Dark Truth (22 page)

T
wenty-six

On their way out of the Branigan police station, where they’d spent the last four hours answering questions and signing statements, Wes took Nina by the elbow and said, “Well, maybe we’ll get to have that dinner after all. I hear that the third time is supposed to be the charm.”

“Actually, I’m going to have to take the train back to New York in a little while. I have to go back to work tomorrow.”

He thought it over while they walked to his car.

“Do they still have dining cars on the trains?”

“Some of them do, yes.”

“Well, if that’s the best we can do . . . “ He took her hand.

“You’d ride all the way to New York just to have dinner on the train?”

“Dinner on the train with you, yes, I would.”

“Do you realize that means you’ll be spending about six hours on the train? And then there’s going to be waiting time in the station while you wait for a return train . . . “

“It’ll be worth every minute,” he told her. “Besides, if I can avoid Chief Raymond for a few more hours, I’m doubly happy. I gave him a heads-up report last night, but he’s called me about six times already today. The press has been driving him crazy since Overbeck was arrested this morning. Did I mention that Mayfield said the professor cried like a girl and admitted everything?”

She laughed. “Twice.”

When they got to the car, he unlocked it and opened the passenger door for her. “I’m not ready to let you go.”

Nina put her arms around his neck and drew his face down to hers, and kissed him. She’d been wanting to do that all weekend long, from the minute she’d sat across the table from him at Dellarosa’s and wondered if the wine would have tasted as good on his lips as it had in her glass. She wasn’t disappointed.

“Actually,” she said into the collar of his jacket, “I was thinking about asking if you’d like to come up to the city weekend after next.”

“Not next weekend, but the one after that?”

“Right.”

“I can do that. Next weekend I have Alec for Saturday and Sunday, but the following weekend I’ll be free.”

“Great. I have an awards thing to go to—the Golden Leaf Awards, it’s an industry thing, very big deal. They’re giving a special achievement award to Regan’s father, so she and Mitch will be there. It’s going to be held at a very posh club and will be a very frou-frou event.”

She leaned back and asked, “Do you have a tux?”

“I can get one.” He smiled. “It’s been a long time since I’ve done frou, but I can pull it off. I’ve been told I clean up real good.”

“I’ll just bet you do, Detective.” She smiled. “I’ll just bet you do . . . “

“Well, they had quite a weekend,” Regan said as she and Mitch watched Wes’s car disappear down the long drive from her house. “Who’d have thought my editor would have been capable of such a kick-ass performance? Singlehandedly taking down a cold-blooded killer? It defies comprehension.”

“Hey, you never really know what someone is capable of until they’re cornered. And he had her cornered, that’s for sure. It was all on the line for her. She had to fight or die.”

“True, but still, she surprised me. Nina’s never been particularly athletic. Oh, I think she may have played sports in college, but that was some years ago.” Regan grinned. “I’m so proud of her.”

“You should be.” Mitch draped an arm over her shoulder and watched as the last of the crime scene technicians came off the boat. “Guess it’s going to be a while before they let you use that boat.”

“I never liked that boat much anyway,” she told him. “It came with the property.”

“I thought there was no house here before you built one.”

“Some years ago there’d been an old fisherman’s shack. He’d built the dock and had that boat tied up to it. When he died and the parcel was divided up, I got the part with the dock. The boat came with it.”

“And the shack?”

“We tore that down. It stood right about where my garage is now, I think.”

“You can always buy another boat, if you don’t like that one.”

“I’m thinking about it.” She nodded. “Something big and fast, maybe. I’ll have to see what they have up at the marina next time I’m there.”

She tugged on him to follow her into the house. The sun was starting to set and the temperature was dropping. In another week, it would be Thanksgiving.

“Mitch, have you ever cooked a turkey?” she asked on their way inside.

“No. My mother does that.” He glanced at his watch. “And I guess she’ll be getting ready to do that soon enough.”

“Do you go home for the holiday every year?”

“Sure. We all do. It’s pandemonium. All my brothers and sisters and their spouses or significant others and their kids, and my mother’s sister and her family, my father’s sister and hers . . . “ He laughed. “You can barely find a place to sit when everyone finally arrives.”

