He looked at me sideways. "Yeah, right." He blue eyes sparkled, despite his obvious discomfort. I sensed a sad longing. The longer I stared, the stronger it got. I assumed it was a yearning for some sort of connection. I sensed it from people all the time. He broke eye contact, tossed a pile of clothes off a red ottoman without a matching chair, and gestured at it.
I sat down and sank a few inches. He reclined on the couch and stared at the thirty-two-inch flat-screen TV sitting on top of a wooden stand.
"So, tell me why you're really here. As if I don't know."
I glanced at the two bottles of prescription medication on the upside-down cardboard box masquerading as an end table. "I really did want to see how you're doing." I bit my lip. "And of course, I wanted to finish our conversation that was so rudely interrupted."
He chuckled and started channel surfing. "Oh, yeah. We were talking about something important. Like a murderer on the loose."
Caesar sniffed me again, then settled at my feet.
"First, why did Eric run us off the road?"
"He wanted to run me off the road. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time."
"Did you ask Kate for a date or something?"
He laughed so hard, he started coughing. "Oh, yeah. Me and beauty queen had a thing going on." He winked.
"What was it, then?"
He paused, then swiped a hand across his nose. "I wouldn't sell to him anymore. He didn't like being refused, especially by somebody like me."
Brenda was right. Eric had been using drugs.
"I was gonna stop selling to anybody, ever, but when I heard him threaten Kate, I closed up shop a lot quicker." I opened my mouth to speak, and he cut me off. "I already told the police that."
"I'm impressed you cared about her."
He shook his head. "My concern was he'd hurt her, the police would find out I sold him the drugs he was high on, and charge me as an accessory or something." He sipped from a half-empty bottle of beer I hadn't noticed when I came in. "Want one?"
I shook my head.
Skeeter had admitted selling drugs, and the police hadn't arrested him. He must have offered the name of somebody the cops wanted more. Like his supplier. I asked, and he confirmed that he "snitched."
"Aren't you afraid the person will come after you?"
He shrugged. "Gotta die sometime."
Dying is one thing. Being killed or hurt very badly for naming your drug supplier was another. "How did Eric threaten her?"
He paused and burped. "He called her a skank and said he was going to slash her face with a razor."
"Where was this?"
He started grinning. "Guess."
I thought about where Skeeter liked to spend his time. "Jepson's Point."
"Yep. Sometime last month. Around nine at night, I saw them arguing outside his car. They weren't even trying to keep it down."
"What else happened?"
"Nothing. She tossed her hair and started walking back toward town. He got in the car and sped off in the opposite direction."
I ticked off the elements on my fingers. "He had motive, means, and opportunity. He must have a pretty tight alibi."
"What is that, by the way?" Skeeter drained the rest of the beer and burped again.
"His mother said he was home asleep." Then something occurred to me. "Are you telling the whole truth about why he got so mad at you?"
He slowly turned his head in my direction, but avoided eye contact. "I might have taken his money and neglected to give him his merch."
I gaped at him. "Dangerous, Skeeter."
He snorted. "Listen at you, lecturing me on danger." He went to the refrigerator that had seen better days and grabbed a can of beer. He eased himself back onto the couch and popped it open. "Then again, I guess you're pretty gutsy, coming all the way out here to my part of town, all by yourself. Ain't that right, Caesar?"
The dog raised his head at his name, snorted, and went back to sleep.
"Okay," I said, composing myself. "That explains why Eric got so mad. Maybe he was trying to kill you, maybe not. The point is, we're alive. Now, about Jepson's Point."
Skeeter drew out the whole thing for dramatic effect, asking about my mother and drinking a toast to her. He apparently didn't get many visitors and seemed to be enjoying talking to somebody besides his dog. I kept a straight face and glanced at him now and then. I peered around the space he called home and wondered if he had any close relatives. His mother died when he was a kid, and his father died of a stroke shortly before Keegan Miller's death. I wanted to ask about all of this, but I had to wait until he told me what I needed to know. I didn't want him tossing me out before that.
"...and that's how I ended up with this beautiful property," he said, waving his hand in the air.
