I Love You More: A Novel (4 page)

“Thank you, ma’am, but that won’t be necessary.” I hate TV crime shows. “What happened when you entered the house?”

“I saw her first.” Mrs. Butterworth indicated the woman on the sofa. “I introduced myself, but she didn’t say a word. Then I saw the body … well, him.” She pointed at the victim. “He looked pretty dead, but I thought I better make sure. So I marched right over and felt for his pulse.”

“Two shots,” Mack said. “See here? Exit wounds. I don’t want to flip the body until the CSIs get here, but I’d say one to the chest and one to the abdomen. Looks by the trajectory of the bullet holes in the wall”—he pointed at two dark spots near the wall’s corner between the fireplace and sliding glass doors—“that the shots came from the direction of the side door.”

Beautiful, lucky, sorry, gun
.

I was just about to bring up the gun when Mrs. Butterworth scolded us for talking in front of the child. Child? There she sat right next to her mother, fingers tightly laced in her mother’s. How had I not seen her before? She looked about the age of my nephew, my sister’s son. Was he ten now? Eleven? All I could see beneath the towel that enshrouded her was a pair of spindly white legs and a thick head of curls. She had her mother’s blue eyes and the dead man’s dark hair (Mediterranean descent?), but her skin tone was much lighter than both of theirs. Her eyes and cheeks were damp, as if she’d been crying, and there was something about the way she looked at me, something beyond sadness, beyond pride or defiance or even protectiveness that I knew I’d seen before but couldn’t quite place.

“What’s your name, sweetie?” I asked.

She looked down at her feet.

“I’m real sorry about your daddy,” I said. “I know you must be sad.”

Nothing.

“I saw this really cool sand castle on my way in. Did you make that?”

“My daddy and me,” she said, without looking up.

“Wow, cool. My dad used to build sand castles with me too.” A lie. Not the sand-castle building part, the dad helping me part. “Maybe you could give me the official castle tour?”

She eyed me suspiciously. Progress at least.

“If you don’t want to, that’s okay.” I addressed Mack. “Do me a favor, will you? Take this young lady to her bedroom and keep her company for a while. Play a game or something.” I had no idea what girls that age played with. Mack’s face wasn’t the only one that registered disapproval.

“Fine,” the kid said. “I’ll give you a tour.” There was no mistaking her defiant tone.

I looked through the sliding glass doors just beyond the vic’s body. The sand castle was within eyesight. It looked safe enough. “Why don’t you go on out. I’ll meet you there.”

“Mama, I’m going down to the beach, okay? I won’t be far.” She pried her mother’s hand loose, set it gently down on her lap, rose, took a step, hesitated—

“Don’t worry about your mama,” I said. “Detective Jones and I will take good care of her.”

She exited through the side door, her expression blank as she passed by me. I could barely hear her footsteps on the wood deck as she rounded the house and headed down the stairs.

“I’ll do a quick check of the rest of the house,” Mack said.

I gave my attention back to Mrs. Butterworth. “We’ll need you to sign your statement once we get it typed up, but otherwise I think we’re done here. We’ll be in touch if we need anything else.” Mrs. Butterworth didn’t seem too keen on leaving.

“Clara,” a deep, commanding voice said from behind me. So Melvin had lungs after all. “Time to go.” An order. Ex-military?

Her body shot to attention. She extended her hand to shake mine. I didn’t take it. There’s nothing cordial about a murder scene. “Oh, well, all right then. I have your card if I think of anything.” She smiled conspiratorially. “Thank you, Detective.”

“Thank
you
, ma’am.”

Melvin all but dragged his wife out the door.

Mack emerged from the hallway. “Vic’s name is Oliver Lane. Thirty-eight years old. Business card says he’s some sort of lawyer. Wife’s name is Diana.” He nodded toward the sofa. “Thirty-six. She’s carrying a passport but I couldn’t find a driver’s license. Looks like they live in a small town called Hollyville. My phone says it’s over there by Cape Fear.”

