The Off Season (29 page)

“If everybody’s finished, I’ll put away the rest,” Kym said as she gathered up the trash. “Then I really need to run home for a little while. My little dog’ll need to go out.”

“Go ahead,” Christina told her. “I’ve got the cleanup. And thanks again, for everything.”

Kym hesitated, shook her head. “It’s nothing, really.”

“It’s a huge thing, your staying with me.” Christina wiped her fingers on a napkin before reaching out to squeeze her hand. “I want you to know I get why you’re doing it—and believe me, it’s the least of my worries, if that’s what’s been holding you two back.”

Kym nodded, her lips pressed together as her dark eyes studied Christina’s face and then filled with tears. After giving her a quick hug, she found her purse and said, her voice roughened by emotion, “I’ll check in with Annie later, but meanwhile, if there’s anything you need, you have my number.”

Once she’d gone, Harris gave Christina a look. “I get the feeling I’ve missed something.”

Christina nodded. “She loves Annie. I mean, as in, they’re a couple. I should’ve realized earlier. Annie tried to tell me, but I wasn’t ready to hear it at the time.”

She recalled her younger sister’s face, remembered the moment she’d said so pointedly,
I want to be with Kym.

“And you’re okay with it, I guess?”

“
Okay
’s not really a word in my vocabulary right now,” she said, “but as for my sister and her—her girlfriend, I’m a little surprised, that’s all. Now that I think about it, though, I see it. See that maybe all these fleeting relationships with men, this unsettledness about her, had been masking something else. Something she felt too scared to admit out in the open.”

He nodded. “She’ll especially need your support now, after what’s happened.”

“Just as I’ll need hers,” Christina said, guilt seeping in at the thought that she wouldn’t be around, either to give or receive it. And Annie would never come with her; she already knew that. Maybe without Christina here to paint a target on her back, her sister would be safe. Or was that just her struggling to convince herself? “And I think Kym will—she’ll be good for her.”

Christina found herself relieved to think that their relationship, at least, would make her sister less vulnerable to the married—and probably predatory—Reg Edgewood. And she would be certain, before she left town, to make good on any debts.

“Let me wrap up this leftover pizza and take it downstairs,” she said. “I think I saw some foil in the—”

“Don’t do that yet,” Harris suggested. “Annie and Lilly are on their way. They may want some, too.”

Christina’s gaze jerked toward him, her heart kicking in alarm. “What? How would you know—is something wrong?”

He held up his scarred hand. “It’s fine. It’s only, when I couldn’t reach you earlier, I called her to let her know I need to talk to both of you about an imminent arrest. She was just about to check out, so I asked her to—”

“An arrest?” Christina’s pulse thumped in her ears.

“Several arrests, actually,” he corrected himself. “Come on in here. Let’s sit down and—”

She shook her head. “I’ve spent the whole day being coddled, told to lie down. To rest, to take a shower, to eat, and I’ll feel better. But I don’t feel better. I can’t, and I won’t until I understand. Am I—am I the reason my mother’s dead?”

His mouth stretched in a grimace. “I take it, then, you don’t to wait for Annie?”

She locked eyes with him, letting her scowl do the talking.

“Okay,” he said, turning toward the doorway. “You may not want to sit, but I’m dead on my feet here. It’s been a hell of a long day. Or days. I’ve lost track.”

She followed, vibrating with impatience, then took a seat on one end of the sofa while he claimed the nearest armchair. Only then did she notice how bloodshot his eyes were and how pale he was.

Feeling a twinge of guilt, she said, “You weren’t kidding, were you, Harris? Have you gotten any rest at all?”

He shrugged. “I finally delegated enough to grab a few hours this afternoon. Enough to hold me.”

Hold me.
His words echoed through her mind, made her body ache for him to do just that and to let her hold him back. But, just as after the first time they’d been together, he said nothing now,
did
nothing to acknowledge that anything had changed between them.

And this time, she swore she wouldn’t be foolish enough to tell him she’d fallen for him all over again. What could it do but hurt him, since she didn’t mean to stick around?

