Her mother, or Barbie June. Neither fell into the no-questions-asked category, though.
She had lunch with her mother two days ago, feeling as though she’d been neglecting her, and was grateful when Mom mentioned her busy weekend ahead, taking a senior bus trip to Mobile to see the Saturday matinee of a touring musical, with dinner afterward.
Ardelle Quackenbush is the kind of woman who would drop everything in a heartbeat to be there for her family; Landry knows she’d insist on missing the show just to be on standby for teenagers with weekend plans of their own. Nor does she want to inflict upon the kids her mother’s early bedtime and house cluttered with fragile antiques that must not be touched.
She correctly guessed that her cousin—also a well-bred belle—would graciously accept overnight guests in a heartbeat despite feeling neglected lately, as long as Landry framed the favor properly: “Sweetie, how would you like to put those two beautiful guest rooms of yours to good use tonight? We have company this weekend and the kids have to give up their beds, and of course they’d much rather sleep at Aunt Barbie June’s than share the pullout here at home.”
Next she texted the kids at work and told them both to call her during their breaks. Neither was thrilled to be shuttled off to Aunt Barbie June’s for the night but they grudgingly agreed.
Now only she is here to face whatever is going to happen next.
Hopefully nothing at all. Bruce is at the airport, waiting for the next flight from Atlanta. Waiting for Jenna Coeur.
If she’s on it.
Landry passes the platter of sandwiches, the bowl of fruit salad, and keeps the conversation going. She asks Elena about the last few days of school. Wants to—but doesn’t—ask Kay again about the woman she saw in the airport.
Wants to tell her to try calling Detective Burns yet again, even though she’s overheard Elena encouraging Kay to do that as well—twice—since they got back from the airport. The first time, as they headed upstairs to settle into their rooms, Kay replied that she’d wait another half hour before calling again; the second time, as they took their places at the lunch table, Kay told Elena she’d just left another message.
If she hadn’t spoken to Bruce already, Landry thought, she’d probably be leaving messages of her own for Detective Burns.
“Look, it’s not as urgent as you think,” he told her when she brought it up in a whispered phone call from the laundry room before lunch. “There’s not much she can do with the information except follow up on it the way she would any other potential Jenna Coeur sighting. She needs to know, but I can pretty much guarantee you that she’s not going to jump on the next flight to Alabama—especially since you said your friend isn’t even positive it was her.”
He’s right. They’re all preoccupied and jumpy.
“Hang in there. I’m at the airport and I’m not budging until that flight arrives from Atlanta. She won’t get past me. You can all relax.”
“I haven’t told them about you yet.”
“You might want to.”
“I will,” she promised, but has yet to do it. Maybe because a part of her still clings to a shred of suspicion about the others.
She forces herself to nibble a cucumber sandwich and tries to focus on what Elena is saying.
“ . . . and I don’t know, all I could think was, thank God he isn’t here. I’ll never have to see him again. Maybe it makes me an evil person, but . . .” She shrugs, stabs a grape with her fork, and pops it into her mouth.
Tony Kerwin, Landry realizes. That’s what she’s talking about: her relief that she didn’t have to face him at school this week.
It doesn’t make her an evil person.
But then a terrible thought occurs to Landry, and the tiny bite of sandwich lodges in her throat.
What if it hadn’t been a heart attack, after all?
What if Tony Kerwin had been murdered?
Thoughts racing, she excuses herself to go inside and get dessert ready. The others offer to help, but she waves them away. “I’ve got it. Just relax. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
She hurries up the stairs, past the closed bedroom doors. She put Elena in Tucker’s room and Kay in Addison’s.
“I thought your kids were going to be home tonight,” Elena protested when she showed them upstairs.
“Change of plans.”
“That’s too bad. I was hoping to meet them.”
What if Elena—and not Jaycee, or Jenna Coeur—is the person she should have been worried about all along?
In the master bedroom, she closes and then—after a moment’s hesitation—locks the door. She grabs her laptop from the desk and sits on the edge of the bed, opening a Google search.
Déjà vu.
She did this when Meredith died, trying to figure out what had happened to her— though not as frantically.
She types Tony—then corrects it to Anthony—Kerwin, taking a guess on the spelling.
She got it right; an obituary pops up.
She scans it.
. . . died suddenly at his residence on Monday, June 10 . . .
But of course the cause of death isn’t listed. It never is.
If he’d been murdered, though, there would be online newspaper coverage, as there was after Meredith’s death.
There is none for Tony.
Going back to his obituary, she rereads it, then the funeral notice.
In lieu of flowers, the family would appreciate donations in Tony’s memory to the American Heart Association.
That, Landry thinks, would certainly indicate a heart attack.
He died at home. There would have been an autopsy. If it had shown anything unusual, that would have come up by now. Because you can’t disguise murder as a heart attack . . . or can you?
She returns to the search engine.
Two minutes later she has her answer—and the implications rock her to the core.
Beck has gone through every e-mail exchange in her mother’s files, going back a couple of years.
Nothing in her sent or received folders indicate that anyone was out to get her; not a shred of evidence to incriminate anyone.
Least of all her father.
Is that really what you were expecting to find?
There are only a few e-mails between her parents—mostly references to job hunting and household paperwork. But there were plenty of e-mails Mom sent to friends that seem to indicate the marriage was as solid as ever.
I miss Hank, she wrote to Jaycee, one of her blogger friends, just a few days before she died. I can’t wait until he’s back home and things are back to normal. I hate being alone at night.
I do, too, Jaycee wrote back. I wish I had a Hank!
There was another e-mail, further back, sent to a neighbor asking for the recipe for the potato side dish she’d made for a dinner party the night before. Hank devoured it, in case you didn’t notice, Mom had written. I want to make it for dinner some night.
Recipe . . .
That reminds Beck.
One of the bloggers she met at the funeral had mentioned that Mom e-mailed her about the cheesecake Beck had brought over on Mother’s Day.
She doesn’t recall seeing anything about that in the files.
She goes back to May 12, Mother’s Day, and begins working her way forward through the sent mail, looking for the exchange.
That’s strange. It isn’t there.
She checks the received e-mails.
Not there, either.
It’s nothing earth-shattering, and yet . . .
It’s bothering her.
She can’t remember which of the bloggers even said it. So much of last Saturday’s service is a blur. There were so many people . . .
She sighs, rising from the kitchen table.
Maybe the e-mail was there, and she’s so delirious she just missed it. She needs a break, and it’s time to go back to the living room to check on Jordan again. He’s been asleep on the couch for over an hour now. She turned off the television and covered him with a blanket when she first found him like that.