False Premises (22 page)

Although her husband didn’t acknowledge me, Mrs. Smith looked up at me with vacant eyes. “Won’t you sit down?”

I murmured my thanks and slipped into the chair next to hers.

“Kind of you to come,” she said on a sigh. “Not many did.”

“Laura hadn’t been back in Crestview very long. Not long enough to get to know many people.”

Mrs. Smith frowned and said softly, “It would have been the same story if we’d held the service in our new home in Kansas. Or in South Bend, where we moved from. Laura had a hard time getting close to people. Whenever she did . . . well, she was afraid she’d come to love them, only to lose them, you see. She told you about what happened to her birth parents?”

“Yes, she did. I’m sure that was unfathomably difficult for her to handle.”

Mrs. Smith nodded with pursed lips and dabbed at her brimming eyes. Angry red splotches were forming on Mr. Smith’s cheeks, meanwhile, and he was studiously avoiding my gaze.

“I was adopted, too,” I said. “Not under anything like Laura’s circumstances, though, of course.”

“He was my brother. Her father was, I mean,” Mrs. Smith replied. “We tried our best to raise her right.”

“You did everything you could for her,” I replied. “You got her into therapy. And you even took her to see Robert Pembrook.”

“Who?” she asked.

At the mention of the name, her husband regarded me with fierce, bright eyes, but said nothing.

“The image consultant. He’s right . . .” I glanced behind me to point him out. John was now speaking to the eulogist, and the two of them were the only people in the room other than those of us at the two tables. “He must have left. He was at the service.”

“Oh, yes. Robert Pembrook. In the black shirt and purple tie. I’d forgotten his name. Laura did that on her own.” Mrs. Smith’s voice and expression were inscrutable.

“You mean she smartened up her self-image on her own, or that she chose to see Mr. Pembrook on her own?”

“That queer ruined my daughter’s life, you ask me,” Laura’s father said with a snarl.

“Well, nobody
did
ask you!” his wife fired back.

“Are you some sort of undercover cop?” he demanded, glaring at me.

“No. Like I said, I was a friend of Laura’s.”

“Yeah? Well, you were sitting right next to her killer.”

“Oh, Richard . . .” his wife moaned.

Shocked, I asked, “You don’t mean John Norton, do you?”

“I mean the bastard you were sitting with first. The one who took off before I could confront him.”

“Richard! Stop! You don’t even know that that was the same man! You just have that one photograph that Laura sent us last year, back when they were living together.”

“Steve Sullivan?” I had to struggle to keep my voice down.

“
That’s
the one,” Mr. Smith promptly replied over his wife’s protests. “He kept calling us, demanding to know where she was, making all kinds of ridiculous accusations. I warned her. When she told us she’d moved back to Crestview, I told her it was a big mistake. That she was going to wind up dead at that crazy man’s hand. But she wouldn’t listen to me.”

“Steve didn’t kill her, Mr. Smith,” I said firmly.

“Yeah?” He rose. “That’s just what my wife said about her brother. For the longest time. Kept insisting some stranger had broken into the house, done all those murders. Didn’t matter how many expert witnesses they called in to look at the evidence or Laura’s testimony about what her own father had done.” He shoved his chair in with such force that the whole table shook. “You women . . . you listen with your damn heart. There’s a reason our ears are right next to our brains, you know!
That’s
the way it’s supposed to be. We’re supposed to listen to what our
brain’s
telling us!”

“But I was
with
Steve that night, and I
know
he’s innocent,” I insisted, on the verge of tears. Mrs. Smith lost the battle with her own emotions and began to sob.

As though he hadn’t heard me, he snarled, “That little girl didn’t stand a chance. Soon as she was old enough to take off, she stayed way away from us. We just reminded her of her terrible past. Begged me, she did, to stay away, to let her live her own life. I kept hoping she’d come back home to us. But who knows what it would have taken to get her back there? I figure if she’d been given the choice between our family farm and prison, she’d have opted for prison.” He crossed behind my chair as if to leave, but then rounded and stopped long enough to wag his finger in my face. “Your friend, Mr. Sullivan,
he’s
the one who belongs behind bars!” He stormed out the door, still grumbling to himself.

