Secrets to the Grave (11 page)

His face softened and he reached across the table to put his hand over hers. “It’ll happen, honey. You’re just still under a lot of stress.”

“I know,” she said softly. And pushing thirty. Ticktock.

“For God’s sake, you haven’t been doing it all that long,” Franny said. “And don’t forget, we’re talking practically uncharted territories down there.”

“That isn’t true!” Anne protested, finding an embarrassed grin.

“Virgin forest,” he said, eyes twinkling. “Thank God you found yourself a lumberjack with a big axe.”

“Stop it!” Anne said, giggling as her cheeks burned. “You’ll get us thrown out of here.”

“You’re a lucky girl, Anne Marie. That’s all’s I’m saying,” he said with an extra-thick Long Island accent.

A waitress came by and took Anne’s order for a glass of pinot grigio.

Piazza Fontana was the restaurant where she and Vince had had their first unofficial date. He had asked her here on the excuse of wanting to talk about her students who had discovered the body of Lisa Warwick. She had gone, protesting the notion that she was interested in anything other than just that. After dinner he had stolen a kiss when he walked her to her car. Her lips had tingled all night.

The restaurant had become their favorite haunt. Vince, who came from—by his own description—a big, loud Italian family from Chicago, knew good food and wine. Anne loved the ambience of casual elegance—dark wood and white table linens, exposed brick walls, a fountain gurgling in a corner. They dined here at least once a week.

The owner himself, a transplant from Tuscany, brought her a glass of wine and a broad smile.

“Signora Leone! What a pleasure, as always.”

“Thank you, Gianni. It’s good to see you.”

“Where is your husband?” he asked, looking around. “He lets you out of his sight? All the young men will be looking and saying ‘Who she is?’”

“I’m here to protect her,” Franny announced.

Gianni Farina rolled his eyes comically, patted Franny on the shoulder, and muttered something in Italian.

“No tip for that!” Franny called after him.

Anne laughed and took a sip of her wine as the front door opened and Vince walked in, greeted by no less than three people before he made it past the maitre d’ stand. He traded a few lines of Italian with Gianni, an exchange that ended in laughter and a big grin from Vince.

“Are you keeping an eye on my bride, Franny?” he asked as he slid into the booth next to Anne.

“I can’t be held responsible for how she looks.”

Vince ran a hand back over her hair, his eyes shining as he looked down at her. “She looks beautiful.”

“You’re in love.”

“I am.” He leaned down and gave her a sweet little kiss that filled her with a soft, warm glow. “You look tired.”

Anne mustered a smile. “Long day. What’s your excuse?”

His head was hurting him. He wouldn’t say so, but she had learned to read the signs: the tightness around his eyes, the deepening of the lines across his forehead. He needed to lie down. She needed to take care of him.

“The same,” he said. “I told Gianni we’d take something home with us.”

“And ditch me,” Franny complained.

“Three’s a crowd,” Vince returned.

“Do you have any leads on the case?” Anne asked.

“Some interesting possibilities,” Vince said evasively.

“What case?” Franny asked. “Peter Crane?”

Franny was obsessed with the prospect of the Crane trial. The idea that his dentist—the person he allowed to put his hands in his mouth, for God’s sake!—was a serial killer. And that Crane had abducted and hurt Anne made him all the more rabid on the subject.

“Somebody murdered Marissa Fordham, the artist,” Anne said.

“What?”

“Marissa Fordham,” Anne said again. “She did that beautiful poster for the Thomas Center.”

“Oh my God!”

“Did you know her?” Vince asked.

“I’ve met her a few times at social events. She just brought her little girl to school for the pre-kindergarten Halloween party. I liked her. She’s a cool lady. We talked about her coming in for a visiting artist day. What happened?”

“She was found dead this morning,” Vince said, giving no details away. “We’re trying to find out who her friends were in the hopes they might be able to turn the investigation in the right direction.”

“People aren’t supposed to get murdered here,” Franny said, getting angry. “Do we really have to go through this again? This is unbelievable!”

“People who kill other people don’t tend to stop and think how it’s going to impact the community,” Vince said. “They don’t stop in the heat of the moment and think
Oh my God, there were all those murders here last year. Maybe I should wait.
”

Franny ignored the edge of sarcasm in Vince’s voice. His mind was racing to try to make some kind of sense of a senseless act. “Was it a robbery or something?”

“No.”

“Oh my God. Someone just went to her home and killed her? At random?”

“We don’t think it was random,” Vince said. “In fact, I would say it was very personal with a lot of rage behind it. She managed to piss someone off to the point of no return.

“I remember you once telling me you know everybody worth knowing in Oak Knoll, Franny,” he said. “You run in some artsy circles. Have you ever heard anything negative about her?”

Franny looked uncomfortable. Vince sharpened his stare a little.

“She was single, independent, talented, and gorgeous,” Franny said. “A lot of not-single, not-independent, not-talented, not-gorgeous women are threatened by that. Surprise, surprise.”

“Women worried about someone stealing their husbands.”

Franny rolled his eyes. “Like anyone would want them.”

“Does anyone in particular jump to mind?”

“No, no. I’ve heard the odd catty remark, that’s all. She’s a sexy single mom—she must be a slut. That kind of thing. It’s 1986, for God’s sake,” he said. “Single women have children. Hello: The scarlet letter went out with the poodle skirt.

“What about her daughter?” he asked. “Where is she?”

“In the hospital,” Vince said. “Unconscious, the last I heard.”

That was the final straw for Franny. Color slashed across his pale cheeks and his eyes all but disappeared behind an angry brows-down squint.

“When you find who did it,” he said, “do the world a favor and just shoot him.”

“If only life was that simple,” Vince said.

“It should be,” Franny declared. “Bad people off the planet! Now! More wine for the rest of us!”

