Quiet as the Grave (9 page)

He went into the kitchen, thanking his lucky stars that Suzie Strickland was such a down-to-earth woman. Justine would have been in such a sanctimonious snit by now. She would already have uttered the words “my son” and “live like this” about ten times each.

It was one of the reasons he'd never let her set foot inside the boathouse.

He rooted around in the pantry and was rewarded by the sight of an unopened, and therefore unstale, box of wheat crackers. He tried the refrigerator's cold tray, and his luck held. A block of nice yellow-and-beige cheese sat there, with only one corner missing.

He sniffed it just to be sure.

“I don't have much experience with drugs, but I don't think you can actually snort Muenster cheese,” Suzie observed politely.

He looked around the refrigerator door. She had followed him into the kitchen, and was leaning against the doorjamb, grinning.

“What? Suzie-freaka of the purple hair and raccoon eyes doesn't have much experience with drugs?” He tilted his head. “You're smashing all my stereotypes.”

She rolled her eyes and pushed the refrigerator shut. She pulled out a couple of drawers, found the silverware and extracted a knife.

“My superfreak image was mostly just costuming, I'm afraid,” she said as she sliced cheese expertly. “Underneath that grungy black flour sack was a normal teenage girl who really just wanted to be like everyone else.”

“Just like everyone else?” He handed her one of the half-full beer steins. He took a sip, then watched her drink. “I'm sorry that didn't work out.”

She might be absurdly beautiful, but she was still Suzie. Still too honest to pretend she didn't know what he was talking about. Still too insecure to be certain he wasn't handing her a bucket of BS.

“Thanks,” she said, flushing. “I think.”

“You're welcome,” he said. “Definitely.”

If this had been a normal date, he would have taken the cheese and crackers out to the porch, and they would have sat together watching the river and listening to the crickets. And he would have told her more about how different she was from other women.

But it wasn't a normal date.

It wasn't a date, for starters. And for the past two years not a damn thing in his life had been normal.

So they camped out at the small kitchen table, where he and Gavin had breakfast every morning. It was near the foot of the stairs, so that he could hear Gavin if he called. He left the gun in his waistband. He heard a small inhale when Suzie first noticed it, as they set the table, but she didn't make any comment.

“So let me go first,” she said, taking a cracker and putting it on her paper plate. “If I don't tell someone how much I hate District Attorney Quigley, I'll pop.”

“Go for it,” Mike said. “I'm the perfect audience for that story.”

He let her spill it all without interruption. Very little of what she said surprised him. He'd known for weeks now that Quigley's dearest dream was to put him behind bars. Quigley had always had a hopeless crush on Justine. She had crooned over him at parties, just for the fun of making him drool. But when she and
Mike came home, she had mocked the man mercilessly.

Too bad Mike hadn't taped her. He wondered if Quigley's thirst to avenge her death might be slaked by hearing that brittle, elegant voice saying, “I'll probably break out in warts where he touched me. The man is absolutely a toad.”

“My interview wasn't much different,” Mike said when Suzie was finished. “I'm not sure where he's going with this, but I agree that he's trying to tie the kidnapping to Justine's murder.”

“But how?” Suzie popped a small slice of cheese into her mouth. She had propped her foot up on the chair and was hugging her knee. “What could Gavin possibly have to do with his mother's death? Could he have…seen anything?”

The idea had been slinking around the back of Mike's mind all day, and he'd been trying to ignore it. The idea of Gavin seeing anything as terrible as his own mother's murder was impossible to accept. The coroner's report said that Justine had been killed from blunt trauma to the head.

He closed his eyes now, instinctively rejecting it. “God, no,” he said. “No.”

Suzie took a deep breath. “I know, but we have to face this if we're going to stop Quigley, don't we? Where was Gavin the night Justine disappeared?”

It was disturbing how much he liked hearing her say “we.” “We're” going to stop Quigley. It would feel bloody fantastic to have a partner in all this. But of course that was a fantasy and would have to stay that way.

