Chad smiled faintly and nodded. “That’d work, and it’s how I feel, too. I don’t want to think about her dying someday.”
“Just tell her that, then.”
Chad released a long breath. “What did she call about today?”
“Your father’s funeral service was supposed to be tomorrow.”
“And now it’s not?”
“The coroner’s office won’t release his remains just yet.”
“How come?”
“In cases like this, it isn’t uncommon.” Because Robert’s body was a piece of evidence. She couldn’t bring herself to say that to her son, not about his father. “Red tape, lots of paperwork. It’s no big deal. Sometime next week, maybe a bit later, they’ll release your dad’s remains, and we’ll be able to say our farewells properly.”
Chad swallowed, his larynx bobbing. “I’m not in any hurry. Are you?”
Natalie would have given a lot to close this chapter of her life. “No. It’ll be a very sad occasion.”
Chad gave her a searching look. “Will it? For you, I mean. I know you didn’t love him anymore—that in a way, you even hated him.”
She moved her hands on the weathered rail. “I didn’t hate your father, sweetheart. I hated the things he did. Can you understand the difference?”
Chad nodded. “Why was he like that, Mom? My blood is partly from him, and I’m not like that. Rosie’s not like that, either. What happened to make Dad so weird?”
In that moment, Natalie was finally able to turn loose of her bitterness toward Robert. “Maybe his mom was always stiff when she hugged him,” she said softly. “Maybe she never kissed him and only made smacking noises by his ear. Maybe he never got to make a mess on the tablecloth when he ate ice cream.” She took a deep breath and slowly let it out, feeling cleansed. “Maybe, for your dad, it was always about clothes and manners and shining at school, and never about being loved just because. All of us need to be loved just because, Chad. If we’re not, we grow up feeling second-rate.”
“You loved him that way once. Didn’t you?”
“I loved him very much,” Natalie confessed. Mindlessly, foolishly, with all the devotion an eighteen-year-old heart could feel. “But I think it was too late for him by then. He’d gone so many years without getting a real hug that he no longer even realized he wanted one.”
“That’s sad.”
Natalie ruffled his hair. “Yes, very sad. When you wonder about your father and feel hurt because he didn’t give you hugs when you needed them, remind yourself that he never got hugs himself.”
“Zeke said the same thing almost, that maybe my dad never learned how to love because no one ever really loved him.”
Zeke. Natalie could almost feel his arms around her. “Well, then? There you go.”
Silence fell between them again. Then Chad asked, “When do you think the funeral will be?”
“At this point, no telling. Next week sometime, I imagine, which was my original reason for coming out to talk to you. Camp starts on Monday.”
“I’d forgotten all about camp.”
“You’re all paid up to go, and I think you’ll have a lot of fun. But you’ll be gone all week.”
“What about Dad’s funeral?”
“That’s the wrinkle we need to iron out. If you’d like, you can go to camp, and if the funeral happens next week, I’ll drive up to the lake to get you the evening before.”
Chad gazed off across the field. “I think I’ll just skip camp this year.”
“I’d love to see you go and have a good time. But I also understand that you’re feeling very sad right now. It might be difficult, being around friends who don’t really understand.”
Chad moved his hands on the rail, pushing farther forward with his upper body. His shoulder bones poked up under his T-shirt, their expanse broader than Natalie remembered. Someday soon he’d be a man, she realized with a sharp tug on her heart.
“I do feel sad,” he said, “but I’d probably still have fun.”
“Then go.”
“I think I need to be home this week,” he insisted. “Just in case anything happens, I want to be here for Rosie.”
Natalie couldn’t think what to say. With a sinking heart, she realized that her son knew far more about what was happening behind the scenes than she’d hoped. She felt so bad. Chad would not only miss camp, but would also forfeit the money he’d earned and put on deposit to pay his way.
“How come the cops think you did it?” Chad asked. “I just don’t get it. You get upset when Gramps puts out poison for the barn rats. You’d never kill anybody, especially not Dad. Why do they suspect you?”
