“Had?” I said, swallowing a yummy bite of buttery corn bread. “She doesn’t do it anymore?”
There was an awkward silence around the table, and I saw Kelly and Colin exchange looks. Rory kept his face down and focused on his bowl of chili. Aidan was the one who finally answered.
“My sister was killed nearly a year ago. Her husband, Ben Middleton, was convicted of her murder. Perhaps you heard about it in the news?”
I looked properly aghast. “Oh no. That carjacking thing?” I said.
Kelly nodded, looking sad. Colin simply looked angry.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said, hating the rote sound of this trite phrase. I looked at the lamp shades again and added, “She must have been very talented. Tell me about her.”
It was a bold request, one I wasn’t sure would work. The men all frowned, Clay included, though I wasn’t sure if he genuinely disapproved of my request or was merely putting on a show. Kelly, however, was eager to talk.
“Tiffany was beautiful, smart, and a very talented artist,” she said. “Some of her paintings hung in a gallery downtown, and several sold for quite a bit of money. One critic labeled her a bright star with a dark center.” Kelly paused and flashed a timid smile. “Her paintings were rather dark, kind of creepy. Not my style at all, but she definitely had her fans.”
“Do you have any of her paintings here?” I asked.
Kelly nodded. “There are several down in the basement, in her workshop. We pulled them all out of the gallery after she died, even though the owners said they would probably sell better and for more money now that she’s gone. But we wanted to keep every bit of her we could, and we didn’t want a bunch of vultures picking over her remains.”
“Kelly,” Colin chastised with a frown. He shook his head. He and Aidan then exchanged a look I couldn’t quite interpret; Rory kept his head down, focusing on his bowl of chili. Clay sat with a spoonful of chili poised between his bowl and his mouth, studying the various expressions on everyone’s faces.
In an effort to keep things moving in the desired direction, I said, “I’d love to see her works if it wouldn’t be too painful for you to show them to me.”
Kelly weighed my request, and after a few seconds, during which she ignored her husband’s cautionary looks, she smiled and said, “Perhaps once we’re done eating.”
Sensing that pushing it any harder at this point would only antagonize the situation, I let the topic drop. The conversation switched to lighter topics, like the weather, local politics, and the upcoming holiday. The expected question of how Clay and I met arose, and I listened, amused, as Clay invented a story, which I embellished a time or two. Everyone joined in the conversation except for Rory, who continued to sit silently, brooding the entire time.
When we were finished eating, Kelly slid off her chair and beckoned me to follow her. “Come with me, Mackenzie, and I’ll show you some of Tiffany’s works.”
“Do you really think that’s wise?” Rory said, finally finding his voice. “You don’t want to dredge up a bunch of bad memories.”
“Your sister is not a bad memory,” Kelly snapped. Her expression was one of cold anger and frustration, and Rory shied away from the look she gave him. Then her face morphed back into that of the pleasant, smiling woman I’d met initially. Without another word, she turned and left the room.
I followed, feeling the curious stares of the men behind me.
Chapter 17
Kelly led me back across the great room and past a hallway to our left that seemed to go on forever. Off this hallway was a series of doors—bedrooms, I guessed—all of which no doubt had the same spectacular windows and views of the lake. Kelly entered the front foyer and headed for a door opposite the coat closet. This led into another, smaller foyer. Straight ahead was the entrance to the garage, and to our left was a door that led downstairs.
The basement boasted a family room, this one decorated with the same holiday decor as the living room—including a second tree—but furnished much less formally. There was a large flat-screen TV on one wall and a sectional sofa covered in buttery-soft brown leather. A wet bar was built into one corner, and there was a computer desk—very modern, with black surfaces and chrome legs—in another corner. The wall facing the back of the house was wall-to-ceiling glass, with a sliding door in the middle. A huge, snow-covered yard led down to the water’s edge with enough of a slope that I couldn’t see the shore but had an expansive view of the lake beyond.
I stood and admired the rising moon over the lake, its pale white light glimmering off the snow and the water. “I envy you this view,” I told Kelly. “It must be magical to see this every day and night.”
“I do enjoy it,” she said, “though sometimes I feel a little selfish having it all to myself and not sharing it. I used to entertain a lot, but that kind of fell by the wayside.”
“Losing your daughter . . . What an awful thing for you to go through,” I said. “No parent should have to lose a child, and to have it happen with such suddenness and violence . . .” My throat closed up on me as memories of my father’s death swarmed over me. I felt Kelly’s eyes on me and tore my gaze away from the view to look at her.
“You lost someone to violence, too, didn’t you?” she said.
I nodded. “My father,” I managed to say. “I found him . . . shot . . . dying.” I couldn’t get any more words out, and I turned back to look at the lake as I felt tears well in my eyes. Kelly placed a hand on my shoulder, and the two of us stood there like that for several minutes, staring out at that spectacular view, trying to suppress the emotions that tore at us.
Eventually, Kelly said, “Come on,” and she took her hand from my shoulder. She headed for a hallway off the family room, and I followed along behind her. She opened up the first door on the right and led me into Tiffany’s workshop.