“What about the kid?”

“Picasso, according to this mystery book.
I Is for Innocent
. My wife loves Sue Grafton.”

“Picasso? Like the artist?”

“Spelled the same way.”

“Any luck on the murder weapon?”

“Nope. Once the CSIs have done their job and the body’s gone, we’ll get some boys in here to tear this place up.”

“Maybe the intruder took it with him or dumped it. Make sure they search any nearby trash receptacles and bushes. There’s some high grass in that field across the street.”

When I turned my head in her direction, Diana Lane’s eyes met mine. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten she was there, a man could never forget a woman like that was in the room, but her despondence had fooled me into thinking she wasn’t listening. Tears ran down her face. She leaned forward, put her head in her hands, started to sob. Her entire body shook. The towel fell from her shoulders. Her wet swimsuit didn’t do much to hide her curves, her breasts, her erect nipples. Goose bumps rose on her arms. I took off my suit coat, wrapped it around her shoulders. She leaned into me, closed her eyes, dipped her head slightly forward. Without thinking, as if
I’d been doing it my entire life, I sat, took her in my arms, held her while she cried. Mack’s expression was blank, controlled, but however hard he was trying to hide his disapproval, it was palpable. I released her, straightened, stood, nodded at Mack, as if to say,
I know, I know, I lost it there for a moment
.

“Is there somebody I can call?” I handed her my handkerchief.

She dried her eyes, blew her nose. “I don’t have family here. I don’t have family at all. Just Oliver and Picasso.”

“Are you okay to answer a few questions?” I asked, trying to regain my business voice. “Or we can talk later. After—”

She shook her head. “No, I’m fine.”

“Do you have something you can take? To calm you?”

She pointed toward the kitchen. “Windowsill above the sink.”

I found some Aleve and two prescription bottles with Oliver Lane’s name on them: zolpidem and lorazepam. The lorazepam was the same dose my mother used to take for panic attacks; I figured it was safe enough. I made a note of the doctor’s name and filled a glass with water.

“Here,” I said when I got back to her. “Take this. It might help take the edge off.”

She washed down the small white pill, drank the entire glass of water. “Where’s Picasso?” she asked as if she’d just noticed her daughter wasn’t there. The kid was stealth.

“Outside,” I said, glancing through the sliding glass doors. “Building a sand castle. We’ll need to question her as well. I need your permission to do so without your presence, or I could ask her to come back inside.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t want her here. Picasso has seen enough already.”

“Mack, I’m going to head outside and talk to the kid. Why don’t you take over from here?” Given my brief lapse in judgment, I thought it was best that way.

“Sure thing,” he said.

Diana Lane’s eyes met mine again.

“I won’t be long,” I said.

The crime scene van was already parked in the driveway when I walked through the door. The bloodsucking media wouldn’t be far behind. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mrs. Butterworth bustling toward me.

“Oh, Detective,” she called. “Can I have a brief word?”

“How can I help you, ma’am?”

“Well, it may be nothing, but I thought I should at least say something.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, when I came into the house, the child was talking to her father.”

“Talking?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “She was kneeling next to him. She seemed very upset. I don’t know exactly what she was saying, but I thought I heard something about her mother being sorry.”

“Did she say what her mother was sorry about?”

“No, not that I heard anyway.”

“What made you think she was upset?”

“She was crying, and it was like she was pleading with him.”

“Pleading?”

“Yes, you know, like begging him not to die. Oh, and just one more thing. I told 911 that a man had been shot, but that I thought he was still alive. Since the child was saying something to him and all. So I hope I’m not in trouble for giving them false information.”

“I’m certain you aren’t,” I said.

“Oh, I hope not. Will you tell them that it was an innocent error?”

“I’ll do that,” I said. “Thank you, Mrs. Butterworth. You’ve been most helpful.”

