Wall-To-Wall Dead (23 page)

“I’ll…um…” I slipped out of the chair and sideways.
“I just wanted to tell you what happened. I thought you should know. So I’ll go now. Let you deal with this.”

“Not so fast.” His hand shot out and grasped my arm again, fingers digging in. I winced. “Who else knows you’re here?”

“A lot of people,” I said, twisting. I’d probably have bruises. Derek wouldn’t be happy when he saw them. “My fiancé. A couple of Candy’s neighbors. You’re hurting me.” And while he was at it, making me seriously consider whether he might not be capable of hurting Candy, too. Not to mention Miss Shaw.

His hand tightened for a second, as if he knew what I was thinking, but then he shifted his grip and pushed me away. More or less flung me in the direction of the door. “Get the hell outta here.”

His voice was rough.

He didn’t have to tell me twice. I scurried to the front door. It took my shaking fingers a few seconds to unlock it, and every moment I stood there, I expected to get hit over the back of the head with a bust of Julius Caesar.

But nothing happened. I got the lock turned and the bolt slid back, and then I yanked the door open and headed out, not concerned with closing it behind me. Once in the car and behind the wheel, I made sure the car was securely locked before I peeled rubber out of Wellhaven. I don’t think I drew a deep breath until I was outside the gated entrance and waiting to join the traffic in the direction of downtown.

I had every intention of going straight to Cora and Dr. Ben’s house, to meet Derek and his family for dinner. I’d already kept him waiting, and I knew he wanted me there. But as I sat there waiting for a gap in traffic so I could swing my Beetle onto the road, a small blue Honda zoomed by in the opposite direction, a whole lot faster than it should have been going. Josh was lucky none of his dad’s deputies were out looking for speeders this afternoon.

He drove like he had the hounds of hell on his tail, and I couldn’t help wondering if something else had happened, something I didn’t know about. So at the first opportunity, when there was a gap in traffic, I swung the Beetle out, and instead of going east, toward Waterfield, I headed west, into the sun and in the direction of Barnham College, trailing the Honda.

He was way up ahead, and gaining ground fast, but I was pretty sure I knew where he was headed. When I reached the entrance to Barnham, I turned the Beetle into the parking lot and wasn’t surprised when I saw Josh’s Honda parked in a corner of the lot. As I slotted the Beetle into a parking space, a couple of cars down, the Honda’s door opened and Josh swung his long legs out. By the time I’d gotten out of my own car and slammed the door, he was on his way across the parking lot toward the computer building, a manila envelope in his hand.

“Hey!” I called.

He turned, and for a second I swear I saw a flash of fear cross his face. “Avery.” He stopped to wait for me as I trotted toward him, his smile looking a little forced.

“Something wrong?” I wanted to know when I stopped in front of him. “You passed me up on the main road a minute or two ago, driving like a bat out of hell.” I gestured with my thumb toward the road.

“I just heard about Candy,” Josh said.

I could feel myself turn paler. “Is she…”

“In the hospital.”

Oh. I started breathing again. “I already knew that. I thought maybe something more had happened.” It had been a half hour or so since I’d spoken to Derek and gotten his assurance that Candy was still among the living. The situation could have changed.

“Nothing that I know of,” Josh said, shifting from foot to foot. He looked guilty, and he’d put both hands—and the envelope—behind his back as if he hoped I might not notice it.

“Are you two close?” I wanted to know.

He shook his head. “Not really. Neighbors. And I see her at school sometimes. But she’s a couple years older than I am. I know Jamie better than I know Candy.”

For some inexplicable reason, he flushed.

“I see,” I said. That was interesting, considering that Candy was a native Waterfielder and Jamie had only been here for a year or so. But if she’d lived across the hall from Josh for that year, maybe it wasn’t so surprising after all. I could see where he might like the quiet Jamie more than the vapid Candy. “What’s in the envelope?”

His shoulders slumped. “I can’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

“It isn’t mine,” Josh said.

“Whose is it? Jamie’s?”

He shot me a surprised look, and that was all the answer I needed. “Does it have anything to do with the Pompeii Gentleman’s Club in Portland?”

This time the look wasn’t just surprised, it was somewhere between floored and respectful. “How do you know about that?”

“Derek was there on Friday,” I said. “Bachelor party. He recognized her.”

“Damn.” Josh glanced past me out across the parking lot and the Barnham quad, brown eyes serious behind the glasses.

“I think she has more important things to worry about right now,” I said.

Josh shook his head. “You don’t understand. Her family will have all kinds of fits if they find out. They’re religious. Fundamentalist. Some small sect where the women wear dresses and aprons and bonnets.”

“Amish? Or Mennonite?”

“Something,” Josh said with a vague wave of his hand. “Somewhere in Mississippi. The Bible Belt.”

“She’s a long way from home.”

“As far as she could get,” Josh said grimly. “Her folks didn’t want her to go. Something about someone else leaving
and never coming back. They wanted her to stay home and get married and start having babies instead.”

I could feel my eyes widen. “Straight out of high school?” What kind of parents actually
want
their daughters pregnant at seventeen or eighteen these days?

Josh shrugged. “I guess it’s one of those groups that think women aren’t good for anything but cooking and having babies.”

So it seemed. “Stripping seems a strange career choice for someone who grew up like that.”

