Bone Deep

by Janice Kay Johnson

  “Sometimes I wonder if I am,” she said, so softly he had to lean forward to hear.

  His heart pumped hard once, like the bellows in an old-time blacksmith shop. “What?”

  Her eyes shied from his. “Not that way. Just…marriages are two-sided. If I wasn’t enough for him—”

  “Son of a bitch. Don’t you ever say that. I’ve spent four long years wishing I had what Hugh did, and you can damn well bet it never would have crossed my mind to think you weren’t enough for me.”

  She stunned him with stark, cold words. “You were married. And you still tried to have what was Hugh’s.”

  She might as well have kicked him in the belly. Was that what she’d thought all this time?

  “No,” he said. “I wanted you like I’ve never wanted anything. You know that. I gave into temptation once. Once. And that’s as far as it ever would have gone.”

  Her stare didn’t retreat at all. “Did you tell Rachel you’d kissed another woman?”

  “No, I didn’t.” His jaw tightened. “Did you tell Hugh?”

  He hated seeing the shame that made her look down. “You know I didn’t.”

  “We kissed. I wasn’t asking you to meet me at some cheap motel in Everett. I was married and I knew damn well I was.” More quietly, he added, “I knew you were, too.”

  “What was it you were going to say to me when you came out to the nursery a couple days later?”

  “Why do you want to know now, when you wouldn’t listen then?”

  She didn’t say anything. She crumbled a bit of croissant with her fingers.

  “I was going to say I was sorry. That I shouldn’t have touched you.” He didn’t want to be honest, but had to. “I was going to tell you that Rachel and I were talking divorce.”

  Her gaze lifted again to his, the blue bottomless. Shocked?

  “I suppose I was hoping you’d start thinking about your own marriage,” he admitted reluctantly.

  “Your divorce was over me?” She sounded horrified.

  “No.” He paused. Honesty. They had to have it, if there was to be any hope. “We moved out here partly because things weren’t so good. Rachel wasn’t happy. Being married to a cop is never easy, and we both thought it would help if she was closer to her family. My hours would be more regular with small town law enforcement.” He shrugged. “Turns out there was more wrong between us than that. It didn’t help when I met you, Kat, but I don’t think Rachel ever knew how I felt. I…tried to ignore it. Those feelings, though, let me know Rachel and I should never have gotten married in the first place. I never felt anything like that for her, and I doubt she did for me.”

  She was still crumbling the sandwich. The birds would have a feast.

  “Tell me,” he said roughly. “Just once.”

  He saw the reluctance in the way her eyes met his, but she said, “That I wished, too? Isn’t that how you put it?”

  His head jerked in acknowledgment.

  “Yes. I did. I wished. And that made me feel a thousand times guiltier when Hugh disappeared. It made me…”

  Suddenly angry, Grant said, “Fixate on him? Decide you were going to stay eternally devoted? Eternally faithful, whether the SOB deserved it or not?”

  Face flaming, she pushed back her chair. “I didn’t know he didn’t. If I’d known—” Halfway to her feet, she stopped, closed her eyes.

  Grant didn’t move. “If you’d known?”

  She opened her eyes and said fiercely, “I would have begged you to take me to that cheap motel. All right?”

  “So you could get back at Hugh.”

  “Yes! And because—” She took several ragged breaths. “Because I wanted you. I’ve never—” Her lips pressed together.

  She’d never felt the way she did about him for anyone else, either. That’s what she was confessing. His chest swelled with the knowledge, but ached, too.

  “You wouldn’t have,” he said gently. “No matter what. Neither of us would have taken it that far.”

  Kat seemed to sag, and sank into her chair. “No. I’ve never had it in me to…lash out at someone like that, I guess. To rebel.”

  He found himself smiling. “If you couldn’t sleep with another man to pay back your cheating husband, it’s hard to see you killing him, even in a rage.”

  “I didn’t. I think, if I’d had incontrovertible proof he was screwing around on me, I’d have left him. And that would have been the scariest thing I’d ever done, because I’d have had to start all over.”

