Quiet as the Grave

She squinted into the sun, wondering if it might be Rutledge, who was supposed to be doing some bookwork at Mike’s office today but who always preferred to be out on the water if he had a choice. She sure hoped he hadn’t ditched work again. There were limits even to nice Mike Frome’s patience.

When the boat curved and turned away, for several minutes she could still hear the lake lapping against the shore in nervous eddies.

She went back to cutting flowers, long purple-blue stalks that were going to look gorgeous in the white bedroom. She filled her basket to overflowing, and then stepped carefully through the mud to the other side of the stairs. She didn’t want to leave the garden lopsided.

Over here the rain had really pummeled things. The mud had run down, out of the bed, onto the grass beyond. She wasn’t sure she could find many stalks that weren’t bruised and spattered with dirt.

She bent, searching, sifting with her fingers….

Suddenly she straightened and backed up a step, her blood running cold, shrinking in her veins.

What the hell was that?

She made herself look again. She made herself stand there, her feet sinking into the cool mud. She reached out numbly and parted the tall stalks of larkspurs. She must have been mistaken.

But she wasn’t wrong. There, half-exposed by the spring glut of muddy rain, were the elegant and bony fingers of a human hand.

“SO…YOU FEEL LIKE maybe taking the boat out this afternoon?” Mike looked at Gavin, who was slumped on the passenger seat, fiddling with the strap of his backpack. “Ledge is minding the office, so I could get free if you’re in the mood.”

Gavin shrugged. He had hardly spoken ten words since Mike had picked him up from a birthday-party sleepover at Hugh’s house.

Well, okay. He didn’t have to talk. It was okay if he wanted to just stare out the window, watching the roadside flowers rush by in a smear of color.

Mike wasn’t usually the hovering type. He allowed his kid the right to a few grumps and sulks, and he didn’t try to jolly him out of them. Sometimes life just sucked, and he wanted Gavin to learn to fight his own way clear of a crummy mood.

Gavin had been blessed with a cheerful nature, and so he usually did just fine.

But this felt different. The air in the truck was dark, though it was a bright spring Sunday. And Gavin’s face, caught in a stream of light from the window, looked oddly pale. Mike had even felt his forehead, a real no-no since Gavin had been about six.

But no fever.

Then he’d probed gently into the usual suspects…teachers, tests, girls, playground scuffles.

But no hits.

He wondered whether Gavin might have wet the bed at Hugh’s, which would naturally have been mortifying. Why would Gavin have reverted to that, though? He’d wet the bed for about six months after Justine’s disappearance, but not lately.

Still…something about this mood reminded Mike of that terrible time.

Shit. His hands tightened on the steering wheel, his heart aching.

He’d thought Gavin was doing so well. But maybe that had been naive. It had been two years, a long time in a ten-year-old child’s life, but maybe not long enough. Gavin seemed fine most of the time, but their psychiatrist had warned Mike that losing Justine this way might function like post-traumatic stress disorder. Despair and grief could strike without warning, with the slightest of triggers.

Especially since there had never really been any closure. Mike knew why Gavin was always jumping up to answer the phone, or the door. He knew why, when Gavin saw a blue Mercedes like Justine’s, he went rigid and followed it with his eyes until it disappeared.

He thought every car might be the car that brought his mother back to him.

Mike didn’t. In his heart, Mike knew Justine had to be dead. She’d been a bitch on wheels, and he wasn’t going to sugarcoat it—he’d hated her. But she had loved Gavin in her way. If she’d been alive, she would have been in touch with her son.

Mike parked the truck in front of the boathouse office and killed the engine. Gavin started to open his door.

“Gavin, wait.”

Mike fought the urge to put his hand on that silky gold head. “Buddy, I’m sorry, but you’re making me nervous. Please give me a hint what’s going on here.”

Gavin might look like his mother, but he had a much softer heart. He obviously heard the anxiety in his dad’s voice. He frowned, took a deep breath, then let it out heavily.

“It’s nothing, really, Dad. It’s just—”

Mike forced himself not to push. If Gavin only knew how many demons could run through his dad’s mind during even a three-second pause. What? Had someone told Gavin that his mom ran away because she didn’t love him? Had they told him that Mike himself must have killed her? Had they invented ghoulish fictions about what happened, just to see if they could make him cry?

