Bone Deep

by Janice Kay Johnson

  “Wait.” Kat stared at him. “Were any of the women he…he was seeing married?”

  “One that I’ve discovered.” He hesitated, his dark eyebrows drawing together again. “No, actually two of them, I guess. In both cases, their marriages were breaking up. That doesn’t mean an almost-ex-husband isn’t going to resent his wife taking up with another man right away.”

  It took Kat a moment to identify her acute discomfort with the topic. Okay, she didn’t like thinking about Hugh screwing around on her. But there was more, she recognized, and the more was what she and Grant had felt for each other when they were both already married. She’d been carrying around that guilt for a long time.

  His eyes narrowed, and she wondered if he’d read her mind, but if so he didn’t comment. He was a good man who took his vows seriously, she knew now. He’d have felt guilty, too.

  “Why do you doubt it?” Kat asked, backtracking. “I mean, that Hugh was killed by some woman’s husband.”

  “There are a couple of things wrong with the theory. One, why the other pelvis?”

  “Maybe he killed his wife, too.”

  He moved his shoulders in a not-quite-shrug. “Conceivable, but the two women I know of who were getting out of marriages are both alive and well.” He paused. “The one woman I know he was seeing that last spring who may have disappeared was single. I haven’t found even a hint that there was a boyfriend.”

  Kat felt as if the air had been squeezed out of her chest. “Oh.”

  “To all appearances, she quit her job abruptly and moved away. The day after Hugh disappeared.”

  “How could somebody not notice if she’d died?”

  His expression was compassionate. “She grew up in foster homes. The couple of friends I’ve found were surprised when she dropped off their radar, but they hadn’t seen much of her in the previous year, and friends do drift apart.”

  “I see,” she said. She lowered her gaze to the table-top. There was a spot of something crusted on the blue-checked tablecloth. She needed to wash it.

  “Usually, it takes family to refuse to let someone disappear.” His voice was deep and deliberate. “Even then… Take me, for instance. I call my sister and Mom and Dad every month or so, but it would be at least a couple of months before they got worried about not hearing from me.”

  Would anyone worry about her? She couldn’t help wondering.

  Well, all of her employees, of course. As a business owner, she couldn’t disappear so easily. But on a personal level…Joan. Joan would. And just about nobody else. She felt hollow until she thought, Grant would, too. Grant was scared for her. Maybe as scared for her as she was for herself.

  He hadn’t said anything about loving her, or marrying her, or about the future at all, but Kat thought that already he cared more about her than anyone else ever had. She didn’t understand why. Why her? But maybe it didn’t matter. It just was, and the knowledge warmed her deep inside.

  “Okay.” She moistened her lips. “You said a couple of things were wrong with the theory that an ex-husband or boyfriend killed Hugh.”

  Grant nodded. Without exactly moving, he gave the impression of relaxing just a little. No, he didn’t like talking about married men running around on their wives, and he hadn’t liked any better reminding her that she had precious few people to care if she vanished from the face of the earth. He wanted to move on.

  “Why fixate on you?” he said bluntly. “If anything, this hypothetical husband would sympathize with you. See you as another wronged party.”

  “That makes sense,” she admitted. “All right. You obviously have a theory.”

  “It’s one of Hugh’s lovers.” He turned his empty milk glass in his hand without ever taking his eyes from her. “A woman who thought she meant more to Hugh than she really did.”

  “Join the club,” Kat muttered.

  “Hugh had a way of ending relationships when he lost interest. But what if he hadn’t done that yet? Or this woman wouldn’t accept it? And what if she caught him with someone else?”

  “And killed both of them?”

  “Right. Since she hadn’t planned it in advance, she had to hustle, then, and make sure nobody missed the other woman. Hugh, though, was another story. He was missed, and there wasn’t anything she could do about that.”

  Kat thought about it. “Wouldn’t she have hated me, too?”

  “Maybe. But maybe not, if she believed Hugh was leaving you for her. You weren’t the enemy. She was the winner, right? She might have even felt sorry for you.”

