Heart of Ice

have for dinner? Spaghetti? Tacos?

She looked closer. The stain wasn’t hot sauce. She remembered they’d had a shrimp salad that night. No red sauce.

She ran her fingertips over the stain, about the size of a half dollar. It was smooth, penetrating the fabric like a dye stain of color. No lumps. No bumps. She wondered if it was blood. If it was, she didn’t recall him saying that he’d injured himself.

“Honey,” she asked later that night as they prepared for bed, “did you get cut or something?”

Michael seemed unconcerned. “Not lately. Why?”

“Oh,” she said, “I thought I found some blood or something on a dirty shirt of yours.”

“Nope. I’m fine.” His reply was brisk. Curt. It was almost as if he thought his short denial was all he needed to say to stop her brain from ruminating on whatever it was that spun over and over.

Leave me alone. Leave me be. You can’t know everything about me. I won’t let you.

He went into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror.

Why is she pushing me? Why is she ruining what we have?

Olivia stood outside the bathroom door. No water was running. No sound of him urinating into the bowl. Silence.

What is wrong with my husband? They lay side by side, drifting off to an uneasy sleep.

Olivia woke as the moonlight poured though the slats of the miniblinds and fell on Michael’s bare upper torso. He’d gone to bed with a T-shirt on, but in the heat of the night, he’d shucked it from his damp skin. The retrofitted central air-conditioning of their bungalow was just that…central. It was barely a puff by the time it reached the master bedroom in the back of the house. Olivia shifted her weight and lifted her head from the pillow. Gently. Slowly. It hadn’t been a dream that stirred her from her restless sleep, but the worry that sometimes crept up in the dark of night.

You really don’t know him. No one really knows him.

Michael was on his back; blades of light played over his muscled chest. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and shifted a bit closer.

The injury was the color of rust, jagged and positioned just below his collar bone.

Michael’s brown eyes snapped open and Olivia let out a gasp. “What are you looking at?”

“You scared me! I just couldn’t sleep,” she said, recoiling into the sheets.

Michael stared hard at her before turning his back and facing the window. “Oh. Me, too. Hot in here. All I can do is rest my eyes.”

Olivia pulled the blankets up around her neck. Suddenly, she felt a chill in the air.

The two of them lay side by side, the digital clock rolling over to morning.

Chapter Sixteen

Cherrystone

The silvery fringes of his thick, wavy hair askew from the winter wind, Chris Collier stood at Emily Kenyon’s front door, a smile on his face and an overnight bag in hand. With barely a hello, Emily planted a deep kiss on his lips and led him inside. He smelled of the cologne she’d given him for his birthday. She was happy to see him for a thousand reasons, not all of them business, of course.

But business was on her mind.

“You feel like a movie?” Emily asked, pouring a glass of garnet-colored merlot from Stone Ridge, a local vintner that had once won a gold medal at a competition in Napa. It was the first winery in Cherrystone to be so honored. After a bacterial blight killed the largest of six remaining cherry orchards in the 1980s, some farmers jumped on the grape bandwagon. Signs were encouraging. Cherrystone might soon be better known for something other than cherries.

A glass for her. A glass for him.

Chris grinned. “I know what movie you’re talking about,” he said. “And I thought you were going to try to get me drunk.”

Emily retrieved a DVD from her purse and slipped the disk into the player. “I don’t need to get you drunk for that.” Their eyes met and she smiled back. “But I thought I might have to in order to get you to look at this Crawford interview with me.”

The blue screen of the flat-screen TV—which had been her sole splurge the previous year—turned black, then the image of Mitch Crawford came into view. She picked up the remote control and pressed the button that froze the image.

“You already know that I think he’s your guy,” Chris said, settling on the couch, facing the TV. The Christmas tree twinkled from across the room.

“We all think so,” she said.

Emily pressed PLAY. The video display showed a small conference room with acoustic-tiled walls and an oversize clock. A voice—Emily’s—could be heard, but it was slightly out of range. It seemed she was giving instructions on where Mitch Crawford was to sit.

“Nice interrogation room,” Chris said. It was a gentle jab, meant to make Emily smile.

It did. “Thanks. We try out here in Podunkville.”

Mitch took a seat facing the table-mounted camera.

“He looks like he’s ready to go out to dinner or something,” Chris said, noting the man’s deep gray suit, red silk tie, and silk pocket square. “Who wears a pocket square, anyway?”

“Except to a wedding.”

“Or maybe a funeral.”

From the couch, the pair sipped their wine from large balloon goblets and watched as Mitch Crawford alternately kept and lost his cool as Emily, off camera, asked him about Mandy’s disappearance.

“He’s a peach all right,” Chris said. “The last bit was interesting to me.” He reached for the remote and backtracked on the DVD.

It was Emily’s voice asking the question. “I need to know more about Mandy. Did she ever leave like this before?”

“No. She was very reliable.”

“Why did she leave, Mitch?” Again, Emily.

Mitch’s eyes darted to something off screen. There appeared to be a slight wetness on his upper lip.

“I have no idea.” He hesitated. “This interview is over. I’ll look for her myself. Thanks for nothing.”

Chris got up and poured himself some more wine, and then returned to the couch. Mitch Crawford’s face was frozen on the flat screen. “All right. He’s everything you’ve said he was, including a world-class liar. He’s holding it together pretty well, but you can see he’s starting to sweat. That’s probably the reason he ended the interview— not that you weren’t pushing him hard, because you were.”

“I tried. I think I did push too hard,” Emily said. “His holier-than-thou attitude brings out the worst in me.”

Chris shrugged. “No worries, Em. I find it interesting that he never mentions the baby.”

“Me, too. It’s as if the baby doesn’t figure into his worries whatsoever.”

“I also noticed how he says Mandy is so reliable, yet says he has no idea where she’d go, and that she’d never done that before.”