Quiet as the Grave (8 page)

Gavin had relaxed. Now they were debating the relative merits of two different sailboat prints. One was very Impressionistic, a boat racing at high noon, with a lot of fractured light and color. The other was nearly monochromatic, representational to the point of being photographic, just a lone gray boat on a moonlit blue lake.

They were both good, though Suzie thought the gray boat might have the edge artistically. But she wanted Gavin to be happy, so she just watched while he tried to figure it out.

“I don't really know anything about paintings,” he said finally, looking at Suzie as if to see whether that disappointed her. “I think they're both pretty, but maybe they're not.”

She did laugh out loud this time. “Hey, that the great thing about art. Nobody can tell you what you like. If you think it's pretty, it
is
pretty.”

Gavin chewed on the edge of his thumb. He obviously felt awkward even here in this studio, which was more like a boathouse than an art gallery. It was too fussy, too crowded. Though he had Justine's fine blond hair and elegant features, he also had Mike's rough-and-tumble masculinity, and he couldn't hold still for long.

“Yeah, but the picture isn't for me, that's the hard thing.” He squinted at the two boats, which Suzie had propped side by side where the light from the window would strike them. “I like the blue and gray one best, I think, because it feels nice, kind of peaceful. But what if it makes Dad feel sad?”

He tilted his head, as if a different angle would
make it all come clear. “It might be kind of sad, don't you think? The boat looks all alone in the dark.”

Immediately Suzie was glad she hadn't indicated her preference for that one. Looked at in the only light that mattered, the light of Mike and Gavin's personal tragedy, the picture did project isolation and gloom.

“I think you're right,” she said. “The other one is really happy. And, if I remember correctly, some of these tints—” she pointed to the sunlight on the water “—match the beige in your sofa, right?”

Gavin nodded excitedly. Here, at least, was something he could be sure of. “Yes, they match exactly. That's great!” He smiled at Suzie as if she'd just decoded the Rosetta stone. “I knew you would be better at this than Debra.”

Debra
. That was the name of the woman who had been at the boathouse with Gavin when Suzie arrived to pick him up. Suzie, who had been expecting to have to deal with Mike, had been surprised, but Debra had explained that she was a friend of the family, and she often watched Gavin on Thursdays, if Mike had to work late.

Friend of the family.
Hmmm…

Debra had been stylish but basically kind of a plain Jane. She didn't really look like Mike's type—but then maybe Mike's type had changed, after ten years. After Justine. Maybe Mike was over the busty, bitchy bimbo type for good.

Still, it was intriguing. It might not be any of Suzie's business how Debra fit into the picture, but she sure would like to know. She had decided not to pump Gavin for information, though. He was smart. She'd been a smart kid, too, and she knew what it felt like to have some grown-up assume that, just because you
were little, you were too stupid to see through a bunch of patronizing baloney.

“I'm sure she would have done fine,” Suzie said. “She seemed nice.”

“Yeah, she's really nice, but she didn't want to come with me anyhow. Ledge was coming over.”

“Ledge?”

“Yeah, Rutledge—Mr. Coffee. He's my dad's friend, and he's Debra's boyfriend. I thought you must know him, he's from Firefly Glen, too.”

Oh, yeah, she knew Rutledge Coffee.

Yuck.

Double yuck
.

Poor Debra.

“So she wanted to stay at the boathouse anyhow. They've been having a fight, and she says she's going to make him crawl till his knees bleed.”

“Good grief,” Suzie said, trying to hold back her delight at the mental image of Rutledge on all fours. “She sounds pretty mad.”

“Yeah, but she'll end up giggling and letting him kiss her and everything. She's always mad at him, and it always ends up like that.”

Come on, Debra
. Suzie sent righteous sisterhood vibes out to the other woman.
Hold out a little longer, and make the sucker pay. It's high time someone did.

They bought the picture, and Gavin even had enough money to pay for gift wrapping and still have about fifteen dollars left over. He insisted on buying Suzie an ice cream with it—a well-bred gesture of thanks that made her wonder whether Mike had known about this outing and had given his son instructions.

