Sucker Punch (16 page)

After making sure that she wasn’t on the floor behind the costume rack, I hurried into the attached ladies’ room. I found Vonetta on the floor, her eyes closed and a trickle of blood on her forehead.

I lunged toward her, our argument forgotten. “Vonetta? Can you hear me?” I touched my fingers to her neck, felt the flutter of a heartbeat, and blinked away tears of relief. “Vonetta, are you all right?”

She didn’t move a muscle. Her eyes didn’t even twitch. But at least I knew she was alive.

I dug my cell phone from my pocket and checked for a signal. Nope. Not even one bar. I wasn’t really surprised. Cell phone service was spotty in Paradise under the best of circumstances. I thought about putting something under Vonetta’s head to make her more comfortable, but decided not to move her. I didn’t know what had happened, and I didn’t want to make an injury I couldn’t see worse by moving her.

I got to my feet and headed for the door so I could call for help, but it flew open before I could reach it. Jason Dahl burst into the room, his face a mask of concern. Alexander Pastorelli puffed in behind him, wheezing and out of breath.

Déjà vu.

“Vonetta!” Alexander rushed toward her and knelt at her side. “My God, what happened?”

“I don’t know. I was talking to Vonetta in the hall, then she came inside and I started to leave. I heard her scream, so I ran in to see what happened and found her like this. Somebody needs to call 9-1-1.”

Alexander’s head shot up and he looked at me . . . hard. “You have no idea what happened?”

“None. Why don’t you stay with her? I’ll go call for help.”

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” Alexander said, and the look in his eyes left me cold. “You go, Jason.
You
stay here with me.”

My legs were shaking so I backed to the sink and perched on the edge of the counter. “You can’t seriously think
I
did this. Vonetta’s my friend.”

“Yeah, well she’s my friend, too.” As if someone flipped a switch inside him, he went from hard-ass to Mr. Touchy-Feely in the blink of an eye. He brushed Vonetta’s cheek with the backs of his fingers and spoke gently. “Vonetta, can you hear me? It’s going to be okay. Jason has gone to call for help.”

“I didn’t do this,” I said, more to myself than to him.

“No? Well you’ll have a chance to prove it when the police get here.”

Great.
Just what I needed. More quality time with Nate Svboda. I had a sudden longing to hear Jawarski’s voice, but I refused to let myself call him. A few months ago, he’d expressed some doubt about my feelings for him. He’d asked whether I really liked him, or if I just liked the information he could give me about the case he’d been working on. Ever since then, I’d done my best to avoid talking to him about murder and mayhem. Since I hadn’t called to hear his voice before today, I couldn’t very well call now.

But oh man, I wished I could.

I spent the next two hours answering the same questions over and over again. I’d come to the theater to talk to Vonetta. I’d been about to leave when I heard her scream. No, I didn’t see anyone else. No I didn’t hear anything unusual—except, of course, the scream.

Vonetta had been awake by the time the paramedics arrived, but she hadn’t been able to shed any light on her . . . accident, either. She’d walked into the ladies’ room and something or someone had hit her from behind, that’s all she knew.

The incident raised more questions than it answered. Who would attack Vonetta, and why? Had the spotlight that killed Laurence been meant for her? Or had she seen or heard something when she found Laurence’s body that she didn’t recognize as being important?

The paramedics’ examination hadn’t revealed any serious injuries, but they’d loaded her, protests and all, into the ambulance anyway. By the time Nate had finally let me go, reporters had started to gather, and I’d had to run the gauntlet to get away from them. By the time I made it back to Divinity, Karen and Liberty were up to their eyeballs in customers and orders, and I threw myself into the normalcy of caramel and chocolate, lollipops and gummi bears.