Natalie swallowed hard and tightened her grip on the railing. If Chad was old enough to ask, he was old enough to get a straight answer, she decided.
“It’s a really long story,” she began.
At a quarter of six that evening, Zeke’s phone rang. He answered to find Naomi Westfield on the line. After the usual pleasantries, she said, “I know this is late notice, but I wanted to invite you over for dinner tonight. Nothing fancy, just pot roast, but I thought you might enjoy the company.”
Zeke had just taken a steak from the freezer. He glanced at the package on the counter. “I’d love to,” he said.
“Good,” Naomi replied. “Show up anytime. If dinner isn’t ready yet, we’ll chat while we wait.”
“Five minutes.”
“Great. And Zeke?”
“Ma’am?”
“Wear your boots this time.”
Zeke grinned. “Yes, ma’am. Is there anything I can bring?”
“No, nothing, unless you happen to have some red wine on hand. Gramps’s burgundy does in a pinch, but it tastes like drain cleaner.”
Less than ten minutes later, Zeke stood on the Westfield back porch with two bottles of merlot cradled in his arm. At his knock, Naomi appeared at the opposite side of the screen in blue jeans, a clingy pink top, and white running shoes. Somehow, even in casual dress, she managed to look classy. Zeke wondered what Pete had been thinking to let a woman like her slip off his hook.
He searched the kitchen for Natalie when he stepped inside, but she was nowhere to be seen. Naomi took the wine, thanked him prettily, and gestured toward the living room. “Natalie doesn’t know you’re coming. She and Rosie are playing with Barbie. I thought having you over would be a nice surprise for her, something to cheer her up.”
“Is she feeling pretty down?”
“Not down, exactly.” Naomi smiled wistfully. “But she’s worried. Every time the phone rang today, she jumped a foot.”
Zeke lowered his voice. “I spoke to Monroe today.”
“You did?” Naomi set the wine on the counter. “About what?”
Zeke told her about the Chopin playing on Robert’s stereo system when Natalie visited his home. “Natalie meant to tell him herself, but given the curveball he threw her with that damned earnest money agreement, I had a sneaking hunch she forgot. I ran it by Sterling Johnson before I made the call. He feels that any leads, no matter how small, should be passed on to Monroe.”
“So you told him about the Chopin?”
“He’s wasting time trying to pin it on Natalie. I told him as much.”
“Is he going to question all the girlfriends?”
“He’s already questioned Cheryl Steiner, Robert’s most recent significant other. And Natalie guessed right. Cheryl left Robert’s house around five thirty that afternoon, about an hour before Natalie got there.” Zeke hung his hat on a hook on a horizontal coatrack by the back door. “Cheryl says she and Robert had a cozy evening planned and were about to go upstairs when the phone rang. After talking with the caller, Robert gave Cheryl a credit card to go shopping and asked her to come back around ten. She was the one who found him in the garage.”
“She heard the car running?”
“No, actually. Not for a couple of hours, anyway. Around midnight, the Corvette engine started to cough and sputter.
She noticed the odd sound and went to investigate.”
Naomi shivered and chafed her arms. “If she was in the house for two hours without hearing the car, why does Detective Monroe find it odd that Natalie didn’t hear it in the space of a few minutes?”
“That’s exactly what I asked him.”
“And?”
“He says he has to double-check everyone’s story. That he asked Natalie about it mainly because Ms. Steiner claimed not to have heard the car running until the engine coughed.”
“But Natalie is still up there on his suspect list?”
Zeke glanced toward the living room. “I think that earnest money agreement is the biggest reason for that. So far, she’s the only person with a motive.”
“There has to be someone else. ”
Zeke nodded. “Do you suppose Robert’s mother would be willing to talk with me?”
“Grace?” Naomi rolled her eyes. “Do you run with the country club set?”
“No.”
“She probably won’t be bothered then. The woman has a fixation about social standing.”
“I do have a very influential connection, though. Maybe I can get in to see her, riding on his shirttails.”
“Who might that be?”
“Ryan Kendrick.”
