Ring of Truth (12 page)

“You don't think we ought to say anything?” asked Margo.

Annie and Violet stared at her, though Violet quickly looked away.

Margo, the thirty-four-year-old mother of a developmentally disabled child, looked at their expressions and said, “No?”

“No,” Annie murmured.

Violet kept her head bowed and didn't say anything.

“But what if it would help find Susanna?”

Nobody said anything for a minute, and then Violet put her face in her hands and started to cry. Annie dropped everything and hurried to embrace her, and then Margo hurried over, too, and wrapped her arms around both of
her friends. When somebody else started to come into the kitchen and saw them, he felt touched by the emotion being shown by Susanna's friends.

After a moment, Violet forced herself free of them. Then she turned and faced them, tears still streaming.

“I've already told about it,” she said, with wide eyes.

“Oh,Violet, no!”

“I thought we agreed we wouldn't—”

But Violet glared at them and said angrily, “How can we not tell what we know? How can we? Our minisiter is having an affair with another woman, and we know it, and we know that Susanna was furious about it, and now she's missing. How can we keep that a secret? It might have something to do with her being missing.”

“Oh,Violet,”Annie whispered. “But that would mean—”

“I know what it would mean, Annie, and I can't help that!”

“You told!” Margo exclaimed, looking horrified. “You told?”

“We're not children,” Violet hissed at her. “This is not some little bit of gossip we're not supposed to repeat. This could be a matter of Susanna's life or death. We had to tell, or one of us had to. So I did it. Early this morning. I called Tammi Golding, because she knows the chief of police, and I told her the whole thing.”

“Did she tell the police chief?” Annie looked aghast.

Violet shrugged angrily. “I don't know what she did. I just know I had to tell somebody, so I told somebody I thought could make intelligent use of the information.”

Margo said, thoughtfully, “You know, Susanna could have left him because of it, just left him, you know what I mean? Without telling anybody. This doesn't necessarily mean that anything bad has happened to her, you know?”

“That's right,” Violet said, with an eager air. “She could
have just left, and she did it like this to humiliate him, which God knows he richly deserves. I can't even stand to look at him in there, pretending to be so pious and so worried about her.”

Annie walked to the door and opened it a crack.

She peeked out, and then looked back at her friends. “He does look worried. He looks like he lost his best friend.”

“She was,” Violet said, tartly. “He just didn't appreciate it.”

Annie moved out of the way of the kitchen door just as it swung open.

A fourth woman stepped through the doorway into the kitchen.

“Hi,” Artie McGregor said quietly, looking from face to face.

She was adorable-looking, a doll of a woman with short blond hair and big brown eyes. They had once been tremendously fond of her, but not anymore. She smiled tearfully at the three friends and asked, “Do you need any help in here?”

For a moment, there was no reply.

“No,” Margo said carefully, when neither of her friends spoke up. “No thank you, Artie.”

When they heard the kitchen door swing softly shut behind Artemis McGregor, shy Annie whispered, passionately, “Bitch!”

“Bob, the police are here! Look out the window.”

At five o'clock on the Saturday afternoon that his wife was missing, the minister rose to his feet so fast he almost lost his balance, and had to catch himself with one hand on the arm of the chair. Church members gathered around him, and together they watched one . . . two . . . three . . . four police officers get out of two cars, slam
their doors, gather together on the sidewalk, and talk for a moment. And then one of them—the youngest one— broke away from the other three and began to jog up the front walk.

He looked as if he couldn't wait to get there.

Bob Wing pushed his way through the crowd behind him and ran to open the door. He hurried past the umbrella stand that held his baseball bat. A feeling of relief and celebration began to sweep through the friends and neighbors who crowded in behind him. Why, anybody could tell just from looking at the cop's face that this was good news. The best news. They couldn't wait to hear it.

“Dr.Wing?”

“Yes! Have you found my wife?”

“Yes, sir, we have.”

Cheering broke out behind BobWing's back.

