Unleashed (A Melanie Travis Mystery) (26 page)

Give me some room, his expression said; so I did. I opened the dishwasher and began unloading clean plates. Upstairs, I heard Davey give a delighted squeal. I wondered if that meant we were going to be raising a puppy named Ezekiel.

Listening to my son’s laugh, it occurred to me that I still hadn’t solved the problem of the lunchtime bully. The older Davey became, the more I realized that a mother’s relationship with her son was a complex bond, fraught with issues that needed to be negotiated with care. Was I protecting Davey too much, or not enough? Should I have stepped back and let him work out the problem himself, or swooped down and knocked the obstacle from his path? Clearly, what I needed was a man’s input.

I glanced over. If Sam had looked like his thoughts were even in the same time zone as mine, I might have asked him. Instead, I finished putting away the dishes and walked back over to the table. The lease was resting where Sam had dropped it. Idly, I picked up the papers and began to read.

Davey’s problem wasn’t the only one I was having a hard time figuring out. It still didn’t make sense to me that Brian would have cosigned a lease for a house in North Salem; nor that he would have wanted to assume responsibility for the rental after Sheila’s death. I skimmed down the first page, stopped at the bottom, then read the last paragraph again.

My breath caught. Mothers and sons and their complicated relationships, indeed. Suddenly, it was all right in front of me.

“Sam,” I said. “Listen to this. I think I know who killed Sheila and Brian.”

“What are you talking about?” Sam reached for the papers.

“Look at the asking price on the house.” I pointed to a figure near the bottom of the page. “This wasn’t just a lease, it was a lease with option to buy. And look at the price Sheila had an option at.”

He found the number I was referring to. “Two hundred thousand? Maybe it’s a little low for the area but it’s not totally out of line. The house is small and it’s in terrible shape. Nobody had done any repairs on it in years—”

“The house isn’t important,” I broke in impatiently. “You’re right, it’s nothing, but the land it sits on must be worth a fortune. Remember how much room there was in the backyard? Sheila told me Mrs. Andrews had eight acres.

“That house predates all the others around it. When the neighborhood began to get built up, Mrs. Andrews must have held on to her land. Any developer would be thrilled to get his hands on it. They’d tear down the house and make three or four building lots in its stead. At today’s prices, each lot would be worth the price Sheila was supposed to pay for the whole package.”

“So Sheila got a terrific deal.” Sam didn’t sound entirely convinced. “I imagine that’s why she took the option in the first place.”

“Which she got from an old woman who’d lived in her house forever and probably thought two hundred thousand sounded like a lot of money.” I was speaking faster as the pieces fell into place. “Remember Chuck saying that his mother wasn’t very sharp anymore? When she left the house, she went into a nursing home. I bet she had no idea how those property values had soared.”

I paced across the room, stepping over Tar and around Sam’s chair. It might have been exultation that kept me on my feet, but it felt more like relief. Finally, a pattern was beginning to emerge.

“Chuck didn’t find out that Sheila had rented the house from his mother until after everything was already signed. By then, it was too late for him to have any input. How much do you want to bet he’s Mrs. Andrews’s heir?”

“The man who kept telling us the house was his,” Sam said thoughtfully.

“Exactly. Picture this: Chuck’s mother is old and growing frail, and he’s just found out that she’s all but given away a major part of his inheritance. I can see how that might make a man angry enough to do something desperate.

“And here’s something else,” I added. “Go back to the beginning, the first thing we noticed. Sheila’s dogs were outside, which meant she was home when the killer arrived. Sheila knew Chuck, he’d been fixing all sorts of things for her lately. Of course she would have let him in. She wouldn’t have thought twice about it.”

“Keep talking,” said Sam. “This is beginning to make sense.”

“Of course it makes sense. Your problem is that you haven’t been here all week, you haven’t met everyone who’s involved. But I have. And the prospect of losing all that money gives Chuck a stronger motive than anyone else.”

“Except maybe Brian,” Sam pointed out.

