Lemon Tart (3 page)

They met Officer McKesson, who was blocking the body from view.
Harris was wrapping a band of yellow tape around the perimeter of the house.
Sadie heard a siren in the distance growing closer.

“She’s going to identify the body,” Malloy said. Officer
McKesson hesitated, but after a few moments he moved aside. Sadie closed her
eyes, letting Officer Malloy lead her the last few steps. The brittle grass and
weeds of the field crunched beneath her feet once they left the back lawn.

“Okay,” he said quietly. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

In answer to his question, she opened her eyes.

Anne’s pale blue eyes stared at nothing, her blonde hair
tangled in the weeds, and her mouth hung slightly open as if she were about to
say something. Her head was at an unnatural angle to her body and her face and
neck were a bluish-purple color. It looked like there was some matted
blood in her hairline.

So it had been murder.

The thought hit Sadie like a cold bucket of water and she
forgot to breathe again. Anne’s arms and legs were sticking out in odd
directions and her clothing was torn as if she’d put up quite a fight. Good for her, Sadie thought,
wiping at her eyes. Good for
her.

She looked away for a moment to get control of her emotions and
noticed Anne’s purse in the weeds not far away, the top of a sippy cup barely
visible. Anne was always trying to avoid taking a separate diaper bag by
cramming Trevor’s things in her purse. Sadie stared at the cup and thought of
the little boy with sandy blond hair and bright blue eyes. If Anne was here,
like this, where was Trevor? It was almost too much to think about.

“Is this Anne Lemmon?” Officer Malloy asked, reminding her that
she was supposed to be making an official identification.

She looked back at Anne’s broken body—one of
Anne’s hoop earrings was missing and she wondered if that was important.
Sadie sniffed. “Yes, that’s her,” she said, her voice shaking. She leaned
down, wanting to straighten out Anne’s head or pull her shirt down so her
stomach wasn’t exposed to the autumn air. She was dead, but was it necessary
that she look so uncomfortable?

Officer Malloy pulled her up. “You can’t touch her. We’ll need
to take photos and measurements of the crime scene.”

Sadie nodded and gratefully turned away, though it felt like a
betrayal somehow. It made her feel horrible to not want to look at the evidence
of how Anne’s life had ended.

“Can you get home on your own?” Malloy asked as they walked
away from the body, toward the driveway.

Sadie watched the grass bend beneath her shoes. The grass was
going dormant and was a muddle of brown and yellow and a few determined green
blades.

“I’m fine,” Sadie lied, numbness taking over.

“Because this is still considered an active crime scene, we’ll
be patrolling the neighborhood and canvassing the area. When you get home, lock
your doors and don’t leave. A detective will be coming around to ask you some
questions. You might want to call someone to be with you.”

Sadie stopped and turned to face him. “So I’m just supposed to
go home? Do nothing?” How was that possible?

“I’m sorry,” Officer Malloy said. “That’s all you can do.”

“I’ll try,” Sadie said under her breath. Doing nothing was not
her strong suit.

“What?” the officer asked.

“Never mind.”

Chapter 3

Sadie went
home, locked her doors as instructed, and sat carefully on a kitchen chair as
if too much movement might break them both. She stared at nothing as old ghosts
moved in to haunt her. Most days she avoided such thoughts, but her defenses
were down and the multitude of her losses began compounding.

She felt her muscles tense as her husband’s face came to her
mind. Oh, how she missed him. Neil had died of a massive heart attack nineteen
years ago at the age of forty-one—leaving her a widow with
two young children to raise. There was a history of heart disease in Neil’s
family, but he’d taken such good care of himself and no one had expected he
would die so young—certainly not Sadie. Ten years later Sadie’s
mother had been killed in a car accident. And then, not quite a year ago, her
father, who had lived with her and the children since her mother’s death, had
died of colon cancer. At least she’d had time to prepare for Dad’s passing—not
that the sting of finding him cold and gray one December morning had been any
easier because of the expectation.

In some ways, the tragic turns of Sadie’s life had aged
her—she’d always felt older and wiser than other women of her
generation simply due to the fact that she’d had to be centered,
self-sufficient, and able to fill multiple roles. However, because of
the twists of fate she’d endured, she also understood the fragility of
mortality better than most, and she took full advantage of the life she
had.

She knew many women her age who felt they had done their time
chained to the kitchen sink and were convinced that other success would make up
for the monotony of cooking and cleaning. She also knew women who lived only to
take care of the other people in their lives, insulating themselves from the
real world by disregarding their own ambitions and giving up their own life for
someone else’s.

Sadie was none of those women.

At fifty-six it was hard to accept that she was
officially considered a senior citizen—she certainly didn’t
feel old—and
she went to great pains to not look or act old either. Life was as much an
adventure as it had always been, and she spoiled herself whenever she felt like
it. She loved learning new things and relished her relationships. She’d been
the one left behind enough to know that life doesn’t last forever, so she made
the best of every day she had.

Perhaps she should be used to loss by now, or the joy she found
in life would have made up for the heartache, but that wasn’t the case at all.
Making the most of her life never filled in the voids left from losing the
people she cared about. But neither did she expect it to.

Poor Anne,
Sadie thought as her fingers felt across the nubby top of her ring. It was so
wrong that just after deciding to change her life, to make a real future for
Trevor, she was gone.