  He’d been hungry when he ordered lunch and hungrier when he had to breathe in the spicy aroma all the way over to the nursery, but food was the last thing on his mind now. Kat was all he could think about. The secrets and sorrows in her deep blue eyes.

  “Why, Kat? Why did you doubt your ability to start over?”

  He knew some of it. That she didn’t seem to have any family. Hugh and she had had that in common. Maybe that had been part of the appeal, at least to her; the two of them allied against the world. Except, it hadn’t been that way.

  “I didn’t know my father,” she said after a minute. “My mother…um, she used to leave me with friends or neighbors. You know, anyone she could foist me on. For a night, sometimes for days. Finally, she didn’t come back. I guess she was using drugs. I don’t really know. Anyway—” she shrugged, as if to say it didn’t matter anymore “—I grew up in foster homes. Mostly people who did it for the money. Knowing they had to be paid to take me…it keeps you at a distance. I never had anything that was mine.” Instead of grief, her eyes held that fierceness again. “I wanted…I wanted what I thought Hugh was giving me. Sharing everything made it even better than if we’d each gone off to different jobs every day. You know? Except as it turned out, none of it was mine. If I’d had a job or business of my own…” She tried to smile and failed. “As it is, I’d have walked away with nothing, not even a means of support.”

  No, he thought. You’d have had me. But she hadn’t known that, and he couldn’t have told her. Not then, not until he and Rachel exhausted the counseling sessions and the talks that got both franker and more strident as they went. Sex and a whole lot of misconceptions about each other had brought him and Rachel together, and with those misconceptions punctured like helium balloons—poof!—the sex didn’t work anymore, either. He didn’t think they’d even tried more than a handful of times after he met Kat and knew what and who he really wanted. He had done his damnedest to see his wife and not Kat when he got in bed with Rachel, but the truth was he hadn’t much wanted her. The coals hadn’t only burned down, they’d gone cold. Probably for both of them, although he couldn’t be sure. He wasn’t proud of the fact that he’d fallen in love with another woman while he was still married, whether that marriage was troubled or not.

  “So you see,” Kat said, after an interval, “I guess I did have all the motive in the world. Because I ended up with everything.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m going to find out who’s doing this to you, Kat. I promise I will.”

  “He was murdered, wasn’t he?”

  “There’s nothing in the bones that have shown up so far to indicate how, but he had to be. Hard to imagine, if he keeled over from a heart attack, say, someone taking his body home and tucking it away as a keepsake. Hiding a body after you kill someone, that makes more sense.”

  Kat nodded. She had to have reasoned all that out, too.

  “If only his body had been found then…” she murmured.

  Their eyes met. It wasn’t so different than the way they’d looked at each other that very first time.

  If she had known she was a widow, if Grant had been able to arrest Hugh’s killer…would she have turned to him? Thinking about the lonely years since was like taking a long swallow of wine that had gone to vinegar.

  He still couldn’t say, “I love you.” Not yet. And not just because of the investigation. Kat wasn’t ready. He could tell.

  Waiting…waiting might not be so hard now, not whe
n he could hear her soft admission, replay it as often as he wanted.

  I did. I wished. I wanted you.

  CHAPTER NINE

  KAT’S FAVORITE PART OF THE DAY was the beginning, the half hour or forty-five minutes she gave herself at the nursery before the first employee arrived. The nursery was hers then, in a way it wouldn’t be once staff and customers started showing up. She loved unlocking and rolling back the chain-link gate and pulling up in front, admiring the effect of the skillfully arranged profusion of foliage and bloom, trellises and necessities. She’d spent these past years a little bit ashamed of the way she gloated.

  I built this.To hell with Hugh, she thought this morning. It is mine. I deserve it. Maybe it was the lunch with Grant yesterday that made her feel stronger, more sure of herself.

  Kat wished it wasn’t Friday, when the first thing on her agenda was firing Tess.