He had a good lawyer finally, the one Parker recommended. That would have to be
partner
enough.

The only problem was, the lawyer had made it clear he didn't want Mike to tell him too much, for fear he might someday have to put him on the stand. Mike was no fool—he knew what that meant. It meant, for fear Mike was guilty.

Suzie Strickland didn't seem to consider that possibility for a minute. She didn't seem to feel one bit nervous, sitting alone here on a darkened lake with a suspected murderer who had a gun tucked into his jeans.

For that comforting blind faith, he would never be able to repay her.

“Gavin was at home that night,” he said. “After the school play, he went to Hugh's house for a party. But they all went back to Justine's afterward, for a slumber party. Even though she wasn't going to be there, they all liked Justine's house best. The house was so big, with a whole video game room and the pool. Anyhow, the plan was for me to pick him up the next morning and bring him here. You knew Justine was going on a trip to Europe?”

Suzie nodded. “I read all about it, back when they first realized she'd disappeared. She was supposed to be gone a whole month, right? That's why it took them so long to know anything was wrong. I heard that her Swedish boyfriend finally called Mayor Millner and—”

She broke off, looking uncomfortable.

“That's right,” Mike said. If she only knew how little he minded Justine's other love interests. “Her boyfriend called, because she hadn't ever shown up to meet him. He didn't worry at first, because Justine was so unpredictable. But eventually, when he couldn't reach her on her cell, or at home, he—”

Suzie leaned forward. “Did the cops look at him? I mean, is it possible he—”

“No.” Mike shook his head. They all would have liked to think that the handsome Swede might have been the bad guy. But it would have been too easy. “When they checked, they discovered that Justine had never used her airline ticket. She never reached Europe.”

“But what if the boyfriend came over—”

“No.” Mike found Suzie's eagerness touching, but it was pointless. “Passports leave a pretty clear trail. He never set foot in New York.”

She subsided with a sigh. “Okay. So who stayed with the kids at the mansion that night? I know it wasn't you. After you dropped Justine off on the road, you just came here, right?”

“Right. I was at the end of a project and had a ton of work to do. But when the boys got to the house for the slumber party, they said everything looked perfectly normal. Everyone assumed Justine had walked home, called a cab, as planned, and gone straight to the airport, as planned.”

“So who did babysit the slumber party?”

“Debra,” Mike said. “Debra Pawley. She's a Realtor. She was just starting out then, not making a whole lot, and she needed the extra money. So Justine used her as a babysitter sometimes. She's a nice woman. She's dating Rutledge. You remember Rutledge?”

Suzie laughed. “Oh, yeah. Some things you just never forget.”

“I'll bet.” Mike remembered, too, how shitty Rutledge had always been to Suzie. Once, when Ledge had been particularly obscene, Mike had knocked him off their motorboat into Llewellyn Lake.

“Anyhow, Debra said everything was fine. The boys were good, nothing out of the ordinary happened all night. So what could Gavin have seen?”

Suzie shook her head. “I don't know. It doesn't make sense. But that must be what Quigley is thinking. And we don't really know when Justine—” She swallowed. “God, it's awful to have to talk about things like this, but—”

“It's okay,” he said. “You're right. We can't just pretend they didn't happen. They did.”

“Well, we don't really know when Justine's body was buried out there, do we? I mean, she could have been killed somewhere else, and—”

“Yes. In fact, it would have been much easier to do it later, because for the next several weeks there was no one at the house at all, except the gardener, who lives in the guest quarters. If you needed to hide what you were doing, it would have been much better to wait.”

“Which brings us back full circle.” Suzie raked her hands through her hair. “There probably wasn't anything Gavin
could
have seen that night. So why would anyone want to hurt him?”

Mike shook his head. “I don't know.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes.

Suzie shifted in her chair, getting comfortable. “Who do you think it was, Mike?”

He took a deep breath. “I just don't know,” he said. “I've thought about it a million times. When I left her on the road, there was a car right behind us. I've tried and tried to remember what the car looked like, but I just can't. I was angry. I wasn't paying attention.”

