A Woman with a Mystery Read online

  “I hope you don’t mind me stopping by,” he said, stomping the snow from his boots.

  “You know better than that. I have a pot of coffee on and I just baked sugar cookies. Would you like some?”

  He smiled in answer. He’d never been able to turn down her sugar cookies. She’d gotten the recipe from his mother, and he was pretty sure she purposely always kept a batch around for him and Shelley during the holidays for that very reason.

  She poured them each a cup of coffee, then motioned to a chair at the kitchen table. He took the cups of hot coffee over, placed them on the table and pulled out a chair for each of them. She followed with a plate of just-iced cookies.

  “I suspect this isn’t a social call,” she said after he’d downed several cookies and sipped politely at his coffee rather than just jump right in with what he’d come for. “What’s on your mind?”

  He smiled his thanks. With Norma and the chief, he didn’t have to beat around the bush. He appreciated that, since patience wasn’t his long suit.

  He pulled out his mother’s letter and handed it to her. “I would imagine the chief already told you about this.”

  Norma opened the letter, taking note of who it was from, then read it slowly. When she finished, she carefully folded it and put it back in the envelope, avoiding his gaze.

  “You knew,” he said, surprised almost beyond words.

  “Yes,” she said. “I knew.”

  He could see she had no intention of telling him anything. “I’ve never believed that Roy Vogel killed my mother.”

  She nodded.

  “This man, whoever he was, I feel it in my gut, he’s the one who killed her. And all these years, he’s gotten away with it.”

  She swallowed, tears filled her eyes as she looked away.

  “If there is even a chance this man did it, don’t you want to see him brought to justice? Please, help me. You were my mother’s best friend.”

  “Oh, Slade.”

  He felt as if his heart would burst. “Then she was having an affair?”

  Norma looked at him, her gaze full of compassion and pain. “I don’t know that it was an ‘affair.”’ But the look in her eyes told him otherwise. “I only saw them once. I stopped by the house. Through the window, I saw her in the arms of a man. I only got a glimpse of him before she spotted me. I hurriedly left.”

  Definitely inconclusive evidence, even to him, that his mother had been having an affair. “That’s it?”

  “Your mother caught up to me as I was leaving and begged me not to tell anyone.” She stopped, the words obviously coming hard. “Especially not your father.”

  “You never asked her about him?”

  “Never. All I knew was that she met him on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.”

  Tuesdays and Thursdays? The two days of the week that he and Shelley walked to the police station to meet their father and ride home with him. The two days of the week they all came home late.

  Slade felt numb. “Does the chief know?”

  She shook her head. “He wouldn’t have believed it anyway.”

  “Then he didn’t mention this letter to you?” Slade asked in surprise.

  “No, did you expect him to?”

  As a matter-of-fact, Slade had. He’d always thought there were no secrets between the chief and Norma.

  “Do you have any idea who he might have been?” he asked her. “Any idea at all?”

  She shook her head. “I never asked. Your mother never told me. It was better that way.”

  He wondered if he knew anyone, really knew them. “How could my mother live with that sort of deception?” He met Norma’s gaze. “How could you?”

  She didn’t even flinch. He’d expected to see guilt, regret. Instead, her eyes blazed with something he couldn’t understand.

  “Your mother was happy, happier than I had ever seen her,” Norma said with a rush of feeling. “I loved your mother like a sister. I wanted to see her happy.”

  He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “What about my dad and us kids?”

  “I knew she would never leave your father or you kids.”

  “How do you know that?” Slade demanded.

  “She loved him, loved you and Shelley, too much.”

  He snorted at that. “You don’t have an affair if you love your husband.”

  “Don’t you?” she challenged. “Whatever she got from this man, she wasn’t getting at home.”

  He stared at her, shocked by her attitude as much as her words.

  “Sometimes a woman needs more than her husband can give her,” Norma said. “And I’m not talking about sex.”