  She parked her pickup in the usual spot, farthest from the building. She’d been thinking that, one of these days, she should add employee parking off Hazeltine Road. On busy days, it was getting so that this parking lot was full to bursting.

  Hugh had always parked in this same place. Once in a while, she thought about things like that, the ways she clung to his example, to habits, when she’d long since discarded others. As she unlocked the front door, she glanced back, half expecting for a second to see Hugh’s battered old red pickup in place of her slightly newer, black one. She didn’t like having him so much on her mind, haunting her as he hadn’t since the first months after his disappearance.

  Joan would be working today, thank goodness. Kat had called her yesterday and told her about Tess. One good thing was that the two day delay meant Kat had had a chance to post the job listing on the Herald website and on Craigslist. Responses poured in immediately. She’d brought half a dozen résumés with her this morning, and would start making calls a little later. Two of the applicants actually, wonder of wonders, had some plant nursery background, one so much Kat was suspicious. But she could get lucky, couldn’t she?

  The figurines Tess had been stealing weren’t doing all that well, Kat mused, pausing by the table. She hated to tell the artist she wouldn’t carry them anymore, because they were clever and appealing. This wasn’t the right place to sell them. eBay, she thought with some irony, was probably a better venue. Maybe she’d start by cutting back. Instead of giving over a whole table, she could have a smaller selection on one shelf by the wind chimes and sun catchers. She could use this table for something else—a rotating display of perennials mixed with garden art, perhaps.

  She was heading for her office when she heard an engine and then tires crunching gravel. Somebody was early. Way early. Surprised, she turned to see a black pickup pulling out of the parking lot, not in. That was her truck being driven away. Had she left the keys in it? Her purse was still slung over her shoulder, and with one quick glance she saw her ring of keys clipped where they should be. Jolted, she thought, Of course I didn’t leave them in the truck. I had to unlock the door.

  She dropped the purse and ran out into the parking lot. The truck was accelerating the quarter of a mile to the highway, going too fast, raising dust on the gravel road. She stopped, stunned, to see it turn right onto the highway, heading toward the freeway rather than toward town.

  The same way Hugh had gone, that long ago morning.

  Kat tore back into the nursery and yanked her cell phone from her purse. That speed dial was coming in handy all too often.

  It rang three times, four. She’d end up with voice mail. Grant probably wasn’t at work yet, she realized. She should have called 911.

  “Kat?”

  “Somebody just stole my truck,” she said. “Right from in front of the nursery.”

  “How long ago?”

  “It turned onto the highway going west not one minute ago.”

  He cursed. “If we’re lucky there’ll be a patrol car in the right place, for once. I’ll call you back or be out there.” And he was gone.

  She closed her phone and stood with it in her hand, picturing the truck accelerating away, skidding once on the gravel.

  Not signalling before making the turn.

  Her heart was thudding, fast, hard.

  There hadn’t been any other traffic that she’d seen. Any more than there had been when Hugh made the same turn.

  Did other people know that she’d been mad because he hadn’t signalled? Grant did, but anyone else? She couldn’t remember who she’d told.

  Somebody stealing a car wasn’t likely to use turn signals, anyway. It didn’t have to mean anything, that this thief hadn’t.

  Or that it was near the same time of day that Hugh had left. Early, like this. He’d dropped her at the nursery, not even kissed her goodbye, merely waved and driven away.

  The echo was coincidence. It had to be. She wouldn’t believe anything else.

  “I DON’T BELIEVE IN coincidences,” Grant said flatly. “If you’d been careless enough to leave your keys in your truck and it had been taken from the grocery store parking lot, that would be one thing. This is something else.”

  “But…” She felt more shell-shocked than she should. The police would find her truck. Or, at worst, her insurance would mostly cover the cost of replacing it. The creepiest part was knowing that someone had been hiding not very far from where she parked. That somebody had been waiting for her, watching her.“But?” he prompted her.

  “Hugh and I were alone that morning. No one else saw him leave.”

