I looked around that pretty little house of yours.
Think about what you stand to lose.
Our house. We’ll be together again.
A shudder ripped through her, and she stopped at the foot of the steps. “I can’t…” She couldn’t stay. Couldn’t be in this house that Martha had coveted. Couldn’t sleep inside there knowing that someone, maybe her, had run over Martha in the street and left her there like roadkill.
She didn’t have to explain it. Tommy shrugged and said, “We can go to my house. Do you want to wait in the car while I pack your stuff?” Then his expression turned dark. “Or is there any stuff left to pack?”
Regretfully she shook her head. She wanted to apologize, to tell him that she’d only been thinking of her own survival, that she hadn’t meant to hurt him. But of course he’d been hurt. They’d been together for four and a half years, and he’d spent four of them trying to persuade her to marry him. He loved her, had said so even the day he’d broken up with her for good. He would have been hurt, and she’d known it.
She just hadn’t cared.
They returned to the car, and he backed out silently, once again avoiding the accident scene by turning onto Thurmond.
His house was located in the south part of town, halfway between River Road and the river, only a few minutes from Robbie and Anamaria’s condo in distance, but a world apart in status.
The house was on the small side, centered in a compact yard on a street filled with other small houses and compact yards. It had belonged to his grandfather; as Pops had gotten older and more frail, Tommy had moved from his apartment into the room where his father had grown up. He’d done the cooking and the cleaning and made it possible for the old man to live another four or five years in the comfort of his home.
Finally, two years ago, Pops had moved himself into Morningside Nursing Center. It had been harder for Tommy than it had for his grandfather. She’d listened to him rail and argue and blame himself, and she’d held him, just held him, a lot of nights.
She doubted he was any happier with the situation now, even though the nursing home had been a good thing for Pops. He was a sociable man, and there were people to talk to and nurses to flirt with twenty-four hours a day. He was less lonely.
Was Tommy?
None of her business.
He parked in the driveway, next to his SUV, and she climbed out wearily. She gazed at her feet as she followed the cracked sidewalk to the steps, then went into the house. It was quiet in a way that hers never was. The silence in her house was an empty sort of thing. It wasn’t a home, just a house where she slept and bathed and, for a time, had sex, but didn’t really live.
This house had seen love and laughter, tears, sorrow and joy. It had a sense of family about it, of home, that she wanted but had never had, could never have.
“You can have Pops’s room,” Tommy Tommy said, closing the door and tossing his keys in a wooden dish on the table next to it. He paused, then picked up the keys again and slid them into his pocket.
He didn’t trust her not to steal his car and disappear, she realized, her mouth curving in the thinnest of smiles.
He shouldn’t.
He led the way into the hall, then the front bedroom. It was square, with windows on the two outside walls, a ceiling fan overhead and an iron bedstead to which a few flakes of white paint still clung. The bed was made—it was Tommy who’d gotten her into the habit of making her own bed every morning—and covered with an aged quilt. The pillowcases were sturdy white cotton, the edges embroidered with flowers and birds in faded threads.
“Not much has changed since he and Grandma moved in here nearly sixty years ago,” he commented, “but it’s comfortable.”
She nodded.
“I’ll call Kiki and see when they’ll release your stuff from the car.”
There was a nice image: Kiki handling her clothes, checking her sizes, passing judgment on her taste, wondering what Tommy saw in her when he could have Sophy.
“We need to talk,” he said, but before Ellie could protest, he moved back into the hall. “After you’ve rested.”
When the door closed, she sank down on the bed and began removing the soft suede boots that looked so wrong with Anamaria’s dress. She definitely needed the rest, but she could live without the talking afterward. He had questions she couldn’t answer, some because she’d held the secrets too long, others because she simply didn’t know.
Such as had she been driving her car when it struck Martha?
Had she done it deliberately?
Dear God, had she murdered her mother?
After wandering through the house four times, Tommy stopped in the bathroom, laying out a new toothbrush and comb, along with clean towels. Back in the living room, he dropped down on the couch, stretched out and shoved a pillow under his head. He turned on the television, but kept the sound muted so it wouldn’t disturb Ellie in the next room. There had been a few creaks of the bedsprings, then nothing but silence. She’d looked exhausted. Hangovers could do that to a person.
When he’d told Decker he wanted time off, the lieutenant hadn’t even blinked. You gonna work with Robbie? He’d had no reaction when Tommy said yes.
Conflicts of interest were different in a small town. Cops investigated people they knew; judges sat on trials involving acquaintances and neighbors. The district attorney would argue a case in court, then have the defense lawyer and his family over for a cookout in the evening. Decker had no problem with one of his detectives trying to prove the innocence of a suspect another of his detectives was trying to nail for a felony.
After all, cops were supposed to build a case against the guilty suspect, not the likely one, not the easy one, and for damn sure not the innocent one.
Which of those was Ellie?
No doubt she had secrets. No doubt she’d lied to him. And if she’d lied about where she was from, she’d probably lied about something else.
Maybe everything. Maybe she wasn’t the woman he believed her to be. Maybe he didn’t know squat about her—who she was, what she was capable of. Maybe he’d been in love all this time with a total stranger.
