Revenge is Sweet (A Samantha Church Mystery) (9 page)

“Thanks again for bringing everything,” she said.

He nodded and left the room waving good-bye.

Sam waited until Danny started up the stairs before she turned her attention to the box. As if she had no control over her actions, she opened the box and slowly started sifting through the contents.

She pulled out a piece of hand-held exercise equipment that Jonathan used often to strengthen his grip and forearms. She smiled slightly as she remembered going to his office many times and seeing him holding it in his hand and squeezing constantly while talking on the phone. He used it every day. She couldn’t remember a time that he didn’t own one. She tried squeezing, but it took her two hands to get it to close.

Next she pulled out a matching pen and pencil set that she had given him for Christmas one year. It was still in its original box and Sam wondered if Jonathan had ever used it. She pulled a five-by-seven framed photograph from the box and felt sadness and emptiness tug at her heart. It was a picture of April and Jonathan together on the beach. Sam knew Jonathan kept the photo on the right corner of his desk, where he could see it no matter what he was doing, talking on the phone, working on the computer, or talking to someone.

In the cool, semi-dark of the conference room, Sam sat down in one of the chairs and rubbed her hand lightly over the front of the glass. They were in Florida when Sam snapped the picture of the two of them getting ready to venture out into the water. April was seven years old, but she was eager to go out into the water. A small smile spread slowly over Sam’s face. April, a carbon-copy of Robin, was a little rebel with no fear, not easily intimidated, ready to try anything. April had been swimming like a fish since she was four years old. Just like her aunt was at the same age.

Sam remembered that Jonathan had to hold her back, waiting for just the right moment to enter the surf. They were holding hands and April was looking in the direction where Jonathan was pointing when Sam snapped the photo. The water had just rushed in. It covered Jonathan’s ankles. It had gone past April’s knees.

Sam stared at the still images until they seemed to move. A knock at the door interrupted her thoughts.

“Sam? You okay?”

Sam looked up. “Oh, hi, David.”

He entered the room hesitantly. “I’ve walked by a few times and noticed you sitting there. You hadn’t moved, so I hope you don’t mind me checking on you.”

Sam’s laugh was small. “I’m fine,” she said and patted the chair beside her, an invitation for David to sit next to her. “They brought the rest of Jonathan’s things from the department and I was going through them…”

Her voice trailed off as she went back and stared at the picture a moment more before showing it to David. He leaned heavy on the arm of the chair for a closer look. She handed it to him. He took it and held it with two hands. She noticed that his forearms were hairless, thin but muscled, laced with veins.

“Jonathan always liked photos where the people weren’t looking at the camera and posing,” Sam said. “He liked to capture them unaware, doing what they had been naturally when the flash went off. Jonathan really liked this one of April. He had it enlarged, framed and on his desk at work as soon as he saw it.”

“It’s a nice picture, Sam,” David said. He looked at the photo another moment and handed it back to her. “Are you going to be okay?”

“Oh, sure, David, I’ll be fine,” Sam said and rose from the chair. She put the photo back in the box. “I probably shouldn’t be going through this stuff here at work, anyway. I’ll do it tonight.”

David waited as Sam collected Jonathan’s items and put everything back in the box. He followed her out of the conference room.

The rest of the afternoon at work passed in a blur. Sam decided against telling Nick about the death threat in the e-mail. Maybe a foolish thing to do, she thought. She was more afraid of Nick calling the police than she feared the threat, at least for now.

By 5:30 p.m., the rest of reporters had gone for the day and Sam watched Nick leave his office and head up the stairs. He knew she was still in the newsroom, but he did not look in her direction when he left. She was alone and the large room was quiet, save for the usual squelch from the police scanner. She checked her e-mail for messages one last time. Nothing new. She shut down her computer without reading the kidnapper’s message again. She gathered her purse and coat and left the building.

A band of smooth gray clouds had covered the sky, casting the city in early twilight. The cold had settled in quickly as evening made its descent on the city. She buttoned her coat and walked slowly from the building toward the car. She could see herself walking through this parking lot many times toward her Mustang. She tried to keep her thoughts neutral, but she couldn’t help thinking of the night that Jonathan was at the wheel of her car. The last night of his life.

“No,” she said aloud. She would not allow herself to think anymore about that evening.

She drove from the parking lot and headed south on Wadsworth Boulevard toward Sixth Avenue and home. She thought about moving to her grandmother’s ranch next month. It would be a new start, and that gave her reason to smile. She turned up the radio. Her heart felt light again with the hope that April might come.

Wrapped up in her thoughts and listening to songs on the radio, Sam did not notice the dark sedan that had begun to follow her. It had been in the parking lot of the beauty salon, which paralleled the newspaper, waiting for her to leave. It followed her at a safe distance until she pulled into her apartment complex.

