The Summer Bones (26 page)

She is lost,
he reminded himself forcefully,
in sorrow, in pain, in loss.
But her mouth was warm and receptive and she arched her body against his in a way that made his control lose another notch.

It wasn't genuine. She was reacting to her grief in an age-old way that substituted desire for comfort. It happened to people all the time. Even as he reasoned with his raging emotions, he knew it to be true. She needed human contact, human warmth. He was convenient, nothing more.

It didn't matter. Nothing mattered. She began to tug at his shirt, to slip it upward, to slide her hands over his skin. She said his name frantically against his lips.

For over a decade now this had been his fantasy. How old had he been, seventeen? Seventeen when he realized that something about Victoria touched him, held him. They'd been close throughout their childhood—a natural closeness that just seemed to be a product of like temperament and compatible personalities. But at seventeen he had realized it had grown into something more.

He'd been in love with her a long time. No one had ever come along to change his feelings.

“Please,” she breathed. Her nails gently raked his skin. He felt her fingers slide under the waistband of his pants and begin to fumble with the zipper.

Christ,
he thought hazily. His muscles felt like lumps of lead. He could smell her skin, her hair, taste her mouth.

The window was open and a breeze stirred outside, brushing his heated skin. That cool touch was like a finger of an outside world, reaching into the moment. An owl hooted dismally from a tree in the yard. He felt himself suddenly see the room as if from a distance, see himself sprawled on top of his half-dressed cousin, see the scene as anyone might see it if they walked in. Shock, self-disgust, embarrassment, all of these emotions flooded in and replaced desire. He sat up, pulled away. “No.”

With shaking hands he shoved his hair off his forehead and moved to the side of the bed. Hands dangling between his knees, head bowed, he willed his breathing back to normal. Victoria lay against the blue coverlet, her eyes dark, her lips slightly parted. She looked dazed.

The sleeping pill.
Shame came in a rush of realization at what he'd done, and what he'd almost done. She was half drugged and exhausted by strain and sorrow. He refused to believe that he was such an animal as to have taken advantage of her in this way.

“Damon?” Victoria said weakly, questioning. She lifted her hand beseechingly.

“No.” His voice gentled, “No. Not this way. Not with you hating me tomorrow. Hating yourself. Not this way.”

“Please.”

He stood up. “No,” he said more forcefully. His chest actually hurt. He relished the slight breeze, looked out the window to the darkened fields.

“I meant … then … please stay. Don't leave me.”

Turning his head, he looked at her. She was terribly pale, biting her lower lip and looking vulnerable as a child.

It wasn't her fault. It had never been her fault. He said, thinly, “I'll stay, Tori. I'll be right here if you need me.”

She looked at the chair beside the bed where he was pointing and then nodded. It was enough. Of course it was.

By the time he sat down and picked up the book carelessly knocked onto the floor, she was already asleep.

Life was coffee that tasted like plastic cups and sawdust doughnuts. Danny held his cup at an angle to catch the light coming through the slatted blinds. In distaste, he watched as a school of coffee grounds swam through the light brown liquid.

It was ten o'clock on Monday morning. He'd already been back to the Paulsen farm to get fingerprints from Elmer and Damon Paulsen, trying to match up the prints that had been lifted from Emily Sims' car. Rounding up Jim Bailey, he'd spent thirty minutes verifying some of the information he'd been given the day before. Back in town, he'd called the coroner's office to see how long it might be before he had the autopsy results, getting only an overworked technician who had put him on indefinite hold.

Pino had offered to attend the procedure, which was fine with Danny. The day before had been bad enough. He had no desire to see what was left of Emily Sims again. It was unfortunate that he couldn't get Neukam to perform the post right away, but there had been a triple homicide in Indy the night before and the whole thing was impossible.

