Die Job (14 page)

His question took me aback and I sipped my water, grateful that the server’s appearance with our salads gave me a chance to think. “I like my life,” I temporized, trying to think if I even had a dream. Once, it had been to marry Hank, have children, and live a life not unlike Mom and Dad’s, except for that whole Dad-dying-young thing. Now . . .

He apparently read my confusion because he said, “I’m sorry. That’s too deep a question for a first date. We should start with the basics. Ever been married? Children? Favorite color? Hobbies?” He forked up a bite of his salad.

I laughed, relieved to abandon soul-searching. “Divorced. No. Green. Singing.”

We chatted easily through the rest of the meal and I enjoyed his company, but the evening’s easy camaraderie dissipated when we pulled up behind a police car parked outside my apartment.

“What’s a copper doing on your doorstep?” Glen asked in a tight voice.

“My ex,” I said, having recognized Hank even in the near dark as he turned away from my door and tromped toward us. I got out of the car.

“I thought you’d be home, Grace,” Hank said, scanning the Corvette suspiciously. “I needed to follow up with you on the incident Halloween night. The explosion. Who’s that?”

“A teacher from the high school,” I said. I did not need a run-in with Hank to cap off my evening and I prayed Glen would have the good sense to just go. “Bye,” I encouraged him with a wave.

Glen climbed out of the car and came around to the sidewalk. He and Hank were of a similar height, but Glen was far less bulky, looking almost willowy beside Hank’s body-armored and uniformed figure. I introduced the two men and they shook hands, Hank glowering and Glen smiling easily. “Looks like the officer needs to talk to you,” Glen said. “We’ll do that nightcap another time.” And he astonished me by ignoring my outstretched hand and kissing me on the cheek, just at the corner of my mouth. Before I could recover, he
was back in the car and zooming off in a way that must have had Hank itching for his radar gun.

He jotted down the car’s license number and turned to me. “What the hell—”

“Don’t start with me,” I warned him, trying to puzzle out Glen’s strange behavior. It was almost as if he were deliberately taunting Hank since neither of us had mentioned a nightcap. Why would he do that?

“Oh, good, you found Grace.” Mrs. Jones’s voice came from her veranda. “Now you can tell us what you found out. I’m dying to know.”

Turning my back on Hank, I trotted over to Mrs. Jones, who looked fully recovered from her ordeal in a plum-colored velour lounging suit, her hair frilled around her face. Hank trailed up the steps after me, saying, “I wouldn’t trust that man, if I were you, Grace. My cop instincts tell me he’s trouble.”

Your cop instincts or your jealous ex-husband instincts? I wanted to ask but didn’t since Mrs. Jones was standing there. “I can take care of myself,” I said instead.

“What man?” Mrs. Jones asked, her eyes wide. “Do you have a new young man, Grace? Was that him that just drove off? I liked that snazzy car. A pretty young thing like you should be playing the field, living it up. It’s about time you got over your divorce and moved on. Life doesn’t stand still.”

I could feel the frustration building in Hank as she spoke and I edged away from him.

“She was married to me,” Hank said, his jaw jutting forward pugnaciously.

“Well, of course she was,” Mrs. Jones said, eyeing Hank like he was a bit dim. “But you blew that all to bits with your
philandering, didn’t you? Ka-boom! Just like my pumpkin.”

I bit back a giggle as Hank gobbled incoherently.

Mrs. Jones blinked at him innocently. “What did you find out about the explosion?”

Hank pulled out his notebook, either to hide behind or refresh his memory. “The lab tested some of the residue. It was aluminum and hydrogen chloride.”

“My goodness! Where would one get that, I wonder?” Mrs. Jones asked.

“There’s a toilet bowl cleaner that has it,” Hank said, clearly pleased to be able to demonstrate his knowledge. “Kids mix some of the cleaner in a container—like a plastic pop bottle—add aluminum foil, and run like crazy. If it explodes in your hand, it can blow off a few fingers. Well, you’ve seen what it did to your jack-o’-lantern.” He glanced up at the ceiling where a few pumpkin strings still clung.

“Mercy.” Mrs. Jones put a hand to her chest. “But why
my
jack-o’-lantern?”

“It was most likely random—kids playing pranks on Halloween,” Hank said with a wrapping-it-up air, returning his notebook to his pocket.

“Did you talk to Alonso Farber?” I asked.

“We know how to do our jobs, Grace,” Hank said huffily.

I took that to mean no and resolved to make sure Agent Dillon had the info on the pumpkin bomb. I couldn’t shake the suspicion that it had been meant as a warning to me, with Mrs. Jones an accidental victim.

I entered my empty apartment with relief, ready for a shower and an hour reading one of my favorite Georgette Heyer novels. I’d read all her Regency romances a
half dozen times or more, but they were still the books I went to when I was stressed. My answering machine blinked at me and I listened to a message from Marty, feeling vaguely guilty about having been out with Glen, but it’s not like we were ever exclusive and the dinner with Glen hadn’t really been a
date
. The message only said, “I’m off to Phoenix and then Houston for my story. It’s heating up. Check my byline this week. I’ll catch up with you later.”

