Two, I was unemployed.
So why did I care so much about these people I had just met and a dead girl I never knew at all? Were they simply a distraction from my own troubles or was it the realization that Emily had been just Katie’s age the night she flounced off to a Phish concert in Washington, D.C., and we didn’t see her again for over three weeks? But unlike the Dunbars, we’d been lucky. Somewhere between Durango and Albuquerque, Emily and her rat-tailed, pierced-eared boyfriend had run out of money and decided to hitchhike home.
I need to go home, too, I told myself. Get some perspective. Sort through my mail, print out my résumé, find some envelopes, and, last but certainly not least, give Paul a sizable piece of my mind.
By three o’clock I had thrown my toothbrush and a few necessities into the car and told Connie I’d call, promising to see her again in a few days. I settled into the driver’s seat and breathed deeply. The overnight rain had cleared the air, leaving it fresh and smelling of clean, damp earth. Plump clouds scudded across an otherwise clear blue sky, and the sun warmed my face as I drove north up 301 toward Annapolis with the car windows rolled down and the wind roaring across my ears, making my gold hoop earrings sing.
Annapolis can be so beautiful in springtime that it almost breaks your heart. Somewhere before Interstate 97 joins Route 50 bringing visitors in from Baltimore and points north, new construction had widened the highway and money had been found, goodness knows where, to face the overpasses with brick. Wildflowers, in a rainbow of brilliant colors, thrived in the median strips and nestled in the Vs formed by the exit ramps.
On Rowe Boulevard, the scenic approach into Annapolis, the city fathers had planted tulips, and as I waited for the light to turn at Melvin Avenue, I had to admire the red and yellow blooms, heads nodding in the light breeze. Nature was doing its best to cheer me up, but I wasn’t buying. It was hard enough to leave Pearson’s Corner with the mystery of Katie’s disappearance still weighing heavily on my mind, but by the time I passed the new courthouse building near the stadium, I had almost convinced myself that Paul must have interrupted a burglary in progress. I worried that I’d find him sprawled on our kitchen floor with his head bashed in, one arm outflung near the off-the-hook phone.
I was going at least twenty miles over the posted limit when I screeched to a halt at the far end of the boulevard where it dead-ends at College Avenue. Late-blooming fat white cherry blossoms had turned the State House before me into a picture postcard. I thanked God for creating spring, giving me something to hang on to in the face of all that I’d gone through. This was my first spring since cancer had turned my life upside down. For poor Katie, though, there would be no more springtimes.
Our house is an old brick colonial on Prince George Street, tucked between two similar houses not too far from historic William Paca House. On a clear day from our bedroom on the top floor you can see the Naval Academy chapel dome. In the winter, when the trees are bare, we even claim a water view of Spa Creek.
Parking is always a problem in the historic district, particularly in summer when hordes of tourists clog the town, so I sometimes sneak my car into the Naval Academy visitors’ lot and walk home. Today I had the luck of a cop in a made-for-TV movie; someone was pulling out of a space just as I circled the block for the second time.
In our entrance hall, ignoring the mail that had piled up-a staggering amount in just four days-I threw my keys on the table and called, “Paul, it’s me. I’m home!” I listened, hardly daring to breathe, until I heard his familiar voice.
“Out here!” I found Paul sitting on the patio, a sweating bottle of Coors Light in his hand and the Sunday section of Saturday’s Baltimore Sun strewn about on the patio table, its pages fluttering in the wind. Paul had anchored them to the table with a flat rock from my garden. He wasn’t reading. He was talking on the cell phone. “Later, Murray. Hannah’s just here.” Murray Simon was an old college friend, a lawyer with a small practice up Route 2 in Glen Burnie, near Baltimore.
Paul punched the talk button with his thumb and turned to smile at me. It was the same crooked grin I loved so well, but today it didn’t match his eyes.
“I’ve been trying to call you for two whole days, Paul. I left messages on the machine. Why didn’t you return my calls?”
He set the phone aside, caught my hand, and pulled me into his lap, surrounding me with his arms and squeezing tight. I pulled away slightly so I could see his face.
“Goodness! You’d think I’d been away for a week instead of just a few days.” He kissed me on the mouth, and I relaxed into him, savoring the familiar tickle of his mustache as it brushed my lips and trailed along my cheek.
“Missed you,” he whispered into my neck. “More than you know.”
I leaned back, one hand flat against his chest. “You didn’t answer my question, Paul. Why didn’t you call me back?” There were tiny worry lines around his eyes. I stood and dragged a patio chair around from the other side of the table and sat down, facing him.
Paul set his beer down on the table and put both his hands together between his knees. He leaned toward me, but before he could say anything, I erupted, words tumbling out of my mouth at one hundred miles per hour, “It’s even in the paper!” I pointed to the table. “I needed to tell you that I found a body in the cistern on the old Nichols place!”
Paul’s eyebrows disappeared into his hair. A look I couldn’t read momentarily lit his eyes. “What? My God. I hadn’t gotten to the newspaper yet!”
“Actually it was Colonel who found the body.” I described my walk, the headlong dash back to the house, our return to the crime scene, Dennis’s visit with Connie, and the disturbing events of this morning. Thinking about Paul’s ties to the community, I asked, “Do you remember a girl named Katie Dunbar?”
He shook his head. “Should I?”
“I just thought you might. Small town and all. Connie and I were in Ellie’s Country Store mailing some packages when Dennis Rutherford stopped in for a soda. He told us the body was hers. She disappeared eight years ago, Paul. Dennis said she’d been murdered.”
Paul opened his mouth, but I’ll never know what he was going to say because the phone rang just then. Paul said it was a wrong number.
A few minutes later the blasted thing rang again, but this time Paul ignored it. “Jeez, honey, I feel like an insensitive clod. Sitting here, drinking beer and feeling sorry for myself, after what you’ve just been through. Are you okay?”
The phone continued to ring-four, five times-making a sound like a strangling turkey-six, seven. “I might be, if you’d pick up the damn phone. Aren’t you going to answer that?”
“Let it ring, Hannah. We need to talk.”
“I’ll say we do. Didn’t I just say I’ve been trying to reach you for days?”
Paul caressed my cheek with the back of his fingers. “I am sorry, honey. I should have been there for you.” His face took on a look of such infinite sadness that my heart seemed to turn in my chest. Suddenly he was not looking at me, and I panicked.
“Paul, what’s wrong?” A cold fist of fear began to form in my stomach. Mom? The last time I’d talked to her, she’d had a persistent cough that she’d promised to see the doctor about.
“Not Mother?” I struggled to my feet. “Don’t tell me there’s something wrong with my mother?”
Paul stood and began to pace back and forth on the slate slabs that formed the patio. “No, it’s not your mother.” Then, seeing the look of alarm in my eyes, he quickly added, “Or Emily.” He ran a hand through his hair and looked at me. “God, Hannah, I don’t know how to tell you this.”