Don't Be Afraid (15 page)

“Hi,” she said, her own voice squeaky, watching her pudgy hand disappear in his. He shook it gently and let go. “Mind if I sit down?” he said and she did mind. Already she could see that they were attracting attention, that people were staring at the good-looking cop and the fat girl and wondering how the two of them paired up.

“I guess not,” she said, pushing the other chair out with her toe.

“Thanks.” He sat down and appraised her over his cone, licking for a moment in silence. She looked away, feigning indifference, though she could feel her face heating up.

“Have you heard about the other killing?” he said.

“Yeah.” She’d seen it on TV, and read about it in the
Steerforth Herald
.

“I’m sure you were upset by the news.”

“Um, yeah, I guess.” She tried to savor her cone, but the detective was distracting. He wore a striped cotton shirt, button-down, with the cuffs folded back so she could see the small dark hairs around his wrists. Dave had favored shirts like that and he’d worn them the same way, those precise cuffs, that same amount of wrist showing. Of course, Dave was fair and his hands smaller than this cop’s.

“You knew Meredith Chomsky, didn’t you?” Juarez said.

“What?” Penelope looked up at him, trying to focus. He’d stopped licking his cone and was staring at her. “I guess,” she said. “I knew her a little.”

“You belonged to the same health club?”

“Yeah.” Now her entire body felt hot with embarrassment. It was like some bad commercial—she and Meredith Chomsky, the before and after-diet pics.

“You even took the same aerobics class, right?”

“Yeah.” It occurred to her, only now, that this was no accidental meeting. He’d wanted to talk to her, and had probably followed her from her office.

“I understand you had a run-in with her in class?”

Was he making a pun? She’d had a run-in all right. The teacher had been leading them through a series of jazz moves and Penelope lost her balance, slipping on that polished floor and taking Meredith down like a bowling pin.

“The aerobics teacher told me that Meredith yelled at you?” His voice was gentle, but the eyes were watching her intently.

Suddenly, Penelope didn’t want any more ice cream. She stood up and headed for the trashcan with her dripping cone. The detective stood up as well, following behind her, tossing his cone without a backwards look.

“Meredith Chomsky humiliated you in front of a roomful of people,” he said.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Penelope said, pushing past him and heading for the exit. The teenage girls were huddled around a table near the door. One of them snickered as she passed and whispered something to her friends.

“She said some very hurtful things, didn’t she?” the detective said as she pushed open the door. He followed her outside.

“
Hurtful?
” Was that the word she’d use? “Get off me, you fat bitch,” Meredith had said, shrieking for help to extricate her from under the “elephant.” She complained of back pain when both she and Penelope got to their feet, and then she demanded to know if there wasn’t a weight limit for the class.

“Yes,” Penelope said. “She said hurtful things.”

“And you stopped going to the club, right?”

Tears prickled in Penelope’s eyes, but she held them back. She hadn’t held them back that day. They spilled down her cheeks as she lumbered from the class and headed straight for the locker room. “I-I couldn’t face going again,” she whispered.

“Until yesterday,” Juarez said, his voice soft, his eyes filled with pity that was as damaging, in its own way, as the snickers and whispers from others

“I read that she’d been killed. I thought—well, I thought that it would be okay to go back.”

“Where were you on Wednesday evening?”

“At home.”

“Alone?”

Did he need it spelled out—nobody wanted her! She lived alone and she’d die alone, a fat old woman who’d only been loved once and then by a man who used her as a shield to hide his real interests.

“Yes, I was alone.”

“And what about the week before. The morning of Tuesday, the sixth?”

“I don’t know. Work, I suppose.”

“So you weren’t killing Sheila Sylvester on Tuesday morning?”

“No!” She knew he’d intended to shock her and it worked. “I liked Sheila!”

“Even though she told you at a meeting that you needed to lose weight?”

“It’s obvious I need to lose weight, detective.”

“But it isn’t nice hearing it, especially from someone who’s supposed to be your friend.”

“She didn’t mean it like that. She wasn’t nasty, she wasn’t like Meredith.”

“She was trying to help you?”

“Yes. She said I had a pretty face and I could have a pretty body to match.” Her face flamed saying the words out loud, but he didn’t react.

