Joyce Sullivan – In His Wife's Name (страница 8)

THE PHONE RANG at ten-thirty in the evening just as Mary was washing her paintbrushes. She’d finished the fine-detail work on the plant pokes and gotten a head start on the signs, but she was too tired to do more tonight. She quickly dried her hands on a paper towel and reached for the phone. Who could be calling her at this hour? Her mother and Aunt Jayne were in Halifax—in a time zone three hours ahead. And they always called from pay phones so Shannon’s number couldn’t show up on a phone bill.

Could it possibly be Luke Mathews calling to say he’d be late tomorrow or had changed his mind about working for her because she’d been such an idiot today?

Why did that thought make her experience a sharp pang of disappointment?

Because ever since she’d walked out on her marriage to Rob, she hadn’t allowed herself to look twice at a handsome man, much less enjoy the simple pleasure of conversation. She’d been too focused on running and being safe. Even the eight months Rob had spent in prison after she’d pressed stalking charges against him, she’d been afraid to make new friends, afraid to share information about herself, worried that she might inadvertently give away her location or her new place of employment…and Rob would somehow find her again.

Even though she had Samantha, having Luke here today had made her painfully aware of how starved she was for friendship and adult company.

The phone rang again.

“Hello?” she said softly, breathlessly, into the receiver, her pulse spiking as an image of Luke, dusty and virile, unfolded in her mind.

Silence met her greeting. But the line hadn’t gone dead. She could hear sounds in the background: the unmistakable clinking of cutlery.

“Hello,” she repeated patiently, feeling the roots of fear sink deep into her chest and twine around her heart. “Who’s calling? What number are you trying to reach?”

The caller didn’t respond. But she could still hear the noises.

Shannon hung up slowly, telling herself it was probably a wrong number, someone who’d misdialed and been confused by the sound of an unfamiliar voice. It couldn’t possibly be Rob this time—even though it was the third wrong number she’d received this week. She shook her head firmly, ticking off on her fingers all the logical reasons it couldn’t possibly be Rob. She’d taken all kinds of precautions—to the point of cutting off all contact with friends. Aunt Jayne and her mother didn’t even have her new name or phone number written down out of fear the information might somehow end up in Rob’s hands. They’d kept news of Samantha’s birth private and didn’t even keep photos of Samantha and Shannon at home. Instead, Shannon mailed them to a post-office box belonging to an acquaintance of her mother’s—a bridge partner—who kept them in her home, no questions asked, so her mother could see them at her weekly bridge games. Shannon never included a return address, and the acquaintance had no idea of Shannon’s new identity. She and Samantha were safe here.

Still, tonight’s phone call disturbed Shannon.

Enough to keep her awake into the early hours of the morning.

Chapter Three

“Sorry I couldn’t get back to you yesterday on the license plate. I was working on another unsolved murder,” Detective Vaughn told Luke over the phone the next morning. His voice was brisk and merciless, like a wire brush scraping rusted metal. Luke heard the sounds of papers being leafed through in a file. “The truck is registered to Mary Tatiana Calder.”

Luke grunted a noncommittal response. Hearing his wife’s middle name spoken out loud by another human being rankled. It seemed a violation of the trust his wife had had in him. A secret only the two of them had shared. But there were no secrets from the police.

And this Mary Calder would have no secrets from him.

Luke brought the detective up to speed about the change in his accommodations and his interview with Bill Oakes. “He told me the suspect has been renting since a year ago last April—two weeks after Mary died. She told him her husband was dead, which is the same line she gave me.”

Vaughn was silent a moment. “You think there’s a custody issue involved?”

“Possibly. It makes the most sense to me. I didn’t see any pictures of a man when I was in the house. I checked the garage for boxes of personal belongings, but no dice.”

“So maybe the husband slit the tire?” Vaughn suggested. Luke could almost hear the gears churning in the detective’s head. “That puts an interesting spin on the situation. You got a name for the husband?”

“No, not even a first name. But then, she’s evasive whenever I ask personal questions. My gut feeling is she’s running from something.”

