The Missing Hour

by Dawn Stewardson

  As she was speaking, Niebuhr walked over to the Caddy, opened the back door and took out three bunches of roses—two red and one white.

  While Cole was trying to figure out if there was any symbolism in that, Niebuhr handed one bunch to Beth and one to her mother. Then, in turn, the three of them walked to the grave and silently placed the flowers—Beth and her mother putting the red ones in the urns, Niebuhr laying the white ones on the grave.

  After that, they all backed off and stood gazing downward. It gave Cole an eerie feeling, and he wondered how it made Beth feel. But he didn’t have much time to wonder before he heard a car coming down the road.

  Turning, he focused on it A dark blue Chevy, it was traveling at an appropriately slow pace for a cemetery, but with the glare of the sunlight on the windshield, it was impossible to see the driver’s face.

  Not taking his eyes off the car, Cole moved to Beth’ s side.

  “You think it’s trouble?” she murmured.

  “Probably not,” he whispered, but his gut was telling him he shouldn’t be too sure about that.

  The Chevy slowly passed his Mustang, the Cadillac, then the Taurus. A second after it emerged from behind the three parked cars, he saw a flash of silver and shots were splitting the air.

  ‘‘Get down!” he yelled, grabbing for his gun with one hand and dragging Beth down with the other.

  Shielding her with his body, he began firing. The Chevy surged forward, its wheels screaming against the pavement as it raced down the road.

  Cole shoved himself up, hoping to catch a look at the license, but the car had already rounded a curve and was gone. He took a full cartridge clip from his pocket and replaced the spent one with it, just in case.

  When he turned toward the others, they were all still on the ground. Niebuhr and Angela were as white as sheets. Beth was visibly trembling. Behind her, one of the marble doves had been shot off La-risa’s gravestone.

  His heart still pounding, he helped Beth up and wrapped his arm around her.

  “Are you okay?” he asked the other two as they got to their feet.

  “Yes,” Angela whispered. “But thank heavens you had a gun. If you hadn’t shot back he might not have taken off so fast”

  ‘‘Yes. Thank heavens,” Niebuhr said, brushing dirt off his suit.

  Bolstering his gun, Cole said, “I’ve got a phone in my car. I’ll go call the police.”

  “Wait,” Beth said. “Wait Just give me one minute.”

  She picked up her purse from where it had fallen, then dug her cellular out and punched in a number.

  “Mr. Gregory, please,” she said after a few seconds. “It’s his daughter calling.” She didn’t sound like herself, and she looked scared half to death.

  Cole glanced at Niebuhr and Angela. He looked tense. She looked both frightened and puzzled.

  Then relief flooded Beth’s face and she said, “Dad, I wasn’t sure you’d be there.” She sounded almost normal again.

  “What on earth are you doing?” Angela whispered loudly. “We just about got killed and you’re making a social call to your father?”

  It took only a quick look at Niebuhr to establish that he knew exactly what Beth was doing.

  Then Cole looked at her again, and her expression told him she didn’t know what to say to her father now that she’d reached him—that she hadn’t thought past square one.

  It had been a hell of a good square one, though. He’d give her credit for that.

  “I guess,” he said, ostensibly to Angela, “she just wants to let him know she’s all right. A drive-by shooting in Toronto the Good will be the top news story of the day, and you know how the media loves to sensationalize things.”

  Beth gave him a look of such utter gratitude he almost smiled.

  “But she has to call him right now?” Angela demanded. “Before you even call the police?”

  Nobody replied to her questions. Beth was already walking away from them and quietly talking to her father, while Niebuhr picked up on what Cole had said.

  “A drive-by shooting? You really think that’s all it was?”

  “What else would it have been?” Angela said

  Cole eyed Niebuhr evenly, waiting to see which way the good doctor was going to jump.

  Finally, he shrugged. “Nothing, I guess. I don’t know why anybody would want to intentionally shoot at one of us.”

