The Cinderella Murder (11 page)

“The way lawyers sometimes use depositions. Do your fishing expedition outside of the courtroom. Go in for the kill in front of the jury.”

She smiled, flattered, and then looked at her watch. “I’ve got to get home to Timmy. And as Brett said, that red-eye took its toll on me. I feel like a wreck.”

“Well, you don’t look it.”

She forced herself to break eye contact and then rose from the sofa to walk him out. Her focus right now was on her family and on telling Susan Dempsey’s story. There was no room for anything—or anyone—else. Not yet.

20

“W
hat are you going to have?” Lydia asked, perusing the menu. “Probably something healthy, I bet. I still can’t get over that wholesome selection of groceries you brought home the other day.”

Rosemary wished her neighbor hadn’t brought up the contents of her shopping bags. It reminded her how annoyed she had been at the woman’s nosiness. She pushed away the moment of irritation and reminded herself why she was having lunch with Lydia in the first place: because she was a neighbor, and her act of assistance that day had been generous, and Rosemary had not made any new friends since she had moved to Castle Crossings nearly a year and a half ago.

Rosemary’s first attempt to return the gesture had come yesterday morning, when she’d brought Lydia a jar of jelly beans, which she had mentioned as her favorite vice. Now they were having their first real outing together, a lunch at Rustic Tavern. It was a gorgeous day, so they had agreed on a quiet table on the restaurant’s garden patio.

“I’m not nearly as virtuous as my groceries would suggest,” Rosemary said, closing her menu. “And to prove it, I’ll have a bacon cheeseburger with french fries.”

“Oh, that sounds delicious. I’m doing it, too. And a salad to start, just so we can say we ate a vegetable?”

“Sounds like a plan.”

They had finished their salads and ordered refills on their glasses
of cabernet when Rosemary asked Lydia how she had ended up living in their shared neighborhood.

“Don was the one who wanted the extra security,” she explained. “It seemed weird to me, since the kids were out of the house by then. But we take the grandkids one weekend a month, and you see all these horrible stories about kids snatched when the adults aren’t watching. Oh, Rosemary, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—”

Rosemary shook her head. “No, please, go on.”

“Anyway, Don said it would be safer for the kids in a gated community. Like he says, he can’t crack heads like he used to.”

Rosemary was silent, wondering if she’d misheard, but Lydia obviously saw the confusion register on her face.

“Right, no reason why that would make any sense to you. Don—that’s my husband—his background is in security management. The hands-on variety. He ran body service, as they call it, for all kinds of professional athletes and musicians. That’s how we met.”

“You had a secret life as a professional athlete?”

“Oh, no. Sorry. My kids tell me all the time, I’m a horrible storyteller. I’m not
linear
, is what they say.
Drip, drip, drip with the information,
according to them. No, I met Don in 1968 when we were still young’ns. Well, he was a young’n: only twenty years old, working security on Jimmy O’Hare’s first world tour.” Rosemary vaguely recalled the name as that of a southern rock singer from around that era. “I was twenty-five but lied and told everyone I was twenty-one. Musicians back then didn’t like us much older than that.”

“So you were a—backup singer or something?”

“Oh, gosh no. I can’t carry a note to save my life. We had a karaoke contest at the home association party a few years ago, and my friends threatened to evict me from Castle Crossings if I ever sang in front of them again. Trust me, you don’t want to hear me sing. No, I lied about my age because I was a road companion. A
groupie
is the more common vernacular.”

Rosemary nearly spit out her wine across the table. Never judge a book by its cover, especially when the book is a person, was the lesson.

The ice—and Rosemary’s expectations—fully broken, their conversation fell into an easy rhythm. They had lived very different lives but found unpredictable parallels between Lydia’s life on the road and young Rosemary’s own adventure of leaving Wisconsin for California.

“And how did you decide to move across the street?” Lydia asked. “You didn’t want to stay in your old house?”

Rosemary found herself picking at her french fries.

“I’m sorry. Did I say something wrong again?”

“No, of course not. It’s just—well, the answer is complicated. I raised Susan in that house. I mourned her there. I lived more years in that house with Jack than anywhere or with anyone else. But when he passed, the place was just too big for me to live in alone. It was hard to walk away from all those memories, but it was time.”

“Oh, Rosemary. I didn’t mean to bring up something so upsetting.”

“It’s okay. Really.”

Lydia reached over and patted her wrist. The moment was interrupted by the buzz of Rosemary’s phone against the table.

“Sorry,” she said, inspecting the screen. “I need to take this.”

“Rosemary,” the voice on the phone said, “it’s Laurie Moran. I have good news.”

Rosemary was muttering the requisite acknowledgments—“Yes, I see, uh-huh”—but was having a hard time ignoring Lydia’s expectant looks.

When she finally hung up, Lydia said, “Whatever that was about, you seemed very happy about it.”

“Yes, you could say that. That was a television producer in New York. The show
Under Suspicion
has picked my daughter’s case for
their next feature. The producer can’t make any promises, but I have to pray that something new comes out of this. It’s been twenty years.”

“I can’t imagine.”

Rosemary realized that it was the first time she had spoken about Susan to anyone who hadn’t known her or been investigating her death. She had officially made a new friend.

