Carla Neggers - The Widow

To ease the pain, she would tell herself she was a different person now, but she wasn’t. Sure she’d changed-she didn’t know if Chris would recognize her anymore. She wasn’t a twenty-five-year-old law student who’d never endured serious loss, who’d never been called to a scene of a triple homicide or looked into the eyes of someone who’d killed in a fit of rage and now couldn’t go back and undo what he’d done. Yet with all she’d done in the past seven years, she wasn’t a different person. Deep down she was the same woman who’d fallen in love with her guy from Maine, her FBI agent.

He’d been her first proper lover, and he’d relished that role in their eighteen months together.

That their life together was over didn’t mean it had never happened.

Or that she needed to pretend that she didn’t want to fall in love again. It wouldn’t be the same-it couldn’t be the same. And it didn’t have to be.

She wanted it, she realized. She wanted to love a man, to be in love with a man-not out of desperation, not just to have someone in her life, but to let it happen if it was meant to, to be open to the possibility of it.

She made no stops on the winding drive.

When she arrived back at her house, the air was still, only the distant cries of seagulls to disturb the silence. Inside, she smelled plaster dust and the faint odor of fresh paint.

She dialed Lou Beeler’s pager. When he returned her call, she was in the back room, shaking open a black trash bag, standing up to her mid-calves in debris from her gutted walls. Any more frustrations, and she’d have all the walls in the house ripped out.

“I don’t have anything for you,” Lou said.

“Did you talk to Mattie Young?”

“I did. He wants to get a restraining order against you.”

Abigail snorted. “Let him try.”

“Doyle doesn’t have anything, either. Abigail-you know these calls could be B.S. You must have made your share of enemies over the past few years. One of them could have dug around on the Internet and figured out just enough to push your buttons.”

“Is that what you believe happened?”

“I don’t believe anything. I just follow the facts.” He paused. “So should you.”

She sat on a chair covered in white plaster dust. She’d meant to throw sheets over the furniture, but hadn’t gotten around to it. Now, she had a bigger mess to clean up-and Lou Beeler doubting her objectivity.

She didn’t blame him. In his place, she’d do no different.

She smiled to herself as she continued over the phone, “Does that mean I still have a green light to look into the calls myself?”

“As if you need a green light from me. You know what I’m saying, Abigail.”

“You’d like for me to go back to Boston.”

“Your caller could be there.”

“Or not,” she said.

Lou sighed. “Or not.”

“What about the FBI guys doing the background check on Grace Cooper?”

“What about them?”

“Come on, Lou. You know what I’m asking. Did you talk to them about the calls?”

“Yes.”

She waited, but he didn’t go on. “All right. I can take a hint.”

The Maine CID detective broke into laughter. “No, you can’t,” he said, still chuckling as he hung up.

Abigail scowled at the dead phone and debated driving out to the local police station and finding Doyle Alden, but what good would that do?

Instead, using an ancient dustpan and brush-and her hands-she swept up the chunks of plaster, bent nails, mice skeletons and yellowed drywall tape, shoving the debris into her heavy-duty trash bag.

She needed answers. But how could she get them with such an elusive caller? Without the law enforcement resources she usually had at her disposal?

“You’re the only person the killer fears.”

Was it true? If so, what leverage did it give her?

She could hardly breathe in the thick dust she’d stirred up. She tied up the overstuffed bag and dragged it out to the back porch, down the steps and around to the side of the house, coughing as she shoved it into the garbage bin.

She knew what she had to do.

Before she could change her mind, she ran back into the house and grabbed the phone, dialing her father’s private number.

“Abigail,” he said when he picked up. “I thought you might call. Where are you?”

She was sure he knew where she was. “Maine,” she said.

He took an audible breath. She pictured him in his office or in his car, taking her call because he was between meetings. He was a busy man with an important, high-pressure job, but he was like any father with a daughter whose life had taken a hairpin turn from what he’d wanted for her.

John March had started out as a Boston cop. Bob O’Reilly remembered him and said they’d all known-even the rookies like him-that her father wouldn’t stay in uniform. He had drive, ambition and a willingness to sacrifice. He’d gone to law school, joined the FBI, moved his family from one city to another as he worked his way to the top. He was fifty-nine, handsome and unstoppable. He was also absolutely convinced that no one would ever crack the only unsolved murder of one of his own-FBI Special Agent Christopher Browning.

Abigail never doubted her father’s love or his desire to see her happy, only what they might lead him to do.

“You know about the calls, don’t you?” she asked him bluntly.

“I was briefed earlier today. You’re my daughter, Abigail. You can pretend I’m a plumber all you want, but I’m not-”

“Do you have any reason to believe the calls are related to your position?”

“No.” He spoke without hesitation, and he wasn’t a liar. If he didn’t want to tell her something, he simply wouldn’t. “Do you?”

“I don’t know anything. It’s frustrating. I’d hoped coming up here would get the caller to come out of hiding, but so far, no luck. And I have zip for leads.” She smiled into the phone. “But I did have tea and popovers at the Jordan Pond House today.”

“Alone?”

“With Owen Garrison, actually.”

“And the Coopers. They were there, weren’t they?”

Abigail sat at the kitchen table and frowned. “Dad, are you having me watched?”

He gave a small laugh. “That’d send Washington aflutter. Just imagine. To answer your question, no, I’m not having you watched. The two agents doing the background check on Grace Cooper saw her there with her father and uncle.” His humor vanished as quickly as it had appeared. “Abigail, you are my daughter. If you’re getting anonymous calls, for any reason, I need to know about it.”

In other words, she should have called him on Saturday after the first call-or, at the latest, this morning, not left it for the news to work its way to him. But she hadn’t, and she didn’t know why.

“Next time, I’ll let you know sooner,” she said.

“Right now, it doesn’t sound as if this caller has shed any new light on the investigation into Chris’s death.”

“So far, no.”

“Do you want protection? An agent-”

“Good heavens, no. Tell Mom I said hi. Don’t worry about me, okay? I’ve been painting and knocking out walls and having tea and popovers.” And kissing Owen Garrison. “I rousted Mattie Young from the old Garrison foundation. He was drinking beer and smoking cigarettes out there in the dark. The Alden boys thought he was Chris’s ghost.”

“You don’t fool me,” her father said quietly. “You’re all over this case. You’ll do what it takes to wring out of it whatever you can.”

“Maybe we’ll finally know-”

“Maybe, but if I had my way, it wouldn’t be now, not this way, with you all alone up there.”

She smiled. “I can take care of myself.”