He raised his glass in a toast and tossed back the last of his cabernet.

16

Sara walked around her sculpture, trying to concentrate, trying to focus and see the direction she needed to go. Nothing came.

She had a vision a week ago, when she started the project. It was supposed to be about strength and femininity. The metal—the strength—would bend but not break. From the wounded heart would flow feminine beauty in the form of hand-painted silk ribbons.

But as she looked at the piece now, she saw nothing but a mess of twisted wire and steel mesh.
Car Wreck on a Stick.
That was what it looked like.

Anxiety swirled through her. Fragments of the morning kept flashing through her mind like a strobe light. Detective Mendez, grim faced, mustache framing his downturned mouth. Marissa’s house. The ruined studio. The ruined art.

Oh my God.

“Oh my God,” she whispered, trembling.

In her mind’s eye she could see Marissa walking, talking. She used her hands when she spoke as if she were trying to draw a picture to illustrate her point. Vibrant. Animated. Full of life.

She felt nauseous.

She reached out and tried to adjust a piece of the wire mesh, and nicked the tip of a finger. A droplet of blood rounded bright red like the sudden bloom of a flower on a cactus, then rolled off her fingertip to splash like a tear on the heavy canvas drop cloth that covered the garage floor.

They had converted the space above the garage into a studio for her some months ago. But it was no place for a sculpture as tall as this was, made from steel and requiring welding. She had commandeered this far stall of their three-car garage for the project.

Her studio upstairs was a beautifully lit space with plenty of room for painting and crafts projects, and working with the silk, her latest passion. Although in empty moments when her head wasn’t full of whatever she was working on, she could never escape the thought that the studio was her consolation prize. It was her payment for not divorcing Steve.

He had been cheating on her with Lisa Warwick, a nurse who had volunteered her time to advocate in family court for women from the Thomas Center. Just as Steve devoted hours and hours of his time—
their time
—to the same cause.

Sara had suspected for a long time, but had never had the courage to confront him. If she had confronted him, she would have then had to confront the reality of the next step. Did they go to counseling? Did she just divorce him? Could she ever trust him again?

The answer to the last one was no. He had never admitted to the affair. To this day, he had never accepted culpability. Typical lawyer. His accomplice was dead. There were no witnesses to testify against him. But Sara knew, and Steve knew she knew. And she got a lovely art studio out of it, but her self-esteem had taken a beating.

She accepted that and lived with it, but she wore that mantle of the betrayed wife like it was made of chain mail and coarse hair. It was heavy and uncomfortable, but she couldn’t get out of it. She told herself she did it for Wendy. She hoped that was true. She hoped that was right.

Wendy loved her father. She very much enjoyed being the center of her parents’ world. She didn’t need to know that her parents’ marriage no longer existed in a true sense of the word. At least, that was what they all pretended.

Sara tried again to focus on her work, walked around to see it from a different angle. It didn’t look like anything.

She wondered if it would have looked like something to Marissa.

Murdered.

Oh my God
.

A car door slammed in the driveway, making her jump. She pressed her bleeding hand to her heart and glanced at her watch. Must be car pool. Wendy coming home. Time to pull herself together. She forced a smile as she turned. It froze and cracked as her husband came into the garage.

“Oh. I thought you were Wendy. You’re early.”

“I heard some bad news,” he said. “About Marissa Fordham.”

“Where did you hear it?” she asked stupidly, as if no one else would know by now. As if it were somehow her terrible secret to keep.

“Detective Mendez told me you were there, at her house.”

“Marissa and I were supposed to work this morning. I got there and ... he told me.”

“Are you all right?”

“No. Of course not. Are you?”

Steve had known Marissa. As part of his volunteer work for the center he had helped with setting up the copyright on the poster so the proceeds of sales would go directly to the Thomas Center.

She had wondered if that was all her husband had done with Marissa. The curse of the woman scorned: to look at every woman her husband had contact with and wonder if he was sleeping with her too. Marissa was beautiful, headstrong, sexy—a description people had used for Sara what seemed an awfully long time ago ... How strange that was, she thought now, remembering that she and Marissa were close to the same age.

Her husband shook his head, hands on his hips. He was standing not three feet away from her. There had been a time when they both would have closed that distance and she would have been in his arms.

“No,” he said. “It’s terrible.”

“What’s going to happen to Haley?”

“I don’t know.”

She went to push a chunk of hair out of her eyes and smeared blood across her cheek.

“You’re bleeding,” Steve said.

Once he would have taken her hand and kissed her wounded finger.

“I cut myself.”

“Why don’t you wear gloves when you’re working on this thing?” he asked, more annoyed than concerned.

Suffering for your art? Mendez had asked her.

She wondered what either of them would think if she told them the physical pain was a relief.

Another car door slammed out on the street, and the opportunity was lost—not that she ever would have taken it. Her daughter was home. Time to put on a happier face.

17

Wendy went to her room as soon as dinner was over and the kitchen was cleaned up. She tended not to hang around downstairs when both her mom and dad were home because they weren’t happy and everyone was tense and it sucked. And it was her fault, which sucked even worse.

Her parents stayed together because of her, because that was what she wanted. Only it wasn’t. She wanted them to go back in time and be happy the way they used to be—
that
was what she wanted. If she could have time-traveled like Michael J. Fox in
Back to the Future
, she would have gone back and changed so many things.

She would have gone back and made sure that whatever had happened to make her parents fall out of love never happened. She would have gone back to that day last October and made sure she and Tommy didn’t take the shortcut through Oakwoods Park, and they never would have found that dead body, and none of what had happened would have happened.

But she couldn’t travel back in time. She couldn’t fix what was wrong between her mom and dad. And she was too afraid of losing what family life she had to tell them not to try anymore.