In the Waning Light (31 page)

“No, I—”

“Do it. Or she’ll call the cops. That’s the last thing you want.”

“And then what? We sit around and wait for the executioner anyway? You’re not going to be immune, either, Geoff. You know what happens to guys like us in prison? Sitting around, doing nothing—it’s a slow form of suicide.”

Geoff rubbed his brow, his brain slurping with booze inside his skull. He needed to crash, get some sleep, but even in his tequila haze, he knew Henge was right. They couldn’t stop this now, even
if
Meg could somehow be made to drop her investigation. Sally knew something. Possibly LB knew, too, through Sally. Blake knew he was on the spit. There was Meg’s memory. Kovacs was snooping around . . . it had taken on a life of its own. They could either sit and wait for the slow-rolling ball of justice to hit them. Or . . .

“Wait for me at the motel,” he said quietly.

Henry regarded him in silence. The heater pumped into the car. “When will you come?”

“Tomorrow night, late,” Geoff said.

“What are you thinking?”

A slow smile curved his mouth.
“Thelma and Louise.”

Meg lay naked in his arms. Blake stared at the beams on the white ceiling. Outside, the sky was turning a pearlescent gray, heralding dawn. Tension increased in him. He wanted to hold on a while longer to this night. To Meg. He was afraid that come the harsh light of day it would all shatter into brightness, like a dream.

He glanced down at Meg. She was asleep, her skin pale against his. He gently moved hair from her cheek. He loved this red hair, this face, this person so much he thought he’d implode. And now that they’d come together, everything felt so fragile and so powerful. He felt the hint of a future, a vision too elusive, too delicate yet to reach out and grasp, for if he did, it might crumble to moondust in his fist. For so long he’d waited for this, dreamed of this.

And now?

She stirred and her lids fluttered open. She saw him watching her face and came up onto her elbow, her breasts alabaster in this light, nipples dark rose. He felt his cock stir. He traced his fingers gently, along her collarbone, shoulder—and his heart stopped. He couldn’t breathe. Around her neck on a silver chain hung her engagement ring. His eyes shot to hers. She smiled. And adrenaline exploded in his blood. For a moment he was blind, and his brain was blank. She reached up, hooked her hand behind his neck, and drew him down to her.

As Blake’s lips touched hers, she pulled the sheet off her body and rolled onto her back, pulling him on top of her. Her hands ran down the sides of his waist, and she opened her legs under him, arching up to him. He could feel the damp heat of her crotch as she tilted her hips, and guided him in. Red and black swirls drowned his vision and he sank himself deep into her body, and she gave a small gasp.

“Mmm,” she said against his mouth as she began to rotate her hips, her inner muscles sucking and pulling at his erection, as she grew slicker and hotter and hotter.

“Need to take Noah to school . . . make breakfast.”

“A quickie,” she murmured, thrusting her hips harder, faster, taking him inside her to the hilt, her breaths becoming fast, short.

Noah rubbed his eyes as he stumbled along the passage to the bathroom. A noise in his dad’s room stopped him in his tracks—heavy breathing, panting. His first reaction was fear. His dad was sick! He quickly went up to the door, was about to open it when he heard another sound—a woman’s sound, like a moan coming up her throat. He froze. His gaze shot to the spare room door. It was ajar, and the bed he could see through the gap was empty. A hot feeling rushed into his chest, and a funny feeling slid into his tummy. It made him angry. Scared. It made his heart beat too fast. His eyes burned and he curled his fists into balls at his sides. He began to shake. He heard more breathing, a gasp, and his dad moaned.

He spun around, raced back to his room, and dived into his bed. He covered his head tight with a pillow, and rocked side to side to make it go away.

CHAPTER 22

The weather was turning, a strange color filtering into the sky. As Meg dressed, she felt a heavy, cold, electrical presence, as if a massive Pacific storm front was pressing in. Downstairs, her instincts were confirmed. The barometer showed a sudden and sharp drop in pressure. And the instant she walked into the kitchen she felt a crackling tension between Blake and Noah. Lucy was edgy, too. She was outside, down on the dock, barking incessantly at something only she could see. Meg was seized by a sense of urgency, of time slipping fast like fine sand through her fingers.

“Morning, Noah,” she said as she came up to the counter. But the kid didn’t even lift his head to acknowledge her. He picked sullenly at his cereal. Blake set a coffee on the counter in front of her and caught her eyes. He shook his head, as if saying “let him be.” Meg motioned with her head, telling Blake she wanted a word in private.

Outside the kitchen, out of Noah’s hearing, she said quietly, “I don’t think I should go with you this morning. Take him to school alone.”

He glanced away, clearly conflicted. “I can’t leave you alone here.”

“I’ve got Geoff for company.”

“His Jeep is gone. Either he didn’t come home last night, or he went out early.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said, placing her arm on his. “I need to compile my notes, phone Emma, ask her some more questions.”

“How about I take you to work in the town library, while I run some errands—you said you wanted to go through the
Shelter Bay Chronicle
archives, and at least you won’t be alone. I’ll pick you up before the book club meeting.”

