The Truth About Comfort Cove (22 page)

S
he couldn
’
t get a seat
on a flight until Friday morning. Not because of cost, but because there were no seats available out of Cincinnati. Figuring it was for the best that she not land at night, anyway, giving her and Ramsey nothing to do but go home without work as a diversion, she texted her flight times, made her pies and went to bed.

And before she went to sleep, she thought of Allie, just as she always did. Not the baby her sister had been on earth, but the adult spirit her sister had always been. She closed her eyes and in a whisper said, “Thank you.”
T
he local
, C
omfort
C
ove
P.D. lab dusted the bear for prints. The stuffed toy had leather insets on all four paws, a leather face and plastic eyes. All of which had at least partial prints.

Frank Whittier’s among them. Cal’s were there, too. And Emma’s, which they’d documented when she’d been in to give them Claire’s DNA. They found others, probably Rose Sanderson’s. Claire’s. And one, unidentified, clear print on the back right paw.

Jack Colton’s? They had his DNA, not his fingerprint. Not yet. And the man still was not answering his phone. He hadn’t used his bank card in the past couple of days. Nor had his rig been spotted along America’s highways.

If he was on a run, how was he paying for gas? Reading the lab report that had just come up Thursday morning, the thought of Jack Colton buying gas reminded him of the gas-station robbery case Lucy had worked on recently. She was at her mother’s, probably preparing dinner. Would Sandy have the wherewithal to make it through dinner?
Had Lucy ever had a happy holiday in her life?
He’d had plenty. And then he’d quit having holidays.

T
he day was just like every
other holiday at the Hayes home. Sandy started out full of energy and forced cheer, insisting that they observe all of their traditions—from starting with a glass of egg nog and breakfast casserole to singing their first Christmas carol of the season as they stuffed the turkey.

After the bird was in the oven, Sandy played only Christmas music until New Year’s, even though she couldn’t listen to any of it and stay sober.

She tried, though. Every year she insisted that she’d make it. That she’d give Lucy a traditional and happy holiday season. The stuff memories were made of.

Over dinner, they listened to “Carol of the Bells” and the rest of Sandy’s favorite Christmas CD, all bell songs.
Other years, when Marie was there, they listened to Barbra Streisand’s Christmas album, too. Marie was in Cincinnati for the day, this year, serving dinner in a soup kitchen. She’d be back by nightfall, freeing Lucy to go home and pack and get some rest before her early morning flight.
“Mama? Remember that witch’s costume we made?” she asked as Perry Como’s version of “Silver Bells” played in the background.
“You were in seventh grade,” Sandy said, the words only slightly slurred as she chewed and smiled at the same time. She was still just drinking wine, which was a good sign.
“Remember how we spent a whole evening looking at patterns and choosing fabric?”
“You were so eager to learn. You were the best helper in the world, Luce. You always have been.”
“I like being with you.”
Sandy’s eyes filled. But then she took a sip of wine and continued. “We put starch and cardboard behind the fabric in the hat and it didn’t droop like all the other witches hats we’d seen,” Sandy said. “And flannel underneath the black linen skirt and bodice so you’d stay warm.”
“I remember the black streaks you put in my blond hair. I was the best-looking witch ever,” she said, wishing they had more pictures.
“You won first place in the costume contest at the junior high.”
Sandy had been drinking then, but she’d had it under control.
“The dressing and Waldorf salad are perfect,” Lucy said, gorging herself. And thinking of Allie’s spirit watching over them.
She’d tell her mother about Allie. It was the right thing to do. And maybe, if Sandy had answers, she’d move on. She’d fall apart at first, sure, but with closure her mom could get out of the valley of pain she’d been living for Lucy’s whole life, make peace with the past and move forward into the future.
If she had nothing to hang on to, maybe…
As she ate and relaxed and talked with her mother, and as Sandy slowly got drunk, as they continued on with tradition and watched
Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street—
the original version—Lucy knew what was happening.
She was no longer hanging hope on Allie’s return to bring her mother back to her. But the hope that she’d one day have a healthy, sober Sandy in her life had not died. It was reshaping itself.
Finding a new version. One that might just have a chance of coming to fruition.
It was almost as if Allie’s spirit was at work, helping her to see that the future didn’t depend on the past.

