Once Bitten (A Melanie Travis Mystery)

by Berenson, Laurien

  His words confirmed what I’d begun to suspect.

  Perhaps Sara had listened to Carole because, for the first time, she’d found someone whose opinion she cared about.

  “Toward the end,” Josh continued, “Sara was probably with Carole more than she was with me. Half the time when I’d call her, Carole would pick up and then it was a hassle getting through. She was always telling me Sara was in the shower or something. Come on, how many times am I going to believe that?”

  As often as it took, I thought, for Carole to drive a wedge between you. Or maybe it was Sara who’d been playing the two of them off of each other. Whichever guess was right, Josh had clearly been the only one of the trio who hadn’t fully understood what was going on.

  “Where did Carole live, do you know?”

  “Down in Westchester somewhere. Sara used to go over to her place, but I never did. I think it was in Armonk.”

  Just like the exchange Patricia had sent her fax to. That probably cleared up the question of where Sara had gone when she’d left home.

  Bertie and I had been operating under the assumption that Sara had been running away from something when she disappeared. Now, looking at things from the other side, it seemed equally likely that she’d been running toward something—a relationship that was important to her, but one that she wasn’t yet ready to expose to the whole world.

  “Josh, do you have any idea what Carole might have been doing at Sara’s cottage last Saturday night?”

  “No. She and I didn’t talk about Carole. Why didn’t you ask her when you were there?”

  “We did,” said Bertie. “She said she didn’t know.”

  Josh shrugged. “Carole probably just stopped by. She did that sometimes.”

  Not if my guess was correct and Sara had been staying with Carole in Armonk. But if Sara had been club hopping in New York with friends, as she’d told the police, why hadn’t Carole been with her?

  I didn’t bother to ask Josh. At this point, I was willing to bet he knew less about Sara and Carole than I did. And if I was feeling baffled, Bertie’s cousin was looking tired. He was leaning, eyes closed, against the back of the couch. Even Beagle, who’d stood up to stretch and seemed to be considering hopping over onto Josh’s legs, thought better of the idea and lay back down. I turned the discussion back to that evening’s events.

  “What about the murder weapon?” I asked. “Did the police find one?”

  Josh opened one eye. “No. Delilah said the intruder must have taken it with him. Sara told the police that Grant kept a gun in his office. They had her look for it but she couldn’t find it, so maybe Delilah was right.”

  “I don’t like this at all.” Bertie sounded equal parts annoyed and worried. “And I still think you should get a lawyer.”

  “What for?” Josh braced his hands against the couch and pushed himself upright. “I’m a witness, not a suspect. And I’m not even much of a witness since I wasn’t there when the shooting happened.”

  “That’s your story,” I said. “The police may believe differently. Why would anyone want to break into the Warings’ house and kill Grant?”

  “There could be lots of reasons,” Bertie said stoutly. “Maybe he was having business problems—”

  “Grant was retired,” I said.

  “Someone he sent to jail got out—”

  “He wasn’t that kind of lawyer,” Josh felt duty-bound to point out.

  “Robbery!” Bertie tried.

  Good thought.

  “Was anything stolen?” I asked Josh.

  “The detective asked Sara about that and made her look around. She said she didn’t think so, but Grant’s office was a real mess. She showed the police where there was a safe in a cabinet behind the bar, and it hadn’t been touched.”

  “But Grant’s gun was missing, so he must have gotten it out for some reason,” I said, thinking aloud. “Why would he have done that unless he meant to use the gun for self-defense? And if he was armed, how did he end up dead?”

  “Don’t look at me,” said Josh. “I have no idea.”

  My gaze shifted to Bertie. She shook her head.

  Three reasonably intelligent people and not a decent answer among us.

  Good thing we didn’t do this for a living.

  By the time I got home, Bob was asleep on the couch. I let Faith out back, then stood in the arched doorway leading to the living room and watched for several minutes as his chest rose and fell with each deep breath he took.