Sadie’s eyes shifted to focus on a watercolor Trevor had
painted for her a few weeks earlier and her fingers stilled on her ring. The
blue and red of the picture seemed to be a mocking tribute to life. She could
still see how his face had lit up when he’d given it to her—a
true treasure in his toddler mind. She put her arms on the kitchen table and
laid her head against them as she began to cry. She wished Ron were there, and
yet if he was, she’d be embarrassed to break down like this. It was probably
better he was away so she could sort out her thoughts and emotions in
private.

Only a few minutes passed before she ran out of tears. Sarah
Diane Hoffmiller was not the kind of woman to give in to sorrow. She’d learned
early on that it didn’t do any good and today she had apples to sauce.

Still wiping at her eyes, Sadie stood and restarted the CD
player. Grateful she had something to keep her hands and her mind busy, she
traded her jacket for her candy-stripe apron and headed for the
apples she’d left to simmer earlier. They were certainly done by now. Neil’s
mother had taught her many things, including how to make homemade applesauce.
Sadie’s own mother cooked out of duty, not joy, but Neil’s mother was an
amazing cook who not only blessed her family with the best meals two hands
could make, but also had fun doing it. Her mother-in-law’s gift
had become a legacy Neil and Sadie shared, which Sadie then passed on to her
own children after he died. There were few things that compared to the joy of
cooking a delicious dish and sharing it with the people in her life. It was
therefore a relief to know the apples wouldn’t sauce themselves and that, for a
moment at least, she could lose herself in the task.

A knock at the door startled her some time later, and she
looked up from the pan of boiled apples she was in the process of mashing. The
Paul Simon CD that had kept her company all morning had started over again and
her favorite song was playing. It bothered her that someone was interrupting
her—and then she thought about what had happened to Anne. And
she was irritated about a little interruption?

As she approached the door, she heard what sounded like
arguing, but as soon as she began pulling the door open the voices stopped. Two
men stood on the doorstep and it didn’t take Sadie long to determine they were
the detectives Officer Malloy had told her would stop by—the
badges they both held out gave it away.

“Please come in,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron. She
hadn’t replaced her headband and tried to smooth her hair a bit as the two men
followed her into the living room and sat on the couch in front of the big
picture window. She smoothed her apron as well, her hands resting on her rather
substantial hips and reminding her that no amount of pressing was going to iron
them out. Oh, well, she’d spent thirty years trying to make peace with her
figure, now wasn’t the time to dwell on it. At least she didn’t have any
mascara smudges to worry about since she hadn’t even thought about makeup
today.

“You’re a Paul Simon fan?” the older of the two detectives
asked when she went over and turned off the CD.

“Love him,” Sadie said with a smile, pleasantly surprised by
the comment and grateful for the distraction. “I think he’s one of the most
underappreciated musicians of our time. However, I don’t hold with his
antiwar beliefs.” She liked to make that clear. If nothing else,
Sadie was a patriot.

“Same for me, on both counts.” He smiled slightly, and she
noted that she liked the look of him—a broad forehead and a
clean-shaven face that didn’t look old enough to match his
silver-white hair. Late fifties she guessed, leading her to assume he
must be like Jack—prematurely gray. She actually thought gray
looked very nice on older men, and on a few women as well; however, she
couldn’t imagine being comfortable with it herself. Then again, she might
simply like the pampering that came with getting her hair and nails done once a
month. Either way, she wasn’t about to find out just how gray her own hair
really was. She’d been coloring it for almost fifteen years and preferred being
a brunette.

Sadie sat in the chair across from the two men on the couch,
curling her feet underneath her and trying to decide what to do with her hands.
She was tempted to wrap her arms around herself in search of comfort, but then
decided on clasping them in her lap instead. The pleasant air faded as the
severity of the situation set in. Was it cold in here or was it just her?
She looked longingly into the kitchen.

The men didn’t look like the detectives on TV. The one who had
recognized Paul Simon was dressed in jeans and wore a black turtleneck under a
buff-colored jacket. His badge was clipped to his belt. The other
detective didn’t look any older than the police officers at Anne’s house, his
blond hair not yet faded with age or wintertime, blue eyes, and one of those
dime-sized beard things in the center of his chin. Sadie hated those
silly beards. Men should either have a full beard—like Ron—or
none at all; none of this spotty facial hair that was such the rage. Yet, even
with the stupid beard-thing, he could have fit right in on a beach
somewhere, except he was dressed in a dark blue suit—tie and
all. The formal attire and hard line of his jaw gave him a severe look that
made his partner seem even warmer by comparison.

“My name is Detective Cunningham,” the older one said, and as
she looked at him she realized there was something familiar about him beyond
his eyes that looked very much like Sean Connery’s and his hair that was so
similar to Jack’s. He waved briefly toward his partner. “This is Detective
Madsen.”

Sadie nodded and looked at Detective Cunningham again. “Do I
know you?” she asked.

He nodded and gave such a slight smile that she wondered if she
had imagined it. “We met a few years ago when you headed the Senior Center
Health Fair—I was one of the speakers.”

“Oh, yes,” she said, smiling back and nodding as she made the
connection. “You talked about crime prevention for the elderly. It was a
wonderful presentation.” Sadie and her father had both found it very
informative, even though she was still several years from her AARP card back
then.

Detective Cunningham nodded. “I appreciated the thank you card
and homemade bread you sent afterward, it was delicious.”

Detective Madsen cleared his throat—the
universal cue to change the subject—and they both went quiet.
Sadie stole another glance into the kitchen as she heard the first watery
rumblings from the stove. She’d already put the water bath canner on to boil in
preparation to process the jars of applesauce once they were filled.

“Are we interrupting something?” Detective Cunningham
asked.