R
amsey
M
iller woke up
Friday morning with a new lease on life. He felt as if he’d survived a storm. He guessed, in a sense, he had.

He’d made it through another holiday.
Dinner with Amelia at eight o’clock the evening before had been lovely. She’d made a turkey and all the trimmings, just like his mother used to. She’d asked about his parents—if he had any, where they were.
The odd thing was, he’d told her about them. About Diane. About his own culpability. About his mother’s subsequent withdrawal from life.
He was a boy again, believing he had something good to offer, although how Amelia helped him feel that way, he had no idea.
And when he was through, he thought maybe he’d imagined the whole thing. Maybe Lucy was right. They were just tired. Overworked. Near the end of years-old cases. They weren’t themselves.
As his voice had faded away, Amelia had told him that he had to go see his parents. Before the year was out.
She was clearly disappointed in him, too.
He’d promised to bring Lucy to meet her.
He’d called his folks from work earlier in the day because calling from work gave him an excuse to not be on the phone longer than the time it took to wish them a happy Thanksgiving and tell them that he loved them. He was the only detective on duty, which they knew, and the holidays had a tendency to bring out the crazies.
Those crazed with grief or loss or aloneness. All maladies that were exacerbated by occasions centered on family celebrations.
He’d had a relatively easy day of it in Comfort Cove. The uniformed guys got the standard domestic violence and disturbance calls.
He’d had to go out on a possible murder, but it turned out that the ninety-year-old man hadn’t been murdered by his much younger, obviously distraught wife. He’d died of natural causes. At least, Ramsey was certain that the medical examiner was going to return that determination later in the day.
In the meantime, he’d investigated the scene, collected evidence, talked to the new wife and older children, taken statements from witnesses and told everyone not to leave town. And then, after dinner with Amelia, he’d come back to the office to write up his report on the incident.
And now, a few hours later, he was up and full of energy. He’d put clean sheets on the bed in the seldom-used room across the hall from his bedroom. It was going to be a good day.

L
ucy got off the plane
ready to go to work. A full day on the job, dinner someplace in Comfort Cove—maybe at the place in the tourist district where Emma Sanderson’s fiancé, Chris, played piano on Friday nights. Not that he’d be playing tonight since it was the night before his wedding.

And then a short night’s sleep before—
“Hi.” Ramsey was there, standing by the luggage carousel, looking gorgeous in a gray suit with a white shirt and red tie, his sandy-colored hair long enough to touch the tip of his collar and kind of windblown. But it was the warm glow in his green eyes, focused straight on her, that froze the professional greeting on her lips.
“Hi.” She turned for her bag, giving her face time to cool down. “I’d have just done a carry-on but I have my dress and shoes for the wedding, and my garment bag doubles as a suitcase and was too big… .”
She was embarrassing herself.
He stepped up to her, close enough that their bodies were almost touching, close enough that she could feel his heat and every breath she took was an inhalation of his musky aftershave. Bending over, he lifted her face and Lucy closed her eyes, ready for the kiss that was probably wrong, but that she’d known, in some part of her being, was also inevitable.
Who were they kidding?
They were healthy adults. Who liked each other and didn’t have a significant other. It was natural that they’d experiment, satisfy the curiosity and be done with it.
But her curiosity wasn’t satisfied.
Opening her eyes she saw him bent over her farther, to get a good look at the disfigurement on her chin.
“It’s a nasty jag,” he said. “But they did a good job stitching you up. Looks healthy, and there won’t be much of a scar.”
“It’s not like it’s going to show,” she said, back on track. They weren’t experimenting. There would be no kissing between her and Ramsey Miller.
“I’m just glad that it’s healing.”
“It itches.” She saw her bag. Went for it.
Ramsey grabbed it just as she was about to lift it off the carousel.
He carried it to the elevator, into the parking garage and put it in the back of his car.
Fine. The necessary personal stuff was done. Now they could get to work. She wondered who would be in the office. Bill Mendholson? She’d met him once. Liked him.
“You hungry?”
“Not too bad.” Her flight had been too early to think about breakfast. But she’d eaten a ton the day before.
“Have you had breakfast?”
“No.”
“I took a chance that you wouldn’t and waited. We can stop anyplace you’d like. Or we can go back to my house. I fry a mean egg. And I brought home the lab report on Claire Sanderson’s teddy bear.”
“You don’t have to be at the office?”
“I flew solo yesterday so I’m off today.”
“And tomorrow?” They had the wedding.
“Yeah. I’m off until Monday.”
So was she. She also wanted to see the Sanderson file. Even if all they had was theory, she wanted to be able to give Emma at least a slim line of hope on her wedding day. Hope was everything.
As she’d learned when she’d temporarily lost hers.
“Breakfast at your place sounds great,” she said. “I brought some things to show you, too.” The Wakerby file, which now included all of Todd’s information regarding Allie. They had to find a way to tie her sister’s death to the bastard who’d killed her.

