In Plain Sight (26 page)

“I don’t understand,” Skye said as Sandy headed back toward the locker room, her head down. “She did just awful. She’s so much better than that.”

I didn’t say anything, but I was determined to find out what was going on. Not while Skye was around, however, because it was as obvious as the cleft in Brad Ridenour’s chin that whatever was affecting Sandy had something to do with the Ridenour family.

The ride home was silent, Skye’s and my attempts to console Sandy shrugged off with a “It’s no big deal” response from her. I’d planned that we’d all go out for celebration pizza after the meet, but I didn’t even suggest it. Skye didn’t hang around after we got to the house. Sandy went upstairs as if she wanted to be alone, but I wasn’t going to let her get away with that. She hadn’t eaten anything but a couple of high-nutrition bars and sports drinks all day, so I made grilled tuna sandwiches and hot chocolate and marched upstairs with them.

Her door was closed, and I braced the tray on one hip and knocked. Her answer was muffled. I decided to interpret it as “come in,” even though I was almost certain that wasn’t what she’d said.

She was lying stomach-down on the bed, still in the sweats she’d worn home, her hair sticking out of the once-sleek knot like blonde porcupine quills.

I thought maybe she’d been crying over the results of today’s competition, but her eyes were dry, her face unblotched. Even so, her face had a haggard look, as if she’d just received failing scores not only on a gymnastic performance but on life.

“I thought we’d have something to eat together,” I said. I looked for a clear place to set the tray. Every surface was covered with teenage stuff: clothes, books, CDs, her collection of teddy bears, old gymnastics awards, stray taco chips, old soft drink cans. I scooped a clear spot on the cedar chest at the foot of her bed for the tray.

I could have predicted her response to the food, of course.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Okay, we can talk then. I know you were nervous, but something a whole lot more than nerves was wrong today. You performed like you’d never seen a set of parallel bars before. You had three left feet on the balance beam.”

My honest assessment brought an unexpected smile from Sandy. “I was pretty awful, huh?”

“I couldn’t have done much worse myself.”

Sandy turned and sat cross-legged on the bed. I sat on the edge of it. We looked at each other.

“It was nerves, I guess,” she said. After a long hesitation she added, “But not just about the gymnastics meet.”

“So what is it, Sandy? I don’t understand.”

She swallowed, but I could see something in her face that said that this time she was going to tell me. In all honesty, I expected to hear anything from a revelation of teenage pregnancy to a confession of drug use. I braced myself.
Show
me what to say, Lord. Show me how to help her.

“I—I think I may know something,” she said.

Not what I anticipated. “About what?” I returned blankly.

“About Leslie Marcone’s murder.”

26

“Leslie’s murder?” I repeated, astonished. I cast around for some logical explanation. I remembered Camouflage Guy at the police station. Was he a student? “You heard something at school or from a friend?”

“No. I—I saw something.” She twisted a loose thread on the teddy bear bedspread, her eyes turned downward.

“You saw something,” I repeated, because the words seemed so disconnected from reality.

“And then today when I saw Skye’s father at the meet, shaking hands and laughing like everything was just wonderful …”

Sandy looked up, and I saw anger in the taut set of her jaw but bewilderment in her blue eyes. I moved closer to her on the quilt and took her hand, wanting to reassure her even though I was bewildered too. “What did you see, sweetie?”

“It was last winter. Miss Cassidy and another woman from the studio took six of us to a gymnastics meet in Little Rock. We had two rooms at a motel, and we stayed there two nights, Friday and Saturday.”

“I see,” I said, although I felt as if I were peering through a pea-soup fog and not really seeing anything at all.

“Friday night was fine. Saturday I had the high score of the meet on the parallel bars.” Sandy motioned to a trophy on a chest of drawers in the corner, but it was an absentminded gesture, without pride in the success. But a powerful reminder of how differently she’d performed today.

“And then … ?”

“Saturday night after the meet we were all feeling hyper, giggling and acting silly. Our room was on the second floor of the motel, and I went downstairs to the machine in the hallway to get a 7Up. But the 7Up slot was empty and I remembered seeing a little store down the street, about a block away. I should have gone back and asked Miss Cassidy if I could run down there—” She stopped and swallowed. “But I thought it would take just a minute, so I didn’t.”