"Having fun?"
He grinned. "Yeah, I am. Okay, here's the deal. You know that big oak tree, the one near the creek where Kate was found?"
I nodded. I tried to climb it when I was kid, fell off, and landed on my butt. I hadn't broken anything, but my backside was bruised for a while. "What about it?"
"Well, you know there's a bunch of names and initials carved on the tree. 'Joanie loves Chachi,' that sort of thing."
"Joanie loves who?"
Skeeter gaped at me. "Never mind. Anyway, I found two sets of initials interesting. The first was TH + TT. Who do you think they are?"
"Tim Hicks and Tessa Truman," I blurted out. "Her maiden name."
Skeeter raised his eyebrows.
"What?"
"That means Tim and Tessa probably, uh, did some things out there."
I wrinkled my nose. Tim was a couple of years older than Tessa, and I couldn't remember if he had his own place then. "Went for walks?"
Skeeter put a finger to his head and nodded. "Yeah, that's probably what they did. Anyway, the other set was TH + KM = BH. He watched me for a reaction and apparently gave up when he didn't get the one he expected. "Tim Hicks and Kate Mansfield. But who is BH? And why are they grouped together like that? You think Officer Timmy and Beauty Queen were into threesomes?"
I winced. Denial, denial, denial. "No way."
"I thought it was interesting."
He sipped and watched me as I tried to process it. BH. I went through the inventory of people in Ridge Grove I knew. Kids, teenagers, and adults. Cops, the mayor, letter carriers, teachers. Brenda Harmon, the receptionist? She was over fifty. I couldn't imagine her, Tim, and Kate doing...whatever. I threw my hands up. "Who is BH?"
"I'm wondering the same thing, darling. When you find out, let me know, will ya?"
"We don't even know if we're right about the initials."
"Yeah, okay," he said, opening a prescription pill bottle. He poured two into his palm and swallowed them with a chug of beer. I got up to leave.
"Hey, can I ask you something?" he said.
"Sure."
He adjusted himself and sat upright. "Did you see Keeg after he died? His body, I mean?"
I nodded.
"Did he say...did he think..." Skeeter's lips trembled as he struggled to compose himself.
"I saw him in the morgue," I said. "But I didn't get any thoughts from him. Just pain."
He set his jaw and exhaled loudly.
Given my impulse to lie to avoid unpleasant things, I picked a wonderful time to tell the truth. I could have lied to Skeeter and told him that Keegan wanted him to forgive himself. But telling the truth meant owning the good and the bad.
Chapter Fifteen
Skeeter was right. TH + KM = BH was roughly carved near the base of the tree. I vaguely remembered a few carvings from when I was a kid, but I hadn't been out here in a long time, not counting the day they found Kate's body. Correction: Skeeter found Kate's body. I'd forgotten to ask him more questions about that.
I stood beside the tree, staring at the carvings and chewing on a fingernail. Had Tim carved these? Seemed unlikely. I couldn't see a grown man with a wife advertising his affair. But a teenage
r? Definitely.
Leaves and sticks crackled in the path behind me, and I spun around. My heart raced. I touched the outline of the stun gun in my pocket. Just in case. I turned in a slow circle and tried to visualize what happened out here that night. For whoever killed her, it was personal. Bludgeoned on the back of the head? Yeah, very personal. I kneeled beside the tree and felt the carving as though I could will BH to reveal itself.
"It's not rocket science," I said out loud. "Think." BH probably wasn't Brenda Harmon. H could be the first letter of the maiden name of someone in Ridge Grove. If a married woman were involved, maybe she made the carving. No, that didn't seem likely, either.
I stood up and leaned against the tree and faced the path, in case someone planned to play a prank and try to scare me. Skeeter was recovering and high on pain meds, and Eric was still in jail. And Adam? I didn't believe he'd kill Kate for turning down a date. Then again, what did I really know?
