Tracie Peterson (42 page)

“Thirty-five thousand? What are you talking about?” Deirdre questioned, leaning forward again.

“Your husband’s private account shows a deposit a few days ago of thirty thousand dollars. I take it you didn’t know.”

“Absolutely not,” she said, shaking her head. “Are you sure about this?”

He checked the information given. “Looks to be accurate. Oh, and there’s a safety deposit box. He opened that on the same day that he made the deposit. Did you want to check the contents of that today?”

“I don’t have the key with me,” Deirdre replied, not wanting to admit to the man that she hadn’t realized there was such a box in Dave’s name.

“Well, just come back with the key and we can take care of that then.”

Deirdre listened as he explained all the various ways that she could put her money into their care. Before it was all done she had acquired a headache and longed for nothing more than a dark room where she could sleep it off.

Here I thought money was a problem. Dave had thirty thousand dollars and never told me. Where could the money have come from?
She flashed back to the police station interrogation and the suicide note.

“
It says here that your husband has done something he’s not proud of
,” the detective had said. “
Something he can’t live with. You have any ideas what that might be?
”

Of course, Deirdre had no clues about Dave’s actions at the time. He had always been aboveboard on everything. Why, he was the kind of man who would return to a grocery store if he realized the clerk had given him too much change. That was one of the reasons she hated herself so much for lying to him about gambling. He would have been very hurt had he realized her problem.

She decided while Mr. Warner was typing up information on the computer that she had to figure out what it all meant. Maybe finding the safety deposit box key would help. Of course, that meant going back to the house.
Can I do that? It’s just a house—just the place where he died
. Her thoughts began to take her in a direction she didn’t want to go.
I know I can do this. Grammy will come with me. The key might hold the answer to where this money has come from. It might even hold the answer as to why Dave is dead
. She summoned her courage.

“Why don’t I go home and get the key,” she said, glancing at her watch. “I can be back here in an hour and then we can just conclude everything at once.”

“That’s fine by me,” the man replied. “It’ll give me time to put together your paper work.”

Deirdre nodded and got to her feet. “I’ll be back.”

She only explained that there was a missing safety deposit box key and never told her sisters or Mattie anything more. There had to
be something going on. Something big that had weighed Dave down with guilt. Deirdre had to know what it was.

“I tell you what,” she said, reaching into her purse for her keys, “Erica, just drop Grammy and me off at the house. We can get my car and go back to the bank.”

“It’s no trouble to drive you around,” Erica replied.

“I know. I just thought it might be better to do things this way.” She didn’t want to hurt Erica’s feelings and so she added, “It would be a great help if you two wanted to go get something for everybody to eat at the hotel. I promised Morgan I’d bring her back some lunch.” She pulled twenty dollars out of her purse and handed it to Connie. “If it costs more than this—”

“We’ll pay the balance ourselves,” Erica said, turning onto Deirdre’s street. “We can easily do that much.”

Deirdre watched as her house came into view. She had once loved the very sight of her home, but now it filled her with apprehension and regret. Had they pushed too hard too soon to have the best in life? Had Dave felt that in order to keep up with her needs he had to do something illegal? The thoughts raced inside her head. At least with her mind preoccupied with this, she felt more confident about returning to the scene of Dave’s death.

“Are you absolutely sure you want us to go on?” Erica questioned. “We can come inside with you—if you need us.”

Deirdre smiled and reached a hand up to touch Erica’s shoulder. “Thank you. I know you would do this for me, but I’ll be okay.” Then, almost as an afterthought, she reached over and touched Connie. “Thank you too. I appreciate that you’re here for me.”

She got out of the car and waited for Mattie before heading up to the front door. “I’ve used the front door more this last week than I have since moving in,” she said, trying hard to sound nonchalant. “Usually we went in through the garage.”

Mattie seemed to understand. “Your flowers are absolutely gorgeous. You’ve done a good job with them.”

Deirdre smiled sadly at the begonias and petunias that vied for
space in the containers by her door. Who would care for her flowers while she and Morgan were in Council Grove? Was there some service she could hire to come and watch over her house? These were questions she’d not even considered before deciding to go to Mattie’s.

“Do you suppose there’s some way I could find a gardener to come and take care of things while I’m gone?” she asked as she slipped the key into the front door.

“I would think so,” Mattie replied. “You’d certainly hate to let all your hard work go to waste.”

The house smelled rather musty from the hot, humid days. Deirdre wrinkled her nose and went to the thermostat. “I guess I had the air conditioning turned off,” she muttered and played with the adjustments.

“So what do we do now?” Mattie asked, tossing her purse onto the nearest chair.

“Well, I need to find that safety deposit box key,” Deirdre replied, forgetting about the air conditioning. She came clean with Mattie. “I didn’t even know he had a safety deposit box.”

“Well, perhaps it dealt only with his work and he felt it unnecessary to let you know anything more.”

“Well, he also neglected to tell me that he’d just come into thirty thousand dollars,” Deirdre replied.

“What?” Mattie questioned.

She shook her head. “The bank says that shortly before Dave’s death, he deposited thirty thousand dollars. Grammy, I figured money was a real problem for us, given my abuse of it. I mean, it wasn’t like I thought we’d lose the house or miss a car payment, but I thought I’d probably cost us a good chunk of our savings money. Then, too, we lost a lot of money in deposits on the trip. But with this kind of balance in his private account, I don’t know what to think. You’re the only one I’ve told about the suicide note. You know that Dave felt he’d done some things he couldn’t live with.”

“And you think the money might have something to do with it?”
Mattie asked.