He didn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe it. Okay, so she might have lied about some stuff, but the person she was, deep down inside…He knew that person. Knew she was good and sweet and generous and passionate and caring. Knew she would never physically hurt anyone.
He stared at the TV, barely registering the NASCAR race on the screen. Cars going round and round, Ellie used to tease. I’d rather watch fishing. Fishing hadn’t really been her thing, either, certainly not on TV, but kicked back in the boat, face tilted to the sun, a cooling breeze ruffling her hair and a bottle of cold water in her hand…They’d passed more than a few lazy afternoons that way.
Last night’s confrontation with Martha, and the meeting they’d scheduled for today, had really upset her. They’d no more been planning to relive old times than Tommy was going to take up with his seventh-grade girlfriend. Another lie from Ellie.
The first thing he and/or Robbie had to do was make her understand that if she kept it up, she would lie herself right into a prison cell.
Ellie in jail. It sounded so ridiculous that he couldn’t even form the image.
He had no idea how many laps the cars had made on the silent television when the bedroom door creaked. Ellie came out, barefooted, dress wrinkled, and padded down the hall to the bathroom. A few minutes later, she walked as far as the living room door, her hair combed and her face washed. Still, she looked tired, stunned and hungover. “Are you hungry?” he asked.
She nodded, and he got to his feet, heading to the kitchen. Though his back was to the door, he knew the moment she followed him in. He turned on the oven, then took a pizza from the freezer, handmade the way Pops had taught him. Back in Italy, Pops’s family had been in the restaurant business for generations. He might have done the same here in Copper Lake if Grandma had lived long enough to help him.
“Like crap.”
“Alcohol never makes you feel better.”
“I know.”
He slid the pan into the oven, set the timer, then turned to face her. She was standing beside the kitchen table, looking vulnerable and ragged.
“My mother was a drunk.” Pretty much everyone who knew him knew that, but he and Ellie hadn’t talked about it much. It had always been a one-sided conversation, and before long she had changed the subject or, anticipating it, he had. “Lilah drank…I don’t know. To ease some pain that no one knew about. To handle her unhappiness. To cope with her depression.
“I have a few vague memories of her smiling and laughing, playing with me, dancing with my dad. But mostly I remember her sitting and staring with a drink in her hand. I could go to bed at night and she’d be sitting on the couch, staring at nothing, and I swear to God, when I got up the next morning, the only thing different was the level of whiskey in the bottle. She always just sat there and looked at things no one else could see, went places in her head that no one else could go.”
And then one day, she went someplace else. She’d taken her clothes and a photograph of the family, and no one had ever seen her again.
Just as Ellie had intended for no one to ever see her again.
Before the stabbing pain could completely grip him, she sat down and quietly said, “My mother was a drunk, too.”
It was momentous—her volunteering something private that not only sounded but felt like truth. Still, he opted for cynicism over surprise or being impressed that she’d confided something. “The mother you grew up with in Charleston? Or the one you grew up with in Atlanta?”
Her attempt at smiling was phony and a failure. “Okay, now you know the dirty truth. I’m from Atlanta. I lived there until I was eighteen. After that, I settled in Charleston until I came here.”
“Why lie about it?”
She shrugged carelessly, another phony effort. “My life in Atlanta was nothing special. My fantasy life in Charleston made for a better story.”
He studied her for a time before turning away to take glasses from the cabinet and ice from the freezer. Her fantasy life hadn’t been a better story. It had been normal. Average. The kind of life he and everyone else she knew in Copper Lake could relate to.
Meaning that her real upbringing was something most of them couldn’t relate to.
After carrying the glasses to the table, he got a pitcher of homemade tea from the refrigerator. Mariccis didn’t eat or drink instant anything. He’d brewed it the day before, strong the way he liked it, without sugar the way Ellie liked it. Four-year habits were hard to break, especially when he didn’t want to break them.
“Are your parents really dead?” he asked as he poured the tea.
She looked away, and for the second time that day, something like guilt darkened her eyes. “Yes.”
“And Martha was connected to them.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
She wrapped her fingers around the glass, turning it in circles that seemed nervous in spite of their slow control. When it became clear that she wasn’t going to answer, instead of pushing, he chose another question. “What made you decide to get drunk last night?”
A question he sensed she felt more comfortable with. “I didn’t intend to. I rarely drink. That smell—rum right out of the bottle, beer spilled on the carpet, tequila freshly puked up—that’s the strongest memory I have of my childhood. I can hardly remember either of my parents without a cigarette in one hand and booze in the other. It was as natural to them as breathing. I didn’t want to be like them.”
Some children of alcoholics became alcoholics themselves because it was natural to them. Others never went past the first or second drink, because they never got over the revulsion, the anger, the resentment, the fear. Those last few months before his mother left, when he’d found her bottles, he’d poured them down the sink, believing that would make her stop, would make her a better mother. Of course, she’d just bought more.
“Why last night? You’re thirty years old. True?”
Cheeks flushed, she nodded.