Sam heard her telephone ringing as she headed up three flights of stairs to her apartment. She quickly unlocked the door, rushed passed Morrison and reached for the cordless phone. She caught it on the end of the fifth ring, one more before the answer machine would have picked up the call.

“Hello,” Sam said, trying to catch her breath.

“Sam? Is that you?”

“Yes, Esther it’s me. Sorry. I’m a little winded. I was coming up the steps when I heard the phone. I didn’t want the answering machine to get it.”

“Well, I’m glad I got you…”

There was a moment of silence as Esther’s voice fell away. Sam’s heart sank, sure what was coming.

“Listen, Sam, I don’t think it’s a good idea for April to come now. She’s just got here and she’s started making friends at school and I don’t want to disrupt that so soon. This is such a tender, young age, and she needs to have some new friends now. You know how it is. You were that age once.”

Yes, of course, Sam knew. She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. She could feel Morrison moving in around her ankles, meowing softly.

“Esther, I’m not asking to take April out of school for a whole week, just a long weekend. Nona and Howard would like to see her just as much as I would.”

Sam opened her eyes and kept them fixed on a nonexistent pattern on a wall in the living room. She was trying to keep not only the disappointment from her voice, but her anger.

“No, Sam, I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” Esther said unconvinced. “Besides she’s got a big science project due very soon and she’ll need some help with that.”

“Esther, please.”

“Why don’t you come up here?” Esther said.

Wilson popped into Sam’s mind. She rubbed the back of her head, where a small bump still remained from the night they were kidnapped. Sam wondered if Wilson was injured.
“Esther, I … I, uh, can’t come to Washington right now. I’ve got something going on at work, that’s very important and I just can’t be away from…”

Esther cut her off.
“Oh, I see,” she said in an accusatory tone. “Work is more important than the relationship with your daughter.”

“It’s not that at all,” Sam said, realizing the trap she was getting herself into.

“What is it then? A two-for-one special on a six pack of Bud this weekend?”

Sam took a deep breath
and tried to ignore Esther’s hurtful comment. “Esther, please. It is very important that I be here.”

Esther snorted. “I think you need to re-examine what’s important, Samantha. Work or your daughter shouldn’t be a choice.
You have an invitation to come. Besides, I’ve already told April as much. You should be on the first plane out in the morning.”

Sam wanted to tell Esther that she was being unreasonable, but she had already made her decision. She wasn’t going to change her mind through arguing. Sam looked at her watch. It was just after seven p.m. Pacific time.

“Could I talk to April?”

“She’s taking her bath,” Esther said in a huffy voice.

Sam nodded knowingly. Esther always made it a point to call when April couldn’t come to the phone to talk to her mother. Not that she would probably want to anyway. Sam couldn’t blame her daughter. She had every reason not to want to talk to her.

“Esther, I’ll see what I can do about making arrangements to come as soon as I can. But I’m sorry, I can’t be on a plane first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Don’t be sorry to me, Samantha. It’s your daughter you should be sorry to.
I
know how you are. Just keep in mind that your daughter’s impression of you is still being formed.”

Sam heard a loud click in her ear. She took the phone away and stared at it.
“Bye to you, too, Esther,” she said and tossed the phone on the couch, acid churning in her stomach.

She moved to the big chair in the living room and sat down hard. She stared out into the parking lot. Amber street lights glowing in the distance stared back. Lights were on in other apartments, people home safe for the evening. It was an often quiet and peaceful image that she usually found soothing, but tonight she stared at the sight unseeing. Morrison jumped up in her lap, meowing quietly. She scratched him under the chin, feeling a lift in her mood. The little creature had a way of doing that to her.

“Are you a hungry little fella?”

Sam went to the kitchen and opened a can of cat food and fed Morrison. Before she left the kitchen, she stopped, eyeing the cabinets over the stove. She knew there was a nearly full bottle of scotch up there. She was sorry now that she hadn’t dumped it down the drain with the rest of the booze she had thrown out
more than two weeks ago. It was only tempting her now. A drink would help to calm her nerves. When she realized that she was salivating at the thought of having a drink, she felt completely disgusted with herself. She couldn’t give in to the temptation now. She pulled a dining room chair into the kitchen, retrieved the bottle and poured the remaining contents down the drain, holding her breath so the fumes wouldn’t entice her.

She went back to the big chair, not bothering to change out of her work clothes. She grabbed Robin’s Izod sweater and put it on. The color reminded her of the brown leaves she saw this afternoon from the window in Nick’s office. She remembered thinking how fragile they looked dangling from the limbs, barely hanging on. Yet somehow they had managed to stay on the trees through the coldest and windiest part of winter. And the darkest. They had survived, but now what?