  That wasn’t true, Cole knew. But the man Niebuhr suspected might have a reason couldn’t have been in that car. Because he was sitting in his office, talking on the phone to Beth.

  AFTER HER FATHER SAID goodbye and hung up, Beth kept the phone to her ear and pretended she was still in the midst of their conversation.

  Cole was standing beside the Mustang, talking on his phone to the police, and she wanted a quick strategy meeting with him before she had to face her mother and uncle.

  She knew he didn’t really believe it had been a drive-by shooting. He figured exactly what she did The man in that car had to have been their gorilla man from the other night. And she’d just established it wasn’t her father.

  Her pulse did a funny little dance as she let herself relish that fact once more. She’d been right to doubt her memory and wrong to doubt her father. He wasn’t the one trying to kill her. It was whoever had really murdered her aunt.

  Finally, Cole stuck his phone into the pocket of his suit jacket.

  “Bye, then,’’ she said into her phone, starting rapidly toward him.

  When he saw her coming he stopped walking. ‘‘The cops who arrive are going to know we got shot at the other night,” he said as she reached him.

  “What?”

  “I told them this was the second incident.”

  “Oh, I wish you hadn’t. My mother’s going to have a fit when she hears that. Mark, too.”

  “Well, it was the only thing I could do. There’s a record of my calling in the first one, and this is the computer age. They’d have matched up the two in no time. And if I hadn’t volunteered the information, they’d have wondered why the hell I didn’t”

  “So they’ll know this wasn’t any drive-by. They’ll know somebody’s after me.”

  “They’ll know somebody’s after one of us. I was with you both times.”

  “Beth?” her mother called.

  “We’ll just be a minute,” she called back. “We don’t have to tell the police about my memory surfacing, do we?” she asked Cole.

  “At this point, we’d better. Let them decide if they figure it could be connected to what’s been happening.

  “But I don’t have to say that I saw my father’s face.”

  When he hesitated, her heart began pounding in her ears. “If I did, they’d question him, wouldn’t they?”

  “I imagine so.”

  “And they’d tell him why. Cole, that would hurt him something awful, and that memory’s wrong. Right this minute, he’s downtown in his office. He wasn’t the one shooting at us. And…oh, I’m only beginning to build a relationship with him again. I don’t want it destroyed forever because of some memory I know can’t be accurate.”

  She glanced uneasily over at her mother and Mark, then looked back at Cole. “You don’t think Mark will decide this is a good chance to say something to the police, do you?”

  “I don’t know. Just let me think about the whole situation for a minute.”

  Looking away from Bern’s anxious face, he tried to decide on the safest way to play things.

  Glen Gregory’s being in his office didn’t mean as much as she apparently figured it did. He could have hired whoever was driving the Chevy—as well as whoever shot at them the other night, for that matter.

  But given the way she was talking at the moment, if Niebuhr told the police she’d remembered her father as the murderer, she’d say he’d misunderstood her. And then…

  Cole had already thought this through, so the pieces rapidly fell into place. Even if she admitted the truth, a recovered memory wouldn’t g
ive the police enough to charge Gregory. And while they were digging for more concrete evidence, he’d still be walking around free.

  Since that was the case, what was the benefit to telling the police exactly what Beth had remembered?

  There wasn’t one, he decided. It would only upset her more. And if by any chance Gregory wasn’t guilty, it would upset him, as well. Worse yet, if he was guilty, he’d probably feel pushed to make an-other attempt on her life—even sooner than he otherwise might have.

  Cole looked at her again, trying not to think about anything terrible happening to her. But they could only be lucky so many times.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s keep quiet about how specific your memory was. But you’d better take your uncle aside right now and remind him he promised you confidentiality.”

  IT WAS WELL PAST lunchtime before the detectives were done taking Beth’s statement. When they escorted her back down the hallway to the front of the station, she saw that she’d been the last one to finish.

