Loe raamatut: «You Must Remember This Part 2»

Chapter Five

“Maybe I was an accountant.” Martin Smith’s words broke the silence that had settled over the dining room nearly an hour ago and brought Juliet Crandall’s attention from the stacks of papers in front of her to him—exactly where he wanted it to be.

“And why do you say that?”

“Because there’s something familiar about this.” He took in the entire room with his gesture—the empty boxes, the countless stacks and piles of papers, the last two boxes waiting for sorting. “I feel like I’ve done it before. We know I wasn’t a cop. Unless I was a very methodical criminal, maybe I was an accountant. Maybe I was an auditor with the IRS, and that’s why no one would admit to expecting my visit.”

She didn’t smile at his joke, but returned to the statements she was sorting as she absently asked, “Are you good with numbers?”

“I don’t know. Try me.”

“What’s two hundred thousand divided by three?”

“That’s an easy one: 66,666.66 for one, .67 for the other two.”

Holding up an official-looking document, she shook her head. “It’s the amount of life insurance each of Olivia’s children received following her death.”

“She divided her life insurance three ways?”

“One-third to each of her children: Hal, Eve and Roy Jr. I thought Olivia was convinced Roy Jr. was dead.”

“That’s what Sue Marie Harper said.”

“I wish we’d asked Eve yesterday.”

It would have been kind of hard to work into the conversation, he thought as he sorted a half-dozen credit card statements from a pile of utility bills. We’d like to go through all of your mother’s personal records to see if we can prove that I didn’t have anything to do with her murder, and, oh, by the way, did she believe that your brother, who ran away when you were a baby, was still alive, or had she finally given up hope?

“What’s the date on the policy?”

She turned to the last page. “It was signed thirteen months ago. Maybe she’d heard from Roy Jr.”

“Without telling anyone? Not even her other children?” It didn’t seem likely. Hal and Eve had just been kids when their brother disappeared, but surely their mother would have told them if he’d contacted her. “Maybe she just never gave up hope.” Hope died hard—his was still hanging on, and he imagined it was nothing compared to a mother’s hope for her eldest child.

Juliet laid the life insurance policy aside and reached into the box at her feet for yet another handful of papers. Olivia never threw anything away, Eve had said, and the boxes proved her right. Unfortunately, she hadn’t been particularly organized, at least in this area. Kids’ drawings from twenty years ago shared space with utility bills from last year. Credit card and bank statements were spread through every box, along with yellowed Christmas cards, long-done to-do lists and personal correspondence.

Most likely Olivia had meant to organize the boxes at some future date. She had never intended to die and leave her personal things in such a mess.

Suddenly antsy, Martin pushed himself to his feet and stretched. “Let’s go somewhere.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. The hardware store. I’ll change your locks this afternoon.”

She looked wary. “Do you know how to do that?”

“Of course. You drill a few holes and install the lock set. No problem.” He waited until the caution faded, then added, “Besides, the directions are on the back of the package.”

When she smiled but didn’t immediately get up, he wheeled her chair back from the table and pulled her to her feet. “Come on. It’s too pretty a day to stay inside with a bunch of old papers.”

She let him pull her as far as the doorway, where she tugged free. “Let me get my shoes.”

He glanced at her feet. He liked her habit of going barefoot at home. It gave a certain intimacy to a situation that she made a real effort to keep on a business level. He wondered why. Was he so far from her type that the idea of anything personal between them had never occurred to her? Was she cautious enough that she would never allow herself to get involved with a man without a name or a past? Or was she insecure enough to think that business—her help—was all he wanted from her?

Someday he would find out.

While she went to the bedroom, he walked around the table. They’d worked last evening and all morning, together yet separately. He’d sat on the floor, the wall at his back, sorting stacks around him. She had worked at the table, and her stacks were neater. The credit card statements that he’d put in one pile she had sorted by company and year. She’d even sorted the kids’ artwork by signature. The biggest stack was Eve’s work, the smaller pile Hal’s. There were only three items in Roy Jr.’s pile—a Mother’s Day greeting, a construction-paper Christmas card and a drawing.

He held up the drawing by wrinkled corners. The crayon lines were childish and crooked, but the forms were easily identifiable: a yellow house with a woman standing on one side, a baby in her arms and a child at her side. On the other side stood a tall, menacing figure. Instead of stick-fingered circles for hands, the figure’s hands were clenched, colored in black, and his scowl was fierce. The sky on the mother’s side of the house was sunny and blue. Above the father it was gray and threatening.

