Yes,Keely thought. It made sense, but how would she ever prove it? The police would ignore her. Wade Rovere seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth. She had nothing to go on but the record of some phone calls and her own suspicions. All she had were questions. She kept thinking about her meeting with the D.A. Maureen, insisting Dylan was to blame. And now this. She was being lied to again.Oh no,she thought.Not anymore. I have had enough.
“Mom,” said Dylan, stuffing some lettuce back into his half-eaten sandwich. “Tell me what she said.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Keely said bitterly. “She’s a liar. Nothing she says can be trusted.”
Dylan pushed his plate away, suddenly without appetite, and slumped in his chair. “So it didn’t help at all,” he said.
“I wouldn’t say that,” said Keely. “It helped me. It helped me to understand a few things.”
“Yeah, but . . .” Dylan shook his head. “She doesn’t see any connection, does she? The D.A. She’s still trying to blame it on me.”
“I won’t let her,” said Keely.
“You can’t stop her,” he said.
“Oh, no?” said Keely. She stood up abruptly. “Keep an eye on Abby,” she said. “I’m going out for a little while.”
“Where are you going?” he asked. “Don’t be stupid, Mom. Remember what happened with that car the other night.”
“I’ll be back soon,” she said. “Lock the door.”
Dylan stared at her. “I will,” he said.
This might be foolish,Keely thought, as she gathered up her jacket, her bag, and her keys. This woman could be dangerous. But Keely was too angry to be afraid of her anymore. It was time to turn the tables on Maureen Chase. It was too late to appeal to her better nature. She had done her best to destroy their lives. Keely was sure of it. She knew it and she was going to stop her, somehow.
Keely got into her SUV, slammed the door, and began to drive. It was too late for the office, but she tried it all the same. The courthouse building was dark and quiet. The security guard at the front desk glanced at the clock and told her that Ms. Chase had left work hours ago.All right,Keely thought.I know where you live.Mark had pointed out the estate where Maureen’s house was when they first moved here, and Keely had never forgotten. Every time she drove by that street, she thought of Maureen, even before she knew what Maureen looked like. Keely used to think about how her happiness had come at Maureen’s expense, and it had made her feel guilty and lucky at the same time.
Even though Keely knew where to find the house, the driveway ofthe estate was easy to miss in the dark. There was no one living in the main house because the season was over, so no lights illuminated the drive. She passed it once before she realized she had gone too far. Then she turned the car around and drove back, turning the Bronco into the driveway over the crunching gravel and rolling slowly up the drive toward Maureen’s home.
At first, Keely could hardly believe this was the home of the tough-as-nails district attorney. Keely had expected something modern and boxy. The cottage looked like something off a postcard of the English Cotswolds. The lights were on in the house, making the multipaned windows glow, although Maureen’s car was not in evidence. That didn’t mean anything, Keely told herself. There was a small, ivy-covered garage behind the house where she probably put her car.
Keely’s heart was pounding as she turned off the SUV’s engine. As she got out, she tried to rehearse what she was going to say, but her mind wouldn’t cooperate. All she could think about was Maureen and Mark, deceiving her.
Keely walked up to the cottage door, then knocked. As she waited, she looked around her. The yellow moon hung low in the sky, and the dried leaves rustled noisily as they tumbled across the lawn and the gray stones in the driveway. Against the house, blowsy hydrangea blossoms, dry and leeched of all their color, rustled in the night wind. Bare tree branches bent and made cracking noises all around her. The little house seemed isolated and lonely, and Keely shivered, waiting on the step. When no one answered the door, Keely thought that perhaps her knock had been too timid, so she rapped harder. Still there was no answer. Keely waited for a few minutes, then called out Maureen’s name. Still no one responded.
Keely leaned over and looked through the cottage window. She couldn’t see anyone inside, but that didn’t mean anything. The only room she could see was the great room with its kitchen, fireplace, and chintz-covered sofas. She could see that there were lights on in the other rooms of the house, but the shades were drawn.
