She blinked back more tears and looked for some vestige of the man who’d knelt at her feet just the night before, but all she saw was the chief of police.
“It doesn’t look good,” he said. “In fact, it looks like a damned movie of the week.”
“You don’t actually think I . . .”
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” Blake countered.
But of course it did.
“What matters is finding out the truth and piecing together the events leading up to Tom’s death. That means questioning any and all potentially involved parties.” He looked at her out of blue cop eyes. “And that would include you.”
“Got some more for you, Chief.” Anne Farnsworthy waved a stack of pink message slips four times the usual size at Blake. “And the coroner’s holding on line two.”
Blake took the slips and headed for his office. Closing the door behind him, he leafed through the messages and shook his head. Word of his cross-dressing underwater corpse had spread through the law enforcement grapevine like lightning. By his reckoning, he’d heard from every officer he’d ever met in his twenty years in law enforcement, and some he’d never heard of. And Tom Smith had been pulled out of Lake Carraway less than a week ago. He picked up the receiver and brought it to his ear.
“What you got goin’ on up there, Chief?” Truro didn’t produce enough dead bodies to warrant its own coroner, so Clyde Bartell in Claymore did the honors.
“Just your usual Sunday driver who wandered off the highway.”
“And ended up in the lake in his wife’s skivvies?” Bartell laughed. “If this guy was seeking sexual pleasure he picked a piss-poor place to find it.”
Blake was too tired of the jokes to laugh. And he needed to know whether there was any evidence linking Miranda to her husband’s death.
A GBI mechanic had confirmed that the Mercedes’ accelerator had stuck, and investigators had discovered frozen skid marks, preserved under a protective layer of snow, on the shore. With no smudge marks on the car’s exterior to indicate a push from a third party, all evidence pointed toward an accidental death. What Blake needed to know now was whether the autopsy results supported that evidence.
Blake switched ears and opened the legal pad on his desk to a fresh page. “What have you got for me?”
“I’ll be faxin’ my report over in the morning,” Bartell replied. “But there’s no sign of foul play. No marks on the body that can’t be accounted for. It looks like he died after the car went into the lake.”
Blake felt relief course through him. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. The cause of death’ll be listed as death by drowning. Drownings are always tricky, but based on the evidence I’d say he was alive when the car went under and trying to get outta there. Must’ve had his panties in a real uproar.” The coroner chuckled. “To tell you the truth, he might have made it out if his brassiere strap hadn’t gotten hung up on the gearshift.”
Blake gave a short bark of surprise. “Are you telling me that if Tom Smith had gone strapless the night he died, he might be alive today?”
“It’s possible.”
Blake snorted at the pure ridiculousness of it.
“The water was probably about four degrees Fahrenheit, so the body was well preserved. Guy was in pretty good shape, definitely an athlete. I’d give my left nut to hear how he happened to be up there driving around in below-freezing weather in that bra and panties.”
So would Blake.
The man chuckled. “Yep, officially it’s a drowning, but you might also call it a DBC.”
Blake didn’t bite. He doubted there was a lingerie joke he hadn’t already heard.
“That’s a Death by Cleavage in case you’re wantin’ to know.”
Okay, so maybe there were a few he hadn’t heard yet. “That’s very creative of you, Clyde. You think of that one all by yourself?”
“Naw. One of the GBI guys came up with it. Kinda catchy, don’t you think?”
Blake groaned as he hung up. He’d be a very old man before he lived this one down.
Anne Farsworthy poked her head back in his doorway. “I’ve got Seymour Butts and Titty Twister on lines one and two. Which one do you want to take first?”
“Neither. But the sooner I get to the bottom of this mess, the better.”
He was more than relieved that he didn’t have a murder case on his hands, but while the coroner and the GBI might be ready to sign off on this, it was his job to find out how in the hell Tom Smith got into that lake in that underwear.
Somebody had to know something, and the logical somebody to start with was Miranda. Despite her claim that the wife was always the last to know, she knew a hell of a lot more than she’d been letting on. Which didn’t say a lot for the effectiveness of Operation Bad Penny.
