is the tree dead?”

  He jerked at the sound of her voice so close just as the limb came away. “Look out!”

  Kit yelped and darted to the side as the heavy limb crashed down right where she’d been walking. She didn’t need his sardonic smirk to feel like an idiot, but it helped.

  “Is the tree dead? Is that what you asked?”

  She gave a weak half laugh. “Stupid question.” She waited for sarcastic agreement, but none came. With a wary glance at the homicidal tree, she approached him, hand extended. “I’m Kit Roarke.”

  He hefted the saw into his left hand and dried his right one on his cutoffs. “Bryan Carlisle.” His palm felt hot, callused, and a little sweaty despite the wipe-down, his grip firm. He didn’t return her smile.

  “Bryan. Oh. You’re Bryan.” At least she wasn’t losing her mind. There was a reason for the resemblance to Ray.

  Something clicked in behind his brown eyes then, something hard. “What’ve you heard a
bout me?”

  The kid’s no better than his grandfather. Leave it at that. “Nothing.”

  “Bull.” He turned back toward the birch. She’d failed some test, and he was dismissing her.

  “You’re right, it’s bull,” she conceded, “but I don’t think people really want to know everything that’s said about them.”

  His back to her, he ran his hand over the trunk of the dead tree, flicking off curls of papery bark. “It doesn’t matter. I know what you heard.” He threw a grin over his shoulder, and it was Ray Whittaker she saw at that moment, flipping steaks and sharing a joke with the ladies. “I got the bad genes.” Laughing, he turned and spread his arms in a see-for-yourself gesture. “I roll into town last year and the yokels do, like, this giant double take. It was Creature Feature time, man.” He gave his words a Boris Karloff spin, with wagging eyebrows. “The Evil One returns from the grave.”

  The chainsaw roared for a second and Kit jumped with a yip she was helpless to stifle. She muttered a low curse. “Very funny.”

  Apparently Bryan thought so, too, but his obvious self-consciousness redeemed him. He seemed to be laughing more at his juvenile sense of humor that at her response to it.

  Frenzied barking drew their attention to a large golden retriever loping across the lawn from the direction of the screened-in porch, with its built-in dog door. The animal was headed straight for Kit, whether to lick her face or tear out her jugular, she couldn’t say. Bryan quickly moved to intercept him and grab his collar. “Easy, Max.”

  This could have been the set of Nightmare at the Kennel, she thought. It was all there: a dog, a chainsaw, and a half-dressed, tattooed youth with bad genes.

  The instant Bryan released him, the beast was all over her, drool spraying, tail swinging, warm dog breath in her face. It was all she could do to keep her balance.

  “Max! Get down!” Bryan commanded, hauling him off her. “Sit!” Max sat. “Stay!” With one eye on Bryan’s admonishing finger, the dog scooted toward Kit on his haunches, his tail rhythmically thwacking the ground. “Stay!”

  She backed up, and the dog scooted forward again, practically vibrating in canine rapture. Bryan seized his collar, and Kit petted him, earning his slobbering gratitude.

  “Where’s your pride, man?” Bryan asked him. He turned to Kit. “I think he’s in love.”

  Something live rocketed down a tree at the edge of the woods, cutting short Max’s slavering devotion. He tore off into the trees.

  “Well, at least he lasted longer than my last boyfriend,” she observed.

  “Bryan! I told you I’d give you a hand with that,” Noah scolded from the steps of the porch. “Why didn’t you wait for me?”

  At the sound of his master’s voice, that Georgia drawl so charmingly out of place at this latitude, Max bounded out of the woods and charged across the lawn. By this time Noah had noticed Kit standing with Bryan. His eyes were mostly on her even as he knelt and roughhoused with Max for a few moments, effortlessly wrestling the big animal to the ground as if he were a puppy.

  “I’m doing all right,” Bryan answered.

  She figured Noah was six foot two or three. That, along with a solid, muscular build and masculine grace, explained his imposing presence. He started across the lawn toward them, Max at his heels. “I can see that,” he said, “I just—”

  “When I finish taking it down, I’ll get rid of the brush and start splitting up the logs.”

  Noah joined them and nodded politely to Kit before turning his concerned gaze to the younger man. She could see him taking in the flushed face and incipient sunburn. “Knock off for a while, Bryan. Doctor’s orders. You’ve—”

  “Save it, man.” The saw whined into high gear as he resumed his work.

  Noah’s features tightened in frustration and he turned to Kit. She sensed he would have liked to push the issue but didn’t want to embarrass Bryan in front of her. “I’ve got to get back in there, but I’ll break for lunch in about twenty minutes.”

  “That’s okay, Bryan and I have been having a real interesting chat.” Let him chew on that, she thought, giving in to a wicked impulse to tweak him a bit for withholding information from her.

  A muscle in Noah’s cheek twitched and his eyes cooled to a pale greenish amber as they flicked from her to Bryan. It struck her like a slap. He didn’t want to leave them alone together! Their private tête-à-tête bugged the hell out of Noah, and she didn’t know why.