If the little bastards had done any of that, Mike would go over there and shake them until their pea-brains rattled.

“We’re having this thing at school,” Gavin said finally. “Lunch With Mom Day, they call it. It’s super dumb, really. But it’s this Tuesday, and…”

Mike’s first thought was, thank God. That was all? Just Lunch With Mom Day?

But then he saw the tears shining in Gavin’s blue eyes, and he realized how dense that was. Lunch With Mom Day mattered. The tough stuff, the nasty, bullying stuff, Gavin could probably handle. He could punch out a bully. He could fight back.

But how did you fight back against Lunch With Mom Day? How did you fight back against the thousands of little losses, the subtle moments in every day when you were simply different? When you were somehow…less?

Mike felt himself getting mad all over again. What insensitive Volunteer Mommy had thought up this stupid idea? In any elementary school classroom, there would be kids whose moms had jobs they couldn’t leave. Moms who had divorced daddy, or even moms who were dead.

But in this particular elementary school, everyone knew there was at least one child whose mom was cruelly missing.

By lifting his chin and breathing deeply, Gavin had managed to keep his tears from falling. Damn, Mike thought. He loved this tough little kid, and he’d do anything to keep him from hurting.

But there was nothing he could do. The world didn’t revolve around them. They couldn’t deny the other families the fun of Lunch With Mom Day just because it made Gavin feel bad.

“They said we could bring some other woman, if our moms couldn’t make it. But the only lady I could think of was Miss Pawley, and everybody knows she’s Ledge’s girlfriend, not yours.”

Mike nodded. “Yeah, I see the problem.”

But darn it, was there no way to get this mess right? After Justine’s disappearance, he hadn’t even considered dating. He didn’t want to confuse Gavin, and he certainly didn’t want to give the police or Justine’s dad any more ammunition against him. They already thought that, jealous of her new lover, he’d strangled Justine and dumped her in the lake.

Millner had even paid teams to drag the lake. Mike had taken Gavin away while they did it, up to Firefly Glen, where Mike’s parents fussed over him and kept him distracted.

And besides, who would want to date Mike anyhow? A black cloud of suspicion followed him everywhere he went. No woman in her right mind would voluntarily join him under there in the shadows.

“Still, you could ask Debra,” Mike suggested. “She’s fun. She’s pretty.”

Gavin looked at him. “Not as pretty as mom.”

“I know. But—”

Mike stopped there. What else was there to say? Gavin wasn’t ready yet to learn that beauty wasn’t everything. Hell, it wasn’t anything.

“I know,” he said again, lamely.

Gavin smiled a little. “But maybe I’ll ask her anyhow. She knows how to make a spitball, and Hugh will think that’s cool.”

Mike rolled his eyes. “Gavin…”

“I’m just kidding.” Gavin gathered up his portable video game and once again put his hand on the door handle. “Come on, let’s go. You’ve gotta tell Ledge we’re taking the boat out.”

But when they entered the cool front office, Rutledge was nowhere to be seen. Damn it, Mike thought, trying to keep his face expressionless. Had the son of a bitch gone missing again? He wanted to help an old buddy, but not if it was going to cost him his business.

“Maybe he’s in the back,” Gavin said as he moved toward Mike’s office, where there was an armchair he liked to plop on and play his video game.

Mike heard a strange noise. A thumping noise.

Gavin looked up from his game. “What’s that? Is he busting up boxes or something?”

“I don’t know.” Mike listened a minute. Then he narrowed his eyes. That noise sounded disturbingly rhythmic. Disturbingly familiar.

He turned to Gavin. “Wait for me in my office, okay?”

Gavin’s brows tightened, and he started to move back toward Mike. “Why? Is it something bad? Is it a burglar?”

Mike smiled and shook his head. Gavin had never been fearful before Justine’s disappearance. Once, when he was only five, he’d caught a large, hairy spider under a glass and sat guard over it until morning because he didn’t want to bother Mike and Justine, who were sleeping.

Now the slightest noise in broad daylight had him as tense as a guy wire.

“No, it’s nothing. It’s just Rutledge, being a dork. I’ll take care of it.”

