Stiff Penalty (A Mattie Winston Mystery) (13 page)

“I have no clue,” I told her. “I don’t know who he is, or why he was shooting at me.”

Hurley said, “Look, Alison, we might need to spin this story a little bit in order to sort it out. Can we count on your cooperation?”

“Sure, if you promise to keep me in the loop.”

“We can do that,” Hurley said, “but you have to promise that you won’t publish anything unless we approve it first.”

“I can do that,” she said.

I wasn’t sure if we could believe her, but she seemed sincere.

Junior was approaching us. He had fetched my phone from the car as well as the bags that I’d had stashed in the back. He was hauling them up the driveway toward us and started talking when he was still a few feet away. “Since we’re probably going to have to tow the hearse in as evidence, I got all the stuff you had in the car,” he said as he approached. He held out my shopping bags. “These fell out of the back when you hit the pole, but it doesn’t look like anything was damaged.” He set them on the ground at my feet, and I swear the words
The Mother Hood
glowed in the light from the various police cars.

Alison’s face suddenly lit up. “You have a lot of clothes here,” she said, peering into one of the bags. “Who’s pregnant?”

I bit my lip and tried to come up with a lie, but I was too rattled to think of anything that made sense. This wasn’t how I wanted this to go down. Alison was staring at me with an expression that resembled one of my cats when they are watching me open a can of cat food. I knew then that she knew, and that meant the jig was up. I looked Hurley dead in the eye, braced myself, and spat it out.

“I am.”

“Y
ou’re pregnant?” Hurley said, clearly aghast.

He stared at me, his mouth hanging open like the perfect flytrap.

“Yes, I am,” I said. “Four months already,” I added with what I hoped looked like genuine enthusiasm.

“Oh my,” Alison said, with a sly grin. She looked over at Hurley. “You didn’t know?”

Junior became a nervous ball of tics, shuffling his feet, wringing his hands, looking anywhere but at me or Hurley. After what seemed an interminable amount of time, Hurley took me by the arm and said, “Let’s go inside and reassure your dog. You really shouldn’t be involved in this investigation anyway since you’re the one who killed the guy.”

I winced at the harshness of his words, however true, and bent down to gather up the bags Junior had set on the ground. As soon as I had them in hand, Hurley started hauling me toward my door, where we were forced to stop. I saw that Alison was right on our heels.

“The door is locked, and my keys are still in the hearse,” I said to Hurley, speaking through tension so thick it was like a wall between us.

Hurley cussed and said, “Stay right here.” He then stormed off down the driveway.

“Who is the father?” Alison asked, as soon as Hurley was gone.

“That’s really none of your business,” I said irritably.

“Oh, come on, Mattie,” Alison pleaded. “I’m asking as a friend, not as a reporter.”

“It’s still none of your business,” I said. “It’s personal.”

“Okay,” she said with a resigned sigh. “But I hope it’s Hurley. It’s obvious that the two of you are gaga for one another.”

Hurley returned with my house key in hand, and Alison, thankfully, turned and headed down the driveway toward the cops who were standing around my car. As soon as Hurley unlocked and opened the door, Hoover came bounding out, wagging his tail furiously, whining and licking my hand. After a few seconds of this he turned and did the same thing to Hurley.

“Hey, boy,” Hurley said, cupping Hoover’s face in his hands. “Good to see you.” Hurley then rose, looked at me, and swept his arm toward the door. “After you.”

I tried to read the expression on his face, but it was all shadows. So I called to Hoover and headed inside, flipping on the light as I went. I half expected Hurley to slam the door closed behind me, but it closed with slow silence, which was actually a little scarier. I went into my bedroom to deposit my bags, knowing that both cats were likely to be there and thinking I might need to use them as my defense. Hurley is deathly afraid of cats.

As expected, both Tux and Rubbish were stretched out on the bed. They barely acknowledged my entrance, each of them opening one eye, shifting their positions slightly, and then going back to sleep. Hurley followed me but stopped just inside the bedroom door.

“You’re pregnant,” he said again, but a statement this time rather than a question.

“Yes, I am. I’m sorry. This isn’t how I wanted you to find out.”

“How long have you known?”

“A couple of months. I found out the same day you and Emily left town.”

Hurley frowned and looked away. I could tell he was thinking, calculating, and when he finally looked back at me, his expression was nervous. So I decided to answer the question I thought he was too afraid to ask.

“I haven’t been with anyone except you, Hurley.”

