coming out with version two in a few weeks.”
“Polizei?”
“That’s Russian for ‘police,’ I guess. The character is a cop in the future and he takes his team to infiltrate this castle-I think it’s in Romania because there are vampires, and there’s a magic sword…it’s pretty cool.”
“Polizei is a German word.”
“Oh. Whatever. Evan can do games, I’ll say that for him.”
“I understand Evan is not Cara’s father?”
Drew blinked, apparently still lost in Romanian castles. “What? Oh, no, he isn’t.”
She waited for him to answer the obvious question. He didn’t. “Who is?”
“What? I don’t know. She never talked about him.”
“Uh-huh.” The desire to do right by the woman Theresa had initially dismissed began to seem a little silly. Jillian Perry had had one man’s baby, had a less-than-perfect marriage to another, and had a third coming by to let her cry on his shoulder. People had opted out of much less screwed-up lives than hers. Every year more people killed themselves than were killed by others. She started to push off the conference table with both hands. “I’m very sorry, Mr. Fleming, but you will not be able to claim the body, unless Mr. Kovacic decides not to-”
“You’re not listening,” Drew Fleming said flatly. Coldly. The weepiness evaporated from his eyes and they turned to ice in less time than it took her to notice. He enunciated his words, as if for someone not very bright. “I have a pretty plot in Riverside, under a tree, that she can have. Evan will just cremate her-and that will destroy all the evidence.”
Theresa had stopped halfway through the act of rising, her body obeying the instinct to retreat from the odd man, knees half bent in a way that worked her thighs. “Evidence of what?”
He couldn’t maintain the icy control, and the timbre of his voice climbed upward. “Murder! Evan murdered her, of course!”
“What makes you say-”
“Why else would she be here? That’s what you investigate, right? Murders?”
“The medical examiner’s office investigates all deaths, Mr. Fleming, natural deaths, homicides, suicides-”
His hands, on the table, clenched into fists. “He murdered her.”
She tried to speak gently. Fleming seemed to be more tightly wound than could be considered healthy, both for himself and others. “We will know more when all the tests are completed, Mr. Fleming, but it appears that Jillian died of exposure. No one harmed her.”
This did not convince him. In fact, her words did not even seem to penetrate. Fine, straight hair fell in his face as he shook his head. His skin had been white from the cold when he first arrived and hadn’t grown any rosier during his visit, only emphasizing the deep blue irises and red veins in his eyes. “I don’t know how he did it, but he did. Don’t let him fool you. He fooled her too, at first.”
She worked to hold on to her patience. “Why would Evan Kovacic want to kill his wife, Mr. Fleming?”
Again the stare, the aura of surprise at how little she knew about the life of Jillian Perry, at her seeming incuriosity about a woman who had apparently been the most fascinating woman to ever walk the planet. “You mean you don’t know about the money?”
“What money?”
A touch of color finally pricked his skin, a pinkish hue almost like a faint glow of triumph. “Sit down.”
She sat.
CHAPTER 7
“So get this,” Theresa told Frank while shifting her niece’s one-year-old to her other hip. She had driven directly from work to her cousin’s middle child’s tenth birthday party in Parma, and now stood in an overwarm, overcrowded house with a marauding horde of sugar-crazed children, a passel of widowed aunts, and the harried generation-her generation-caught in between. As long as she ignored the claustrophobic air, the warmth felt good, and her mother beamed to see her at a family function. She had avoided far too many of them in the past nine months, and family was everything to her mother. Everything.
“Jillian’s grandparents left a huge amount of money to her baby, Cara. Like a million and a half huge.”
Frank shoveled another spoonful of potato salad into his mouth despite having made the comment earlier that potato salad was a summer dish and there was something weird about eating it in March. “So Jillian was rich? Then she didn’t marry for the money.”
Theresa’s niece reappeared and collected her son. He took a handful of Theresa’s hair with him, but at least the danger of a spit-up had passed. Theresa began to rethink the glories of a large family gathering. “According to Drew, she’s never drawn on the money. It’s sitting in an account, waiting for Cara. Jillian paid her bills with her salary from Beautiful Girlz. Her parents disowned her, more or less. They didn’t care for her choice of careers, and they certainly didn’t care for her having a baby and not only not marrying the father, but not even telling them who he was.”
Theresa’s daughter, Rachael, chose that moment to dart in for another piece of her grandmother’s cheesecake, and Theresa took the opportunity to add, “As any parent wouldn’t. Something all daughters should keep in mind.”
Rachael just laughed in response and carried her prize off to a corner of the living room, rejoining the daughters of Theresa’s cousins. The girls burst back into conversation. Theresa’s heart gave a contented sigh to see her daughter laughing; perhaps she had managed to keep up enough of a show at home that Rachael’s life, at least, had gotten back to normal. She
“Hmm. Lucky kid.”
“She’s now an orphan.”
“Okay. Poor kid. Very rich poor kid.”
With some difficulty, Theresa turned her back on a plate of brownies. “And now it will be Evan’s. Or will it? He’s not Cara’s father.”
“A man married to the mother is considered the father unless a court rules otherwise,” Frank recited around the potatoes.
“Unless the biological father shows up and sues for custody.”
“Obviously that mystery man hasn’t heard about Cara’s nest egg. Though isn’t it all tied up in trusts or whatever?”
“No. Her grandparents thought Jillian would need the money now, so that Cara wouldn’t starve to death before she reached her majority. They didn’t have much faith in either Jillian’s job or her fiance, according to Drew. No trusts or mutual funds for them, just a big ole pile of money with no strings attached.” She watched Frank chew thoughtfully, no doubt deciding what he could do with a million and a half.
One of their aunts nudged him out of his daydream before Theresa could, placing a birthday cake festooned with pink-frosting roses among the other dishes. Theresa moved bowls out of the way to make room while the aunt grilled Frank about his latest girlfriend and when they could expect to hear some news. She did not give Theresa the same treatment. The nice thing about being a divorcee in a large Catholic family was that no one encouraged you to remarry. Oh, they had supported her engagement to Paul and planned to attend the wedding. They would be happy for her again if the same situation occurred, but they didn’t actively encourage the idea, an attitude for which she felt only gratitude. She had enough thoughtless coworkers encouraging her to “start dating again.” The thought made her want to gasp for air.
As a bachelor, however, Frank remained fair game.
“What about the phone number in her pocket?” Theresa asked him.
“The main line for some place called Delta Dynamics. They do data processing for trade shows. Don’t ask me what that means, but neither the receptionist nor the manager had ever heard of Jillian Perry.”
“Trade shows. She could have worked one of theirs.”