Roy Stuart Jr. couldn’t have been older than seven or eight when he’d drawn the picture, just a little boy who should have been innocent, carefree and ignorant of the evil in the world. But he hadn’t been. His father had seen to that.

So had his mother.

“It’s not a pretty picture, is it?” Juliet stood behind him, her hand on his arm. For an instant, the drawing was forgotten. All he could think of was how warm her touch was, how slender and perfectly formed her fingers were. All he could want was more—both hands touching him, hell, her entire body touching his. Too soon, though, she drew away, squeezed his arm, then walked to the door. “I’m ready.”

So was he. How unfair that he was ready for something so much more intimate than she was offering.

He returned Roy Jr.’s drawing to the table, moving it to the bottom of the pile, before following Juliet out.

At the hardware store, she paid for the two dead bolt locks he chose, then they returned to the car. “Back home?” she asked over the roof.

“Want to drive up the mountain? We can see…” The image of a place popped into his mind, a clearing ringed with large boulders, with a pine-needle carpet and a view to forever. The picture was so clear and exact that he knew he’d been there before—in that nebulous before that haunted and eluded him—and he knew exactly how to get there.

He would give a year off his life to know how he knew.

Juliet slid behind the wheel, started the engine and waited for him to climb in. He gave her directions out of town, turning off the main highway, switching from one road to another as they climbed higher through the forest. After six, maybe seven, miles, the last road they’d taken came to an end, and he sat still, staring.

Yes, he’d been here. A number of times. Important times.

Leaving Juliet and the car, he walked between two granite boulders taller than he was and through the clearing. It climbed up at a gentle slope, then abruptly dropped straight down two hundred feet or more. Years ago, a split-rail fence had been built a few feet back from the cliff for safety’s sake, but time and the elements had tumbled most of it. Vandals had played a role, too, burning the fallen wood in a makeshift fire ring in the middle of the clearing.

“Oh, Martin, it’s beautiful.” Juliet had stopped a few feet away, and her gaze was directed to the northeast, where the mountains spread out as far as the eye could see. It was beautiful. Breathtaking. Awe inspiring.

“On a clear day, you can see…” All the way to heaven. Where had he heard that? Who had told him?

“Forever.” She tore her gaze from the vista to look at him and sobered. “This is one of those places you remember.”

He nodded.

“Did you come here often?”

Instead of giving the answer he’d come to detest, he turned his back on the mountains. Except for the view, there was nothing special about the clearing. The same boulders, trees, mosses and wildflowers that made up this area could be found in a million other places in any direction he turned. Awe-inspiring views could be found all over, too. So what made this place special?

Damned if he had a clue.

“Can we sit down?”

“Sure.” He started toward the rocks nearest the fire ring. They were just the right size for huddling around a fire but only a fraction of the size that apparently interested Juliet, who was looking for footholds to reach the top of a ten-foot-tall boulder. “Go to the other side,” he advised, and she disappeared from sight. A moment later she reappeared on top.

“Come on up.”

How had he known that the jagged surface on the opposite side of the rock served as well as any staircase could? Had he come here with family, friends, girls, all of the above or none of them? Had he shared picnic lunches, camped around the fire or created his own private lovers’ lane?

As he reached the top, his gaze fell on Juliet, sitting cross-legged and straight-backed. Recreating that last possibility—if he’d ever created it in the first place—certainly held merit. Right here on this boulder would be a hell of a place to make love. Maybe the act itself wouldn’t be the best—he felt damn near like a virgin again—but the location would make it memorable.

Juliet would make it memorable.

He sat down, close enough to touch her if he let himself, not so close that he would be tempted to let himself. For a long time she simply looked out. For a longer time he simply looked at her.

Gradually his watchfulness made her uneasy. She glanced at him, gave half a smile, looked away, then glanced back. It wasn’t an uncomfortable or negative uneasiness but more of a self-consciousness. An awareness. A beautiful-woman-to-lonely-man sort of thing.

He forced himself to look away, to shift away, putting solid rock between them. Supporting himself on one elbow, he stretched out and offered conversation that was as harmless as he could imagine—and a world away from what he wanted to say, something along the lines of, Do you want to make love on top of the world? Do you want me? Would you have me? “Did you ever imagine growing up in Dallas that someday you’d be living in a place like this?”

“Growing up in Dallas, I never imagined that a place like this existed.” She moved away, too, finding a place where stone jutted up to provide a backrest. “My family has lived and died in Texas for more than a hundred years. I didn’t expect to be any different.”

“I’m glad you are.”