Like every other room I’d seen so far, this one had big windows and a knockout view. On the wall opposite the windows was a row of easels, positioned so that anyone standing in front of them would have their back to the view. At first this puzzled me, but then I realized that the light coming in through the windows would be ideal for painting. At the opposite end of the room was a large wooden table with an exhaust fan above it. Scattered over the top of the table were various pieces of glass in a variety of colors and textures. In the center of it all was a half-finished project that depicted a rocky shoreline, a blue expanse of water made out of rippled glass, and a lighthouse with a red base, a white top, and gold-colored glass making up the windows in the lantern. The sky above was unfinished.
“That’s the last thing she was working on,” Kelly said, seeing the direction of my gaze. “It was supposed to be a gift for me for my fiftieth birthday. At least that’s what Aidan said.”
“You should have someone finish it so you can display it. It would look beautiful hanging in one of your windows.”
“Maybe someday,” she said wistfully. “But not yet.” She turned and looked at the four easels behind us. “These are the paintings that were left at the gallery,” she said.
It was easy to see why Tiffany’s work had been called dark. The painting on the first easel featured a woman’s face, the mouth open in a silent scream, her hair wild around her, her eyes shedding tears of blood. The background was a maelstrom of black and dark red colors.
The second painting depicted an expanse of flowers beneath a brilliant blue sky. There were trees off in the distance, the leaves painted in varying shades of green, the trunks in brown and black. This part of the painting was serene and beautiful, but the flowers in the foreground were painted in shades of brown, black, and gray, and they hung over, wilted and limp. The ground they grew from looked scorched and desolate.
I moved on to the third painting, a seascape done beneath a stormy sky. The waves peaked and splashed, breaking in curds of white foam, and dark, menacing clouds hovered in a gray and black sky. In the midst of the sea was a single flower, a bright red poppy ad
rift on a wave. Beneath the flower, and heading up toward it, was the vague outline of a shark—gray, menacing, its mouth gaping open, its teeth visible just beneath the flower. The clearest thing on the shark was its eye, which was open, black, and dead looking.
I suppressed a shudder and moved on to the fourth and final easel. This one was the most disturbing of all. At its center, on a sandy shore, was a small rowboat tipped up on its side. Behind it the lake glimmered and shimmered beneath a bright yellow sun. Half buried in the sand beneath the boat was the rotting skeleton of a woman, with the torn remnants of a flowery dress hanging on the bones, and long blond hair matted and splayed out from the skull. The red poppy put in an appearance again, this time resting by the skeleton’s half-buried hip bone. And off to the left, in the calm shimmer of the water, was an eye, the same dead-looking eye that had been painted on the shark.
“Wow,” I said in a low voice. “I see what you mean.”
Kelly stared at the paintings, one elbow nestled in a palm, a hand cupped over her mouth.
“When did she paint these?”
Kelly dropped her hand from her mouth. “She did these two”—she pointed at the ones with the poppies—“right after she finished high school. It was her first year of college. The others she did during the years that followed. I also have some unfinished canvases in a closet, ones that she did later. Those have . . .” She hesitated. “They have a happier feel about them.”
“Forgive me for asking this,” I said in as gentle a voice as I could muster, “but was your daughter troubled in any way? These paintings seem to suggest there was a darkness inside her.”
Kelly dropped her hand from her face and turned to look at me. Tears glistened in her eyes as she spoke. “When Tiff was little, she was a bright, beautiful kid with an infectious laugh and a sunny outlook on life. But when she hit her teen years, something changed. She would get these moods where she’d be weepy and irritable and sullen. . . .” Her voice drifted off, and she swallowed hard, looking past me to the other end of the room. Her eyes were unfocused, as if she was seeing something that was only in her mind or her memory.
She went on. “I suggested she go see a counselor, but she refused. I made her go, anyway, when she was fifteen, but all she did was sit in the woman’s office in stony silence. After four sessions of that, I gave up. It seemed to get better during her junior year in high school, but the summer after that, her demons resurfaced.” She shot me a teary-eyed, shameful look and then quickly glanced away again. “Once I caught her in her bedroom with a razor. She was cutting herself on her legs, not bad, not deep, but enough to draw blood.”
I stepped closer to her and draped an arm over her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it. Her pain was palpable. It seeped from her pores. I felt her shudder beneath my arm, and it made a scene of jagged, sharp rocks flash before my eyes. I blinked it away and gave her a small sideways hug.
Her next words made my body go rigid.
“You’re not really dating Clay, are you?” she said just above a whisper.
Chapter 18
“It’s okay,” Kelly said, and then she looked at me with that expression of raw pain. “I know who you are. You’re that barkeep who was on the news, the one who solves crimes with ESP or something, right?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “Yes, I’m that person. And yes, I do look into crimes from time to time. But I don’t have ESP.”
“Are you looking into Tiffany’s?”
I couldn’t lie to her. “I am.” I waited for her to get angry, to demand that I leave her house at once and to chastise me for my impudence. But she did none of those things. Instead, she looked back at the paintings again and continued her story.
