by Brenda Novak
Sydney
Dear Sean,
I waited up for you last night, but you never came. What’s going on that you can’t even keep a dinner date with me? I need you, babe. What about Courtney and Darci? They don’t understand why their world’s suddenly been turned upside down, and I can’t keep it together for them. Not by myself.
Never mind. Forget about last night. I’m ready to start with a clean slate. Our anniversary is this weekend. Maybe we can go out to dinner at the Point, like we used to. Remember how much fun we used to have? Let’s put the past behind us, Sean, please.
No signature.
Sean,
How long are you going to give me the cold shoulder? I don’t deserve this! I went a little crazy for a while, that’s all. But I was just so jealous. Can’t you understand that? We need to move on, okay? Surely you’re tired of living alone. Or are you not alone anymore? Is that what’s going on?
Again, no signature.
Tucker frowned as he stuffed the letters back in Sean’s top drawer. He’d assumed Sydney had discovered Sean’s infidelity and left him, but these letters sounded as though it was Sean who’d broken up the marriage, Sean who was reluctant to get back together. Why? Sydney was an attractive woman. She was outgoing and ambitious. Why would Sean prefer the life he was currently living to the life he’d had before, when he’d seemed so happy?
Maybe he hadn’t been as happy as he seemed, Tucker decided. So much that happened during a divorce defied understanding. Emotions swung in a wide arc, and the very person who filed for divorce was often the one who begged for reconciliation. The only way to know what had happened would be to ask Sean, and Tucker planned to do exactly that.
He spent another forty minutes searching the house without any success. Except for a few cans of soup, the cupboards were bare. There were more dirty clothes in the laundry room than clean ones in the bedroom. The refrigerator held nothing but a six-pack of beer and a bottle of ketchup. A filled ashtray could be found in almost every room. Sean might not have smoked before, but he certainly did now.
There was no evidence of a girlfriend. Tucker found no feminine articles in the whole place. No messages jotted on scraps of paper or left on the answering machine. No letters besides those from his ex-wife. No photos of Sean with anyone but his daughters. To all appearances, Sean was living a very staid, boring life. Only the heavy smoking indicated that it was a neurotic one, as well. Why? What had happened to the easygoing guy Tucker had known?
Maybe he’d been foolish enough to fall in love with Andrea and was still pining for her.
Tucker mulled over that possibility, then discarded it. He’d been around them enough to know that neither one had felt more than a passing sexual interest for the other. What had happened at the cabin was about lust and risk, not love, or Tucker would have known about it before now.
He opened the door heading into the garage to see what he might find there, but the gears of the garage door-opener suddenly sprang to life, sounding raucous and loud in the silence, and he jumped back. Sean was home. Now maybe he’d get his answers. Either that, or Sean would attempt to call the police. Tucker had no idea how his old neighbor might react to seeing him, but he thought it was worth his time to find out.
He waited in the living room, thumbing through the Polaroids his father had found.
When Sean came in, Tucker saw a man whose skin was sallow, as though his health wasn’t quite what it should be. Sean had gained some weight—soft weight that suggested he was eating too much junk and not enough vegetables—and his widow’s peak was more pronounced than ever. In short, he looked almost ten years older.
“Hi, Sean,” Tucker said.
Sean’s head jerked up from the document he’d been reading on his way into the house, and he flushed. “W-what are you doing here, Randy?” he asked. “I thought—” he swallowed “—I mean, I heard about your escape, but I never thought you’d show up here. Not in a million years.”
“Why not? We’re friends, aren’t we, Sean? I always believed we were friends, anyway.” Tucker began to look through the Polaroids again, making it a point to stop at the one that most compromised Sean. “I came because I had a few things to ask you. You got a minute, old friend?”
Small beads of perspiration began to pop out on Sean’s forehead. His eyes cut to the counter, where a pack of cigarettes lay next to the phone. “I—I’m supposed to be somewhere, actually. Why? What do you want? What are those?”