Juliet clenched her teeth as she felt her face warm. He said that as if he meant it. Of course, he did—on a business level. It was a fair guess that no one else in the city of Grand Springs could match her ability with computers, though there were probably some kids who came close, and she was possessor of a logical mind and strong deductive reasoning. For all the good it’d done him. So far her computer had told him that Roy Stuart Jr. didn’t have a listed phone number or any social media networking pages. Wow. Big deal.

“It’s not as if I’ve been much help.”

He grinned. “It’s not as if I’m talking about your help. Overall, I’d have to say that losing my memory has not been a particularly pleasant experience, but if there is an upside to it, it’s meeting you.”

To hide her nerves, she clasped her hands together in her lap, stretched out her legs and crossed one ankle over the other. He recognized her discomfort, anyway, and gave a dismayed shake of his head. “The men in Dallas are idiots. They deserved to lose you.”

She laughed in spite of herself. “Trust me. I didn’t leave any broken hearts behind.”

“You could break my heart.”

“You could have left behind a few broken hearts yourself.”

“Does the idea bother you?”

That there might have been some significant woman in his life? A girlfriend, a lover, maybe a wife? It made her jealous. It saddened her because she could imagine too easily how deeply it would hurt if the man she loved just suddenly and without warning disappeared from her life. But did it bother her? Would it make her refuse anything he might offer because some woman, whoever she may be, back home, wherever that might be, had a prior claim to him?

She slowly, hesitantly shook her head. That was in another life, when he was another man. She had no place in that life, and that life had no place in her life.

Her answer seemed to give him something to think about. With a nod, he rolled onto his back, folded his arms under his head and gazed up at the sky. He looked thoughtful. Troubled. And just a little bit satisfied.

Heavens, her answer gave her something to think about. He could be a married man. He could have children who mourned their daddy and begged for him to come home. She could be falling for another woman’s husband. She could fall in love with him, and his memory could return, and he could realize that she offered nothing compared to the life he’d lost. He could break her heart.

Or not. His memory might never return. Or maybe it would, and there would be nothing to return to. Maybe there was no lover, no wife, no children. Maybe he had nobody, like her. It was hard to imagine, but it was possible. Anything was possible.

Even a woman like her attracting the interest of a man like him.

Wanting to save such a fantasy for later, when she was alone, she turned to face him. “Where did Olivia live at the time of her death?”

He didn’t open his eyes or turn his head. “In a house on Poplar.”

“What did the kids do with it?”

“I guess it belongs to them. No one’s living there. That’s where she was found, you know.”

She knew. She’d filled in the gaps in the gossip with the newspaper clippings she’d brought home Thursday. It had happened on a Friday evening last June. The night of one of the most intensive rainstorms in Colorado history. Olivia had left the office early and gone home to get ready for Hal’s wedding to Randi Howell at the ski lodge. When she didn’t show up, Josie Reynolds—now Stryker—had gone looking for her and found her unconscious on the floor in her kitchen, suffering from an apparent heart attack. It was nearly a week later that the real mechanism of death had been discovered: the injection of pure potassium into her system that caused her heart to stop.

“I wonder if there’s anything at the house that might help us.”

Finally he did look at her. “It’s a fair bet that Hal isn’t going to let us in to find out. I don’t know about Eve.”

“Well, if they say no, couldn’t we just go, anyway? Just for a look around?” As his expression turned disbelieving, she realized what she had suggested and flushed. “Just go, anyway” was a sorry euphemism for breaking in, and even if they did just look around and didn’t take anything, it was still wrong.

It would be easy, though. They would go at night, of course, to diminish the risk of being seen. Martin could probably pick the back door lock, or maybe there was a window that could be easily opened. People in small towns were notorious for trusting their neighbors, leaving locks undone or settling for substandard security. They could take flashlights, close the drapes, make a leisurely search of the premises and be gone with no one the wiser.

And what if it wasn’t so easy? If one of Olivia’s neighbors suffered with insomnia? If someone called the police? Even if she and Martin could convince them that they had simply been looking for clues, Hal Stuart would have her fired for sure. If they couldn’t convince the police, she would have a tough time finding another job with a criminal record.

“Forget I said that,” she mumbled. She had too much to lose on what would probably be a fruitless quest, anyway. If the police hadn’t found anything of value in the house, it wasn’t likely she and Martin would, either.

“Don’t get caught up in this. Playing cop can be fun, but don’t ever forget that that’s all you’re doing—playing.” He rolled to his feet and offered her a hand up. When she was standing, he didn’t immediately release her but turned her to face the mountains, then moved close behind her, his arms around her shoulders, his body warm and solid against hers. “You should see this place in winter, when there’s snow everywhere. The trees get so heavy with snow and ice that the branches break. You can walk through the woods and hear the cracking. Everything’s cold and clean, and the sky turns the clearest, sharpest blue.”