“I didn’t kill her and I didn’t kill Meredith,” she said. “I don’t know who told you that story about Sheila, but if you want some weird coincidences you shouldn’t be checking me out. Have you talked to Jackson? He’s the one you should talk to if you want to know about Meredith.”

He pulled out a small notebook, flipping through it rapidly and she took the opportunity to walk away. He caught up to her.

“Why should I talk to Jackson?” he said.

She didn’t hesitate. Let someone else deal with this. “Because he dated her.”

Jackson Lapinski’s restaurant, Shade Blue, was a favorite with connoisseurs of fine dining and not just in Steerforth. It was not uncommon on the weekends to find Manhattanites waiting at the bar for their table to open up, or in good weather sitting outside at the café tables, drinking one of the wines from his small but excellent cellar.

The nature of the restaurant business was to handle various food crises and handle them well. The salmon didn’t arrive? Substitute marlin. The soup was too salty? Add raw potato cubes to absorb it. The custard caught on fire? Turn it into flambé.

The one crisis they weren’t used to dealing with was police scrutiny. Mark Juarez could feel the eyes of every sous-chef and waiter on him when he arrived an hour before lunch. Jackson was wearing a white jacket with a single, dramatic red smear down the front and he could not or would not stand still, moving around the kitchen at a ferocious rate of speed, barking orders at the staff and sampling numerous dishes.

“Yes, I dated Meredith Chomsky,” he freely admitted when he learned the reason for Mark’s visit. “It was years ago. We were both a lot younger and I still had hair.” He laughed heartily at his own humor, running one hand over his shaved head.

“When was the last time you talked to her?”

“I don’t know—a long, long time ago.” He moved over to another stove and an enormous pot and took a quick taste of a yellow sauce, looking like an overgrown hummingbird hovering over a flower. “Come here,” he said, waving Mark closer. “You’ve got to taste this.”

A fresh spoon appeared out of nowhere and Mark dutifully tasted.

“It’s delicious.”

“Yes, yes, it should be.” Jackson smiled. He said something unintelligible in cooking lingo to the short Asian man in the white chef’s coat directing traffic around that station.

“Phone records indicate that you spoke to Ms. Chomsky two weeks ago,” Mark pushed on, following Jackson to the next stop where several young pastry chefs were making what looked like chocolate tarts.

“Did I?” Jackson seemed unperturbed. “What’s happened, is she saying that I did something?”

“Meredith Chomsky is dead,” Juarez said, looking for impact and surprised when he got it from everyone else in the room. Everyone stopped to stare in his direction, but he looked only at Jackson’s face, gauging his reaction.

Jackson paused, too, but that stopping was his only visible emotion. “How did she die?” he asked after a minute.

“Shot,” Juarez said. They would not reveal the weapon.

“That’s too bad,” Jackson said. “She was a physically lovely creature.” He began moving again and the rest of his staff joined suit.

“Only physically?”

Jackson smiled. “An ugly personality that could not be hidden, ultimately, by that perfect body.”

“How long did you date?” Mark asked, following him to another stove. Jackson tasted something and spat it out.

“This is terrible! What are you trying to do? Close us down? I give you beautiful vegetables and you offer me this crap? I should fire your ass. Throw out this swill and do it again!”

The cook being subjected to this tirade was a young woman with purple hair and a nose ring. She nodded and went back to work as if being berated like this was all part of the job.

“We dated for about six months before she realized that it wasn’t as exciting dating a chef as she’d thought,” Jackson answered Juarez in a normal tone. He seemed more amused than offended by the recollection.

“Do you remember the phone conversation you had with Meredith?”

“Well, knowing Meredith, she was probably trying to score something. Ever since the review in the
Times
, we’ve been completely booked every night. She probably wanted me to make an exception for her.”

“Did you?”

Jackson laughed, spilling some of the capers he was adding to a salad another young chef had brought for him to check. “I have no idea!” he said. “How long ago was it? You’d have to ask Holly to check the books. Holly? Where’s Holly?”

“You sent her to get the wine,” a tattooed young man reminded him.

“Yes, yes, of course I did.” Jackson patted him beatifically on the cheek and threw up his arms for Juarez. “So, do you want to come back and talk to her?”