“Blake, Noah hasn’t even acknowledged my presence this morning. You need time with him. I . . . I’m not good for him right now.”

“You are. I saw you with him. He’s confused, that’s all. He likes you. My guess is he feels the mere act of liking you is betraying his mother’s memory in some way. We’ll work through it.”

The depth and the reality of it hit her—trying to make a life, a family from disparate pieces.

“Listen, I didn’t mention it because I didn’t want to worry you, but there was someone outside last night, on the property. I gave chase up the path and flushed whoever it was up into the road. There was a car waiting. Tires squealed. I’m guessing it wasn’t Sally Braden.”

Her eyes flashed to his. She’d heard the squealing tires.

“Get your stuff. We’ll be in the truck.”

Noah remained mute all the way to school in spite of Blake trying to cheer him up with the prospect of his Friday art class after school. In the end, Blake gave up and punched on the radio to fill the brooding silence. Wind whipped dead leaves and rusted pine needles across the road. Meteorologists on the radio were discussing the possible convergence of two major storm fronts offshore around midnight. If the fronts did clash, it could result in what one meteorologist was calling a “perfect storm” that would bring massive swells and gale-force winds. People in low-lying shore areas were being advised to stay tuned for further weather alerts.

“I should get the sandbags out,” Blake said to Meg as he turned into the school lot.

Noah slammed the door and disappeared with his backpack into the throng of kids. A different mood pervaded the students today as they hunkered against wind and flying debris beneath the strangely colored cloud.

As they drove to the library, Meg dialed Emma.

“It’s Meg,” she said, when Emma picked up. “I was hoping to follow up on our interview with a question or two.”

“I’m in a rush to get ready for work,” she said crisply.

“I’ll be quick. My mom wrote in her journal that she told you and Tommy that she was doubting Ty Mack’s guilt, and conducting her own investigation, yet you said she didn’t mention it.”

“For chrissakes, Meg, it was almost a quarter century ago. Maybe she did, but I really don’t recall.”

“It’s a major detail to forget, Emma.”

“Oh, really? As major as what you forgot?”

Meg closed her eyes, pulse quickening. “Touché. I’m sorry.”

“Is that it?”

“Just one more.” Meg hesitated, then bit the bullet. “Tommy said that you lied to the cops about why Sherry went to the spit. He claimed it was for drugs, not sex. He said you and Sherry both dabbled in ‘e.
’
”

“Everyone did.”

“Did you lie to Ike Kovacs, Emma?”

Dead air.

“Emma?”

“No,” she said, her voice suddenly low, cool. “I did not. That
is
what Sherry said on the phone. She was going to make out with Ty Mack.”

Meg believed this. It’s what she’d felt when she’d watched her sister and Ty rumble off on that custom chrome cruiser.

Cover for me, Meggie . . .

“Tommy’s full of shit, and he knows it. I phoned him right after Sherry called, and I told him what she’d said she was going to do with Ty, so whatever he’s saying now is a flat-out lie. And I’m done talking about it—”

“Wait.” Meg tensed. “You told Tommy
before
Sherry went to the spit? Why’d you do that?”

Emma cursed. Meg could hear her lighting a cigarette, blowing out smoke. “Because he was a thick-skulled, navel-gazing, son of a bitch, that’s why. He refused to see that Sherry was not interested in him anymore. I . . . I just thought he should know.”

“Because
you
wanted Sherry’s boyfriend,” Meg said quietly.

“And lived to regret it,” she said.

“Emma, did Ike Kovacs know this?”

“It was none of his business.”

“So Tommy was right, you did lie, just not in the way he led me to believe?”

“If that’s all—”

“Emma, wait, please. If Sherry was not interested in Tommy anymore, why was she still going out with him?”

The line went dead.

“Wow,” Meg whispered, staring at her phone.

“What was that about?” Blake asked, turning into the library drop-off zone.

“She claims she gave Tommy the heads-up that Sherry was going with Ty Mack to the spit that day to have sex.”

“You believe her?”

Meg ran her hand over her hair. “I don’t know. Tommy said she was a passive-aggressive, a vindictive and pathological liar. It just seems the more we dig, the more twisted this becomes.”

Blake drew to a stop outside the entrance to the Shelter Bay Public Library. “You going to be okay?”

“Yeah.” Her eyes met his. And instantly what they had shared in bed this morning rose thick and hot between them—raw, powerful. Fragile.

He cupped the side of her face, traced the rough pad of his thumb quickly over her lips. “I’ll be back to pick you up at lunch. We can grab a quick bite before we fetch Irene and head to the book club meeting. After that we can swing by the house to assess the damage, before getting ready for Tommy’s fund-raiser. We can talk to him there.”

“Blake, I really don’t need you to come to the book club meet—”

“Hey, I’m coming. I
want
to hear what Shelter Bay’s most famous writer has to say, whether she likes it or not.” He held her face, grinned. “Wild horses couldn’t keep me away.” His eyes sobered. “I want to see what you do, Meg. I want to know you. All of you.”

