Not Guilty (24 page)

A
relentless rain and the rumble of thunder followed Keely home from the Blenheim Institute. Nicole greeted her cheerily and assured her that Abby had been a perfect angel. Keely thanked her and paid the girl for her time. She insisted that a protesting Nicole borrow an umbrella—a black umbrella with blue sky and white clouds on the inner surface—to make her way home from the Weavers’ house in the rain. Standing in the front doorway, Keely watched the girl go jauntily down the driveway, her blond ponytail bobbing along beneath the umbrella, a spot of gold in the darkness. Once Nicole was out of sight, Keely carried Abby, whom Nicole had already dressed for bed, to the rocking chair in the nursery and sat down, singing softly as she held her. In a few minutes, she heard the shuddering sigh that always signaled when Abby was asleep. Keely stayed in the rocker in the dark room, enjoying the feeling of the baby’s heart beating against her own. She put her head back against the headrest and shut her eyes.

Suddenly, the doorbell rang. Keely jumped at the shrill sound and covered Abby’s ears. Carefully, she placed the sleeping baby in her crib and rushed to the darkened vestibule as the bell sounded again.
Stop it,
she thought.
You’ll wake her.
She pulled the door open.

The rain had stopped and the night was clear. A huge, yellow moon hung low in the sky. The man on the doorstep peered at her through hooded eyes. His blond hair stood up over his black roots like a skunk’s stripe. The pockmarks in his complexion looked like craters in the moonlight. He was smoking a cigarette. When she opened the door, he flicked the butt into the bushes beside the steps. Keely stared out at him.

“Remember me?” he said. When she did not reply he added, “Wade Rovere. From the pizza place.”

“I know who you are,” she said. Her heart was hammering. It was almost as if he had appeared on the doorstep in response to her thoughts. “I’m glad to see you,” she said truthfully. “Did you remember something?”

“Well, maybe,” he said evasively.

“Maybe?” Keely asked. Suddenly, she was on her guard. This was not the response of someone eager to help. “I’d rather not play games,” she said coldly. “This is very important to me.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “How important?”

“Excuse me?” said Keely stiffly. “What do you mean? Very important.”

“Are you going to ask me in?”

Keely hesitated. Suddenly, she realized how alone and isolated she was here. She thought about the fact that this man had a prison record.
Too late to worry about it now,
she thought. She stood aside and said tensely, “Come in.”

Wade sauntered past her into the house. He looked around the living room, picking up a silver bowl on the table and turning it over to read the hallmark. He squinted at the painting over the mantle and tried to read the painter’s signature. He looked over his shoulder at her, cocking his thumb at the painting.

“Is this real?” he said.

Keely frowned at the painting. It was a framed watercolor that she and Richard had bought one day long ago at an outdoor art show. “It’s a real painting,” she said.

“Famous artist?” he said.

“No,” said Keely irritably. “I got it at a sidewalk sale.”

Wade snorted. “Right,” he said.

“Would you care to sit down, Mr. Rovere?

“Just call me Wade.”

Now that he was in the house, she thought again about the foolishness of admitting him. How would she get him out if he didn’t want to leave?
Stay calm,
she told herself.
You need this guy. Find out what he has to say.
“Look . . . Wade. If you have any information, I’d be interested to hear it,” she said. “I’d be very grateful for anything you could tell me about this.”

Wade started to sit down on a damask-striped chair but then hesitated, his rear end hovering above the seat. “Mind?” he asked.

Keely shook her head. He seated himself and then took out a cigarette and lit it, without asking if she minded that. He shook out the match and then looked around for an ashtray. Stifling an impatient sigh, Keely found an old blue-and-white porcelain ashtray on a bookshelf and handed it to him. Wade sighed with contentment and settled back in the chair. “Nice house,” he said nodding. “I’ll bet this place is worth a bundle.”

Keely crossed her arms over her chest and remained standing. “Does this house look familiar to you? The night my husband drowned,” she prodded him. “Was this the house you stopped at first?”

Wade blew out a smoke ring and watched it rise. Then he grinned, although the expression in his eyes was hard and dull. “Uh-huh.”

Keely felt a pleasurable shock run through her. “So you
were
here that night. Did you actually knock on the door? Did you see my husband?”

“Tall guy, nice looking. Had on some kind of banker’s shirt without the tie.”

“That’s right,” Keely yelped. “You saw him.”

“I saw him.”

“Did you see anyone else? Was anyone with him? There was one car in the driveway when I left—his silver Lexus. Did you notice any other cars? Even a description of a car in the driveway might be helpful. You look like the kind of guy who’d probably know a lot about cars . . .”

“Hold it, hold it,” he said. “Not so fast.”

“Sorry,” Keely mumbled, anxious to please. “What were you going to say?”

“I know what you want, lady,” he said. “I have what you want, as a matter of fact.” Keely felt her heart start to hammer again.
Oh God,
she thought. Her mind leaped ahead, envisioning being able to tell Dylan. To prove her faith in him. To throw it in Maureen Chase’s face and show the world, for good, that her son was not to blame.

