She had killed Thomas Bradford tonight.
The chapter, written an hour ago, sat in her briefcase, scrawled by hand on a tablet of white paper while she sat at the back corner booth, shelling peanuts and nursing a diet cola.
The only thing she had left was her career and she had just hung it out to dry. Ann was going to kill her; her agent would not appreciate having the golden goose killed. Jennifer smiled tightly without it reaching her eyes and drilled the seven ball into the rail to send it the length of the table and into a corner pocket. He was quite dead, her detective, Thomas Bradford, the bullets having hit him in the middle of the back and ripped through his chest. He was now as dead as her parents, as dead as her husband, as dead as her three-month-old daughter. Dead.
Maybe she should sell the house.
She contemplated the idea as she moved around the table, laying out her next shot with the precision of someone who had learned to see the game as an interesting study in geometry.
“Jen, what happened? Who hit you?!” The jacket dropped onto the stool next to her, the detective’s shield flipping visible. Randy and William both looked over at Bob’s words and immediately left their game, heading her way. Jennifer looked up at her friend, annoyed, and then looked back at the cue ball and laid her next shot with finesse, nudging the ten ball into the side pocket without disturbing the eight ball. She wasn’t surprised to see him. It was midnight, and Bob Volishburg got off at eleven-thirty. He knew her car. This place was on his way home. He would come in to talk with the other guys from the force, maybe play her a game and then see that she got safely home. He had a mission in life to see that she always got home safely. Compliments of her brother, Jennifer was sure.
“I walked into a door,” she replied flatly.
The honest answer went over about as well tonight with the three cops as it had done four days earlier with Scott.
“I was wondering if you would come back,” Scott said, stopping a few feet away from her so as not to crowd her space and startle her. His voice was calm and steady while inside his reaction was one of elation. She was back. He had been praying and hoping and working toward this day. She was sitting out on the pier behind his house, dangling her feet over the edge, her hands tucked into the same windbreaker she had worn the last time he had seen her.
He had spent ten days trying to track her down. His conscience had given him no rest. He had finally decided she must have an unlisted phone number. He had tried every St. James in the phone books for the surrounding area. He had ended up calling every battered women’s shelter in the surrounding county—not that they would tell him anything, but he had had to try. He had been ready to consider calling the police and the local hospitals, she continued to weigh so heavily on his mind. Then, three days ago, he had his first bit of what he knew had to be providential luck.
He had been browsing a local bookstore when he had chanced upon her picture. She was a writer. The author of a mystery series about a detective named Thomas Bradford. Scott had held the book in his hand and looked at the picture and been stunned at the change in her from the picture on the back of the paperback to the woman he had met on the beach. The book was the paperback release of a previous hardback so he figured the picture was about four years old. The difference was painful to see. Her face was gaunt now. The light in her eyes was gone. What had happened to her in the past few years? Calling her publisher had managed to get him the name of her agent, but there his luck had run out. Her agent—Ann something or other—had refused to give him any information about Jennifer. All he’d been able to hope for was that she would deliver a message.
Jennifer turned now on the pier, drew her knees up to drape her arms across them and quietly looked up at him as he stood at the top of the steps to the pier. “Hello, Scott. I understand you have been looking for me.” Her voice was dry and her smile slightly amused.
She looked awful. The black eye had faded to an ugly dark bruise that marred her cheek, and the tenseness in her body and in her face reminded him of a rubber band stretched to its limit for a very long time. “I was worried about you,” he said simply.
She nodded and looked down to spin her wedding ring for a moment before looking back up. “Don’t be. I’m fine.”
Fine compared with what? Her black eye was now an ugly bruise, and she looked as brittle as toffee. She had been exhausted the last time he’d seen her, and the past ten days hadn’t made much of an improvement. She looked well past worn out. He walked down and sat on the steps to the pier, close, but not so close as to crowd her. The last thing he wanted to do was give her reason to move. “Been taking another walk?”
“Sort of,” she replied. She smiled, and it was a real smile. “I haven’t gotten very far.”
“Which message finally reached you?” he asked, interlacing his fingers and watching her.
“My agent called. Relayed your message. Really, Scott, ‘Come stay with me’ does raise a few eyebrows among my friends.”
She was embarrassed now; he could see the blush. He knew that his message might cause her some embarrassment with her agent, but it was what needed to be said. He was serious. His home had plenty of guest rooms. He would prefer she accept a place with his sister and her husband, but he would make whatever arrangements she considered reasonable. The idea of someone, her husband, hitting her had haunted him. “I wanted to make sure you knew you had a safe place to stay.”
She sighed and dropped her hand to rub it along a wooden beam of the pier. “Scott, I walked into a door.”
“So you said,” he agreed evenly, very aware of the fact she was not looking at him again. She did it when she didn’t want him to see the truth in her eyes.
She looked up. She didn’t even look offended that he didn’t believe her. She did look like she was in pain. She ran her hand through her hair. “Monday night before we met,” she said abruptly, “the third anniversary of my husband’s death. I got myself royally drunk. Finally went to bed about 3:00 a.m. When I woke up I headed for the bathroom. I was in a bit of a hurry. I ran right into the edge of the bedroom door.” She didn’t spare herself when it came to telling the story.