“Or someone. Think you can get her prints? We might be able to identify her. Stands to reason that if she was involved in Mary’s murder or is the type to buy stolen ID, she may have been in trouble with the law before. She might have a record.”

“I’ll get them,” Luke promised.

Vaughn instructed him to keep in touch and hung up.

Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, with the small cell phone tucked into his pocket, Luke took the dirt path by the lake in the direction of Mary’s cottage. She wasn’t expecting him for another half hour, but he figured he could get the lay of the land and keep a vigilant eye on her cottage at the same time. The person who’d slit her tire might be keeping close tabs on her. And Luke didn’t want anything to happen to Mary and her daughter. Mary was the key to the answers he needed.

Voices drifted over to him from the other cottages. But the only person he encountered on the path was a sullen-faced teen in a black tank top and baggy swimming trunks that hung past his knees. The kid had bleached his dark hair to an electrifying hue and had affixed a row of silver studs to his right earlobe. Luke wondered if he’d ever looked that sullen as a teen.

Mary and Samantha were outside when he arrived. Samantha was sitting in a small sandbox with brightly colored toys while Mary was seated in a blue Adirondack chair that someone—Mary herself?—had turned into a work of art with hand-painted renderings of garden spades, hoes and seed packets. A mug of coffee sat on the wooden arm of the chair and a pencil and sketchbook were in her lap.

“Good morning, Luke, you’re right on time.” Mary’s welcoming smile was so cheerful and beguiling it stirred a response from his body that was far too vigorous for his comfort. She was dressed in a pair of sky-blue shorts this morning, with a matching blouse.

He averted his gaze from the devastating eyeful of tanned silky arms and legs as a razor-sharp sliver of guilt pricked his heart. “Of course I’m on time. Believe it or not, I know a number of contractors and subcontractors who actually show up at the time they promise.”

Mary laughed doubtfully.

Telling himself that he wasn’t attracted to her but to her passing resemblance to his Mary, didn’t help. It only made him feel more unsure. The truth was he didn’t want to feel anything for this Mary and her daughter. He was here to seek justice for his wife, nothing more, nothing less. He needed closure and peace to free himself from the limbo of his existence. Then maybe he could get on with his life.

Samantha gave a whimper of frustration as she tried to turn over a mold filled with sand. Luke hunkered down beside her so he could see her face beneath the brim of her pink sun hat and smiled at the unidentifiable clumps of sand she’d created in the sandbox. Judging by the forms she was playing with, they were supposed to be animal shapes. “I see you’re quite the designer, kid, following in your mother’s footsteps. Want some help making that turtle?”

Samantha sweetly handed him another shovel, those big smoky brown eyes of hers a trap in themselves. Luke helped her fill the plastic turtle mold with sand, then flipped it over. The turtle held its shape. Samantha clapped her hands as he added two tiny pinecone eyes. “There you go, kid.”

An unbearable ache wedged just below his heart, widening into a chasm of pain deep enough to drown in. It took every ounce of his willpower not to let himself think about what kind of father he might have been if he and his wife had had a baby. He’d been eagerly doing his duty to get her pregnant in the weeks before her death.

The Adirondack chair creaked behind him, and Mary’s voice, rich with motherly indulgence, encircled him in a bubble of intimacy that touched the emptiness inside him. “Oops, what are you going to do with that pinecone, Samantha?” she said as her daughter pinched another pinecone between her thumb and forefinger and ever so carefully placed it off-center on the turtle’s head for a nose.

“Nice touch, Samantha,” he praised her, patting her back awkwardly. “Every turtle needs a nose. It helps them find lunch.” Samantha giggled as Luke rose and brushed his hands on his jeans.

He risked taking another look at Mary and tried not to think about all those seemingly insignificant yet cherished moments he’d spent with his wife. The Saturday-morning French-toast breakfasts, the visits to antique shops to find just the right touches for their home. The hello and goodbye kisses. So many lost moments, lost dreams. So much he owed his wife. Luke took a firm mental step away from the edge of the chasm that threatened to suck him into its darkness. He could do this no matter what it took.