I didn’t wait for him to repeat the number, but scrolled straight back to the first message that had come in from that number yesterday afternoon.
“Hey, shug. We got here just fine, but when we stopped for lunch, I dropped my phone in the parking lot and by the time I missed it, somebody’d run over it.” I heard his rueful laugh. “You were right. We should’ve packed a lunch. Sandy’s lending me hers while we’re here. They think the SIM card’s okay, so I’ll wait till I get home to buy a new phone. Call me back at this number, okay?”
I played that message three times and heard absolutely nothing in his voice to indicate that he was still mad or that he thought I might be. All my angst for nothing?
Relief flooded through me as I remembered the many times I had snarled at him back when he was more like another brother than a future love. Half the time he never realized I was mad at him. The other half he just shrugged it off. He knew me too well: if I was seriously angry, I’d let him know; otherwise, I’d get over it as soon as I cooled down enough to think it over.
Was it really that simple? I played the message again.
Yesohyesohyes!
He and I and Cal were still going to have to sit down and thresh out the ground rules again, but for now, the huge weight that had burdened my shoulders for two days melted away like ice cubes in a glass of warm sweet tea. I was no longer exhausted. I wanted to rush downstairs and dance naked on the beach. I wanted to ring room service and order champagne. Most of all, I wanted to hurry the night along so that morning would come quickly.
I slid between the sheets and fell asleep hugging one of the oversized pillows and whispering happy nothings in its nonexistent ear.
CHAPTER
14
Monday dawned blue-skies bright with crystalline air that for June was almost humidity-free. Sunlight sparkled on the turquoise water and turned the soaring gulls a dazzling white. Another day in paradise, made even more beautiful by calling Dwight as soon as I awoke. We talked for almost an hour. He planned to go on to his seminar this morning while Cal went camping with Paul Radcliff and his boys. Paul and his wife Sandy had known Dwight and his first wife from their tour of duty in Washington. Paul is now chief of police in Shaysville, which was how he and Dwight have kept in touch over the years.
“What about the house?” I asked.
“There were some family pieces that Jonna’s mother wanted back,” he said, “and you remember Eleanor Prentice, Mrs. Shay’s cousin?”
The only normal member of that whole family? Of course I remembered her.
“Her daughter will take the china. It’s been in the family a couple of generations and I didn’t think we wanted it.”
“God, no,” I said. In addition to the casual dinnerware we’d received as wedding gifts, we also had my own mother’s Royal Doulton in enough place settings to serve a formal dinner to twenty.
“How’s Cal handling things?” I asked.
“Okay. He cried a little when we got to Jonna’s room, but Eleanor had emptied out all her closets and drawers and stripped the bed so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, I guess. About the only thing he really talked about was that the house and yard looked smaller than he remembered.”
Time does that, I thought—magnifies in memory the well-loved places of childhood.
“Will’s on his way back with a truckload of things he’ll put in his next auction. The housing market here’s a lot worse than ours, but the real estate agent’s going to try renting the house to someone with an option to buy. With gas prices what they are, she thinks people are going to want to live in town again instead of miles out in the country.”
“There was nothing in the house Cal wanted to keep?”
“Not really. We pretty much cleaned out his room when we moved him down in January. There was a little wooden box that Jonna used to toss her spare change in and a souvenir mug from Six Flags, stuff like that. None of the furniture. So how’s your conference going?”
“It doesn’t officially start till this afternoon,” I said, stalling as I tried to decide how to tell him that there might be a murderer among us. “The chief judges meet at three and there’s a reception tonight in honor of Judge Fitzhume.”
In the end, because there was no way to avoid it, I told him as calmly and unemotionally as I could about Pete Jeffreys’s death.
He was concerned that I was the one who had discovered his body in case Jeffreys had been someone I liked and respected. Not that my likes or dislikes would ever affect the way he works his cases.
“Who’s in charge?” he asked.
“The lead detective’s a guy named Gary Edwards. He says he’s met you and to tell you hey when I talked to you.”
“Tell him I said hey back if you happen to see him again. He struck me as pretty solid. You aren’t messing around in his case, are you?”