“You don’t remember?”
“Remember what?” he said, but his voice rose at least an octave, and he glanced at his cigarettes again.
“These are pictures of when we all went up to the cabin for Christmas a couple of years ago. I assume this is you, although, from this angle, it’s a bit difficult to tell.” Tucker flashed him a picture of his penis. “What do you think?”
Sean blanched, went to the counter and lit up a cigarette.
“I don’t remember you being a smoker,” Tucker said.
“I wasn’t,” Sean replied.
“What’s changed?”
“Everything.”
“You’re going to give yourself lung cancer.”
“The sooner the better.”
Tucker dropped his gaze to the pictures. “You know, I knew my wife was messing around on me, but I never would’ve guessed she was doing it with you.”
Sean blew out a stream of smoke, looking awkward and self-conscious. “Yeah, well, I told her taking those pictures was a stupid idea. But you know how she was. She had to have things her way, and she liked living on the edge. I think she wanted to hold them over my head. Or maybe she wanted some sort of proof for you.”
“For me?”
A scowl wrinkled his eyebrows as he regarded his cigarette. “She hated it that she couldn’t rattle your cage, hated that you loved Landon more than her. I think what she did was to try and get under your skin. She wanted to bring you down to her level. Like the rest of us, she got damn tired of being inferior to you.”
Sean’s candor surprised Tucker. He hadn’t cared about winning any popularity contests. He’d been too engrossed in his work to spend much time cultivating relationships beyond his immediate family. But he’d always considered Sean and the other guys in the neighborhood his friends. If they’d felt inferior, he hadn’t realized it. “You want to explain that?”
“You were the guy with everything, Randy—the nicest house, the most beautiful wife, the fastest car, season tickets to the Suns. You worked out and ate healthy, which made the rest of us look bad by comparison. We couldn’t even call you stingy. If any of our kids were doing any fund-raising, we’d send them over to your place, and you’d order up a whole bunch of Girl Scout cookies or whatever it was, as if fifty bucks meant about as much to you as three.” Sean took a long drag on his cigarette. “Sometimes lesser mortals get jealous of that crap. It’s not complicated.”
“I ordered too many Girl Scout cookies? That’s why you felt it was okay to screw my wife?” Tucker asked.
Sean swiped at his shiny forehead. “I knew it wasn’t okay, Randy. I regret it to this day, if you want the truth. If not for that…oh, well.” He waved a hand through the air as if he could erase his words. “Anyway, there was a time when I fancied myself in love with Andrea. She was so beautiful…” He sighed. “I even told her once that I loved her.”
“Did she love you back?” Tucker asked.
Sean emitted a self-deprecating laugh. “Are you kidding? She scoffed at me, wanted to know how I thought I could compete with you. She said she’d never love anyone but you.”
“Lucky me,” Tucker said.
Sean studied him for a moment. “Yeah, lucky you.”
Moving to the counter, Tucker spread the pictures out in front of Sean. “So why didn’t you destroy these?”
“I didn’t know what she’d done with them. I had no idea where to even look.”
“And it never crossed your mind to come clean, to tell the truth?”
&nbs
p; “Why would it? It wouldn’t have helped you. The police were insisting you killed her in a jealous rage. What I had to say would only have put another nail in your coffin.”
“Except I didn’t kill her, in a jealous rage or otherwise,” Tucker said.
“I know.”
That surprised Tucker. He waited, hoping Sean would elaborate, but he didn’t.
“How do you know?” he pressed.
“I just believe you, okay? That’s all. I believe you.” Sean would no longer meet his eyes. He busied himself looking for an ashtray and settled for a bowl of dried oatmeal that had been left on the kitchen counter for days if not weeks.
“You know something about Andrea’s murder,” Tucker said.
“That’s bullshit.” Sean’s agitation grew. “What would I know?”
“Did you see anything that night? Hear anything?”
“I already told the police I got home from work late.”