“After I caught Tiffany cutting on herself, I threatened to send her away somewhere for inpatient treatment. She cried and begged me not to and promised me she wouldn’t do it again. I relented, only because I figured it wouldn’t do any more good than the therapy sessions had, and might even do her more harm. A month or two went by, and her mood worsened to the point that I made her strip down and show me her body, to prove to me that she wasn’t cutting on herself anymore. She wasn’t, but around the start of her senior year in high school, something happened.” She paused, staring at the paintings.
I didn’t move or say a word, unsure if she was going to continue but hoping she would.
“I found a pregnancy test in her bathroom trash,” Kelly said finally. “It was positive.”
She sighed, a long shuddering exhalation that seemed to brace her. “Colin and I grilled her and drilled her to try to determine who the boy was, but she refused to say. And then she started with the morning sickness, only she had it at all times throughout the day. She missed the whole first week of school. Colin and I spent that week debating what to do about the pregnancy. We both come from strict Irish Catholic families, and the idea of an abortion was out of the question with him. I was a little more open to the idea because I knew having a child would only complicate things for Tiffany, and I’m not as devout as Colin is.” She glanced over at me, I assumed to gauge my judgment of her.
I shrugged and gave her a small nod of understanding, which seemed to satisfy her.
“In the end we decided to send her to a special school overseas, a private boarding school designed for girls who . . . girls in trouble.” Again, she looked over at me, this time with an apologetic smile. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you any of this, and you can’t tell any of it to Clay. Promise me.”
I hesitated a split second before answering. The raw pain on her face helped me make the decision. “I promise.”
She weighed my sincerity and must have found me passing, because eventually she nodded. “It’s just that I haven’t had anyone to talk to since . . . well, since forever, it seems. I’m always surrounded by the men in my family—Colin and my sons—and they never want to talk about anything . . . any of it. They still don’t.” She sighed again, turned back to the paintings, and began to pick at one of her fingernails.
“When we sent Tiffany away, I didn’t dare tell any of my friends, because I knew it would get out. That didn’t stop them from prying and gossiping, though, and eventually, I kind of withdrew from the social circle. Over time the curiosity waned, and I was just starting to get involved socially again when Tiffany died. After that, everyone avoided me. I guess what happened to her was just too difficult for them to deal with.”
“What happened to the baby?”
Her face contorted into a sad smile. “It was stillborn, which was probably for the best. At first I thought it might push Tiffany over the edge. When she came back that next summer, she was her old happy self at first. But her mood quickly grew dark and sullen. That’s when she did those paintings. Then in the fall she went off to college, and things got better. During her junior year she met Ben, and she seemed so happy and content and in love. It was the first time in a long time I felt truly hopeful about her future.”
“But he killed her,” I said softly. I watched her closely as I said the words, gauging her reaction.
For the longest time, she didn’t move, didn’t even blink. Her face was blank; I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.
“Mrs. Gallagher, do you think Ben killed Tiffany?”
She finally looked at me with a sad expression. “The evidence said so. And he was convicted. So I guess he did.”
Up until now, her voice had tasted like apples: sweet, ripe, with an occasional hint of tartness. But with this last statement, the taste turned rotten, as if I’d bitten into an apple that was brown and mushy in the middle.
“You don’t think he did it, do you?” I said.
She eyed me curiously, her brows drawing down for a few seconds. “Why would you say that?”
“It’s your voice. It changed when you answered my question about his guilt.”
She looked away for a second or two, staring at the floor, her brows drawn down into a consternated V. When she looked back
at me, she gave me a fleeting smile. “Are you reading my mind now? Is that it?”
I shook my head. “I don’t read minds, Mrs. Gallagher. I have a neurological disorder that cross-wires my senses so that I experience each one in multiple ways. For instance, I typically experience a taste with people’s voices and can tell when they’re lying to me because the taste changes. It’s some subtle difference in the voice. I think it’s the knowledge that one is lying, or perhaps a lack of conviction, that causes it. Your voice, the taste of it, has been consistent all evening, up until the statement you just made about Ben’s guilt. That tells me that you don’t believe what you’re saying.”
She stared at me, wordless.
“I’m right, aren’t I? You think he’s innocent.”
A host of emotions flitted across her face: fear, doubt, anger, confusion.
I closed the gap between us and took one of her hands, then sandwiched it between mine. “Tell me why you think he’s innocent,” I urged.
Kelly blinked several times. Her mouth opened and closed, opened and closed . . . the proverbial fish out of water. But she didn’t pull her hand away. Finally, she said, “Because he truly loved her. He made her happy, happier than I’d seen her in years. The way he talked to her, and about her, the way they touched one another. . . secret little love pats and holding hands under the table when they didn’t think we would notice.”
“How do you know it wasn’t all just an act on Ben’s part?”
She thought a moment before shaking her head. “I just do,” she said. “They came by the house the day they left for their trip, and Ben was so happy, so full of hope, you know?” Her eyes appealed to me, begging me to tell her that her read of the situation had been correct.
“You say Ben seemed happy. What about Tiffany?”
A cloud crossed over her face, and I knew there was more to the story. She pulled her hand loose and turned away from me, chewing on the side of her thumb. She began rocking back and forth on her feet, chewing, staring, and agonizing.
Shots in the Dark Page 15
