Over Her Head (24 page)

It took ten years off her. And the dress didn’t hurt, either. Nick had been so busy seeing her as the victim’s bereaved parent
that he’d completely missed the attractive woman . . . until now.

He opened the door of his truck and helped her into it, noting with interest how slender and shapely her calves looked. Where
had his eyes been all this time?

In her daughter’s case file
, the thinking part of his brain answered.
Right where they should be, until you get this mess straightened out.

And while he was on that subject . . .

“Are you okay with this?” he asked. “Going to the Hales’, I mean.”

She looked at him curiously. “I hope you’re not having second thoughts after I wrestled my way into panty hose for the first
time in two years.”

The image produced a quick grin, and then he got serious again. “I just thought that you might have changed your mind after
that article in the paper.”

“It was a shock.” Her skin paled, and her fingers tightened on her handbag in her lap. “But it’s not true, of course, what
Kate said. That paper should be ashamed for printing stuff like that, even if they didn’t name the juvenile in question. Like
that helps.”

“You know who the juvenile was.”

“Oh, sure. Debbie and Maggie got it from Kate’s mother, who’s been broadcasting it far and wide.”

“So we’re okay?”

She smiled at him, but it wasn’t the kind that meant dimples. It was a sad smile. “As okay as it gets.”

That was good enough for him, all things considered.

At Laurie and Colin’s, he gave a peremptory knock on the front door and opened it. “Happy Thanksgiving! Two hungry people,
incoming.”

“Nick.” Colin came out of the living room with a hand extended and a cordial smile. “And Tanya. We’re so glad you came.”

“Thanks for having us,” he answered, while Tanya murmured the same. “Where’s Laurie? And the kids?”

Colin took Tanya’s navy-surplus coat, which didn’t go very well with her dress but was evidently the only one she had that
would do the job of keeping her warm in late November. “In the kitchen, scarfing appetizers. Better hurry.”

The only one doing any scarfing, though, was Tim. Laurie stood in front of a double oven, checking a bubbling pan of sweet
potatoes flavored, by the smell of it, with orange and brown sugar.

“My favorite,” he said.

She pushed the pan back into the top oven, closed the door, and shook her mitts off her hands and onto the counter. “I know.
Along with dressing, brussels sprouts, cranberry salad, and mashed potatoes. You are so predictable.” She leaned in and gave
him a hug, then turned to Tanya. “Welcome,” Laurie said with a smile that didn’t quite reach her shadowed eyes. “We’re so
glad we get to have you to ourselves today.”

“Thanks, Laurie.” Tanya didn’t seem to be aware that there was anything amiss. And there was obviously going to be no further
discussion of newspaper articles or anything connected to them. “I don’t know what I would have done if Nick hadn’t invited
me. Gone and had a burger somewhere, I guess.” A spasm flickered across her face.

“No burgers here, I’m afraid, much to Tim’s relief. He prefers brussels sprouts.” Tim stuck his finger in his mouth and mimicked
throwing up. “All right, you. Remember the rules. You have to eat one single sprout. As in, two halves.”

“Aw, Mommmmm,” he whined.

“Cheer up, bud,” Nick said. “They’ll build your muscles so you can play pond hockey with the big kids.” He turned back to
Laurie. “Where’s Anna? She might not be a big fan of brussels sprouts, but she’s like me. She can scent a pan of sweet potatoes
in a lead-lined bunker sixty feet underground.”

“Up in her room, sulking. She’s grounded for two more weeks.”

“Through Christmas break?” Tanya asked.

“That’s the first thing she said.” Laurie pulled a can of whole cranberries and one of cranberry jelly out of the fridge and
dumped the contents of both into a cut-glass bowl. “But if she’s going to disobey us, her social life will just have to suffer.”
As she mixed the berries and the jelly together, the clang of the spoon on the glass sounded like a miniature alarm.

“Can I do something for you?” Tanya asked. “Make a salad? Put out pickles and olives?”

“No, I have it handled.” Laurie smoothed the top of the pulverized mixture. “You can put this on the table, though. Everything’s
nearly ready.”

