“Going back how far?”
“Ten years. Anything older than that is on microfiche and will take longer to find. But I can’t imagine anyone holding a grudge that long, then suddenly deciding to kill the person.”
“Maybe the grudge wasn’t worth killing over to start with. Maybe over a period of years it festered and grew until the person felt he had no choice but to kill her.”
She shrugged but didn’t look convinced.
“You’ve never hated anyone, have you?”
“Not enough to wish them dead. Certainly not enough to kill them.” Then, hesitantly, she asked, “Have you?”
He regretted his answer, regretted even more that it was Juliet hearing it, but he couldn’t lie to himself and certainly not to her. “Yes. I think.”
She didn’t ask exactly what he thought—that he had wished someone dead or that he’d actually taken steps to kill someone. She was probably afraid to know. So was he.
For a long time she stared at him, her face pale, then blindly she opened the folder. “We should get started.”
He laid his hand over hers on the top printout. She tensed but didn’t pull away. “I asked a few questions around town today. Olivia and her husband came here from Denver right after they were married. There’s no other family in the area. They had three kids—”
“Three?”
“The oldest was a son named Roy Jr. He’s been gone so long that most people have forgotten he existed.”
“Gone, as in dead?”
“He ran away from home more than twenty years ago. He apparently didn’t get along with his father. Olivia believed he was dead. She was convinced that he would have contacted her sometime over the years if he were alive to do so.”
“What about her husband? Mariellen said he died when Eve was a baby.”
“Roy Stuart was a drunk who knocked his wife around until he got tired of it, then started on the kids—the boys, at least, especially the older one. He doted on Eve and never laid a hand on her. Sue Marie Harper, who was friends with Olivia from the beginning, thought that was why the older kid ran away. He got tired of playing punching bag. Anyway, one night about twenty years ago, Roy got drunk as usual, got into an argument at home and grabbed Olivia. She pulled away, which threw him off balance, and he went tumbling down the stairs. The fall killed him.”
“Lucky Olivia.”
“I doubt she felt lucky. She had two kids to take care of on her own.”
“She obviously did a good job. Hal and Eve would make any parent proud. It’s a shame about the older boy, though. It must have been hard for her, believing that he was dead but never knowing for sure.”
“Maybe if she’d done something to protect him while he was here, he wouldn’t have disappeared and she wouldn’t have had to wonder.”
“That’s a hard-hearted attitude,” she said, quietly censuring him. “She was abused, too.”
“She was his mother. She should have protected him. If she couldn’t get help for herself, then she should have done it for her children.”
“She did the best she could. The services, assistance and acceptance that a battered woman can find today weren’t always available twenty years ago. She had three children to consider, one of them a baby. She made the best choices she could—”
“She wasn’t a helpless woman. After her husband’s death, she took care of those other kids, worked and went to college, then law school, all to give them a better life. Yet before that she stood by and let her bastard of a husband beat the hell out of her oldest child and did nothing to stop it.”
Juliet was giving him a sympathetic look that made him wish he could call back all his words and bitterness. She was wondering if his old man had knocked him around, something he’d wondered himself when the anger had started building as Sue Marie Harper had talked this morning. It didn’t take a shrink to know that he’d either been some adult’s adolescent victim or had been close to someone who was. He didn’t like the image of himself as victim. He felt more comfortable with the idea of avenger.
“You’re right. She owed her son better than that. She should have killed her husband the first time he laid a hand on the boy instead of waiting for him to fall down the stairs in a drunken rage.” She slid her hand free, then tapped the newspaper articles. “Do you want to look at these now or get some dinner?”
He wanted dinner, preferably without any mention of the Stuarts, last June’s accident or his memory loss. He didn’t want a single reminder that he had no right to the kind of intimacy he wanted with her. “Dinner.” Then maybe a movie. Or a walk around town. One slow, sensual dance. A night in her bed. Then tomorrow they could talk about business. Or next week. Maybe next month.
She closed the file and slid it into her bag. “I have a roast in the slow-cooker at home, or we could go out.”
“At home sounds fine.” Better than fine. Private. Promising.
Torture.
He got his shoes on, locked up, then followed her to the car. Five minutes later they were inside her house with its familiar shadows and scents, along with the new aromas this evening of roasted beef and vegetables and, courtesy of the timer on the bread machine, a loaf of fresh bread.
They ate at the kitchen table and shared clean-up when they were done. Stretching above her, he placed the serving platter on the top cabinet shelf, then, as he lowered his arm, brushed his hand across her hair. Her hands became still in the sink of sudsy water, and for a moment, she stopped breathing. So did he.
Her hair was cool, silky, and slid between his fingers. He could wrap both hands in it and pull her head back for a kiss, but he would never stop with one kiss. He wouldn’t stop until it was too late and they would both be sorry. One thing he wanted was to never make Juliet sorry.
She bent her head, pulling her hair through his fingers, and he let go. He put distance between them, moving as far away as the job allowed to dry the remaining dishes.
After rinsing the sink and drying her hands, she looked at him but didn’t quite meet his eyes. “Do you want to go in the living room and read the articles?”
