“Don’t get me started.” She moved past me toward a door down the hall that had been left on the latch. “It’d probably take an hour and I need to get back to Fitz. Don’t you worry though. I didn’t kill the bastard. Fitz wouldn’t’ve let me.”
I couldn’t help smiling as I swiped my key card in the lock. No way could Martha have strangled Pete Jeffreys and dumped him into the river, but there was also no way Fitz could’ve stopped her from trying if she’d set her mind to it.
Moonlight spilled through the windows of my dark room, and without switching on the lamps I crossed over to the balcony doors and stepped out into the humid night air. Beyond the multilevel pool decks, the gazebos, and the deserted pool lay the ocean. No whitecaps and almost as calm as a millpond. The tide was dead low and what waves there were rolled gently onto the sand and quietly dissolved in white foam. The moon was three or four nights from being full and it sparkled on the slowly undulating water like a handful of golden sequins tossed by a careless mermaid.
The moon, the stars, the thick brine-ladened air—I had stood gazing out to sea like this on dozens of other summer nights and memory held me in its grip, sending kaleidoscopic images coursing through my head of weekends with Mother and Daddy and my brothers back when I was a child: musty summer cottages borrowed from a more affluent aunt or uncle, pallets of quilts on the floor, sand underfoot no matter how often the floors were swept.
A week at the beach for high school graduation, chaperoned by my brother Seth and his new bride: beach music and shagging the night away on the boardwalk at Atlantic Beach and sneaking sips of beer when Seth’s back was turned, trying to forget for a few hours at a time that Mother would be dead by the end of that summer.
Then, after I was grown, that heady mixture of freedom and abandon, and yes, the mild flirtations with a colleague or two here in this very hotel during summer conferences.
But I had never been to the beach with Dwight. No memories of kissing him with salty lips, of making love to him in the moonlight on a deserted stretch of sand.
I sighed and stepped back into the air-conditioned room, switched on the lights, and drew the curtains. My cell phone lay amid a clutter of tissues and lipsticks where I had unthinkingly left it when I changed purses earlier in the evening. I’m not quite as bad as Daddy about talking on phones, but the fact is that I don’t like being tethered to one and the older I get, the more often I seem to forget to carry mine or to switch it on. It exasperates the hell out of Dwight, who never turns his off. I flipped it open and saw that I had missed several calls. Chelsea Ann’s number was there, along with my friend Portland’s, and several I didn’t recognize, but Dwight’s?
CHAPTER
6
Despite my late night, I was wide awake by 8:30. Reid had left his riverfront table long before I did, so if I was up, he might be, too.
He answered on the fourth ring and did not sound all that happy to hear my voice. “Do you know what the hell time it is?” he asked.
“Sorry,” I said unrepentantly, “but I wanted to catch you before you left for your first session.”
“First session?”
“Isn’t today the opening session of your conference?”
“Yeah, but we don’t plan to get down there till this afternoon.”
“You mean you’re still in Wilmington?”
“Yeah, why?”
I heard him yawn, which made me yawn, too, of course.
“Deborah? You still there?”
“I’m here.” Another yawn overtook me. “How about we have breakfast together? Where are you?”
“At my friend Bill’s house. Bill Hasselberger. You met him last night, remember? He said I could stay with him this week. Save on hotel bills.”
“Ask him where’s a good place to get breakfast.”
“It’s too early for breakfast,” he grumbled, but after a muffled conversation on his end, he said, “Bill says for you to come on over here. He claims he makes an awesome frittata.”
I got directions and we agreed I’d be there within the hour after I’d showered and dressed. From his lack of questions, I gathered that neither of them knew about Pete Jeffreys’s death. Good. Maybe I’d get to see their faces when they heard. Not that I suspected either of them. All the same…
Forty minutes later I turned off Market Street, counted three blocks, turned left, and pulled up in front of a modest white clapboard bungalow with dark red shutters and a porch that was shaded by a large mimosa tree covered in thousands of puffy pink flowers. Only a few miles from the ocean and not quite 9:30 in the morning, but the white-hot sun shone fiercely in a sullen blue sky and the air was already muggy when I opened the car door. My antiperspirant gave up the fight before I could make it up the front walk to the shady porch.
Hasselberger’s rolled-up Sunday paper lay by the steps where his delivery person had thrown it.
Reid met me at the door, along with the odor of bacon, basil, and sauteed onions. A night’s growth of stubble darkened his jawline and he was still in a faded T-shirt and loose knit pants. Like all my male Stephenson relatives, he’s tall and good-looking and he loves women. With his broad shoulders, curly brown hair, and clear hazel eyes, they love him right back, which is the main reason his marriage fell apart. He still acts like a kid in a candy shop