Unless . . . 
“So what is it? Do you know who did this to my mother?”

“I have a pretty good idea,” he admitted as Max strode into the room and stretched out in front of the hearth. “But there’s something I have to clear up first.”

“Just tell me, Harris. Tell me everything. I need to—I’ve been torturing myself over it.” Her poor mother must have been so terrified. “What did I do that cost my mom her—”

“No, Christina, no.” As the words came, she sensed whatever wall he’d erected inside himself crumbling. In two steps, he crossed the distance to sit down beside her on the sofa and wrap her in a hug. Tangling his fingers in her hair, he squeezed her tight against him. “You can’t ever blame yourself.”

“Then it was the vandals?”
Nothing to do with me at all.
She prayed it would be true. “It was just another break-in?”

“It’s possible,” he allowed. “The—the injuries we saw last night were consistent with the type of injuries sustained by the man I told you about before—and we’ve confirmed that your mother called her home-security company to inform them of the dates she would be gone.”

From there, he recounted the arrest of security-company employee Eric Edgewood, who had eventually given up his criminally minded friends, a group of local males between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five. “We acted fast, rounding up all four of them before somebody could tip them off, and they ran. When I woke the judge to get the arrest warrants, he signed search warrants, too.”

“And you found something?”

He nodded. “Evidence in the room of the ringleader. Items stolen out of beachfront houses, glassines of white powder—they were doing it for drugs and kicks. Idiots claimed they never meant for anybody to get hurt.”

Covering her mouth with her hand, she looked away. How could she have imagined that learning that her mother’s death was a result of something senseless, and very nearly random, would make her feel one bit better?

“There was—should I stop here?” he asked gently.

She shook her head, her voice hoarse as she forced the words out, “All of it. Please.”

“There was a bat, too—a wooden baseball bat found in the trunk of the beater this asshole was driving. A bat taken from Walt Gunderson when he heard noises in the house and came down the stairs with it. It still had blood on it.”

“His blood, or my—?” She couldn’t get the word out.

“That’ll be for the forensics team from the medical examiner’s office to determine. But, Christina, I’m not sure we’ll find your mother’s DNA on that bat. Or any link to Frank Fiorelli among their belongings, either.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’ve questioned these guys separately, before they got the chance to get their stories straight. In every case, I made sure they knew their buddies couldn’t wait to rat them out and cut some kind of deal with the DA.” He shook his head. “These aren’t sophisticated criminals, just young delinquents who like to think they’re tough. They broke fast, every damn one of them.”

She braced herself, heart pounding, to hear whatever came next.

“The thing is,” Harris went on, “they’ve admitted the robberies, the vandalism, even to beating Mr. Gunderson after he surprised them. But not a one would cop to the damage done to your car. You see, they’d been tipped off that someone was living in the big Victorian on Cape Street. And one of them had spotted me watching the place. They knew it wasn’t worth the risk.”

She narrowed her eyes, considering. “So you don’t believe they torched the house, then? Or stabbed Fiorelli?”

“If they were a brighter bunch, I might think they were denying hitting that house or this one for fear of implicating themselves in either murder. But they seemed genuinely surprised to find out that a woman was found dead here, surprised and worried I was just trying to pin my unsolved cases on them.”

“So what’s been ha—what’s happened to me and to my mother—you think it’s something separate?”

“Most likely, yes.”

“Why?” She swallowed back her fear, then forced herself to face it.

Pushing a hand down into the cushion, he rose from the sofa and crossed to the piano. From its top, he picked up a large manila envelope. The sight of it filled her with a sense of déjà vu, quickly followed by a wave of nausea.

“Renee brought that to you, didn’t she?” she asked, anxiety needling the tender flesh behind her neck as she remembered the meeting between Renee and that young guy she’d witnessed at the Sweet Shop.

He frowned. “This was left for me in my office, no signature, and no one around to see who did it. But it could have been her, I suppose. She knows her way around, and she’d feel comfortable enough with our routine to—you’re sure?”

Leaning forward, she dropped her head to her hands and drew in a deep breath. “I am.”