“It doesn't have to have been that car,” she said. It was sweet how eager she was to take the weight from
his shoulders. “As Justine was walking, anyone could have come by. They could have offered her a ride, and—”

He nodded. He'd imagined it that way, too. Justine had been out there alone on Woodcliff Road, walking home after their spat. She would have been angry, offended. If someone offered her a ride, she would have been so relieved. He could just see her smiling, climbing into the car with…

With whom? Quigley? Certainly the D.A. would have seemed respectable enough to be completely safe. Richie Graham, the gardener who had always acted way too familiar? She obviously hadn't disliked Richie as much as Mike had. She'd kept him on, whereas Mike would have fired him so fast he wouldn't have had time to wash his hands.

What about Phil Stott? Phil was happily married, but still, he'd always watched Justine with that same hungry expression Mike had seen on a hundred men's faces. Or even Rutledge, who liked to play rough and had always envied Mike's conquest of Justine?

And what about all the lovers? He didn't know who they were, but the field was wide open. The fathers of Gavin's classmates, the husbands of her own friends, Mike's clients, her aerobics instructor, the postman, the priest? Justine had the power to hurt any man enough to make him want to hurt her back.

God knows he would have preferred a total stranger. It would be so nice to believe it was a drifter, an anonymous evil who just happened by at the wrong moment.

And yet, even as he wished it, he knew it couldn't be true. A stranger would have disposed of Justine's
body out in the woods, or in a ditch, even in some deserted train yard near Albany or Niagara Falls or Troy.

Not in her own backyard.

Mike heard a small noise upstairs. He pushed back his chair.

“I should check on him,” he said.

“Go ahead.” Suzie smiled. “I'll put away the leftovers.”

Gavin was fine, just restless, and he'd knocked his alarm clock off the nightstand with his pillow. Mike got everything sorted out, gave Gavin a kiss on the forehead, which made him roll over again, and then went back downstairs.

The breakfast table was clear, and the French doors were standing open. Suzie must have walked out to look at the lake.

He stood in the open doorway, one ear listening for Gavin, but his eyes locked on Suzie, who leaned over the railing. Her long, shining hair blew in the wind, which was unusually strong tonight. And the lake smells were more intense, too. That usually meant there would be a storm by morning.

He was acutely aware of every tiny motion of the boat below them, as it thudded softly against its slip, adjusting to the edgy water. Maybe it was symbolic. He'd tried to build a stable world for his son, but he'd built on flowing water, not solid ground. If he wasn't careful right now, everything could come tumbling down.

After a couple of minutes, Suzie seemed to sense his presence. She straightened up and turned around.

“Everything okay?”

He nodded. “He's asleep.”

She dragged her tousled hair out of her face. “I've
made a decision,” she said. “This is going to sound crazy, but I'm not leaving. I'm not going back to Albany. Not until this whole thing is cleared up.”

He wasn't ordinarily a slow thinker, but this caught him so completely by surprise he could hardly find words. “What do you mean, you're not leaving?”

She smiled grimly. “Well, I don't mean I'm going to squat on your living room sofa and refuse to budge, if that's what you're afraid of. I just mean I'm not leaving Tuxedo Lake. I can get a motel room nearby. But I think we need to work together to figure this whole mess out.”

“No, Suzie,” he said. “This isn't your problem. It isn't your mess.”

“It is now. I've got some anonymous son of a bitch trying to kidnap Gavin on my watch. I've got a D.A. breathing down my neck, implying that maybe I helped you kill your ex-wife so that we could—”

She paused, then waved her hand irritably. “Well, that whole line of logic is so convoluted I'm not sure
what
the heck he thinks we wanted to do. I mean, we were both free and, since your divorce, single. If we'd wanted to have sex 24-7, there wasn't anyone who could stop us.”

Mike felt a painful lurch in his groin.
Yes
, his body was saying,
yes we could have. We still could.