Shroud of Fog: (A Cape Trouble Romantic Suspense Novel) (9 page)

He stuck close until she was almost back to the cottage,
when he finally turned off. 

Daniel waited until they were well into dinner before he
gave into his curiosity about Sophie.

“You said you knew the Billingtons a long time ago,” he said
casually, setting down his wineglass.  “Did you grow up here?”

She made an involuntary movement that he would swear was a
shudder.  “No.  My family rented a cabin summers at the resort.  Mom and I
would spend the whole summer here, and Dad would drive over weekends.  I’m not
sure when we started doing that.  I must have been four or five the first
time.”

“Sounds idyllic, unless you missed your friends.”

“No, there were usually some other kids staying with their
families.  I loved it here then.”

But not now, he diagnosed.  “You must have known Doreen back
then,” Daniel realized.  How else had her father met Doreen’s sister?  Had a
divorce happened in there?  No, he knew right away.  He’d seen the pain and
complications she suppressed.  He was willing to bet something bad had happened
to her mother.

“No, actually I didn’t.”  There was something careful in the
way she was choosing her words – or choosing what what not to say.  “I’m not
sure even Dad had met her.  I mean, my parents didn’t have any reason to shop
at a plant nursery over here on the coast.  Julie, my stepmother, worked at the
pharmacy, so they had met.”

He tried and failed to think of any way to ask if her father
had had an affair during those summers.  Tough to pull off, though, if he was
only here a couple days a week and had a wife and daughter waiting eagerly for
him to show up.

Sophie hadn’t taken a bite in a while.  Her eyes met his,
and there it was, the pain not veiled at all.  He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t
look away from her stricken green-gold eyes.

“Somebody will tell you,” she said abruptly.  “The summer I
was ten, my mother killed herself.  It was here in Cape Trouble.  I’m the one
who found her.”

“God.  I’m so sorry.”  He should have known.  Hadn’t he
recognized from the beginning that they had something in common?  It might
explain why she’d had such an impact on him.  He reached across the table and
covered her hand with his, but she didn’t seem to notice.

Her eyes never left his, though.  He wasn’t sure she was
even blinking.

“It was horrible.  I can still see her, the way she looked. 
And I didn’t believe it when people talked about how she must have been sad to
do that.  She wasn’t!  She wasn’t,” Sophie repeated more softly.  “I was so
sure she wouldn’t have left me like that.”

Suicide was hard for any kid to accept.  At ten, you tended
to take your parents at face value.  What an adult would recognize as
depression might seem normal to a child.  Were those summers at the beach
supposed to be therapeutic for Sophie’s mother?

“Tell me what happened.”

As if she didn’t know she was doing it, she turned her hand
in his and grabbed on.  Her gaze still riveted him, but he had the sense she
wasn’t seeing him anymore.

“I woke up one morning and Mom wasn’t there.  Usually she
waited to go out until I was up, too.  Plus, she’d promised she would make
waffles.”  A child’s indignation sounded in her voice.  “So I got dressed
really fast and went looking for her.  It was foggy.  I remember that.”

 Man, she sounded dreamy, and not in a good way.  Twice he’d
sat in when someone was hypnotized.  That’s what this reminded him of.

“I walked past the other cabins, but I didn’t see her, so I
ran toward the beach.  That’s when I heard voices.”  Momentarily she seemed to
focus on him.  “You know how it is in the fog.  It’s hard to tell where sound
is coming from.”

He nodded his understanding.

“Later, they said I’d heard someone else, not Mom.  Because
she had to have been by herself.”

He tensed, but she didn’t seem to notice that, either.

“I started calling for her.  I don’t know why I was scared. 
The fog was creepy, that’s all.  But I kept calling, ‘Mommy, where are you?’ 
And then there was this crack of sound, like the ground splitting open.  I
found her between some dunes, lying sprawled on her side.  It was…she’d been
shot in the temple.  The gun was lying there, a few inches from her fingers as
if she’d just let it go.”

Tears leaked from her eyes, and Daniel couldn’t stand it for
another minute.  He swore, circled the table and squatted beside her chair,
taking both her hands in his now.  “That’s a hell of a thing to have seen.”