  Slade could only stare at her. “You sound as if you—”

  “As if I know firsthand?” She looked away. “It was a long time ago. I was very young. I wanted children. L.T. was working all the time—

  “I don’t want to hear this,” Slade said, suddenly getting to his feet, sloshing coffee from his cup onto the tablecloth.

  “Maybe you should hear this. You are so quick to judge your mother.”

  He felt as if she’d slapped him. “I’m trying to find my mother’s killer. That’s all.” But he knew she’d struck a chord. He’d seen his mother as perfect. Just as he had Norma. He swore under his breath as he sat back down, took a paper napkin and began to sop up the spilled coffee. “It’s just such a shock. You think you know someone…”

  Norma nodded. “People are human. Sometimes they make mistakes.”

  “Was your affair a mistake?”

  “No,” she said flatly.

  He stared at her. Was she saying marrying L.T. had been her mistake? “Did you ever think about leaving the chief?” he had to ask.

  She dropped her gaze in answer.

  He was almost too shocked to ask. “What happened to the man?”

  “He was in love with someone else.”

  He shook his head, beyond disillusioned. “You have no idea what my mother would have done. Maybe she was planning to leave us and the man didn’t want that.” A thought struck him. “Or maybe he was married and my mother threatened to tell his wife. Whatever happened between my mother and this man, it got her killed. I’d stake my life on it.”

  He looked at Norma, the last person he would have expected to have an affair. No, he thought, his mother was the last person. Norma sat with her hands wrapped around her coffee cup, huddled over the hot dark liquid as if needing the heat. He could see the weight of the deception in her shoulders, the weight of keeping her best friend’s secret, of keeping her own. “You never told the chief?”

  She shook her head, not looking up. “It would have killed him.”

  Slade nodded. “I think it killed my father.”

  AS HE DROVE AWAY, Slade thought back to his childhood. His mother always at the stove when he and Shelley came home from school. She seemed always to be cooking. His father was usually late because being a cop wasn’t like a desk job.

  Had his mother been different on Tuesdays and Thursdays? Not that he could remember. He’d always thought his mother was happy. Had everything been a lie?

  Another thought wormed its way in as he drove through town. His father had been a cop. If Joe Rawlins had suspected something, wouldn’t he have investigated? What would his father have done if he found out his wife was having an affair?

  The thought shook him as he pulled into the visitors parking lot of the Dry Creek Police Department.

  “WHY DIDN’T YOU tell me before this just whose family plot you wanted to dig up?” Curtis demanded after Slade told him.

  Slade stared dumbly at the chief as he closed the door to the cop’s office. “You knew Wellington?”

  “Dr. Allan Wellington? Damnation, Slade.”

  “The baby isn’t Allan’s. Allan’s been dead for over a year,” Slade snapped. He didn’t want to talk about Allan Wellington. He didn’t even want to think about him. Not now. “And who the hell cares about Allan Wellington anyway?”

  �
�I see,” Curtis said in his so-that’s-the-way-it-is voice. “Judge Koran will care. And Inez Wellington will care a whole hell of a lot.”

  “Inez doesn’t have to find out.” Slade said.

  “Judge Koran is a good friend of Inez Wellington’s. Need I say more?”

  No, Slade thought. It seemed Inez had powerful connections.

  Curtis let out a loud sigh as he sat back down behind his desk. “Only you would take a client who was married to Allan Damn Wellington, of all people.”

  He wondered how Curtis knew who Wellington was when Slade had only a vague feeling he’d heard of him.

  “Holly was only married to him for a matter of days. And what did he do anyway, invent a cure for cancer or something?” Slade demanded, taking a seat across from the chief. Why hadn’t he even thought to ask Holly what kind of doctor her husband had been? He knew the answer to that one. He didn’t like the man. Didn’t even have to know anything about him to know that.

  “He was just one of the top infertility doctors in the U.S.,” Curtis said. “He made it possible for thousands of couples to have children.”

  Something in the way he’d added the last— “You and Norma went to him.”