“How about showing me your computer?”
The request surprised her, but with a nod, she led the way into the office, booted up the computer, then glanced at him. “What are you interested in?”
Things that couldn’t be found on any computer screen, at least not with the right faces on the bodies. But he was good and didn’t suggest anything that might make her blush. “I don’t know. Travel.”
“To where?” To his shrug, she responded, “Since you say ‘hey’ instead of ‘hi’ and ‘soda’ instead of ‘pop,’ how about the South? Atlanta?”
She did a little pointing and clicking and a little typing, and in a moment a full-color picture of Atlanta’s skyline filled the screen. He didn’t think he was familiar with it, didn’t think he would have recognized it without the text to identify it.
“Are you interested in shopping? Restaurants? Tourist attractions?” A few more photos appeared, nothing that struck a chord. At his silent response, she returned to the search feature. “How about Raleigh?”
They took five-minute tours of several more cities before she got to Miami. When she would have clicked past a particular photograph, he laid his hand over hers. Now that was a shot he remembered—the downtown building all lit up at night. He’d seen it before.
The look she gave him was apologetic. “That building’s pretty recognizable. It’s been in the opening credits of a TV show, on postcards, in magazines and a music video or two.”
Sure, he’d seen it. Probably everyone in the country had. “What else have you got?”
“Do you like to read? Want to see what Stephen King’s up to on his web site? Check out his social media page? Maybe order a book or two from an online bookstore, paper or digital? We can check the local weather or see what’s on television tonight. We can read the Washington Post or— What’s today? Thursday? We can check the new bestseller list in USA
Today. We could browse through a few thousand sites on amnesia, or we could run Roy Stuart Jr., for a phone number.”
“Do that.” He sat back and watched. In only a matter of minutes, she came up with no matches on three different searches. “So what does that mean?”
“Maybe he doesn’t have a phone, or it’s unlisted.”
“Or maybe he’s dead.”
She shrugged. “Maybe he changed his name. Maybe he has a roommate and the phone is in his or her name.”
“Do yourself.”
She did, and the screen displayed a Dallas address and phone number. “It’ll be updated to show this address within a few weeks.”
He had probably never imagined that he would be envious of a phone listing, but he was. Juliet Crandall knew exactly who she was, where she was and where she had been, while he lived with a name borrowed from a fictional character and chosen for a reason as frivolous as hair color.
“Want to read the newspaper articles?” Her voice was soft, tentative, as if she sensed the downturn in his mood.
“Yeah, sure.”
* * *
A thick stack of papers later, his eyes were bleary, the muscles in his neck were tight, and he’d learned nothing. By all accounts, Olivia Stuart had been a pillar of the community, a progressive mayor and a model citizen. She had worked tirelessly for her favorite charities—one of which funded searches for runaway children—and had been active in her church. She had been fair in her running of the city, had compromised when it was in the people’s best interests and stood her ground when it wasn’t. She’d given no one a reason to kill her.
But someone had killed her.
“It must have had something to do with the mayor’s office.”
Juliet, comfortable on the couch, blinked before focusing on him. He knew how she felt. “Why do you think that? There was never anything really controversial going on, other than the strip-mining business, and the town never would have approved that, regardless of Olivia’s opinion. Everyone in authority was against it.”
“Whoever wanted her dead hired a professional killer to do it. That pretty much rules out a crime of passion or a personal grudge.” He didn’t like the argument he was about to offer, but he offered it, anyway. “If I hated you so much that I wanted you dead, I would want to kill you myself, not pay someone to do it for me.”
“Unless an alibi is important.”
“But an alibi is important only if I believe I’ll be a suspect, if my grudge against you is well known. Everyone swears Olivia didn’t have an enemy in the world.”
Juliet resettled on the couch, stuffing another pillow behind her back, stretching out her legs on the sofa cushions, fixing her gaze on the lamp hanging above his head. “But these articles cover all the mayor’s business the entire time Olivia was in office. There was nothing worth more than a few harsh words.”
“Maybe it was something that hadn’t come out in the papers yet.”
She nodded. “If we could see her records and papers…”
“Everything that pertained to city business would have been turned over to the acting mayor—her son Hal—until the new mayor was elected. My guess is the personal stuff went to Hal, too, and his sister.”
“Do you think they would let us look at it when we don’t even have a legitimate interest? I mean, we aren’t cops or anything.” She didn’t sound hopeful, and Martin shared her feelings. She’d never met either Stuart, and what little they knew about him wasn’t likely to persuade them to turn their dead mother’s personal papers over to them.
Still, he tried to ignore his own pessimism. “The cops have been trying to solve their mother’s murder for ten months and haven’t done it yet.” He shrugged. “Maybe they’re ready to give someone else a crack at it.”
* * *
They weren’t—or, at least, Hal Stuart wasn’t.