“Not especially. Can someone else give us this information?”

The other man sighed and stroked his goatee. “Not as easily, no. It’s her system, not mine. Holly is the manager, you see, and the maitre d’. She does not interfere in my kitchen and I do not interfere with her books.” He smiled as if this was completely understandable, but his smile faded a bit when Juarez asked him to account for his whereabouts on the day and night in question.

“Am I, Jackson Lapinski, really a suspect?” he asked with indignation. “What possible motive do I have?”

“You dated one of the victims and were known to have had a loud argument with the other, Sheila Sylvester.”

“This is absurd. So I fought with her at a meeting. It doesn’t mean that I killed her.”

“Nonetheless, Mr. Lapinski, I do need to know where you were on those dates.”

“Fine. Let me look.” Jackson stalked to a room just off the kitchen that was equipped as a small office. A suit coat was hanging from the back of the chair and he pulled a PDA from it. Juarez looked around the office while Jackson poked at the gadget with a stylus.

The office had a bookcase so stuffed with cookbooks that it seemed in danger of collapsing and a wooden desk with an iMac and silver-framed photos of Jackson with two young boys. There was a smaller framed photo, hidden slightly behind the others, of a beautiful, red-haired woman.

Juarez picked it up to look at it more closely and Jackson looked up from his PDA and frowned. He plucked the frame from Juarez’s hands and put it back in place behind the others.

“As you can see, on the evening of the sixteenth I was at the restaurant,” he said, drawing Juarez’s attention to the screen.

“And the morning of the sixth?”

Jackson scrolled again. “There is nothing on the sixth, so I’m sure I was at home, sleeping.”

“These your kids, Mr. Lapinski?” Juarez nodded at the photos of the boys.

“Yes.”

“Nice-looking boys. How old are they?”

“Eight and ten.”

“It must be hard, juggling their schedules with being a chef.”

Jackson’s face shuttered. “I manage.”

“But you’re a single dad, right? That’s how you knew Sheila Sylvester, from the support group?”

“My therapist recommended it.”

He said “therapist” the way some people say “mother-in-law,” as if this were someone to be endured.

“Is that your wife?” Juarez reached for the frame with the red-haired woman’s picture and Jackson immediately put his hand on the opposite corner, stopping him.

“I don’t think that’s any of your business, detective,” he said. He moved in front of the desk, blocking Juarez’s view and gestured toward the door. “I’ve answered your questions, detective, so if you don’t mind, I must return to my kitchen.”

 

 

Emma loved the ducks at Waldorf Park, running back and forth from her mother to the edge of the small pond, joyfully flinging handfuls of stale bread into the still water. It was one of those rare fall days when the sun was high and hot in a bright blue sky and if it weren’t for the carpet of red and gold leaves covering the ground, you could believe it was early summer.

Amy leaned back on the park bench, tilting her face up toward the heat, closing her eyes against the brightness and letting Emma’s chatter become background music while she pondered her conversation with the detectives.

Perhaps it was the shock of finding Meredith, combined with discovering that Trevor wasn’t responsible for Sheila’s death, but Amy hadn’t fully grasped her own connection to the murders. Two gruesome killings, both at her properties, both left for her to discover. It couldn’t be coincidental.

When she thought it was Trevor, she hadn’t been afraid. Horrified, yes, by the nature of Sheila’s death, by the loss of her friend and the emotional support that relationship had represented, but not afraid. Now she was scared. Everyone was a suspect. She caught herself looking around, wondering if the killer was lurking nearby.

She also felt fully the impact of finding the photos at Meredith’s. In trying to protect herself, she’d ended up as a suspect. Even now, the police could be watching her.

Amy turned to scan the small parking lot some twenty-five feet away. Was that someone standing near the copse of pine trees? She got up to get a better look, leaving the bench and crossing the lawn to the crushed limestone path that ran from the pond to the parking lot.

The figure she saw near the trees turned out to be a tennis player coming to take advantage of the weather at the outdoor courts, but there were other things that caught her attention. A car idled with a shadowy figure behind the wheel. A man, smoking, slouched against the slide of the large brightly colored playground opposite the parking lot, though there wasn’t a child in sight.