As they walked back to her car after the ice cream,
they passed a Grand Opening sign swaying between two balloon-covered goalposts in front of a new electronics store. Gavin's wide-eyed, curious dawdling was too obvious to miss.

“Want to go in? We've still got time, if you'd like to look around.”

He nodded. “That would be awesome.”

She had to agree. It
was
an awesome store, and immediately she could see how much more at home the little boy was in a place like this. Equidistant from the front and side entrances, the owners had set up a “Welcome” table. It was loaded with coffee, soft drinks and doughnuts, and decorated with more balloons.

Smiling employees sat behind the table urging customers to enter contests to win the plasma TV, satellite radio or “gaming system of your choice.”

While he gobbled down a doughnut, Gavin filled out three separate forms in a shaky cursive, then dropped them eagerly into the boxes.

“I have one,” he explained as he entered the gaming system contest. “But Dad doesn't. He's always using mine.”

Suzie smiled. “Bummer,” she said. “He should definitely get his own.”

She pointed to the gaming area, where several pods had been set up to let customers sample various popular video games. “Hey, that looks like fun.”

“Oh, man, yeah!” Gavin was off in a flash. Suzie followed and took up a position right next to him. Within minutes they were both twirling joysticks and blasting evil aliens off the surface of the planet Nuperdorf.

After a few rounds, Gavin glanced at her totals. “Hey,” he said. “You're good.”

She grinned. “I know. I used to date the guy who designed this program.”

Gavin frowned thoughtfully, as if he were going to have to rearrange his mental image of her. “That's awesome. Are you still dating him?

“Nope,” she said without taking her eyes off the screen. “He was a dork. I was, too. But when he started talking to me in Nuperdorfian, he outdorked even me, you know?”

Gavin laughed. “I don't think you're a dork.”

She killed another Dorfblat. “You should have seen me in art school.”

Five minutes later, Gavin moved to another machine, but Suzie was on a roll. Another five minutes after that, she realized she wasn't quite sure where he was.

She took her hands off the joystick and gazed around the game area. She heard the Dorfblat attack her character and begin to chew its bones. Then she heard the little descending cascade of notes that meant her character was dead.

But she didn't even look at the screen. She'd started to feel tight around the chest. Where the heck was Gavin?

The store was busy, filled with at least a dozen kids who might be Gavin…but weren't. She asked two other boys hanging around the area, but they just shrugged. A third thought he'd seen Gavin playing the last video game toward the back, just a minute ago, but there had been a guy with him, an older guy….

She felt her breath coming faster. She might not be a dork, but she was a fool. A dangerously shortsighted fool. She shouldn't be trusted with a kid. She had no experience. She was still a kid at heart herself and had no common sense to boot.

“Gavin!” She called out loudly, not caring how many heads turned in her direction. “Gavin!”

She thought she might have heard someone call her name…but over the pinging and blasting of the video games, the swelling of a U2 song as someone tried out the car stereo speakers and the constant yammering of the customers, how could she be sure?

She began to run. And as she reached the Welcome table, she saw him.

A man was with him. She'd never seen the man before. He had his arm around Gavin's shoulders, and he was pushing him forward. Gavin wasn't refusing, exactly, but he was resisting, as if he weren't sure, as if he were confused, or frightened….

They were only a few feet from the side door. She knew she'd never reach them in time.

“Gavin!” she cried again.

Gavin tried to turn, but the older man wouldn't let him. They were going to get away.

Think quickly….

She turned to the refreshments table. All the utensils were plastic. All the plates were paper.

But the coffeemaker was real.

She reached over and lifted it up. She heard the shocked protest of the employee behind the table, and she heard the
pop
as the cord jerked free of the outlet.

“Gavin, duck,” she screamed.

His reflexes were fantastic. He would make a good football player someday, she thought as everything went into slow motion. Gavin ducked and swiveled, pulling free of the arm that held him captive. The coffeemaker sailed neatly through the air toward the stranger.

Damn it,
she was going to miss. She had a pretty
good aim, but her arm wasn't quite strong enough. The coffeemaker fell with an insane bang and splatter, just behind his feet.