I shot a glance at the other occupied table. Everyone was staring agape at us. Mrs. Smith said through her tears, “Don’t mind my husband. He’s grief-struck. We couldn’t have kids ourselves. But Laura was so beautiful. Somebody killed our baby. Our beautiful baby.”

I gave her a quick hug around the shoulders and whispered, “I’m so sorry.”

John crossed the room. He bent a little at the waist and said gently, “Mrs. Smith? I’m John Norton. I’m sorry for your loss. Laura was a beautiful person.”

She showed no signs of recognizing John’s name. She hiccuped a couple of times, then dried her tears and said, “Thank you.”

“Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked. “Can I get you something to eat or drink? Do you and your husband need a ride back to your hotel or anything?”

At his solicitous offer, she squared her shoulders. “No, but why don’t you take your lady friend someplace nice now?” She got unsteadily to her feet, waving off his attempts to help her rise. “Richard and I are used to being alone.”

She shuffled out of the room in the direction her husband had gone. “Oh, dear God,” I murmured. I felt heart-broken for the woman.

“Should we leave?” John asked quietly.

I nodded and rose. John took my hand. We left by way of the opposite exit. Although the sky was a beautiful azure and the air felt crisp, I remained on the edge of tears. “This is about as depressing as a day can get,” John said under his breath.

“Knock wood,” I muttered.

“Guess I can’t blame Steve for not being able to take it. And I suppose seeing me was the last straw. If he honestly thinks I had anything to do with her death, though, he’s gone off the deep end.”

I felt myself tense. I couldn’t stand this; even while we were leaving Laura’s service, John was telling me that Sullivan was crazy to suspect him. Although Steve had bolted without a word, I felt compelled to defend him. “I’m sure your arrival just gave him the excuse to stand up, and once he did, he fled.”

I stopped walking, only then realizing we were heading away from my van. John’s bright red Audi was in the second, small parking lot, straight ahead of us. “I’m parked on the other side of the building.”

He turned toward me and took both my hands in his, lacing his fingers through mine. “I’ve got to get back to work. We have an open house next week, so I’m working all weekend. Otherwise, I’d offer to take you out for drinks. Like Mrs. Smith said, we
should
go someplace nice. We haven’t seen much of each other lately.”

I nodded and said, “So I’ve noticed.” He gave me a smile, kissed me softly, then we parted company, muttering vague salvos about things getting better soon.

When would they get better? How?
All this animosity and cross-accusation was hard to bear. If this murder wasn’t solved very soon, I was going to lose my mind.

As I rounded the building, I spotted Hannah Garrison standing near my car. “Hannah. Hi.” I glanced back at the funeral home. “Were you waiting for Dave?”

“Originally. But he already left.”

So who’s she waiting for now? Me?

She frowned. “He didn’t even see me, I don’t think. He looked terrible. I felt sorry for him . . . even though he’s feeling this way due to the”—she drew finger quotes in the air and continued—“
other woman.
”

I sighed, determined to rid my immediate thoughts of the pain of Laura’s adoptive parents. Hannah obviously needed someone to chat with, so, just to be kind, I suggested, “Want to go get a cup of coffee or something?”

“That’d be nice,” she replied with a smile.

Minutes later, as we sipped our coffee, I tried to let the
quiet, stately ambience of the restaurant restore me. Hannah said, “You know what, Erin? Even though I would never actually go through with it myself, there were times when I would pray for Laura to die a hideous, mutilating death.”

That statement was a major ambience killer if ever there was one. “Are you still in love with Dave?” I asked impulsively.

“No, but I’m no longer in
hate
with him, so that’s good. It took me a while to forgive him. Really, he’s just this sweet guy that Laura led around by the nose.”

“You couldn’t have thought so kindly of him when you were still ‘in hate’ with him.”

She peered at me over the rim of her scuffed-up white ceramic cup, then set it down in its saucer. “I’m sure that he felt like he’d hit the jackpot when Laura came on to him.” She motioned as though she were displaying a banner headline in the air and continued, “ ‘The Geek Lands the Sexpot.’ I’m sure he knew Laura just wanted him for his money, but he didn’t care. And what chance did
I
have . . . his equally geeky high school sweetheart.”

