For the Sake of Their Baby (12 page)

“I didn’t have the heart to straighten it up after…while you were gone,” she said. “I was going to. Ron offered to help me, but after boxing up your clothes and moving out your furniture, I just couldn’t—”

He put a warm hand on her shoulder. “I’m glad you couldn’t. Anyway, the point is that the saw and chisel could have been missing for weeks or just hours and neither one of us would know.”

“So, maybe someone took the tools, then walked along the beach and sabotaged the stairs, then came here while we were both gone, jimmied the window, replaced the tools, hurt Sinbad and tied him to the stairs for me to find.”

“Either that or they took the saw weeks ago and got the idea to jimmy the window with our chisel when they came to use the cat as bait. So, who knew we’d be gone?”

“Well, the sheriff—”

“Exactly.”

Liz shook her head. “He’s not the only one. Dave knew you were coming to his house.”

“Why would Dave—”

“All I’m saying is that there were other people who knew some of our plans and may I remind you that the sheriff is the one who offered to install a chain on my door? Would he have done that if he was running around stealing your tools?”

“What better way to case out the garage and see what’s out there? Maybe he was formulating a plan.”

“You’re hopeless. Okay, the sheriff knew about me leaving, Dave knew about you—”

“How about Ron and Emily?”

“They knew the sheriff was coming, but they didn’t know he changed his plans and called me into his office. And they didn’t know about you.”

“I hate to say anything that might give Kapp a break, but do we even know if he was the one who changed the original meeting place from here to his office?”

“I guess we don’t.”

“Exactly. Take Harry Idle, lurking over there across the road, looking out his window. He sees me leave, he sees you at home, he disguises his voice and calls you away, he comes over here—”

“Wait a second. I can’t picture Harry Idle messing with stairs and windows and cats. And he’s got huge hands.”

“You’re thinking of the gloves. You’re right.”

“Exactly. Plus, how would he know I was expecting the sheriff?”

“Kapp knew he was coming, of course, and so did Ron and Emily and probably half the sheriff’s department. He could have heard it from a buddy in the department.”

Liz shook her head. “I don’t know. And neither the sheriff or Ron or Emily knew
you
were going anywhere.”

“This isn’t helping. How about your scarf? Have you remembered when you saw it last?”

“I’m afraid not. I keep trying. It’s like I have a mental block.”

“We need to find out for sure if the sheriff was behind the call that changed your meeting from here to there and we need to see if there’s anything incriminating
about the sheriff in those boxes you brought home from your uncle’s house before he died.”

“I think they’re just boxes of my school records and things he didn’t want to store anymore.”

“Maybe so, but since the rest of his stuff is still tied up, they’re all we have. I’ll go dust off those boxes and bring them inside where it’s warm. We’ll go through them together.”

“And I’ll call the sheriff’s assistant and make sure it was she who called here,” Liz said.

“I
DIDN’T CALL YOU
,” the young woman said adamantly once Liz had reached her. “I’ve already been grilled by the sheriff about this, Mrs. Chase. I didn’t change anyone’s plans and I don’t know who did. And I don’t take too many long lunches, I don’t care what that pip-squeak deputy says. If he’d get a life of his own, he wouldn’t have to tattle about mine.”

Liz related this information to Alex, speculating that since the sheriff had questioned Belle Carter himself, he was innocent.

“Or just covering his tracks,” Alex said, piling the last of five boxes near the kitchen table. They each took a chair and opened a box.

“Good grief, he saved these?” Liz said as the first bundle she touched turned out to be a dozen or so old report cards. “I never dreamed.”

“He also saved the programs from your recitals,” Alex said, lifting out a stack of papers. “I didn’t know you took ballet. You look damn cute in your tutu.”

“Let me see.” Alex handed over a picture of her in a pink tutu standing arm and arm with another girl dressed in lilac. “Oh—this is Carmen,” she said, gently touching the other child’s face. “She was my best friend.
She had the most beautiful long, dark hair. Sometimes, she’d let me braid it. I haven’t thought about her in years.”

“And you never told me you play the piano,” Alex added as he produced a recital card.