Friday afternoon found them in the Redtree living room—Juliet and Martin, Eve and Hal. Even though Hal was the city council liaison to the police department, it was the first time Juliet had met him or his sister. She took an immediate liking to Eve. The young woman was only a year or two older than Mariellen in age but years ahead of her in experience and maturity. Of course, Mariellen had never had a reason to grow up, but Eve had, in the form of her brown-eyed little girl, born when Eve was still a child herself.
Juliet didn’t take such a liking to Hal Stuart. He was, in Mariellen’s words, real cute, but in too polished a manner for her taste. She preferred a little rough and rugged, someone who might pick up a hammer or hike up a mountain, someone who didn’t consider himself too good for honest manual labor, who wasn’t afraid to defend a woman from a drunken cowboy. Hal looked the type to worry more about his clothes wrinkling or his salon-perfect hair getting mussed than his dinner companion’s safety.
From his seat at the end of the coffee table, Martin had finished their request and was waiting for an answer. Eve looked intrigued. Hal didn’t.
“You want us to hand our mother’s personal papers over to you.” Hal shook his head. “No.”
Juliet spoke for the first time. “Mr. Stuart, we just want to help find the person responsible for your mother’s death.”
“Evidently, you’re a little confused in your job description, Ms. Crandall. You’re a computer operator and records clerk. You’re not a police officer, and you’re certainly not a detective. Why don’t you toddle on back to your computer and do the job you’re being paid to do instead of interfering with real police work?”
She stiffened, her fingers knotting tightly together. As the records supervisor and a soon-to-be-certified NCIC full-terminal operator, she was authorized access to any and all records within the police department. Granted, she wasn’t a cop—her job was administrative—but she wasn’t just a dumb little clerk, either, and she resented like hell his saying so. “Mr. Stuart—”
He rose to pace behind the sofa where his sister sat. “You people are something. A clerk and a—a handyman, both of you strangers, both of you obviously with too much time on your hands and with delusions of grandeur, waltz in here and expect us to just happily give you everything left behind when our mother was brutally and senselessly murdered, so that you can try to do what the best and most experienced detectives in town can’t. Give me a break.”
A clerk and a—a handyman. For a moment, Juliet had been afraid he was going to say something worse. Town freak, Martin had called himself when he’d come to her office at the library, and she had half expected similar words to come from Hal Stuart. Instead, he’d settled for simplistic descriptions and chilling disdain.
“Forget it,” Hal said, his tone final. “And if you bring this up again…” He gave her a cold, hostile look. “I’ll speak to the chief.” With a great sense of drama, he left the room and the house, slamming the door behind him. A moment later she heard his car drive away.
In the heavy silence, Eve sighed. “I apologize for my brother. Our mother’s death has been difficult for him.”
“We didn’t mean to make things worse,” Martin said quietly. “It’s just that… From my first night in town, I’ve felt some…connection to your mother. I wanted to find out whatever I could. Juliet and I have time to spend on this that the detectives don’t. And sometimes, a fresh perspective can reveal clues that others have missed.”
“A fresh perspective always makes everything clearer.” Eve sat silent for a moment, clearly debating with herself, then reached a decision. “All right.”
“All right?” Martin echoed.
“You can have the papers.”
“But your brother said—” At Martin’s warning glance, Juliet cut the words off.
“My brother thinks he’s head of the family now that everyone else is gone and that his word is law.” She smiled wanly. “But Mom’s records are in my attic, and I said you can take them.”
“If he finds out—”
“He won’t, unless you tell him.” She rose from the sofa and gestured to them
to follow. They climbed the stairs to the attic, finding a half-dozen neatly labeled boxes. “Mom never threw anything away. She’s even got drawings I did in first grade in here.”
With Eve’s help, they moved the boxes to Juliet’s car in two trips. After Eve returned to the house, Juliet slammed the trunk shut on the last three, then murmured, “Hal’s going to be furious if he finds out.”
“Like she said, he won’t find out if we don’t tell him.”
She hoped Martin was right. She liked her job and wanted to keep it, and getting on Councilman Hal Stuart’s bad side didn’t seem the best way to do it.
She glanced at the clock after backing into the street. She’d skipped lunch today to make this meeting instead. No way was she going to give anyone a chance to accuse her of slacking off on the job, especially an obnoxious, smug person like Hal Stuart. She would be back at her desk precisely when she was due, but she still had time to take the boxes home.
“You didn’t like him, did you?”
She glanced at Martin. “I don’t like anyone who takes that patronizing, superior-male attitude and tells me to ‘toddle’ off.”
He laughed. “I didn’t think that would sit too well with you. You have to wonder, with that attitude, how he got along with his mother. She was a very strong woman, and, as mayor, she pretty much ran the city council.”
It would be easy to let her dislike for the man color her conclusions, but she reined her feelings in. “Apparently they got along very well. He loved and respected her. She was his mother, a lawyer and the mayor. I’m just a computer nerd.”
“With an IQ double his and the know-how to make him disappear into cyberspace.”
It was a lovely thought that she had indulged in on more than one occasion. She’d never done anything of that nature herself, but she knew people with the ability, who could teach her step by step how to disrupt someone’s life.
You Must Remember This Page 8