“Okay.” Gavin headed into Mike’s office, the little dinging and chiming sounds of his video game already audible.

Mike headed back to the receiving area, where the thumping noises had just reached a crescendo and died away. He rapped roughly on the door, though he felt like busting in and letting the damn fool get caught with his pants down.

This wasn’t the first time he’d heard those thumping noses. Not the first time Rutledge Coffee had used Mike’s business as a by-the-hour motel room.

It was beginning to piss him off.

Worst of all, Mike knew that the thumpee wasn’t Rutledge’s girlfriend, Debra Pawley. Debra was handling an open house at Justine’s mansion this afternoon. Ledge must have found some other poor fool to join him in a little afternoon delight.

Mike’s knock had brought thirty seconds of scurrying and scrabbling noises. When they stopped, he opened the door. Sure enough, there between the cabinets that held pens and pencils and spare paper was Rutledge.

He grinned at Mike, though he was flushed and disheveled. He sucked in his belly, which had just a hint of beer bloat, while he put the finishing touches on his belt buckle.

Standing behind him was a curvy redhead who looked familiar. Mike noticed the smell of melted cheese, and then he remembered. Bonnie, the girl who delivered their pizzas when they had to work late.

“Hi, Bonnie,” he said.

“Hi, Mr. Frome,” she responded shyly. She swiped at her hair, which was decorated with tiny Styrofoam packing peanuts. They must have been using the mail table. “I’m sorry… I mean I brought Mr. Coffee a pizza and—”

Rutledge gave her a look. “And you were just leaving.” He shook his own hair with his fingers. “Right?”

“Right.” Bonnie slipped by Mike carefully, as if it would be rude to touch him. “Goodbye, Mr. Frome.”

When she was gone, Mike turned to Rutledge. “You stupid son of a bitch.”

Rutledge had decided to brazen it out. “Why? She’s got great tits, and we got the pizza for free.” He held up a slice and bit into it. “Want some?”

“No. My kid’s out there, Ledge. What I want is for you to stop treating my business like a brothel.”

Rutledge chewed a minute before responding. “A brothel?” He grimaced. “You sound like my Victorian uncle. You know, I think you may be hungrier than you think. What’s it been, two years? You’re starving, my friend, and you just don’t know it.”

For a minute Mike wanted to punch him. What the hell did he know about the two years Mike had just been through? What did Rutledge Lebron Coffee III, who had spent his life taking, whether from the pizza girls or from his parents, know about real loss? He thought that because he’d run through his inheritance and had to work for a living, he had really suffered.

And on top of that he was idiot enough to cheat on Debra. Sure, they’d both done crap like this in high school, but they were grown men now, supposedly. And Debra just might be the best thing that had ever happened to a jerk like Rutledge.

“Get out,” Mike said. “Go home and don’t come back until you’re ready to work for your paycheck, not sit around eating pizza and screwing the delivery girl.”

Rutledge frowned. “Come on, Mike. You know I was kidding. I—”

But just then Mike’s cell phone rang. He tugged it out of his pocket roughly and answered without looking at the caller ID.

“Yes,” he said tightly. “What is it?”

“Mike? It’s Debra.”

Debra? She sounded stuffy and wet, as if she’d been crying. Had she somehow found out about Rutledge and the pizza girl already? Mike tightened his grip on the phone.

“Hey,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“I—” She began to cry in earnest. “Oh, Mike—”

“Honey, calm down. What’s wrong?”

“I found her,” she said. “In the garden, in the larkspurs. I saw something and—” She couldn’t go on. She was crying so hard she was hiccuping.

Saw something? That wasn’t much to go on, but Mike’s blood was already running cold. He knew he still held the phone, because he could hear Debra crying, but he couldn’t feel his fingers. Rutledge had gone very quiet, too, and was watching him carefully.

“What? Debra, try to tell me. What did you see?”

“B-bones,” she spluttered out. “A hand. A human hand.”

“Oh, my God,” he said in a stranger’s voice. He felt dizzy. It was as if he’d been holding his breath for two years, waiting for this call.

For a minute, he saw the slim white bones against the black mud, in the blue shadows of the larkspurs.

But then a more terrible image took over his mind’s eye. He saw Gavin, sitting innocently in his office, playing video games, never guessing that the blue spring sky had exploded and was already falling around them.