“I’d like to see that,” she said softly. Maybe next winter, if he was still here, he would show her. Maybe next winter he would have no interest in her. Maybe she would have to be satisfied with this: snow on the distant peaks, slopes covered with a thousand shades of green and dotted with massive outcroppings of stone and, nearer, the delicate colors of wildflowers.

For a time he held her, and she let him. She didn’t lean into him, didn’t snuggle closer, but stood motionless, arms at her side, and savored the feel of him.

“Juliet?”

“Hmm.”

“Want some lunch?”

He could have asked a dozen questions that wouldn’t have disturbed her warm, enveloping sense of well-being—Are you comfortable? Do you like this? Can I touch you? Can I kiss you? Something so mundane as lunch, though, disrupted the coziness of their position. So did the sudden growl of her stomach.

His chuckle stirred her hair. That was all it was—not a brush of his cheek against it. Not the touch of his mouth to it. Just the rush of breath when he laughed. “I’d call that a big yes.” He released her and started to the ground.

Before following, she turned for one last look. She would come back here in the summer and the fall. She would bring a blanket, a picnic and a wish for an artist’s talent to capture the scene.

Martin jumped the last few feet to the ground, then offered her a lift down. For a moment his hands lingered at her waist. For a moment his gaze met hers and she thought he was going to kiss her. She was wrong. He released her and turned toward the car. Stifling a disappointed sigh, she went after him.

They ate lunch in town, then swung by the church so he could borrow the tools necessary to install the locks. She had wondered, when he’d brought it up that morning, if she wouldn’t be better off calling a locksmith, but, in spite of his teasing, Martin knew what he was doing. She helped, if standing there handing him an occasional tool could be considered much help. When he was finished, he gave her the new keys, then went out into the backyard to take a look around. “You need a dog.”

“A dog.” She said it as blankly as if he’d just advised buying a machine gun. Never in her life had she considered owning a dog—or any other kind of creature, for that matter. The lack of pets was a long-standing Crandall family tradition. “Why in the world would I want a dog?”

“For protection.”

“I don’t want a mean dog.”

“He doesn’t have to be mean, just noisy. No burglar wants to deal with a barking dog.”

Was that just common sense or did he know from experience? She pushed the thought from her mind. “I don’t want to deal with a barking dog.”

“Well, of course he’s not going to be barking all the time. You’ve got a great yard for him, and he could keep you company in the evenings, and he’d keep an eye on both you and your house.”

She would prefer that Martin keep her company in the evenings and look out for her safety, but, of course, he wasn’t always going to be there. But a dog just wasn’t her idea of a companion.

She looked over the yard. It was great—fenced all around, not too wide but deep, with lush grass that would require mowing soon. It was one of the reasons she’d bought the house, and she had big plans for it—shrubs along the back fence, bulbs and perennials on one side, more bulbs and annuals on the other, a brick patio with room for a grill, a table and chairs and maybe even a fountain close to her bedroom so she could open the windows at night and sleep to the sound of bubbling water.

She didn’t have room in those plans for a dog who would poop on the lovely grass, dig up the flower beds and probably pee in the fountain, all while annoying both her and the neighbors with its incessant burglar-warning bark.

Considering the matter closed, she opened the screen door and waited. “Are you ready to get back to work?”

They went inside, finished the job of sorting, then merged their two sets of papers. “Now what?”

He sprawled in the chair beside her. “When you checked the other night to see if Roy Jr. had a listed phone number—can you do it the other way?”

“You mean a reverse search? Put in a number and ask for a name? Sure.”

“Why don’t you take the most recent phone bills and check her long distance calls? I’ll start with the bank records.”

She went online and pulled up the site she needed. Checking Olivia’s long distance calls for the last year of her life wasn’t much of a task. Business calls had been made at the office on the city’s bill, and personal calls were few and far between.

At least until the March preceding her death. Once a week for three months there was a call, usually between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m., lasting an hour or more, to a number in Miami Beach, Florida. Curious, she typed in the number, hit the enter key and waited. “You ever hear of a Jason Scott?”

Martin shook his head.

“Olivia called him regularly for three months. The last call was the week before she died.”

“Call him.”

She picked up the cordless phone from the china hutch and dialed the number. “And say what? ‘Hi, you don’t know me, but I was just wondering what your connection to Olivia Stuart was?’ As if any sane person would actually tell me.”

He grinned. “If he’s a red-blooded man, he will, if for no other reason than to hear you talk some more.”