Presumed Guilty

by Tess Gerritsen

  “Lorne, he was out to kill her.”

  Lorne sat down and looked him in the eye. “And what are you out to do?”

  “Learn the truth.”

  “You don’t believe she did it?”

  “I’ve been hearing some things, Lorne. Other names, other motives. Tony Graffam, for instance.”

  “We’ve looked into that. Graffam was off the island when your brother was killed. I have half a dozen witnesses who’ll say so.”

  “He could have hired someone.”

  “Graffam was in big enough trouble with that north shore development. Charges of bribing the land planning commission. That article would’ve simply been the last nail in the coffin. Anyway, how does this tie in with what happened tonight? Why would he go after Miranda Wood?”

  Chase fell silent at that question. He couldn’t see a motive, either. Other people in town might dislike Miranda, but who would go to the trouble of killing her?

  “Maybe we’re looking at this the wrong way,” said Chase. “Let’s ask a more basic question. Who put up the bail money? Someone wanted her out so badly he put up a hundred thousand dollars.”

  “A secret admirer?”

  “In jail she’s safe. Out here she’s a sitting duck. You have any idea who bailed her out, Lorne?”

  “No.”

  “The money could be traced.”

  “A lawyer handled the transfer of funds. All cash. Came from some Boston account. Only the bank knows the account holder’s identity. And they aren’t talking.”

  “Subpoena the bank. Get the name on that account.”

  “It’ll take time.”

  “Do it, Lorne. Before something else happens.”

  Lorne went to the sink and rinsed his coffee cup. “I still don’t see why you’re getting into this,” he said.

  Chase himself didn’t know the answer. Just this morning he’d wanted Miranda Wood put behind bars. Now he wasn’t sure what he wanted. That innocent face, her heartfelt denials of guilt had him thoroughly confused.

  He looked around the kitchen, thinking it didn’t look like the kitchen of a murderess. Plants hung near the window, obviously well tended and well loved. The wallpaper had dainty wildflowers scattered across an eggshell background. Tacked to the refrigerator were snapshots of two little towheaded boys—nephews, maybe?—a schedule of the local garden club meetings and a shopping list. At the bottom of the list was written “cinnamon tea.” Was that the sort of beverage a murderess would drink? He couldn’t picture Miranda holding a knife in one hand and a cup of herbal tea in the other.

  Chase looked around as Dr. Steiner shuffled into the kitchen. Some things on the island never changed, and this old grouch was one of them. He looked exactly the same as Chase remembered from his boyhood, right down to the wrinkled brown suit and the alligator medical bag. “All this to-do,” the doctor said disapprovingly. “For nothin’ but a muscle strain.”

  “You sure about that?” asked Chase. “She was sort of dazed for a minute. Right after it happened.”

  “I looked her over good. She’s fine, neurologically speaking. You just keep an eye on her tonight, young man. Make sure she doesn’t get into trouble. You know, headache, double vision, confusion—”

  “I can’t.”

  “Can’t what?”

  “I can’t stay and watch her. It’s awkward. Considering...”

  “No kidding,” muttered Lorne.

  “She’s not my responsibility,” said Chase. “What do I do?”

  Dr. Steiner grunted and turned for the kitchen door. “You figure it out. By the way,” he said, pausing in the doorway, “I don’t do house calls.” The door slammed shut.

  Chase turned to find Lorne looking at him. “What?”

  “Nothing,” said Lorne. He reached for his hat. “I’m going home.”

  “And what the hell am I supposed to do?”

  “That,” said Lorne with an I-told-you-so look, “is your problem.”

  * * *

  Miranda lay on the living-room couch and stared at the ceiling. She could hear voices from the kitchen, the sound of the door opening and closing. She wondered what Chase had told them, whether Tibbetts believed any of it. She herself couldn’t believe what had happened. But all she had to do was close her eyes and it came back to her: the roar of the car engine, the twin headlights rushing at her.

  Who hates me so much they want me dead?

  It wasn’t hard to come up with an answer. The Tremain family. Evelyn and Phillip and Cassie....

  And Chase.

  No, that wasn’t possible. His shout of warning had saved her life. If not for him, she would be lying right now on a slab in Ben LaPorte’s Funeral Home.

  That thought made her shudder. Hugging herself, she burrowed deeper into the couch cushions, seeking some safe little nook in which to hide. She heard the kitchen door open and shut again, then footsteps creaked into the living room and approached the couch. She looked up and saw Chase.

  Weariness was what she read in his eyes, and uncertainty, as though he hadn’t quite made up his mind what should be done next. Or what should be said next. He’d shed his windbreaker. His chambray shirt was the comfortably faded blue of a well-worn, well-loved garment. That shirt reminded her of her father, of how it used to feel to nestle her face against his shoulder, of those wondrous childhood scents of laundry soap and pipe tobacco and safety. That was what she saw in that faded blue shirt, what she longed for.

  What she’d never find with this man.

  Chase sat in the armchair. A prudent distance away, she noted. Keeping me at arm’s length.

  “Feeling better?” he asked.