  A shudder ran through Kat. “Well, she doesn’t anymore. So…why’s this happening?”

  “I’m still working on that part. What changed?”

  She’d thought about this, too. “The award,” she said. “I got it the week before the first bones showed up. It brought a lot of attention to me and the nursery.”

  “I keep going back to that award,” Grant agreed. “The only thing is, it didn’t change anything.”

  Slowly, Kat said, “But what it did do is highlight how much more successful the nursery has gotten since Hugh disappeared. I mentioned him in my thank you, remember? But…I’ve gotten funny vibes from some people. As if they think it’s not fair I’ve gotten recognition that should have been Hugh’s. The business was his.”

  “That’s occurred to me,” Grant said. “So, okay. All was fine as long as you were the meek little woman not sure whether you’d been widowed or abandoned, but suddenly you came across as a superconfident businesswoman instead. Maybe all that fanfare was an unpleasant reminder that you had actually profited from Hugh’s death.”

  “And that didn’t seem fair to her, not if she’d believed he loved her and was going to marry her.” Kat felt weird having this discussion while they ate lunch. It was as if they were players in some murder weekend at a bed-and-breakfast, not two people talking about real murder.

  Grant let out a sigh and stretched his arms above his head. Joints cracked. “It hangs together, but, hell, I’m being charitable to call it a theory.”

  Kat nerved herself. “How many of his women have you identified?”

  He didn’t try to look away. “Four.”

  “But you don’t suspect any of them.”

  “No. I could be wrong, but the three I’ve talked to all seemed resigned to the fact that Hugh had lied to them. He used, uh, similar terminology when he cut each of them loose. So none of the three would have been surprised to see him with someone else.”

  She bit her lip and nodded.

  “I haven’t looked further back. I figure it had to be someone he was seeing that last year. Probably the last few months.”

  That made sense.

  “I’ve got a gap of a few months in there. Either there wasn’t anybody, or…”

  Talking about Hugh’s infidelity, thinking about it, was getting easier, as if it didn’t really relate to her at all, Kat thought. He didn’t deserve any grief or misery from her. She realized she resented the amount she’d already expended on him.

  “Tell me your timetable.”

  He did, with her thinking back to that spring before he disappeared.

  “There was definitely someone else in there,” she said. “When we were first married, he’d stay focused on me for longer periods. But by that time, I was lucky to get a few weeks before I could feel him sort of drifting away.”

  It made her feel stupid, in retrospect, to see so clearly now what she hadn’t then. But she also recognized that she just hadn’t wanted to see. So—not stupid. What she’d been was willfully blind.

  “Let’s think about how he met these women,” Grant suggested. “One of them cleaned his teeth.”

  She went to the same dentist Hugh had. Faces of various dental technicians, dimly remembered, flickered through her memory. It horrified her to think that the woman who cleaned her teeth had been one of Hugh’s past lovers.

  “One met him when he was briefly shopping for a second mortgage.”

&nb
sp; Kat remembered that. She’d talked him out of it.

  “One, at least, met him at the nursery. I gather she hired him to do some landscaping.”

  A customer. Maybe a woman who was still a customer. Kat worked to keep her breathing steady. Was it a surprise to find that he’d cheated on her with women he’d met at the nursery? Where had she thought he’d found them?

  “Hugh did that sometimes,” she said. “I think he’d have liked to be a landscape designer, but that’s a really hard way to make a living.”

  “So where else did he go? How else could he meet women?”

  They talked, but the truth was Hugh could have taken up with a clerk at the grocery store or pharmacy, a neighbor, someone who worked at one of the wholesale nurseries or other suppliers he’d dealt with…. The possibilities were almost endless.

  “Not the doctor’s office.” She shook her head when Grant threw that idea out. “I don’t remember Hugh ever going.”

  “Was he involved in the garden club?”

  “Are you kidding? It’s mostly women. He loved it, they loved him.” Kat heard herself and felt a chill. It was true. She’d gone to meetings with him sometimes, but had felt the next thing to invisible. It was uncomfortable enough that mostly she hadn’t gone, until she had to take his place if she was to maintain the ties between the club and the nursery.

