Secrets to the Grave

by Tami Hoag

  “What’s going on with the investigation?” she asked.

  “They’re still digging for background on the victim. I have a feeling there was a lot more to her than met the eye,” he said. “She claimed she was from Rhode Island, but there’s no trace of her ever having been there. And records of her here in California only go back to 1981.”

  “Haley was born in 1982,” Anne said.

  “Yeah. So was Marissa Fordham invented for the sole purpose of being Haley’s mother? Who was she before that? And so far no clue to who her father is. And the one person I think can tell us that has gone missing.”

  “Voluntarily?” she asked cautiously, a low-watt current of unease going through her.

  “I don’t know. It appears that way,” Vince said. “But I admit I don’t have a good feeling about it. I think these two gals could have been in something together and it got one of them killed.”

  “And the other one is missing.”

  “Ask Haley about her. See if you can get any impressions. Her name is Gina Kemmer. I think she and Marissa go way back.”

  “All right.”

  They sat at the table in the breakfast room overlooking the backyard. Anne picked at her food, anxiety chewing at the ends of her nerves. Their yard was boxed in by tall privet hedges, but no fence. A woman was missing. The only witness to a murder was upstairs sleeping ...

  Her heart was beating a little too fast.

  “Do you want the deputy in the house?”

  “No,” she whispered, angry with herself for letting the fear creep in.

  “Nervous?” Vince asked.

  “Don’t say I told you so.”

  “I won’t,” he said. “Eat your eggs, Mrs. Leone. I need you strong and healthy to bear my children.”

  They both smiled at that.

  Vince’s pager came to life beside his coffee mug. He checked the readout.

  “Tony. I’ve got to go.”

  41

  “We can go in and make sure she’s not dead on the floor,” Mendez said. “But we can’t take anything—unless we’ve got an obvious crime scene—and then Worth wants me to call her so she can come and make sure I’m not lying.”

  “That’s better than nothing,” Vince said. “She’s going to dot every i and cross every t in ink. She’s good. She’s careful.”

  The three of them—Hicks, Mendez, and Vince—went into Gina Kemmer’s cute little Tudor house with gloves on and paper booties over their shoes. Just in case. Nothing seemed out of place. There were no signs of forced entry or of there having been a struggle in the house.

  Someone had cleaned up the broken plant pot and the vomit in the living room. The snapshots that had been lying loose on the coffee table had been put away.

  Vince had wanted another look at them. He would have liked to have put them up on a wall and just stare at them, waiting for that one certain something to pop out at him. He had wanted to study the two women—their faces, their body language, how they related to each other. He had wanted to find a date on the back of one of those snapshots that predated 1982.

  He opened a drawer in the base of the table. No photos. He looked in a magazine rack, in a small bookcase. Nothing.

  Wandering through the house, Vince was struck again by the feeling Gina Kemmer had put roots down here. He didn’t think she would pull those roots back up easily and just leave.

  The house was neat and clean, but comfortably lived-in. There was an afghan tossed over the arm of the sofa, a couple of jackets hung on the hooks of an antique hall tree near the front door. There was art on the walls—several small paintings from Marissa, and casual groupings of photos, presumably of family and friends.

  “It doesn’t look like she packed anything,” Mendez said, poking his head in the bedroom closet.

  The bedroom was tidy. Dust rose and country blue. Very girly. Lace and dried flower bouquets. A couple of well-read romance novels were stacked on the nightstand at the base of a lamp with a frilly shade. Gina Kemmer still believed in fairy tales

  Vince went into the kitchen. The counters were cluttered with canisters and cookbooks. The refrigerator held half a dozen Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers, a rusting head of lettuce, some cheese, and condiments.

  On the door of the fridge a multitude of novelty magnets held photographs and notes and a drawing Haley had made.

  “Who are these people?” he asked, pointing to a snapshot of Gina and Marissa and two good-looking men at a beach party. The girls were in bikini tops and hula skirts. The men were in baggy shorts, Aloha shirts, and Ray-Bans. All four of them were laughing, having the time of their lives.