Laurie was the most together person Nick knew. Whether she was making spaghetti for her family or organizing a potluck for
the entire church, she went at it armed with her lists and an unshakable belief that everyone would support her. The problem
was, sometimes that kind of efficiency was formidable, and once in a while, if she was having a bad day, she took an offer
of help as an insult, like maybe the person thought she wasn’t doing a good enough job.

He hoped this wasn’t that kind of day.

Tanya took the cranberry sauce into the dining room with a meekness that, for some reason, caused a little twist of pain in
the region of his heart. He consoled himself with the thought that the two women had been in the same Bible study group for
months. Tanya knew Laurie well enough to know she wouldn’t deliberately set out to hurt her.

Tim leaned into the open fridge. “Hey, Mom, are we having pumpkin pie?”

“Of course. The pies are sitting out in the garage. Don’t even think about touching them.”

“Where’s the whipped cream, then?”

“We have to make it. After dinner.”

“But there isn’t any cream.”

“What?” Laurie checked the fridge herself, and sighed. “I knew I’d forget something. Tim, take a couple of dollars out of
my wallet and run to the store, okay?”

“I can do it,” Nick offered. “Take me five minutes.” The Stop-N-Go was on the other side of the river, but it was still closer
than the supermarket, which had probably closed at noon anyway.

“No, Tim can go,” Laurie said. “He needs to work off some energy.” Tim already had his coat and boots on. “And no stopping,
either. Straight there and straight back, or no pie for you.”

“Bye, Mom, back next year!” The door slammed behind him and Laurie rolled her eyes.

“You should have sent him after dinner,” Colin observed. “If he gets distracted, we could be eating cold turkey.”

“If he’s more than ten minutes, I’ll walk down and fetch him,” Nick said. “But I bet he won’t be. He’s pretty serious about
his food.”

“KeShawn lives close to where the walking path goes over the river,” Colin pointed out. “He’s been sucked into the vortex
before. Meantime, where’s my other offspring? She needs to get down here and say hello like a civilized person.”

“Anna!” her mother called. “Time to come down.”

There was a mumble from above that didn’t sound very promising.

“Anna Catherine Hale, you come down. Now.”

No response.

Nick spread his hands. “Was it something I said? Suddenly I’m not her favorite cousin?”

“You’re a cop, and everyone thinks she’s a suspect,” Tanya said, coming back into the kitchen. “She’s hiding.”

The eight-hundred-pound gorilla that everyone was determined not to talk about landed in the middle of the kitchen with a
thud. Silence fell as the three of them looked anywhere but at Tanya.

Laurie was the first to find her voice. “What do you mean?”

“Hiding? That’s ridiculous,” Nick said. “We’re family.”

Tanya addressed herself to Laurie. “You know what I mean. I’m just telling the truth. What have I got to lose? It’s my daughter
who’s not here to have turkey and cranberry sauce.”

“Anna’s
not
responsible for that.”

“She was there that night.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Lor.” Colin put a hand on his wife’s arm. “This isn’t easy for Tanya.”

“Of course it isn’t.” Laurie shook him off. “But no one seems to be thinking about us. Or about a young girl who is completely
innocent. And you haven’t answered me, Tanya.”

Both women faced off over the marble breakfast bar. “Okay, so I don’t believe Anna would have pushed Randi’s face under, like
people are saying. But she was there. She could have done something to help. I’d give a lot to know why she didn’t.”

“She was
not
up on that bridge,” Laurie hissed, her face white, her skin stretched over her cheekbones. “You should be saying these things
to Kate’s mother, or Rose’s, or Kelci Platt’s.”

“If she was close enough to run under that bridge and look, she was close enough to go up on it and stop them.”

“She couldn’t have—” Nick began.

“My daughter is not responsible for your daughter’s death.” Now dark blood flooded Laurie’s cheeks in a rush, and she bit
off the consonants one by one.

“Why didn’t she stop them, then? Why didn’t someone stop them? All it would have taken was one kid to say, ‘Wait, this is
nuts,’ and Randi would still be alive.”

Again, Nick tried to intervene. “It might not have been as simple as—”

“And you think my daughter should have been that kid?”

“Well, aren’t you the church leader around here? Sophie Dayton might be the pastor’s wife, but everybody knows you really
run the show.”

“That’s not true!”

But Tanya was relentless. Her face was so pale that the freckles stood out on it like measles spots, and her eyes were wide
with unshed tears. Nick looked at Colin and tried to signal that maybe he ought to step in and separate them.