She hesitated, and he stole the moment, kissing her quickly and fully on the mouth. And he did not drive away until she was safely inside the library doors.

Through the window Meg watched his truck pulling out, and she felt a tightening, a kind of unarticulated claustrophobia. She put it down to the low pressure from the storm. But deep down, she knew it was more. It was about her fear of intimacy. And commitment.

The librarian showed Meg to a computer station. The place was almost empty at this hour. A few women perused the stacks or worked at tables. Meg guessed them to be moms who’d just dropped their kids off at school. And a grizzled gent, maybe in his early seventies, hunkered at a computer two tables down from the one where Meg was being seated.

“Over the last three summers our student volunteers have been working to digitize the entire archives of the
Shelter Bay Chronicle
,” the librarian said as Meg draped her tote over the back of the chair and set her notebook and laptop on the desk. She seated herself at the monitor. The librarian leaned over to show her how to work the system.

“You can now narrow your searches of the archives to specific time windows, and you can also search the entire collection just by name, or phrase.”

Meg thanked the librarian and quickly got to work perusing news reports and feature commentary around the time of Sherry’s murder. She noted which stories she might like to quote in her book, and which news photos she might like to secure the rights for. She paused at a grainy black-and-white image of the early search party that had gone out to look for the Brogan sisters. Bull Sutton was among them. So was a young Dave Kovacs.

Meg chewed on the inside of her cheek, a faint memory whispering around the periphery of her mind as she stared at Dave’s younger face. But she couldn’t quite tease it out.

She came across a photo of herself. Young and freckled. School photo. Headline: “Youngest Brogan Still in Coma.” Another photo showed Blake Sutton. “Teen Hero Saves Life.” Meg’s heart kicked into an erratic beat. She felt hot.

Focus. Just remain objective. Get the info. You can feel the emotions later, in the writing of it.

After combing through the key editorial pieces, Meg set a parameter of dates around the event, and one by one, she punched into the search field the names of the primary players. Sherry Brogan. Her own name. Blake’s. Ike Kovacs. Jack and Tara Brogan. Emma Williams. Tommy Kessinger. Tommy’s alibi, Ryan Millar. Tyson Mack. Lee Albies. Her goal was to see what allied snippets of information she might find about each person, unrelated to the case. It would help her flesh out a picture for readers of the lives these people were living before, and then after the murder. Who they were. What track meets they’d just won. What football games their teams had been playing. What the crab fishing was like that season. What other crimes they’d been working, or legal cases they might have been battling.

There were sports photos of Tommy with the Shelter Bay High football team in action. Meg made a note to secure one of these for her book. She also found a news pic of Sherry being crowned homecoming queen, posing with Emma in her court. And one of Sherry bending over to receive a gold medal for track around her neck. One step down on the podium, awaiting silver, was Emma.

Meg tapped her pen on the desk thinking—Emma, always the princess, never the queen. Emma, beautiful, smart and talented in her own right, but always in Sherry’s shadow. Emma wanting what Sherry had, including her star quarterback boyfriend.

The old man sitting two computer stations down from Meg cleared his throat loudly in irritation at the noise of her pen. She stopped tapping, dropped the pen, and typed into the search box the next name on her list. Ryan Miller. Alibi for Tommy Kessinger on the day of the murder, August 11.

Meg came across a photo of Ryan, also in sports action. It showed him as a massive linebacker in a leaping tackle, his elbow covered in blood, his eyes squeezing tight, his features pugilistic as he tried to crush the opposing team member fleeing with the ball. Another showed Ryan with his teammates after a game. Handsome in a brutish way. She remembered him now, with Peggy. Bit of a bruiser.

She punched in “Millar’s Garage.” Up came a story and photo in the business section from twenty years ago. According to the piece, Millar’s Garage, a well-known family operation in Shelter Bay, was closing its doors and moving to a new location. Apparently environmental studies had discovered the underground fuel storage tanks were leaking and an environmental upgrade had been ordered for the site. Remediation work to remove contaminated soil and fuel vapor from the site would take several years. The photo showed the old location where the Millars had lived in a house adjoining the property. In the driveway, around the side of the house, was a red VW van.

Meg’s pulse kicked.

She tried to enlarge the photo on the screen. It might not mean a thing—old VW vans were common enough now, and were even more so twenty years ago. The Millar family ran a garage. They could have been working on the van. Yet, it was parked around the side of their residential property.

She thought of Lee Albies and her homeless witness who’d seen a red van parked on the spit the day Sherry died, but had never reported it to the police.

Ryan had made a sworn statement to the cops that he was with Tommy from 10:00 a.m. until 11:00 p.m., working in his father’s garage. And this photo was taken two years after Sherry’s murder. The question was: Had he or someone in that house owned the red van two years earlier?

Her phone buzzed. Meg jumped and scrabbled in her tote as the old man two desks down scowled. Text from Blake. He was waiting outside already—she’d completely lost track of time. Quickly she looked up Ryan Millar’s garage phone number, jotted it down, gathered her things, and hurried out of the library, mentally running through what she might talk about at the bookstore.