Rite of Wrongs (26 page)

F
IFTY
-E
IGHT

Saturday, 5:00 p.m.

Evelyn Rome’s surprise party wasn’t much of one, but that was due to Esther being unable to keep the secret. So instead of Miriam’s father taking her mother out for an afternoon of shopping and gelato to celebrate reaching her seventh decade of life, she stayed home and replaced Esther’s decorations with ones she wouldn’t be ashamed for company to see.

And Miriam wondered why she and her siblings were so screwed up. Oh, they’d tried, over the years, to gain their mother’s approval, but none of them had ever been able to meet her standards or her expectations. Erik and Esther had decided rather than put up with her constant criticism to let her take over their lives. Miriam had said screw it and gone her own way.

That, of course, meant nothing she’d done since was right because it lacked her mother’s influence. But that was okay. She was her father’s daughter, after all.

He was the one who understood her, who knew she was not her brother or her sister when her mother expected her to be another clone. Appearance was important to her mother in ways Miriam was certain had roots in the past.

But since her mother had never talked about her childhood—had refused, in fact, to talk about her childhood—Miriam had found her champion in her father instead. Her father, who also didn’t know everything about his wife’s past.

Kinda like Jeff Gardner hadn’t known about Gina’s history.

Kinda like Miriam hadn’t known about the abuse Augie had suffered as a child.

Miriam and her father shared a love of books, a love of baseball, a love of crossword puzzles and logic conundrums. Not to mention Chinese food, which her mother abhorred. She glanced across the backyard to where he stood. He caught her gaze and waved her over.

She stopped by the margarita machine on the way, downing half the drink before she reached him. He pulled her into a hug, whispering, “I hear you and your sister had a nice lunch.”

“Nice?” she huffed, as he pulled away and grinned. “Is that what she called it?”

“I believe you may have bought the new outfit she’s wearing.” He inclined his head toward the dessert table, where Esther stood beside their mother. The capris she wore today were a peach linen, just a shade closer to apricot than their mother’s. Because, of course, it was their mother’s celebration, and the true peach belonged to her. As did the jewelry.

Today, none of it was costume.

The two women were the same height, both three inches taller than Miriam, the runt. She glanced around the backyard, searching out her brother. Erik was six feet one. Augie’s height. And Augie’s age. Without an inch of Augie’s empathy or compassion, and a level of selfishness her ex-partner would never know.

Still, Erik looked good. His hair. His clothing. No middle-aged paunch for her middle-aged brother. Hard to believe he was the father of five, one old enough to drive. And just as the thought crossed her mind, little Haven ran across the lawn in front of him. Erik scooped him up and blew a raspberry on his belly. The boy giggled and wiggled.

Miriam smiled. Erik really was a good dad. And she hadn’t realized it was Haven’s weekend. She looked back to her father. “Mom looks wonderful. Esther, too. Even Erik.”

“They do make some kind of threesome, don’t they,” her father said, his arm around her shoulders, hers around his waist.

“And the two of us?” she asked. “Are we the ugly ducklings or something?”

“I’ll answer that.”

The voice was gravelly and familiar. Miriam looked around as she drained her glass, only to have another offered to her by a big beefy hand. “Uncle Roger! What are you doing here? I mean, I know what you’re doing here, but I had no idea you were coming. It’s good to see you!”

Roger Ware was shorter than Miriam, shorter than her father, and at least sixty pounds too heavy for his frame. She didn’t think she’d ever known another person with a greater love for life than her mother’s brother. Or a better golf swing.

He gave her a big one-armed hug, since his other hand held his drink. “It’s my sister’s seventieth. I’ve come to see what that decade is going to be like when I finally get there.”

“Next year, you mean?” Miriam’s father asked, causing Roger to sputter his mouthful of margarita.

“Thanks for that, Cyril. I was hoping someone would remind me how old I am.”

Both Roger and Cyril laughed. Miriam, too, though as they continued to talk, she found her attention drifting to Haven again. She wondered if anyone would notice if she kidnapped him for a pizza and a movie. She’d clear it with Erik, of course . . .

“Cyril, did you tell your daughter about your mystery?” Roger asked, finishing off his drink. “Maybe she can solve it, being a detective and all.”