21

D
wight Cook wished he could gut the interior of REACH’s headquarters and start over. The design concept had sounded great when the architect first pitched it. The three-level building had plenty of open space, some of it with forty-foot ceilings, but was also filled with nooks and brightly painted crannies with couches and bistro tables for people to gather in small groups. The idea, according to the architect, was to create the illusion of one large, continuous, “mazelike” space.

Well, the maze effect had worked.

Was it only he who craved monochromatic symmetry?

He blocked out all the horrible visual distractions and thought about the work that was taking place within these ridiculously shaped walls. REACH had been around for nearly twenty years and still managed to hire some of the brightest, most innovative tech workers in the country.

He reached the end of the hall and turned right toward Hathaway’s office. His former professor had been at REACH from the beginning in every possible way. But regardless of their work together, he would always think of Hathaway as his professor, the man responsible for building REACH into an empire.

Hathaway’s door was open, as was the norm in REACH’s “corporate culture.”

Richard Hathaway was well into his fifties by now but still looked essentially the same as when UCLA coeds had dubbed him the school’s “most crush-worthy” teacher. He was of average height with an athletic build. He had thick, wavy brown hair and a year-round tan, and always dressed like he was about to tee off at a golf course. As Dwight approached, he could see that Hathaway was reading a magazine article called “Work Out Smarter, Not Longer.”

Dwight took a seat across from Hathaway, unsure how to raise the subject that brought him there. He decided to ease into it, the way he had noticed people did when they were trying to avoid a topic. “Sometimes when I walk around the building, it reminds me of your lab back at UCLA.”

“Except we were working with computers the size of economy cars. And the furniture wasn’t as nice, either.” Hathaway was always quick with a good line. How many times had he saved the day by “tagging along” to a meeting with a potential investor? Dwight had surpassed Hathaway in programming talent, but without Hathaway, Dwight would have always worked for someone else.

“The walls were straight, though,” Dwight said, making his own attempt at the same kind of humor.

Hathaway smiled, but Dwight could tell that his self-deprecating one-liner had fallen flat.

“What I meant,” Dwight continued, “was that we have all these kids—smart, idealistic, probably a little weird.” Now Hathaway laughed. “They all believe they can change the world with the right piece of code. I remember your lab feeling like that.”

“You sound like a proud parent.”

“Yes, I suppose I am proud.” Dwight tried so hard not to feel his emotions that he had never learned to describe them.

“It’s fine to be proud,” Hathaway said, “but REACH has investors with expectations. It would be nice to be relevant again.”

“We’re more than relevant, Hathaway.” Dwight had called him
“Dr. Hathaway” long after they both left UCLA. Despite the professor’s insistence that Dwight refer to him as Richard, Dwight just couldn’t do it. “Hathaway” had been the compromise.

“I mean front-page-of-the-
Journal
relevant. Our stock price is holding steady, Dwight, but others’ are going up.”

Even as a professor, Hathaway was never the tweed-jacket-and-practical-shoes type. He made it clear to his students that technology could not only help people and change the world, it could also make you rich. The first time an investment banker wrote them a seven-figure check, enabling REACH to set up shop in Palo Alto, Hathaway had gone directly to the car dealer for a new Maserati.

“But you’re not here to relive the old days,” Hathaway said.

Dwight trusted Hathaway. They’d had a special connection from the moment Hathaway had asked Dwight, after freshman midterms, to work in the lab. Dwight had always felt like his own father was trying to either change him or avoid him. But Hathaway had all the same interests as Dwight and never tried to tell him to act like anyone other than himself. When they worked together, combining Dwight’s code-writing skills with Hathaway’s business savvy, it was a perfect match.

So why couldn’t he tell his friend and mentor of twenty years that he was hacking the e-mail accounts of everyone who might be connected to Susan’s murder?

Oh, how desperately he wanted to tell him what he’d learned. He knew, for example, that Frank Parker’s wife, Talia, wrote her sister to say she was “dead set against Frank ever speaking that girl’s name again.” Was Talia opposed to the show because she suspected her husband was involved?

And then there was Madison Meyer’s e-mail to her agent, insisting that once she was in a room alone with Frank Parker again, she was “sure to land a true
comeback
role.” That one definitely made it sound like Madison had something to hang over Frank’s head.

And yet, Dwight could not bring himself to tell Hathaway what he’d been up to. He knew Hathaway would worry about the corporate implications if Dwight were caught hacking into private accounts. No one would ever trust REACH with information again. Their stock price would plummet. This would have to be one secret he kept from his oldest friend.

But Hathaway was looking at him expectantly. “What’s up, Dwight?”

“I think I actually forgot. That walk down the maze must have made me dizzy.” He was pleased when Hathaway smiled. The line had worked.

“I do that all the time,” Hathaway said. “But, hey, since you’re here: I got a call from a Laurie Moran? A TV special about Susan Dempsey? They said you gave them my name. I thought everyone sort of knew Frank Parker did it but the police could never prove it.”

Dwight wanted to scream,
But I might be able to!
Instead, he said, “I just want people to know that Susan was more than her headshot. She wasn’t some wannabe actress. She was . . . truly phenomenal.” Dwight heard his own voice crack like a middle schooler’s. Once he was on camera, would everyone watching know how obsessed he had been with his fellow lab assistant? “And, let’s face it,” he added, “you’d be better on TV than me.”