“You never used to get home from work late. At five o’clock every night, you called it quits. You inherited too much from mommy and daddy to worry about mortgage payments. And you weren’t ambitious enough to stay any later.”
Sean flicked some more ashes into the oatmeal. “Yeah, well, thanks for the compliment, but that doesn’t change anything. That night I wasn’t around. But I should have been.”
“Why’s that?”
“Maybe I would’ve heard something. Maybe I could’ve stopped it.”
“Maybe you were the one who did it.”
Sean shook his head. “Oh, no, you don’t. You’re not going to pin her murder on me. Why would I hurt Andrea?”
“You tell me. Did she threaten to tell Sydney? Make you jealous with another guy? Wound your ego? What?”
“You’ve got it all wrong,” Sean said, still shaking his head. “I told Sydney myself.”
“When?”
He shrugged and stubbed out his cigarette. “I don’t know exactly.”
“Before or after Andrea’s death?”
“Before.”
“Is that why your wife left you? Because of the affair?”
“That certainly started the whole thing.”
“So where is Sydney these days?”
Sean shoved the bowl of oatmeal and ashes away from him. “She took the girls and the dog, and they live in a rental house in Gilbert.”
“Why the divorce?” Tucker asked, scooping up the pictures. Sean’s eyes followed his hands, as though he longed to wrestle the pictures away and destroy them, but he made no move. “What happened between you?”
His old neighbor didn’t answer. He stared out the window, into the backyard. “Do you remember when we were planning to put in a pool, one like yours and Andrea’s?” he asked. “The four of us drew up all kinds of plans, one with a Jacuzzi, one with a waterfall, one with natural landscaping. Sydney and the girls were so excited about that damn pool….”
“What happened between you and Sydney?” Tucker asked again, refusing to be sidetracked.
Sean met his gaze, looking disillusioned and miserable. “I should have put in the pool,” he said.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
TUCKER SUSPECTED Sean hadn’t been completely truthful with him. He knew more about Andrea’s death than he was willing to say. Too much had changed in his life starting at exactly that point, and none of it for the good. Yet Tucker couldn’t believe Sean had actually killed her. There was no violence in him, even now. Surely Tucker would have seen some glimpse of capability or culpability—something. So what was the real story? And how did Tucker get to it? He wasn’t a cop; he wasn’t a private investigator. He was just a real estate investor who’d been sent to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Was he crazy to think he could unravel this thing on his own?
Probably. He yawned and rubbed his palm across the stubble on his chin as he signaled and moved into the fast lane of Eastbound 60. No, not probably—absolutely. He was in over his head. His name and face had been gracing the front page of every newspaper in the area for over a week. Sooner or later, someone was going to recognize him and turn him in, which meant he had only so much time to figure out who’d killed Andrea two years ago—and why.
But what did he have to go on so far? Except for proof of another of Andrea’s affairs, he had nothing more than he’d had two years ago—a dead wife but no trace of a body and tons of circumstantial evidence stacked up against him. Just like before, he had only unsatisfactory answers in response to key questions. For example, everyone wanted to know why he’d waited so long to call the police when Andrea went missing. But Tucker had simply assumed she’d left on another partying binge. He hadn’t wanted to find her badly enough to look for her, let alone call the police. He’d assumed she’d come home eventually. She always did. And their problems would be waiting for them.
Tucker checked his speed, realized he was doing seventy and eased off the gas. During the days following her disappearance, he was so preoccupied with work and taking care of Landon that he’d somehow missed the blood spatter in the garage. But how many people routinely examined their garages for blood? He couldn’t understand why no one would credit him with having the good sense to clean up the mess if he was going to murder someone. Why would he leave blood on the floor of his own garage for the police to discover almost a week later?
The questions and inconsistencies in his case went around and around in his head. Where were the answers? He was exhausted and desperate and no closer to the truth, despite the unsettling pictures of Sean and Andrea.