Later, the police officer, who had been told to observe closely, would swear that the young, handsome minister looked stunned, as if he had just been given news that couldn't possibly be true. The other three police officers coming up behind him interpreted the preacher's reaction in exactly the same way. And, in fact, the Reverend Dr. Robert Wing said to the cop, in a shocked and hollow tone, “You found Susanna?”

“Yes, sir, we found her.”

The minister's knees seemed to give way. He sagged where he stood, though a member of his congregation quickly moved to put an arm under his to support him.

“I don't believe it,” Bob Wing said in an incredulous tone of voice.

It was a dirty trick the Bahia police pulled, and one for which they would be pilloried in the press, in pulpits, and the trial. They didn't care; as they would say later in their own defense, they had a brutal murder to solve and something important to prove. It wasn't as if they actually
said that Susanna Wing was alive. They only said they had found her. He could have asked them if she was dead or alive, but he didn't. First he said, “You found Susanna?” And then he said, “I don't believe it.” It made some people furious, what the police did, but the cops claimed that if they lied, it was only by way of omission. They defended their action by saying they wanted to gauge the reaction of her husband when he heard them say they'd found her. In hindsight, it would seem to be the reaction of someone who had not expected the body to be found, at least not so soon.

“She's dead,” the minister stated flatly. “Isn't she?”

Behind him a woman gasped, and then cried, “No!”

“Yes, sir,” the young cop said and then added after an almost imperceptible hesitation, “I'm sorry.” Another pause, and then: “Would you please step out here alone, so that we can tell you about it, and ask you some questions?”

“Not alone,” asserted Tammi Golding, stepping forward.

“Am I under arrest?” Bob Wing asked, in an unsteady voice.

“Arrest?” the young cop repeated, looking surprised. “Why would you think so?”

“She was murdered, wasn't she?”

“Bob!” Tammi said sharply. “With all due respect, shut up.”

“Yes, she was,” the cop confirmed, while his compatriots remained very still in the background, listening and watching. “But how did you know that?”

“Bob—” Tammi warned.

“I just knew it. It had to be something bad. I felt it in my heart.”

“You think we want to arrest you for the crime, sir?”

The husband, who hadn't yet shed a tear over his wife's death, or even asked where she was killed or how, looked
with knowing eyes at the police officer on his front stoop. “It's usually the husband, isn't that right?”

“Quite often,” the cop confirmed in a soft voice.

“Not this time,” snapped Tammi Golding, stepping forward from her role as concerned friend to her job as criminal defense attorney.

Susanna
7

The morning after finishing my book, I reluctantly roll out of the warm embrace of the naked brown arms of the state attorney for Howard County. It appears I do still have a lover. Apparently he is not high-maintenance. With a sigh for what I'm leaving behind in bed, I heave myself onto the floor. No rest for the weary writer. Or the horny one, for that matter, although that is considerably less of a problem now than it was at this same time yesterday.

I look back and smile at his sleeping face.

Franklin DeWeese sleeps with his mouth open.

It would be precious little on which to blackmail the man, but I haven't found many other faults, if you don't count the natural flaws of a born prosecutor. A bit aggressive, the way a Bengal tiger is a bit aggressive, but no more argumentative and bullheaded than a mama alligator with a nest to protect. A sweetie, really, if you don't mind brutal truth, or fighting him for every inch he gives you, if you don't mind being the perpetual defendant in the stand. Every now and then he gives me a break and lets up—like when he's just won a big case and doesn't have anything to prove for twenty-four hours or so. But, hey, it's good mental exercise; almost as good as the other kind I get from him. But, damn, I cannot stand here mooning like this.
Got to keep all of the many appointments I have quixotically made for this day: with a homicide detective, an assistant state attorney—as if one prosecutor per day were not enough for any woman—and a reporter.

“What?” he says, opening an eye and smiling a little.

“Nothing. I was just enjoying the view.”

The eye closes, the smile widens.

“Franklin, would you kill to have me?”

“Sorry, no,” he says sleepily into his pillow. I return to sit on the edge of the bed, where I can stroke the silky mound of his right shoulder, on down to his bare back. “Mmm,” he says.