Naomi’s eyes widened. “Of the Rocking K Kendricks?”
“One and the same. Ryan’s my brother-in-law.”
Naomi crossed her arms and smiled. “My, my. That’s definitely a name to get Grace’s attention. May I ask why you want to talk to her?”
“I’m hoping she can give me a list of people with whom Robert recently did business.”
“Surely Monroe has already done that.”
“Probably. But maybe he didn’t ask the same questions I will. I’m not so much interested in people with whom Robert completed transactions. I’m more interested in finding out about deals that fell through for one reason or another.”
Light dawned in Naomi’s eyes. “People who may have been done dirty, in other words.”
“Exactly. The guy who walks away with money in his pocket isn’t usually so unhappy that he’ll contemplate murder.” Zeke shrugged. “I may turn up nothing, but I’d really like to talk with Robert’s mom. If anyone will know about his affairs, it’ll be her.”
Holding Barbie in one hand, Natalie was flirting outrageously with Ken in a high-pitched voice when she sensed Zeke behind her. She jumped with a start and went hot with embarrassment when she looked into his laughing blue eyes.
“What have we got going here?” he asked in that deep, resonant voice that did such strange things to her nerve endings.
“We’re playing Barbie!” Rosie informed him. “I got a new dune buggy today!”
Zeke looked far more amazed than the announcement warranted, telling Natalie she’d guessed right about who’d left the package on their porch. Her heart went soft and achy watching him interact with her daughter. Even though he looked silly handling the brightly colored dune buggy, he pretended intense interest as Rosie pointed out all the features of the miniature conveyance.
“Wow,” Zeke said. “Barbie has some nice wheels now.” He inclined his head at Ken, who’d been cast aside in a sprawl by the child. “Is that young fellow a safe driver?”
“Oh, yes. He’s got a license and everything.” Rosie retrieved Ken and straightened his swimming trunks. “He’s very safe.”
“That’s good. If I were Barbie’s dad, I’d make him take a driving test to make sure my little girl would be safe with him.”
Rosie gave Zeke a speculative look. “Do you want to be her dad?”
“Rosie,” Natalie interjected, “Mr. Coulter probably—”
“Mr. Coulter is just plain old Zeke from now on,” Zeke interrupted, “and I’d love to be Barbie’s dad.”
He smiled at Natalie, one of those bone-melting grins that never failed to make her knees feel weak. Then he sat cross-legged beside them on the hardwood floor, gave Barbie’s string bikini a long look, and said, “First things first. If I’m going to be Barbie’s dad, she needs to get some clothes on, or I’m going to ground her for the rest of her natural life.”
“It was the most awful moment of my life!” Naomi said, tears of mirth streaming down her cheeks. “Poor baby. Standing there on the stage in nothing but her underwear, with her poppy costume in a puddle around her ankles.”
Holding Natalie’s hand under the table, Zeke gave her slender fingers a squeeze to let her know he was very much aware of her sitting beside him. The meal was long since over, and the plates had been removed to the sink. Now only the adults remained seated, their wine goblets thrice filled and subsequently emptied. Zeke’s two bottles of merlot had been drained, and Gramps’s rotgut burgundy was presently under attack, the contents of the gallon jug diving at an enjoyable rate.
“The most awful moment of your life?” Valerie cried. “I was the one on display, Mom, not you!”
Naomi wiped her cheeks. “Finally the poor little thing had the presence of mind to duck behind the curtain. Then she ran. Pete went to find her. He looked for thirty minutes, had almost given up, and then heard her sobbing in a closet in the dressing room. Opened the door, and there she was, huddled under a Santa costume from the Christmas play, her yellow blossoms sitting crooked on her head.”
Valerie lazed back on her chair, turning her wine goblet in her fingers, her smile nostalgic. “My one chance at fame, and my mother blew it by gluing my costume together.”