“I don’t. Uncle Devon insisted I try, but I guess he came to my one and only recital and heard how hopeless I was because the next day the piano disappeared from the house and he never mentioned lessons again. I think my nanny at the time cried with relief.”

He lifted out additional papers, all semi-yellowed with age. “I thought you said your uncle didn’t have anything to do with you when you were little. He sure kept a lot of stuff.”

“The nannies probably collected it,” Liz said as she found several drawings she didn’t recall making. Her initials were on the papers, though, and since most featured a small house being consumed with red and orange crayon fire, she assumed she’d been working out the deaths of her parents.

The realization that she’d coped with their loss by recreating their deaths this way made her feel a pang of sorrow for the little girl who had gone from beloved only child to orphan in the time it took a fire to rage through her home. At first, she could remember wishing she’d been with them when it happened. Not because she had a death wish, but because she was convinced she could have saved them. Later, she’d realized that wasn’t a likely scenario; in all likelihood, her life would have ended with theirs.

How ironic that she should fall in love with a fireman of all people. She looked at Alex and found him staring at the drawings in her hands. Their eyes met and he smiled at her.

She sighed back a flood of tears and set the drawings aside. “Let’s try different boxes.”

The next two held more memorabilia including pictures of Liz with her parents, pictures taken years before their deaths when Liz was a toddler with plump legs and arms and white-blonde hair. She’d never seen the pictures before and was startled by how much she’d grown to resemble her mother and how handsome her father had been.

“I don’t think I can take too much more of this stroll down memory lane,” Liz said.

Alex propped the last box on top of one of the others and cut it open. “There’s just the one more. We might as well finish the job. I’ll do it, you sit there and look pretty.”

“It’ll be easier to search through the box than manage looking pretty,” she said. “My ankles are swollen, I have no lap to speak of, my fingernails are all cracked and chipped and I slept on my hair wrong.”

“You look perfect to me,” Alex said, laying aside the box flaps, and damn if he didn’t manage to sound sincere.

This box was slightly different from the others. While the top layer held scraps of Liz’s past, the bottom of the box was filled with correspondence, grouped in separate stacks and bound with string. Her uncle’s name seemed to be on every envelope.

“The man never threw anything away,” Alex said as he thumbed through the letters. “There isn’t a postmark here that isn’t over twenty years old.”

“I’ll go through them later,” Liz said, standing and stretching. “Maybe my parents wrote to my uncle once in a while and maybe he kept their letters. If so, I’d like to read them.”

“You don’t know much about them, do you?”

“Very little. The fire destroyed everything and Uncle Devon was never what you could call chatty. He turned my care over to a nanny who quit after a year or so because he was so nasty to her. After that, there was a whole string of nannies, one after the other, all leaving when his belligerence wore them down.”

A stack of papers on the table caught her attention; she’d forgotten to return the drawings to their box and she picked them up now, looking again at the raging crayon fires, noticing for the first time the two little stick figures caught in the waxy flames.

“What an awful way to die,” she whispered.

Beside her, Alex said, “There are no good ways to die, honey.” He kissed her cheek and added, “Which brings us back to yesterday’s incident. Why don’t you call the sheriff and invite him out here? I want to hear what he has to say for himself.”

“But you and he are like firecrackers when you’re together.”

“I know, I know. I’ll make you a deal. I’ll be in the house, but I won’t barge into the interview unless he tries something.”

“Like clubbing me over the head?”

He laughed softly. “Something like that, though hopefully nothing quite so drastic.”

“You’re wrong about the sheriff, but I’ll go ahead and arrange it.”

“Good.”

Liz yawned into her hand. “Another long day and it’s only half over.”

Alex trailed a finger down her cheek. “You could take a nap,” he said, his eyes suddenly brimming with mischief.

Ah, the memories, of lazy afternoons making love, napping, reading, making love again. So many memories…

“I can’t go to sleep at night if I nap during the day,” she said, pretending she didn’t know what really lay behind his suggestion, pretending that the touch of his finger on her face didn’t have her aching for his touch in other, more sensitive areas. Last night, she’d wanted him to break down the door. Today, she was trying to keep her distance. She felt a continual pull toward him while at the same time fearing it. If she was this confused about her feelings, she couldn’t imagine the mixed signals she must be sending him.