  “I’ll be fine.” She kept her voice like his—detached, neutral. She added, “You can leave if you want.”

  “No. Not yet. I’ll wait here awhile, if that’s okay. Until Annie gets here.”

  “Annie?”

  “I didn’t know who else to call. She said she’d be over to spend the night. You should have someone here to keep an eye on you. Make sure you don’t slide into a coma or something.”

  She gave a tired laugh. “A coma would feel pretty good right now.”

  “That’s not very funny.”

  She looked up at the ceiling. “You’re right. It isn’t.”

  There was a long silence.

  Finally he said, “That wasn’t an accident, Miranda. He was trying to kill you.”

  She didn’t answer. She lay there fighting back the sob swelling in her throat. Why should it matter to you? she thought. You, of all people.

  “Maybe you haven’t heard,” he said. “The car belonged to your neighbor. Mr. Lanzo.”

  She looked at him sharply. “Eddie Lanzo would never hurt me! He’s the only one who’s stood by me. My one friend in this town.”

  “I didn’t say it was him. Lorne thinks the driver stole Mr. Lanzo’s car. They found it abandoned by the pier.”

  “Poor Eddie,” she murmured. “Guess that’s the last time he leaves his keys in the car.”

  “So if it wasn’t Eddie, who does want you dead?”

  “I can make a wild guess.” She looked at him. “So can you.”

  “Are you referring to Evelyn?”

  “She hates me. She has every right to hate me. So do her children.” She paused. “So do you.”

  He was silent.

  “You still think I killed him. Don’t you?”

  Sighing, he raked his fingers through his hair. “I don’t know what to think anymore. About you, about anyone. All I can be sure of is what I saw tonight. It’s all tied in, this whole bloody mess. It has to be.”

  He looks so tired, so confused, she thought. Almost as confused as I am.

  “Maybe you should move out of here fo
r a few days,” he said. “Until things get sorted out.”

  “Where would I go?”

  “You must have friends.”

  “I did.” She looked away. “At least, I thought I did. But everything’s changed. I pass them on the street and they don’t even say hello. Or they cross to the other side. Or they pretend they don’t see me. That’s the worst of all. Because I begin to think I don’t exist.” She looked at him. “It’s a very small town, Chase. You either fit in, or you don’t belong. And there’s no way a murderess could ever fit in.” She lay back against the cushions and stared at the ceiling. “Besides, this is my house. My house. I saved like crazy for the down payment. I won’t leave it. It’s not much, but at least it’s mine.”

  “I can understand that. It’s a nice house.”

  He sounded sincere enough, but his words struck her as patronizing. The lord of the manor extolling the charms of the shepherd’s hovel.

  Suddenly annoyed, she sat up. The abrupt movement made the room spin. She clutched her head for a moment, waiting for the spell to pass.

  “Look, let’s be straight with each other,” she muttered through her hands. “It’s only a two-bedroom cottage. The basement’s damp, the water pipes screech and there’s a leak in the kitchen roof. It’s not Chestnut Street.”

  “To be honest,” he said quietly, “I never felt at home on Chestnut Street.”

  “Why not? You were raised there.”

  “But it wasn’t really a home. Not like this house.”

  Puzzled, she looked up at him. It struck her then how rough around the edges he seemed, a dark, rumpled stranger hulking in her mauve armchair. No, this man didn’t quite fit on Chestnut Street. He belonged on the docks, or on the windswept deck of a schooner, not in some stuffy Victorian parlor.

  “I’m supposed to believe you’d prefer a cottage on Willow Street to the family mansion?”

  “I guess it does sound—I don’t know. Phony. But it’s true. Know where I spent most of my time as a kid? In the turret, playing around all the trunks and the old furniture. That was the only place in the house where I felt comfortable. The one room no one else cared to visit.”

  “You sound like the family outcast.”

  “In a way, I was.”

  She laughed. “I thought all Tremains were, by definition, in.”

  “One can have the family name and still not be part of the family. Or didn’t you ever feel that way?”

  “No, I was always very much part of my family. What there was of it.” Her gaze drifted to the spinet piano, where the framed photo of her father was displayed. It was a grainy shot, one of the few she still had of him, taken with her old Kodak Brownie. He was grinning at her over the hood of his Chevy, a bald little gnome of a man dressed in blue overalls. She found herself smiling back at the image.

  “Your father?” asked Chase.

  “Yes. Stepfather, really. But he was every bit as wonderful as any real father.”

  “I hear he worked for the mill.”

  She frowned at him. It disturbed her that Chase was obviously acquainted with that detail of her life. A detail that was none of his business. “Yes,” she said. “Both my parents did. What else have you heard about me?”

  “It’s not that I’ve been checking up on you.”

  “But you have, haven’t you? You and your family have probably run my name through some computer. Criminal check. Family history. Credit report—”

  “We’ve done no such thing.”

  “Personal life. All the hot and juicy details.”

  “Where would I find those?”

  “Try my police record.” In irritation she rose from the couch and moved to the fireplace. There she stood focused on the clock over the mantelpiece. “It’s getting late, Mr. Tremain. Annie should be here any minute. You’re free to leave, so why don’t you?”