She gave a twisted smile that hurt to look at.  “I…hardly
remember what happened after that.  Except I can hear myself screaming.”

He pictured her, a big-eyed, skinny kid screaming and
screaming until someone finally heard and came running.  Sand soaking up the
blood, the sound of the ocean like the last beats of her mother’s heart.  Gray
tendrils of mist curling around the body and the terrified little girl.

“Come here,” he said roughly, rising to his feet and drawing
her up and into his arms.

She came without protest, leaning against him as if she
couldn’t do anything else, clamping her own arms around his waist.  He held her
tight and ran one hand up and down her back, kneading and soothing.  She wasn’t
sobbing, just breathing quietly, so much tension in her body she quivered with
it.

At last she exhaled deeply and went lax.

“That’s it,” he murmured.  “What a memory to have to live
with.  Damn, I’m sorry, Sophie.”

She pulled back then, her gaze shying from his as she said,
“Thank you.  I mean, for…”  She lifted her hand in an abbreviated gesture, her
fingertips almost touching his chest before curling into a fist and returning
to her side.

“My dad died when I was a kid,” he heard himself say, voice
hoarse.  Not something he usually told people.

Sophie did look at him then.  “You, too?”  Damp streaks on
her cheeks betrayed the tears that were no longer falling.  Now compassion
filled those beautiful eyes. 

“I didn’t see it.  Or him.  He was just…gone.  I was five, a
few weeks into kindergarten.”

“What happened?” she asked softly.

“Motorcycle accident.”  He swallowed, shocked at how
long-forgotten emotions had risen to choke him.  “He had a Harley.  He used to give
me rides on the back.  Around the block, that kind of thing.  He was probably
going really slow, but I remember—”  Daniel couldn’t finish.

Her arms closed around him again and gave one hard squeeze. 
When she started to retreat, he didn’t let her.  It was easier to talk when she
couldn’t see his face.  He bent his head and laid his cheek against her head.

“I hardly remember him.  Only flashes.  Mostly now when I
envision his face, I know what I’m really seeing are pictures.  My mother never
remarried.  Dad kept pride of place on the mantle.”

“So you had no father.”

A little startled at how unerringly she’d zeroed in on what
he’d come to realize had shaped his life in ways he didn’t yet understand,
Daniel felt himself wanting to retreat.  He eased back, his hands on her upper
arms.

“Maybe you were lucky your father remarried,” he said
abruptly, wanting to deflect her but also…wanting her to hear what he was
really saying. 
Yes.  I needed a father to show me who a man should be.

“I never let myself care about my stepmother, and she wasn’t
very interested in me.  I don’t think she wanted children.  She and Dad didn’t
have anymore, I know that.  But I was lucky because I did have Aunt Doreen,”
she said simply.  “Nobody else saw my grief or how lonely I was.  She just kind
of adopted me.”

He’d already known Doreen Stedmann was a good woman.  He
hadn’t known how good.

His jaw muscles flexed.  “And now you’ve lost her.”

“Yes.”  She was retreating, too, stepping back, regaining
her dignity.  “I will miss her terribly.”

And she knew loss, as only someone who’d been hit by it as a
kid did.  It disturbed him, how easily he saw her essential aloneness.

The intensity of his attraction to this woman with her
complicated mix of strength and fragility had set off his internal alarms.  If
she’d been a weekend visitor….  But given a month with her in his bed, with
them sharing life stories, he could get in too deep.  He wasn’t prepared to
take that chance, even if she was interested, too.

With only a nod, he returned to his place and picked up his
fork, although any remaining appetite had disappeared.

Sophie seemed to feel the same, because she said, “I’ll put
coffee on,” and carried her plate the few steps into the kitchen.  Through the
doorway, he saw her scraping leftovers into the trash can beneath the sink.

Instead of continuing to watch her, he frowned at the
painting of a cottage garden scene that hung on the wall, and thought back to
what she’d told him about her mother’s death.

She hadn’t said,
I don’t believe she killed herself
,
but he’d heard it anyway.  Even if the doubt hadn’t clung to her voice, his
alarms had gone off.

That’s when I heard voices.

They said I’d heard someone else, not Mom.
  Because
she had to have been by herself.