“I read somewhere that if you lay down without sleeping, you’re resting your body, and that if you lay down and go to sleep, you’re resting both your body and your mind. But there are ways to lay down and close your eyes and rest neither. We used to be pretty damn good at it.”

“I know,” she whispered, “but I’m not ready for that kind of—”

“Intimacy.” There was a note of irony in his voice, and his eyes narrowed.

She nodded miserably. She’d let him save her, but not love her. How messed up was that? And in this scary time, could she deny she needed him in every way imaginable? Or that he needed her?

His expression softened again, as though he understood how torn she was and didn’t want to add to her pain. He said, “Well, then, as an alternative, how about I bring down some of those Christmas boxes I found in the attic? The holidays are just a couple of weeks away.”

“What with everything that’s been going on, I forgot all about it.”

“I grew up in a house where no one put up anything. Mom had split and Dad was usually in jail or sleeping it off somewhere. My brothers had problems of their own, so it was usually just me and a television special. I don’t want that for our child, even if he or she isn’t technically here to celebrate with us.”

“Of course not.” What he didn’t say but what Liz understood was that this might be the last Christmas he spent in his home with his baby, born or unborn, the last Christmas they all spent together.

No!
she screamed internally.

But you don’t have control. You can go to the sheriff and tell him about your scarf and your late-night visit and Alex could still end up behind bars.

“While you get the boxes, I’ll go buy a tree—” she said, but he cut her off with a jingle of his truck keys.

“From now on, you aren’t going anywhere without me. Where you go, I go. From now on you and I are more or less joined at the hip. Tell me what obligations you have ahead in the next few days.”

She shook her head. “Nothing important—”

“What about your annual office Christmas party? Won’t you be responsible for it this year now that your uncle is…gone?”

“Yes, but I’ll beg off—”

“No. Don’t do that. I’ll go with you.”

“Why?”

“Like I said, where you go, I—”

“I mean why do you want me to go to it? I can get someone else to stand around and hand out bonuses and congratulate everyone that we managed to pull through
another year without losing more than ten percent of our leases. My assistant, Jane, can do it or Ron—”

“But if we’re there, we can ask questions. We can ferret out information. Maybe there’s someone within the management team at the mall who hated your uncle enough to kill him.”

“I thought you had Sheriff Kapp pinpointed for that dubious distinction.”

“I like to keep my options open. Where is the soirée being held this year?”

“The Egret Inn.”

“Hmm, ritzy,” he said with a glint in his eye. They’d dined just a few times at the Egret Inn because Alex was right, the place was ritzy and expensive and exclusive and all the rest. She studied the floor in lieu of looking at her feet which she hadn’t been able to see in about two months, and said, “Alex, beyond our attempts at sleuthing, that party is likely to be kind of uncomfortable for you. People love to gossip—”

“Let them. All I care about is finding Devon Hiller’s murderer and the fiend who almost killed you. Period. A little gossip can’t hurt me.”

She nodded. He was right. Gossip couldn’t hurt them. Falling off cliffs—now that could.

Chapter Seven

After the stress of the day, walking around parking lots crowded with cut evergreen trees seemed like a veritable walk in the woods. It began raining midway through their search, but it was a relatively mild rain for December, and Liz had brought an umbrella.

They stood beneath it, side by side, as a good-natured teenager straightened a dozen different trees for their perusal. They finally chose a Nobel Pine and Alex strapped it into the back of the truck. They made one more stop and Liz waited in the truck while Alex went inside a wireless phone company and signed up for a cell phone. By the time they finally arrived home, Liz was starving. As Alex secured the tree in the metal stand, she made a plate of sandwiches which they ate as they decorated the tree.

In the end, it took up most of a corner and Liz felt a melancholy streak for Sinbad who would have loved the process. She couldn’t wait to get him home and see how he’d react to the red balls and twinkling green lights. Hopefully his cast would keep him from scaling the tree and bringing it crashing to the ground.