Keely frowned. Maureen could have gone out and just left the lights on, Keely told herself. After all, there was no car visible infront. She could have run out to a convenience store or had a date or God knows what. Or the car could be in the garage and Maureen could be inside the house, in the shower, or wearing a headset in her bedroom.
The heels of Keely’s leather ankle boots crunched on the gravel as she walked back toward the garage. She would check to see if a car was there. As she got closer, she thought she heard a murmur of voices from inside the tiny, dark building. Keely stopped for a minute. She could hardly believe it. What would anybody be doing inside a dark garage with the doors closed?
“Ms. Chase,” she called out in a harsh voice. “It’s Keely Weaver. I want to talk to you.”
She expected that the speakers would at least stop to listen, but it did not seem as if there was even the slightest hesitation in their murmured conversation.
Get out of here,warned a little voice inside of her. For a moment, Keely thought about heeding her instincts. But the thought of Dylan’s wistful expression, the note of defeat in his voice, the ugly red wound still visible on his neck, spurred her on. As she gingerly took a few steps closer, she was aware of another sound coming from behind the closed door of the garage—a loud, steady hum almost obscured by the murmuring voices, was coming from behind the door.
It took Keely a moment to recognize what she heard. A car engine was running in the garage.
Keely rushed to the side door and peered through the glass. It was dark inside, but in the moonlight through the window she could see the shape of a car. The driver’s door was open. The engine hum was louder. Keely rattled the doorknob, but the door was locked. She ran around to the front doors, which were crisscrossed with dark timbers, and turned the old-fashioned latch. It turned, and she was able to pull open the door a few inches. She recoiled at the smell of gasoline and exhaust fumes. Holding her breath, she tightened her sweaty grip on the handle and pulled. The right door swung out, and a billow of fumes enveloped her. Keely began to cough. She picked up one end of the foulard scarf she was wearing and pressed it over her face. She could see the blackBMW now. The front door was open on the driver’s side. Something white was spilling out the door.
For a moment, she hesitated. It couldn’t be a trap. Maureen hadn’t known she was coming. This was, Keely thought grimly, exactly what it looked like. She could hear the muted voices clearly now, and, suddenly, it registered on her that one of the voices was Mark’s. It was coming from inside the car. It was a tape. Maureen and Mark’s voices were murmuring to each other on the tape. A chill ran through her. She took a step backward, but she couldn’t run. If there was someone in that car . . . Pushing the other door to the garage open wide, Keely rushed in and cautiously approached the open door on the driver’s side, still holding the scarf over her nose and mouth.
Maureen Chase was behind the wheel. Her arms hung at her sides. Her head lolled back on the headrest. Her eyes were closed, as if she were sleeping, and her skin was cherry-colored. Pinned crookedly to her auburn curls was a veil. She was wearing a cream-colored satin wedding dress, the train of which was hanging out of the door on the driver’s side.
Keely stifled a scream.Oh my God,she thought,oh my God.She reached out to touch the other woman and felt the coldness of her skin. She wanted to turn and run, to try to forget she had ever seen this sight, but she couldn’t.She might still be alive,her shaky inner voice insis
ted.You have to do something.
Holding her breath, Keely reached past Maureen and switched off the ignition. The voices on the tape, uttering sickening words of lovemaking, abruptly stopped in midmoan. Then, she reached into the now silent front seat of the car and grabbed hold of the woman in the wedding dress.
Come on,she thought, as if the unresponsive woman could help her. Coughing from the fumes, she grabbed Maureen under the slippery satin arms of the dress and began to tug her free. The lace veil caught on the gearshift and dislodged from the red curls. Maureen’s body was leaden in Keely’s arms.
Keely felt sure that Maureen was dead, but still, she continued to wrestle her out of the car. She had to get her out of these lethal fumes.Maureen’s rump and then her feet, still wearing house slippers, hit the oil-stained floor of the garage as Keely dragged her outside, into the brown grass beside the ivy-covered little building.
