with student teams from all over the country. The sister — her name is Tresa, T-r-e-s-a — she goes to school at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls. She came down here on a bus with her teammates. Her mother couldn't come, so it sounds like Glory and her boyfriend — his name's Troy Geier — drove down here separately to cheer for Tresa during the program. They were all supposed to be heading back home today.'
'The victim, Glory, she wasn't part of the competition?'
Lala shook her head. 'Nope.'
'Did you get any more info about Glory out of the sister or the boyfriend? Do they have any idea what she was doing on the beach last night?'
'They say no.'
'Do you believe them?' Cab asked.
'If one of them was involved, they put on a good act. Most of the time, you can see through kids if they're lying.'
'I pretty much assume everybody's lying,' Cab said.
That was part of his legacy growing up with a mother who worked as an actress. If someone was moving their lips in LA, they were probably lying. Being a cop had done nothing to change his conviction that people were dishonest at heart. He'd learned that lesson the hard way.
'How old is the sister Tresa?' he added.
'Nineteen. She's a freshman at River Falls.'
'How about the boyfriend? Did you pick up anything about his relationship with Glory?'
'Nothing about Glory,' Lala said. He saw a self-satisfied smirk on her golden face. She knew something. She'd been aching to tell him from the beginning.
'Spill it, Mosquito,' Cab said. 'What did the boyfriend tell you?'
Lala didn't blink at the nickname this time. 'Troy followed me so we could talk in private. He didn't want Tresa to hear what he had to say, because she wouldn't let him talk about it.'
'About what?'
'Apparently there's another couple from the same part of Wisconsin staying at the resort this week. Their names are Mark and Hilary Bradley. I checked, and he's right. They have a room that opens right on to the beach. It's not even two hundred yards from where the murder took place.'
'OK,' Cab said, waiting for more.
'Troy told me that we needed to talk to the husband before he skipped town. He claimed that if there's anyone in the hotel who might have done this to Glory, it's Mark Bradley.'
Cab raised an eyebrow. 'Yeah? Based on what? Does this guy have some kind of connection to Glory?'
'Not to Glory,' Lala told him, 'but to her sister. According to Troy, everyone in Door County knows Mark Bradley. He was a teacher at the high school until he was let go under a cloud last year. The police couldn't bring statutory rape charges, because Tresa wouldn't say a word against him on the record. But the story is, he was having sex with her.'
Chapter Four
Hilary Bradley sat motionless on the sofa in their hotel room as Mark paced in and out of the dusty stream of light through the patio door. They hadn't spoken. She studied the stricken expression on her husband's face. His breathing was fast and loud through his nose; he was scared. It was like a rerun of the previous year, when they'd sat together in their Washington Island home and confronted the rumors about Mark and Tresa.
Not again.
They didn't need to talk to each other to know what was going to happen. Hilary could see it all too clearly. Accusations were about to rain down on Mark like a storm. There would be a knock on the door. Questions. Suspicion. This one would be even worse than the previous year because Mark's name was already linked to teenage girls and sex — and because there was no doubt this time about whether anything bad had really happened. There would be no he-said, she-said this year.
A girl was dead on the beach. Someone killed her.
Mark stopped in the middle of the carpet. He'd closed the glass door to the beach, and the air in the room was cold and sterile. Their eyes met. She saw anger and anxiety fighting in his face. He took two steps in his long stride and knelt in front of her. He took both of her hands and squeezed them hard. 'I need to say something.'
Hilary was calm. 'Go ahead.'
'I didn't do this,' Mark said. 'I never thought I'd have to ask this again, but I need you to have faith in me. You have to believe me.'
'I do.'
He stood up again, relieved, and she hoped he didn't doubt her sincerity or wonder if she was hiding something behind her face. She wasn't lying.
A year ago, her friends had called her naive when she told them that she didn't think that Mark had slept with Tresa Fischer. He denied it; she believed him. They'd both been foolish in letting Tresa get closer to them than their other students, which was a mistake Hilary had always sworn to herself she'd avoid as a teacher. But she and Mark were new to Door County and anxious to fit into small-town life. Tresa was sincere, smart, quiet; she was pretty, but she wasn't wild or sexual like her younger sister Glory. They'd paid attention to her, and Tresa, who didn't get much attention at home, thrived on it.
Hilary had realized quickly that Tresa was developing a schoolgirl crush on her husband. It wasn't the first time. Women young and old were drawn to Mark, but he'd never shown any inclination to cheat. She hadn't seen Tresa's emotions as a threat, because she knew the girl too well and didn't believe Tresa would ever try to act on her feelings. Her affection for Tresa made her forget her first rule of teenagers, which was that they weren't girls growing up to be women; they were women in girl's clothes. She also never expected that Tresa's fantasies alone could get her husband into trouble.
Then Tresa's mother Delia found her daughter's diary.
When Tresa wasn't dancing, she was writing. Mark was her English and art teacher. He'd encouraged her to write short fiction, and he and Hilary had both read several of her stories, in which she'd created a teenage detective who was a lot like herself. What neither of them realized was that Tresa had been writing other stories too. On her computer, she'd invented an imaginary diary in which she related the details of her passionate sexual affair with her teacher. It was erotic and explicit. She described their trysts, how he touched her, how her body responded, the things he told her, the things she told him.
It was Tresa's sexual awakening on the pages of her diary, and it was convincing enough to be real. When Delia Fischer found it on Tresa's computer, she leaped to the obvious conclusion: Mark Bradley was having sex with her seventeen-year-old daughter.
Delia confronted Tresa, but the girl's evasive denial persuaded her mother that Tresa was covering up the truth of the affair. She didn't confront Mark about their relationship; instead, she went directly to the principal, the school board, the police, and the newspapers. Faced with allegations of criminal sexual misconduct, Mark's own denials meant nothing. No one believed him. The intimate detail in the diary spoke for itself. The only thing that saved him from prosecution and jail was Tresa's stubborn insistence that the diary was a fantasy, that there had never been any sexual relationship between herself and Mark. Without her testimony, there was no case to bring to court.
Even so, Tresa's and Mark's denials didn't change many minds in Door County about what had really happened between them. When Tresa talked about Mark, everyone who listened to her could tell that she was in love with him. Her face glowed when she talked about him. To her mother, and to the school authorities, that meant she was protecting him.
Mark escaped without criminal charges, but the principal, teachers, and parents of Fish Creek High School weren't about to leave him in front of a classroom. As a second-year teacher, without tenure, he had essentially no