People jumped away in all directions, yelling.

Coffee went everywhere—but a gratifying amount of it splashed forward, onto the man. He made a strangled sound, clutched at his back and stumbled. But somehow he didn't lose his head. He righted himself and began to run.

And before anyone could quite figure out what the hell had happened, he had disappeared through the side door and into the street.

T
HE AFTERMATH WAS HIDEOUS
.

Everyone in the entire town of Tuxedo Lake was annoyed with Suzie, it seemed, from the customers who had coffee stains on their pant legs and the store manager whose grand opening had turned into a circus, to the police, who seemed unable to accept the fact that she couldn't identify a man when all she'd seen was the back of his head.

And she couldn't even bear to remember the look on Mike's face when he showed up at the store. He'd played it cool, of course. That was the official Frome way. He'd entered with a mild frown, and he'd chucked Gavin on the shoulder, saying, “Hey, goof, what did I tell you about talking to strangers?”

But then he'd knelt and wrapped Gavin in his arms, and Suzie had seen his face over the little boy's shoulder. He looked as if someone had just given him a private glimpse of the end of the world.

Of course, no one was as annoyed with Suzie as she was with herself. She hadn't felt this wretched, scared and guilty in…in her whole life.

Add four hours at the police station, the three of them going over and over the same info in separate cubicles, and you ended up with a pretty hairy day.

But when District Attorney Keith Quigley entered
Suzie's interview room and shut the door behind him, she knew things had just gone from bad to worse. The minute he introduced himself, she remembered what Mike had told her about Quigley: the D.A. was out to get him.

Quigley held out a sheaf of papers. “I've been looking over your statement,” he said, chewing on his lower lip. Suzie knew it was an affectation, designed to imply that something troubled him.

It didn't work with her, because her statement had been honest and straightforward, and she had nothing to hide anyhow.

So Quigley could just chew away.

Which he did. She found herself fixated on his lips. Fat, pouty and unpleasantly wet. She would never accept a commission to paint this guy. Portrait painting was always a tightrope walk between reality and flattery, and there would be no way to flatter Keith Quigley.

He had a round face and hypothyroid eyes that looked weirdly wet, too. He was not exactly fat, but he gave the impression that he should have been a taller man, as if some computer photo program had been used to compress his image.

He looked smart, though, and the overall effect was of some abnormally evolved reptile. But he was clearly too smug, too sure of his power and his intellectual superiority, to invite any real sympathy, so she didn't bother trying to find any.

He must have noticed that she wasn't intimidated, because he quickly changed tactics. When he sat, he ignored the power chair behind the desk, and pulled out the one beside her.

Suzie wanted to roll her eyes. He thought he could
play Harmless Uncle Keith with her, did he? That offended her even more than the monotonous repetition of questions from the earlier detective.

Suzie watched as Quigley settled back and got comfortable. Two friendly people, his posture said, just talking things over. She sighed audibly, so that in case they were recording this somewhere, the machine would register that she wasn't buying it.

“I'd like to talk to you a little about how you came to be with Gavin today.”

“It's on my statement,” she said. “About ten times. I don't have anything new to add. I'm sorry, but…shouldn't you be out looking for the bad guy?”

Quigley smiled. Not an improvement. When he stretched his lips, it exposed little pink pockets of wetness at the corners.

“I'm the D.A., Miss Strickland. I'm not on the ‘looking for bad guys' team.”

No, she thought.
You're on the “harassing the good guys” team
. But she kept her mouth shut somehow and waited for him to continue.

“So, let's see. You said that Gavin called you yesterday and asked you to come over and help him secretly pick out a painting to give his father as a birthday present. Is that accurate?”

“Yes.”

“You said that his father knew nothing about it.”

“If he did, it wouldn't be a secret, would it?”

“Would it surprise you, Miss Strickland, to learn that Mike Frome knew all about your assignation with his son?”