Morrison returned and jumped in her lap. The heat from his body began to warm her and make her sleepy. She felt herself drifting off. She woke later with a start, dreaming about Jonathan. She looked at the clock on the mantel. It was nearly midnight. She had been asleep all evening. She felt hungry, but it was too late to eat.

“Come on, Morrison,” she said. “Let’s go to bed.”

Morrison jumped down and followed Sam into the bedroom. Sam dropped all her clothes at the foot of her bed and changed into a nightgown. Within minutes the house was dark and she was in bed.

With all the lights out in the apartment, the engine in the black sedan purred to life. It rolled slowly beneath Sam’s bedroom window, its shiny exterior gleaming under the amber streetlights.

My Dear Sweet April,

That’s what happens when you sleep the entire evening in the big chair in the living room and then get up and actually try to go to bed. You end up spending the rest of the night tossing and turning in the dark.

I looked at the clock one more time after going to bed and when it showed 2:51 a.m., ‘what’s the use,’ I thought.

No use disturbing little Morrison, who had no problem whatsoever when he followed me into the bedroom at midnight, going back to sleep. He was still curled in a fat little ball when I carefully slid out of bed and headed for the kitchen. I made a cup of Howard’s hot
cocoa standing under the soft light over the stove. Now I am back in the big chair looking out the living room window when I am not writing to you.

Amber lights from the park
ing lot are twinkling in the distance, and everything else seems to have taken on the calm and stillness that this time of night usually brings. The sounds of traffic have dissipated and the sky is clear above and a band of stars spread out across the sky in a thin ribbon of light. I follow the trail until it disappears into the darkness.

It seems in these moments
, my sweet baby, I find the peace that often eludes me the rest of my waking hours.

There is no use trying to sleep anymore the rest of this night.
Your father will only return to me in my dreams. I once welcomed them and him in them, but it has been a long time since I have. A long, long time.

It
occurred to me while sitting here, April, that I have never really told you that much about your father and me. It used to be when we first separated that I could hardly wait to go to sleep at night. I was sure to dream of him. I liked it in the beginning. I missed him terribly and dreaming was the only way I had of being with him. Of walking beside him again.

But it has been some time since
your father has stood beside me in a physical sense. Close enough, that if I wanted to, I could reach out and take his hand in mine. Or as I had so often done, at least earlier on in our lives together, I could run my hands through his hair or rub his neck while we were driving somewhere in the car together. I loved his hair, soft and auburn, short and closely cut. What gray there was collected evenly along the sides. Your dad never did mind the gray, but I can tell you that he hated that his forehead was high. But I loved it and often told him that’s what made him so attractive.

Your father
was slender and tall, almost six-foot three. The thin wire-framed glasses he wore I always thought added a scholarly look to his appearance and the stubble of a day’s beard growth on his face often made him irresistible. In the beginning he wore the beard because he knew how much I loved it, even though he’d tell me often that he didn’t like it because it made his face itch. But I think he must have grown to like it. He kept it when we separated and even after we divorced. I told myself once not long after our divorce was final that he kept it mainly because it tickled you when he gave you a kiss! He always loved the sound of your laughter.

I am allowing myself to let these faded images of him wash over me. Even aft
er everything that has happened I still find comfort in them. Just the other night I was standing in line behind a man at the grocery store. He was tall and slender and wearing a smooth band of gold on his left finger. I smiled when he turned slightly, allowing me to see the box of diapers he was about to purchase. He looked at me eyeing his purchase. His eyebrows drifted toward the top of his head as he smiled, obviously proud, and said “I have a little one at home now.” He looked to me to be a doting father and a loving husband, though nothing I saw about him specifically made me think in such a way. And what does standing in line for five or ten minutes in the grocery store tell me about a person anyway?

That’s something
your dad was in the very beginning, April, a loving father and husband. I don’t remember how many times he made late-night runs to the grocery store to buy diapers for you, my sweet baby.

We
can’t go back to days gone by, but there are times that I want to, so much so that sometimes the longing inside presses itself against my chest, making it nearly impossible to breathe.

Perhaps, sweetie, your father,
always was loving and doting and it was me who changed. Maybe grandma Church is right. She blames me for everything that happened to your dad after he met me. “Money,” she used to tell me, April, “is not the root of all evil. You are, Samantha.”

I always wanted to say something back at her in a voice dripping with sarcasm and disrespect like, “Tell me how you really feel, Esther.” Then I wanted to follow that up with something said under my breath like “Bitch.” I just kept my thoughts to myself instead
and forgive me now, sweetie, for telling you this, but if I am going to tell you about your father, I am going to tell you everything about him. Your grandmother’s words were like a Blue Northern, the chill of the wind, it seemed, wouldn’t leave me for days after one of her remarks.