  The television was on, tuned to a sports channel where, improbably, a giant slalom was being shown. Bob, who won’t even drink a soda if it has too many ice cubes, must have nodded off before skiing came on. He’d removed his shoes and tucked his feet beneath the end cushion. His arms were crossed over his chest.

  It was amazing, considering how much turmoil he’d caused in my life, just how peaceful my ex-husband managed to look. And while part of me was sorry that Bob hadn’t waited up, hoping to continue the evening where we’d left off, on the whole I realized I was relieved.

  Images from our life together flitted through my mind, like a series of postcards from a long-ago trip. I’d spent some of the best times of my life with Bob. And some of the worst. He would always be my first love, the man with whom I’d experienced the giddy high of feeling my heart open to all life’s possibilities.

  He would also always be the man who’d deserted me when the going got tough, left me flat without even a remorseful backward glance. In the span of our time together, I’d felt both the glory and the cruelty of love. I’d learned to trust, and I’d felt betrayal. And I’d grown up.

  For better or worse, Bob’s actions had had everything to do with the woman I’d become. I’d always feel the connection to our shared past; not to mention that tug of physical awareness. But flattered as I was by the attention he’d paid to me, tempting as it would be to slip back into something that would come together so easily, I had to let Bob know that my answer was no. I couldn’t go back to where I’d been years earlier, nor would I want to.

  My ex-husband might have changed, but I had, too. And it was time to move on.

  I let Faith inside, then went upstairs and got a blanket and pillow out of the linen closet. Bob stirred when I lifted his head and slipped the pillow underneath.

  “Don’t tell me it’s morning,” he mumbled groggily.

  “It isn’t.” I brushed my hand along his brow. In this sleepy state, he looked just like his son. “You’ve got hours yet. Go back to sleep.”

  Rather than take my advice, he fought to rouse himself. “Is everything okay?”

  “Fine. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow,” Bob murmured, losing the battle. “There’s always tomorrow.”

  “Right.” Because I could, because he wasn’t awake to read something into it that I didn’t mean, I leaned down and kissed him gently on the lips.

  A soft caress. A heartfelt good-bye. Funny how life works sometimes. The decisions that ultimately mean the most are, in the end, the easiest to make.

  27

  I arose the next morning to an almost empty house and a note on the kitchen table. Gone fishing, it said.

  Like that made sense. Nobody went fishing in November, did they? And where in Fairfield County would you go to go fishing, anyway?

  I had no idea.

  Nor did Faith. I know because I asked her. When I came downstairs, she was lying on the kitchen floor, her nose resting on the rim of her empty food bowl in what I’m sure she thought was a charmingly subtle gesture.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  The Poodle pricked her ears and woofed softly.

  Hungry! That answer was easy enough to decipher.

  But when I moved on to the bigger questions, like where were Bob and Davey, what were they planning to use for poles and bait, and what, by the way, was the meaning of life, Faith was annoyingly noncommunicative. Of course, by then I’d put some dried kibble in her bowl an
d she was busy chewing. That probably had something to do with it.

  I poured myself a cup of coffee, added a dollop of milk, and sat down to ponder Sara’s situation. What the heck? For once, it wasn’t as if I had anything else to do.

  What had started as a puzzle had ended with a murder. Usually, in my experience, things work the other way around.

  Maybe, I decided, I should start with Grant’s murder and work my way back to Sara’s disappearance. I’m not a big believer in coincidence, so I was pretty sure the two things had to be related. What did I know about Sara and Grant separately? And what did I know about the two of them together?

  Item one: Grant was Sara’s stepfather. Though her relationship with her mother had been seriously strained for most of her life, by all accounts, Sara and Grant got along well.

  So what, I wondered, thinking back, had they been arguing about at the dog show two weeks earlier? Something important enough for them to air their grievances in public. Maybe something upsetting enough to cause Sara to disappear the next day.

  Hmmm.

