“You’re positive it’s the same coroner?” Dutch asked.
“Yep.”
“But how can you be sure Mimi’s death wasn’t an accident? How can you be sure she intended to cause the explosion?” I asked.
Candice produced one last piece of paper and handed it to Dutch. I leaned forward and saw that it was a report from the arson inspector. I skimmed it over Dutch’s shoulder, my eyes widening as the facts of the investigation became clear. “All four burners on the gas stove were set to high?” I asked.
“Yep. Mimi plugged up the pilot lights, turned up the gas, filled the apartment with gas, lit a match, then…”
“Kaboom,” Dutch said.
Candice nodded.
I sat back, stunned. “That’s a pretty dramatic way to kill yourself.”
“It is,” Candice agreed.
I pointed to the report still in Dutch’s hand. “Why didn’t the arson investigator or the police fight the coroner’s report? I mean, clearly Eppley got it wrong.”
Candice shrugged. “Those guys have far bigger cases to worry about, Abs. Plus, unless the family or an insurance company is willing to make a stink about it, no one really cares that a death gets labeled an accident or a suicide.”
“Are we certain that foul play from another source isn’t suspected?” Dutch asked.
“You mean like maybe Mimi was murdered?”
Dutch nodded.
“We’re certain. Page two of that report goes into detail about what was found at the scene. A large box of charred matches was discovered under the victim’s body.”
A chill went through me. “It can’t be a coincidence that Mimi blew herself up and a year later her sister gets strapped to a bomb and also dies in an explosion. Someone wanted to mimic her death.”
Candice lifted her coffee toward me. “My thoughts exactly.”
My brain was spinning with possibilities. “Do you think her family knew?”
“That Mimi killed herself?”
I nodded.
“Yes. They definitely knew. The arson investigator told me over the phone yesterday that he had a long conversation with Mr. Greene when he called from overseas, and that Mrs. Greene—Mimi’s mother—had requested a copy of his report. What happened to that copy I’m not sure of, but I’ll bet that Taylor was aware that her sister killed herself.”
My radar hummed. “The question we need to ask is, who else knew what the arson investigator’s report said?”
Dutch frowned and wiggled the paper. “It’s a public record, Abs. Anyone could have gotten a copy of it.”
Candice said, “I also wondered who else might know if Mimi committed suicide, so I called her manager back at Jamba Juice late yesterday, and Debbie, the manager, had no idea that Mimi had taken her own life, but she did confess that she wasn’t surprised that the girl had committed suicide. She reiterated that Mimi appeared very sad in the days before the fire. She also told me that the rest of the store employees knew only what was reported in the news, that Mimi had died in an accidental fire caused by a gas leak.”
“Well, someone made a point of obtaining a copy of that report,” I said. “And hated Taylor enough to torture her by rubbing Mimi’s death in her face for two hours before killing her.”
We all fell silent for a bit before Dutch said to Candice, “Have you shared all this with Brice?”
Candice grinned. “Of course. He’s taking over the file now that you’re on vacation. He told me and Abby to pick up the lead as soon as she’s done packing up the place.”
Dutch’s eyes bulged. “He said what about me?”
I winced. Apparently Brice hadn’t gotten around to explaining to Dutch that he was officially on vacation. “He granted your request,” I said lightly. Dutch turned to stare hard at me and I gave him my biggest winning smile. He grumbled something that, prior to our agreement from the day before, would’ve cost me a few quarters to repeat. He then hopped out of bed to take his cell to the study. We heard the slam of a door and his raised voice about fifteen seconds later.
Shuffling out of bed myself, I grabbed a pair of jeans, my shoes, and my purse and motioned to Candice that we needed to skedaddle. I was just closing the door on her car when I heard Dutch yell for me from inside the house. “Go!” I told her, and she peeled out of the driveway like a good sidekick.
“How is it that your fiancé doesn’t know he’s on vacation?” Candice asked me.
