Софи Райан - No Escape Claws

I parked the car in the lot and gave Liz back her keys.

“I’m going to stop by Channing’s office,” she said. “It occurred to me that he might have a contact at that consulting firm where Gavin Pace used to work. I’d like to know more about that young man.”

“You’ve been spending an awful lot of time with Mr. Caulfield lately,” I teased. “I’m not going to have to start calling him Uncle Channing, am I?”

She narrowed her blue eyes at me and waggled one finger. “Remember what I told you. An Uber and a robot vacuum cleaner, Sarah,” she said. “And you’d be replaced. Don’t say you weren’t warned.”

Liz came around the car and slid behind the wheel. Rose and I walked toward the back door. She put an arm around my waist. “Don’t worry, sweetie,” she said. “I would never replace you with a robot vacuum.”

“You don’t like robot vacuum cleaners,” I pointed out.

She nodded. “That’s true, but it’s not the only reason. I promise.”

I laid my head against the top of hers for a moment.

She stopped when we reached the back door. “Sarah, do you think it would be a mistake to show Mallory a photo of Gavin Pace and ask if she saw him around the time of the fire?”

I folded one arm up over my head, digging my fingers into my scalp. “I don’t know. She’s going to ask us who he is and why we want to know. Are you ready for those questions?”

Rose looked thoughtful. “I think so. I know we agreed not to tell Mallory that we believe her mother was murdered and I still agree with that, but we can tell her we’re talking to people, including people Gina worked with, trying to find out if she had any enemies. That’s not a lie.”

“That should work,” I said. Rose’s idea made me a little uneasy in truth, but Mallory might have seen someone in the neighborhood and we couldn’t afford not to find out.

I knew this was as good a time as any to tackle Rose about those notes Nick had showed her. She was about to go in the back door. I put a hand on her arm. “I need to ask you something.”

“Of course. What is it?”

I shifted from one foot to the other, suddenly feeling uncomfortable. “I know you said it would be better if I didn’t know what you and Nick were talking about the other day, but I don’t think it is.”

She made an annoyed sound. “Honestly, Nicolas could not keep a secret even if you put duct tape over his mouth. Not that I would.” She looked up at me and I thought once again how she reminded me of a tiny, inquisitive bird. “He told you about that investigator’s notes, didn’t he?” She gave her head a little shake.

I squeezed my eyes shut for a second, counted to three and opened them again. “He did,” I admitted. “But to be fair, Rose, I pressured him.”

She all but rolled her eyes at me. “Sweetie, you smiling and batting your eyelashes can hardly be called pressure.”

I felt my cheeks get red. She knew me too well. “Okay, how exactly I pressured Nick is not what matters here. What matters is that something in those notes twigged for you. Please tell me what it was.”

“It might be nothing,” she hedged.

“So no harm done in telling me then.”

“You’re not going to let this go, are you?” she asked.

I raised an eyebrow. “I learned at the feet of the master.”

She smiled. “All right.” She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Did you know that Greg Pearson was in the car that day with his mother?”

“No,” I said. I shook my head. “That’s awful.”

“It had to have been,” she said. “And not just the accident itself, which was bad enough. There was an . . . incident afterward. The ambulance had just arrived. Greg had been arguing with his mother. One of the police officers who had responded had separated them. He took Gina over to the police car. Greg was sitting on the back bumper of Gina’s car. He got sick. The officer went to help him and when she turned back around a woman was . . . attacking Gina. She yelled and . . . and hit her.”

I kicked a rock and sent it skittering across the pavement. “It was Hannah’s mother, Jia, wasn’t it?” I remembered the way Jia’s hand had clenched into a fist, almost involuntarily it had seemed, when she talked about Gina.

Then I noticed Rose was slowly shaking her head. “No, dear,” she said. “It wasn’t her. It was Mallory.”

“Ah crap!” I muttered. I looked at Rose. “That’s ugly.”

“I can’t believe that that sweet child could have done anything to hurt her stepmother,” Rose said.

“Just because Mallory lost it with her stepmother after the accident doesn’t mean she had anything to do with the fire.”

“I know,” Rose said. She still looked . . . troubled.

“What am I missing?” I asked.

“What if the reason Mike Pearson agreed to the plea deal is because he thinks Mallory was the one who started the fire?”

For a long moment I just looked at her. “I don’t know what to say,” I finally said.

Rose nodded. “I know. But it explains why he took the deal and why he instructed his lawyer to tell us to back off. It explains why Gina’s friend Katy Mueller came here to try to get us to drop the case.”

“It explains a lot of things.”

I tried to imagine Mallory being responsible for her stepmother’s death. And I couldn’t reconcile the young woman who had pleaded with Charlotte to help her father also being the person who had killed the only mother she could remember. Yell at Gina because she drove drunk with one of the kids in the car? Yes. Hit her because Gina had run someone down? Yes. I was no different than Rose, who had insisted she just knew Mike Pearson wasn’t guilty. I just didn’t believe Mallory Pearson was guilty, either.

“But nothing is different,” I said, hoping the conviction I felt came through in my voice. “I have no idea whether Mike Pearson thought Mallory had played any part in what had happened and it’s not like he would tell us anyway. So the only thing we can do is figure out who did kill Gina.”

Rose stood on tiptoe and kissed my cheek. “I love you, sweetie,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

As usual Rose was a dynamo. She put Mr. P. to work getting in touch with Molly Pace. She got Charlotte to make a list of anyone they knew who might have a connection to the street where the Pearsons had lived. And she even had Avery make a pot of tea.

The teen came down the stairs looking quite pleased with herself. She was carrying a small tray holding three cups of tea and a coffee mug. She stopped in front of me. “That’s for you, Sarah,” she said with a shy smile.

“You made me coffee?” I said. “Thank you.”

“It might suck,” she said. She pressed her lips together for a moment. “I mean, it might not be very good.”

I reached for the stoneware mug and took a sip. “Hey, this is good,” I said.

She narrowed her gaze at me. “Good for real or good so you won’t damage my fragile self-esteem?”

“Good for real,” I said, taking another sip. “How did you learn to make coffee? You’re much more of a smoothie person.”

“Yeah,” she said with a shrug. “But I’ve seen Mr. P. make the coffee about a dozen times. It’s not rocket science, although it is math.”

“Well, thank you,” I said. I watched her head for the workroom with the tea and it occurred to me that being around Avery could only be good for Greg Pearson. I hoped their friendship would keep going.

The rest of the day was busy. Liam’s electrician came and finished the wiring work in the sunporch. Liam came by to put another coat of mud on the drywall late in the afternoon.

“If everything goes well, the office should be ready by the end of the week,” he said, shaking drywall dust out of his hair and all over the workroom floor.