Who was
they
?  Had the then-chief of the Cape Trouble
P.D. bothered to bring in a detective from the county?  Or had it seemed open
and shut?  Why believe a kid, who was probably hysterical anyway?

But I kept calling, ‘Mommy, where are you?’  And then
there was this crack of sound.

People who committed suicide could be damn selfish.  Quite
often they chose to kill themselves when a loved one was near, as if the
knowledge was a comfort.  Never a thought given to the fact that the wife or
father or son would be confronted with the horror of the death.  But a child as
young as Sophie had been…that was something else again.  Especially when the
father wasn’t there and Sophie had been entirely dependent on her mother. 
Would she have listened to her daughter calling frantically, “Mommy, where are
you?” and shot herself anyway?

Daniel found himself shaking his head.  His every instinct
told him too much was wrong with the scenario.

Had the mother owned a handgun?  Otherwise, where had it
come from?

Had anyone checked to find out where the father actually was
when his wife supposedly committed suicide?  This was, after all, a man who
remarried a woman he had to have met during those maybe-not-so-idyllic summer
weekends in Cape Trouble.

And if not him – after five summers spent in town, the
mother had to have made friends, maybe enemies.  Maybe she was having an
affair.

With a married man?  Could she have threatened his marriage?

Yeah, there were all sorts of possibilities.

One of which, Daniel recognized, was that Sophie didn’t
remember events the way they’d actually happened.  Maybe she never had run out
to the dunes and heard those voices distorted by fog.  Maybe the morning wasn’t
even foggy.  She’d have had dreams, told herself stories.  Even adult
eyewitnesses were prone to reshaping what they’d seen, an effect amplified by
the passing of time.  Sophie had had – what? – maybe twenty years to recast her
memories.

But damned if he wasn’t going to pull what information he
could find on her mother’s death, even if there wasn’t a thing he could do if
the investigation had been incompetent.

Abbott Grissom, it occurred to Daniel, might even have been
the responding officer.

     A hand set down a cup of coffee in front of him and he
was jolted to realize he had neither seen nor heard Sophie’s approach.

Very calmly, as though the conversation hadn’t been
emotional at all, she said, “You have questions about Doreen.”

Did he?  He stared at her blankly for a minute.

Then he pulled himself together.  “Yeah.  Tell me what you
know about her relationships.  Friends, people she despised, people who
despised
her
.  To your knowledge, did she date?  Have a lover?  Used to
have a lover?”

She said nothing for a minute, only searched his face with
those extraordinary eyes.  “Why would the killer have searched the stuff in storage
if she was killed for personal reasons?”

“To make us think exactly what we have been thinking.”  He
didn’t have to look far for reasons.  “Rage, because the auction meant so much
to her and it was a way of lashing out.  Greed, because, hey, maybe he’d find
something valuable.”

Her lashes fluttered a few times, but otherwise she didn’t
react.  After a moment, she nodded.  “You’re right.  Although, the longer he
hung around, the greater the risk of getting caught.”

“That’s true, but somebody not used to killing who’d just
done something like that wouldn’t have been real clear-headed at that moment.”

“No, that’s true.”  Her forehead crinkled.  “You said ‘he’.”

“Convenience.  I still think a woman is just as likely.”

“Oh.”  This was said very softly.  “I’ll tell you what I
know, but it’s not that much.  You have to understand, I’ve only come over here
a couple of times a year, usually not for more than a long weekend.  Doreen
would talk about her latest enthusiasm, whatever that was, more than
personalities.”

A smile twitched at Daniel’s mouth.  He’d heard Doreen once
she got started on the nerve of the road workers who sprayed poison on roadside
weeds or the negligence of the city council because they didn’t have the guts
to pass a measure that might conceivably offend some constituents.  Doreen had
been more interested in her causes than she was in gossip, that was for sure.

He took a sip of coffee and said, “Let’s start with the
auction committee members.”

*****

After Daniel left, Sophie made herself turn on her laptop
and go online, first to check email then to start searching for descriptions
and values for the items she’d brought home from the storage unit.  As
distracted as she was, concentrating was a challenge, but she didn’t want to
think anymore about that long-ago morning or the chill of the fog.  She wasn’t
crazy about the idea of reflecting on who among Doreen’s acquaintances might
have hated her enough to murder her, either.