BH. I tried to put myself in Kate's shoes. I'm sleeping with a cute but married cop. My ego is stroked. I have a secret. Maybe the cop tells me he's going to leave his wife for me. Or maybe he tells me it's over, that he made a mistake. If I'm happy, I'd celebrate by doing a Tim-loves-Kate carving on a tree. If I'm angry, I'd threatened to tell people, including his wife. I wouldn't make these carving if things had turned sour. Unless I was nuts.
TH + KM = BH. The equals sign was strange. A threesome would have two plus signs. A light bulb flashed in my brain, and I drew in a sharp breath.
A baby.
TH + KM = BH. Tim Hicks plus Kate Mansfield equals...Baby Hicks? If so, it was a strange way to phrase it. I had several names picked out for my future children. Maybe BH stood for a future child's name. Bob Hicks? No. Brenda Hicks? Doubtful. Brittany, Barbara, Bosco, Banshee? Brandon, Brett, Brunhilde? I laughed out loud and peered around the clearing. Maybe there'd been a pregnancy scare. Or a real pregnancy. Neither Granddad nor the news story mentioned anything about Kate being pregnant.
The kind of psychic powers I possessed weren't helpful in this situation. I'd get no more thoughts from Kate, and reading living people involved emotions. I needed to hash it out the non-psychic way and talk about affairs and teenagers and babies. And I knew just the person. If I could get her to talk to me.
***
"I'm not leaving until you talk to me!"
I ignored Mr. Wilson, the Parkers' neighbor across the street. When I started banging on Tamzen's front door, he came out and sat on his front porch, smoking a pipe and rocking in his chair. He hadn't said a word. He just stared and rocked and enjoyed the show.
"Look, I just want to talk."
The door flew open. I stumbled over the threshold and caught myself before I hit the floor.
"What if I'd called the police?" Tamzen said. Her dark hair in a loose ponytail, she wore a ratty pair of pajama pants and a faded pink T-shirt. "Then again, your granddad would probably try to talk me out of pressing charges."
I gaped at her. It was hard to believe that only a few days ago, we hung out at the mall. She'd cried at my hospital bed. Now, she didn't want to talk to me. Or look at me. There was no point asking what I did wrong. I knew. Her boyfriend and I were chummy all of a sudden, and I had no excuse for it. Okay, so Zeke was my life-long crush. He was also my best friend's boyfriend, and that's all that should have mattered.
"Why are you mad at me?" I braced myself for the onslaught, prepared to offer no excuses, only profuse apologies. I was tempted to put my arms over my face, in case she got violence. I watched her, shrinking inside.
She let out a choking sob and threw her arms around me.
I stood there, stunned. "What happened? What's going on?"
But she continued to cry, holding onto me so tight I couldn't move.
"Zeke...broke..." She pulled away, eyes squeezed shut, lips trembling. "He broke up with me."
"Oh, no." This was my fault. Confusion competed with guilt and curiosity. "When did this happen?"
She cried as she spoke. "Monday night. He said he didn't want to see me anymore. Just like that. All business-like."
The day we went to the mall. He must have known the affair would come out and decided to focus all of his time and energy on his family until things were resolved. So why had he come to my house? Why had he taken me to lunch?
"You could have told me," I said.
I followed her up upstairs to her room. A super-sized photo of Zeke posing in his baseball uniform and holding a bat greeted us as we entered the room. She must have been lying on her bed and staring at the photo for days. Then it hit me. He'd slept with her and dumped her the next day.
"I was too embarrassed to tell you," she said, collapsing onto her bed. "Besides, I knew it would get around."
I told her my theory about why he might have done it. She gazed at me, her dark eyes welled with tears. She broke eye contact and stared at the balled-up tissue in her hand. "It's more than that. I did something..." She trailed off.
I waited. And waited. I sighed softly and tried to look patiently understanding.
"It's going to come out, anyway," she said, mumbling. She roughly brushed tears away. "I was so stupid. I don't know what I was thinking."
"What did you do?"
She looked me in the eye. "You really don't know? You didn't...sense anything?"
"You, Zeke, my family—you guys get the red-brick wall. I don't want to know what you're feeling. You'll tell me if you want me to know."
She averted her eyes again and took a long, slow breath. "It's about Eric Rodman." She sniffed and licked her lips. "Zeke and I had this stupid argument last Christmas, and Eric and Kate were arguing a lot."