Calm down,Keely thought.Call for help.She set Maureen down gently on the ground, and Maureen’s head lolled lifelessly to one side. Her arms and legs splayed out awkwardly on the grass. Keely reached into her bag with shaking hands, pulled out the red phone, and punched 911. When the operator answered, Keely tried to tell her what had happened, but her voice was torn by sobs.
“Help is on the way,” the dispatcher assured her. “Do you know CPR?”
“I don’t know,” Keely wailed. “I took a first-aid course once . . .”
“I’ll tell you what to do,” the woman said in a reassuring voice.
Keely fell to her knees beside Maureen, still clutching the phone. Then, following the dispatcher’s instructions, she leaned over the body and placed her own lips against the cold, cherry red lips of her rival.
37
Phil Stratton snorted in disgust and replaced a stack of photos of Mark Weaver in the drawer of the bedside table. The more they unearthed in this little house, the clearer it became that Maureen had been consumed by her memories of Mark Weaver. The house was a shrine to his memory. And now, in some sort of desperate, bizarre proof of her love, Maureen had crossed the bar, perhaps in hopes of finding him again. Phil sighed, thinking of how hopeful he had been before their dinner date the other night. He’d indulged in fantasies of him and Maureen as a couple, imagined what a good team they would make. Well, at least he’d realized before he slept with her that he would only be a stand-in for Mark Weaver. Even so, he hadn’t realized the extent of it.
Phil walked out of Maureen’s bedroom into the living room, where Keely was seated, on the edge of a pink-and-green chintz sofa, drinking from a Styrofoam cup of tea that a young policewoman had gone out to get for her. The cup shook in her hands. Keely looked up at him.
“Feeling any better?” Phil asked.
Keely shrugged. “A little, I guess.”
“Mrs. Weaver, you want to tell me why you came over here tonight?”
Keely heaved a sigh. “I found out . . . I just found out tonight that Ms. Chase had been calling my husband frequently before he died—including on the night he died . . .”
Phil waited for her to continue. She thought about mentioning her suspicions of an affair but thought better of it. “I guess I just wanted to know why,” she said, sticking her chin up defiantly.
Phil shook his head. “Well, it’s pretty clear why. She was obsessed with him,” he said. “The bedroom’s full of pictures of him. Her closet—she’s still got shirts with his monogram that haven’t been washed in . . . quite a while. Tapes. Files with every scrap of his handwriting she was able to collect. She’s got receipts from his gas station credit card, for crying out loud. She was completely fixated on your husband. Did he ever mention to you that she kept calling him?”
Keely shook her head slightly.
Phil scratched his smoothly shaven jaw. “Maybe he didn’t want to worry you. It might have freaked you out to know she was stalking him.”
Stalking him. A wave of relief engulfed Keely as the term registered.Stalking.Keely thought about the phone calls. They were mostly from Maureen when she thought about it. She tried to recall what Betsy had said. Naturally, if Maureen had been calling Mark at work ten times a day, it would give rise to rumors. Maybe Mark had felt responsible for Maureen’s obsession, guilty over leaving her for Keely. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to expose her behavior and embarrass her. Keely nodded and looked around the room. Everything was neatly in its place, the ruffled chintzes, flowered rugs, and dried flowers indicating a woman’s orderly domestic life. There was no outward sign of Maureen’s secret mania, but there was plenty of evidence tucked away. Maybe Detective Stratton was right. Maureen had been stalking Mark. Keely would never be able to banish from her memory the grotesque image of Maureen in that wedding dress, listening to those revolting tapes as she took her last suicidal breath. Stalking. It made sense. Of course.
Keely shuddered, remembering that first glimpse of Maureen in the car, the limp, twisted body, the terrible sensation of touching those cold lips. “I tried to save her,” Keely said in a small voice.
“I know you did. The EMT told me about your call.” He sighed again. “It’s pathetic, really. She was completely stuck in the past. She couldn’t get Mark back, and she couldn’t get on with her life without him. I think she had a . . . morbid fixation on your husband, and it finally just drove her around the twist.”
