“If he had said it was from the president, would you believe him? Don’t answer that. You probably fucking would.”
Sarah took a step back, wary of his tone. “Just calm down, okay? It’s no big deal. I’ll talk to Ryan and find out what this is all about.”
“It’s about money, you idiot. It’s all about Liz trying to get her hands on my money. Why didn’t you just slam the door in that guy’s face? Just slammed it!” He went to the door and slammed it so hard the windows rattled. “That’s all you fucking had to do!”
“How was I to know?” she said timidly.
“Common sense, that’s how. If you had any.”
Her eyes welled with tears. It was a cumulative emotion. Anger. Frustration. Fear at the thought of Brent as the father of her child.
“Oh, stop your sniveling, woman.”
“Maybe — maybe I can get Ryan to cancel the deposition.”
“Just stay the hell out of it. You screwed things up enough already.” He went back to the couch, moving the car brochures aside with care. “I’ll handle this myself. This is one deposition they ain’t never gonna forget.”
30
It was getting late on Colorado’s Front Range. Clouds drifted across the night sky in long, tattered strands, as if shredded by the mountaintops on their journey toward Boulder.
Amy watched in silence from the balcony off her bedroom. She was alone for the night. Gram and Taylor were staying with a neighbor for a few days, until they could replace the sliced-up mattresses and other busted furnishings. Amy had been cleaning up their ravaged apartment all afternoon, working into the evening. Little was salvageable. The insurance adjuster had come and gone hours ago. The check would come in a few days, he’d promised, though it wouldn’t help much. Most of the furniture was much more than ten years old and had almost zero depreciated value. For what it was worth, the adjuster seemed to agree with the detective’s assessment. This was no simple burglary. Someone had wanted to send her a message.
The question was, what was the message?
All her life, Amy had been exceptional at solving problems of any kind, from calculus to crosswords. Ever since she’d opened the box of money, however, she’d felt completely clueless. She hated that helpless feeling, that inability to figure things out. She’d felt that way only once before in her life. Many years ago.
Right after her mother died.
“Amy, you okay here tonight?” It was Gram.
Amy was leaning on the balcony rail. She glanced over her shoulder, back into the bedroom through the sliding glass door. “Yeah, I’ll be okay. Taylor asleep?”
Gram joined her on the balcony. “Like a log. I just wanted to come up and see how you were doing, check on things.”
“Not much to check on, is there?”
“Aww, forget it. I’ve been meaning to get rid of a lot of all this old junk anyway. We’ll be fine.”
Amy smiled with her eyes. “What is that you used to tell me? Our guardian angel owes us one?”
Gram smiled back. “It’s been a long time since I said that. That’s quite a memory you have there.”
“I don’t forget much. Just certain things.”
Gram looked at her with concern, as if she sensed what her granddaughter had been thinking. “Amy, darling. When something bad happens, it’s natural to think back on the past, to other sadness.”
She nodded, looking up to the sky. “I can see Vega.”
“Where?”
“Right overhead. It’s the brightest star in the constellation of Lyra. See it?” she said, pointing.
“It forms a harp, or lyre, with those four other faint stars that are positioned like a parallelogram.”
“Yeah,” Gram said, smiling. “I do see it.”
“That’s the constellation I was looking at the night Mom died.”
Gram’s smile faded. She lowered her eyes.
Amy said, “I have a very spotty memory of that night. Certain things are clear. Other things are fuzzy. Some things I can’t remember at all. I remember the noise, the sound of the gunshot. I remember waiting in my room, pitch dark. Going up in the attic, then down the hall and into Mom’s room.” She drew a deep breath. “And I remember the hand hanging over the side of the bed.”
They stood in silence at the rail. Finally Gram spoke. “We found you in your room. I found you. You were curled into a tight little ball, shivering. In shock, I think. You were on that padded ledge of the bay window. Right by your telescope.”
“I don’t remember any of that.”
“That’s normal. It’s probably best.”
“No,” she said sharply. “It drives me nuts. I can’t figure it out. I’ll never figure it out if I can’t remember what happened.”
“What happened was tragic. You don’t need to go back there.”
“Do you really think she killed herself?”
Gram made a face, as if the question surprised her. “Yes. No one’s ever questioned that.”
“I’ve always questioned it.”
“You were eight, Amy. Suicide wasn’t something you could accept.”
“No, it’s more than that. Think about it. Why would Mom shoot herself in the head while I was in the house?”
“That’s why she tied that rope to your door, I suppose. I think the police were right about that. She didn’t want you to come out and find the body.”
“That doesn’t hold up, Gram. Mom had caught me playing in the attic just a few months before that. She was completely aware that I knew how to get out of my room with the door shut. She knew about the ceiling panel in my closet.”
“Maybe she forgot. She was obviously in a very tortured state.”
“But she wasn’t suicidal.”
“That’s a pretty tough judgment for an eight-year-old girl to make.”
“Not really. I remember the conversation Mom and I had before she died. I asked her to read me a story. She said she was too tired. But she promised to read me one the next night. She promised it would be the best story I ever heard.”
“Who knows what was going through her mind?”
“That just doesn’t sound like something a woman would say to her daughter an hour before she kills herself. She never even said goodbye, Gram.”
“Amy, you don’t know what happened after she tucked you into bed.”
“ Exactly. I don’t know, because there are things I can’t remember about that night. I try to remember. You know what happens? I get numbers in my head. M 57. You know what that is? It’s an astronomical designation for the Ring Nebula, the dying star I was looking at the night Mom died. Here I am trying to sort out the death of my mother, and all my overeducated brain can bring into focus is M 57, the fifty-seventh object in Charles Messier’s eighteenth-century catalog of fuzzy objects in the sky. It makes me crazy, Gram. Look at the sky right now. You can pick out the constellation of Lyra where the Ring Nebula lives, but you can’t see the Ring Nebula with the naked eye. We’re looking right at M 57, but we can’t see it.
“That’s the way I feel about the explanation for Mom’s death,” said Amy, her voice fading. “I’m looking right at it. But I just can’t see it.”
Gram looked into her troubled eyes, then gave her a gentle hug. “It’s not your fault that you don’t remember. Sometimes we don’t figure everything out. Sometimes we just never know.”
Amy wiped a tear from the corner of her eye. She knew Gram was trying to make her feel better, but it wasn’t working. That was Amy’s greatest fear in the world. The fear of never knowing.
Together, they turned away from the night sky and headed back inside.
31
From his hotel room late Tuesday night, Ryan called his voice mail at the clinic for messages. He had canceled his appointments for the week and routed his patients to the clinic in Lamar. Still, he wanted to make sure there were no emergencies. The first message was definitely nothing to worry about. Ninety-year-old Marjorie Spader wanted to know if she could use her own prescription cough medicine to help her cat dislodge a fur ball. Ryan shook his head. That was the crazy thing about Piedmont Springs. Folks would let a deadly cancer grow inside them for years, completely untreated. But let their cat start hacking on a fur ball and they were immediately on the phone to the doctor.