Yes, she should have asked Miss Cassidy first. Not a smart move for a girl to be out alone on the street in a strange town. But I knew this wasn’t the time to chastise her. I was still puzzled about where she was going with this, but apprehension curdled in my stomach. Because somehow I knew it was going somewhere I didn’t want it to go.

“Actually, the store turned out to be two blocks away. And I had to go by another motel before I got to it. I saw a light blue car stopped under a kind of carport thing by the registration office. Leslie Marcone came out of the office, and I was so surprised that I almost spoke to her. Even though she didn’t know me from a crack in the sidewalk, of course. But I was glad I didn’t, because she got in the car, and then I saw who else was in the car.”

“Which was?”

Sandy twisted the thread so tightly around her finger that the thread snapped. “Mr. Ridenour. Brad Ridenour. Skye’s father.”

For a moment, even with the triple identification, I was blank. Skye’s father in Leslie Marcone’s car outside a motel in Little Rock? That didn’t make sense. And then it made too much sense. Ugly sense. Sandy spelled out the details as I sat there stunned.

“I ducked behind a hedge by the entryway so I could watch. I suppose I shouldn’t have … but I did. Leslie parked the car in front of one of the motel rooms. She and Mr. Ridenour got out. She was wearing jeans and high-heeled boots and a black turtleneck, with her hair all swirly and loose around her shoulders. Very … sexy looking. He was wearing a dark suit and tie, just like he always does on TV. The Big Brad, you know.” She snarled the nickname with bitter contempt, as if she’d like to strangle him with the tie. “He opened the trunk and got out a couple of small suitcases. One gray, one green. She unlocked the door to the motel room and went inside. I could see him lean over and kiss her when he followed her in with the suitcases.”

The details about clothing and suitcases told me how deeply the incriminating scene was branded into Sandy’s memory.

“Then I … I forgot all about my 7Up and ran back to our motel.”

Sandy may be only fourteen, but she is considerably more mature and knowledgeable than I was at fourteen, and she didn’t need diagrams to know what was going on. Brad Ridenour and Leslie Marcone at a motel in Little Rock. A clandestine affair.

The curdling in my stomach expanded to an industrial-strength churning. With the churning came a sudden spotlight on past events. Leslie’s overnight absence from the house while I was working for her. Another out-of-town rendezvous with Brad? Her ill temper the next day. A lovers’ quarrel? Her stiff command that I never answer the phone. So I wouldn’t hear Brad’s distinctive voice? Even her peculiar system of sometimes answering the ring of the phone, sometimes not. Now I wished I’d paid more attention to those rings. Did they have some code worked out so she’d know when it was Brad calling and would pick up?

Now I understood Sandy’s antagonism toward both Leslie Marcone and Brad Ridenour, and her recent avoidance of Skye as well. My heart ached for her as I realized how desperately she’d tried to figure out what to do with the unwanted knowledge of that clandestine relationship.

“You didn’t tell Miss Cassidy or any of the girls what you’d seen?”

“No.”

“And you never said anything about it to Skye?”

“No! I was afraid if she knew, if anyone knew, everything would just … fall apart for her.”

I appreciated Sandy’s caring concern for her friend. Skye’s life had been unstable enough without the added disillusionment of finding out what a sleazeball her father was. Or having the marriage to Tammi explode and take Skye with it.

“Although I almost said something a couple of times, when she was going on and on about how wonderful her dad is, and I know he isn’t wonderful at all. It … it just makes me so mad that he cons everyone about what a great guy he is, and Skye just swallows every bit of it.”

I remembered Sandy and Skye’s sharp exchange about Leslie too, Skye calling her beautiful and mysterious, Sandy countering that Leslie was a stuck-up snob. Knowing what she did, she’d undoubtedly wanted to say more, but for Skye’s sake she’d held back. I admired her willpower.

I also felt a grim appreciation for her clear sense of right and wrong. She hadn’t put blame on one of them and excused the other. Both Leslie and Brad Ridenour were deeply in the wrong, and Sandy knew it.