“Because your fiancé is a big fat chicken.” Candice cut me a look and I held up a hand in apology. “Dutch put in a vacation request for the honeymoon, but he got the dates wrong. Brice knew about the error, and granted him the time without bringing it to Dutch’s attention as a way to get him off the case as a favor to me. You know how the bureau is about their paperwork—once it goes through, it’s set in stone, so Dutch knows he’s officially off the case, and I’m assuming he’s officially pissed about it.”
Candice frowned. “Brice,” she muttered. “I love that man, but sometimes he works too hard to avoid conflict and it ends up biting him in the ass.”
I agreed, but I couldn’t exactly tell her that. We were both a bit too protective of our men. Then Candice said, “But wait. If Dutch is officially on vacation now, does that mean you two have to skip the honeymoon?”
“Naw. Brice is making sure Dutch has that time off too.”
“Good. I’d hate to see you miss out on the tropics. Or Europe. Or wherever the hell you two are going on your honeymoon. Which reminds me, are you guys ever going to let me in on where that is?”
“I wish we knew.”
Candice gave me a quizzical look. “Come again?”
We hadn’t exactly been honest with Candice about who was paying for our honeymoon, which had in fact been arranged by a certain CIA agent who owed us both a ginormous favor. The fact that Agent Frost was withholding the location until the last minute was simply his way of saying, “I may owe you this favor, but I’m still in control of when I give it to you and where you’ll go.”
I tried to recover my blunder with Candice quickly. “Dutch’s family arranged our honeymoon as a wedding gift. We won’t know where we’re going until the wedding.”
Candice’s eyes narrowed. Her lie detector was almost as well honed as mine. “Ah. I see,” she said flatly.
My phone rang and with a relieved sigh that I’d been saved by the bell, I answered it. “Hey, cowboy.”
“How long did you know?”
“Brice told me on Thursday. I thought he was going to tell you then too.”
“You’re not working this case without me, Edgar.”
I felt my temper flare. “Says who?”
“Abigail,” Dutch growled. He only used my full name when he was seriously mad.
Candice grabbed the phone from my hand. “Hey, Dutch. Listen, the leads that Abby and I are gonna work this week are all softballs. We’re simply going to talk to Mimi’s friends and coworkers. We’ll save all the heavy lifting for your squad.”
I heard some squawking from the other end of the line, but Candice’s expression never wavered beyond calm, cool, and determined. “I’ll look after her,” she promised. “Nothing’s going to happen to her, okay? I swear. She won’t leave my sight for a second, and you know I never leave home without my Glock.”
I felt a sudden sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was all I could do to ignore it.
Candice continued to reassure Dutch and at last she held the phone against her chest and turned to me. “Dutch wants to know if you’ll come with him to the airport at three o’clock to pick up his mother and Aunt Viv.”
The sinking feeling got worse. “Three o’clock?” I said. “Uh…”
Candice rolled her eyes and put the phone back to her ear. “Abby says she has a manicure/pedicure appointment at three. She says she’ll need pretty hands and feet to get married. You know how she is.”
Candice then listened for a minute before putting the phone back to her chest. “He wants to know if you
can meet up with them after your manicure.”
My eyes widened and my brain fought for a plausible excuse.
Candice got back on the phone. “She’d love to, just as soon as her nails are dry. She’ll text you when she’s ready.”
I breathed out a sigh when Candice hung up. “So, what’s the deal?” she asked after handing me back the phone.
“What deal?”
“You don’t like Dutch’s family?”
Dutch’s mom and aunt were lovely women, but they tended to overwhelm me with questions about Dutch, his work, his health, and how well I was taking care of him. (Little did they know he tended to take care of me way more than I took care of him.)
I shook my head. “No, it’s not that. It’s just, well, Dutch’s mom and his aunt Viv are like two separate forces of nature and when you bring them together, it’s like trying to ride out a hurricane. It’s impossible to have an opinion around them that they didn’t grant you. Plus, when we went to visit his family over the Labor Day weekend, Dutch finally admitted to the whole family that he and I aren’t interested in having kids.”
