Catherine Coulter: Split Second

She sat in that humongous Jacuzzi, its jets going full blast, for a good long time. Afterward, she put on her pajamas, shrugged into a tatty chenille robe, and brought out the box with her workout clothes and shoes.

There were so many things to do that would take great gobs of time—clothing to unpack and arrange, books to go through, laundry—so much laundry to do—so many decisions to make. She held a pair of gym socks in her hand, simply stared down at them, not knowing where to put them, and began to cry. She was crying not only for her father but at the ending of a whole part of her life. There was no turning back, no changing what had happened. Life happened and would continue to happen. What would the rest of her life be like?

She didn’t know, but she knew there had to be something in this house to give her a clue as to what had happened here. She would find out why her grandmother had murdered her husband. And you saw it, Dad.

She couldn’t imagine it.

Philadelphia

Chilly’s Bar

Tuesday night

Ruley had served three tours of duty and been wounded twice in the Vietnam War, and come home to find that his four siblings and many of his friends despised him for fighting in an immoral war. A few days after his plane landed in Philadelphia, he bought a six-pack of Bud and a lottery ticket, the only one he’d ever bought in his life. He won a bucket load of money. His family and friends tried to do a one-eighty when they found out about it, but he decided he wanted new friends and he’d make his own family. He hung up on all the scammers who wanted to take good care of his winnings for him and bought lots of long-term bonds and a bar he named Chilly’s, after a buddy of his who’d stepped on a mine in the war. He married and fathered four kids, all married with kids of their own now. He was set.

Chilly’s Bar was a popular hangout with the young professional crowd in a neighborhood once filled with industrial buildings turned into lofts, artists of every medium imaginable, and rundown bistros. It had been gentrifying for more than fifteen years now, and the lofts were giving way to high-end apartments for account executives, and more coffeehouses than Seattle.

Chilly’s had changed right along with the neighborhood. It was low-key now, a place to stop after a long day at the office. Ruley liked the pleasant hum of conversation, the good manners. He hadn’t had to break up a fight in Chilly’s for a good ten years now. He was looking complacently over the Tuesday-night crowd, most of them white wine drinkers. The wine from his top-end wine list made him lots of money, much more than he’d made years before when he’d had to push light beer. Chilly’s, he thought complacently, no longer smelled like stale cigarette smoke, bless the lawmakers.

A young woman he’d never seen before came in alone. She was tall, pretty, and well dressed, and when she bellied up to the bar, she smiled at him. It was a beautiful smile, but it didn’t reach her pretty brown eyes. There was some kind of trouble, he thought, behind those eyes of hers. She looked over his specialty Tuesday-night wine list and ordered a Peridot Vineyard chardonnay that cost twelve dollars a glass. Ruley asked her if she was new to the neighborhood. She’d been visiting the police station a block over, she told him, closed her eyes, and took a huge gulp of the very fine chardonnay. Not a happy camper, Ruley thought. He told her his name was Ruley and shook her hand when she said her name was Liz.

As the night wore on, Chilly’s regulars sauntered in for their prebedtime drink. Ruley knew all their faces and most of their names. Lately he often heard them sharing horror stories about losing their credit lines or other business catastrophes, and he shook his head about it. Things never changed. Only the young sharks still talked urgently about their plans for expansion and higher market share. That never changed, either.

When he was finally ready to take a break at the bar, he asked Cindy, his second daughter, to take over. “Keep an eye on Liz,” he told her. “She’s in a funk.” When he was walking toward his backroom office, he noticed a young man he’d never seen before come into the bar. He looked for the world like a throwback to the old neighborhood with his black beret, his black clothes on a rail-thin body, and his slouchy walk. Didn’t this guy realize he was out of his time, that his effete look had been gone at this bar for more than ten years now? Ruley shook his head and walked into his office. Taxes, he thought. He was always paying some hand that was sticking in his face—city, state, feds, they all had lots of big hands.

Cindy was serving Liz her second glass of Peridot chardonnay when the guy next to her asked if he could buy it for her.

Liz Rogers looked the guy up and down and liked what she saw—namely, that she was bigger than he was and could beat him up if the need arose, which it probably wouldn’t. She liked his thin white face, his dark eyes, and the beret that covered long black hair. It was a big plus that his hair didn’t look greasy. Good hygiene in a guy was always a plus.

Cindy kept half an eye on the two, as she did everyone who sat at the bar. The young guy bought the woman a refill of the same fine chardonnay that made her dad’s cash register cha-ching with pleasure. They chatted, Cindy saw, and looked rather cozy after about an hour.

Because this was a professional neighborhood, even the young people began to straggle out at about ten o’clock, some with a bit too much of Ruley’s fine wine in their bloodstreams. A wine hangover isn’t any big deal, Ruley always said, and besides, they were young, they could drink themselves stupid nightly for ten years and still get up with a smile the next morning and go to work. Hit forty and it’s a different story. They’d learn.

Ruley was coming around the end of the bar when he saw the young man walking close beside Liz of the beautiful smile as she swayed out the front door.

She’d drunk only three glasses of wine; she shouldn’t be weaving around like that. He frowned. Maybe she couldn’t hold her drink, but still, something wasn’t right. What was it?

Liz Rogers was happy, and that was good, even though she knew well enough life would be grim tomorrow morning when she had to face reality again, and that reality was her mother. She’d had to bail her mother out of jail yet again, this time for shoplifting at Marnie’s, an upscale clothing boutique, and so she’d decided to stop at Chilly’s Bar, only a block over from her mother’s condo. Their wine was expensive, but then Todd—with two d ’s—had come in and lightened her load and listened to all her woes, and paid for a glass of the swank white wine.

She had really dumped on him, bless him, and he’d told her he’d walk her home. She’d meant to tell him she didn’t live in this neighborhood, that her mom did, but she forgot. When they stepped outside Chilly’s, she took a breath of the cold night air and realized she had to cut this nice man loose and get a taxi.

She smiled up at Todd and pulled out her cell phone. “I’ve got to call a taxi.”

“Why? You live right here in the neighborhood. I’d love to walk you home, Lizzie.”

“Nope, this isn’t my neighborhood; it’s my mom who lives here.”

There was a slight pause, then he said, “Then I’ll take the taxi with you and walk you up.”

“Nah, that’s too much trouble; don’t bother.” No sooner had she spoken than she felt a wave of dizziness and a sudden sick feeling twist in her stomach. Great, this was all she needed after dealing with her mother and the cops and a lowlife bail bondsman named Lucky Tasker.