  Hicks closed a cupboard door and came to look.

  “The taller one next to Marissa is Mark Foster, head of the music department at McAster. He and Marissa went out from time to time. The one on the other side of Gina is Darren Bordain.”

  “You’ve talked to both of them?”

  Mendez nodded. “Don Quinn told us Foster is gay. Foster denies it. I can’t imagine anyone would care one way or the other.”

  “People are funny about their secrets,” Vince said. “It doesn’t matter if anyone else cares or not. People will guard their secrets like junkyard dogs, and take them to the grave if they can.”

  “He’s the one who saw Steve Morgan having dinner with Marissa Fordham in Los Olivos,” Hicks said.

  “And Morgan said ...?”

  “‘So what?’” Mendez answered with a dark look.

  “What about Bordain?”

  “Fair-haired child of Milo and Bruce Bordain,” Hicks said. “He seems to be one of the few guys in town who hasn’t gone out with Marissa. They were casual friends.”

  “What did his mother think about that?” Vince asked.

  “He said maybe he should have had a fling with Marissa just to flip the old lady out,” Mendez said.

  “Marissa was her toy, her pet,” Vince said, thinking about Milo Bordain’s attitude regarding Haley. Possessive. Entitled.

  “Right,” Hicks said. “Good enough to trot out for occasions, but never invited to Thanksgiving dinner, he said.”

  “Hmmm ...”

  “He also said a bohemian single mother wouldn’t be good for his future political career.”

  “The apple didn’t fall far from that tree, did it?” Vince said. “What about Bruce Bordain? Have you spoken with him?”

  “He’s been out of town,” Hicks said. “He was supposed to fly into Santa Barbara last night.”

  “I’m just curious about the family dynamic,” Vince admitted.

  “According to the son, Bruce and the missus live separate lives. They hardly ever live in the same house at the same time.”

  Which could have explained, at least in part, Milo Bordain’s need to hang on to the people in her life, Vince thought. She was lonely. It was as simple as that. Being able to keep Haley in her life would fill the void left by losing Marissa, who had filled the void left by an inattentive husband.

  “She was a beauty, wasn’t she?” Vince said of their victim as he looked at the photo.

  “Vibrant” was the word that came to mind. With a wicked smile and dancing dark eyes, there was something about her that just made her seem more alive than anyone else in the picture.

  Funny, Vince thought, they were supposed to be looking at Gina Kemmer. She was the one missing. Her situation was urgent. Yet they were all drawn to Marissa. She had definitely been the dominant person in the friendship.

  Gina was pretty, but in a quieter way. Blond and fair, she paled in comparison to her friend—physically as well as in terms of her presence. He had never met Marissa in life, but even after death he could feel the strength of her spirit. Gina didn’t have that. She had been the shy one hanging on to her friend’s coattails.

  Mendez had glanced away to look in the trash. He reached into the receptacle and came out with a long-handled tongs at the end of which was the Polaroid of Marissa Fordham, stabbed, her throat slashed, dead eyes half ope
n.

  He held it up next to the happy snapshot.

  “She was a beauty,” he said.

  She was no more.

  They could only hope her friend had not met the same fate.

  42

  I’m dead.

  But if she were dead, should she have been able to have that thought?

  Gina drifted for a time in the blackness with no answer. She couldn’t feel her body. It was as if her soul had abandoned it, as if it were no longer of any use to her.

  That was the definition of dead, wasn’t it? The body died and the soul went on. If a person believed in the soul, then that belief extended to include an afterlife. Heaven and hell.

  Was she in hell?

  Should she have been?

  She wasn’t a bad person. She hadn’t done a bad thing. But she hadn’t stopped a bad thing from happening either.

  Maybe that meant she was in purgatory.

  Her mother’s crazy aunt Celia had always told the kids purgatory was full of dead babies. She hadn’t seen any dead babies. She hadn’t seen anything but blackness.

