“I see,” Emily said, her mind flashing on the house she’d just toured. There wasn’t a thing out of place. Not only was Mitch Crawford a social climber who’d rejected his middle-class roots for the accoutrements of a rich lifestyle, he was a self-absorbed ass. A lot of husbands were. She’d had one of those herself. “Was anything going on between Mandy and her husband? Was she angry at him?”
“No, not that I know of. She was focused on the baby. That’s all she wanted.”
Emily nodded. “All right. I’ll check with Mitch this evening to make sure she came home.”
“Emily, one more thing.”
“What is it?” She held her breath as if Jeanne was about to reveal some critical clue about why Mandy Crawford might skip work. Maybe she was mad at someone. Maybe Mitch had been beating her up.
“Can you send someone over here to get some of this cake? No one here feels much like celebrating.”
Emily let out a sigh. “Of course,” she said. She hung up the phone and went down the hall to find her deputy. He was at his desk surfing a Web site for ski conditions in Idaho. He clicked his mouse to close the window.
“Jason? Can you find someone to go over to the clerk’s office? Jeanne has something she wants to give us.”
“Right on it, Sheriff.”
Emily smiled as her deputy leaped to his feet and started for the door.
Jason Howard was always hoping that something would happen around Cherrystone. What no one knew just then was it already had.
It was half past six and already dark. The snow-threatening cloud cover was a snug lid over the town. Despite the elements, the Bryant-Thompsons were still out stringing lights to outline every architectural detail of their two-story Victorian across the street from Emily’s charming but more modest home. The Bryant-Thompsons—Trevor and Mason—were one of those couples who insisted that it wasn’t Christmassy if it wasn’t over-the-top. Way over the top. No bush was left unadorned, no skeletal tree left without a coating of little white lights. This year, Emily thought as she waved at the two men on ladders, she wasn’t going to give into her halfhearted attempt at trying to keep up with them. There was no point in it. She was doing a lighted wreath outside her front door and an artificial tree in the front window. That’s it.
She let herself inside and reached for her phone. The house was quiet. Jenna, home from her job consulting for a sorority’s national office, was in the shower.
Emily left her number with Mitch Crawford, but he hadn’t called back. She pressed redial and it went to his voice mail a second time. She went toward the kitchen, dropping her shoes by the back door and her purse on the stainless-steel island. She dialed the Crawford dealership next. A young woman answered.
“Mr. Crawford went home an hour ago, Sheriff Kenyon,” she said. “He didn’t say if he was stopping anywhere. You should be able to reach him there. Is everything OK?”
“We’re worried about his wife, that’s all.”
“Oh, nothing to worry about. She’s fine. I’m pretty sure she called in here and he talked to her.”
Emily felt a surge of relief. She thanked her, swung open the refrigerator, and looked at the foil-wrapped turkey.
Mandy Crawford is fine. I’m in trouble here. What do I do with this thing? I can’t make soup for twenty!
She retrieved a large kettle from the rack over the island and started filling it with water. She wrestled with the turkey carcass, snapping the bones and cramming it into the pot. Two cups of mirepoix, a cup of rice, and some salt and pepper, and she was done.
It wasn’t going to be the best turkey soup anyone ever made, but there would be a lot of it.
“Hi, honey,” Emily said as Jenna came into view, a ratty old robin’s egg blue robe wrapped around her slender body. “Maybe Santa will bring you a new robe.”
Jenna twisted her hair into a knot on her head and wrapped a thin, white towel around it.
“Only if I’m good.” She smiled at her mother.
Emily held the image of her daughter in her mind’s eye. She had a lithe figure that thankfully proved at twenty-two that she had her mother’s good genes, and not her dad’s. She had perfect teeth—without the utter sameness of a row of orthodontia-manufactured smiles. And she was smart.
“I thought you might have left for your father’s,” Emily said, stirring the kettle.
Jenna took a seat on a bar stool next to the island that held the Viking range Emily had splurged on when she remodeled the kitchen, a project as complicated as a murder investigation. “I’m going in the morning. How could I miss your famous turkey soup?”
Her change in plans had nothing to do with turkey soup, of course. Jenna, having been away at college and now traveling with the sorority job, had a new perspective about the most important relationship she’d ever had—the one with her mother. Certainly there had been the silly fights over boys, but that was long ago. The worries about who she was with and when she’d be home had abated. The talk about whether she should go to law school or find something that didn’t keep her so close to the dregs of society had waned.
“Like me, Jenna,” Emily once said as the two of them toured the Cascade campus when Jenna was eighteen. “Don’t be like me. Some jobs come with a high price. I know.”
Jenna watched her mother as she turned the peppermill over the bubbling soup pot. She wanted to burst forth with the words: “Mom, I love you. Mom, you’ve always been there for me.”
Instead, Jenna teased her.
“The soup looks a little watery.”
Emily made a face and reached for the yellow box of cornstarch. “I can fix that,” she said.
“You can fix anything, Mom.”
Neither mother nor daughter had a care in the world just then. Neither noticed that a pair of eyes had fastened onto them…onto their every move.
He had come for her.
His warm breath mixed with the cold air outside the big white Victorian. White puffs of vapor rose above him where he stood watching the scene through the backyard windows. He almost heard their laughter as the mother and daughter passed from one room to another, enjoying their lives.
Yes, they had lives.
He’d stalked her online. That was easy enough, of course. She’d left a trail all over the Internet—Web sites, blogs, e-mails. He knew so much about her—her shoe size, her best friend’s flailing love life, her plans for life after Cascade University. Seeing her in the flesh was the necessary step. A precursor to the plans that were forming like a disease, for which he alone held the cure.
He aimed a penlight at the photo of the three young women, all blond, all pretty.
Yes, it was her.
The girls were posed in front of a Greek revival mansion that had been their home away from home. It was summertime. They wore shorts and strappy tank tops and flip-flops. No cares. Just bright, shiny futures. They were blue-eyed Barbies, with perfect plastic skin and figures that only a doll maker could conjure.
He focused on their smiles. Their obvious joy was like an ice pick to his gut.
“I’ll wipe that smile off her face,” he thought looking at the girl in the center. “She’s the reason. She’s the leader.”
He told himself when he first got on the airplane in California that it was only to see her, to confront her. He wanted to tell her that her stupid decision had catastrophic results.
“Better be more careful next time,” he’d planned to say. “Some one else might not be as reasonable as I am.”
His interior monologue made him grin as he stood outside in the cold, watching. Waiting. Thinking of what she’d done. What they all had done.