Home Before Midnight

by Virginia Kantra

  “I’ll go right away,” she promised.

  “I never should have signed that damn consent.”

  Privately, she agreed with him. But he had been eager, even insistent, that he had nothing to hide.

  “I’m sure they’ll be done soon,” she said soothingly. What had Steve said? “One more day. Maybe two.”

  “I didn’t pack for two days. I only expected to be away overnight. I need things. Socks. Boxers. My laptop. I can’t write the damn book on hotel stationery.”

  Bailey jammed her tiny mobile under her ear, stretching her other hand for the paper and pencil her mother kept by the kitchen phone. Underwear, she wrote. Laptop.

  “Of course not,” she said, while a small, disloyal part of her wondered how Paul could even think about the book with his wife’s funeral scheduled for Friday. “Anything else?”

  “My black suit should go to the cleaner’s. I’ll need it for Friday.”

  Dry-cleaning, she wrote. So he was thinking about the funeral. But something about the request niggled at her like a persistent toothache.

  Before she could figure it out, Paul spoke again. “Has Regan called about her flight?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Find out when she’s coming in. She’ll need a ride from the airport.”

  Bailey made another note. “Did you book a room for her at the Do Drop?”

  “I haven’t had time,” Paul said stiffly. “I can’t think of everything.”

  He was upset, Bailey reminded herself. Overcome. She wrote reservations next to taxi. “How many rooms?”

  By mid-July, most of Helen’s social set would already have fled New York for the Cape and the Hamptons. But surely some of them would brave the heat and humidity of Stokesville, North Carolina, for her funeral?

  “How should I know? Just take care of it.”

  “Can do.” Bailey drew a circle around reservations and added a question mark. “What about Richard?”

  Richard and Regan—attractive, headstrong, and disagreeable—were the children of Helen’s first marriage to local developer Jackson Poole. They resented their mother’s second husband bitterly. All Paul’s charm and all Helen’s assurances had failed to convince them he hadn’t married her to get his hands on their inheritance. Bailey they simply despised as his stooge.

  Paul sighed. “Who can say what Richard will do? But you’d better reserve a room, in case he shows up.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bailey said gently. “Is there anything I can do?”

  Paul hesitated. “I don’t want to bother you.”

  Who else could he turn to? He was a brilliant, driven, difficult man. He was estranged from his own family. He had fans and admirers and precious few friends.

  “It’s not a bother,” she assured him.

  “Do you think while you’re at the house you could pick up the mail?”

  Bailey winced. She wasn’t his therapist. She was his gofer. He didn’t need her sympathy.

  “Got it.” Mail, she wrote, her pencil point digging into the paper.

  “And don’t forget my suit.”

  Bailey underlined dry-cleaning with two short, sharp jabs of her pencil. “I won’t.”

  “That’s my girl.” The warm approval in his voice more than made up for her irritation at being called a “girl.” “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “Oh.” She flushed with pleasure. “Just doing my job, that’s all.”

  “You’re amazing. I’ll see you around five. With my laptop, remember.”

  “Five o’clock,” she promised.

  The line went dead.

  Bailey tightened her grip on the phone, as if she could hold on to . . . something.

  “You’re not meeting him, are you?” her mother asked.

  “I work for him, Mom.” Bailey kept her tone light. “He just needs me to run a few errands.”

  “Most girls your age are driving carpool. Or running errands for their husbands.”

  Bailey grinned at her. “But they don’t get paid.”

  “And he pays you enough to make you drive all over town?”

  Not really. But it wasn’t about the money. Paul was her mentor. Her inspiration. Okay, so her time wasn’t her own, and her manuscript was nowhere close to submission. Paul still understood her goals. He valued her intelligence. He made her feel smarter, more worldly, and infinitely more appreciated. I don’t know what I’d do without you . . . You’re amazing.

  She would never make her mother understand.

  “I make more than three-quarters of the women who live in Stokesville,” Bailey said. “Anyway, Paul doesn’t have his car.”

  And then it struck her.

  Neither did she.

  THE lobby stank of popcorn and soda-saturated carpet. Steve scanned the line in front of the concession stand. He must be the only male over thirty in the whole multiplex. He for damn sure was the only one carrying a gun.

  Unless that ponytailed mama over there wrangling her toddler off the velvet rope was carrying concealed in her diaper bag . . .

  A cluster of teens slouched and postured by the bank of video games, the girls in skinny spaghetti-strap tops and lip gloss, the boys in baggy shorts and overpriced sneakers. Steve watched one boy’s hand drift down his date’s back to rest on the belt of her low-rise jeans and narrowed his eyes.

  “What’s the matter?” Gabrielle asked from beside him.

  He rearranged his face in a smile. “Nothing, sweetheart.”

  Not as long as she was still with him and not playing Bloodlust 4 while some fourteen-year-old punk groped her behind.