“Mike? Did you hear me? It’s— It’s—”

“I know who it is,” he said. And then, in his head, he heard the cruelest words in the English language.

It’s my son’s dead mother.

CHAPTER THREE

JUSTINE’S MANSION WAS every bit as overblown and pretentious as Suzie remembered from her visits here four years ago. Suzie stood in the center of the great room and shook her head. All this sprawling marble, frou-frou Louis-something furniture and cherubs grinning down from celestial ceilings.

Ridiculous. Marie Antoinette might have been comfortable here, but Suzie darn sure wasn’t.

But Mayor Millner had asked her to come. And considering that his daughter’s dead body had been found buried in the yard just two weeks ago, she hadn’t been able to say no.

She picked up a millefleur glass bowl, which was the only truly pretty thing in the room, lots of red and blue and yellow and green coils of glass captured inside it like a field of wildflowers. It must have been a wedding present. Justine would never have picked out anything so sweet.

Deep in the recesses of the house, a thump sounded. Then a whispering shuffle, as if someone dragged something heavy over the marble.

Suzie set the bowl back down carefully, replacing it in its same circle of dust. She looked over her shoulder toward the circular staircase. A shadow lay on the checkerboard marble floor, and it had a watery quality, as if something or someone just out of sight was stealthily moving.

“Mayor Millner?” Suzie walked to the edge of the room and looked out.

There was no answer. The shadow was perfectly still now, bisecting one white and one black square. She scanned the hall and realized that it came from a door, which was propped half open and cut off the light from the etched-glass front entry.

“Dork,” she told herself, and went back into the room.

She twisted her watch on her wrist and looked at the face. Where the heck was Millner? She didn’t like being down here all alone.

At least she hoped she was all alone. A half-naked gardener, who clearly believed he had come into the world gift wrapped and labeled To Women, From God, had opened the front door. He had licked her all over with his eyes, and then, when she’d given him her best no-way-in-hell look, he’d deposited her in this room and ambled out the back door.

He’d told her he needed to put out some poison for the rabid raccoons, which she had to admit was pretty funny as a response to her rejection. She did have on a lot of eye shadow today.

But who knew what he was really doing? Any dude who liked to strut his six-pack and his five-o’clock shadow at nine in the morning simply couldn’t be trusted.

He was probably the murderer himself.

She shivered. That didn’t come out as funny as she’d meant it to.

She looked out the big bay window toward the lake, which shimmered so violently under the bright morning sun that it seemed to be on fire.

And then, for the very first time, she realized that this wasn’t a scary story; it wasn’t a dream. And it wasn’t a joke.

Justine was really dead. Her body had been found right out there, between the marble house and the fiery lake.

There really was a murderer.

Suzie’s stomach tightened, which made her mad at herself. When did she get to be such a bundle of nerves? No one was after her. At any given moment, there were probably a hundred people in Justine’s life who might have been driven to murder. Ten years ago, Suzie could have been one of them. It wouldn’t necessarily follow that those people would ever kill anyone else.

Justine had always been a law of her own.

Suzie sat on the piano bench, her legs oddly weak. Back in Albany, when she’d heard about Justine’s body being found, she’d thought, oh, poor Mike. And then, poor Gavin. And then, though she wasn’t proud of this, good riddance.

But never once had she truly assimilated the reality. A real, breathing woman, a woman with laughter and dreams and passions and fears, was dead. All her possibilities for good or bad were extinguished.

And a son was motherless.

Much as she’d disliked Justine, Suzie wished that the beautiful blonde would saunter into the room, tossing her wavy hair and laughing through her full red lips at what a gullible dork Suzie Strickland was, falling for yet another of Justine’s mean practical jokes.

But it would never happen.

Suzie flipped open the sheet music and hit a few keys, thinking the noise might chase away the image of Justine’s red lips rotting in the garden just a hundred yards away.

The piano was so out of tune it made her ears hurt. She wondered whether Justine had been tone-deaf. Mike had been musical, she remembered that. Probably, after Mike moved out, no one had touched the piano at all.

“Suzie?”

She looked up at the sound of Mayor Millner’s voice. He stood in the entryway, and for a minute they just stared at each other, as if neither one could believe their eyes.