  She floated then for a while longer. It seemed very peaceful to be dead.

  Then—slowly at first—something began to impede on the quiet calm within her. Her mind didn’t register what it was. Sound? Feeling?

  Pain?

  PAIN.

  Oh my God, the pain!

  Gina came to consciousness with a gasp, like a swimmer breaking the surface from a deep, deep dive. Her eyes opened. Her mouth opened. Her whole body strained as she came free of the blackness that had enveloped her and protected her. She gasped for air once, twice, a third time. Each breath hurt worse than the one before it.

  She learned very quickly then to take only shallow breaths, but she took them too quickly and her vision began to dim again. Good, she thought. Dead was better.

  But she wasn’t dead, and she didn’t die. At the edge of consciousness her body was able to regulate its breathing. Gina lay there trying to corral the pain into something she could comprehend. Were her bones broken? Were her organs damaged? What had happened to her? Where was she?

  She was no place she had ever been.

  Pinpoint beams of sunlight came down from above her, penetrating the dark like lasers. The wall in front of her appeared to be coated with layers of dirt and grime. The thick root of some plant was growing into the space through a jagged crack in the concrete like a long bony finger reaching in to point at her.

  Was she in a cell? A basement?

  The pain burst out of the flimsy confines of her will and engulfed her, choked her, convulsed through her until there was no room in her being for anything else—not air, not consciousness.

  She had no idea how long she was out. It could have been moments. It could have been hours. When she came awake again, nothing seemed to have changed. She hadn’t been dreaming—unless she was dreaming still.

  No dream. Nightmare.

  She felt dizzy and sick to her stomach. The stench of her surroundings went up her nostrils and down the back of her throat. Feces and urine, rodent and decay. Garbage. Sour beer. Her stomach turned itself inside out and she retched and retched.

  She wanted to push herself up with her left arm so as not to vomit on herself, but her hands were stuck behind her back. Then she remembered the masking tape around her wrists.

  The tape wasn’t tight. She twisted her right hand and plucked at it with her fingers, working it off. She went again to support herself with her left arm, but the arm collapsed beneath her, sending a searing pain through her.

  Oh my God. Oh my God.

  No dream. No nightmare. She was wide awake.

  Tears came then, and fear. Where the hell was she?

  The memory came back in strobelike flashes. Night. Walking. Choking on her fear. Begging for her life. A gunshot.

  A gunshot. She’d been shot. She looked down at herself. Her T-shirt was soaked with blood, a hole burned through the upper left shoulder. She didn’t know if the bullet was still in her body or if it had passed through her. Whatever it had done, it hadn’t killed her. Hours had to have passed and she hadn’t died from loss of blood.

  That was one good sign.

  Slowly she took stock of her body. She had feeling in her left arm, but it seemed to be useless. Her right arm worked. She moved her left foot, bent her left knee. No damage there. Her right leg was a different story.

  The attempt to move her right foot was excruciating. She struggled up onto her right elbow and looked down, panic knifing through her. The foot was turned inward almost perpendicular to the leg bone, as if it had been snapped off at the ankle.

  “Help!” Gina called out. “Help! Somebody help me!”

  She called out until her throat was raw. She was in the middle of nowhere. There was no one to hear her.

  The space she was in was maybe five feet wide. It was a long way to the light. She was a poor judge of distance, but it had to be more than twenty feet. She remembered now the doors, like cellar doors. The doors—cracked and dilapidated—were the ceiling of her prison.

  She reached out with her right hand to touch the wall, rough and hard. Concrete. Filthy. Beneath her was garbage—old boards, collapsed cardboard boxes; stinking plastic garbage bags that had been ripped and torn, their contents spilling out: eggshells and coffee grounds and putrid food and milk cartons. And beneath it all was the smell of stagnant water.

  She was in an abandoned well, and she wasn’t alone.