Suspicion took hold like a virus. Amy shook herself mentally and turned back to Emma. The ducks were still circling the shore, waiting for bread, but Emma was gone.

The edge of the pond where she’d been standing was empty. Amy looked farther on, fully expecting to see the familiar dark little head bobbing, but there was nobody.

“Emma!” Amy called, trying to make her voice carry across the pond. The limestone path circled the pond and then shot off it, like spokes on a wheel, diverging into the woods or toward the picnic pavilions.

She ran along the right bank of the pond, feeling panic rising like a storm. She scanned the edges, looking along the rocks that bordered the pond, at the grasses and mums that grew among them. She’d thought they were so pretty, but now they seemed like thoughtless planning. A child could hide in those grasses, sit down behind those rocks and not be seen. A child could slip into the water on the other side of the rocks and nobody would notice at all.

“Emma!” She was screaming it now, turning in circles to see the whole of the park. An older woman had paused on the path and was staring at her, not noticing that the toddler whose hand she held had released a pink balloon and it was floating higher and higher in the sky.

Emma wasn’t at the shiny new playground across the field. She wasn’t at the tennis courts; she wasn’t behind any of the rocks or grasses near the water’s edge. If she’d slipped into the pond, there were no ripples now. Amy saw a small handful of crusts on the grass on the far side of the pond, well away from the water, and she hoped Emma had dropped them.

“Where are you, Emma?” she shouted, her voice ragged at this point. She bargained with God.
Let her be alive and I’ll never complain about her illness again. Let her be safe and I’ll never let her out of my sight again. Let her be alive. Let her be well.

Just as the panic had begun to solidify into a rock-hard certainty that Emma had been snatched, Amy heard someone call her name.

“Amy! Over here!”

She turned and saw a man waving from the small walking bridge she’d just passed. It crossed a gully at the edge of the parkland and suddenly she remembered the old playground.

It seemed to take forever to stop, turn back and run across that bridge, though afterwards she realized it was really just seconds. The man looked familiar. He was carrying a baby in a backpack. She realized it was Paul, the new guy from the single parents’ support group. He was smiling.

“It’s okay,” he said. “She’s here. She’s okay.”

He moved aside so Amy could run ahead of him. There, on the old metal jungle gym that the town still hadn’t removed, was Emma.

“Mommy! Look at me!” She was hanging upside down, swinging from a bar in the center so that she looked like an exotic bird in a cage. Amy ran toward her, vision blurred for a moment by tears of relief. She reached out to her daughter, but Emma protested, “I can do it” and pulled herself up before jumping to the ground.

Amy caught her in a bone-crushing hug and Emma allowed it for a moment before wiggling to get away. “Mommy, let go!”

Only Amy couldn’t, not all the way. She let her daughter pull back far enough to see her face, but she kept Emma’s arms in a firm grip. “What have I told you about wandering off?” she said, speaking sternly.

“But I didn’t, Mommy. I said I was going to play.” Emma’s voice was plaintive.

Had she? Amy wasn’t sure. She’d been distracted; maybe Emma had told her. “Okay, baby, it’s okay,” she said as Emma started to cry. She loosened her grip, but pulled Emma back into a hug, stroking her hair. “Just make sure Mommy hears you, okay? I don’t want to lose you.”

Some movement on the edge of the old playground caught her eye and she looked up to see Paul.

“Thank you so much,” she said. “I was frantic.”

“I can imagine.” He smiled, lightly jogging the baby up and down in its carrier. The baby was a solemn little boy with a moon face and big brown eyes. The only resemblance he bore to his father was found in his small tuft of light hair.

“This is Brendan.” Paul reached behind him and lifted one of the baby’s chubby hands to wave. Amy laughed.

“He’s cute.”

“Thanks. We think so—” He stopped short, the smile fading. “I mean, I think so.”

She remembered that he was a widower. “I’m sorry. It must be hard.”

“He misses Beth. They say he’ll be too young to remember, but I can’t help think he knows he’s been left with the less competent parent.”

There was so much pain in his voice that Amy reached out and touched his arm.

“I’m sure you’re a great dad,” she said. “I think it’s just the nature of parenting that you always feel inadequate for the job.”

He put his hand over hers. “That’s very kind. Thanks.”