It made me sad. Not a word about missing me or about rescheduling my trip to Washington. I reached for the phone but pulled back my hand. I wasn’t up to cheery enquiries about what he was working on when all the time I was worried that more than geographical distance separated us. Trailing to the bathroom, I remembered what Stella had said about all that goes unsaid in a relationship. Certainly with Hank I’d kept my innermost feelings to myself. Oh, we’d had it out about his affairs, but I’d never once told him how his screwing around made me feel little and worthless. Yes, it had hurt my feelings and finally dried up my love for him, but it was more than that.

I stepped into the shower and let the pounding spray wash away my unusual melancholy. I put it down to the aftereffects of Braden’s death—was it only this morning Dillon stopped by to tell me about it? Towel-drying my hair, I pulled on my UGA tee shirt and traipsed barefoot into my tiny kitchen. Glass of milk in hand, I headed for the orange and cream recliner, which didn’t match anything in the room but had cost me only fifteen dollars at a garage sale. I read
Faro’s Daughter
for a few minutes, but found that Ravenscar’s attitude toward Deb was depressing me instead of amusing me. My gaze fell on the box of documents from Rothmere.

I rooted through the box, looking for something with Clarissa’s handwriting. I found a slim packet of letters tied with a blue ribbon and slid one out. Bolder and slantier handwriting than Clarissa’s.

I folded the letter thoughtfully. Quentin sounded like a nice guy who truly cared about Clarissa. I hoped they’d married and lived happily ever after. But what had he meant about her suspicions? Clearly she’d written to him about her father’s death. Had she implicated a family member? Who? One of her brothers? Her mother? Extracting the next letter from the pile, I carefully spread it open.

[Tuesday]

TUESDAY MORNING, PUFFY CLOUDS WERE CREEPING across the sky from the east, forerunners of Horatio, and a slight headache behind my eyes told me the barometer was falling. For the first time, I began to worry that Horatio really was going to hit St. Elizabeth. I needed to run by the Piggly Wiggly and scoop up some supplies before the shelves were barer than Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. Midway through the morning, a woman I didn’t know came in looking for a haircut. Dark brown hair, too flat a shade to be natural, hung around a thin, tanned face that matched her thin, tan body clad in a long-sleeved blouse and Bermuda shorts that showed wiry, muscular legs. In her forties, I guessed, she had the nervous energy of a sparrow, her sun-speckled hands fluttering as she talked, her gaze darting about the salon, taking everything in. I was able to accommodate her without an appointment because we’d had many
cancellations as people fled inland. Evacuations weren’t mandatory, but many people left anyway, dodging the inconvenience of no electricity as much as true danger.

As I led the woman back to the shampoo sink, she introduced herself as Joy Crenshaw. “My son mentioned what you were doing for the high school girls and since I needed a cut myself . . .”

“Mark’s your son? Did he ever catch up with Lindsay yesterday?”

She rolled her eyes but smiled. “That boy. He’s such a worry wart. Lindsay was fine. She hadn’t felt well, so she’d skipped practice and gone home to take a nap. I don’t know where he gets that worry gene. Certainly not from me, and not from his father, either. Mark Sr. was intrepid until the day his F-14 went into a flat spin and crashed into the Pacific.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, taken aback by the easy way she introduced her husband’s death into the conversation. “I had no idea.”

“It was a long time ago,” Joy said. “Mark was only eight. Eric’s been a good father to him.” She relapsed into silence as I massaged her scalp but began to chatter again when I wrapped her head in a towel and showed her to my station.

“What a shame about Braden, huh?” she said, using the towel to dab at some water in her ears. “Mark’s absolutely distraught about it. And even Eric and I—well, we’ve known the kid for years. It gets to you, you know?”

“It makes me sad, too.” I worked my fingers through her damp hair. “What are you looking for today?”

She cocked her head, looking at her reflection in the mirror. “Something shorter maybe, and really wash-and-go. I play tennis and it’s just such a pain having to blow-dry my hair in the morning when I get up and then after a match.”

I showed her a couple of photos from a style magazine and she pointed to a short, layered bob. “Like that.”

As I sectioned her hair and twisted it up with clips, she prattled on, drowning out the quiet conversation Mom was having with a client and the rattling of the door blinds as Stella’s nail client left and another one came in. “Even though Mark plays football and not tennis, he gets his sports drive from me. That boy is disciplined! That’s how he got into the Naval Academy—with discipline. Eric, well, he works out, but he doesn’t set goals the way I do. And I’ve taught that to Mark. ‘Set a goal and work your butt off,’ I tell him. ‘Never give up! That’s the way to success. It’s how your father became a naval aviator.’ Mark’s always wanted to be a pilot like his dad.”

“Congrats on his getting into Annapolis,” I said. “It’s hard to get into one of the military academies, isn’t it?”

“You wouldn’t believe! All the usual academic tests, plus physical fitness tests, interviews, psych profiles, and background checks. Pretty much anything can get you disqualified: asthma, a DUI . . . you get the picture. But that’s where Mark Sr. went to school, so nothing else would do for Mark.” She smiled proudly.

“And Mark’s stepfather is in the navy, too, right?”

“You betcha. I guess I have a thing for men in uniforms.” She laughed. “Eric’s a submariner, though, not a pilot. We’re PCSing to the Pentagon next summer. The traffic will be awful—everyone says so—but we’ll be that much closer to Mark. And if Eric’s going to make admiral, he’s got to do his time in the Pentagon.”