  Mark and her mother were sitting on a bench, while Cole was talking with one of the detectives.

  Her mother, she noted anxiously, looked extremely worried—which had to be because she knew that the shootings were probably related to her daughter’s recovered memory.

  The three of them spotted her at about the same moment, and her mother hurried over to hug her, Cole and Mark trailing behind.

  “Oh, Beth,” she said, holding her close. “I can’t stop wishing you’d talked to me about this memory thing before you and Mark started in on it. It was just such a bad idea and—”

  “It was not a bad idea,” Mark interrupted.

  Beth felt her mother tense.

  “It’s trying to keep traumatic memories repressed that’s unhealthy,” he went on. “And there was no conceivable way of knowing we’d end up with a mess like this.”

  Her mother turned toward him, angrily saying, “But we have, haven’t we. And we have no idea who’s trying to kill her—except that it’s likely the same man who murdered Larisa. And do you think the police are going to figure out who he is this time around? Before he kills Beth?”

  With that, her mother burst into tears.

  “Aw, Mom,” she murmured, hugging her again. “I’m not going to get killed.”

  ‘‘You almost did today.” Her mother backed away a foot or so and made an effort to compose herself.

  Finally, she looked at Mark. “If only the police had found that journal. Even though it would have been too late for Larisa, at least we wouldn’t be facing this now.”

  “Journal?”

  The way Cole said the word, Beth could tell he’d gone onto red alert.

  “My sister kept a daily journal,” her mother told him. “But nobody could find the most recent one after she died. And we always thought that, if it had turned up, there might have been something in it that would have helped the police.”

  “I never knew she kept a journal,” Beth said.

  “No, there was a lot you didn’t know,” her mother said slowly. “And you were so close to La-risa that I always realized I should have talked to you about her as you got older. But each time I meant to, I ended up letting myself off the hook, rational-izing that it would be just too painful. Now, though, knowing you’re in danger because of her…

  “At any rate, she kept a journal from the time we were teenagers. Every night, before she went to bed, she’d write about her day. She had a pine blanket box, and after she finished writing she always locked the journal back into it. Journals, plural, as time passed, of course.

  “When she died…She used to finish at least two or three of them a year, so that blanket box must have been almost full of them when she died. Was it, Mark?”

  He silently nodded.

  “Angela, let’s get back to the missing one,” Cole said.

  ‘‘Well, she’d finished the latest one in the box a few months before she was murdered, and if only the police had found the current one…Well, as I said, it might have helped them, because there’d been a man visiting Larisa they couldn’t identify, and—”

  “They know all about that,” Mark said. “I told you, they talked to the detective who was in charge of the case.”

  “But he didn’t mention the journals,” Cole said.

  Mark shrugged. “They didn’t learn anything useful from the ones that were there, so I guess he didn’t think they were worth mentioning.”

  “But did they figure the killer might have taken the missing one?”

  “I don’t think so,” Mark said slowly. “You see, Larisa was a real creature of habit And she never had the journal out during the day, so it wouldn’t have been just lying around for him to see.

  “As Angela said, Larisa always took it out at night, then locked it back in the box after she finished writing. And the box was locked when she died. I mean, nobody had forced it open, looking for anything. But when the police opened it, there was no current journal inside.”

  “What about the earlier ones? Do you still have them?”

  “No. I kept them for a while, but every time I looked at that box…I eventually got rid of them.”

  “You’re sure there was one missing, though? That she was still keeping a journal when she died?”

  “Frankly, I didn’t know. I used to go to bed a little earlier than Larisa, and she’d do her writing after that. So she never mentioned that she’d stopped, but—”

  “I’m positive she wouldn’t have,” Beth’s mother said. “Not when she’d been keeping them for all those years.”

  After a moment’s silence, she turned her attention back to Beth. “I want you to come and stay at the house with me.”

  “No, Mom, thanks for offering, but I’ll be fine in my apartment.”