He was putting on his jacket when Anne put a hand up to stop him.
“Tell those guys I’m not interested in—” he began.
“You’ll want to talk to this one, Chief. It’s her, our anonymous caller. She’s calling from her favorite location.”
Blake motioned to the deputy at the next desk. “Ed, go on down to the pay phone near the Dogwood. Walk real slow and easy, don’t look right at it, but make sure you see who’s inside. Then come right back.”
Ed nodded and took off.
“Tell her I’ll be right there,” Blake directed Anne, but he took his time, wanting to give Ed a head start. In his office he closed the door and took a while getting seated. “Chief Summers,” he finally said into the phone.
“I told you there’d been foul play. I knew he wouldn’t have left me without a word.” She was still disguising her voice, but he could hear a very real anguish in it.
“And why is that?”
There was a silence and then a quiet, “Because he loved me.”
“Is that right?”
She sniffled. “Yes, that’s right. And here he’s been dead all this time, while she’s been running around acting as if he was away. As if she was talking to him and seeing him.”
“By she you mean his wife?”
He waited, wishing to hell Ed would get back here and tell him who he was talking to.
There was another sniff and then the voice grew harder. “It was me he loved. We were supposed to go away together.”
“Did Miranda Smith know that?”
“I don’t know. He said he was going to tell her, but I’m not sure.”
“And did you know he liked to . . .”
“Dress up?” She laughed, the sound dry. “Such a big dark secret. He wasn’t gay, you know, no matter what all the ignoramuses are saying.”
“But he was going to leave his wife for you?”
“Yes.”
“You do realize . . .” he paused, but she didn’t rush to fill in her name, “that he only had one airline ticket. His car was packed and ready to leave town, but he was traveling alone.”
She cried, and her distress sounded genuine. “I don’t believe it. But I’ll tell you something I bet you don’t know.”
Blake wished there were only one thing he didn’t know, but he stayed silent and waited for the woman to speak.
“Miranda Smith was at the lake the night of January eighth. I was supposed to meet him that afternoon and couldn’t get there. When I finally made it to the lake road later that night, she was coming down that mountain like a bat out of hell.”
He waited, holding his breath.
“When I got up to the house there was no sign of Tom or his car.” She sniffed again and her voice quivered. “He must have already been in the lake.”
The line went dead as Ed Beagley raced into Blake’s office, out of breath. “It was Helen St. James,” he whispered, the surprise evident on his face. “The bookkeeper from Ballantyne. I saw her clear as day.”
On the day of Tom’s funeral, Miranda sat in the family pew between her mother and grandmother and stared at the casket that held her husband’s incredibly well preserved mortal remains. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she stared at the brass-bound box while memories, the ones she’d held at bay while she struggled to maintain her charade and salvage what she could of Ballantyne, assaulted her.
The day they met, their first kiss. The holidays and vacations. Their increasingly frantic efforts to produce a child.
She didn’t know how to reconcile the man she’d married and loved with all the things she’d discovered about him. Nor did she know when he’d begun to change. Or how he’d ended up in the lake.
Floating in and out of the turmoil were her undefined feelings for Blake Summers and the crushing formality with which he’d handled her as the legal end of Tom’s death unfolded.
Behind her, Helen St. James sobbed brokenheartedly, and Miranda had no doubt most of the mourners were busy trying to guess whether the corpse had on hundred percent cotton or beige cream satin under his burial suit.
It was a funeral the residents of Truro were unlikely ever to forget.
chapter
25
M
iranda?”
“Hmmm?” Miranda blinked and looked up from the condolence card she was reading to stare up at her mother. She was so tired. Tired of pretending she was okay, tired of trying to get the details of Tom’s death out of her mind, tired of being the subject of everybody’s delighted speculation. She wanted to curl up in a ball and go to sleep and wake up in a couple of years when all of this was over.
She stared unseeing at the kitchen with its endless Tupperwared offerings and paper plates covered with foil. A vase of tissue-paper flowers from Andie sat in the center of the table, and Carly had brought one of Lindsey’s crayon masterpieces for the front of her refrigerator. Everything she looked at made her want to cry. Or sleep.