“Brian didn’t need the money enough to kill for it. But Chuck’s situation is totally different.” With satisfaction, I realized what it was I’d overlooked earlier. “And now that I think about it, he was pretty upset when Tim told him that Brian’s name was on Sheila’s lease, too.”

“The two of them talked on Friday morning?” Sam asked, checking to see if he had the sequence right.

“Right. Chuck said something about trying to find a copy of the lease so he could see for himself. And Friday night, Brian was dead.”

“We need to tell the police about this.” Sam got up and walked over to the phone. “Detective Holloway gave me his card. Let’s see if I can get through on a Sunday.”

I followed him across the room. “If not, we can try Detective Walden in Harrison. He’s the one who’s looking into Brian’s murder.”

Our timing couldn’t have been worse. Predictably, neither man was working on Sunday morning. Both police departments offered to pass along messages, however, and Sam and I took turns telling our story. Twice we were told to expect a return call, probably sometime that afternoon.

We’d accomplished something, but it wasn’t enough for Sam. “I’m not going to sit here all day and wait,” he said irritably. “I feel like that’s all I’ve been doing ever since Sheila died. Waiting to find out what went wrong. Waiting for the funeral. Waiting to feel normal again. I’ve got to do something.”

I was game. “What do you want to do?”

He thought for a minute. “I think I’ll drive up to North Salem.”

“You’re not going after Chuck.”

Sam snorted. “Give me some credit. I have no intention of tipping our hand. I’d much rather leave the next step up to the police and have it done right.”

Thank God for a man with common sense. “Agreed. So why are we going to North Salem?”

Sam shook his head. “You’re not going. I am. It will give me something useful to do. Now that I’m executor of Sheila’s estate, I have to sort through every scrap of paper in that house from the electric bill to the warranty on her car. I may as well go and pick it all up.”

“Chuck changed the locks,” I said. “You won’t be able to get in.”

“That house was falling down around Sheila’s ears. If there’s even one window with a lock that holds, I’d be surprised. Don’t worry, I’ll get in.”

As he spoke, Sam was already stuffing papers back into the folder. A sense of purpose, all out of proportion to the errand he’d proposed, seemed to galvanize his actions.

What was the rush? I wondered. Why did he need to go up there right now?

Tension hummed in the air. Or maybe it was my imagination. But once again, we seemed to have fallen out of sync. The unity that had come so easily to us that I’d almost taken it for granted was unraveling strand by strand, and nothing I did seemed to stop it.

“I want to come with you,” I said.

“There’s no need,” Sam countered quickly. “Stay here and keep an eye on Faith and the puppies.”

“Aunt Peg can do that.”

“Melanie—”

The more he protested, the more determined I became to have my way. “I’m coming.”

Sam didn’t look happy. “All right then, let’s go.”

I ran upstairs. Since Aunt Peg, Davey, and Faith had six delightful, day-old puppies to keep them entertained, they barely spared me a glance when I told them that Sam and I were going out for a couple of hours.

“We’ll take Tar with us,” I told Aunt Peg. “Can you stay with Davey?”

“I don’t see why not. Besides, it may take me that long to convince him that we don’t want a puppy named Nebekenezer.”

I flew back down the stairs and found Sam already loading Tar into the back of the Blazer. I grabbed up my purse and joined him in front. I’d barely shut my door before the car was moving. No use speculating whether he’d have left without me.

An uncomfortable silence lasted almost five miles. Even if I’d wanted to end it, I had no idea how. This chore Sam had been determined to do seemed precipitous, to say the least. Was he really in such a hurry to pick up Sheila’s things? I wondered. Or was he just in a hurry to get away from me?

Finally, Sam spoke. “I was lying,” he said.

I turned slowly in my seat. I’d been staring so hard out the window that my eyes burned. Still, I was amazed how calm my voice sounded. “About what?”

“You must think I’m crazy for taking off like that. Who knows? Maybe I am. The worst part is, I’m not sure I even know anymore. I’ve been thinking about what you said last night. About how I wasn’t talking, wasn’t telling you things you needed to know. Maybe I figured you were better off not knowing ...”

I swallowed hard and held my gaze steady. Dread welled up inside me. I knew with certainty that I didn’t want to have this conversation. And I was just as certain that we had to have it.