“And your mother has to cook for that crowd?”

“Everyone brings something. My mom just does the turkeys. Plural. Usually two of them. And a ham. It’s quite a feast. It’s noisy and people argue over politics and which football game to watch. Someone’s kid always feeds a sock or something to the dog and then someone has to take the dog outside and make him throw up the sock. Someone always drinks too much wine and insults someone else.” He smiled happily. “I can’t wait.”

Regan forced a smile and turned to the sink where she absently rinsed the coffee mugs they’d used earlier in the day. This was the tough part about not having family. She’d never experienced the kind of boisterous event that Mitch described. Her holidays with her father had always been fun, in their own staid way. But now, with him gone, the looming holiday season seemed to be a long black tunnel with nothing at the end for her. She felt the lack of any extended family most acutely this year.

She could go to England for Christmas with her cousins, she supposed. It would be better than being here alone, especially knowing that Mitch was celebrating with a loving cast of thousands.

“Regan?”

“What?”

“I asked you what you thought.”

“I’m sorry, Mitch. I must have spaced out for a second.” She turned off the faucet. “What do I think about what?”

“About making the trip to Maine with me next week. Do you think you could handle it? All those strange people doing strange things?” His eyes never left her face.

“Really? Seriously?” Her hands fluttered to her midsection.

“Sure.” He put his arms around her. “My mom keeps asking me what’s so special about this woman who occupies all my spare time. I think she needs to see for herself.”

“What do you tell her?” Regan snuggled into him. “When she asks, what do you tell her?”

“I tell her you’re quite wonderful and brilliant and beautiful, and that I don’t mess with you because you’re a better shot than I am, and you have a black belt and mine is only brown.”

“I am quite good,” she murmured.

“You are indeed.” He smiled. “So, what do you think? A trip to Peyton-land over the long holiday weekend?”

“I’d love to go. Thank you so much for inviting me.” She swayed with him for a long minute. “We should bring something, too, if everyone else does.”

“I’ll ask her what she still needs.”

Regan closed her eyes, and began to count her blessings, a week early.

“Hey, what’s up with Dolly Brown, anyway?” Mitch was asking. “There was so much going on here last night when I brought you home from the airport, I never got to ask you. What happened in Illinois?”

“Oh. Dolly is Eddie’s sister, I figured that out, as you know. I still don’t think I really understand why she felt she had to hide that from me.” Regan frowned. “But, in any case, I did get her to show me some pictures of Eddie. She only had photos of him when he was younger, or so she claimed. And almost none of their younger sister, Catherine, which I thought was also very odd.”

“Dolly sounds like a lady who is hiding something.”

“You bet she is, and you can bet I’m going to find out.”

“My money is always on you, Ace.” Mitch laughed.

“Here’s the strangest thing, though. As I’m getting ready to leave for the airport, the doorbell rings, and it’s Stella, Carl’s wife. She says she just stopped over to show me some of the pictures she had, and she whips out this pile of photos, mostly of the whole group when they were kids. Eddie, Carl, Harry—he’s the brother who died—Dolly, and a few of Catherine. She died in a car accident in the nineties, not so long ago that they wouldn’t have had pictures of her, which I thought was another odd thing.”

“Sounds like that Sayreville crowd is a puzzling bunch.”

“It gets better. I spend a few hours with these two, and then I leave, figuring Dolly Brown is not going to tell me another damned thing. I get on the plane, and reach into my purse for some aspirin, and what do you suppose I found?”

“I have no idea.”

She went to her purse and took out an envelope and handed it to him.

“Open it.” She gestured, and he did.

“Photos.” He thumbed through them. “Who are these people and why were they in your purse?”

“They are the Krolls, and they were in my bag because Stella slipped them in there.”

“Why would she have done that?”

“I have no idea.”

Regan leaned over his shoulder. “The boy on the left, the one in the cowboy hat, that’s Eddie. Then there’s Carl and Harry and I don’t know who the other boy is.”

She turned the photo over and read the names on the back. “Danny. Whoever he was.”

She flipped the picture over again. “He was a cute little guy, don’t you think? Eddie? I think he’s probably around seven or eight in this picture.” She shook her head. “Hard to imagine that five or six years after this was taken, he’d be arrested for his part in killing another young boy. A friend.”

