Blood Red (19 page)

 

Chapter 10

“I
have good news and bad news,” Bob's voice greets Rick when he picks up his cell phone on Monday afternoon. “Which do you want first?”

No brainer: “The bad.” How bad can it be compared to all that's already happened?

“My flight was canceled. I'm stuck in New York overnight.”

“That stinks,” Rick says mildly.

“The good news is, I'm free for dinner if you are.”

His immediate instinct is to make up an excuse. He knows he said too much yesterday about Vanessa; knows Bob is concerned about him and will want to discuss it again.

No thanks.
But when he opens his mouth to say he has to work late tonight, “Sure—­dinner sounds great” comes out.

“Great. Let's go to the Blue Water Grill in Union Square. I haven't been there in a while.”

“I don't know, I'm not really—­”

“My treat,” Bob adds quickly.

“You don't have to do that.”

“I want to. If I'd been around when Vanessa died, I could have, you know . . .”

“You could have sent a fruit basket and a card. You don't have to spring for dinner at a fancy restaurant.” The quip might have worked in person, but over the phone it lands with an obnoxious thud.

I sound like an asshole
, Rick thinks.
Maybe I am an asshole.

“I'd have been here for you if I could have been, Rick.”

“I didn't mean it that way. I meant . . . never mind. Vanessa always said my communication skills weren't great.”

Her communication skills, however, were stellar. She always managed to tell him precisely what she thought of him, right to the bitter end.

Rough around the edges. That's me.

Except with Rowan. With her, he was the man he could never be for Vanessa, even from the start. Why?

Was it because Rowan, who was down to earth, unlike his wife, didn't intimidate him? Or simply that he loved her, and he'd never loved Vanessa?

Sometimes Rick wonders how he and Vanessa wound up together in the first place—­and how they'd managed to last as long as they did. When they met, they were both lonely. She was looking for a father for her children, and he was looking for . . .

Not passion, because he'd met plenty of women who were far less reserved and if not more attractive than Vanessa, who was truly striking, then at least more appealing to him. And he wasn't looking for a meal ticket, though she'd accused him of that during the final days of their marriage. Not companionship, either, because Vanessa was on the verge of being too busy for him even when they met. After they met, forget it. She had no time for him.

Maybe if she'd been more attentive to his needs, he wouldn't have strayed.

He regrets having said that to her during their last fight, the one during which he'd confessed—­all those years later—­that he'd stopped loving her years ago and fallen in love with Rowan.

Yeah. Communication isn't his forte. Either he says too much, or too little, or the wrong thing.

“I'll help you work on those communication skills,” Bob offers. “And I want you to think about taking my advice. Like I told you yesterday, if you would just reach out to the ­people who care about you, you might—­”

“I did that.”

“And . . . ?”

“We'll talk.”

“See? That's good. It's a good start.”

Realizing Bob misunderstood, Rick doesn't bother to correct him. He meant he would talk to Bob about the kids, not that the kids had agreed to talk to him when he'd reached out to them.

He'd followed Bob's advice and made four phone calls—­to his stepsons, and to his son and daughter. All four went straight into voice mail. None has been returned so far.

He spends the rest of the afternoon alternately trying to figure out how to get out of having dinner with Bob and looking forward to it.

It's been ages since he ate in a place with cloth napkins and a wine list that extends beyond house white and house red. Besides, brunch yesterday was a good distraction from thinking about Rowan. Maybe dinner tonight will be an even better one.

“A
nd who can tell me the year the first settlers arrived in Mundy's Landing?” Rowan asks her class as their afternoon history review winds down. “Raise your hands, please. No shouted answers. Let's see . . . Shane?”

“Sixteen sixty-­five?”

“Good. And do you know where they came from?”

“Holland?”

“No, the Dutch had lost control of New Netherland the year before to which country?”

“England!” Billy blurts, resulting, predictably, in a reprimand from Amanda Hicks, whose hand has been waving in the air since the history review began.

“You were supposed to raise your hand! Ms. Mundy, he was supposed to—­”

Mercifully, Amanda's final tattle of the day is curtailed by the final bell.

­“People,” Rowan calls above the explosion of chatter and scraping chairs, “please hand me your review sheets on the way out. And I'm still missing a few permission slips for our field trip. They were due on Friday. You need to get them in or you're not going!”

Predictably, she's inundated by questions about the review sheets, the homework, the permission slips, including “What permission slips?” and “What field trip?”

At last, she's alone, holding a sheaf of papers, including a permission slip that appears to be from last September's field trip, and a single boot someone just found on the floor under a desk and no one recognizes.

She closes the classroom door and then locks it, something she never does—­not from the inside, anyway. But she has only a few minutes before she heads down to the tutoring room, and the gift bag she stashed in her desk earlier has been on her mind all afternoon. It's time to find out whether it's an offering from her Secret Santa, or her Secret Stalker.

First things first. She tosses the boot into the lost and found crate with all the other single boots and shoes—­and there are many. Then she puts the papers on her desk, tosses the old permission slip into the blue recycling bin, and plucks out the things that don't belong there: an apple core, a cellophane wrapper, a mitten. The garbage goes into the garbage can, the mitten into the lost and found.

You're procrastinating. Just look inside the bag.

She opens the drawer, takes it out, and takes a deep breath.

Go ahead. Hurry up.

She gingerly pushes aside the white glitter-­dusted tissue paper tufting from the top.

What if there's a layer of yellowed newspaper beneath it?

Then that's it. I call the police
, she decides.

There's no newspaper, only a small balsam-­scented jar candle. She recognizes the label from the gift department at Vernon's Apothecary on Market Street. She was just talking about these candles in the teachers' lounge last week.

Okay. Okay, this is good.

