Finn turned bright red and my amusement grew. He’d finally met a woman who first, wasn’t charmed by him, and second, wasn’t afraid to chew him up and spit him back out in pieces. I felt like letting Finn sit there and stew in it, but that wouldn’t accomplish much.
I thought Finn might have a point, too. Maybe Nicky wasn’t as smart and sweet and wonderful as everyone seemed to think he was.
I stood up and tapped Finn on the shoulder.
“Sir, Mrs. Bellington, we’ve taken enough of your time. We’ll be in touch if anything else comes up. Thank you for the coffee,” I said. “Annika, nice to see you again.”
The mayor and his wife nodded at me. Annika stood and wiped her eyes. “I’ll walk you guys to the door.”
She led us back down the long hallway.
“Do you think it’s true?” she whispered to me at the front door. “Would Nicky keep something like that from me?”
She looked so sad, and small, in her oversize sweats, that I felt my own eyes welling up.
“I don’t know, Annika. But I do know that you guys loved each other very much, and that’s what matters, doesn’t it? The love endures,” I said. I gave her a little pat on the shoulder and then followed Finn out the door.
“The love endures?” he snickered. “You’re a bad Hallmark card.”
“Yeah? And you’re a real piece of work… I wonder if you might be on to something, with the blackmail. Nicky seems a little too good to be true.”
Finn paused at his car. He licked his finger and rubbed at a spot of mud on the rear left light. “Say he did figure out who the Woodsman was. Would he really go to this guy and threaten him? Nicky may not have been perfect but I haven’t heard anything to lead me to think he was foolish. The blackmail angle is intriguing but it’s probably a dead end.”
Everywhere I turned in this case was a dead end, it seemed.
Chapter Twenty-four
I decided to call it a day. The rain continued to fall, and in the wet, dim light, the streets were a foggy sea of red and yellow taillights and bobbing black shapes I could only assume were umbrellas. I wanted a warm bath and a mug of hot tea and my own oversize sweats, the pair that was so worn there were holes in the armpits and the elastic in the waist barely kept them up.
I drove slowly up the canyon, my windshield wipers rocketing back and forth. The wipers needed replacing and their worn rubber strips put cloudy streaks on the windowpane that left me craning my neck to and fro to peer around them.
When I pulled into the gravel drive, I saw a brown car parked by the side of the house, under our big pine tree. In the rain, I couldn’t see much beyond the color of the sedan, certainly not the plates or the occupants.
I sat in my car a moment, letting the engine idle, remembering Seamus’s strange behavior the night before, and the feeling that someone had been in the yard.
Finally I turned off the ignition, grabbed my things, and opened a newspaper over my head. I hurried to the front door and then turned and stared at the sedan, waiting. It looked like there were two people in the car, but I couldn’t be certain. Beyond the porch, the rain left the world as blurred as a wet watercolor.
After a minute, I decided to go inside, but then the driver side door opened and Tessa O’Leary tumbled out and ran to me. Her hair was soaked in a matter of seconds and she shook her head like a puppy under the front eave.
“Tessa? What are you doing here?” I asked. And how do you know where I live? I thought.
“I wanted to apologize for my behavior earlier. I’m really, really sorry I acted like that at the police station,” she said. She wore jeans and a thin T-shirt and she shivered. I sighed, knowing better but still saying, “Well, come in, you’ll catch your death out here.”
Inside, I put down my things and found an old sweatshirt of Brody’s. Tessa put it on and thanked me and then immediately made her way over to the fireplace mantel and picked up one of the framed photographs there.
“Is this your husband?” she asked. “Wow. Bet you have to fight all the ladies off.”
My mood darkening, I muttered, “You have no idea, kid.”
It was an old black-and-white shot of Brody on his mountain bike. In the picture, he is wearing a jersey and shorts and an Afro wig; it was some costume charity race he had done years ago. I joined her at the fireplace and gently took the photograph out of her hands and put it back in its spot, next to a framed picture of my parents and another one of my grandmother and me, taken at my high school graduation. I look incredibly young in that photograph. As I’ve aged, I find myself looking more and more like my mother.
I catch my reflection and wonder what she would have looked like at fifty, sixty, seventy years old. She’ll always be thirty-five in my mind, frozen in time, young, beautiful, vibrant.
She was full of life, until she wasn’t.
I rubbed my lower back and grimaced at the knot I found. “Tessa, it’s been a long day. I’m beat. I appreciate the apology, but it wasn’t necessary. I should apologize to you, my partner wasn’t trying to trick you or get you to rat out anyone.”
She looked at me with concern. “Do you want me to rub your back? I can get those knots out, if you want. I’ve studied massage therapy.”
I said, “No, thank you. I need to lie down and get some rest. Can we talk tomorrow?”
I put a hand on her shoulder and gently steered her toward the front door. She stopped halfway there.
“Is that your dog? He’s so cute! Here, puppy, puppy,” Tessa squealed.
Seamus ambled over and she knelt and ruffled the fur around his ears. He flopped to the ground and exposed his belly with a big grin, in doggy heaven.
I sighed and counted to ten and then tried again.
“Tessa?”
“Sorry, he’s just so cute. Yeah, yeah, tomorrow’s fine. We’ve got a performance, why don’t you come by and watch?” she said. She peeled out of the sweatshirt and handed it back to me.
I was surprised. “Fatone is having you perform?”
She laughed at my response. “Don’t you know, Gemma? The show must go on. We’re losing buckets of money if we sit here in town, not doing our thing.”
Tessa closed the front door gently behind her and I leaned against it, the wood cool against my forehead. She was a strange one, mature one moment, angry the next, then childlike, then solicitous.
I fed Seamus and let him out and then locked the back door and drew a warm bath upstairs. I lay in the hot water, a rolled hand towel for a headrest, and stared up at the darkness in the ceiling. A few years back, Brody installed a skylight above the bathtub. The rain struck the glass window with fat splatters and the sky beyond was dark and moonless.
A distant boom of thunder thudded somewhere, a few miles off, and through the skylight I watched as the night filled with a white glow that danced away as quickly as it had flashed by.
Another clap of thunder, this one much closer, was followed by a loud thud downstairs.
I sat up in the bath. “Seamus?”
There was no answer. Although he could be a real pain in the ass, that dog was trained to the teeth. If I was in the house, anywhere, and called him, he came.
“Seamus?” I called a little louder. “C’mon, boy.”
Another loud thud and I propelled myself out of the bath and into the white terrycloth robe that I’d tossed on the counter. At the same time, the lights in the house flickered once, and then twice, then went out completely.
I froze and listened to sounds that crept in, replacing the space where once there had been light. The rain was loud, much louder, as though the plunks and plinks and splats now came in through an open window.
Maybe through an open door.
I had lived in this house on the edge of the forest long enough to know most of her more intimate noises. Her winter noises, when her eaves and shingles crackled with frost and ice; her summer noises, when the wooden planks in the floor expanded and contracted with the heat. And her settling noises, the occasional creaks and squeaks as the foundation shifted imperceptibly.