Ross had chosen all the traditional readings from
At the end of the service everyone was invited to a reception in the fellowship hall to pay respects to the family. As the organ postlude ended, I walked outside into the sun-dappled courtyard with Harry and Amy Dye.
Harry glanced in the direction of the throng of reporters, still kept at bay by the Fauquier County Sheriff’s Department. “I’ll be glad when this is over,” he said. “I heard the cops aren’t exactly buying it that Randy committed suicide. What if they’re right? Maybe the real killer is someone who’s here right now at her funeral.”
“Harry!” Amy scolded him. “You’re still in church. Enough! At least no one thinks it’s you anymore. Thank God for that.”
He grew serious. “Yeah, I know. Sorry, Ame. I shouldn’t joke about it.”
“What about Gaby?” I asked. “Is she still a suspect?”
“The sheriff let her go home finally,” Amy said. “But they told her they might bring her back for more questions if they need to.”
“She didn’t do it,” Harry said. “Gaby was hysterical when she saw Randy, but she didn’t kill him. Or Georgia. Come on, ladies. I’m starved. Let’s get something to eat.”
“You two go ahead. I’ll catch up,” I said. “I left something in my car.”
“Parking lot’s that way,” Harry said, as I started to leave.
“I’m taking the long way.”
The navy pickup, backed up to the side entrance next to the church thrift shop, looked as if it had just rolled out of the dealer’s showroom. The license plate, though, was familiar. “SVANH.” Stephanie van Holland. Ross’s ex-wife. I found her in the basement, elegant in jodhpurs, boots, and a fitted white shirt, pulling clothes out of a duffel bag and piling them on a table.
As I walked into the room, she stopped folding what looked like a cashmere sweater and held it up against her chest. “Hello, Lucie.”
Ross and I hadn’t become close until my accident and by then he and Georgia had already been married about a year. Stephanie and I knew each other as passing acquaintances, meeting at local social events or occasionally in Middleburg shops. She was good friends with Dominique, though, and my cousin still considered Ross a cad for divorcing her.
“Hi, Stephanie. I thought I recognized your license plate. New truck?”
“Yes.” She finished folding the sweater and set it on top of the other clothes. A tall, patrician blonde, she had the kind of ethereal all-American looks that smoldered rather than sizzled. If Georgia had been fire, Stephanie could be ice, until you got to know her and she trusted you. At least that’s what Dominique said.
“Yes, it is new, as a matter of fact.” She raised an eyebrow and said with sweet irony, “I assume you’re not here to shop or talk cars?”
Guilty as charged. “No. I came for Georgia’s funeral.”
“Well, this is my volunteer day.” She pulled another shirt out of the bag. “How’s he doing?” The shirt was badly creased, so she placed it on the table, concentrating on smoothing out the folds.
“Coping.”
She paused in her work. “I heard the sheriff thinks he might have had something to do with it.”
“At the moment he doesn’t have a verifiable alibi for the time of Georgia’s death. He delivered twins that night, but the mother was illegal and wouldn’t go to the hospital. So he went to her place. Now the whole family’s disappeared.”
“Tough break.” She finished folding the shirt department-store-perfect. It didn’t sound like she felt too sorry for Ross. “But he’s not the only one dragged into this. The police came to see me, too. I thought he and that woman were out of my life for good.” She sounded bitter.
“Really?” I said, startled. “You mean, just because you’re—”
“His ex-wife?” She looked down at her long slender fingers and touched the place where a wedding ring would have been. “It’s a known secret I didn’t want the divorce at the time. And I resented Georgia for breaking up our marriage.” She shrugged and pulled another sweater from the bag. “I guess Ross and I have something in common. I don’t have an alibi, either.”
“What were you doing, if you don’t mind my asking?”
She rolled her eyes. “What any God-fearing person is normally doing at two in the morning. I was in bed, asleep. Alone.”
“You’re not really a suspect, are you?”
“No.” She laughed, but there was no mirth in it. “He was really a bastard when it was all over, you know? I felt so betrayed.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was devastated when he told me about Georgia. One minute I thought everything was fine, we’d been talking about taking a safari in Kenya in the spring, then, boom. There’s another woman. He’d been seeing her for a while. I had no idea. He seems like an open book, but he’s not.” She twisted the sweater as she talked until it resembled a thick cord. “Oh, God, look at what I’m doing.”
“I’m so sorry, Stephanie.”
She shrugged again, unraveling the sweater. “Frankly, I’d be more likely to kill him than her.”
Some years Memorial Day weekend already feels as if we’re well into full-blown summer because the weather has been blisteringly hot since mid-May and the swamplike humidity wrings you out like a damp dishrag. The haze fades the Blue Ridge Mountains until they are as white as the sky, vanishing from the horizon like smoke. Other years, like this one, the humidity stays at bay, the sunshine is pure gold, and the sky so achingly blue that pilots call this kind of weather “severe clear.” The air smells clean and fresh and full of the promise of indolent summer days to come.
I had just finished breakfast on the veranda when the doorbell rang, which meant there was a stranger at the front door. Around here everyone knew the door was likely to be unlocked and protocol usually involved banging loudly, then opening it a crack and yelling, “Yoo-hoo, anybody home?”
When I opened the door, Mick Dunne stood there. Definitely not a “yoo-hoo” kind of guy, though he was wearing jeans, a polo shirt, and brand-new blindingly white sneakers. This time the jeans hadn’t been ironed.
“Good morning,” he said. “I’ve come to show you my land.”
“I thought you might have come to show me your sneakers,” I replied.
He laughed and stuck out a foot. “They are rather white, aren’t they? Look, Lucie, please say you’ll come. We need to straighten things out.”
“You mean Quinn?”
“I mean us. It would mean a great deal to me if you’d do this.” Suddenly he was serious. “Please?”
There was no graceful way to get out of this—literally or figuratively—because he’d put one of his newly shod feet in the threshold and was standing there, arms folded, waiting me out.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll come.”
We took his car, a shiny black Mercedes convertible with a GPS system. “Where did you get the car?” I asked.
“From a nice chap at the Mercedes dealership. I gave him some money and he let me drive off with it.”
We took Atoka Road and at Route 50, Mosby’s Highway, the GPS female voice told him to signal right toward Middleburg.
“Where is this land?” I asked. “Can I scroll down the display and see where we’re going?”
“Absolutely not. It would ruin the surprise.”
“Are we going to Middleburg to pick up Erica or Austin?”
“No, but we are meeting someone.”
We drove through Middleburg behind a slow-moving horse trailer, passing Federal Street and the offices of