  “Can you give me a list of members?”

  She nodded numbly. “A whole bunch of them were on the lists Joan and I made up of people who’d been at the nursery when I found those first bones. A lot of them are good customers.”

  He pushed back from the table, as though suddenly restless. “I’ll check out those first, then.”

  Kat found she’d crossed her arms and was squeezing them tight to herself. Until this moment, the possibility that someone she knew well might have killed Hugh hadn’t seemed real. The lists she and Joan had made had been an academic exercise to take their minds off the horrific possibility that the finger bones might be Hugh’s.

  She couldn’t help remembering the last garden club meeting and trying to imagine who among the group hated her this much. She shivered slightly, wondering how many women in the club Hugh might have slept with.

  Comforting herself, she thought, not Dorothy Glenn, who was in her sixties. Or Andi Barrick, a scrawny, leathery woman in her late fifties. But there were two many genuine possibilities.

  Amanda Hinds, who’d snubbed Kat at that last meeting? Bridget Moretti was pretty, and about the right age, and she hadn’t been very friendly, either. Fay Cabot was…maybe thirty-five, but homely; Kat didn’t know if she could bear to ask Grant whether Hugh had chosen only beautiful women. There must be eight or ten women, now that she considered it, who were at least reasonably attractive, in an age range that might have appealed to Hugh, and who had been around in those days.

  Annika Lindstrom, for one, and she’d been on both lists Joan and Kat had made. Wasn’t Becca Montgomery, too? But both of them had continued to be friendly.

  Carol Scammell? Lisa Llewellyn?

  She couldn’t help a shudder, and suddenly Grant tugged her out of her chair and into his arms again.

  “Don’t,” he said, voice low and harsh. “I can tell what you’re thinking. It’s not going to do any good.”

  “I have to think about it,” Kat cried. Her hands balled into fists. “I know them all better than you do. I see them all the time.”

  “I know you do,” he said. “I know. But wait until you’ve calmed down a little. My guess is your gut will tell you how unlikely some of them are.”

  He was massaging her neck to comfort her. Focusing on the gentle kneading helped. Gradually her own hands relaxed, and finally she found the strength to straighten away from him. Her eyes burned, as if she hadn’t blinked in too long a time, but she was all right. She was.

  “You need to go to work,” she said. “I’ll be fine. I wasn’t really hurt. Mostly scared. Nobody is going to attack me here at the house in the middle of the afternoon.”

  He frowned at her. “Maybe Joan will come back.”

  “Don’t be silly. I’ll take a baseball bat to bed with me tonight. How’s that? Hugh had a couple, you know. They’re still in the hall closet.”

  “I’m not worried about tonight. I intend to be here. No, damn it.” He reached out and gave her a little shake. “Don’t argue. I don’t care what anyone thinks. I’ll sleep on the damn couch.”

  She swallowed. “You…don’t have to do that.”

  A muscle spasmed on his jaw. The flare of emotion in his eyes sent a shiver of awareness through Kat.

  “You mean that?”

  She nodded and whispered, “Yes.”

  The air in here was even harder to breathe than it had been in the enclosed, smoky space of the shed.

  Grant closed his eyes briefly, said, “Thank God,” and kissed her. It was quick, but potent. As if he was staking a claim. “I’ll be back for dinner,” he said, in that rough voice she knew meant he was aroused or deeply moved. Maybe both. “Do you want me to pick something up?”

  Kat gave a tremulous smile. “No, I need to stay busy. Cooking will be good for me.”

  “Lock behind me.”

  “Yes.”

  She walked him to the front door. He stepped out on the front porch, turned and came back in. One thorough kiss later, he finally left, although he waited until she shut the door and he heard the dead bolt snick closed.