“What do you think that would feel like?” I continue. “To want somebody so bad that you'd kill to have them?”

“Like sex, I suppose.”

“You ever get a hint of that kind of sexual obsession off of Artemis McGregor or Bob Wing?”

He moves his head a little, indicating no.

“Me neither.” I change my caress to a sharp swat on his butt. “I wouldn't kill to have you, either.”

He laughs and darts out a hand to grab me, but I escape.

On my way back into the bedroom after my shower, the phone rings.

“Marie! I stayed home and read it all day yesterday.”

My heart goes into overdrive. It's Charlotte Amstell, my editor. It's early; either she's calling me from her loft in Tribeca or she has subwayed to her office in Midtown Manhattan to break the news to me. Desperately nervous, as if I hadn't received phone calls like this on every prior book I've done, as if I were still the vulnerable beginner that all writers are in our hearts, as if I weren't as used to hearing good news as I am, I wait for her to say, “It stinks.” Not that she would say it like that; Charlotte's much too kind for torture, but she's also much too good at her job to hesitate in going for the kill. If it's bad, Charlotte says so. She does it nicely, elegantly, but the knife still slices the verbiage clean off the page.

“Hi, Charlotte,” I say, and go into a coughing jag.

The good news about being a bestselling author is that your stuff gets read immediately. It's very early by New York publishing standards; if she's at the office, that means she has come in early to talk to me without being interrupted by all the million and one things that keep editors from actually editing these days. When she says she had to stay home a day to read my manuscript, she means it; otherwise, she'd have to read mere snippets in between maddening meetings.

“Are you all right, Marie?”

Getting my voice under control, I ask, “So what do you think of it?”

“It's beautifully written.”

Oh, shit. My heart goes from overdrive to park. My knees feel as if somebody removed my kneecaps during the night while I slept. The bad news about being a bestselling author is that you get the bad news faster. This is not what your editor is supposed to say after she reads your manuscript. She's supposed to say, “I couldn't put it down.”

“I love the prologue with the two little girls,” is what she actually says. “I don't see any changes there, it really pulled me into the story. And you've done your usual wonderful job researching the backgrounds of these people.”

Oh, God, she's complimenting my research. This is worse than I feared. My research is something she ought to be able to take for granted, and the quality of my writing, too. Feeling hopeless, I wait for the ax.

“I just love it from start to finish.”

I wait for her to say, “But . . .”

“Marie?”

“Yes?”

“Did you hear me?”

“You love it?”

“You sound so surprised.” She laughs at me. “Don't I always? Are we having ourselves a little attack of neurotic writer, Marie?”

“Must be,” I agree. “Did you find anything you didn't like, Charlotte? Any stuff for me to work on?”

“Don't you even want to know what I like about it?” She's highly amused at my perversity. “And you call yourself a writer? You don't want to hear all the praise first? But that's what they taught me in editor school. Praise first, criticize later. Do you want me to lose my editor credentials? I have to spend at least fifteen minutes gushing over you. Which I will do with utter sincerity, of course.”

“Sincere gushing is my very favorite kind.”

So I sit through a painful five—not fifteen—minutes of being appreciated for all my sterling writer qualities, none of which seems very much in evidence to me in the manuscript that she and Franklin have both read and which both now claim to like very much. As I listen to her talk about me, I make grateful noises, like a magpie doing a good imitation of somebody who believes what she's hearing. Finally, she gets past the gooey part to the problems. I knew it. I
knew
there were problems.

“I do have a couple of problems with it, Marie.”

I brace myself. It's going to be major. But at least Charlotte's now going to tell me how to fix it. I gird myself for the sting of the wasp soaked in the honey.

“First of all, I wondered why you put in so much about the murder of that poor girl in Lauderdale Pines?”

“You mean Allison Tobias?”

“Yes. That's such a sad story, but I think you give it too much emphasis—in relation to your story as a whole, I mean—by going into such detail there in the beginning. Do we really need that much? Could you boil it down, do you think? Otherwise, I'm afraid your readers are going to think it's more important than it really is. To the story of Susanna and Bob Wing, I mean.”