“Please . . .Wade. You cannot imagine how important this is.”

“Well,” he said, leaning forward, resting his forearms on his thighs and closing one eye as the smoke drifted up and back. “There’s a little problem.”

Keely gazed at him suspiciously. “What kind of a problem?”

Wade grimaced as if it gave him pain just to think about it. “It’s just that I feel like I need to be . . . um . . . compensated, if you know what I mean?”

It took a moment for his intentions to register in Keely’s mind. “You want me to pay you?” she said at last.

Wade nodded, took an enormous drag, then stubbed out his cigarette butt. “Yeah,” he said, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “That’s right. That’s what I’ve been thinking.”

Keely closed her eyes and tried not to let anger get the best of her.
Why am I even surprised?
she asked herself. He had asked about a reward at the pizza place. She felt like gagging on the smoke from his cigarette. It was some kind of crime, wasn’t it, to make people pay for information like that? Extortion. She didn’t know the legal details, despite having been married to a lawyer. But she knew she could say it and make it sound authoritative.

For one second she thought about threatening to call the cops, but instantly, she thought better of it. This was a man who had spent time in jail. Any mention of the cops was going to be a red flag to a guy like this. It couldn’t do any good, and it might possibly alarm him enough to make him deny that he knew anything. And who could prove he did? After all, the police weren’t looking for any information about Mark’s death. She was the only one who even believed there was something more to know about Mark’s death.

“All right,” she said evenly, although she felt clammy and shaky all over. “I did mention a reward. I guess it would be . . . all right to pay you . . . for your trouble. Let me get my checkbook.”

“No, no,” he said. “No checks. Cash.”

Keely’s eyes widened in surprise. “I keep about a hundred dollars in my wallet. Would that be enough?”

Wade began to cough and then looked up at her with an expression of bemused disbelief. “A hundred dollars.” He shook his head. “No.
That would definitely not be enough. I was thinking more of like . . . five grand. You’ll probably have to go to your bank to get it.”

“Five thousand dollars? Are you insane?” Keely asked.

“That’s the price,” he said sullenly.

He reached into his pocket for another cigarette. Without thinking, Keely snatched the pack out of his hands. “Don’t smoke in my house,” she said.

Wade jumped up from the chair and grabbed her wrist. “Give me those,” he said.

His face was so close to hers, Keely could smell the alcohol on his breath. His eyes flashed.

“All right,” she said. “Here.” She handed over the cigarette pack, and he stuffed it into his shirt pocket and dropped her wrist.

She didn’t want him to see that he had frightened her. She tried to keep her voice steady. “Let’s hear this information you supposedly have,” Keely demanded.

Wade shook his head. “Oh no,” he said. “Then you’ll never pay me.”

“Maybe I’ll never pay you, period,” she said.

Wade shrugged. “If that’s how you want to play it. It looks like that husband of yours left you pretty well fixed. But if you don’t want to waste any of those precious bucks to find out what happened to him . . .”

“Don’t try to bully me,” said Keely. “How do I know you’re not going to make something up?”

“I told you I saw him, remember?”

Keely nodded thinking about Mark in his business shirt without the tie. “Yes,” she said softly. “But maybe that was all you saw.”

“Have it your way,” he snapped. He started for the door.

“It’s greedy and disgusting. Nobody’s going to pay you five thousand dollars,” Keely said.

“Don’t bet on it,” he said. “I have other options.”

Keely rushed to the door and blocked his way. “Wait a minute,” she said. Suddenly, she saw her best chance getting away. “Look,” she said. “What you’re doing is wrong. It’s wrong and it’s illegal. But I won’t deny that I want to know. So let’s try to come to an agreement. A reasonable agreement.”

Wade studied her, weighing his options. Then he shook his head. “No. It was a mistake to come to you first. I was just trying to be nice.”

“Nice?” she cried.

“Get out of my way,” he said, and before she saw it coming, he reached out and batted her away from the door as if she were a rag doll. She fell against the table in the hallway and knocked it over. A vase of flowers on the table toppled and crashed to the floor. As Wade hurried out the door, Keely landed, winded by the shock of it, in a puddle of water and a pile of broken crockery on the floor. For a minute, she struggled to catch her breath.

Suddenly, she was aware of someone standing in the doorway, and for an instant she felt a strange mix of hope and fear that Wade had come back. She looked up and saw Dan Warner looking down at her. He was holding a furled black umbrella. A patch of sky blue was visible among the folds. “Keely!” he cried. He set the umbrella into the stand by the door, crouched down, and tried to help her up, but she shook off his aid. She felt unaccountably furious at her well-meaning neighbor. Already she was thinking about Wade, about how she could take back what she said, pay his price—pay anything.

“I’m fine,” she said as she stood up.

“I came over to return this umbrella. I saw that fellow leaving.”

“I’m fine. Really.”

“What happened here?” he asked