Wondering if anything suitable for Haven was showing on the big screen, Miriam smiled at her father. “What mystery is that?”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” he said, only telling her after she poked him on the shoulder. “I don’t know what was going on, but when I went out to my car last evening, there was a plastic tarp spread beneath the driver’s-side door. One of those big blue ones. Like you might see covering roof damage after a storm.”

And just like that, Miriam’s blood grew cold, her heart nearly stopping before jolting hard enough to bruise her ribs. Her fingertips went numb. Her tongue stuck painfully to the top of her mouth. She tossed the rest of her drink into the grass, then handed her glass to her uncle, who stared into it as if wondering what in the hell was wrong with her.

“Tell me about this tarp.” The words were shaky. She was shaky, but she hid it well.

Her father shrugged, pocketing his hands. “Not much to tell. Plastic. Blue. It was half under the car as if it had blown there.”

Except it hadn’t blown there. And she knew it. Still, she asked, “Was it balled up? Folded over?”

“Actually, no.” He pushed his glasses up his nose and frowned. “It was flat on the ground. The way a painter would use it to protect a floor from drips.”

Or a killer to collect his victim’s blood.

Miriam swallowed and pulled her phone from her denim miniskirt’s pocket. “I need you to talk to someone. Don’t move. Don’t leave. Roger, don’t let him leave.”

That had her father chuckling. “I live here. It’s my wife’s party. Where would I go?”

Miriam just held up a finger, telling him not to move, and waited for Melvin to pick up. Augie was on his way, but she needed her partner to do the police work neither she nor the priest could do.

“What’s up?” he asked, answering after three rings.

She turned her back on her father.
Breathe. Breathe, Miriam.
“How fast can you get to my parents’ house?”

“Oh, so now I’m invited to your party. I see how it is. You wait until you run out of hamburger buns, then call ol’ Melvin to pick some up on his way. You need a case of beer, too? A rack of ribs? More tequila?”

She took one step. Then she took another. She made it two more before she reached for the fence to keep from falling as she spoke. “Last night my dad found a blue tarp beneath his car door.”

Melvin bit off a sharp curse. She pictured him surging to his feet. “Be there in twenty.”

F
IFTY
-N
INE

Saturday, 6:00 p.m.

Though he’d told Miriam he’d come to her mother’s party, Augie spent the drive to the Romes’ residence having to talk himself out of turning around. Last night he’d given up too much, telling her things he’d held close the whole time they’d been together.

It had been so easy to do. He hadn’t even thought about the words before they’d come tumbling out of his mouth. But he hadn’t wanted the same thing to happen again, and it took a lot of back and forth to convince himself it wouldn’t.

That her mother’s party wasn’t conducive to confession.

That he could enjoy the Tex-Mex spread and the company.

Wearing his collar would keep the conversation from going where he didn’t want it to.

Now, he stood inside the front of the house with Miriam, her father, Melvin Stonebridge, and Miriam’s uncle, Roger Ware. The party was still going on in the backyard. Miriam had done a very good job of containing things. Not even her mother or her siblings had come in to see why she, her father, and her uncle were huddled up with her current and ex-partners.

“I don’t understand.” Standing with the others in the open entryway, between the foyer and the formal living room decorated as opulently as the rectory, though with an ivory color scheme, Cyril Rome looked from Melvin to Augie to Miriam, then back. “Why would a serial killer come after me?”

“To get to your daughter. To mess up her head. To throw her off her game.” Melvin stopped and waited for that to sink in, giving Cyril a good long look before nodding to Augie. “I’d say she’s pretty thrown.”

Augie agreed. Miriam was pacing from the living room, down the length of the foyer, and back. She was talking to herself, one arm crossed, the hand of the other in a fist at her mouth as if she were chewing her thumbnail to a nub.

“She needs some fresh air,” he said to Melvin. “You got this?”

Melvin nodded and answered, “Yep,” so Augie walked from the room to meet her as she stepped from the foyer tile onto the living-room rug. “C’mon. Let’s get you a glass of water. Then we’ll figure this out.”

She jerked her elbow free from his hand. “I don’t need—”

“Yeah, Miriam. You do.” This from Melvin as he moved to put himself in front of Cyril. “Go with Augie. Get a cup of coffee.”

“I don’t want coffee,” she said, glaring at them both.