  “Probably not,” he said more slowly than she liked, as if he was seriously considering the possibility that somebody had been here that morning, too. “But you know how much talk there was. You repeated your story over and over. Hugh waving goodbye, driving away, turning out onto the highway.”

  “Not signalling.”

  His sharp eyes took in her expression and he gripped her elbow. “That,” he said, “might have been coincidence. Kat…you need to sit down.”

  She shook herself. “I’m okay. Really.”

  “All right.” He turned. “Someone’s here.”

  “Joan,” Kat said with relief. And then gasped “Oh, God, and Tess.”

  “Isn’t Tess supposed to work today?”

  She hadn’t told him. “I’m going to fire her. You know those security cameras? One of them caught her stealing from me.”

  His fingers tightened on her arm. “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “She’d have thought of some excuse. Grabbed the figurine to be a last-minute gift, intended to pay for it the next day she worked. Forgot because she had two days off.”

  “And this is the end of her two days off.”

  “Yes.”

  “You going to give her a few minutes to remember to pay?”

  “One hour. Starting right now.”

  Grant inclined his head. “Fair enough. If she doesn’t have a record for shoplifting, she wouldn’t get more than a slap on the hand anyway. Will you let prospective employers know if they call for a reference?”

  “Carefully.” She grimaced. “I’ll hint. These days, it’s lawsuit city if she claims I’m slandering her.”

  “Save the footage.”

  “Oh, I will.” Kat summoned a smile. “Joan.”

  Her friend hurried from her car with alarm on her face. “Not more bones?”

  “No. My pickup truck was stolen.”

  Tess exclaimed, too, when she got within hearing distance.

  Looking grim, Grant left with a murmured, “I’ll keep you informed.”

  Kat didn’t tell either Joan or Tess how unpleasantly reminded she’d been of Hugh’s departure. She didn’t suggest that this had been anything but common car theft, although Joan frowned and said, “Isn’t your truck a 2003 or 2004? With a lot of miles on it? It has that big dent in the fender, too. Why would anyone want it?”

  Good question. One Kat preferred not to think about. What she wanted was Grant to call and say, “The State Patrol pulled your truck over a
nd arrested the kid driving it. Sounds like it was just a joyride.”

  Walking back to her office, she wondered whether kids knew how to hot-wire vehicles anymore. Weren’t ignitions all electronic now? Could they be hot-wired?

  Well, of course they could. Obviously. Because she hadn’t left the key in the ignition. It was in her purse where it belonged.

  A cold lump settled in her stomach. What about the spare key?

  Frantic suddenly, she dropped her purse on her desk and slid her hand into the small, inner, zippered pocket where she kept extra house and pickup keys. Neither was there.

  Scared, she scrabbled through her whole purse, finally dumping the contents onto the desk. The only keys were the ones on her ring, still clipped to the strap. She groped the silky lining of the purse. If it had torn somewhere…but it hadn’t.

  Finally, hand shaking, she reached for her cell phone and called Grant again. The moment she heard his voice, she said, “My spare key is missing from my purse.” She had to swallow. “So is my extra house key.”

  She’d never heard him use strong obscenities, but he did now.

  “Kat, you need to call a locksmith. Now.”

  “Yes.” She fumbled her way around her desk to the chair. “Okay.”

  “Get the locks on your house changed today. If you can’t find someone to do it, call me.”

  “Yes,” she said again.

  “I don’t suppose you know when you last saw those keys.”

  She shook her head, then realized he couldn’t see her. “No. Months.”

  Grant was quiet for a moment. “Was your purse in the office the day the bones were left in your desk drawer?”

  “Yes.” Her hand wasn’t all that was shaking now; a tremor seemed to be running over her whole body. “I always keep it in the bottom drawer.”

  “A locked drawer?”

  “No.”

  “Then that’s probably when the keys were taken.”

  “This…person could have gotten into my house at any time.”

  “I’ve had patrol units driving by your house at least hourly every night,” he told her.

  “Thank you. It’s not so much myself I’ve worried about as that I could be set up really easily. I keep thinking you’ll get a tip about where to find the rest of Hugh.”