  “Fine? Darling, someone’s trying to kill you.”

  “I think it would be a good idea,” Mark said.

  She looked at Cole, silently asking what he thought. She didn’t like the idea of staying at her mother’s, but she certainly didn’t want to be on her own. And maybe he was getting tired of putting his life on hold to play bodyguard.

  “Actually,” he said, “I think Beth’s better off at her own place.”

  Both her mother and Mark eyed him cooly, but he either didn’t notice the sudden chill in the air or was choosing to ignore it.

  “I’ve checked out her building and it’s reasonably secure,” he explained.

  “But what about those phone calls?” Mark said. “They were making her nervous even before—”

  “They’re taken care of,” Cole interrupted. “The caller was a creep with a grudge, and the police charged him last night. At any rate,” he added to Angela, “Beth mentioned that your house is a big two story. I imagine there are a lot of potential ways into it?”

  “I’ve never had a break-in.”

  “Well, we wouldn’t want to give someone a reason, would we.”

  Beth felt icy fingers trailing up her back. Twice, the man with the gun had known exactly where and when to find her. And Cole was right. Breaking into her mother’s house would be a piece of cake.

  “What about coming and staying in my condo, then?” Mark offered. “We have tight security. And I don’t like the thought of your being alone any more than your mother does.”

  When she looked at Cole again, he raised his eyebrows a fraction of an inch. Obviously, if anybody was going to tell them, he wanted it to be her.

  She cleared her throat. “Actually, I haven’t been alone. Since the first shooting, Cole’s been sleeping on my couch.”

  Her mother looked surprised.

  Mark said, “Oh?” Then he focused on Cole. “Didn’t you think I’d like to know that? As a matter of fact, don’t you think you should have told me about the first shooting? I asked you to keep me informed.”

  “And I was doing that,” Cole said evenly. “But 1 didn’t see any point in alarming you. Not when, for all we knew at the time, the shooting could have been meaningles
s—nothing more than some guy looking to take potshots at anyone he saw.”

  “If you thought it was meaningless, why were you sleeping on her couch?”

  “Mark?” Beth said. “You told him not to let anything happen to me. He was just doing his job.”

  When she looked at Cole again, the quirk of a smile he gave her said there was no way he’d just been doing his job. It made her heart skip a beat.

  “And I’m glad he was,’ her mother said. “But you can’t stay there indefinitely,” she added to Cole.

  “She won’t need someone indefinitely,” he said. “Only until we get to the bottom of things. Or, I should say, until the police get to the bottom of things. I’ve just been told to back off. They’re treating the cemetery shooting as an attempted murder, and they don’t want any civilian help with it.”

  “You’re hardly a civilian,” Beth said, trying to ignore the anxious feeling creeping through her. But if Cole was backing off…

  Surely she hadn’t misread that smile, had she? Surely he wasn’t just going to desert her?

  “Well, if you’re not going to be involved any longer,” her mother said to him, “Beth will have to come home with me.”

  “That gets us back to the problem of your house probably not being the safest place. But look, don’t worry. I can arrange for someone to watch out for her.”

  “You mean a bodyguard?” Her mother turned to her. “Beth, if you need any money for that, just tell me.

  Cole looked at her and smiled again—a warm, lazy smile this time.

  She exhaled slowly. The message in his eyes was clear. He was going to keep on watching out for her.

  And there was no one in the world she’d rather have as a bodyguard.

  Chapter Twelve

  Mark Niebuhr and Angela Gregory were already get-ting out of their cars when Cole pulled into her drive-way.

  “I’m sorry we had to come,’’ Beth said for at least the third time.

  He simply shrugged, although he was sorry, too. He wanted to get back to her apartment and figure out where they went from here.

  The police might not want him having anything more to do with the case, but that was their problem. As long as someone was trying to kill her, nothing was going to stop him from trying to find out who it was.