He was stupid to stick around Florence, hoping to dig up something he’d probably never find. He needed to flee to Mexico, to get out of town. He had some money. He spoke a little Spanish. He could cross the border and rent a cheap motel in Nogales, where no one was likely to ask questions or to bother him. There, he could build a new life with Landon, figure out some way to earn a living. Nogales might not be heaven, but he’d be a whole lot safer there than in the States. And he’d have his son.
Except Landon wasn’t the only person who’d come to mean something to him. As much as he’d fought the softening of his heart, he also cared about Gabrielle. Just the thought of her kicked his pulse up a notch. He knew he should get out of her trailer and leave her to enjoy her life. She was so much better off without him. To do anything else was selfish and foolhardy, but he couldn’t walk away from her. Not again. She was brave enough to jump into that fight, stubborn enough to follow him into the desert, compassionate enough to risk her own well-being to give him a place to stay, and beautiful enough to fill him with longing. She was more than he’d ever hoped to find in a woman.
He glanced in his rearview mirror to see what was coming from behind, caught his reflection and frowned. If he stayed in Arizona, he’d spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder, wondering what was going to happen next. But if he ran, he’d be giving up to the cruel fate that had already taken so much. He’d be letting go of the one thing he wanted most….
He wasn’t going anywhere, he decided, at least not without Gabrielle. Neither did he plan to spend another night sleeping on the couch.
LANDON TURNED the cookie he’d made for his father a little to the left so that when Tucker finally arrived, it would be presented from its best side.
“I should’ve let you write the words,” he said skeptically.
“Why?” Gabrielle asked. “You did a beautiful job.”
“The first two letters are just a blob of frosting. Looks like it says, ‘Come home’ instead of ‘Welcome home.”’
Gabrielle considered the cookie. Landon was right. It did look like it said ‘Come home.’ But those words held more significance, anyway. They were both praying for that very thing, that Tucker would come home, and that he’d do it soon. “It won’t matter once he eats it,” she said.
Allie pulled herself up from the floor using Gabrielle’s leg and demanded another taste of frosting. Gabrielle squeezed a dab onto her finger from the decorator bag Landon had
just used and slipped it in her baby’s mouth. Allie rewarded her by clapping her hands in approval.
“Do you think baking is for sissies?” Landon asked suddenly.
“Of course not,” Gabrielle said. “Some of the best chefs in the world are men.”
“Really?”
“Sure. Do you like to cook?”
He shrugged. “I like to make cookies.”
“Well, that’s a little different. I don’t know very many kids who don’t like to make cookies. I think it has something to do with sampling the dough.” She grinned and wiped a smudge of frosting from his chin, and he surprised her by not flinching or moving out of her reach. He’d been skittish with her at first, reluctant to let her get too close. But they’d had a good day, overall, and she was making progress with him. They’d baked and swum and played with Allie. They’d even stopped by the drugstore before leaving Chandler and purchased a ball, a bat and a glove. Since Tucker couldn’t play with Landon, Gabrielle had stopped at a park on the other side of town and done her best to fill in. She knew she was running a risk that someone from the prison might see her, but no one seemed to notice them.
“You’re not so bad,” Landon had told her when she managed to catch a fly ball he hit right at her head. He might’ve been the coach of the Diamondbacks for the way that grudging bit of praise had felt to Gabrielle.
“When do you think he’ll be here?” Landon asked, his eyes again flicking toward the clock.
Gabrielle knew “he” was Tucker, of course, even though Landon hadn’t mentioned him by name. She’d been stalling him with, “Anytime now” for the past two hours. She’d made the mistake of setting Landon’s expectations too high. All that talk about what they were having for dinner had started the “When’s he going to be here?” countdown too soon.
“It’s like I was telling you before,” she answered. “Your father’s staying here is a secret. He has to wait until it gets dark so no one’ll see him come in, but then he’ll be hungry and want the dinner we saved for him.”