Keely stared at the tea bag floating in her cup and thought about Maureen, still being so desperately in love with Mark. All those phonecalls. It would be flattering to a man—terribly flattering—to a have a woman like Maureen Chase, a cool, in-control sort of woman, who couldn’t get over you. She kept thinking of Betsy’s words—We didn’t know anything for sure . . . We didn’t have any real evidence.
No,she thought adamantly.No.Since reading Richard’s note, she had been plagued with doubts about why Mark had sought her out in the first place, even why he began to court her. But they were married and had a child together. After all that, there couldn’t be any doubt of his devotion to her—or of his love for Abby. Mark, the man who had wooed her so ardently and insisted he couldn’t live without her, would not have resumed an affair with his old lover. No, Mark wouldn’t have done that. It had to be stalking. There was no other explanation.
“I have to say, Mrs. Weaver . . .” Phil said, interrupting her thoughts,“I think maybe I owe you . . . and your family . . . well . . .”
Keely gazed at him curiously.
Phil took a deep breath. “I began to think this the other night when I had dinner with . . . the D.A. I began to think that perhaps her desire to blame your husband’s death on Dylan might be motivated by . . . her unresolved feelings. I started to wonder if maybe I was participating in a . . . personal . . . a grudge situation,” he said.
“Are you trying to apologize, Detective?” Keely asked.
“I didn’t say that,” he insisted.
Keely smiled thinly. “I’m not going to sue your office, if that’s what you’re worried about. I understand that she was pressuring you.”
“There was a certain amount of . . . urgency to her . . . investigation,” he admitted carefully.
“Still, it would do my son’s heart good if you were to explain this to him,” she suggested. “He has suffered quite a bit.”
“Keely!”
Keely looked up and saw Lucas, leaning on his walking stick, in the doorway of Maureen’s cottage. “Thank God you’re here,” she said. She rose shakily to her feet and went to Lucas, who drew her close, putting his arm around her.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “What happened?”
Lucas’s worried gaze searched her face. Keely felt herself breakingdown under the warmth of his concern. “I came to talk to her,” she said.“I found her . . .” Her voice cracked.
Lucas murmured soothingly to her. “It’s all right,” he said. “I’ll take you home. Phil, is it okay for me to take Mrs. Weaver back home? Are you through with her?”
Phil nodded. “Yeah. Go on. We’re still checking out her s
tory, but it’s a formality. This looks pretty open and shut. Anyway, I know where to find her if I need her.”
Lucas shook his head. “I still can’t believe it,” he said. “Maureen Chase.”
“There was a lot we didn’t know about Maureen. She had a dark side,” said Phil.
Lucas sighed. “Apparently. Come on, dear,” he said to Keely. “Let me get you home.” He turned to Phil. “Can you have somebody bring her vehicle back?”
“Sure,” said Phil. “I’ll get a couple of my men to bring it around tonight,” he said.
Keely handed him the keys.
Phil nodded. “I’ll be in touch, Mrs. Weaver.”
Keely let Lucas lead her out to his Lincoln. He opened the door, and Keely obediently settled herself in the front seat. Then Lucas went around to the driver’s side and got in.
“Put your seat belt on,” he said sternly.
Keely nodded and did as she was told.
“That must have been a terrible shock for you,” said Lucas, “finding her like that.”
“It was horrible. You can’t imagine. I tried to save her,” said Keely.
“I know,” said Lucas absently. “One of the cops outside told me. You did all anyone could.” He hesitated a minute and then he asked, “Why did you go over there in the first place?”
Keely shook her head, as if trying to clear the image of Maureen out of her mind. Then she looked over at Lucas’s handsome profile, ravaged by age. “I found out she was calling Mark all the time.”
“Well, they still had business together,” Lucas said.
“This wasn’t business,” said Keely.
Not Guilty Page 30