  The expression on the cop’s face hardened. Curtis wouldn’t like his wife confiding their secrets. “We were one of the couples he couldn’t help. It seems I’m sterile.”

  Slade heard the bitterness, the disappointment. “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t want your sympathy,” Curtis snapped. “At least I’m not responsible for bringing you into the world.”

  Slade pulled up a chair and sat down, feeling tired and lost.

  “Look, the sister-in-law had the baby named Allan Junior and buried the body in the Wellington family plot.”

  Curtis lifted a brow. “How did that happen if it wasn’t his kid?”

  “You’ll know when you meet Inez—if you haven’t already. Anyway, it turns out that there is a good chance the baby isn’t even my client’s. But the infant definitely wasn’t Allan Wellington’s.”

  “You know that for a fact?”

  “For a fact,” Slade said meeting his gaze.

  The chief let out a long sigh. “The Wellington name means a lot in this country, let alone this area. The doc was like a god. He was on talk shows!”

  Slade had heard enough. “Are you saying there isn’t any chance of an exhumation if we find we need it to prove the paternity of the baby?”

  “We?”

  He ignored that. “Well?”

  “Wellington’s sister will raise holy hell. It won’t be easy to get an exhumation. You’re going to have to have a damned good reason.”

  “The baby in that grave could be mine,” Slade said. That was the bottom line. “If it’s not, then the infant I sired is more than likely on the black market right now. If it hasn’t already been sold. Or worse.”

  Curtis actually seemed at a loss for words. He shook his head. “Well I’ll be damned. This must be that woman you had staying with you this time last year, the one who couldn’t remember who she was.”

  Slade had forgotten that the chief had met Holly. “Yeah.” But he hadn’t come here to talk about Holly Barrows. He took a breath and let it out slowly. “I just spoke with Norma. She knew about my mother’s secret.”

  The chief looked as if all the wind had been knocked out of him. He got up from behind his desk and went to the window, his back to Slade.

  “Norma knew?” he asked, shock and disbelief in his voice. “Does she know who the man was?”

  Slade studied the older man from the back, unsure why the cop was taking this so badly. From the beginning, Slade had had a bad feeling that Curtis knew more about this than he was willing to tell him, but never more than at this moment. “She says she doesn’t. But I think you do.”

  “Why would you think that?” Curtis asked, his back still to him.

  “Gut instinct. Isn’t that what you said made a good cop? Isn’t that what you told my father all the time?”

  The chief didn’t answer as he turned slowly around. His face had grayed. He looked older than his years. He moved to his chair and gripped the back, his knuckles white.

  “When were you planning to tell me?” Slade asked, fear making his voice sound strangled.

  Curtis blinked, then seemed to focus again as if, for a moment, he’d forgotten Slade was there. “You don’t think that I was her— Good Lord, don’t you know me better than that?”

  “I thought I knew my mother better than that,” Slade snapped. “Now I’m not sure I know anyone. Even you.”

  “I’m going to say this once and then you and I are never going to have this conversation again, is that understood? I wasn’t her lover.”

  Slade wanted desperately to believe him. Anyone but Chief L. T. Curtis. And yet he’d seen the cop’s reaction to the news. If, God forbid, it had been L.T., then what did that do to his theory about his mother’s lover being the killer? “Why do I get the feeling that you know who was?”

  Curtis shook his head. “Your father was like a brother to me. I would have killed for him.”

  “Did you?” Slade asked.

  “I think you’d better go.”

  Slade didn’t move. “It crossed my mind that one of you could have found out that she was seeing someone every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. One of you could have been waiting. Or both of you. If you found him with her at the house—” He shook his head. “The two of you—”

  “I don’t have time for this,” the chief snapped as he came around his desk, hitting it with his leg, sending several files showering to the floor. He didn’t seem to notice as he started past Slade for the door.

  Slade grabbed his sleeve. “L.T.,” he said, his voice softening at the name he used to call the chief back when Slade was just a boy. “I have to know the truth. No matter what.” The words echoed. So close to what Holly had said.