“Maybe that’s why the family doesn’t like to talk about him, Regan. It has to be very painful for them to look back on it. He was their brother. It’s a small town. Besides the obvious, the family must have taken a lot of heat over this.”

“They probably went through a lot of the same emotions that Nina did, after her father’s arrest,” Regan murmured. “Only she could leave town. She never really had to deal with what the locals were saying. The Krolls had to stay and face it all. It must have been hard to live with that.”

“Who’s this?” Mitch went on to the next picture.

“That’s Dolly and Carl. Wasn’t she a cute little bugger?” She laughed. “She’s still a cute bugger, though I’d never say it to her face. She’s some character. I wish you could meet her. She’s given me headaches every step of the way, and yet I can’t help but like her.”

“Hey, who’s this?” He held up a photo of a little girl with light auburn curls.

Regan stared at it, then turned it over for the name. “It’s Catherine. The other sister.”

She turned back to the photo. There was something eerily familiar about the girl in the picture.

“And this is . . . “ Mitch had gone on to the next picture in the stack.

“This is who?” Regan asked, putting Catherine’s picture aside.

“Well, if I didn’t know better, I’d say it was you.” Mitch held up the photograph.

Regan studied the face in the photo, then turned it over.
Catherine Kroll—1963.

“Dolly said that Catherine died when she was in her mid-fifties, in the early nineteen-nineties. Ninety-three, maybe. If she was fifty-five in 1993, she would have been born in . . . “ She paused to do the math.

“In 1938,” Mitch said without hesitating. “So in 1963, she’d have been twenty-five.”

He looked over Regan’s shoulder. “She was beautiful, but babe, she looks a hell of a lot like you.”

Regan sorted through the remaining pictures. Catherine appeared in six of the thirteen. The resemblance to Regan was striking, both as a child and as an adult. Regan felt almost dizzy looking at them.

“Dolly claimed to have no pictures of Catherine other than as a child. She was lying. If Stella, her sister-in-law, had these, Dolly had to have some, too.”

“Why would Dolly hide them from you,” Mitch asked, “while Stella clearly wanted you to see them?”

“I don’t know,” Regan told him, resolve settling into her face, “but you can bet your sweet ass I’m going to find out.”

“Like I said, Ace, my money’s always on you . . . “

By Mariah Stewart
(
published by The Random House Publishing Group
)

COLD TRUTH

HARD TRUTH

DEAD END

DEAD CERTAIN

DEAD EVEN

DEAD WRONG

UNTIL DARK

THE PRESIDENT’S DAUGHTER

“Mariah Stewart is fast becoming a brand-name author.”

—
Romantic Times

Praise for Mariah Stewart’s Dead Trilogy

DEAD WRONG

“Fast-paced and intricately plotted . . . [a] chilling, creative tale . . . Stewart excels in writing romantic suspense.”

—
Library Journal

“Mystery writer Stewart kicks off her new interconnected trilogy with a bang. Nail-biting suspense and emotional complexity make this launch irresistible.”

—
Romantic Times
(****
¹
⁄
₂
)

DEAD CERTAIN

“Stewart’s Dead trilogy crackles with danger and suspense. Great characterization and gripping drama make Stewart’s books hot tickets.”

—
Romantic Times
(****)

“A stand-alone read, and highly recommended . . . Mariah Stewart is an awesome storyteller, and the Dead trilogy is wholly entertaining and totally outstanding.”

—America Online’s Romance Fiction Forum

DEAD EVEN

“Get set for an exceptional tale.
Dead Even
is a masterpiece of writing. You will not want to put this book down.”

—
Romance Reviews Today

“Hold onto your seats, because Mariah Stewart will plunge you into a heart-pounding roller-coaster ride. You won’t come up for air until the last page has been turned. Excellent!”

—Huntress Reviews

“Well plotted, imaginative and entertaining . . . The race against time is nail-bitingly tense.”

—BookLoons Reviews

“An elaborate balance of suspense and outstanding storytelling . . . Ms. Stewart is truly a master of the romantic-suspense genre!”

—Reader to Reader