She was a widow. A chunk of his gut tightened. “Jen, I’m sorry. You’re way too young to be widow.” He put together what she had said, what he had seen, and he winced. “You must have had an awful night.”
She grimaced. “That’s one way to describe it.” The memories of that night came rushing back, and she felt the tension radiate up through her shoulders and neck. She wanted so badly to forget that night. She had thought drinking would help her forget, but it hadn’t. If anything, it had simply given her one more memory to regret.
She picked up a small twig the wind had blown down onto the pier and twirled it between her fingers. “How did you find out I was a writer?” she asked, changing the subject.
“I found Dead Before Dawn at the local bookstore.”
“Honey, it’s a perfect title. It’s short. To the point. An attention grabber.”
“Jerry, there isn’t a single murder in the whole book.”
“Then let’s add one. It’s a great title. Great titles are hard to come by.”
The memories haunted her. Jennifer tossed the twig she held into the water and watched the waves push it around. Scott’s answer surprised her. The paperback was out already? She had lost track of the publishing schedule. “Jerry liked the title,” she told Scott.
Scott wasn’t sure how to interpret Jennifer’s expression, there was distance there and memories of the past. Did she not like to talk about her work? Jerry—was that her husband’s name? “It was a very good book,” he told her, trying to feel out what she would consider comfortable to talk about.
He thought she was a very good writer. He had bought Dead Before Dawn and read it in one evening, not finishing until well after midnight. He had searched bookstores during the past two days until he found all eight of her books. They were now piled on his nightstand in the order she had
written them. He was almost done with the first book in her series, the book that introduced Thomas Bradford. Her series was great. The closest comparison he could draw was to Robert Parker’s Spenser novels, and he loved those books.
“I’m glad you liked it.” She shivered slightly as the breeze picked up.
“Would you like to join me for breakfast?” The question came out before he realized it was going to be asked. He instantly regretted it. Had he learned nothing about her so far? Give her an opportunity to leave and she was going to take it. She had accomplished what she had come here to do—acknowledge his message and set him straight as to what had actually happened. How many times in the past ten days had he told himself he would be careful not to make her shy away from him again?
He felt an enormous sense of relief when he saw her smile. “That depends. Are you a good cook?”
He laughed. “You’ll have to decide that for yourself. I like to think I am.”
She moved to stand up, and he offered her a hand, feeling delighted when she accepted the offer. Her hand was small and the fingers callused, and she would have a hard time tipping a scale past a hundred pounds. He lifted her easily to her feet. The top of her head came to just above his shoulder, a comfortable height for him, and her long auburn hair was clipped back this morning by a carved gold barrette. Up close, her brown eyes were captivating. He forced himself to release her hand and step away once she was on her feet. He wanted to reach out and touch her cheek, say he was glad to see her bruise beginning to heal. Instead, he shoved his hands into his pockets and gently smiled as he waited for her to precede him.
The back patio door was unlocked, and they entered into a large kitchen, adjacent to a formal dining room. The coffee was brewed, the aroma rich and strong. Scott placed his jacket and hers across one of the six kitchen chairs and held out a chair for her at the glass-topped table.
His kitchen was spotless, a matter of honor with him. He found that cooking relaxed him, so he spent a lot of time here unwinding after a day of work. “Do you have any preferences for what you would like?” he asked, mentally reviewing the contents of the refrigerator. He had been planning homemade muffins, peaches and cereal for his own breakfast this morning, but that was pretty routine. He wanted this breakfast to be special. Maybe eggs Benedict, or fresh blueberry waffles, he could even do a batch of breakfast crepes with fresh strawberries.
“Since breakfast is normally coffee and maybe toast or a bagel, I think I’ll let you decide,” she replied.
He turned from the open refrigerator to look at her, knowing immediately that what breakfast normally was, was skipped. The last thing this lady needed to be doing was skipping meals. “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, you should at least try to have something like muffins and fruit,” he told her firmly. “How about an omelet?” he offered. He did a great omelet.
“Sure.” She spotted the bookcase he had in the kitchen for his cookbooks and got up to study them. “These are all yours?” she asked, surprised.
“Yes.” He started pulling items from the refrigerator. Ham. Tomatoes. Green peppers. Cheese.
He watched as she randomly selected one of the cookbooks from the bookcase and opened it. “Why are the page corners turned down?” she asked.
“A favorite recipe,” he replied. As the eggs cooked and he chopped the ham and tomatoes and green peppers, he reviewed the dishes he liked to cook, pointing out different cookbooks and which recipes were uniquely good in each one. It was a comfortable conversation. He liked to talk about his hobby, and she was more than casually interested. It was a comfortable conversation that continued as they ate. They split a western omelet between them and a half dozen warm, homemade blueberry muffins. It was not until they finished breakfast that the conversation turned back to personal subjects.
“How did Jerry die?” Scott asked quietly as he sat watching her drink her second cup of coffee. He didn’t want to ask, but he needed to know.