Naomi started to laugh again. “Oh, that was a horrible year. I was stretched so thin, helping Pete in the fields, that there weren’t enough minutes in a day. After I got the costume cut out, I decided to use Stitch Witchery and a steam iron to put it together, thinking it’d hold just fine for one performance. It didn’t, and my daughter has never forgiven me. I think what bothered her most was that she was wearing Tuesday panties on Friday.”
Pete winked at Valerie. “Didn’t bother her a bit to flash her fanny at three hundred people. Oh, no. She was just fit to be tied because she was wearing the wrong day of the week.”
“Nothing has ever changed,” Valerie said, lifting her wineglass to her dad. “Put me in fancy enough underwear, and I’ll walk down Main Street in broad daylight.”
Naomi groaned. “Anyway, such is the Westfield family’s tawdry past.” She sent Zeke an expectant look. “Your turn.”
“I have five siblings,” Zeke began. “If I even touched on all the crazy things that have happened in my family, we’d be here all night. Besides, none of my stories would be half as entertaining as yours.”
“Ah, come on,” Naomi said.
“What would you like to hear about first, my brother Hank’s brush with the law when he and some friends carried a teacher’s Triumph into the gymnasium after a game? Or about the time Tucker got in a fight, and all the Coulter boys ended up in a rumble to defend him? Or about the time my sister, Bethany, was getting ready for the prom, and Hank did her makeup?”
Chin propped on her fist, Naomi grinned broadly. “I want to hear all three stories. But first tell something on yourself.”
Zeke chuckled. “Caught that, did you? In all honesty, I was a pretty boring kid. I can’t really recall any funny stories about myself.”
“Really.” Naomi arched one elegantly penciled eyebrow. “Do you lie your way out of sticky situations frequently, or only occasionally?”
Zeke burst out laughing. “Okay. A story about me.” He thought for a moment. “There was the time I loaded my father’s cigarettes with those little explosives you can buy at joke stores.”
Naomi’s eyes warmed with amusement, and she nodded. “That’ll do.”
As Zeke began the tale, he lightly trailed his thumb over the back of Natalie’s hand. “I was about sixteen, I think, and I was really put out with my dad because the doctor had warned him to quit smoking, and he was still puffing away. As an incentive, I got the bright idea to load his cigarettes. I only tampered with three,
and being a smart kid who didn’t want to get caught, I put them toward the back of his pack before I left for school one morning. My father chain-smoked, most times two to three packs a day, so it was pretty much guaranteed that he’d light the loaded cigarettes while I was gone. Or so I thought. Come to find out, even though he hadn’t actually quit yet, he was trying to cut back, so he’d slowed way down on his consumption.
“That evening when I got home, he never said a word about his cigarettes being loaded. After dinner, he always sat in his recliner and smoked while he watched the news. I noticed that his pack was about half gone. I spent the whole night on pins and needles, expecting a cigarette to blow up in his face. It never happened until the next morning, as luck would have it when he visited the bank. He’d gone in to see about getting a loan to keep the ranch afloat. The bank manager invited him into a private office and asked Dad if smoking bothered him. Dad said no and lit up himself. Murphy’s Law, of course. That was the cigarette that blew.”
“Oh, of course,” Naomi inserted in a voice gone thin with suppressed laughter.
“Dad swears to this day that I must have double loaded the thing because the blast was deafening and sent tobacco and paper flying everywhere. It startled the bank manager pretty badly, and he had a weak bladder.”
Naomi started laughing so hard that she slid down on her chair. “Oh no!”
Between chuckles, Pete asked, “Did your old man get his loan?”
Zeke grinned and looked at Natalie. “He did, actually. The bank manager had teenage boys himself, and one of his sons had pulled the same thing on him only a few months before.”
A few minutes later, Zeke was about to launch into an account of his sister’s senior prom when the doorbell rang. Everyone at the table straightened on their chairs. Gramps frowned. “Who’n hell might that be, do ya think?”
“It’s only twenty ’til eight,” Naomi pronounced.
Chad came in from the living room where he and Rosie had been watching the animal channel. “It’s two guys in suits,” he said in a hushed voice. “I think maybe they’re cops.”