A full morning already, and not about to get any easier—Ronald Sims sat across from him, hunched over his cup of coffee and staring at him with reddened eyes. He was older than Danny had expected, maybe midforties, well dressed in tailored slacks and a pale blue shirt. His blond hair was trimmed short, but he'd not bothered to shave, a light grayish-blond fuzz covering his chin. The good-looking face was beginning to show tiny red veins across the cheeks and around the nose and loose skin near the eyes.
A drinker,
Danny thought automatically,
and maybe more by the sniffling that usually gives away a cocaine habit.
That aside, Sims seemed stone cold sober this morning—sober and anxious to speak his mind.

“As soon as I learned this would be your investigation, I decided to not wait for you to contact me.” Sims took a glance around, as if disbelieving that this could be the headquarters of any homicide investigation.

“We already did contact you, Mr. Sims. Last night.” Danny set aside his coffee and leaned back in his chair. It was unfortunate that someone from the family had been able to get hold of Sims before the police had. Of course, given the location of the corpse, it wasn't exactly easy to keep the discovery quiet. He added, “I won't be investigating this case alone. Several different departments will likely be involved.”

Sims nodded. He leaned forward, his face grim. “I wanted to tell you myself that I know, I've known for a long time, that my wife was having an affair.”

Danny reached over and picked up a pad of paper. Lifting a pen, he jotted something down. “And how did you discover this? Who was she seeing?”

“Her cousin, Damon Paulsen.”

Danny ignored the impulse to raise his eyebrows. “You know this? You saw them together?”

“I know it, but I didn't see them together, how could I?” Sims looked disappointed in the way Danny took his revelation. His eyes were hard, glazed over. “Over the past few months, Emily started spending more and more time at the farm. She was always there. I'd call her office and she would be out. I'd find out later that she was at the farm.”

“Seems natural enough to me.”

“Natural? First cousins? It makes me sick, if you want the truth. Paulsen has always had a thing for Victoria. I guess I thought maybe he would leave Emily alone.” A laugh escaped the man's lips, short and bitter.

“I meant it seems natural enough for your wife to visit her relatives often,” Danny elaborated mildly. He watched the other man's twitching features, his jerky movements, with a careful eye.

“Emily was seeing someone.” It was a positive forceful statement. “I began to suspect it from the way she was acting. Secretive. She was tired often. Edgy, like she felt guilty about something. And she had bruises, which she tried to hide.”

It was an interesting point for Sims to be making. Danny said, “Bruises?”

“On her upper arms, on her thighs—she didn't want me to see them. Actually”—Ronald Sims' gaze slid past the other man, fixing on the view of the street outside—”we'd stopped sleeping together.”

“You're saying the bruises looked like the kind a woman might receive from rough consensual sex?”

“Yes.”

The air smelled distinctly like burned coffee. Danny got up and went to switch off the coffeepot, his brow furrowed. When he returned to his seat, he picked up his pen but didn't write. He said, “I see. But you have no proof this person she might have been involved with was Paulsen.”

“I don't need more proof than what I'm telling you.”

“I'm afraid, actually, you do.”

“Look at where you found her body. I'm telling you that they were sleeping together and now she's dead. Add it up, will you? Christ!”

“I assure you, Mr. Sims, that I'm experienced in conducting a homicide investigation. ‘Adding it up,' as you put it, is my job. Can we go back to my last question, please? Do you have proof of any kind? Anyone else who can support your accusations?”

Sims was breathing hard—his nostrils shown white at the edges. “She was at the farm. She didn't go anywhere else. Just to her office, to her appointments, and to the farm to see Paulsen. I suppose that since Victoria was in Chicago, he decided he might as well bang her sister.”

The man was obsessed, no doubt of it—paranoid and angry and a hundred things that Danny had seen before. Every word out of the man's mouth supported what he had been told already by Victoria Paulsen. She'd mentioned her brother-in-law's insinuations about her sister and her cousin, among other interesting things that needed to be confirmed by concrete physical evidence.

However, Paulsen's name had already come up once before, in the Helms investigation. It was impossible to ignore the possibility of a connection. Impossible. Ronald Sims might seem irrational, but he was a man who had just lost his wife. He did have some excuse.

Danny asked, “How do you know she didn't go anywhere else?”

