Софи Келли - Paws Аnd Effect

“You know better than most people how private a man Marcus is.”

I nodded.

“And you know how important trust and loyalty are to him.”

“I know,” I said. They had almost derailed our relationship before it got started.

“There’s something he hasn’t told us in all of this.”

My stomach clenched as though some giant hand had grabbed it and started squeezing. “Hope, he’s what you two like to call a person of interest in his friend’s death and you think he’s keeping secrets?”

She exhaled softly. “I think he’s protecting someone—I don’t know who—that he cares about.” She looked down at the ground for a moment and kicked a rock, skittering it across the grass. Then she met my eyes again. “Can you tell me with one hundred percent certainty that Marcus has told us everything? Absolutely everything?”

The hand on my stomach squeezed harder and harder. Because I realized that I couldn’t. That little niggling feeling that had been burrowing in the back of my brain wouldn’t let me.

“I don’t know what he’s holding back,” Hope said. “But we need to find out.”

All I could do was nod. I wasn’t sure what felt worse: the thought that Marcus didn’t completely trust me, or the thought that I didn’t completely trust him.

I cleared my throat. “I’ll talk to him.”

“I’m sorry to put you in this position,” Hope said. I believed her. I could see the sadness in her eyes and the downturn of her mouth. “I can’t let Marcus be arrested for something we both know he didn’t do.”

She pressed her lips together and it suddenly hit me that she loved him. Not as a partner. Not as a friend. She loved him. Why hadn’t I seen it before? Or maybe I had and I just hadn’t wanted to admit it.

“It has to be done,” I said. I looked past her to the lake. The water looked rough and troubled—exactly how I felt. “What else did you find out?”

“I didn’t get this from Bryan,” she said. “I have a . . . contact in the prosecuting attorney’s office—he’s keeping a close eye on this—and anyway, it looks like Marcus doesn’t have an alibi for the time that the medical examiner thinks Dani was killed.”

I held up a hand. “Wait a minute. The prosecuting attorney’s office is where he was. Remember? He went for a meeting. The prosecutor had been held up. He went to talk to Dani and then he went back to the prosecuting attorney’s office.”

“Where the meeting lasted all of about five minutes,” Hope said. “Which means there’s an hour unaccounted for.”

“Did you ask Marcus where he was?”

“Uh-huh. He was evasive. Finally he said he went for a walk. He said he had a lot on his mind and just wanted to figure some things out. When I asked him what things he said they had had nothing to do with the case.” She looked past me, at the water, and for the first time I saw a flicker of fear in her eyes. “Keeping secrets is the worst thing he could be doing right now.”

The words hung in the air between us. “I’ll find out where he was,” I said, working to keep the emotions that were swirling in my chest from getting out. “I’ll find out all of it.”

Hope looked away again for a moment. “I don’t want this to come between the two of you.”

I believed her. She loved him and I should have seen that a long time ago but I could also see that she wanted him to be happy.

“It isn’t going to come between us.”

“I have to go,” Hope said abruptly.

“Wait,” I said. “Did you find anything more about Dani’s family?”

“I’ve got a line on someone who might be able to give us some inside information.”

I nodded. “Good. I’m going to out to see Marcus and I’ll stop and talk to Oren about the guy in the truck.”

“Okay, I’ll talk to you later, then,” Hope said. She walked back across the grass to her car. I was about to head back to the truck when my phone rang. It was Marcus. He had been planning to make dinner for us. I had thought I might stop to talk to Oren on the way out to Marcus’s house. If I left now I could still do that.

“How do you feel about spaghetti at Eric’s?” he asked.

“Okay, but what happened to spaghetti at your house?”

“My stove won’t work. Larry Taylor is coming to take a look at it in the morning. I told him it wasn’t an emergency.”

I started for the truck. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll meet you at the café in about an hour. There’s something I need to do first.”

Oren’s house was a renovated farmhouse not a lot different from mine, with the same steeply pitched roof and bay window. His house had an addition on the left side, set back from the main house. A covered veranda ran along about half of the front of the main house and all the way across the front of the extension.

I could see his truck in the driveway as I got close to the house. He was on the veranda painting what looked like a long wooden bench with a hinged seat.

I pulled my truck in behind his and got out. Oren waved his paintbrush in greeting and got to his feet. He was tall and lean, in his mid-fifties, with sun-bleached sandy hair. He minded me of actor Clint Eastwood with a little quiet farm boy thrown in.

“Hello, Kathleen,” he said. “It’s good to see you.”

“It’s good to see you, too, Oren,” I said with a smile. I craned my neck to get a closer look at the bench. “Is that going in Roma’s porch?”

He nodded. “It gives people somewhere to sit down and take off their boots in the winter time and it gives Roma some storage space.”

The bench was about five feet long and he was painting it a pale gray that reminded me of foggy mornings down by the water. “You’ve done a beautiful job,” I said.

Oren was a very talented carpenter. He was an even better musician. He could have been a famous concert pianist but it wasn’t the life he’d wanted for himself. He could play the piano by the time he was four and he’d started composing music at six, using his own method of notation because he hadn’t learned to read music at that point.

As he had once explained to me, “I could—I can—make music with almost any instrument: piano, guitar, bass, mandolin. If I look at a piece of music, just once, I can remember it and play it. Years later I can play it.”

As someone whose musical ability was limited to making sounds with my armpit and not very well at that, I was in awe of his talent.

“Roma showed me the bench you and Maggie found for the upstairs hallway,” he said, reaching down to set his brush on the edge of the painting pail. “You did a beautiful job on that.”

“Thank you,” I said. “All that took was paint and sandpaper. You built this.”

He smiled again and ducked his head. “My father was a good teacher.”

I cleared my throat. “Oren, I need to talk to you about something.”

He didn’t ask me what, he just nodded. “All right. I just need to put the paint back in the can and wash the brush.”

He put one more stroke of paint on the front of the bench seat, then bent down and picked up the plastic pail.

“It’ll only take me a minute,” he said. “C’mon in.”

The extension attached to the main house was Oren’s workshop. The space was completely open from floor to ceiling. There were high windows on the back wall that flooded the room with light even on the darkest winter days. More windows on the end of the room overlooked the long workbench. There was a counter with cupboards underneath and a sink at one end over on the other side of the room. Everything in the room was neat, clean and perfectly organized.

I stood in the doorway and remembered the first time I’d seen the space. My mouth had literally gaped open. Oren’s father, Karl Kenyon, had worked as a carpenter and a house painter. But he had the soul of an artist. In his spare time he made massive metal sculptures. The first one I’d ever seen was an enormous metal eagle with a wingspan of at least six feet. It had been suspended, in flight it seemed, from the ceiling beams at the back half of the room. Even though the sculpture was nothing more than pieces of metal welded together somehow I’d felt I could see the bird flying, its powerful chest muscles making those huge wings slice through the air. Now the beautiful bird, along with another of Karl Kenyon’s pieces, was touring museums on the East Coast.