  Item two: Despite all the men that she had previously and publicly enjoyed flings with, there was a good possibility that Sara had, for the last several months, been involved in a romantic relationship with Carole Eikenberry. During that time, she had become pregnant.

  Item three: Feeling pressured by the baby’s father, Sara had run to Carole for refuge. That led me to believe that although Sara’s pregnancy was a secret, Carole must have known about it.

  Big deal, I thought. None of that brought me any closer to figuring out what Carole had been doing in Sara’s cottage on Saturday night. Or who had set the fire that took her life. Or what had happened to Grant’s gun and why he hadn’t used it to defend himself.

  I sipped my coffee, nestled my bare toes in Faith’s thick coat as she lay stretched out beneath my chair, and let my thoughts drift. Sometimes I solve problems better when I’m not trying so hard to find an answer. And when a possible solution came moseying into my mind, I didn’t sit up and shout eureka! but I might as well have. Because all at once I realized what I should have seen earlier.

  I’d been thinking back to Thursday night when Bertie and I had gone to visit Sara at her parents’ house. Bertie had asked Sara whether or not her parents knew she was pregnant. And Sara, who’d insisted to Josh that the only person she’d informed was the baby’s father, had said, “Grant does. I told him.”

  For a moment, the revelation seemed so stunning, so unexpected, that it was all I could do to process the ramifications. I’d been assuming that Carole was Sara’s mystery beau, the partner she’d kept so carefully concealed. But Carole was only half of Sara’s explosive secret; her stepfather, Grant Waring, had been the other half.

  I was so astounded by the direction my thoughts had taken that I barely even heard the doorbell ring. Faith, of course, was quicker on the uptake. Especially since, as it turned out, one of our visitors was a dog. Eve, to be precise.

  Aunt Peg was standing on the front step beside her, holding a box of doughnuts. “Breakfast,” she announced when I opened the door. “Have you eaten yet?”

  “No, I . . .”

  Aunt Peg wasn’t listening. She thrust the pink box into my hands, marched past me, and peered up the stairs. Eve, meanwhile, was dancing circles around Faith in the hall. Not much seemed to be required of me—Peg was now poking her nose into the kitchen—so I opened the box, helped myself to a glazed doughnut, and took a bite.

  “Looking for something?” I inquired as Peg circled back through the living room.

  “Bob.”

  Oh. I chewed and swallowed.

  “He isn’t here.”

  “He was last night.”

  “So he was,” I said agreeably. “Isn’t that allowed?”

  “Don’t be fresh,” said Peg.

  So help me, I couldn’t see why not. Wasn’t this my life we were discussing?

  “I got the impression he might be staying over.” Aunt Peg threw down that verbal gauntlet on her way back to the kitchen. This time I followed.

  “Is that what you’re doing here so early? Checking up on me?”

  “Certainly not.” Aunt Peg is one of the smoothest liars around. It’s a gift. Unfortunately for her, it’s one that I’ve long since stopped being fooled by. “I came by to drop Eve off for the weekend.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She was now putting a kettle of water on the stove to heat for tea. Since the professed goal of her visit—dropping the puppy off—had already been accomplished, I guessed we were now getting ready to move on to phase two. I took a seat at the table.

  “Anything else?”

  “Have a doughnut,” said Peg. “The sugar will cheer you up.”

  “I’m already about as cheerful as I get.” I hoped that didn’t mean that she was setting me up for bad news.

  Instead Aunt Peg changed the subject. “I brought lots of doughnuts. Chocolate ones, too. Where’s my nephew?”

  “Gone fishing, apparently.”

  “Fishing? Where?”

  I’d managed to surprise her. Of course, Bob had managed to surprise me, too.

  “I have no idea. Bob took him. The two of them were gone when I got up this morning.”

  “Aha!” cried Peg.

  I reached for my mug, dragged it over, and took a sip. The coffee was now cold. “Bob slept on the couch.”

  “You should have sent him home.”

  To Texas? I wondered. Or to Frank’s place? Shoulda, woulda, coulda.