  “Why don’t you sit back down? It makes me nervous, having you up and about.”

  “I make you nervous?” She turned to him. “You hold all the cards. You know everything about me. What my parents did for a living. Where I went to school. Who I slept with. I don’t like that.”

  “Were there that many?”

  His retort struck her like a physical blow. She could think of no response to such a cruel question. She was reduced to staring at him in speechless fury.

  “Don’t answer,” he said. “I don’t want to know. Your love life’s none of my business.”

  “You’re right. It’s none of your damn business.” She turned away, angrily clutching the mantelpiece with both hands. “No matter what you learn about me, it’ll all fit right in with your image of the mill worker’s daughter, won’t it? Well, I’m not ashamed of where I came from. My parents made an honest living. They didn’t have some trust fund to keep them in caviar. Like some families I know,” she added, leaving no doubt by the tone of her voice just which family she was referring to.

  He acknowledged the insult with a brief silence.

  “I’m surprised you fell for Richard,” he said. “Considering your attitude toward trust-funders.”

  “Before I knew Richard, I didn’t have an attitude problem.” She turned to confront him. “Then I got to know him. I saw what the money did to him. For him. He never had to struggle. He always had that green buffer to protect him. It made him careless. Immune to other people’s pain.” Her jaw came up in a pose of proud disdain. “Just like you.”

  “Now you’re making the assumptions about me.”

  “You’re a Tremain.”

  “I’m like you. I have a job, Miranda. I work.”

  “So did Richard. It kept him amused.”

  “Okay, maybe you’re right about Richard. He didn’t need to work. The Herald was more of a hobby to him, a reason to get up in the morning. And he got a kick out of telling his friends in Boston that he was a publisher. But that was Richard. You can’t slap that rich-boy label on me because it won’t stick. I was booted out of the family years ago. I don’t have a trust fund and I don’t own a mansion. But I do have a job that pays the bills. And, yes, keeps me amused.”

  His anger was tightly controlled but evident all the same. I’ve touched a nerve, she thought. An acutely sensitive one. Chastened, she sat in a chair by the fireplace. “I guess—I guess I assumed a few too many things.”

  He nodded. “We both did.”

  In silence they gazed at each other across the room. A truce, however uneasy, had at last settled between them.

  “You said you were booted out of the family. Why?” she asked.

  “Simple. I got married.”

  She looked at him in puzzlement. He had said the words without emotion, with the tone of voice one used to describe the weather. “I take it she wasn’t a suitable bride.”

  “Not according to my father.”

  “The wrong side of the tracks?”

  “In a manner of speaking. My father, he was attuned to that sort of thing.”

  Naturally, she thought. “And was your father right? About those girls from the wrong side of the tracks?”

  “That wasn’t why we got divorced.”

  “Why did you?”

  “Christine was too...ambitious.”

  “Hardly a flaw.”

  “It is when I’m just the rung on the social ladder she’s trying to climb.”

  “Oh.”

  “And then we had some lean years. I was working all the time, and...” He shrugged. Another silence stretched between them.

  “Richard never told me what kind of work you do.”

  He leaned back, the tension easing away from his face. Unexpectedly he laughed. “Probably because what I do struck him as so damn boring. My partners and I design office buildings.”

  “You’re an architect?”<
br />
  “Structural engineer. My architect partners do the creative work. I make sure the walls don’t come crashing down.”

  An engineer. Not exactly a fluff career, she thought, but a real, honest job. Like her father had.

  She shook her head. “It’s strange. When I look at you, I can’t quite believe you’re his brother. I always assumed...”

  “That we’d be a matched set? No, we were definitely different. In more ways than you’ll ever know.”

  Yes, the more she knew about Chase, the less he seemed like a Tremain. And the more she thought she could like him.

  “What did you ever see in my brother?” he asked.

  His question, voiced so softly, was jarring all the same. It reminded her of the ghosts that still hovered in this house.

  She sighed. “I saw what I wanted to see.”

  “Which was?”

  “A man who needed me. A man I could play savior to.”

  “Richard?”

  “Oh, it seemed as if he had everything going for him. But he also had this...this vulnerability. This need to be saved. From what, I don’t know. Maybe himself.”

  “And you were going to save him.”

  She gave a bitter laugh. “I don’t know. You don’t think about these things. You just feel. And you fall into it....”

  “You mean you followed your heart.”

  She looked up at him. “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Didn’t it seem wrong to you?”

  “Of course it did!”

  “But?”

  Her whole body sagged with the weight of her unhappiness. “I couldn’t...see my way out of it. I cared about him. I wanted to be there for him. And he’d string me along. He’d tell me things would work out, as long as we both had faith.” She looked down at her hands, clasped together in her lap. “I guess I lost my faith first.”

  “In him? Or the situation?”

  “Him. I began to see the flaws. It came out, after a while. How he manipulated people, used people. If he didn’t need you, he’d ignore you. A user, that’s what he was. An expert at making people do what he wanted.”