“Yes,” she said irritably. She knew how these people worked. Well, okay, she didn't know, but she'd seen it on TV often enough. They'd offer up one of their spec
ulations as fact, hoping that you'd confirm it. “It darn sure would. Gavin was really happy about pulling it off. He talked about how surprised his dad would be.”

She shifted, trying to release some of her annoyed tension. “And it wasn't an assignation. What an absurd word.”

Quigley didn't seem phased by her criticism.

“I know that's your story,” he said, flipping through the pages he held. “But unfortunately, Mike has given a statement, too. And in his he admits suggesting your name to Gavin. Apparently the whole outing was his idea.”

Suzie found herself without a good response. She was shocked. It could be true…. Heck, it probably
was
true. What a dummy she was—why hadn't she found it suspicious for Gavin to call her out of the blue like that?

She realized that she'd still been operating under the Old Suzie rules. A kid could relate to the Old Suzie, with her funky hair and adolescent
who-cares
attitude. The Old Suzie had never attracted much male-female interest, not from handsome, self-possessed guys like Mike, anyhow.

But she wasn't the Old Suzie anymore, at least not on the outside. And apparently she didn't understand the New Suzie rules quite as well as she'd thought she did.

“Okay, so it was Mike's idea. Is that so weird? I hope, Mr. Quigley, that you don't think Mike used me as a pawn in a conspiracy to kidnap his own son. His son, as you may have noticed, is already in his custody anyway.”

She wondered why Quigley annoyed her so much. She didn't usually react this way to a person's appear
ance—in fact, she ordinarily far preferred the homely to the beautiful.

And, in the end, she had only Mike's word for it that Quigley was unfairly persecuting him over Justine's murder.

“Point taken,” Quigley went on, seeming satisfied to have unsettled her, and not requiring a response. “But I've just learned something else that interests me. I've learned that, ten years ago, you and Mike Frome had a relationship.”

That jerked her out of her musings. The detective who had interviewed her earlier had taken great pains to feel out this possibility and had gone away empty-handed.

“A relationship? That's nuts. The relationship of salt to pepper, maybe. Oil to water.”

Quigley gazed at her calmly. “It's well-known,” he said, “that opposites attract.”

She felt her hackles rising. “It's also well-known that people who gossip frequently get it wrong. Who laid this particular rotten egg for you? Alton Millner?”

“No. I heard this one from an informant a little closer to the source.”

“Well, it's absurd, and frankly, unless you can show me the connection between my high school love life and what happened to Gavin today, I don't care to discuss it with you.”

“Don't you want to know where I heard it?” He was watching her carefully, as if he had a nice big bomb to drop and he was enjoying toying with the trigger.

But he was out of ammunition. She was on to him.

“Not really,” she said. “It's pretty clear you heard it from Mike.”

He was good, she had to admit. His eyes flickered
for a millisecond—just enough to let her know he was surprised—and then he covered it.

“You think I don't know what you're doing?” She leaned forward. “You aren't really investigating what happened to Gavin today, are you? You're investigating Justine's murder.”

He didn't deny it. He raised his eyebrows. “What if they're connected?”

“They may be.” The idea had, belatedly, occurred to her, too. “But not this way, Mr. Quigley. If you think that Mike Frome killed his ex-wife because he was pining for a girl he left behind in high school, you're barking up the wrong tree. In fact, if you think Mike Frome killed his wife
period
, you're not quite as smart as you look.”

Quigley laughed. He put his palm on the table and hoisted himself to a standing position. “I hear you, Miss Strickland, and I appreciate your…intensity.” He folded her statement and slipped it into his breast pocket. “Actually, I'm glad to know there's one thing I obviously wasn't wrong about.”

She stood, too. “And that is?”

He smiled enigmatically.

“You.”

 

O
RDINARILY
M
IKE KNEW
that Gavin would wheedle for an extra hour, half hour, ten minutes, whatever he could get, at bedtime. But the day had been so stressful the poor kid fell asleep the minute they got home from the police station, though it wasn't even dark yet.

Mike tucked him in and then sat on the chair beside his bed, waiting for the world to stop spinning. He stared out the window at the lake, which was as bright
as gold leaf in the approaching sunset, and wondered how it could all look exactly the same as it had yesterday.