  “Actually, I was out when he fell asleep. How did you know he was here?”

  Aunt Peg carried over her tea and sat down. The two Poodles were playing tug-of-war with a length of thick, knotted rope. In a minute, Peg would probably remember that the game was bad for Eve’s newly emerging adult teeth, but for the moment she had other things on her mind.

  “I called, of course. Just as soon as I heard about Grant. The story made last night’s news. Bob told me you were off getting the scoop from Bertie.”

  I nodded. “Her cousin Josh was there when it happened.”

  “When what happened? The news report was annoyingly vague about the details.”

  Today being Saturday, Bertie would already have left for the first of the weekend’s shows, which was probably why Aunt Peg was grilling me rather than going directly to the source. On the other hand, even though we’d just seen each other the day before, I had plenty of news to bring her up to date on.

  Aunt Peg managed to polish off two jelly doughnuts in the time it took me to recount what Josh had said, throw in what I’d learned at the specialty from Terry, and finish by airing my own speculations about what was going on. When I got to my guess that Grant was the father of Sara’s baby, Aunt Peg began to shake her head in denial. It was hard to tell whether she was more horrified or intrigued by the possibility.

  “He must be thirty years older than she is! Not to mention married to Sara’s mother. That’s almost incest.”

  “They’re only related by marriage,” I pointed out.

  “But they’ve been living in that house together since Sara was a child. Are you trying to tell me that there’s been hanky-panky going on all that time?”

  Hanky-panky. Only Aunt Peg could come up with a phrase like that. But her question put another new spin on things. I’d been thinking of Sara as the aggressor in the relationship, going after Grant the same way she’d gone after so many other things she’d wanted. Once again I was forced to consider that I might have been looking at things backward.

  “I don’t think so,” I said finally. “Sara’s friends talk about the troubled relationship she had with her mother. Nobody seemed to think Grant was a problem.”

  “Then what’s your explanation?”

  “I think Sara made it happen.” It was conjecture on my part, but it made sense. “I think she met Carole Eikenberry and fell in love. Sara’s getting to that age where the biologic
al clock starts ticking. I’m betting that she and Carole decided to have a baby together.”

  “But why Grant?”

  “Revenge,” I said simply. “Everything I’ve heard suggests that Delilah was a terrible mother. Maybe after all these years Sara decided to strike back, to hit her mother where she knew it would hurt.

  “Sara planned to tell Delilah what she and Grant had done, but then she lost her nerve. She had told Grant about the baby, however, and he was pressuring her to have an abortion. That’s why she ran away from home.”

  “And the fire that killed Carole?”

  “I’m still guessing,” I said.

  Aunt Peg lifted both hands and beckoned with her fingers, impatient for more information, even if it was only speculation.

  “I think Grant set it hoping that the fire would flush Sara out from wherever she was hiding. Remember, he knew how attached she was to Titus and that she’d left the Sheltie behind in the cottage. I’m betting he thought that was the one thing that would be sure to get her attention.

  “Grant desperately needed to get Sara back home so he could change her mind about having the baby. Don’t forget, he was under a serious time constraint. If Sara was going to have an abortion, she had to do it soon.

  “Not only that but Delilah was still in the dark about what he’d done and I’m sure Grant wanted to keep things that way. Once Sara left, Grant lost all control of the situation and he knew it. Compared to the alternative—having his wife find out that her daughter was pregnant and by whom—I bet setting that fire didn’t seem like such an awful thing, especially if it could accomplish what he needed it to do.”

  “Except that in the process, he ended up murdering Sara’s other lover.”

  “Right. But I’ve been thinking about that and I’m almost certain that Grant had no idea Carole was in the house. After all, what would he have stood to gain by killing her?

  “Remember how the newspaper article said that the body was near an upstairs closet? Well, Bertie and I were over at Sara’s house right after she disappeared. We opened that closet and the door stuck terribly. Imagine this: it’s Saturday night and Carole’s in the cottage—”