“Suzie Strickland?” He squinted. “Is that really you?”

She stood, smoothing her long hair, her blue cotton skirt falling around her shins. She was used to this stunned double take when she saw people who’d known her back in Firefly Glen. Sometimes it annoyed her. Had people really been so blinded by her purple hair and black glasses that they didn’t recognize her without them?

But it didn’t annoy her today. She was too shocked herself. The last time she saw him, Mayor Millner had been black haired, bold and big chested, in his prime and enjoying it. Exuding importance.

The man she saw now looked fifty years older, not ten. His hair was thin, unkempt and the color of unpolished silver. His shoulders were rounded, sloping in, like a person carrying a boulder on his back.

She flushed with instinctive shame, remembering her callous “good riddance” when she’d heard of Justine’s death. How could she have been such a bitch? To Suzie, Justine was little more than a bitter memory, a cartoon caricature of aggressive breasts and predatory lips.

To this man Justine had been life itself.

“Hello, Mayor,” Suzie said, about ten times as gently as she’d intended to. Mayor Millner had treated Suzie like dirt in the old days, and she’d been looking forward to a little payback. But that was unthinkable now.

He came into the room. His left arm seemed to be trembling, and he held it close to his side.

“Thank you for coming,” he said. “I wouldn’t have recognized you. You look lovely.”

She ignored the barb. Though she knew it hadn’t been intentional, it was true. She hadn’t been exactly “lovely” back in her high school days. She’d gone out of her way to avoid it. She’d been making a statement, or so she’d thought.

Mostly, she knew now, she’d just been hiding behind it.

“I know this must be a terrible time for your family,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you.” His eyes, watery from the beginning, glistened in the light from the bay window. “It’s been a two-year nightmare, but in my heart I’ve always known she was dead. She would never have put her mother through this.”

Suzie nodded, though she wasn’t quite as certain about that. In the past, Justine had rarely seemed to concern herself with the fallout from her outrageous behavior. But she had to allow that perhaps Justine’s parents knew her better than Suzie did.

“Why did you want to see me, Mayor?”

She couldn’t imagine calling him anything else, though he wasn’t the mayor of Firefly Glen anymore, she’d heard. When Justine disappeared, he had resigned that job and come to live alone here, in this house, for eighteen months, looking for his daughter and waiting for her to come home.

She wondered if that haunted him now, knowing that, every time he walked down to the lake, he had passed within feet of Justine’s dead body.

If Suzie had ever needed proof that there was no such thing as ghosts, this would be it. Surely Justine’s ghost would have called out to her father as he tromped by, supervising the divers who dragged Tuxedo Lake.

“I need you to help me,” Mayor Millner said with more force than Suzie had seen yet. “I want justice for my daughter.”

Something invisible skittered down Suzie’s spine on tiny cold feet. What was he talking about? Did he think she had done something to Justine? Exactly how crazy had grief left this guy?

“Justice?”

“Yes. I want that bastard Mike Frome arrested, but the police say they don’t have enough evidence.”

Suzie frowned. “Mike? You think Mike killed Justine?”

“I don’t think he did. I know he did. And I’m going to make him pay for it, if it’s the last thing I do. I need you to help me.”

“Mayor Millner, I don’t think—”

“He did it, damn it. He never loved her. He just used her, and then, when he got caught, he had to marry her. He never gave a damn about her except as a plaything.”

The tears she’d seen in his eyes a minute ago had been replaced by a fanatical gleam. She had a cowardly urge to just turn and get the heck out of here, but she forced herself to remain calm. Maybe she could make him see reason.

Mike hadn’t loved Justine when he married her, that much was definitely true. Suzie had been with Mike the night he found out Gavin was his son, and that he would have to marry Justine. A sheltered Firefly Glen teenager, Mike Frome had been faced with the first problem so big his rich, loving family couldn’t fix it, and it had damn near broken his heart. He’d sat on the floor of her kitchen and cried like a child.

She had thought back on that night often, and wished she had been more sympathetic. But her own heart had been a little cracked, and at the time she hadn’t been very good at tenderness or compassion.

Still…Mike Frome, a cold-blooded murderer? Not until penguins ice-skated in hell.