“Everyone says so. So what I’d like to know is, why won’t she come forward and tell the truth even though it’s too late? For
that matter, why won’t she come down here and look me in the face? Do you know what that says to me?”

Again, silence fell like a rock—the kind of appalled silence that was too hard to break and inflicted injury on every soul
it touched.

Into it came a young, frightened voice. “Does anyone know where Tim is?”

Nick turned to see Anna standing in the kitchen doorway. Automatically, he glanced at his watch and part of his mind recorded
the fact that Tim had been gone for twenty minutes. Twenty agonizing minutes that he wished had never happened.

“I’ll go get him,” he volunteered. “Tanya, want to come? I think maybe a break would do us all some good.”

“It doesn’t sound like Tanya has anything to be thankful for where we’re concerned.”

“Lor—”

“She’s right,” Tanya said. “I’ll go with Nick, but it’s probably better if I don’t come back.”

“Isn’t he here?” Anna said.

“Who?” her father asked, looking from his wife to Tanya as if he couldn’t believe two Christian women could speak to each
other this way.

“Tim! Isn’t he here?”

“For heaven’s sakes, Anna, he went to get whipping cream.”

“And he’s not back yet? Dad, we have to do something.”

Nick felt as though he’d stepped into an alternate universe. People were saying the unspeakable. Getting upset about the trivial.
No one was reacting the way normal people were supposed to.

He latched on to concrete action. “Fine. Tanya, get your coat. We’ll go find Tim and send him home. Then we’ll go get some
supper somewhere else.”
And maybe I’ll step back through the looking glass tomorrow and find out I dreamed the whole thing.

“Fine.” Laurie’s face, which he hardly ever saw without a smile, was set and expressionless. “Thank you.”

Nick hustled Tanya out the door and down the sidewalk. He had three blocks before they came to the walkway over the river
and KeShawn Platt’s house—and he intended to use every step.

“Mind telling me what that was all about?” he asked.

“I’m not going to apologize.”

“I’m not asking you to. I just asked what it was all about. I always thought Laurie was good to you.”

“She was. Is. I know she’s your cousin and you love Anna. I thought I could handle it. Obviously I made the wrong decision.”

Two blocks.

“I hope you meant what you said about Anna not pushing Randi under. I’ve interviewed a dozen kids at least twice each, and
Kate is the only one who brought it up. It still needs to be investigated.”

“But the mayor’s boy said he saw Anna standing in the water. His mother said so yesterday at Bible study.”

“Sure. And the place where Randi went in is a good thirty or forty feet away. The current isn’t strong enough to have taken
her over to the bank in those few seconds.”

“Then why did Kate say what she said?”

One block.

“I’m guessing it’s a diversionary tactic. We’re bumping up the heat on those three girls, and when you’re cornered, your first
reaction is to lash out or throw up a distraction. A smoke screen. It’s just unfortunate that that reporter happened to be
in the waiting room when she did it, and went public with the story before we could prove whether it was true or not.”

Tanya sighed, and with the Platt house and the river walk in sight, she slowed her pace. “Anna still could have done something.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. But speculating or dwelling on the what-ifs isn’t going to get us anywhere. And neither is hurting Laurie
and Colin.”

“It hurts
me
, Nick.”

Inside, he felt himself shift from cop mode to protector mode. Almost before he could think about it, he’d slipped an arm
around her shoulders, right there on the sidewalk.

“I can’t imagine how much it must hurt. I’m not a parent, so I don’t have much room to talk. But Tanya, I swear to you, we’re
closing in on a resolution. I’m doing everything I can, and Gil, my partner, is working on it today. This case is the department’s
highest priority.”

“I know.” She turned so that her next words were muffled in the front of his jacket. “And I’m going to regret saying what
I said to Laurie. But there she was in her beautiful house with her perfect kids and her husband, who is my boss, and what
do I have? Nothing. No house, no husband, no daughter. Sometimes I think I can face it, and then a day like today happens,
and I know I never will.”

“You have me,” he blurted, then felt like smacking himself on the forehead. He wasn’t ready for a relationship. His job was
too demanding. And she was a Christian—and he’d already made up his mind that wasn’t the path for him.