"We gave up on her at eight," said one member. "At first we thought she'd needed to stop at the store. It was her night for snack. We made do with coffee and shortbread cookies."
Jesus, she thought. Some friends.
And now there was the husband sitting across from her.
Derek Edwards's cold black eyes stared as Emily opened the folder and like a menu handed it to him. Inside was a photograph of a pretty blonde in a periwinkle sweater over a blouse with a Peter Pan collar. Emily noted that Mandy was apparently a very traditional pregnant lady who had chosen the same look her own mother's generation had sportedpregnant woman as child. Big bows. Babyish prints. None of the trendy hipster black pregnancy wear for her-no bumpclinging spandex tops revealing a thin slice of tummy.
"I know what my wife looks like," he said.
"Say her name"
Edwards shoved the folder back at Emily. "Damn you, Emily. Mandy! Mandy is her name! Was this some kind of a test here? Why are you so willing to let another person die under your watch?"
Emily knew he was baiting her with the old Kristi Cooper case, but she didn't bite. She'd finally made peace with that. To do otherwise, she knew, would have killed her like a slowly bleeding wound.
"Calm down, Derek," Emily said, her voice steady and commanding. "I want to find Mandy, too. I need some help here. Are you sure you've told us everything?"
Edwards turned away from her and headed for the door. "There isn't any more to tell," he said over his shoulder. "You've been to my place. You've interviewed everyone I've ever known. I'll look for her myself. Thanks for nothing"
From the hallway, Emily watched Derek Edwards's retreating figure. It was more than a hunch. She knew it in her bones. Derek was holding back. Crime statistics indicated that Mandy was dead and that her husband had killed her. But there was no evidence. No blood.
"There's a reason for that," she told Casey Howard, her deputy.
"Yeah, he didn't kill her.'
"But you saw the plastic bleach bottle in the trash"
"Yeah, but if you went to my house you'd find two bottles in our trash. Bleach kills germs. I've got two germy kids."
Emily smiled. "I don't know. Something's with this guy."
"Yeah, he's full of himself, for one. His home gym is the biggest room in the house. The baby's room is the size of a closet."
"Not hard to tell his priorities," she said.
"Anyway, Sheriff, just because the dude is a self-absorbed ass doesn't make him a killer."
She smiled.
Patrice Fletcher had left the potato chips in the trunk.
"Watch the boys, Stacy," she told her daughter, a fittingly sullen girl of 14. "I'm going back to the car to get the chips."
"You always leave the boys with me. You ought to pay me, Mom. I'm the live-in sitter around here"
Patrice pretended not to hear Stacy rant about watching her younger brothers, Brandon and Kevin. She'd thought of asking Stacy to get the chips, but she knew she'd complain about that, too.
"You use me like a slave, Mom!"
Patrice and her children had packed up early that morning for a fall picnic at Brier Lake, just to the west of Cherrystone. She knew that cold weather would come in a flash and that day might be the very last day before rain, snow and bundle-up weather. Patrice was 35, with red hair that she wore long, with bangs that made her daughter cringe whenever they were out in public.
"You need a makeover, Mom!" Stacy said. Although mostly teasing, she wouldn't have minded if her mom did change her hair from her decidedly un-chic '80s hairdo.
"Oh, I don't know, I think I look hot"
The response brought an exaggerated gasp.
"No one's mom is hot," Stacy said, with a smile more mean than sweet.
Patrice made her way across the almost deserted field that bordered the parking lot. No more than a half dozen cars huddled by the main pathway down to the lake. Her silver Prius gleamed in the sun, screaming out loud to the world that she loved the earth.
She pressed the trunk key into the lock, and it popped open. She stared into the blackness below and her heart sank.
"What the--? "
The chips were gone. She had left them at home on the kitchen counter.
"This is the kind of day I'm having," she said, closing the lid. "Stacy's going to blame me for this."
As she slammed down the trunk, she heard a scream.
"Mom!"
It was Stacy's voice. She turned around and looked for her daughter.
"Mom! Come here quick!"
Patrice squinted into the late afternoon sun, the light blinding her with the shimmer of gold off the lightly rippled surface of Brier Lake.
Something was wrong.
"Stacy! Kevin! Brandon!" Patrice called out. She started running to the spot where she had left her children, but they weren't there. Instead, about fifty yards away, she saw them huddled at the water's edge. The low sun had wrapped them in a halo of light. Were all three there? She ran as fast as she could, losing a flip-flop in the process.
"What is it? Brandon? Kevin?"
"We're fine, Mom," Stacy called out, her voice breaking, as she turned around to face her mother. "Oh, Mom!" She lunged for Patrice, who gladly held her daughter. At that instant Stacy was no longer a flippant teenager. In the space of the time it took for Patrice to go to the car, Stacy was once more a little girl-a scared little girl. She started to cry and pointed to a lily-pad-tangled spot about ten yards from shore.
Floating among the degraded greenery of a fall patch of aquatic plants was the swollen figure of a child, a teenager. She was facedown, her blonde hair swirling around her in the water. Her skin looked waxy and white. Patrice craned her neck to get a closer view.
No, it wasn't a child, but a woman. She could see a wristwatch and wedding band.
The boys just stood there, their eyes fastened on the floating corpse.
"Want me to poke her with a stick?" It was Kevin, her 8-year-old, who she once caught eating canned dog food off the broken end of a hula hoop-with his older brother Brandon urging him on.
"I'll get a stick for you," Brandon said.
Patrice's heart was racing just then. She shook her head and gently pulled her brood away from the frothy edge of the lake.
"Let's go back to the car," she said. "I need to call the sheriff."
Emily's cell phone vibrated on her desk and she looked down at the small LCD screen. An electronic envelope rotated across the screen. She had a new text message. She snapped open the phone. It was from Jenna. She knew so even before she opened it. No one else sent text messages to her. Certainly no one over 25 could even work the tiny keys and create a message.
One of our BZs drowned last night. At the Kappa Chi house.
Call u tonight. Strange.