In fits and starts, she told him about that evening she’d passed through Bridgeport, explaining what she’d seen through the window of the Sweet Shop—and how she’d talked herself out of believing it could be Renee.

“You’ve talked yourself out of telling me a lot of things, haven’t you?” he asked gently. “Because you weren’t sure you could believe what you were seeing, hearing. You don’t trust your own senses—or maybe I should say, your mind.”

At the slither of papers being pulled from the envelope, she shuddered, guessing even before her first glance what he held in his hands. Her personal medical records, her records from that time two years before.

“I should’ve—should have known,” she said, voice breaking as it hit her.
He knows everything. All of it.
“Should’ve realized she had this on me. The other evening in the parking lot, the night she called me—called me—”

“Let’s just go with the c-word,” he suggested, sitting back down next to her.

She shook her head. “Thing was, though, that wasn’t the only c-word, or even the worst.” The conversation spun back through her mind, including the moment so branded in her memory so painfully that she repeated it verbatim.

“‘You know what, Christina? You’re not only freaking crazy, you really are a cunt.’”

“You’re sure?” He stared at her, his expression clearly troubled.

“Maybe I am still a little crazy,” Christina said, thinking of the living image of the lighthouse in its frame, “but there’s not a damn thing wrong with my memory. Still, it’s hard to imagine. Could she really be vindictive enough to gaslight me over the baby monitors and fill my daughter’s head with whatever gossip she’d picked up?”

If Annie had told one person the circumstances of their adoption, it stood to reason that others might’ve heard the story. Heard it and repeated it until it reached Renee’s ears. “Why would she do this? I don’t get it. Jealousy? Resentment?”

“Maybe a little of both,” he said, “but I’m betting that wasn’t her only motivation.”

“Why else, then? Why bring you my patient records?”

With a shaking hand she reached for them, hoping that, by some miracle, they would prove to be fakes. Instead, her mouth dried in an instant as the damning phrases jumped out at her.
Patient presented with severe psychomotor agitation . . . paranoid delusions . . . involuntary commitment recommended.

Tears blurring the page, she looked up at him and tried to explain. “I—I—during the move here, someone broke into the Mercedes in a hotel parking lot. They didn’t get much—I know better than to leave anything of value. And who would care about a box of paperwork, anyway?”

“So that’s how your records got out. From there, they could’ve been sold online—identity frauds do a brisk trade on anything with birth dates and Social Security numbers on them. Or maybe that’s what this thief was after in the first place.”

Heart racing, she struggled to explain. To erase the disappointment she imagined she saw in his eyes. “You have to understand. It was a bad time, when I—Lilly was about two months old. I’d taken some time off, and I really thought that I was coping. But it was so much harder than I imagined, handling almost everything on my own. Doug was busy with work, and, to be perfectly honest, he left everything to me. He really—he loved Lilly in his way, but I could tell he was only humoring my wish to have a family. He’d already raised two kids, and he was older, old enough that what he really wanted was to focus on his interests during the little time he could take off.”

“You didn’t have anyone to help?”

She shook her head. “I could’ve—should’ve hired someone. That was Doug’s suggestion when he saw how fried I was getting. But I was stubborn enough to think I could handle it on my own. I mean, all those other mothers—a lot of them single and with far fewer resources seem to manage, and I had taken three whole months off . . . but Lilly was a fussy baby. She cried all the time. She spit up milk—she wouldn’t take the breast at all. It felt like the ultimate rejection.”

“Babies can be tough. Even with Renee and me working together, I can remember a few nights—”

But Christina barely heard him. “She never seemed to sleep, and I got so worked up, so worried I was failing her—damaging her—just like my biological mother failed me. It didn’t help a bit that I wasn’t really eating or sleeping, either.” She remembered random compliments from her Dallas friends and neighbors, some of whom had asked her secret for taking off all the baby weight so quickly. As her hair grew dull and her eyes sunken, the praise stopped—and she began to imagine them whispering behind her back.

“What about your family? Couldn’t you reach out to them?”

“No way, not then. My father—the cancer was in his bones by then, his brain, too. It took my mother and my sister both to see him through those last few months.”