I spent the rest of the day trying not to think about what had happened at the Playhouse. It seemed only fair that I make at least a minimal contribution to the effort of getting Divinity through Valentine’s Day. Luckily, we were too busy for Karen or Liberty to notice how distracted I was. I made three batches of cherry divinity and manned the phone for a while so Karen and Liberty could catch their breath. In spite of my lack of concentration, the divinity turned out perfectly, which was something of a minor miracle. After packing away the pale pink puffs of candy, I helped Karen and Liberty restock the shelves so we’d be ready to go in the morning. I forgot all about looking for the sales slip Karen had written up for Geoffrey Manwaring until I turned the key in the lock at the end of the day. Promising myself that I’d look for it tomorrow, I climbed the stairs to my apartment.

I was lucky, I guess. Nate and I didn’t get along, but we had known each other since we were kids, so he hadn’t taken Alexander’s accusations seriously. But I didn’t delude myself into thinking that the heat was off. I had the feeling Nate would be keeping an eye on me for the next little while.

It had been one helluva day, and I would have liked nothing more than to climb into bed and sleep for hours. But I was too wound up to sleep, too agitated even to sit still. I settled Max in the Jetta, swung past Burger King on my way out of town, and set a course for my brother’s house.

I shared my fries with Max as I drove, and I polished off the last of my Whopper with cheese as I pulled off the highway onto my brother’s gravel driveway. His truck was in front of the house, and I could see my sister-in-law, Elizabeth, framed in the kitchen window. Lights spilled from almost every window, giving the old two-story farmhouse a warm, welcoming feeling.

The house has belonged to Elizabeth’s family for four generations, a fact that I usually find interesting. Tonight it just made me sad. For the first time in a long time, I felt a pang of regret over my life. No husband. No kids. I’d turned my back on my family for so long, I still didn’t feel as if I truly belonged here. Thank God for Max. Without him, I’d have been completely alone.

Elizabeth had seen me drive up, and I realized she was watching from the window, waiting for me to get out of the car and come to the door. Shaking off the melancholy, I climbed out into the cold and made my way along the shoveled walk to the front door. I knocked once and let myself inside. My nieces and nephews were draped all over the furniture, watching something on TV. The looks on their faces when they saw me chased away the rest of the clouds.

“Aunt Abby!” Nine-year-old Caleb shot to his feet and threw his arms around my legs. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

I tousled his hair. “You didn’t know I was coming? That’s weird. Neither did I!” I waggled my fingers at Dana and Danielle, who looked pleased to see me but didn’t bother moving, and gave Brody a cool chin jerk, appropriate for even the most discerning twelve-year-old. “Is your dad around?”

Brody sat sideways in Wyatt’s favorite chair, his back propped against one of its arms, his legs draped over the other. He lifted his head slightly and pried his eyes away from the TV screen. “He’s helping Mom with something, I think. Want me to get him?”

“Thanks, but you look busy. I’ll find him.” I left the kids fighting mildly over which of them Max should sit with, and nosed my way toward the scent of bleach wafting from the kitchen. I found Elizabeth folding a huge stack of crisp white T-shirts at the kitchen table. Wearing a pair of sweats and a T-shirt, her long reddish blond hair pulled into a ponytail, she looked comfortable and relaxed.

Wyatt’s legs protruded from the cupboard under the sink. I heard a clang followed by a string of words I won’t repeat here. “How in the hell did this happen, Liz? How could you lose your wedding ring down the drain?”

He sounded angry, but Wyatt often does. It rarely means anything. I grinned at Elizabeth and nudged the bottom of my brother’s boot with my shoe. “Maybe she tried to grind it up in the garbage disposal. I wouldn’t blame her if she did.”

Wyatt lifted his head so he could see and squinted up into the overhead light. His brown hair was matted to his head in a severe case of hat hair, and whiskers stubbled his cheeks and chin. “Funny. What are you doing here?”