She looked out the large window and out over the lake. “He’d gone to the gym to play racquetball with my brother when he collapsed. He died of a massive heart attack.”
How old would he have been? Thirty? Thirty-five? “It was unexpected,” Scott said, stating the obvious.
“Very.”
He looked at the wedding ring she wore. He had noticed it ten days ago, a small heart of diamonds, and it looked like it belonged. “Was there any warning? High blood pressure? A history in his family?”
She shook her head. “No. He had passed a complete physical not more than six months before.”
“I’m sorry, Jennifer.” It was such an inadequate response. Her life had been torn apart, and all he could convey was words. She would have felt the loss like a knife cutting into her, especially if they had been a close couple. “You loved him a great deal.” Scott made the observation, more to himself than her, but she answered him, anyway.
“I still do,” she replied calmly.
He heard her answer and was envious that love could be so enduring. Not many couples had that kind of closeness. No wonder the anniversary of his death had been so painful for her.
She set down her cup of coffee and changed the subject abruptly. “I’ve decided to end the series of books.”
Scott didn’t know what to think, both of the abrupt change of subject and the statement she had just made. She couldn’t be serious. She had been writing the series for almost ten years. She wanted to end it? “Thomas Bradford is going to get killed?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s not the same without Jerry.”
“You wrote the books with your husband?”
She nodded.
Scott didn’t say anything for some time. It wasn’t wise to make such dramatic life changes when you were grieving. But the books had to be a continual reminder to her of what she had lost. “You’ve been writing the series for years. Are you sure, Jennifer?” he finally asked.
“I’m sure. I’ve known for months it’s something I needed to do.”
“What are you going to do once the series is finished?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
He frowned, not liking one possibility that had come to mind. “You are still going to write, aren’t you?”
“It is the only profession I know.”
He leaned back in his chair, thinking, studying her. He had never known a writer before, and it was hard to make any sort of intelligent judgment about the decision she had to make. The sadness he saw in her expression made him frown. She needed some help. She needed to recover. She needed someone to ensure she ate. He forced himself not to follow that line of thinking any further.
“Do you know when you start how the book is going to end?” He had always wondered that. He assumed that knowing in advance would be helpful as far as clues and situations were concerned, but on the other hand, knowing the ending would make writing the book less interesting. Like seeing a movie for the second time.
Jennifer couldn’t stop the memory from returning—
“Jerry, you can’t kill the gardener. He’s the man who stole the will to protect Nicole’s inheritance. Kill the gardener and the will disappears forever.” Jennifer didn’t like the twist Jerry had added to the well constructed story. They had spent two months hammering out the details of a tight story plot and Jerry was changing the game plan a hundred pages into the book. They were out in the backyard, Jerry reclining in his hammock watching the 49ers and Rams game on his portable TV, Jennifer having come outside to find him. She dropped into the lawn chair beside him, retrieving the two pillows on the ground to use as a headrest. She was distracted momentarily as she realized she had missed the start of the game.
“Who said the gardener was dead?” Jerry asked, handing her a diet soda from the cooler beside him.
“Thanks,” Jennifer said, accepting the cold drink. She flipped open the dog-eared manuscript. “Page ninety-six, and I quote, ‘The bullet entered th
e man’s chest and did not exit. He fell forward into the cold waters of the lake without anyone seeing his departure from among the living.’” She dropped the script on his chest. “That sounds like dead to me.”
The 49ers threw a deep pass which was caught inside the twenty. The discussion paused while they both watched the replay.
“Did I ever say the man in the boat was the gardener?”
Jennifer thought about it carefully. “No. The killer assumed the man in the boat was the gardener.”
Jerry grinned. “Exactly.”
“Okay Jerry, what are you planning?”
“I don’t know,” he replied seriously.
Jennifer tossed one of the pillows at him. “Why do you always insist on adding wrinkles to our nicely planned books?” she demanded, amused.
Jerry smiled. “I have to keep you guessing somehow, don’t I?”
Scott watched as Jennifer struggled to come back from somewhere in the past and answer the question he had asked. It was not the first time he had seen memories cross her eyes, and he wondered what memory had just made her smile. “Every book we wrote had at least one major change in the plot by the time we finished writing the story. We would construct an outline for the book, then take turns writing chapters. Invariably Jerry would create a few extra twists in the story.”
Jennifer rested her hands loosely around the coffee mug and was amazed at how easy it was to talk to Scott about the past. Normally sharing about her life with Jerry brought back the pain, but not today. They were memories of good times, and she had thought they were gone forever.
She had been so embarrassed by her panicked flight, her reluctance to explain exactly how she had gotten the black eye. It had taken over a week to put the incident into the back of her mind, get past the embarrassment, and thankfully accept the fact she would never have to see Scott Williams again. The next morning her agent had called. Jennifer had wanted to crawl into a hole and die. Her one consolation had been the mistaken belief that Scott would have at least let the incident go. It had taken her forty-eight hours to work up the nerve to come back to this beach. She was glad now she had. Glad that now he knew the truth.