And yet, according to what Sullivan had told me, Dave and Laura had originally linked up
before
Dave had struck gold in the business world. Pointing out that discrepancy to Hannah would be like pouring salt in her wounds, so I merely asked, “You two were sweethearts back in high school?”

She nodded. “And while we were both going to college at CU.”

“Steve Sullivan told me that when he first met Laura, she convinced him that Dave was physically abusive to her.”

She furrowed her brow. “That was a ridiculous lie. Dave and I had some doozies of fights, believe me. Especially when our marriage was breaking up,” she added bitterly, “thanks to Laura. But, even so, he never once raised a hand to me.”

“Did you notice his black eye?”

“Dave’s got a black eye?”

“Hidden behind his dark glasses.”

“Laura must have clobbered him.”

“He claims he tripped.”

She scoffed, “Even if she came at him with a baseball bat, he’d kill himself before he’d have harmed a hair on her head. He worshiped the ground that conniving bitch walked upon. He was too love-blind to see what she was, so in love with herself that there was no room in her shriveled heart for anyone else.”

I frowned, but held my tongue. In spite of Laura’s extreme shortcomings, I resented Hannah’s speaking so scathingly of her on the day of her funeral. Hannah took another sip of coffee, then said, “Actually, I’m kind of sorry she’s dead. In a weird, sick way, I
owe
her. Laura Smith gave me a reason to get up in the morning. I wanted to prove that I was somebody, too, that Dave had made a terrible mistake in leaving me.”

“You once said he tried to win you back, when Laura dumped him for Steve Sullivan.”

She raised her chin and perked up a little. “He tried to, yes, but I wouldn’t take him back. I might have, eventually, but I made it clear he had to prove that he was home for good. And, of course, he went crawling back to Laura the moment she returned to town.”

She looked at her watch and sprang to her feet. “Oh, dear. I should have been at work ages ago.” She swept up her purse, which she’d hooked on her chair, then rounded the table, patting my shoulder just as she headed for the door. “Sorry, but I’ve got to run. Thanks for the coffee, Erin.”

“You’re welcome. Take care.”

Maybe I’d been hanging around Sullivan too long, but I, too, was starting to become skeptical. Hannah’s tale of rejecting her husband struck me as false. A weird theory popped unbidden into my head:
What if Hannah had
conspired with Laura to rip off her ex-husband?

My thoughts were in turmoil as I made the short drive home. To shore up my flagging spirits, I told myself to take in the soul-warming grace of Audrey’s home as I made my way up the walkway.

That instruction to myself backfired. There was nothing soul warming about what I was seeing as I neared the house. I kept thinking my eyes were deceiving me. By the time I’d reached the front steps, there was no denying the sight.

A knife had been stabbed with tremendous force into the center of Audrey’s oak door.

Chapter 16

Audrey seemed unable to stop pacing as Linda Delgardio and her partner interviewed us. Three months ago, Audrey had told me that she wanted an “old-world Italian feel” to this room, and I’d applied sunny yellow Venetian plaster to the walls, replaced the ugly parquet floor with terra-cotta tiles, stained the wood trim a deep, rich brown, and installed filigreed crown molding and a matching ceiling medallion, from which I’d hung an elegant chandelier. We both loved the results, but then she’d told me that she wanted to select the furniture herself. She had yet to do so. Instead of “old-world Italian,” we now had a time-traveling, continent-hopping hodgepodge— the kind of interior space that a tactful designer terms “eclectic.”

Officer Mansfield, Linda’s partner, kept making gentle suggestions that Audrey “might be more comfortable” if she took a seat. Linda had met Audrey a couple of times: she already knew that Audrey did precisely what she wanted to do.

“You always use the back door when you come and go?” Linda asked her.

“Yes. There’s a one-car garage back there. It used to be the carriage house, when the home was first built.”

“You didn’t ever open the front door today?”

“No.” She continued her path from the west wall to the east and back again.

“Not even to get the mail?” Mansfield asked.

“No. There’s a slot for mail next to the sidelight. Although I would
think
that if the knife had been there at the time of delivery, the mailman would have rung my doorbell and asked whether or not I had intentionally stabbed a six-inch knife into my front door.”