“Good to see you, too, Wyatt.” I sat at the table with Elizabeth and inhaled the scents of soap and bleach and fabric softener. Homey smells. Comfort smells. For a minute, I wanted my apartment to smell like that. I wanted the sounds of kids and TV floating in from the next room and a husband swearing at pipes under the sink. Could I have something like this with Jawarski? Maybe. But how much of myself was I willing to give up to find out?

Elizabeth got up and pulled a couple of Cokes out of the fridge. She filled two glasses with ice and handed me one along with a bottle. “We heard about the excitement in town. What a mess, huh?”

I poured the Coke over the ice and watched the bubbles rise. “Have you heard about all of it?”

“We heard about Laurence Nichols. Is there something else?”

“Unfortunately. Vonetta was attacked this afternoon. She wasn’t seriously hurt, but there’s something going on at the Playhouse, and I don’t like it.”

Wyatt slid out from under the sink and sat up on the floor. “Nate know about the attack on Vonetta?”

I nodded. “Yeah. I got to spend a couple of hours with him this afternoon. For some reason, Alexander Pastorelli decided to accuse me of both attacks.”

Wyatt frowned and got to his feet. “Nate didn’t take that seriously. did he?”

I shook my head. “He didn’t seem to, but he did question me for a while.”

My brother pulled a beer from the fridge and carried it to the table. He wiped his hands on a towel and straddled a chair, resting his arms on its back. “You want me to talk to him?”

“Thanks, but no. Actually, I didn’t come to whine about myself. I came to see if you know a guy named Doyle Brannigan.”

Wyatt opened his beer and took a swallow. “Sure, I know Doyle. What about him?”

“What do you know about him?”

“I don’t know. He’s a decent guy. Married that friend of yours, didn’t he? What was her name?”

“Colleen.”

“That’s the one.” Wyatt took another swig, then put the bottle on the table. “I haven’t seen much of him lately, but I used to run into him at least twice a week. Why? You think he has something to do with the stuff going on in town?”

“It’s possible.” I told them about the night I’d met Doyle and his suspicions about Colleen and Laurence. “I haven’t seen him since, but if Laurence’s death
wasn’t
just a horrible accident, he’d definitely be on my list of suspects.”

Elizabeth pulled a T-shirt from a pile in the basket beside her and shook it with a snap. “Do you think Colleen was having an affair with Laurence?”

“I don’t know,” I said again. “She seemed pretty upset when we found his body, but that’s not so suspicious, after all. Seeing a dead body, especially someone you know, is pretty awful. Does Doyle have a temper?”

Wyatt shrugged. “No more than any other guy. He doesn’t go around looking for trouble, but he doesn’t back down from it either.”

“Do you think he might have gone looking for trouble if he suspected his wife of being unfaithful?”

Elizabeth folded the T-shirt with a few sharp moves and sat it on a growing stack. “If he did, who could blame him?”

That response from my normally peacemaking sister-in-law should have surprised me. She’s choir director at the Shepherd of the Hills church, for Pete’s sake. Not the type you’d expect to encourage violence. But she’s also in the process of putting her marriage back together after a particularly stupid move on my brother’s part. She knew how it felt to suffer betrayal.

“She denies it,” I said, but we both knew how little that meant.

Wyatt considered my question for a minute before he gave me an answer. “I think that if Doyle caught his wife in the act, he might do something about it. But I don’t see him whacking somebody over the head with a spotlight just because of a rumor. If there was any truth to it, though, he’d find out. He wouldn’t ignore it.”

“Do you know where he works? I’d like to talk to him.”

Wyatt shook his head. “Like I said, it’s been a while. Last I heard, he was working construction for some guy over in Leadville, but I don’t know if he still is.” He gave me a stern look and added, “I don’t suppose you’d listen if I told you to keep your nose out of it?”

I shook my head and grinned. “When have I ever listened to you?”

“Never, but you should.”

“I’ll consider it,” I said, pushing to my feet. “Just as soon as Nate realizes that Richie Bellieu had nothing to do with Laurence Nichols’s death.”