“Tell me what’s going on,” I said quietly. “Whatever you’re thinking, whatever you’re feeling, even if it hurts, I’d rather know. I don’t want secrets between us. I had that kind of marriage before. I don’t want it again.”

Sam’s hands gripped the steering wheel, fingers clenched as if he meant to squeeze it into submission. His eyes never left the road. “If anyone had asked me a month ago to define how I felt about Sheila, I would have said she was someone from my past, nothing more. And yet now that she’s gone, I find there was more.”

My lower lip was trembling. I nipped it with my teeth and tried to hold it still. It didn’t seem to help. Now my throat was fluttering.

“I guess it’s because I always thought there’d be time. An opportunity for Sheila and me to sort out what we had and where we went wrong. It’s not that I ever thought we’d get back together. Or that I even wanted it to happen. All these years we’ve been apart, getting back with Sheila was the farthest thing from my mind.”

Right. That’s why he’d repeated the thought three times.

Ever since Sheila’s arrival in the spring, I’d sensed a gap opening up between Sam and me. Maybe I’d been naive, but I’d believed in our relationship. I’d thought it was strong enough to hold us together.

Now I realized how badly I’d been deluding myself. It wasn’t a fissure that had come between us, it was an ever-widening gulf. And while I was reaching desperately across the expanse, Sam was looking the other way, off into some distant future that only he could see.

He seemed to be waiting for me to say something, but I couldn’t. Words were wholly inadequate to express what I was feeling.

“Please try to understand,” said Sam. “For the first time in my life, I have no idea what to do next. There are so many regrets, so many things I should have done differently. Now I’ll never have the chance.”

Pain and frustration dulled Sam’s tone, even as it seemed to sharpen the blade that was turning inside me. Despite the fact that we were discussing a woman he’d loved and lost, part of me still yearned to reach out and soothe him. How dumb was that?

Better than the alternative, I realized. My own feelings were too raw. It was much easier to deal with his hurt than my own.

“There was no way you could have known what would happen,” I said.

“Maybe not, but I feel like I should have. Sheila and I were together at such a formative time in my life. In many ways, who I was with her shaped the man I became. And yet, when it all fell apart we were so angry with each other that I wasn’t able to see that. I certainly wasn’t ever able to tell her.”

“I’m sure she realized,” I said softly. “She must have known how much she meant to you or she wouldn’t have followed you here.”

Sam sucked in a breath. “Me and Brian,” he said after a moment. His voice held a bitterness it hadn’t earlier. “I can’t believe she never told me they were still in touch. What an opportunity this must have been for her to play us off against each other. I wonder if Brian realized what she was up to.”

“Probably. He seemed to have a pretty clear idea where Sheila was coming from.”

Sam glanced over, waiting for me to point out that he hadn’t. It was much too late for recriminations like that. I let the silence linger.

“Anyway,” Sam said after a minute, “I’m not sure this makes any sense but I feel like I need to go back to where Sheila was, one last time. Maybe I need to touch some of her things. Maybe I need to wallow in a few memories. Who knows if it will help? All I do know is that I’ve run out of other ideas.”

He reached across the seat, took my hand in his and squeezed it gently. “I’m sorry, Melanie. I know that’s not what you wanted to hear. I realize how you felt about Sheila, that’s why I didn’t want you to come with me. I didn’t want to hurt you any more than I already have—”

Abruptly Sam stopped speaking.

We’d rounded the corner onto Sheila’s road, and I looked up to see what had caught his attention. Midway down the road, behind a stand of trees, a thick plume of dark smoke rose in the air.

Sam’s foot bore down hard on the gas pedal, and the Blazer shot forward. By the time we reached Sheila’s driveway, flames were visible through the trees. The Blazer bounced from rut to rut, but neither of us cared.

Smoke grew thicker as we burst out of the trees and into the yard. Fire was shooting out of Sheila’s open front door. I was already reaching for the cell phone in the tray. An anguished cry was torn from deep within Sam’s heart.

“Nooo!” he roared.