into every aspect of their business.
“You said you worked successfully in both those areas at St. Stephen’s, right? I’d like you to write up any recommendations you have for us to improve our ingathering during the upcoming year. I know the members of the stewardship committee will want to benefit from your experience.”
“Certainly,” Elizabeth said, her face reflecting a calm gratification.
Lois, on the other hand, was a study in skepticism. The stewardship committee had a hard time benefiting from each other’s experience, let alone that of a woman who had been at St. Alban’s for all of two days.
“You’ll see that Elizabeth gets that, won’t you?” Clare asked, hoping her bright tone masked her desperation.
“Mmm.”
Clare chose to take that as agreement. “I’ll leave you to it, then!” She escaped down the hall, fishing her keys out of her pocket as she went.
She unlocked the door quietly. It swung open easily. She stared. The lamp was lit and the computer was on, but her desk chair sat unoccupied. As did the sagging love seat and the two admiral’s chairs in front of the fire. A sharp cut of emotion slashed through her, low. Disappointment.
She pressed her lips together, determined not to feel like an abandoned child, and shut the door.
And would have screamed if Russ hadn’t clamped his hand over her mouth.
TWENTY-FOUR
Sorry,” Russ whispered. “I didn’t know if it was you. Or if you were alone.” He released her.
“Good God.” She clutched at her breastbone. “You scared the sh-sheep out of me.”
The edges of his mouth curled. “Scared the sheep?”
She shot him a dirty look. “Don’t start with me.”
He held one finger up to his lips. “Unless you’re in the habit of talking to yourself, you’d better keep it down.”
She had a small cache of CDs she kept on the bookcase for office ambience, a sort of Anglican top ten, heavy on Purcell and Elgar. She dropped one of them into the small Bose player her parents had given her for Christmas. She tilted it, directing its speakers toward the door, and switched it on. The rigorously romantic music of Ralph Vaughan Williams filled the air.
“Have you found anything?” She pulled one of the admiral’s chairs toward the desk.
“Yeah. There are some e-mails from a guy named Oliver Grogan. Owns some sort of fabric shop in Saratoga. Looks like they met at a trade show in New York and she’s bought some stuff from him. There’s a lot of flirting back and forth in the e-mails, from both of them.”
“Do you think he might be the man she was seeing?” She caught herself. “Possibly seeing?”
He gave her a look of weary thanks. “I’m certainly going to check him out. The trouble is, it’s all spelled out there in the file, with his name and address and everything. I find it hard to believe that if she was seriously thinking about… someone in a romantic way, she’d leave an electronic trail. I mean, she referred to the man by a code name, for chrissakes, like she was Agent 99 or something.”
Clare chose her words with care. “That doesn’t mean she was skilled at covering her tracks.”
“Oh, she was skilled all right. Seven years, and I never suspected a thing. Not a damn thing.”
“Do you really think… is it possible Lyle could be involved?”
He gestured toward a pad of paper he had covered with notes. “In the e-mails to her sister, she never reveals who Mr. Ooo, Sweep Me off My Feet is. But I’ve developed a time line for the dates she mentions seeing him.” He looked at Clare full on, now. “It could-the times correspond to-it could be Lyle.”
“You can’t believe that.”
“I don’t know what to believe. Seven years MacAuley’s been my right-hand guy. The closest thing I had to a friend until you came along. I went to the mat with the aldermen to get him promoted to deputy chief. Now I find out the bastard was nailing my wife.”
“You only have Debbie’s word for that. Has it occurred to you she might have told you that deliberately? To hurt you?”
“As in, she made it up to get back at me?”
“Yes.”
“You heard her. She wasn’t lashing out at me, she was defending her sister. Besides, I don’t think she had any idea who Lyle was. Other than the guy Linda was-” He shook his head, his throat working. “I just can’t believe it,” he said finally. “I can’t believe she had an affair and I never knew. She always seemed so”-he spread his fingers flat against the air, miming a pane of glass-“transparent to me.”
Clare opened her mouth to deliver a consoling word but snapped it shut again. She imagined she could see his pain, spiky and fragile, spreading through him like frost lines along the frozen surface of a lake.
“Did you find anything else?”
He sat still for another moment, then gave himself a shake and turned toward the monitor.
“More e-mails to and from her sister. She was pretty mad at me.”
“That can’t have been a surprise.”
He sighed. “It wasn’t.”
“Anything else?”
“Nothing that twigged me. I looked at her Internet history, the stuff she had bookmarked. Lots of fabric sites, lots of other drapery business sites. The only thing that might be related to Mr. Sandboy is a sort of regional craigslist-you know, lots of personals and help-wanted ads. Vacation housing swaps and things for sale. Pet sitting and snow shoveling.”
“Did she have a profile in there?”
“Not that I could find.”
“Maybe she was using it to find more seamstresses for her business.”
He shook his head. “She always hired her workers locally before. By word of mouth.”
“Had she taken on a job that was bigger than usual? Something that might have caused her to turn to other ways of finding seamstresses?”
“Her last big job was doing the draperies and whatnots for the Algonquin Waters resort.”
“Is she replacing them in the sections they’re rebuilding?”
“She will.” He winced. “I mean, she would have. From what I understand, they’re still doing the finish work in the parts of the hotel that were destroyed in the fire.”
Clare nodded. She had been there, at the resort, the night an explosion and fire wrecked the grand ballroom and a sizable portion of the ground floor. She’d be surprised if it was ready to reopen by the spring.
“If there’s anything else pertinent in her computer files, I’m not seeing it.” Russ tapped the notepad again. “That leaves me with three leads to follow up on. Oliver Grogan, which is probably the weakest of the bunch. Aaron MacEntyre, the kid who was with Quinn Tracey when he allegedly drove his snowplow past my house and saw a car parked in the drive. Another one that’s not likely to get me anywhere. And finally, the mystery car itself.”
“What do you know about it?”
He fished his cell phone from his pocket. “You’re going to tell me that.” He tossed the phone to her.
“Me?”
“I got three calls from the station while you were away. One of ’em’s going to be”-his lips tightened whitely around the words-“Lyle. With whatever he dug up on the car.”
“You… don’t want to hear his voice?”
He gave her a look that could only be described as dry.
“Ah.” She put the pieces together. “You don’t want to hear anything from the state investigator.”
He tapped his nose. “Smart girl.”
She hit the menu button and selected “listen to messages.” The phone connected to his voicemail. “What’s your PIN?” she asked.