“Then get tea. Water. A soda. Anything that’s nonalcoholic.”

At that, Miriam bristled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Exactly what it sounds like.” Melvin got close, almost nose to nose, and kept his voice low. “Don’t drink any more alcohol. Not tonight.”

She spun away and headed for the kitchen. Augie gave Melvin a nod of respect, then followed. Miriam was already pacing the room when he got there.

“What do you want? What do you need?”

“I’m not going to drink, if that’s what you’re worried about. No matter how much I want to. It won’t do my dad any good. God. My dad.” Her voice breaking, she stopped and doubled over, reaching for one of the island’s stools. “My dad. My mom. My brother and his five kids. My sister and her four. They’re all here, at least, but how am I supposed to keep them safe?”

“You don’t have to,” he said, holding the stool’s seat on either side of her forearms. This close, he could smell the flowers in her shampoo. “Not by yourself. You know that. You’ve got the entire UPPD behind you. Nothing is going to happen to your family. Not here. Not tonight.”

“What about Nikki?” She straightened, lacing her hands on top of her head. Her chest rose and fell like a bellows. “Is he going to go after her next? Thierry’s out of town, thank God, but the killer won’t know we’ve broken up.”

“I’ll call Nikki. And I’ll get in touch with Thierry. No one is going to get hurt.”

She bobbed her head, breathing deeply as if she were counting to ten. Then she grabbed a napkin from the island and blew her nose. “I know what he’s doing. Trying to get to me through my dad. Whoever he is. At least we don’t have additional fosters to worry about, thanks to the pact the five made.”

Augie wondered if the five had indeed kept Dorothy from taking in more after they were gone. Then he wondered if there had been others before them.

“Too bad that doesn’t help narrow down the rest,” Miriam was saying. “It could be Gordon or Edward. Sameen, even. Jeff Gardner. Dorothy.”

“Dorothy?” Arms crossed, he leaned against the island, waiting. This he needed to hear.

“Not on her own, obviously, though I wonder how necessary that wheelchair of hers really is.” She opened the pantry door and tossed her napkin into the trash. “But every time I talk to her, I get a sense of . . . I don’t know. Something isn’t right.”

“She has dementia, Miriam. Nothing about her is right. It’s the disease.”

“That’s the thing.” She was pacing again. Anxious. “I know she’s more lucid some days than others, but I get this sense that she turns it on and off at will.”

“You think she’s faking.”

“Honestly?” She stopped and faced him. “Yeah, I do. But I can’t prove it. And if you don’t believe me, no one else is going to.”

“Why’s that?” he asked, because if she put that much gravitas on what they’d once had . . .

“She was a psych nurse, right?” She waited for him to acknowledge that. “It was a long time ago, but I’ve got to think she’s still familiar with dementia symptoms. Memory loss. Problems with language and communication. Focus, reasoning, judgment. And it’s not like there’s a definitive test to prove any of this. Treatable conditions, sure, but most labs and imaging are more about ruling things out than they are pointing to a positive result.”

“Sounds like you’ve done some research,” he said, though he wasn’t sure he bought it, even while he thought back to what Carolyn Preston had told him about growing up with Dorothy. And with Edward . . .

Miriam didn’t respond, except to start up again, all business and dry-eyed. “There was a psychiatrist in California, maybe fifteen years ago, who faked dementia to avoid a trial on sex-abuse charges. And that mafia don who wandered around New York in a bathrobe did it to get out of prosecution, too. It’s called malingering. It’s a real thing.”

It was a stretch, but then this
was
Miriam. “What do you think about Gordon?”

“What do you mean?” she asked, frowning.

He elaborated. “What was your impression of him?”

“Do I think he’s faking, too?”

He nodded.

She thought a minute, then shrugged. “If he is, he’s doing a great job. But then he may have had a great teacher.”

That said, she headed back to the living room. Or she started that way. She only made it halfway down the foyer when the door opened and one of the patrol officers stationed out front walked through.

“Detective Rome?” he asked, holding out a cell phone. “You’ve got a call—”

“Not now—”

“It’s from Sergeant Vince. Robert Vince. You have him on assignment?”

Miriam looked from the officer to her father. Cyril was deep in conversation with Melvin. Roger stood nearby. She motioned for the phone, turning to face Augie as she took the call.