“Miranda, can you help me carry these things out to the car?” Her mother pointed to a group of casseroles she’d separated from the rest. “You won’t even be able to make a dent in all this food. I thought I’d take some to Gran.”
“Sure.” Miranda balanced a disposable baking dish of macaroni and cheese in one arm and a tuna-noodle bake in the other and followed her mother outside onto the front porch.
Her grandmother’s Cadillac sat in the drive, bathed in swaths of dark and moonlight.
“Why do you have Gran’s car?”
“Mine’s in the shop and she didn’t need hers. I thought I’d just leave these off for her and then walk on home from the cottage.”
Her mother’s voice receded as Miranda stared at the car; something about the way it looked in the dark jiggled at her brain. She’d replayed the night of January eight in her mind countless times, trying to remember something that might make a difference. She’d passed two cars on the gravel road that night, one while she was going up and one while she was coming down, but she’d only looked to assure herself that neither was Tom’s white Mercedes; she hadn’t bothered to try to figure out who was in them. Until now.
Flipping on the porch light, she trailed her mother down the drive. There was a slight chill in the air. Nothing like the bitter cold that night in January, but . . .
Her mother popped the trunk on Gran’s dark blue Cadillac, and Miranda stopped as the image she’d been trying to call up became clearer. The first car had been a dark sedan about this size.
No
. She cocked her head and looked at the car from another angle. What would Gran have been doing up there that night? And if it had been Gran on that gravel road, surely Miranda would have recognized her. Or Gran would have said something.
Her mother bent into the backseat and started rearranging things. “I think you’d better put those casseroles in the trunk, Miranda. Just make sure they’re flat and secured in some way.”
Miranda opened the trunk and slid the casseroles toward the back, then looked for something to prop against them. She wedged them in place with a black umbrella and a pair of galoshes she found in the recess, then felt around for something softer to wrap around them.
Her hand closed around something promising and she pulled it out to examine it for barrier-building potential.
Glancing down, she saw the Izod logo, noted the size was too big to be Gran’s. And froze when she recognized Tom’s sweatshirt. In disbelief she rooted around until she came up with a pair of his pants.
Miranda closed her eyes and tried to picture the car she’d whizzed by on her way up, but her head was swimming with thoughts she didn’t want to think.
What would her grandmother have been doing up there that night? And more importantly, what was she doing with Tom’s clothes?
Miranda’s heart dropped down around her knees as she tried to come up with an answer that didn’t require Gran being responsible for Tom ending up in the lake. With what she hoped
wasn’t
evidence crumpled to her chest, Miranda waved good-bye to her mother and hurried back into the house. She was going to have to have a little talk with the wrinkly wise woman.
Miranda wasted several valuable days trying to come up with a tactful way to broach the subject with Gran. She definitely couldn’t do it by phone, and she couldn’t for the life of her figure out an opener that would smooth the way into such a conversation. A “My, the weather’s getting lovely, you didn’t have anything to do with Tom’s death, did you?” simply wasn’t going to cut it.
When she finally accepted the fact that she was simply going to have to get her grandmother alone and dive right in, having that private conversation proved much trickier than she had anticipated. Having it before Blake forced her to “cooperate with his investigation” proved trickier still.
The night she knocked on her grandmother’s door primed for truth-seeking, Gus Summers opened it and invited her in for drinks. The next day she drove into town and tracked Gran to the post office, but she had barely finished parking her car when Blake came strolling down the sidewalk toward her. Panicked, Miranda ducked into the first doorway she came to—and learned how to count Weight Watchers points while she waited for him to move on.
For days she skittered out of Blake’s way while unsuccessfully trying to get her grandmother alone. In her fear and frustration, she vowed she’d answer every one of Blake’s questions—just as soon as she was able to stop worrying about Gran having a hand in Tom’s death.
On Friday evening, determined to put her fears to rest, she caught up with Gran in the bakery aisle of the Piggly Wiggly.