“You’ve never been drunk before. You’ve never even finished a glass of wine before. Why get drunk last night?”
“I didn’t mean to,” she repeated. “I just wanted a few sips. I was anxious. I thought it would help me relax.”
“About meeting Martha today?”
She shook her head, stared hard at the tabletop and murmured, “About leaving.”
The buzz of the oven timer gave him an excuse not to respond right away. Using a mitt, he pulled the pan from the oven, then set it on the stove. The crust was thin and crispy, and heavy with toppings: vegetables all over with Canadian bacon on one half, sausage and anchovies on the other. Her favorite and his. Old habits.
After digging through a drawer for the pizza cutter, he tried to make his voice neutral when he asked, “Where were you going?”
“I don’t know.”
“Were you coming back?”
Her shrug wasn’t the fake one she’d given earlier, but a smaller, more vulnerable lift of her shoulders. “Probably not.”
“Why?” For this question he turned his back to her, focusing instead on cutting the pizza into neat slices. It was hard enough talking calmly to her about her plan to disappear. He didn’t want to watch her consider a lie over the truth, or choose to give no answer at all, as if it weren’t important enough to bother. He didn’t want to see that she could have run off, leaving the people who loved her sick with worry.
He didn’t want to look at her and see his mother.
She was silent a long time, and when she did speak, her voice was unsteady. “Martha brought back a lot of memories that I wanted to stay forgotten. You’ve probably guessed that my childhood wasn’t as idyllic as I portrayed it. I prefer not to remember it. It was another life. I was another person. But she was planning to stay here. Every time I saw her, every time I heard her name or even thought about her…it was easier to leave.”
Tommy dished the pizza onto plates. He set one in front of Ellie, the other at his own place, sat down and stared across the table at her. “Easier,” he repeated bitterly. “Easier to run out on the people who love you than to deal with a few bad memories? The past is over and done, Ellie. It can’t hurt you now.”
Her smile was thin. “Spoken like a man who doesn’t have a past. Your childhood really was idyllic. You grew up in a nice little town with a father who loved you, a grandfather who adored you, friends, neighbors, everyone cared about you—”
“And a mother who abandoned me. Just like you were planning to. How could my childhood be perfect without her in it?”
“You had plenty of other people in your life.”
“I have plenty of other people now, but do you think that makes me miss you any less?”
She stared at him. He knew she wasn’t surprised that he still missed her, still wanted her—damn it to hell, still loved her. She knew him far better than he knew her. He had no secrets. What you saw was what you got. It had taken a lot of years for him to fall in love; it would take even more time for him to fall out.
“So you were going to go off someplace where we could never find you, where we could never know if you were even alive, and what? Start all over again? A new life, a new business, new friends, a new man?” He snorted derisively. “Who knows? You could have ended up next door to my mother. Two weak cowards, living in anonymity, hiding from the only people who give a damn about them.”
After a moment, he muttered, “Eat your pizza before it gets cold,” and took a big bite of his own. The sauce was hot on his tongue, the anchovies salty, the cheese stringy, and he barely noticed because along with all those other things he still was, he was also still pissed.
Ellie ate cautiously at first, making certain her stomach would tolerate the pi
e. After two pieces, she picked at the third, scooping the toppings off, breaking off the crispier outer rim and leaving an empty, misshapen crust on the plate. She wiped her fingers on a napkin, drank her tea, then sat back, arms folded across her chest. She looked closed off, detached, and her voice sounded it. “So how does this work? Anything I tell you, you tell Robbie and Kiki?”
He shrugged. He’d never been in this situation before. Robbie, yeah, Tommy would keep him informed. Kiki? He didn’t know. Working or not, he was still a cop; if he had knowledge of a crime, he had to share it with the investigating officer. But anything Ellie told him?
“I can’t answer that until I hear what you’re going to say.” Of course, that was too late for her if the information was incriminating.
She nodded as if his answer was no more than she’d expected. “This—” she gestured between them “—is a bad idea.”
“You’d prefer to bunk down in a jail cell?” Given a chance, she would make a run for it. He was pretty sure of that. Robbie and Anamaria didn’t have room for her at the condo; Jamie and Russ couldn’t keep a close watch on her; Carmen had too much going on with her husband and five kids. Staying with him might not be her first choice, but it was the only one guaranteed to keep her in town.
Before she could answer, his cell phone rang. He fished it out, saw Kiki’s number and considered letting it go to voice mail. Whining or bad news—that was all he’d get from her, and he wasn’t up for either at the moment. But, scooping up the last piece of pizza on his plate, he flipped open the phone, left the chair and went to stand at the back door, gazing out into the yard. “This is Maricci.”
Behind him a chair scraped, and he shifted just enough to see Ellie carrying their plates to the sink.
“Hey, do me a favor,” Kiki said. “Ask my suspect a question for me.”
“Yeah, sure, what?”
“What’s her name?”
Blankly he bit off a chunk of pizza, then talked around it. “What do you mean? You know—”
“Ellen Leigh Chase is dead. Has been for over fifteen years.”
Passion to Die for Page 11