I sat at the foot of her bed, waiting.
"Eric and I had...we slept together. Once. In his car at Jepson's Point."
Her words wouldn't penetrate my brain. I stared and nodded. "Okay," I said. "When did Zeke find out?"
She shrugged. "I think he suspected all along. I'm not sure. He just said we're not right for each other and not to act like I didn't know what he was talking about."
I furrowed my brow, trying to recall details of conversations I'd had with him since then. He hadn't mentioned the break-up or Eric sleeping with his girlfriend. "If he didn't bring up Eric, maybe he doesn't know."
She shook her head. "He knows. Even if he doesn't, telling him won't change things. He definitely wouldn't take me back."
Wouldn't take me back. Now the words dug deep, and I felt both sympathy and anger. Tamzen Parker had Zeke Hicks. And she cheated on him. There was a lot of that going around lately. I could pretend I was above it, but what had I done? Gone out with him behind her back. I suddenly felt dirty and exhausted.
I wanted to change the subject, to talk about the initials on the tree and get her take on who BH could be. Instead, I listened to her and tried to console her. I failed.
***
"Kate Mansfield definitely wasn't pregnant," Granddad said, reclining in his chair and draining a mug of police-station coffee. His office looked like its old self—clean and organized. "In cases involving the death of a child-bearing-age woman, especially a homicide, the pathologist tests for pregnancy."
I raked a hand through my hair. "Who do you think BH might be?"
He pursed his lips and stared into space. "I don't think you need to worry about it. How's that for an answer?"
I rose from the chair and paced the room. I felt guilty for leaving Tamzen collapsed in tears, but I couldn't ease her pain. In fact, I could only make it worse. And her emotions were contagious. Her hopelessness started to seep into me.
"I want you to level with me, and I won't tell your mother. Who told you about the tree?"
I stopped pacing and closed my eyes.
"I thought so," Granddad said, sitting upright.
I changed the subject. "So, as I was saying, maybe the killer thought Kate was pregnant. He saw the carving and made the same assumption I did, and killed her."
"Maybe."
&
nbsp; "Eric and Adam have alibis, Tim and Tessa have alibis." This time when I included Tessa's name, I didn't shudder. I knew I had to be as objective as I could, and Tessa definitely had motive. Then again, Kate might have been sleeping with someone else's husband or boyfriend. An unwanted thought surfaced. Had Zeke and Kate slept together to get back at Eric and Tamzen? No way.
"Who else is a suspect?"
My grandfather let out a resigned sigh and clasped his hands behind his head.
"Will you go home, please?"
Chapter Sixteen
I stood in front of the mirror in the hall bathroom, peeling off the bandage on my head and examining the wound. I leaned in and squinted. Healing but ugly, with red and yellow splotches.
"In a few more days, you can remove it for good."
I jumped and banged my still-sore arm on the sink. Fresh pain reverberated from elbow to shoulder.
The horrified look on my mother's face made it feel a little better. "Oh sweetheart, I'm sorry. Have you been taking your pain meds?"
"I've taken a couple," I said, raising my arm to alleviate the throbbing. "I don't want to get hooked."
She smiled, looking impressed. "You need to take one if the pain gets really bad." She looked at the injury. "After the bandage comes off for good, we'll use some kind of cream to fade the scar."
I hadn't thought about a scar. I tried to stand still while she put on a fresh bandage.
"Are you nervous about something? Why so fidgety?"
I pulled a reason out of the air. "I'm sort of nervous about D.C., going to a new school."
"Is that all?" She stood back and placed her hands on her hips. "You'll have a new set of friends in no time. You'll see."
I gave her a weak smile and followed her downstairs. She'd made lasagna. We tried to hold out for my grandfather but didn't make it. We ate in the den in front of the TV, just like Granddad and I always did. When we'd finished, she took our plates into the kitchen, returned to the den, and settled back into my grandfather's recliner.
"I can't believe he still has this ratty old thing," she said, running her hands across the arm rests. "I remember when they bought it."
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