Hurley raked a hand through his hair, turned around, and took two steps into the living room, then spun around and returned to his original spot. “You and I are going to have a baby.” He said it with a flat tone, and the expression on his face was equally benign. I couldn’t read him at all. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“I wanted to do it in person. I didn’t think it was the kind of news that should be delivered over the phone. Plus, you had a lot of other things on your mind with Kate and all.”

“Who else knows?”

“Izzy knows. He guessed after Dom figured it out. And I told my sister and her family tonight right before I came home. Obviously the owner of the clothing store I was at today knows, so I suspect the news will get out pretty fast now.”

“What did Izzy have to say about it?”

“He said we would need to talk, about the job and such. I was supposed to join him for dinner tonight, but then he got the news about Dom’s father and had to leave. So I don’t know what he was planning to tell me.” I paused and took a breath. Hurley was still staring at me with that benign expression. “I’m really sorry this happened, Hurley. I didn’t plan for it. The doctor said the antibiotics I took back in December interfered with my birth control pills. Apparently it happened that first night . . . the night Kate and Emily showed up.”

Hurley smiled and gazed off at nothing. “That was one hell of a night.”

“Yes, it was.” I wasn’t smiling, mainly because I was recalling the humiliation and depression I felt when Kate showed up and announced that Hurley was not only married to her, but the father of her teenage daughter. It wasn’t hard to guess what part of that night Hurley was remembering.

“Okay,” Hurley said, refocusing on me, “when should we do the deed?”

“Do the deed?”

“Yeah, when should we get hitched?”

I stared at him, utterly dumbfounded, and didn’t say a word.

“Oh, should I do it all romantic like?” He got down on one knee, and I immediately turned away from him.

“Get up, Hurley. We’re not going to get married.”

“We’re not? Is it because I don’t have a ring, because I can get one.”

I turned and looked back at him. He was so damned adorable down on one knee, his face imploring. “I don’t need a ring, Hurley.”

“Fine,” he said, rising to his feet. “No ring. But we should still get married.”

“We should?”

“Yeah. We’re having a kid. It’s the right thing to do.”

“And that’s precisely why we’re not doing it,” I said. “I’d never be able to convince myself that you didn’t marry me simply out of some sense of duty and obligation.” Hurley opened his mouth, presumably to object, but I didn’t let him get a word out. I had an advantage in this debate; I’d been practicing it for the past two months. “And I have several more reasons,” I added quickly. “One, I don’t want to lose my job, and if you and I are married, one of us is going to have to change jobs. Two, I just killed a man . . . granted he probably deserved it, but still . . . so it really isn’t the time to be talking about future plans. And three, I know you felt duped, trapped, and not ready when the whole Kate and Emily thing happened, and I’m not going to do that to you. You have enough on your hands right now with Emily. And speaking of Emily, how is she going to handle the news?”

Hurley gave me a wounded look, and his lips pinched tight. He moved closer, and I resisted the two opposing urges I had: to back away from him and to run into his arms. “Look,” he said, stopping a few feet away, probably because Rubbish—who was asleep on the bed with Tux, both of them oblivious to the chaos going on outside—opened one eye and stared at him. I saw Hurley shoot the cats a wary glance before he continued. “I know I said some things when Kate showed up that implied how unhappy I was with the surprise she sprang on me . . . several surprises for that matter. But you and I . . . we’re different. I don’t feel trapped; I feel excited about this. And as for the job situation, we can do a justice of the peace thing and keep it quiet for now. No one has to know.”

“Get real, Hurley,” I said, feeling my heart break. The one thing I wanted to hear from him and didn’t was that he loved me. “We live in a small town where gossip spreads faster than flesh-eating bacteria and with a similar end result. We’ll both be skinned alive. There’s no way we could keep something like that a secret. Not only that, you’re just coming off of another relationship, and I don’t want to be your rebound wife.”

He let out a sigh of exasperation. “Kate and I didn’t have a relationship. As for Emily, she’ll do fine with it. She’s a great kid.” He paused and cocked his head to the side, looking at me with a sad, longing expression. “I missed you, Mattie, and I—”

Whatever he was going to say next was cut short when there was a loud knock on my door. Hoover, who up until now had been sitting at our feet, his head moving back and forth as he looked at whoever was doing the talking, barked and ran for the door.

“Mattie?” It was Junior Feller yelling from outside. “Dr. Henderson is here, and he wants to talk to you.”

“See?” I said, trying not to cry. “Not a good time.”

I made a move to walk past him, but he grabbed my arm and stopped me. “Look, we need to discuss this,” he said. “If not now, then very soon.”