“She got a scholarship,” Josh explained. “That was how she convinced her parents to let her come here. It pays for her tuition and her books, and for her dorm room. But once she actually got here, she decided she wanted to live off-campus instead, and the scholarship didn’t cover off-campus housing, so she got a job. If her parents find out what she does, or even if they just realize she’s not living in the dorm anymore, they’ll drag her home. By the hair, most likely.”

“They can’t do that,” I protested.

“Yes, they can,” Josh answered. “Jamie’s twenty. The age of majority in Mississippi is twenty-one.”

“You’re kidding.” In New York it was eighteen. As far as I knew, it was eighteen in Maine as well. To be honest, I’d assumed the age of majority was eighteen pretty much across the board, and across the country.

“There are only a few states where it’s higher,” Josh explained when I voiced this thought. “Mississippi is one of them.”

“Wow.”

He nodded. “She’s terrified that her parents will make her move back home. When Miss Shaw…”

He snapped his lips shut, but it was too late. “What?” I said.

Josh shook his head, his cheeks pink.

“Don’t give me that. You can’t mention Miss Shaw and then refuse to say anything else. When Miss Shaw what?
Died?” Or had she, per chance, threatened to call Jamie’s parents?

Josh made a sound that was somewhere between an exasperated sigh and a raspberry. “When Miss Shaw died, Jamie was afraid Dad was gonna call her parents.”

“Why would he do that? She didn’t have anything to do with Miss Shaw dying, did she?”

“Of course not,” Josh said, sounding offended. “I told her he wouldn’t care. Stripping isn’t illegal. And it wasn’t like Miss Shaw was murdered. But she—” He stopped again, and once again pressed his lips together.

“What?”

He sighed, and this time it
was
a sigh. “She came knocking on my door that night, after Brandon had gone home. Late. Or early morning, really. Four o’clock or so.”

No wonder he’d looked tired when I’d seen him around nine that morning. “What did she want?”

“She wanted me to let her into Miss Shaw’s condo,” Josh said.

“You’re kidding.”

He shrugged. Obviously not.

“Why didn’t you tell her no?” Frankly, I was more than a little surprised, not to say shocked, to hear this. I mean, he was the son of the chief of police; how could he even consider letting a civilian into a crime scene?

“It was one of those offers I couldn’t refuse,” Josh said. When I looked at him, brows arched, I saw that he was squirming in a very guilty way. His cheeks were flushed and he avoided looking at me, quite determinedly.

“Oh my God,” I said, putting two and two together, “you slept with her, didn’t you?”

Josh’s shoulders hunched, and he pulled his head down, like a turtle.

“I can’t believe it,” I said, full of righteous indignation. “I thought you and Shannon were getting serious. How could you sleep with someone else?”

I’d assumed he’d been pining for Shannon forever, and here it turned out he’d been getting it on with an exotic dancer instead.

His head snapped up. “I didn’t! For God’s sake, Avery!”

I blinked. “But if you didn’t…”

“Not then!” He took a breath, and when he spoke again, his voice was a little calmer. “It was last year sometime. November, maybe December.”

Almost a year ago. Long before Shannon had given his long-standing crush on her any encouragement. That made it a little better.

He added, “It was back when Shannon was spending all her free time with Gerard. I was frustrated. Jealous, even. I didn’t know at first that Gerard was Shannon’s dad. Jamie was nice. She’d just moved in across the hall, and the new
job was making her feel”—he hesitated—“dirty, I guess. Like nobody decent would want her.”

I nodded, and bit back the several snide comments I could have made.

“It only happened once. She’s busy with school and work, and I”—he blushed again—“I’m in love with Shannon. I don’t want a relationship with anyone else.”

“Does Shannon know?”

He shook his head. “And I don’t want her to.”

Small wonder. I wouldn’t like to hear that my boyfriend had had a fling with a stripper, either. Might make me feel just a little inferior, yeah? As far as I was concerned, Melissa was bad enough.

“So Jamie knocked on the door and wanted you to let her into Miss Shaw’s condo. And made you an offer you couldn’t refuse.”

An offer which obviously didn’t include another session between the sheets. I was pretty sure I could trust Josh on that.

“She said if I didn’t do it, she’d tell Shannon about us,” Josh said.

Ah.
That
kind of offer he couldn’t refuse.

“That wasn’t very nice of Jamie.”

Josh shrugged.

“So you let her in. And left her there?”

“Of course not.” He sounded offended again. “I stayed with her. And I didn’t give her the stuff. I kept it.”

“What stuff?”

He ran a hand through his curls. They were in disarray, so it obviously wasn’t the first time. “Miss Shaw had information she’d dug up on people. Everyone in the building. People who used to live there but don’t anymore. Even people who never did, but who just know someone in the building. Like Kate and Shannon.”

“Miss Shaw had information about Kate and Shannon?” I don’t know why that should strike me as worse than Miss Shaw having information about her own neighbors, but it did.

Josh nodded. “And you and Derek. And me. And Jamie. And Candy—” He broke off.

“Let me guess. Miss Shaw found out that Candy was sleeping with what’s-his-name.”

“David Rossini,” Josh said, nodding. “Her boss. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you know about that, too.”

I wasn’t quite sure how to take that, so I decided to let it pass without comment, even as I suppressed a quick shudder as I remembered the look in those cold, black eyes. David Rossini probably hadn’t been thinking about killing me and fitting me for concrete shoes before tossing me off the cliffs into the Atlantic, but it had felt that way.

“Did Miss Shaw blackmail them? Candy and Jamie?”

“For money? I don’t think so. Jamie was just worried about her parents finding out. And she told me that Rossini’s married, so…”