  Unless it was because he was afraid of what Bryan might tell her. Of what she might learn. That possibility crawled up her spine with icy little fingers and tickled her scalp. She didn’t care to speculate on what it was Noah might not want her to learn.

  “Well,” she said, with a casualness she didn’t feel, “don’t let us keep you. I’ll be here when you break for lunch.”

  The saw idled in Bryan’s hand and he glanced at the dog, now lying in the shade of a nearby spruce. “You know, my grandfather had a dog named Max, too,” he said. At the sound of his name Max raised his head, and finding nothing more exciting than three pairs of eyes staring at him, let it drop again. “And get this,” Bryan continued. “It was a golden retriever. Just like this guy. That’s something, huh?”

  Kit thought so. She turned to Noah to find his look of uneasiness had hardened into something else. Something... well, scary. A cold-eyed intensity that made those icy fingers tighten on her scalp and squeeze, even as she told herself she was being silly. He caught her eye then, and something in her expression must have alerted him. As she watched, the muscles in his face relaxed, his heightened color returned to normal, and his eyes darkened fractionally. All that in about five seconds.

  She blinked. No. It couldn’t have been a conscious thing. No one could willfully control the size of his pupils, for heaven’s sake!

  Noah’s smile was wide and genial as he said, “It was sort of a joke.”

  “What, the dog’s name?” she asked. “You did it deliberately?”

  “Well, sure. When I realized my new puppy was the same breed as the dog that lived here thirty years ago, I gave him the same name.” He shrugged, the smile still in place. “Had to call him something, right?”

  “Guess so,” Kit murmured, though she guessed nothing of the sort. Admittedly, she didn’t know him very well, yet somehow Noah didn’t seem like the kind of man to bring home a puppy and give it another dog’s name.

  “I better get back in there before my next patient decides to draw his own blood sample.” Still smiling, Noah turned and ambled back to the house.

  “So.” She turned to Bryan. “You do yard work for Noah.”

  “And anyone else that doesn’t mind having their hedges trimmed by the Bad Seed.” He looked around the neglected lawn. “I should be able to do something with this place before fall.”

  “How’d you get by during the winter?”

  “I taught the tourists to ski at Stowe. How come you’re so nosy?”

  She shrugged. “I got the bad genes.”

  One side of his mouth curved up. “It’s the red hair.”

  “I prefer to think of it as chestnut. It’s more brown than red.” She shared his lopsided grin.

  “It’s more red than brown. It’s really beautiful, too. Wild, you know?” With his free hand he reached for the untamed thatch of corkscrew curls that fell to her shoulder blades. “How do you get it to do that?” Idly he pulled one long ringlet and watched it recoil as he released it.

  “How do I get it to do that? After a couple of decades of battling the stuff, I finally threw in the towel and let it have its own way, that’s how I get it to do that.”

  “I bet Noah can’t keep his hands out of it.”

  The image invoked by Bryan’s offhand comment swamped her senses in a dizzying rush. It took an effort of will to force her thoughts away from Noah’s long, warn fingers sliding through her hair, over her scalp. She gave a light chuckle as she felt her face burn, then said, “It’s not like that. I only met No
ah yesterday.”

  “Tourist?”

  “No. I’m a friend of Joanne Merino’s.”

  Now it was Bryan who seemed to slam up against the unexpected. His eyes grew round and suddenly he looked about twelve. Then his features tightened and he looked away, his chest rising and falling rapidly. He glanced at the chainsaw he still held, idling with a low rumble, as if he’d never seen it before.

  “I know you found her,” she said gently.

  He lifted his eyes to hers. They looked weary, defeated. He cleared his throat “Listen, I got to finish taking down this tree.”

  “We can talk while you work. I promise to stay out of the way.”

  There was one more limb to remove, then the bifurcated trunk. Bryan swiftly dispatched the limb and pulled the ladder up to one of the skewed boles.

  Kit did some quick arithmetic as he climbed the ladder and began to lop off the top two feet of the trunk. The ripe green fragrance of the nearby woods blended with the tang of fresh sawdust spraying from the whirring chain. She shouted to be heard. “You graduated high school last year, so that makes you what? Nineteen? Twenty?”

  “Eighteen.” He kept his eyes on the chunk of tree as it thudded to the ground. The sun was nearly overhead, and his face and chest were sheened with sweat. “I skipped a year.”

  So he was smart. She supposed it ran in the family. What was a bright kid like this doing mowing lawns and giving skiing lessons when he should be in college?

  “Your mom must’ve gotten married young,” she said, remembering that Henry had told her Debbie was six when Ray died, making her thirty-eight now. Of course, there’s young and then there’s ridiculously young. Kit’s mother was only forty.

  “Your nosy genes are showing,” he said. “I was an accident.”

  “Join the club.” He shot her a quick look. Good. She’d managed to chip away a bit of that belligerent pride. “Most of the world is an accident, Bryan.”