  TWO DAYS LATER, GRANT WASN’T sure whether he’d gotten anywhere. He’d started his inquiries with garden club members he knew well and had good reason to believe were unlikely to have been Hugh Riley groupies. One was Carol Scammell, a school board member and parent of four kids ranging in age from six or seven to sixteen. Carol’s husband Rod was a plumbing contractor and a hell of a guy. Grant had seen them together enough to find it hard to imagine either of them fooling around on the side.

  Carol had been willing to be frank. She admitted she’d heard gossip about Hugh and had even wondered about a couple of fellow garden club members.“Bridget Moretti,” she said. “Do you know her? She works at In Full Bloom.”

  He knew Randy Nyland, who owned the florist shop, but hadn’t had reason himself to go in.

  “I, um, saw them together once.” Color had risen in Carol’s cheeks. “Maybe a year after he married Kat. I couldn’t be sure about what I saw, but… You know what a dead giveaway people’s body language can be sometimes.”

  He knew.

  “Bridget dropped out of the garden club a month or two after that. She didn’t come back for, oh, ages.” Carol looked reflective. “Maybe after Hugh was gone.”

  Bridget, he learned, had been and still was married. When he stopped by the florist to talk to her, she fiercely denied ever being unfaithful to her husband or thinking that way about Hugh. She was lying. Grant could tell, and she knew he could. She was vibrating with fear when he said, “Thank you for talking to me, Ms. Moretti,” and left.

  Turned out the other woman Carol had named, a Nicole Flood, had moved the year before. Only up to Bellingham, which was just over an hour’s drive from Fern Bluff, but when he made a few calls he found she worked in the Whatcom County assessor’s office and hadn’t missed a day since she started there nine months before. That didn’t make her impossible as a suspect, but she was pretty damn unlikely.

  He’d talked to Greg Buckmeier, too, something of a character, and one of the only men who were dedicated garden club members. Turned out Greg was more observant than you’d expect. He hadn’t much liked Hugh. He suggested a couple more names, and both made more likely prospects than either Nicole or Bridget, who’d stayed married despite having succumbed to temptation at one point.

  Lisa Llewellyn was one. She was a real estate agent, which meant that tying down her whereabouts for any particular time and day was next to impossible. Who’d know whether she had been showing houses or not? Lisa was married, Grant knew, but her husband was a long-haul trucker. She might easily have be
en lonely enough to be vulnerable to Hugh’s appeal. And maybe she’d started imagining having a man who wasn’t gone more than he was home.

  Annika Lindstrom was the other possibility Greg cited. “Hugh was working with her on her garden not that long before he disappeared, you know.” His mouth puckered. “She let everyone think she designed it and maintained it all by herself, but I overheard them a couple of times. He redesigned some flowerbeds, sketched an arbor she had built. Oh, yes. She’d deny it, but Hugh had something to do with her getting her garden in the Seattle Times. You can’t tell me he didn’t.”

  Annika, Grant knew, didn’t work at all. She’d reputedly been left well-off by her long-deceased husband. Which meant she didn’t have to account for her time or whereabouts to anyone at all.

  Of course, it was also possible that Buckmeier had let envy get the better of him. His garden had never been featured even in the more local Everett Herald, never mind the Times. Plainly, he resented the fact that Ms. Lindstrom might have taken advantage of Hugh’s professional advice while pretending her garden was entirely an amateur achievement.

  When Grant’s phone rang, he answered absently while scowling at his notes, spread on the desk before him. “Haller here.”

  “Mortensen,” the city manager said brusquely. “I need you to come to my office.”

  Grant didn’t much like being summoned as if he were a schoolboy being called over the intercom to the principal’s office, but he kept his voice even. “I can make time.”

  Jeffrey Mortensen was six feet four or five and painfully thin, giving him a peculiarly storklike appearance. He had his priorities: dollars and cents first, and the wishes of the city council members second. Any needs the citizens of his town might have came in a distant third. He and Grant had clashed more than once. Unfortunately, although he’d have to get council backing to fire his police chief, he was technically Grant’s boss.

  Grant knocked on the glass inset of his office door and entered without waiting for a “come in.” Mortensen sat behind his desk, the lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses glinting.

  His mouth tightened. “Haller.”