Ronald Sims took a last convulsive gulp from his cup of coffee, presumably not noticing the awful taste. He coughed, wiping his mouth carelessly with a limp hand, his eyes just slightly unfocussed. “Because,” he said harshly, “I've been following her for about the last month.”

How nice,
thought Danny.
Bingo.

* * * *

Getting up had been a major effort. Emily was dead. Because of that reality, the whole world had changed. Taking a shower was different, getting dressed was different, looking in the mirror was different. Victoria moved slowly, as if she were old and infirm, going through the everyday motions with a mind kept carefully blank by sheer willpower. She wouldn't think about yesterday, or about last night.

She would not.

Her fingers fumbled with the buttons on her shorts. Her hand shook as she doled out toothpaste on her brush. She felt ill and weak and blurry around the edges, like an old faded black-and-white photograph
.

Downstairs, she found a sea of somber faces at the table. There was a brief lull in whatever low-voiced conversation might have been going on as she entered the room.

“Good morning.” Kate, wearing the same clothes as the night before, rose immediately and came over. Her face was weary as she touched Victoria's cheek. “Did you sleep a little?”

Victoria's mother sat at the table, unmoving. Her eyes shifted to look at her daughter's pale face, and then she looked away swiftly. Her mouth worked. Her hand groped for a tissue from a wad sitting on the table next to her cup of coffee. “Oh, God.” Her voice was a sob of despair. “Emily, my little Emily.”

She hadn't quite thought of that, had she? Victoria stood blankly, not knowing if she should bolt screaming from the room, which was her first impulse. Her mother's reaction wasn't sensitive, but it was honest. Her resemblance to her sister was like salt to a festering sore. If she didn't want to look in the mirror and see her own face, how would others feel about it? She was the ghost, haunting everyone who saw her, who looked at her and was reminded of what they had lost.

“I'm … sorry,” she said incoherently, ridiculously. “Mother—”

“Victoria.” Aunt Kate's arm came up around her shoulders. She sent a sharp look at Victoria's mother. Then she began to soothe, to make excuses. The police had already been by this morning. People had been in and out. Her father had gone to try to talk to Ronald. It was such a strain, no one quite knew what to do. “Don't worry, honey. It'll be fine.” The words flowed outward in reassurance.

Victoria let herself be led to the table, to have a cup of coffee pushed into her hands. She lifted it and drank, scalding her mouth and throat. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered. Her grandmother drifted past, sitting down by her mother and patting her hand. Rachel was eating toast. Her grandfather sat in hunched silence, not drinking, not eating. There were ink stains on his fingers. They'd found fingerprints in Emily's car, she remembered, and wanted to see if there was a set they couldn't match. Both Damon and her grandfather had admitted to being inside the car recently, the two of them having fixed an exhaust problem some weeks before.

Aunt Kate fluttered around, refilling cups and murmuring. Sitting at that table, Victoria drank her coffee and wondered hazily what on earth would happen through the next hours.

“You've had several calls,” Rachel announced. Her gaze slid toward Victoria. “I went to wake you up, but you weren't in your room.” She shook some crumbs off her thick fingers.

Victoria looked vaguely at the clock. It was after ten. She felt exhausted for having slept so long. “Who was it?”

“Michael, for one.”

“Oh.” It was natural he would call, but it was too late to call him back now. He would be in court nearly all day.

“Gail Benedict was the other.” Rachel folded her mouth primly. “She wants you to call her back. She was pretty insistent.”

“Today?” Victoria put a hand on her forehead, rubbing absently.

“I guess so.”

The thought of dealing with Gail was not very appealing. Yet it was interesting that she had called. It was possible, if she knew about Emily's death, she would be more cooperative. Maybe she wanted to make up for her earlier lack of response to all of those unanswered questions. Victoria had thought the situation over and come to the conclusion that Gail must had known about the pregnancy
.
Emily might have kept it secret from Ronald, and even her family, but she would have told someone. The very fact that she had noted the appointments with her doctor in her business diary suggested a lack of worry over Gail finding out. It hadn't taken Victoria much time to draw obvious conclusions.