R
amsey had never before
had a hard-on while frying eggs. Thankfully the suit he was wearing hid the evidence, and experience told him that as soon as he focused his thoughts, the embarrassing reaction to Lucy Hayes in his home, sitting at his dining-room table going over his files, would dissipate.

“Here, take a look at this,” he said, pulling a binder from the far corner of the table and putting it on top of the report she was currently looking at. A copy of what he’d written late the night before regarding his ninety-year-old dead body. They were going to go over the Sanderson file together while they ate. “I asked Amelia Hardy if I could take a look at her activity journal and she insisted that I bring it home with me.”

Opening the pages, Lucy was soon engrossed enough that he was able to get eggs and toast onto plates and in front of them at the table. He managed napkins and forks and glasses of juice, too.

He didn’t manage to rid himself of a great desire to take the woman at his table into the bedroom, hold her in his arms and block out the world for a while.

“It says here that immediately prior to Claire’s disappearance, Amelia was living in Boston.”
“That’s right.”
“So she doesn’t know if he had someone at his place then or not.”
“Correct.”
“He and Frank could have met there and we’d have no way of knowing that.”
“Yep.”
She waited for him to sit and then started right in on the eggs and toast. “Before we look at what we have, I think we should pretend that Frank and Jack are out and see if there are any angles we’re missing. Let’s make certain that we aren’t just on this path because we need answers and can make cases that sound strong.”
So they spent breakfast coming up with other theories, using the tunnel, and not. And reached dead ends for every single one of them. If the perp had been completely unknown, wouldn’t Jack have noticed? Wouldn’t Frank? Wouldn’t Claire have cried out? And the police had combed the area at the time of the disappearance. There was no sign of anyone who didn’t belong in the area, not a stray footprint. Not a car or a bike or anything.
Which was why Frank Whittier had been the only suspect all these years.
“But Jack had been there and the police hadn’t known that,” Lucy pointed out.
“Because his presence wasn’t anything unusual in the neighborhood.”
“So let’s look at everyone else that ‘belonged’ in the area. Could any of them be our perp?”
By rote, he went over every resident on the block, naming names, alibis, job descriptions and family situations.
“There’s no motive here at all,” Lucy said, half an hour after the food was gone.
Getting up from the table, she gathered the dishes and moved to his sink.
Ramsey followed her. “I’ll get those.”
“Like hell you will, Detective,” she said, grinning at him. “You cooked, I’ll clean up.”
Mostly because his body was all out of whack again, due to the saucy grin she sent him and the way she’d said
detective,
Ramsey leaned back against the cupboard and let her do her thing.

T
hey worked for an hour
after breakfast. Going over reports again, looking at different angles. Making calls to check on updates from Lori Givens at the Cincinnati lab, to the Boston DNA lab that had Claire’s box of evidence and Jack’s DNA sample. To the Comfort Cove lab to see if there were any answers back yet on the storm-sewer water sample. To Ramsey’s office to see if anyone had called in any reports on Jack Colton’s location.

And then it was just the two of them at Ramsey’s diningroom table with reports they’d been over numerous times. And a whole day stretched in front of them.

Lucy felt like a schoolgirl on her first date.
But she wasn’t on a date.
And she hadn’t been a schoolgirl in a long time. What she was was a grown woman who was tired of being