Lisa Black - Evidence of Murder

“Jeremy?”

“They dated through high school and into college. A nice boy. Even Andrew liked him, felt he would take sufficiently good care of his little princess.”

“Is that what your husband called Jillian?”

“Always.” A gentle smile showed, in no uncertain terms, the origin of Jillian’s looks. “Both our kids, the prince and princess. Just a family joke-it’s not that they were spoiled. Our son wasn’t interested in being royalty, only in running and playing ball and getting a car. But Jillian, she would play dress-up in my old clothes and fashion tiaras for herself out of pipe cleaners and costume jewelry. Every day in the summer she’d be in the backyard with a court of stuffed animals and dolls.”

She seemed in danger of getting lost in the memory, so Theresa said, “My daughter did the same thing after I brought home a tape of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty.” She didn’t add that Rachael had tired of the pomp and circumstance in a week, after figuring out you couldn’t ride a bike in a ball gown.

“My husband finally built her a castle. It was basically just a plywood crate and she was nearly ten, barely enough room to turn around in, but Andrew put a little turret at the top and painted it as best he could. She’d spend hours in there, winter and summer. I’d go out and check on her, make sure she didn’t faint from heatstroke or freeze to-” She stopped.

Theresa didn’t press the image. “Jillian and her father were close?”

“We both were,” the woman said firmly, nipping that idea in the bud. Problem girls often had daddy issues, and sexually precocious behavior often sprang from molestation at a young age. But so many years with her steady, the “nice boy” Jeremy, did not mesh with that profile.

“What about her brother?”

“The typical bickering when they were kids, but otherwise fine.”

“What about as adults? I understand he lives out of state?”

“New Mexico. I don’t know if they spoke much, but I doubt it. He’s busy with his own family now…and he and his father have too much conflict. They love each other, but they’re too alike.”

So you’ve lost both your children because of your husband. Theresa tried to think of a tactful way to ask for her reaction to that. “Did Jillian say why she broke up with Jeremy?”

“She felt disappointed in him. She didn’t get more specific than that, so I don’t know what she meant, but I assume the relationship went on too long. He began to take her for granted; she began to think she had settled down too soon and was probably right. I wasn’t concerned about Jeremy. If she wanted to broaden her horizons, I thought that was a good idea. Dropping out of college to become a model, that wasn’t.”

“Was she living at home?”

“No, she had her own place by then. That’s why it took us almost a year to figure out that modeling wasn’t paying her bills. She didn’t get jobs-she had a pretty face but her personality…Jillian glowed in person, but the camera couldn’t catch that.”

Theresa nodded. She realized her thighs were aching from pressing her knees together, trying not to fidget or do anything to break Barbara’s train of words. The man in the office had hung up the phone and Theresa hoped he would not come out and interrupt them. “Being beautiful and being photogenic are two different things.”

“I think that’s how she got into the live modeling. I don’t know how she wound up with that- man -downtown. Then one of our friends saw her out with a group of businessmen and told Andrew. He called that man…I don’t know what he said, but it nearly killed Andrew. One day I had a daughter.” She sighed. “The next, I didn’t.”

“Your husband disowned her?”

The woman waved her hand at the idea. “We’re not the Hiltons. There wasn’t much to disown her from except us. He stopped speaking to her, which was a million times worse. Jillian thought the world rose and set on her father.”

“But she wouldn’t quit the agency?”

“No.” Barbara crossed her arms over the pink knit top, as if protecting her midsection against a new onslaught of pain. “I don’t understand. I never understood.”

“Perhaps she wanted to, er, enjoy her youth after being in a steady relationship all those years.”

“My daughter wasn’t a slut, Mrs.-I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”

“MacLean.”

“My daughter was a romantic. That was the problem all along. She had no realistic sense of how the world worked. She expected a man to come along and build her a castle.”

“Evan.”

This made Barbara look at her, the blue eyes startling in their clarity. “Was my daughter happy?”

She should have been. She’d found a man to replace her father, in charge, controlling, a man who designed castles and took her to live in one with her very own little princess at her side. She should have been very happy. “I don’t know, Mrs. Perry. She might have been.”

“Then why is she dead?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“Barbara.” The office man had materialized next to them and Theresa gave a little start. “Here’s the order for that wardrobe. They’ll be in this afternoon.”

She took the folder he held out. Her hand trembled.

He did not appear to notice the wet eyes or quavering voice. Perhaps he had poor eyesight or an utter lack of empathy. “Be sure it’s wrapped properly. We don’t want another disaster like the Bennings’ china cabinet.”

“No, of course.”

When he had returned to his desk, Theresa asked, “Did Jillian have any health problems?”

Barbara seemed a bit relieved to have a specific, answerable question to tackle. “She was born with a hole in her heart, where the wall didn’t close up.”

“A septal defect? Between the two ventricles?”

“Yes. It had healed by the time she started school. It didn’t hold her back from any activities, but Jillian didn’t care for sports anyway. She had chicken pox at ten, and mono her first year in college. Other than that she was hardly ever sick.”

“Any allergies?”

She shuddered. “Shellfish. I let her try my crab at a restaurant once, on her first day of second grade. She turned blue and we had to go to the emergency room. She scared me to death, and completely terrified her father.”

There had been no sign of anaphylactic shock in the dead woman. “Anything else you can think of, something that might have affected her physical condition?”

“I thought Jillian froze to death. Do you think it could have been natural causes?” The stillness in her face eased, and her spine straightened just a millimeter in cautious hope. “Do you think some physical ailment could have affected her mind? Is that why she walked into the woods and froze to death?”

“I’m just gathering information, Mrs. Perry-”

“Maybe she didn’t know what she was doing. Because I don’t believe she would kill herself, I really don’t. Only if she had taken a lot of drugs, but Jillian hardly took aspirin, and you didn’t find any drugs in her system, did you, or you wouldn’t be asking all these questions. Maybe it was a brain tumor?”

“We would have found that during the autopsy.” It pained Theresa to dampen Barbara Perry’s hope that her daughter had not chosen to end her own life. Some bizarre biochemical reaction would be preferable. A brain tumor would be preferable.

Murder, even, would be preferable.

“I don’t know exactly how Jillian died, Mrs. Perry. That’s why I’m trying to find out.”

“I know there’s some explanation. You don’t know how frustrating it is, to know that there must be an answer out there but without any means of finding it.” For the first time her fingers unclenched. “I have to wait for someone like you to find out for me.”