  L. T. Curtis jerked his arm free. His eyes hardened to stone, making it clear he was the chief of police, not the man who’d finished raising Slade. “I’ve reopened your mother’s murder investigation based on the new evidence. It’s out of your hands now. Don’t butt heads with me on this. I could have your license pulled. And I will.” He strode to his office door, jerked it open and stomped out.

  Slade stared after the man, shaken. The chief had reopened the investigation? Because he now believed that the killer could have been Marcella Rawlins’s lover? Or because he wanted to keep Slade from finding out the truth by making the case off-limits?

  He started to leave, but bent to pick up the files first. He couldn’t miss the photos that had fallen out of one of the files. A half-dozen snapshots of a murder scene. The chief must have been looking at Slade’s mother’s file when he came in. No wonder the man was worked up.

  Agonized, he flipped through the photos, stopping on the last one. A close-up of his mother’s hand holding the Christmas ornament she’d pulled from the tree, the last act of her life.

  He stared at the tiny golden twin angels. He’d forgotten which ornament she’d grabbed. He’d always just thought she’d been clutching at the tree. But as he looked at the ornament he wondered if she could have possibly been trying to leave them a message.

  Twin angels. Wasn’t that what she’d always called him and Shelley? Maybe she had been trying to tell them something. That she was thinking of him and Shelley, that they were her last thought.

  Or maybe she’d just been clutching at anything she could get her hands on—just as he was now.

  Chapter Six

  As Slade drove toward Pinedale and Holly’s studio, the afternoon sun cast long gray shadows across the snow. He could feel the temperature dropping outside the pickup, the windows trying to frost up. He kicked up the heat, his heart heavy, mind racing.

  He didn’t know what to think. Or who to believe. Nothing had been as it appeared. And now he was doubting people he’d known his whole life.

  He pulled up in front of Holly’s
place, cut the engine and stared up at the apartment, the dying light shining on the window like a two-way mirror. He felt sick with worry and couldn’t tell which case had filled him with such dread. Maybe both. His mother’s murder pulled at him. Just as everything Inez had told him about Holly did. He feared what Holly would tell him when he confronted her. Feared what he’d find out about his mother.

  But, like Holly, he had to know the truth. No matter what. And there was no turning back now for either of them.

  For a few minutes, he sat in his pickup, immobilized by a terrible foreboding. Then, slowly, he opened the door and stepped out, not bothering to zip his ski jacket against the bite of the icy breeze. The sun had set, leaving the eastern sky a cold, clear blue. By morning, everything would be covered in thick frost. Or snow. Again.

  He thought about the fireplace at Shelley’s and about sitting in front of it drinking a glass of Scotch, just staring into the flames. He wanted to forget about everything, just for a little while.

  But he couldn’t. Not until he talked to Holly. He tried not to think about the baby. The one buried in the Wellington family plot as Allan Junior. Or the one Holly claimed was alive and taken by three monsters in masks.

  His steps heavy as he climbed the stairs to her apartment, he felt a weight, like a premonition of bad things to come. For the first time, he wondered if the chief wasn’t right. Maybe he didn’t want to know who’d killed his mother. Or the truth about Holly Barrows, either.

  But he’d opened Pandora’s box, and he couldn’t close it until he knew what was inside. It was a character flaw, his inability to leave things unfinished. His mother’s murder was one of them. Holly Barrows was the other.

  Holly gave him a faint worried smile as she let him in. “So you met Inez.”

  He wanted to ask her what had possessed her to marry into a family like that. But he feared he already knew. “I need you to tell me about your husband’s insurance policy. And your breakdown.”

  She winced and turned back toward the living room. “I would imagine you could use a drink.”

  He watched her sort through the bottles of liquor in a small bar against the wall, passing up several different Scotches to pull out a bottle of Glenlivet and pour him a couple of inches. Straight. No ice. She poured herself a cola on ice.