I remember
how your father used to tell me after we started dating how his mother thought that police officers and reporters were a poor mix. We used to laugh over it eating greasy burgers and fries and drinking chocolate milkshakes in that old diner off Wadsworth Boulevard. I can still see him holding his hamburger up to his mouth and as the thick gold chain he wore on his right wrist would slide down his forearm.

We met while I was working for the Denver Post. I had covered an arson that had occurred at a warehouse in Grandview.
Your father was the lead detective on the case. I met him once at the scene and then we talked back and forth by phone for over a week whenever something new happened or I needed an update on the story. I knew I was instantly attracted to him, but I was certain that the feeling wasn’t mutual, so I didn’t allow my hopes or feelings to build. Until I met your father, baby, dating just wasn’t something I did on a regular basis.

My
own father, whose memory I still can’t seem to erase, said my looks were as plain as a farm girl’s in every sense of the word.

“Ha, ha, ha,” I used to say when his back was turned, “looks aren’t everything.”

Well, they solved the arson, and I filed the final in the series of stories thinking that would be the last I’d hear of Jonathan Church.

Several weeks passed before one night, when I was working late and he showed up at the Post. I tried not to act too startled that he had slipped past security and found his way to my desk, or too pleased since the rest of the newsroom was empty that it was me he had come to see. He asked, apparently knowing my full-blooded Italian heritage, if I knew a good place in town for a smooth glass of
merlot and a dish of homemade pasta.

“What makes you think I’m Italian?” I asked, unable to help the smile that was stretching across
my face like the Grand Canyon.

“With a name like Marino?” he said. “Who’s kiddin’ who?”

I, in fact, knew of a small cozy little place on 38
th
Avenue, for the merlot and fresh pasta he was hungry for. It was the only place in Denver where Nona would eat. If she ate there, it was Italian enough for me. We ate and then went to his place. I woke up in his arms the next morning, late for work. But I didn’t mind.

We dated ten months before
your dad asked me to marry him. We enjoyed a year of married life before I learned I was pregnant with you.

I drank a little in the beginning, but not too much
. Or maybe it was more than I realized and it was overlooked, the way couples do with certain things early on in their relationship still fragile with newness. I don’t know now. Too much time has passed and too many things have happened for me to remember much anymore.

Maybe I am the one, the reason
, April, that your father did what he did. The reason he is no longer part of this earth. Maybe I am the reason. Maybe grandma Church is right. I am the root of all evil.

I never drank when I was pregnant with
you, baby, I promise. Not a single drop. When I was carrying you, I thought that for sure I had overcome the problem. I was thrilled, but not long after you were born, the cravings, the urge for just one drink came back. Who is there to blame, but me?

Your father
was so supportive in the beginning. That changed after we had you. He didn’t like that I drank around you. In fact, he hated it and always told me so. I couldn’t seem to help myself. I can’t touch the stuff again if I ever hope to get you back, but still the urge for just one drink is always there. And I can never seem to get that feeling to leave. I wear it as if it were my own skin. Not as if it is my skin, it simply
is
my skin.

When we separated, sweetie, I know you
wanted nothing to do with me. You’d only come with me, if we went to Nona’s ranch for the weekend.

Though your father’s
feelings changed toward me, he is one of the first, if not the first, thought I have when I wake in the morning. Still, honey. I expect it to be that way now, because he is still so much a part of me, not in a physical way, but he is alive in my thoughts. Still.

Dreams were something I used to look forward to, but not anymore. Now it only seems that when I dream of him I am running as fast as I can in the other direction. And every time I look back over my shoulder
your father has gained another step. I try running faster, but it is no use. I don’t run as fast as I used to run. It’s these forty or so extra pounds that I’ve gained since all of this began to happen.

Now when I see a man wearing a smooth band of gold on his left ring finger, like the young man in the grocery store the other night, how could I not remember what it was like when
your father wore his?

He took it off months before we separated and put it in my jewelry box. When we divorced and I moved into the apartment I have now, I remember I was packing to leave and my jewelry box was one of the last things I took with me.

I can still see myself standing over it and getting ready to open the lid, thinking that I would see his ring, sitting there on top, where he had placed it. I opened the lid, but the ring was gone. I looked through everything in my box, but his ring was gone.

I remember I asked him what had become of it. He shrugged a reply. “I removed it,” he said simply. And offered nothing more. To this day, I do not know
what became of that ring. He’s gone now. So I guess I will never know.

But, April,
my wedding rings are still in my jewelry box.

And every so often I put them on.

Goodnight, sweetie, Mommie loves you now and always.