Chasing Venus (5 page)

All those hours of
servitude at her computer seemed worth it now.
 
All that battling with the language, the
struggle to make her characters leap off the page and dance, all those
mornings, nights and
noons
of trying to craft stories
that people would want to read—she’d done it.
 
So much for the naysayers.
 
She’d done it.

See, Philip?

She hated herself for
thinking of him at this moment.
 
He,
chief doubter, didn’t deserve to be part of her victory.

The organ music
swelled.
 
With a congratulatory pat
on her shoulder, Frankie edged away.
 
Annie blinked, tried to restrain the tears that pooled behind her
eyes.
 
At least it was socially
acceptable to cry in this setting, better than, say, screaming for joy.

She had a distraction,
at least, the bereaved family shuffling up the center aisle.
 
Along with everybody else, she pivoted
in the pew to see.

And found herself
staring, once again, at the man she now knew by name.
 
Reid Gardner.

*

He held her gaze
without blinking, a skill he’d honed in his cop days, and tried to get a bead
on why this woman interested him.
 
He’d known who she was right away, thanks to the reading he’d done on
the short flight up California’s coast.
 
Along with a file of background information on the writer murders,
Sheila had provided him with a handful of mystery novels to acquaint him with
some of the personalities.
 
He’d
read a few pages of each and given a passing glance to the authors’ bios and
photos.
 
One had captured his
attention more than the rest.

The black-and-white
still hadn’t let on how feisty this particular writer was.
 
Or how much intelligence shone out of
her bright green eyes.
 
Or that she
favored a musky perfume over a floral scent.
 
Or how her voice had a husky quality
that made him wonder what sounds she might produce in other circumstances.

Not that she was the
sort of woman who made a man think instantly of sex, at least not more than any
other attractive female.
 
She was
more a tomboy type than an erotic beauty.
 
He’d always favored the girl-next-door, though.
 
After all, look at Donna.

Remembering Donna made
Reid break the stare.
 
He couldn’t
think of her and look at another woman.
 
It seemed disloyal, even now.
 
Five years it had been since he lost her.
 
Such a long time, and so little progress
made.
 
Visions of her, bleeding to
death at the mouth of that damn alley, still haunted his dreams.
 
Bigelow still roamed free.
 
Justice still remained to be done.

Sheila, beside Reid
next to the aisle, leaned toward him.
 
“That’s Boswell’s husband walking in front of the coffin,” she whispered
in her lightly accented voice, then consulted her notes.
 
“Charles
Waring
.
 
And that’s her mother.”

The widower was an
unprepossessing man who looked like he spent all his time indoors.
 
Maggie Boswell’s mother was a
white-haired woman nearly bent double with a dowager’s hump.

“They didn’t have
children,” Sheila added, then flipped through the slim reporter’s notebook in
which she’d jotted notes on the videotape the crew had already shot and on what
remained to be done that afternoon.

All told, Reid did not
find the service notable save for an unusually verbose eulogy delivered by the
new widower.
 
Eventually it wound to
a close.
 
Mourners filed out behind
the coffin.

“I’ll catch up with
you,” Reid told Sheila, and without waiting for a response plunged into the
thick of the departing crowd.
 
She’d
be surprised by him abandoning her but he knew she could manage the B-roll and
interviews on her own.
 
And there
was something he wanted to do.

Something that’ll advance the story
, he told himself, keeping his
eyes on the brunette ahead of him, who was walking swiftly now, unencumbered by
her friend in the wheelchair.

Reid got stalled by a
crowd in the church’s narrow vestibule and managed to extricate himself only
with a few gentle shoves.
 
On the
street out front, he spied her halfway down the hill to the right.
 
Then she made another right and
disappeared from view.

He caught up with her
at the base of the hill as she was unlocking a powder-blue Honda
parallel-parked in front of an Art Deco apartment building.
 
“I’m thinking it’s time for me to
introduce myself.”
 
He held out his
hand.
 
“Reid Gardner.”

“I already know your
name.”
 
She ignored his hand,
instead swinging the driver’s side door open.
 
If he hadn’t hopped backward it would
have slammed into a part of his anatomy he’d rather not injure.

“Ah.
 
Well.
 
I apologize for not introducing myself
earlier, Annette.”
 
She didn’t react
to his use of her name.
 
She simply
tossed her handbag in the passenger seat, then peeled off her black jacket and
threw that inside as well.
 
“Where
is Michael Ellsworth, by the way?”

No reaction to his
familiarity with her friend in the wheelchair, either.
 
“He went to the funeral lunch with my
agent.”

“You’re not
going?”
 
Reid lay his hands on the
driver’s-side door as she settled herself in the car.

“I have a manuscript to
write.
 
So I’m going home to write
it.”
 
She tugged on the inner handle
of the door but he didn’t release it.
 
“Will you give me back my car door, please?”

“Look, it’s like
this.”
 
He opened the door all the
way and crouched with one knee on the asphalt, so their eyes were level.
 
“My show is doing a segment on the
murders and I’d like to talk with you about them.
 
As I said before, maybe I could put you
on camera for a couple of questions.”

“I’m sure that’s a very
nice offer but I’m going to pass.”
 
She poked the key into the ignition and turned it.
 
The engine revved into life.

“You would provide a
unique perspective.
 