Gavin whimpered in his sleep. Mike touched the top of his head, the way he'd done back when Gavin was a baby. Gavin settled down quickly with a sigh.

The turmoil inside Mike couldn't be as easily soothed.

For the first time in his life, he actually felt that he could do violence. If the man who had tried to grab Gavin were here right now, what couldn't Mike do to him? He felt out of his control whenever he even thought about it.

It was terrifying, like having swallowed a tiger.

And always the question, roiling around inside him.

Why
?

Why would anyone try to kidnap Gavin?

He heard a small sound, and he bolted from the chair so roughly it banged against the wall. Sheepishly, he glanced at Gavin, who frowned in his sleep, and then turned over.

Mike heard the sound again. It was a soft tapping. It came from downstairs.

He had bought a gun right after they realized Justine was missing. He wasn't sure why, except that finding himself mentioned over and over in newspaper articles next to the phrase “police suspect foul play” had undermined his sense that the world was benign—or even sane.

They clearly weren't in Firefly Glen anymore, Toto, and it was time to play tough.

He went and got the gun now. He shut the door to Gavin's room, then made his way quietly down the stairs.

The tapping was louder down here, and it was coming from the front door. Probably no need for the gun, then. He would assume that kidnappers didn't usually ask permission to enter. But he tucked it into the back waistband of his jeans, just in case.

He hadn't installed a peephole when he built the boathouse. At the time, his imagination hadn't stretched to kidnapping and murder and cold gun barrels crammed down his pants. He put his right hand behind his back, resting on the butt of the gun, and opened the door with his left.

It was Suzie.

He realized with a streak of relief that she was probably the only person in the world he would actually enjoy talking to right now. She had more common sense than anyone he'd ever met, and enough butt-kicking candor to tell him the truth when she thought he needed to hear it.

“So…” She scrunched her mouth up to one side self-consciously. “Are you still speaking to me?”

“Of course I am,” he said, moving aside to let her in. He was glad that Debra had cleaned up this afternoon. He'd left in a hurry this morning, and the sink had been full of breakfast bowls that probably would smell pretty rank by now. “Why wouldn't I be?”

“Because everything that happened today was my fault. I came to say I'm sorry, Mike. I never should have agreed to take Gavin out. I don't know squat about taking care of kids. I should have watched him like a hawk. He just seems so mature, and it never occurred to me—”

“Hey.” He touched her shoulder, trying to calm her the way he'd calmed Gavin. “It's not your fault. Do you have any idea how many times I've done exactly
the same thing? It wouldn't have occurred to me, either.”

She looked at him suspiciously, a frown between her eyes. “Are you just feeding me a bunch of baloney to be nice?”

“Cross my heart,” he said. “I've let him wander around the video arcade by himself a hundred times. I won't do it anymore, that's for sure.”

He moved toward the sofa, bending down to sweep away the controls for Gavin's video game and a couple of candy wrappers. Debra hadn't exactly gone for the Good Housekeeping award. Ledge had probably shown up and distracted her.

“Have a seat. I don't think anything will actually bite you.”

Suzie dropped her purse and fell onto the cushions with a sigh. “Well, even if you're being nice, I'll take it. The guilt is killing me.” Leaning her head back against the cushion, she looked at him through heavy-lidded eyes. “How's he doing? Is he totally fritzed?”

“He was exhausted. He went straight to bed.”

“Good,” she said. “Because I think you and I need to talk.”

“I know,” he said. He mentally inventoried his cabinets and fridge. “Want something to drink? I think I've got a Dr Pepper and a beer.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Well, not together, I hope.”

He should have gone grocery shopping. But Thursday was pizza night at the Frome boathouse, and they always let the delivery guy bring a couple of two-liter bottles of cola on the side. It was one of Gavin's favorite traditions. He'd been big on traditions, ever since his mother disappeared.

“We could split the beer,” Mike offered with a
smile. “We probably both need it. I could get two straws.”

“Make that two plastic cups, and you've got a deal.”