  “Are you really okay with the movie?”

  All Steve knew about this afternoon’s feature was that it had some vaguely recognizable teenage star and the word “princess” in the title. But it was rated G, and Gabrielle had elected it as an acceptable alternative to Orlando Bloom. He could probably nap through most of it.

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he told his daughter.

  “Liar,” Gabrielle said. But she was smiling, and for at least a minute he felt like they were complete again, a unit, instead of something broken with a part horribly missing.

  “What do you want?” he asked as they inched to the front of the line.

  “Popcorn?”

  With some vague thoughts about saturated fats and spoiling her dinner, he asked, “How about Raisinets?”

  Raisinets was a fruit, right?

  Gabrielle looked at him with big, sad eyes. “Okay.”

  Shit. Wrong answer.

  “Large popcorn, medium Coke, and a bottle of water,” Steve told the kid behind the counter.

  “Extra butter?” asked the kid.

  Steve looked at Gabrielle. She nodded, beaming.

  “Yep. Thanks,” he said.

  “No problem,” the kid said.

  Steve forked a ten over the register, knowing he’d been manipulated by a nine-year-old and feeling pretty good about it. Maybe Gabrielle wouldn’t mind so much not getting her way in the big things if she had some control of the small.

  “Come on,” she urged, clutching her red-and-white tub. “We’ll miss the previews.”

  As he turned to follow her, his police pager went off.

  PROBLEM solved, Bailey thought, as she maneuvered the rear end of her mother’s dark blue Mercury Grand Marquis toward the road, feeling like a teenager borrowing the family sedan on a Saturday night. Back in high school, her mother had been too grateful when Bailey went out at all to ask awkward questions. Bailey figured the police officer on duty at Paul’s house wouldn’t be so complaisant. But she’d deal with that problem when she came to it.

  The car lurched as a wheel ran off the drive. She strong-armed it back onto the gravel. So her driving skills were a little rusty. She hadn’t needed a car in New York. Longing for her old life in the city seized her chest: the bright awnings and dingy lights, the smells pouring from restaurant kitchens and rising from subway tunnels, the choked tra
ffic, the swimming sidewalks, the rush of life.

  She gave herself a shake. If she were back in the big city, she’d have even less chance of talking her way past the cop.

  But the officer on duty, pink-eared and regretful, held firm against both Northern aggression and Southern charm.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said after about five minutes. “I’ll have to call Lieutenant Burke. He’s in charge of the scene.”

  Bailey’s heart bumped.

  Somehow she didn’t think Steve Burke would tolerate the contamination of his alleged crime scene. Besides, he had a “prior engagement.”

  Not that she cared about that.

  “Oh, I’d feel terrible bothering him on his afternoon off. If you could just ask the chief about Mr. Ellis’s medication . . .”

  She held her breath while the young officer, Lewis, considered.

  “I could do that,” he allowed, finally. “If you’d wait in your car a minute . . .”

  Bailey waited, palms sweating and heart racing, while Officer Lewis spoke into his cell phone. The street was quiet. No chugging lawnmowers, no barking dogs, no curtains twitching at the windows.

  She wasn’t doing anything wrong. She didn’t even want to go into the house. She was simply doing her job.

  Her skin felt clammy. Like Helen’s skin. Bailey shivered, cold despite the heat that lay like a wet wool blanket over everything.

  That’s my girl . . . You’re amazing.

  The young officer approached the car and bent down to her window. “All right, ma’am. Chief said it would be okay to let you get Mr. Ellis’s pills. But I’ll have to accompany you into the house.”

  “That’s fine. That’s great.” Maybe once they were inside she could persuade him to let her take Paul’s suit as well.

  Unpeeling herself from the damp upholstery, she sidled from the car. “This will only take a minute,” she promised. “Five, tops.”

  But it was closer to twenty minutes later when they left the house, Bailey’s vision half-obscured by the pile of absolutely essential items in her arms. With her purse on her shoulder and her keys in her teeth, she turned to lock the door behind them.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Her heart leaped into her throat.

  SIX

  MACON Reynolds III stepped outside the 1930s clap-board house that sheltered the law offices of Pierce and Reynolds, glancing up at the sky. The sun was shining, he had a nine o’clock tee time tomorrow, and all was right with his world.

  He strolled the cracked sidewalk in the direction of the two-block center of town. An unusual number of cars crowded the parking lot of the Do Drop—was that a Channel 5 news van?—but for the most part, the streets were quiet. Flags hung limply from front porches. Orange ditch lilies bloomed by the side of the road. Cannonballs rusted in a pile by the courthouse steps. God, he loved this town.