“I agree. But for now, can we keep things on the down-low? I don’t need any more complications in my life right now.”

“Is that what I am to you? Is that what
this
is to you? A complication?”

“Come on, Hurley. You know what I mean. We’ll talk more about it later. Now is not the time.”

“Whatever,” Hurley said a bit snidely, raking his hair with his hand again. He looked confused, shell-shocked, frustrated, and a little hurt. “But it will be soon.”

He let me go then, and I hurried over to the door and opened it. Junior was standing on the front porch with Gary Henderson. Hoover took one glance at them and then promptly stepped forward and started sniffing at their shoes like they were raw hamburger. Then I realized that, considering the scene outside, it might have been something frighteningly close to that he smelled, so I grabbed his collar, pulled him back inside, and told him to sit.

Gary Henderson was a tall, somewhat gangly man with wavy brown hair, hazel eyes, and a friendly smile. He was wearing rectangular-shaped glasses and was dressed in blue jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. The lumberjack outfit seemed a sharp contrast to his otherwise nerdy appearance.

“This is Mattie Winston,” Junior said, nodding toward me. “Mattie, this is Dr. Gary Henderson. I briefed him on what happened, but he still needs to talk to you.”

“Of course he does,” I said with a smile. “Come on in.”

“Actually, I’d rather not,” Dr. Henderson said. “This is your home?”

“Yes. I live here, and Izzy lives in the main house.”

“Yes, well,” he paused, cleared his throat, and pushed his glasses up on his nose. “Given the proximity of the . . . um . . . incident to your home, this is part of our crime scene. As such, we need to secure it until we’ve had a chance to investigate the matter more thoroughly.”

“What? Why?” I protested. It was bad enough that my car was likely to be out of service for who knew how long. Now I was going to lose my house, too?

I felt rather than heard Hurley come up behind me. I could feel the heat from his body radiating onto my back. “I don’t think that’s necessary,” Hurley said. “I’m Detective Steve Hurley with the Sorenson Police Department. I was with Mattie when she entered the house, and the front door was locked. Everything that happened did so outside.”

“Yes, well . . .” Henderson paused and pushed his glasses up again. “You know how closely we need to guard our evidentiary processes these days after that scandal in Milwaukee. And given that Ms. Winston here works closely with all of you, I think we should bring in someone from the outside to investigate this matter, both to process the evidence and to conduct the investigation.”

“Are you suggesting that we’re trying to hide something here?” Hurley asked, his voice surly. I suspected he was about to vent his suppressed anger from our little chat on Dr. Henderson.

“I’m not suggesting anything,” Henderson said with a forced smile. “Bringing in outside investigators is as much to protect all of you as it is to protect any evidence. I’m sure the investigation will show that Ms. Winston was perfectly justified in running over the man outside.”

I winced at his blunt wording, and his equally blunt tone, which somehow belied his words.

“That man she ran over was trying to kill her,” Hurley said, still angry. “The guy shot at her, for Christ’s sake. Did you bother to look at her car? Clearly this was a case of self-defense.”

Henderson’s phony smile grew even phonier. “Now, now, detective, I understand why you’re upset about this given that Ms. Winston here is a colleague of yours.”

Something like that, anyway
.

“And I assure you that the investigation will be done swiftly and fairly,” Henderson continued in the tone of voice a parent might use on a child having a tantrum. “If what you say is true, then Ms. Winston should be exonerated in very short order. But in order to ensure that all of the evidence is processed properly and the investigation is conducted properly, we need to be very transparent and objective about things. And if you investigate this case, and Ms. Winston’s coworkers process the evidence, it will appear as if you are trying to sweep things under the rug, whether you are or not.”

“Are you kidding me?” Hurley seethed.

Sensing that things might get out of control rather quickly, I spun around and put a hand on his chest. Since the angle of our positions hid my other hand from view, I slid it into the belt on Hurley’s pants. “It’s okay, Hurley. Let it go. If you think about it, you know Dr. Henderson is right about this. I don’t want any lingering doubts when the investigation is concluded. I need to have my name completely cleared, with no shadows or gossip that might taint things in the future. You understand that, don’t you?”

I said these last two sentences in a tone of voice meant to make him realize I was implying more than just my own future. Just in case he didn’t get it from that alone, I tugged on his belt as I said it. My gambit seemed to work. At first Hurley’s hands were closed into fists, his face looked like an overripe tomato ready to explode, and his entire body was tensed, ready to spring. But by the time I finished my little tug-and-speech, I saw the spark in his eye fade and felt his body begin to relax.