Deirdre glanced up the stairs. “It might. I just don’t know. I’m hoping maybe the safety deposit box will give us the information.”

“But it may not, Deirdre. You have to accept the fact that you may never learn the truth.”

Deirdre had never allowed herself to believe that. She had to have answers as to why her life was suddenly turned upside down. “I suppose you’re right,” she finally said, though unwilling to admit defeat. “I guess we’d better get to looking.”

“Where should we start?”

Deirdre looked back to the stairs. “I guess the bedroom.”

Fear gripped Deirdre’s heart. Could she go back into that room? Could she see his blood on the rug and the walls and not fall to pieces? She took a hesitant step and then another. Then without giving it another thought, she was halfway up the stairs with Mattie close behind.

When they reached the bedroom, Deirdre took a deep breath and plunged right in. There was no sense in delaying the inevitable. She immediately noticed that Mattie or someone else had duct taped a thin piece of plywood over the broken portion of window. The curtains were also missing and the wall had been scrubbed clean. On the floor, the blood-soaked carpet had been cleaned, but a brown stain still remained to remind her of where her husband had lain.

Deirdre began to tremble. “Did you do this?” she asked Mattie softly.

“The girls and I did,” Mattie replied. “Remember when I left you and Morgan with Julie and Mike yesterday?”

Deirdre nodded. “But how did you get in?”

“Erica had a key.”

Deirdre nodded again. Yes, that was right. She had given Erica a key to manage the house while they were in Hawaii. When they’d canceled the trip, she’d forgotten to get the key back. “Thank you.”

“I know it doesn’t take care of everything and it certainly won’t block the image you have of what happened here, but I didn’t want
you coming back here to find the mess.”

Deirdre began to cry. Her whole body was shaking. “Oh, Grammy. You’re so good to me. How many more of my messes are you going to have to clean up?”

Mattie opened her arms to her granddaughter and held her tightly. “As many as I need to. That’s what family is for. Someday you’ll no doubt be helping me with my messes.”

“I thought I could do this. I thought I’d put this behind me.”

Mattie pulled back and looked Deirdre in the eye. “It’s not even been a full week, child. You can’t expect to put something like this behind you for a good long while. Look, you tell me where Dave kept his things and I’ll look. You go downstairs and see if you can’t find the number for a good gardener.”

Deirdre didn’t even bother to protest. She was simply too emotionally raw to try to do otherwise. “Dave’s chest of drawers is the one over there by the window. If that key is here in the house, it will either be there or in his desk in the den. I can check the desk.”

“Good. See, we’ll share the work load. Now, you go on back downstairs, and I’ll get to work here.”

It wasn’t long before Mattie appeared downstairs with the key in hand. It had been in Dave’s top drawer, carefully hidden in an old cigar box with a bunch of old coins he had been collecting for fun.

Mattie volunteered to drive them back to the bank, even though she chuckled when they’d pulled into the street. “I haven’t a clue which way to go,” she admitted.

Deirdre even laughed at this. “We’re quite the pair, aren’t we?”

She gave her grandmother directions to the bank, then mustered her courage to do what had to be done.

Inside, Mr. Warner was ready and waiting for her. He took her to the vault where the safety deposit boxes were kept. “I’ll leave you alone to go over the contents,” he told her after they’d taken the box to a table and unlocked it.

Deirdre nodded and just sat staring at her husband’s secret. The box was probably no more than eight by ten inches, but for reasons
that she couldn’t understand, Dave had felt the need to conceal this part of his life from her.

Dear God, please let this answer my questions
, she prayed and lifted up the lid to the box.

Inside there was a white envelope addressed with her name on it. The only other contents was a manila envelope with no markings on the outside. It clearly contained quite a few papers, for the envelope was thick and forcibly folded in half. What could it be? She looked at both and chose the one intended for her eyes. Her hand shook fiercely as she opened the white envelope.

“‘My dearest wife,’” she murmured. “‘If you are reading this, then I am dead.’”

By the time Deirdre finished the letter, she not only knew why her husband was dead, but by leaving her this final missive, Dave had also left her a way to see that his life had not been in vain. Wiping the tears from her eyes, she folded the letter and put it in her purse before taking up the manila envelope. This envelope held all the information she needed to set Dave’s memory back in order.

“Oh, Dave,” she whispered. “I would have understood. We could have fixed this together.”

Chapter 37

After living in Denver most of her adult life, Ashley was hardly intimidated by the maddening pace of Kansas City traffic. She managed the minivan through more than one bottleneck and only had to recheck the map once in order to find her way to Erica’s apartment complex.

“Are we at Aunt Erica’s yet?” Zach asked in complete exasperation.

Ashley smiled and shook her head. “No, not yet. But if you close your eyes and count to one hundred, I’m thinking we’ll probably be there.”

This seemed to be just the challenge that Zach needed. He began to count. “One, two, three, four—”

“Zach, I meant for you to count to yourself.”

“I am counting to myself.”

“No, I mean count it in your head without counting out loud.”

She glanced at him via the rearview mirror, saw his brow knit tightly as he considered this, then watched him close his eyes and start his task once again.

Ashley shifted a bit to catch sight of John. He seemed strangely silent and she wondered if he was worried about the events to come. He had never gone to a funeral. When his Grandpa Issacs had passed on, John had been very small and so Ashley had left him with a sitter. And because she and Jack had opted not to tell the boys about Rachelle’s death, the miscarriages, or the loss of the baby in the accident, this was the first time either one had been called upon to face death.

As if reading his mother’s mind, John called from the back, “Will we have to look at Uncle Dave’s dead body?”