“It was awful enough when I just knew about Mr. Ridenour and Leslie and their affair,” Sandy went on. “But then after Leslie was murdered, and I realized he might have done it …”

For a few moments I’d been so wrapped up in thoughts of Brad and Leslie’s relationship and its possible effect on Skye that I’d forgotten the connection with murder. A connection that sent snaky chills slithering along my spine.

This implicated Brad Ridenour right up to that cleft in his chin. I could feel it as surely as if I’d seen him toss Leslie’s body in the lake. No wonder Sandy had seemed so strangely preoccupied and distracted ever since the murder. She’d had
this
slamming around inside her. No wonder she’d avoided any contact with Brad. And no wonder his presence at the gymnastics meet today had sent her into a tailspin.

I realized she was watching me now, her expression unexpectedly hopeful, as if she thought perhaps I’d pat her hand and tell her she was imagining things or somehow make everything right. I tried.

“An affair like this is … is unethical and immoral and awful, but it doesn’t necessarily mean Skye’s father killed Leslie.”

I tried to think of all the reasons that could be true. After all, a man is innocent until proven guilty.

For one thing, Brad Ridenour had apparently always been an upright, law-abiding citizen. He was respected and well thought of in the community. A bit egotistical and self-centered, perhaps, but wasn’t that practically a requisite to get anywhere in TV or politics?

Another possibility was that the affair may have been over for weeks or months. Maybe Brad had had an attack of conscience and ended it. Maybe Leslie had decided that sneaking around with a married man was a dead end. (
No
pun intended,
I thought guiltily.)

Leslie’s later overnight trips may have been with some new man. Yet it occurred to me now that there was a distinct physical resemblance between Brad Ridenour and Leslie’s ex, Shane Wagner. Both men were big, blond, and husky. Was this her preferred type of man? Or was she working on some deeper psychological agenda? Shane had been unfaithful to her, so after her makeover she deliberately sought out another guy who resembled him?

No, I didn’t think Leslie had acquired a different man. She was after the Big Brad. And Leslie was a woman of powerful determination.

But maybe Brad had a stainless-steel alibi. Maybe Tammi could vouch for every minute of his time. Or maybe he’d been so far out of town he couldn’t possibly have killed Leslie. Hadn’t he made a trip to Little Rock about that time?

Yet both those potential alibis were riddled with holes big enough to drain Little Tom Lake. Leslie’s time of death couldn’t be pinned down to a window of a few hours, and Tammi surely couldn’t account for Brad’s whereabouts every minute over a period of two or three days. As for being out of town … I hadn’t heard it suggested anywhere, but who’s to say Leslie hadn’t been killed elsewhere and brought back here to be dumped in the lake? A motel pillow suffocating a scream of surprise and terror …

And motive. Brad Ridenour had it big time. Some well-known politicians have survived scandals, true, but Brad was just starting out in politics. News of an illicit affair could crash and burn his political career before it ever got off the ground. Even his position as a local TV anchor might be in jeopardy. Had Brad felt he had to kill Leslie before the relationship was somehow exposed?

Yet, on the other side of the motive equation, wasn’t murder just a little extreme in this situation? If Brad got worried that the affair with Leslie could jeopardize either his political or TV career, couldn’t he have simply said “It’s over” and be done with it?

Or maybe he’d tried to do that, and Leslie was having none of it. I thought again about that day after Leslie’s overnight absence, when she must have been with him. She’d been in a foul mood, angry and critical. Had he tried to break it off with her then? And she’d retaliated by telling him that if he did she’d blast him sky high with public revelation of their relationship? That it was leave Tammi and marry her
or else
?

I realized that I’d been silent for a long time as things whirled round and round in my head, like some video game spinning out of control. Sandy was still looking at me expectantly. “Well, uh, this, uh … puts a different perspective on things, doesn’t it?” I mumbled.

I thought that was pretty lame, but she sounded relieved when she said, “I’m glad I shared it with you, Aunt Ivy. It’s such a relief! I’ve been worrying and worrying. It was awful keeping it all to myself. Like carrying around a weight as big as your old Thunderbird.”

She scooted down the bed and grabbed a sandwich and cup of hot chocolate from the tray I’d set on the cedar chest.

“I’m glad you shared it with me too.”

And I was. This was too big a burden for a fourteen-year-old. The question was, what was I going to do with this revelation about Brad Ridenour and Leslie?