And even if it didn't turn out to be just a harmless little gift . . .

How could she have considered calling the police?

Even if she asked them not to make the case public or involve her husband, this is a tiny village. Everyone gossips.
Everyone.
It would get back to Jake, and she'd have to tell him.

Besides, what happened last week wasn't a crime. It's not as though the cops will put the anonymous package sender on their most wanted list and alert the FBI.

Your life isn't hanging in the balance here. Your marriage, maybe, and definitely your personal integrity and peace of mind—­but not your life. Not unless . . .

Again, she thinks of Vanessa.

Again, she wonders . . . and keeps right on wondering as she endures the next ninety minutes going through the motions with her students in the tutoring room.

When at last the school day drags to a close, she's come to a decision.

Alone in her car, she takes her cell phone from her pocket and begins dialing.

M
ore than twenty-­four hours after discovering the body, Sully continues browsing through photos of young women who have recently gone missing in the tri-­state area. There are always so many—­far too many. But she's no closer to identifying the victim than she is to finding her killer.

“Sully.”

Something in Stockton's tone causes her to glance up sharply from her computer screen. Seated at his adjacent desk and focused on his own computer, he's shaking his head. “Come and look at this.”

She jumps up and hurries over. “Did you find her?”

“No, but I found this in the unsolved case files.”

Leaning over his shoulder to see the screen, Sully finds herself looking at a female corpse.

Nude . . .

Covered in bloody slashes . . .

Bald.

She curses softly. “Who is she?”

Stockton wordlessly clicks over to a new screen, revealing another photograph. This one shows a smiling young woman with long red hair.

“That's the victim?”

“Right. It's a selfie she posted on Instagram a few hours before she went missing last March in Erie, Pennsylvania.”

“So she still had her hair when she disappeared.”

“But not when her body turned up a few days later, dumped by the side of a road.”

“Son of a bitch shaves their heads.”

“Looks that way.”

Forensics already confirmed that the strands of hair that turned up near their victim had been cut or shaved off, as opposed to ripped out in a struggle.

“Are there others?” she asks, pulling up a chair.

“Aren't there always?” Stockton asks grimly, and clicks over to another case file.

M
ick has been looking for the right opportunity to anonymously present Brianna's first Secret Santa gift from the moment he arrived at school this morning. Having memorized her schedule back in September, he did his best to stay one step ahead of her as she went from class to class. That plan resulted in three tardy slips on his own schedule, and the small gift bag containing the bead charm was still in his backpack when the final bell rang.

That leaves him with two options: he can either deliver the gift to her house, or slip it into her bag or coat when she leaves them in the employee closet at the restaurant tonight.

If he waits until then, though, the mystery will be over on the first day. She'll guess that it's from either him or Zach. The only other guys who work on Mondays are Mr. Marrana and the dishwasher, both of whom are married.

After the last bell, he detours several times past Brianna's locker and her friends' lockers. No sign of her, or of them. Now running late for practice, he stops by his locker to grab his jacket and gym bag, brooding. Maybe this was a stupid idea all along. Maybe he should just forget the stupid gift, and Brianna, too.

He slams the locker door, turns around, and nearly crashes into Zach Willet.

“Sorry,” Mick mutters, and starts to move on.

“Hey, Lou, you okay?”

“Um, not really.”

“What's wrong?”

Mick turns to face him. “Are you sure about that college guy?”

“What college guy?”

“The college guy!” he repeats, wondering how Zach can possibly be so ignorant. “The one Brianna's seeing!”

“Am I sure what?”

“That she's seeing him!”

“Stop shouting at me, Mick.” Zach never calls him by his real first name, and he looks irritated.

Well, that makes two of us.

“You know what? Forget it.” Mick turns and walks away.

“You know what? I will,” Zach calls after him.

In the gym, the coach gives him extra laps for being late. Before he starts running, Mick says, “I just want to let you know that I have to leave early today for a doctor's appointment.”

The coach nods but he looks a bit suspicious, probably assuming it's a ploy to get out of running the extra laps. To prove that it isn't, Mick runs them hard and fast, and succeeds in purging some of the frustration that's been percolating all day.

Ninety minutes later, as he covers the few blocks from the school on Battlefield Road to Brianna's house on Prospect Street, he belatedly realizes that this wasn't a great plan after all. Now he can't catch the late bus with the rest of the team, which means he'll have to walk all the way home. Plus, if Mom shows up at the bus stop again like she did last Monday, she'll freak out when he doesn't get off.

He pulls his phone out of his pocket, deciding to send her a preemptive text. He can say that he's getting a ride home with one of the seniors on the team, or—­

No, he can't. His phone battery is dead.

He'll just have to deal with the consequences. Tomorrow, he'll make sure it's charged—­and come up with a better plan for delivering Brianna's gift.

Prospect Street runs along the south side of the Village Common, parallel to Church Street and perpendicular to Market Street and Fulton Avenue. East of the Common, it climbs into a hilly residential enclave known as The Heights. Mick's parents both grew up in that neighborhood, Mom on State Street right around the corner from the Armbrusters' two-­story yellow house with black shutters.

Dusk is falling. The lights are on in some of the houses he passes, and there are even a few Christmas trees glowing in front windows.

Not at Brianna's house, though. The first floor is dark, and there are no cars parked in the short driveway beside the front walk. Both her parents work up in Albany, Mick knows. They probably aren't home yet.

He looks to make sure no one is around before he stops to stare up at the light spilling from a second-­floor window. Is that Brianna's room? Is she there right now, getting ready for work beyond the drawn blinds? Is she . . . dressed?

He promptly pushes that tantalizing notion from his head, telling himself that it's probably her kid brother's bedroom anyway.