“Don’t tell me,” Candice said, “that was met as a personal challenge by his mom and aunt to convert your thinking.”
“You have no idea,” I told her.
“Yeah, Brice and I are trying to brace ourselves for a similar conversation with his parents. I think it’s going to be especially hard, as he’s the only boy in the family.”
“What is it with parents practically insisting their kids have kids?” I asked. “I mean, some people just aren’t kid people.”
Candice smiled. “I think that the urge to be a grandparent is pretty fierce.”
“Yeah, but Dutch’s mom is already a grandparent three times over. Two of his brothers already have kids.”
Candice shrugged. “I think that if you’re already a grandma, you can never have enough. I know my grandmother loved me, but I also know that it was hard on her to have only one grandchild to dote on when all her friends had at least a half dozen to spoil and brag about.”
Candice’s grandmother had been a wonderfully colorful woman of French origin who’d left Candice quite a bit of money and property when she passed on. And thinking of my own grandmother and her love for me and all my cousins also helped to put things into perspective. Still, Dutch and I were of the same mind on the subject of kids. We loved them, as long as they were someone else’s. They just weren’t for us.
A few minutes later we pulled into the parking lot of our office building and headed in. For most of the day Candice worked the phones trying to find anyone who might’ve known Mary Greene. She even contacted a few classmates from Mary’s graduating high school class, but no one seemed to remember her, which was quite sad, I thought.
Meanwhile I went over the case notes until my vision began to blur. I wanted something to jump out at me—for a lead to shout out from the pages and say, “Follow me!”—but all I kept getting was the intuitive feeling that I needed to dig deeper into Mimi’s past. We were doing that, but nothing new was coming to light.
Around four Dutch began texting me—where was I? Was I ready to join him, his mom, and his aunt? Could I please come join him? Could I please come join him right now? Could I please come join him yesterday?
By five o’clock the texts were sounding a bit too desperate, so I finally had Candice drive me home so I could change, then joined my fiancé and his mother and aunt for dinner. The minute I arrived at the restaurant, I knew I should’ve faked an illness. “Abby, honey!” Dutch’s mother called loudly across the restaurant as I stepped through the doors. “It’s about time you got here! Come sit between me and Viv!”
Pushing a huge smile onto my lips, I obliged. But before I could sit down, Mrs. Rivers had stood up and was squishing me in a big hug. Dutch’s mom is a formidable woman, three inches taller than me and with considerably more girth around the middle. “Oh, Abby!” she cried. “It’s so good to see you! How are you getting on?” she asked, at last releasing me and allowing her gaze to drop to my cane.
“Much better, Dottie. Thank you for asking. I think I’ll even be able to make it down the aisle without the cane.”
“You poor brave thing!” Mrs. Rivers cried again, clutching me to her breast.
The minute she let me go so that I could sit down, his aunt started in. “So! When do we get to meet your parents, Abby?”
I felt the smile freeze onto my face and my gaze flickered to Dutch. He coughed loudly and said, “Aunt Viv, what looks good tonight? I hear they have a great porterhouse steak here.”
“One minute, Roland. I’m asking Abby about her parents.” Turning back to me, she repeated, “When will Claire and Sam Cooper be getting in?”
I took a sip of water. I was positive that Dutch had privately told both his mother and his aunt about my situation, so his aunt’s question had caught me off guard.
I was raised in a terribly volatile household. My mother had serious mental issues and my father had been a high-functioning alcoholic for as long as I could remember. My earliest memory is of my mother beating me with a wooden spoon. I think I was three. My father had done little more than ignore me my whole life. It’d been an awful childhood. I’d left home at seventeen and I hadn’t spoken a single word to my parents in several years now.
I’d also never shared much of what I’d gone through as a child with Dutch. It isn’t that I didn’t trust him enough to share that history with him; it’s simply that I’d been conditioned my whole life to keep silent. It’s part of that terrible shame that comes with being a child of abuse—you learn to shut up and bury all those haunting memories just to cope in a world that can’t really fathom the idea of a mother throwing her four-year-old down a flight of stairs in a fit of anger. What made it perhaps even worse was that our family was upper middle class and everyone in our social circle pretended not to notice the bruises on the sad little girl who preferred hiding in closets to going outside to play.