  Oh, he’d been wild enough to leave once, he remembered, bored with high school and hot to conquer the world beyond its borders. But he’d felt adrift in the unfamiliar waters of the big state campus, despite its ready access to college bars and fresh pussy. He’d done what was expected of him, of course, finished his four years at Carolina and then struggled through law school. Grades didn’t matter. His place in his father’s firm was settled before he was out of diapers. So he’d passed the bar and come home to this backwater town, where he’d always be one of the biggest fish around.

  Macon rounded the corner to the diner. After he’d made partner and then councilman, his old man had been after him to run for the state senate, but Macon suspected mayor would suit him better. The mayor had real power in this town, more than any rookie legislator in Raleigh, more than any party politico, more than the chief of police, even.

  Macon smiled at his reflection in the diner’s glass door: only thirty-six years old, trim and still handsome, with affable blue eyes and blond hair kept short by regular visits to Buddy’s Barber Shop. Mayor Reynolds. It was just a matter of time.

  “Hey, Macon.”

  “Howdy, Mr. Reynolds.”

  He nodded to the regulars in ball caps and Wrangler jeans chatting at the counter, accepting their greetings as his due as he slid into his booth by the cash register. The lunch buffet was closed, of course, but there was still time for a cup of coffee, plenty of time to see and be seen.

  Charlene, wearing a hair net and a polyester dress that had been in style in his daddy’s day, brought him his coffee without being asked. “Slice of pie, Macon? Or we got a nice banana pudding left from lunch.”

  He patted his flat stomach. “Just coffee today, honey. Can’t spoil my appetite, or Marylou will have my hide.”

  Marylou wasn’t likely to give a damn. His wife didn’t cook. Hell, they barely spoke anymore. The two kids shuttled between piano lessons and soccer practice while Marylou put in her time with the Junior League, the PTA, the Ladies’ Guild and the tennis pro. For all he knew, she was putting out for her tennis instructor, too, between lessons, on her back behind the clubhouse locker room. But she’d be waiting when Macon got home. Marylou understood the importance of keeping up appearances. That’s why he’d married her.

  Charlene dipped into her apron pocket for two creams. “Terrible thing about poor Helen Stokes.”

  Macon nodded seriously, like he cared. It wouldn’t do to seem indifferent toward a client, and Helen, with her waxed snatch and catty tongue, had at least been entertaining. “She sure will be missed,” he said, which was a lie, but in Stokesville you didn’t speak ill of the dead. Particularly not when the dead were named Stokes.

  Charlene set her coffeepot on the table. “I hear her own son isn’t coming to her funeral.”

  Did the stricture against speaking ill of the dead apply to their children? Macon thought not. “That boy was always trouble.”

  Drugs, he’d heard. Thank God his children weren’t inclined that way. There must be bad blood in the Stokes family somewhere.

  “Did she . . . You know.” Charlene leaned over the table, smelling of breath mints and fried okra. “Disinherit him?”

  “Oh, no.” Macon was genuinely shocked at the notion of leaving money outside the family. “Old Jackson made sure of that. His estate goes to the children. With conditions, of course.”

  “What about that husband of hers? The writer.”

  The Yankee.

  Macon shrugged. “He’s provided for.”

  And handsomely, too. As part of her prenup, Helen had taken out a four-million-dollar life insurance policy designed to keep Paul Ellis in comfort for the rest of his natural life . . . or until he remarried.

  “Well, that’s good.” Charlene shifted her weight in her orthopedic shoes. “I just love his books.”

  Macon grunted, losing interest.

  “I think it’s so exciting he’s setting the next one here.” Charlene chattered on, oblivious. Macon raised his cup, hoping she’d take the hint and leave. “Wouldn’t it be something if the police really did make a mistake in the Dawler trial.”

  Hot coffee scalded Macon’s tongue. He swallowed. “What are you talking about?”

  Charlene looked surprised. “That’s what he does. In his books. He takes these real famous cases and he shows where the police went wrong.”

  “Paul Ellis is writing a book about the Dawler murders,” Macon said carefully. Son of a bitch.

  Charlene nodded.

  “But Billy Ray confessed.”

  “Well, I know he did. But it’s interesting, don’t you think? My cousin Clayton—he’s a deputy over in Guilford—told me Paul Ellis has been in three times to visit Billy Ray.”

  Panic skittered in Macon’s chest like a mouse behind the baseboards. He willed himself to stay calm. It didn’t mean anything. Charlene was a silly bitch and Billy Ray Dawler was a moron.

  “Sure you won’t have that pie?” Charlene asked.

  “No, thank you, Charlene.” He gave her his good-old-boy smile. “Got to save room for dinner.”<
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  Any appetite he’d had was gone.

  STEVE’S head pounded as he watched Bailey back out the front door of Paul Ellis’s house: her pale, narrow feet in black flip-flops, her pale, narrow back exposed by black drawstring pants riding low on her hips. His blood pressure rose.