inside, where it wasn’t thirty-five degrees with a wind chill that cut to the bone. If he was having an illicit assignation, he wouldn’t have left his vehicle out for everyone to see.
Not that Sam would be having an affair. He and his wife still held hands in public and sat shoulder to shoulder whenever seating arrangements allowed.
“I suppose . . .” Erica sounded uncharacteristically indecisive. I glanced over and, even in the poor light, saw anxiety and concern on her face.
“I’ll go check,” I offered. “Probably he had car trouble and someone gave him a ride home.”
“Yes.” Her relief was obvious even in the one syllable. “How clever of you to come up with a likely explanation.” I started walking, and after a half-step hesitation, she came along. “My mama always said I made things more complicated than they needed to be. She said I was born to be a lawyer.”
My mother had told me I was born to make her hair go gray, but I didn’t pass that comment on to Erica. I’d never understood Mom’s exasperation until I had children of my own. Oliver probably hadn’t understood my reaction when he shoved his multitudes of stuffed animals in the washing machine and added a bottle of detergent. And Jenna probably hadn’t understood how I could be angry when she’d taken the scissors to her bangs. “It’s my hair,” she’d said, weeping. I’d wept, too, over the quarter-inch-long tufts sticking straight up out of her head.
Erica and I approached Sam’s SUV, her boots clicking, mine thudding. “Do you have any plans for your garden next year?” she asked. Erica was a master gardener and her garden was so spectacular that the Madison newspaper had done a Sunday feature on it.
“Oliver wants to plant cucumbers.” The SUV’s windows were tinted slightly; I couldn’t see through them at all.
“He’s eight? An excellent age to have his own gardening space. Old enough to have full responsibility and old enough to understand the direct relationship between hard work and the payoff hard work can bring about.”
Why was Erica talking about gardening? She almost sounded nervous. “Old enough to pull weeds?” I couldn’t quite see into the driver’s seat. To gain some elevation, I walked on the balls of my feet for a few steps, but it didn’t help.
“Old enough by far to detect the difference between a weed and a desirable plant. I had my children taking care of their first tomatoes by the time . . . ah, it appears that he just fell asleep.”
“He’s been putting in long hours, trying to get his business off the ground.”
“Well, he can’t sleep here all night. His wife will worry, and besides, he’ll freeze to death.” She rapped on the window. “Sam, wake up.” Her knuckles made a dull sound against the glass. “Sam?”
I edged closer. Inside, a shadowy form sat in the front seat, slumping forward against the shoulder strap. If he slept like that much longer, he’d get a horrible stiff neck. As a business owner myself, I understood all about long weeks and fatigue and wearing myself thin, but I’d never fallen asleep in my car. At my desk, yes. On the couch trying to make sense of invoices, yes.
“Sam!” Erica pounded on the window with her fist.
Unease prickled at the back of my neck. I’d had this feeling before, and it hadn’t turned out well. “Um, Erica?” I dropped the diaper bag, pulled off my mittens, and reached into my purse for my cell phone. I flipped it open, trying to ignore the tightness in my chest. “Erica, something’s wrong. There’s no way Sam is asleep.” Not even Jenna, my out-like-a-light daughter, could possibly sleep through all that window whacking. I punched the first number.
“Sam?” Erica called. “Are you all right? Sam!” She grabbed the door handle and lifted it.
I stabbed at the second number.
Erica yanked the door open. “Sam? Are you—” Her question ended in a gasping shriek. Sam fell toward her, his scarf too tight around his neck. There was no life in his slumped body and his open eyes were seeing nothing but death. “Sam!” Erica screamed. She jerked off her gloves and felt for a pulse, then dragged Sam’s body out of the SUV and onto the cold ground. As she started the pointless job of CPR, I pushed the last button.
There was a single ring. Then: “Dane County dispatch. What is your emergency?”
Chapter 3
Gus Eiseley, Rynwood’s chief of police, looked at me. “I hear you have the perfect alibi.”
“It’s all my fault.” I clutched a cup of coffee as if it might be the rock that would sustain me. It wasn’t, of course. It was a blistering hot liquid that, thanks to its caffeine, would keep me awake most of the night, but after seeing poor Sam like that, it wasn’t likely that I’d be able to sleep anyway. I blew at the coffee, making small ripples.
“Your fault.” Gus turned a chair around and sat, putting his arms on the back and looking as comfortable as he looked in his living room. “Are you ready to make a confession?”
I shook my head and almost slopped coffee over the side of the foam cup. “It’s my fault that Sam’s dead.”
Gus propped his chin on his hands. “This, I can’t wait to hear.”
The coffee’s temperature had dropped to merely scalding. I took one sip, then another, as I tried to think out a way to say what I had to say without sounding like a complete idiot. No matter what, Gus would be kind and understanding because that’s the way he was, but he would also poke me in the back at the next church choir rehearsal and make fun of me.
I took another sip of coffee. “It’s my fault because if it hadn’t been for me, he would have been home tonight.”
“And you think that would have made a difference?”
“Well, yes.” I took another swallow. My drink of choice was tea, but Gus didn’t believe in anything brewed from leaves. “If he’d been home maybe his wife would have seen the signs and called 911 before he died.” Even though we were inside the school, I could see the revolving lights of the ambulance that arrived much too late to save Sam’s life. Around and around they went.
“Signs?” Gus asked.
I gestured with my cup. “Of a heart attack, or whatever it was. PTA meetings are always on Wednesdays. It was because of me that we met tonight.” Me and my dumb story session idea. I’d wanted the project approved, I’d wanted to get going on plans, I’d wanted to—
“He didn’t die from a heart attack,” Gus said.
“Oh.” I stole a look at my watch. Barely an hour had passed since I’d called 911. How Gus could know cause of death already, I wasn’t sure, but maybe forensic conclusions really did happen as fast as they did on television. “Um, stroke?”
Gus spoke softly. “Sam was murdered, Beth.”
I heard the words, but they didn’t make sense. “No, he wasn’t. He must have had one of those silent diseases they talk about. Scary, to think every one of us could be walking around with a little alarm clock inside, and one day the alarm will go off but we won’t hear it. All we’ll do is not wake up the next morning.” I was babbling. This is what I did when nervous, scared, or uncomfortable. When I was all three, like now, the effect expanded geometrically. “Back in college there was this professor who died of an aneurysm. Here one day, gone the next. You just never know, do you? And I once knew a—”
“Beth.” Gus interrupted my steady flow of words. “Sam was murdered. There’s no question about it.”
“How can you be so sure?” Everyone made mistakes. I made them every day. I even did dumb things in my dreams. “Shouldn’t a coroner or a medical examiner or a doctor or somebody be the one to say?” Not another murder, I pleaded silently; my children had only recently recovered from the last murder in town. Oliver was sleeping with only one stuffed animal instead of a bedful, and Jenna hadn’t woken in the middle of the night, shrieking, in weeks. “Are you certain? I mean . . .”
“Am I qualified to say how anyone died?” A smile came and went on his weather-worn face. “Normally I wouldn’t. But in this particular case the signs are clear.”
I shut my eyes. Sam’s wife would be devastated. And the poor children. To lose your father to disease was