Later, when I was out on my own and had the freedom to talk about it, I’d quickly learned how unreceptive the world was to my stories of abuse. Every person I’d ever told about my childhood had looked at me with incredulity at first, and then their eyes had brimmed with something even more hurtful than a physical blow. They’d stared back at me in doubt.
The awful part is that I can actually understand that reaction. To anyone raised by a loving mother, it’s unfathomable and uncomfortable to believe that a woman could be so cruel to her own child. So I learned to make it easy on close friends and boyfriends who would inquire about my parents. I would simply say that we didn’t talk much these days, or that we weren’t a very close family.
Still, I was aware that Dutch knew the truth, because shortly after he and I had moved in together, my sister had come for a visit and while I was tied up with clients one Saturday afternoon, Cat had taken him out to lunch. They’d been gone until the early evening and when they got home, Dutch had come through the door looking stricken. He’d immediately taken me into his arms and hugged me tightly, and I could feel him struggle to hold it together. In alarm I’d looked at Cat and she’d simply said, “I told him, Abby. About Claire and Sam. All of it.”
Dutch had never spoken a word about it, for which I was immensely grateful, but there were times when people would ask about my family—where they lived and such—and I’d see his jaw clench and his eyes darken…. The way they were now, right across from me at the dinner table.
Viv was also staring at me expectantly, but before I could answer her question, Dutch snapped, “Viv. Don’t.”
She looked at him sharply and for a moment there was some tension at the table until Mrs. Rivers put a gentle hand over Aunt Viv’s and leaned over to say to me, “Dutch took us by the new house today. Such a beautiful home! And so many bedrooms to fill! You’ll have guest rooms galore unless you two decide after you’ve been together for a year or two to fill it with the happy sounds of a little one.”
My forced smile ratcheted up another notch, and I saw Dutch signal to the waiter. “We’d like a bottle of wine,” he said. “As soon as you can, please.”
* * *
Later that night after we’d dropped his mom and Viv off at their hotel and made it through our own front door, Dutch apologized. “I told them both not to ask about your folks,” he said.
“It’s fine, sweetie.”
“I can’t believe she said that to you,” he muttered irritably.
I turned to him after flicking on the light switch and put my arms around him. “It’s enough that you get it, cowboy. I promise.”
He squeezed me tight. “Are you really ready to marry into this family?”
My radar hummed. There was still something dark swirling in the ether, hovering so close I felt I could almost touch it. It came around every time Dutch mentioned the two of us getting married, and try as I might to shoo it away, it kept coming back. I felt a horrible foreboding, and something close to certainty that no matter how much I wanted it—Dutch and I weren’t going to walk down the aisle together. His life still felt in danger, and that elusive threat was so close to him I felt I could taste it, but try as I might, I couldn’t identify it. A tremor curled up my spine and I shivered.
“Abs?” Dutch asked, and I realized he had stepped away from me and was holding me at arm’s length with concern in his eyes.
I blinked. “What?”
“What?” he repeated. “Honey, I just asked you if you were ready to marry me.”
I shook my head to clear it. “Oh! Yes. Of course I am.”
Dutch stared at me for several seconds and I saw the concern fade to hurt. “You sure?” His eyes were pinned to mine, forcing me to look at him.
I didn’t look away. “I am.”
“Then what’s up?”
I bit my lip. “I don’t know. It just feels like…”
“Like what?” I was quiet, letting my gaze drop to the floor while I tried to put what I was feeling into words, and Dutch reached up to lift my chin with his fingers. “Babe…please, talk to me.”
I pushed myself back into his arms and as I did so, a horrible realization hit me. It was so terrible that my breath caught and I squeezed him tight and closed my eyes. “It’s nothing!” I whispered a bit desperately.