  Slowly she became aware of the feeling of being watched. Her heart pounding, Gina turned her head left inch by inch and came face-to-face with the biggest rat she had ever seen in her life.

  43

  “No signs of forced entry. No signs of a struggle. No signs that she packed anything in a hurry—or at all,” Mendez told Dixon.

  They had gathered in the sheriff’s office to share the news. Dixon sat back against the edge of his desk with his arms crossed tight across his chest. As always, his uniform was pressed crisp and impeccable. The only wrinkles were the creases Vince could see deepening across the sheriff’s forehead and around his mouth.

  Dealing with the press was taking its toll. Not only the entire state of California, but the nation was watching this case with a magnifying glass. The national press had moved in. The story of the beautiful artist murdered in the beautiful setting was made even juicier by the back story of Oak Knoll with the sensational See-No-Evil murders and the upcoming trial of Peter Crane.

  Throwing gasoline on an already hot fire, the story of the delivery of Marissa Fordham’s breasts to Milo Bordain had been leaked by someone to the hungry media pack.

  Vince didn’t envy Dixon his public relations job on this. Dealing with the press and the public was like trying to satisfy a multitude of two-year-old children who wanted what they wanted NOW. None of them wanted to hear that this case wasn’t going to be solved overnight.

  “And nobody has spotted her car,” Dixon said.

  “No, sir.”

  Dixon stared out the window for a moment. “What do you think, Vince?”

  “She was pretty shaken up yesterday,” Vince said. He had claimed a seat for himself on the credenza built in along the outer wall of the office. Mendez and Hicks stood, nobody taking the much lower positioned chairs in front of the desk. Cops.

  “She definitely knows more about Marissa and what got her killed than she told us,” he went on. “My gut tells me they were in something together. Marissa would have been the leader. Gina probably got dragged along for the ride.”

  “We’re thinking blackmail,” Mendez said. The Lidocaine had finally worn out of his face so he didn’t have to talk out the side of his mouth. But his lip was still fat beneath his mustache. “There’s a reason why nobody seems to know who Haley’s father is. And we still haven’t located a birth certificate.”

  “That would explain how she came to have that much money in the trust account for the little girl,” Dixon said.

  �
��That would also make sense looking at the crime,” Vince said. “The personal quality of the attack, the amount of rage involved, the concentration of stab wounds to the lower abdomen, removal of the breasts—”

  “Right down to the knife in the vagina,” Mendez added.

  “Exactly,” Vince said. “The killer’s rage was focused on everything that made Marissa a woman—every body part related to reproduction.”

  “And we have plenty of candidates for the title of Dad, don’t we?” Dixon said.

  “The list goes on and on,” Hicks said. “And those are just the men we know about. It’s just as apt to be somebody she didn’t date openly, right? I mean, the guys she was seeing casually are single men. It might be embarrassing for one of them to have a kid pop up, but it wouldn’t ruin anybody.”

  “Steve Morgan isn’t a single man,” Mendez pointed out.

  Dixon scowled at him. “No. He’s a man who’s going to sue the department.”

  Mendez spread his hands. “He assaulted me!”

  Vince intervened. “If she was seeing Steve Morgan on the sly, she could have had other married lovers.”

  “Gina Kemmer probably knows,” Hicks said.

  “But Marissa Fordham didn’t move here until after the baby was born, right?” Dixon asked.

  “Right,” Hicks said. “At this point, we don’t really know where she came here from. She told people Rhode Island, but for all we know she might have come here from Vegas—somebody’s drunken weekend indiscretion.”

  “A threat’s not a threat unless it’s in your face,” Vince said. “Being here in the community is a constant reminder that revelation is just one missed blackmail payment away.”

  “Has the little girl said anything about her father?”

  “No, not specifically. She talks about ‘daddies,’ plural,” Vince said. “She asked me if I was ‘the daddy.’”

  “Chances are even better that Gina knows who the father is,” Mendez said. “If she didn’t leave on her own ...”