“My pleasure,” she said. “And you know how to find me.” She smiled and began walking up the drive.

“Mrs. Butterworth,” I called after her.

She turned. “Yes, Detective.”

“Where is it that you’re staying exactly?”

She pointed at a thicket of trees at least three hundred yards west of the crime scene—all I could see was a portion of red roof—and continued on her way. No wonder she and her husband hadn’t seen anything.

I descended the weathered beach steps, all the while watching the kid gather sand in her hands, meticulously pat it onto the wall of her sand castle. So concentrated. So vulnerable. So screwed. Poor thing. Her father was dead, and there was a good possibility that her mother had killed him. Although I loved my sister’s kids, I’d never really wanted any of my own, never wanted to bring children into this fucked-up world. When I was a few feet away, the kid stopped working and gave me that same look, the one I’d seen inside, like she was staring into my soul, and I remembered where I’d seen it before. It was in an affluent Detroit neighborhood, a house robbery gone wrong. We arrived at the scene to find a man and woman dead on the living-room rug; they’d been shot in the back of their heads execution style. A low growling sound came from somewhere upstairs. A German shepherd paced before a closed closet, blood dripping from a wound in his chest, his eyes wild, fiercely protective, posture vigilant, a dead six- or seven-year-old boy maybe a foot in front of him. We thought that was the end of it until we tranquilized the dog and opened the closet door. A baby no more than three months old lay sleeping in a pink blanket. I found out later that the dog didn’t make it. It was weeks before I could get the look in that dog’s eyes out of my mind. I never did find out what happened to the baby.

As I walked toward the kid, I thought about what Diana Lane had said just before I left the house:
Picasso has seen enough already
.

What
had
Picasso seen?

I remember feeling grateful for my sand castle. It was taking longer than I thought it would for Detective Kennedy to show up and “get his tour,” and the whole thing—the salty scent of the ocean, the sound of crashing waves and squawking seagulls, the feel of the sun beating on my shoulders and the wet, gritty sand running through my fingers—was helping keep my mind off Daddy’s dead eyes. The thing is I wasn’t just thinking about Daddy’s dead eyes. I was thinking about his dead eyes in relation to his unsmile eyes, which is hard to explain unless I share an actual unsmile event. As it turned out, Daddy made a bunch of unsmiles while we were at the beach in those last few days before he died, more than I remember him ever making in such a short amount of time before, but I think it’s best to share the very first one, the one he made the morning after we arrived, the one I shouldn’t have questioned because, if I hadn’t, maybe everything would’ve been different. I would’ve had time to warn Mama. She might’ve listened to me. Daddy wouldn’t have died. And I wouldn’t have been sculpting away at my sand castle, alone, in a less than fully and artistically absorbed manner while waiting what seemed like forever for Detective Kennedy to show. But, as usual, I didn’t question that unsmile, or the ones that followed it, until it was too late.

So, rewind forty-eight hours
.

It’s probably best to start with the heat. It was hot that summer on Cooper’s Island—the kind of hot that makes your throat hurt when you breathe too deeply, melts your body and mind, and makes folks irritable. People in those parts were calling it a heat wave. Daddy called it “stupid hot.” He said intense heat numbed the brain and that’s why there were more crimes in the summertime. He said he knew the statistics because of his job; he was a lawyer. As it turns out, it was ironic he said that being that two days later
he
became a statistic. We’d been working on my sand castle nonstop for hours—well, with the exception of wave riding and Coca-Cola breaks now and then. We’d gotten the bottles from the Cooper’s Island General Store—they even came in an old-fashioned-looking red Coke machine—and were using the empty ones for smoothing and sculpting sand.

“Where do you want the moat?” Daddy scrunched up his face and squinted his eyes against the brightness. Sweat dripped off his forehead, hairy chest, and armpits.

“How about here?” I asked, pointing to a spot between the castle and the ocean. “There’s already a big hole here anyway, from all our digging.”