You’re an
up-and-coming member of the mystery community.
 
I expect you’d have insights I wouldn’t
get elsewhere.”

“Be that as it may, I’m
really not interested.
 
Why don’t
you
go to the funeral lunch?
 
I’m sure you’d find lots of takers
there.”
 

He hated to admit it
but thought he was probably beat.
 
He rose but didn’t step away from the car.
 
“By the way, on the flight up today I
read the beginning of
Devil’s Cradle
.”

She was staring out the
Honda’s front window but he could see her battle her desire to ask the question
any author would be sorely tempted to ask.
 
As he hoped, she couldn’t resist.
 
“What did you think of it?”

“I thought it was
really good.
 
Very gripping.
 
Made me want to read more.”

“Well, I guess you can
do that on your flight home.”

This time he stepped
away from the car.
 
“If I don’t get
too distracted by the author’s photo.”
 
Then he shut the door but kept his eyes on the woman inside.

She sped away from the
curb without giving him another glance.

*

The last thing she
needed was a man interested in her.
 
Annie was convinced of that even before she cleared San Francisco
proper.

Her Honda sped north up
Highway 101, Marin and then Sonoma counties flying past in a blur of suburbia
beautified by more trees and rolling hills than that usually described.
 
Eventually she exited onto a narrow road
that led toward the coast.

As she careened up one
incline and down another, she decided that Reid Gardner might be an interesting
man—he certainly was a good-looking one—but she was in a phase of
her life when she wanted to be unencumbered by male needs and desires.
 
Selfish though other people might find
it, she wanted to focus on herself: her writing, her workouts, her parents, her
friends.
 
She’d spent a lot of
time—all of her twenties—trying to make Philip happy, and that would
have been wonderful if he’d returned the favor.
 
But instead he found fault with so much,
and it got really wearing.
 
They
always had to live spitting distance from the hospital in deference to his long
and unpredictable hours, regardless how
grotty
the
neighborhood was.
 
She had to
understand how much pressure he was under, and how fatigued he was, and so
forgive his moods and tirades.
 
She
had to stifle any complaint about her own unsatisfying work as a legal
secretary, even though it was helping put him through his medical training, as
he declared he “shouldn’t have to listen to it.”

She often wondered
where her passionate college lover had gone.
 
It took her some time to realize that
she must have conjured him in her imagination.

The one consolation of
those troubled years was that Annie had time to write mysteries on the
side.
 
She wrote almost as a guilty
pleasure because she knew Philip disapproved of the genre.
 
Even after a big-name publisher scooped
up one of her manuscripts, Philip poked fun.
 
Later, she wondered if he preferred the
old arrangement: when he was much the brighter light.

Now all she wanted was
to reclaim the Annie she used to be, when she was as courageous and full of
spirit as any fictional hero, when her future seemed boundless and
exciting.
 
That Annie was still
there, buried under layers of hurt and disillusion.
 
Slowly, slowly, she was rising again to
the surface.
 
Annie did not want her
progress hampered by a new man, regardless of how attractive he might be.

She reached into the
handbag she’d thrown on the passenger seat and pulled out her cell phone.
 
One thing she could count on: her mother
would bolster her resolve.

She listened to her
parents’ phone ring off the hook.
 
She could imagine it on the Formica kitchen counter of their Berkeley
bungalow, atop a pile of phone books and next to the pots of marijuana plants
they’d been growing all her life.
 
There was an outdoor crop as well, larger and just as well-tended.

Traditional, they were
not.

She disconnected the
call and made the final turn that led to her house.
 
Most likely her parents were at a
protest.
 
Like other people went to
movies, they went to protests.
 
It
wasn’t a practice that had endeared them to her ex.

About a block away from
her house, she frowned.
 
A cop car
was parked at the curb.
 
Helms was
leaning against the front fender, his beefy arms crossed over his chest.
 
His sidekick
Pincus
stood on the sidewalk talking to two men in dark suits, a heavyset fiftyish
black man and an Asian man fifteen years his junior.
 
They all looked toward her car as she
slowed and stopped.

She exited the car and
collected her things, less than pleased with this development.
 
She suspected she knew who the men in
suits were, and in seconds she received confirmation.

The African-American
approached and flipped open a leather case to reveal his ID.
 
He looked like a cross between a
preacher and an NFL coach, someone who could tame either Satan or a prima donna
wide receiver.
 
“FBI.
 
San Francisco field office.
 
I’m Special Agent in Charge Lionel
Simpson and this is my assistant Mark Higuchi.
 
Ms. Rowell, we’d like to ask you a few
questions.”

Not how she wanted to
spend the rest of her afternoon, but it was clear this was a command
performance.

“Of course.”
 
She led the men inside.
 
They took up residence in her living room,
dwarfing the furniture.
 
Simpson, as
the quartet’s big dog, claimed the largest upholstered chair and flipped open a
notebook to a page on which a great deal had already been written.
 
“Tell us about yourself, Ms.
Rowell.
 
You’ve lived in Bodega Bay how
long?”

She settled into a
cane-backed chair she carried over from the dining room.
 
“A little more than a year.”

“And you live here
alone.”

“Yes.
 
I’m divorced.”
 
Annie noted Simpson’s wedding ring and
gold bands on every other man in the room.
 
Somehow her failed marriage felt like a count against her.