Marie Ferrarella - A Widow's Guilty Secret

“Did you forget your key?” Suzy called out as she yanked open the front door in response to the ringing doorbell.

It wouldn’t have been the first time that Peter had forgotten his house key. But if everything went right, it would be one of the last, she thought.

Suzy did her best to contain the nervous anticipation that all but vibrated through her. She’d been up for most of the night, not because of the baby, but because she kept hearing Peter come through the door.

Each and every time it just turned out to be her imagination, hard at work. What that meant, she decided, was that she really wanted to get this divorce matter out and on its way.

Throwing open the front door, she found herself on the receiving end of a surprise. And not the pleasant kind, she couldn’t help thinking.

Suzy instinctively took a step back.

Her hand on the doorknob, she started to close the door again, intent on locking out the strangers on her doorstep.

The sheriff’s wife was quick, but Nick was quicker. He blocked her motion with his hand, at the same time putting his foot over the sill to keep the door from closing.

“We need to talk with you, Mrs. Burris,” Nick said as his tongue-tied partner appeared somewhat startled by her behavior and all too ready to retreat.

Nick watched as suspicion came and then went from the pretty blonde’s cornflower-blue eyes. She appeared to regard them both in silence for a moment, then said in a hushed tone, “You know my name. Why is it you know my name?”

She had a bad feeling about this—and it was escalating by the moment as she waited for an answer. She looked from one man to the other, then back at the older detective. Waiting.

“Would you mind if we stepped inside, Mrs. Burris?” Nick suggested, gesturing into her house. He was surprised when she remained planted before him. “This isn’t the kind of thing a person likes to hear while standing in the doorway of her house.”

Suzy raised her chin, thinking herself already prepared for the worst. “Sitting on the sofa isn’t going to change whatever it is that you have to say to me, Detective …” She deliberately let her voice trail off, waiting for the tall, strikingly handsome dark-haired man to fill in the blank.

“Jeffries,” he told her, then nodded toward Juarez. “And this is Detective Juarez,” he added before going back to what she’d said. “No, it won’t,” Nick readily agreed. “But it just might help you to cushion the shock—no pun intended,” he interjected when his own words played themselves back in his head. He didn’t want her to think he was being flip at her expense.

Cushion the shock. Just how great a shock, she wondered. Suzy felt oddly numb, yet still somehow in control. Or so she told herself.

“Is he hurt?” she asked in a voice so quiet, it was almost a whisper. “Is my husband hurt?” she amended when neither man standing on her doorstep answered her.

“It’s worse than that, ma’am,” Nick told her, trying to be as gentle as possible.

Suzy felt her stomach lurch, then turn over. She struggled to pull herself together. She could handle this, she told herself. Whatever the somber-looking detective in the dark suit had to tell her, she could handle it. She could handle anything. She had to. She had practically a newborn depending on her. She had to remember that.

“May I see some identification, please?” she requested, holding whatever the older detective was about to say to her at bay.

Juarez fumbled for his wallet, searching his pockets, while Nick took his out and flipped it open to display his badge and ID.

Suzy could feel panic well up inside her. She barely glanced at the man’s wallet, but his image registered.

“Worse than hurt,” she heard herself repeating as she raised her eyes to the man’s face. That could only mean one thing. Her lips felt frozen as she asked, “Is my husband dead, Detective Jeffries?”

Nick felt a wave of pity stirring. “I’m sorry to have to tell you that, Mrs. Burris, but yes, I’m afraid he is.”

Every inch of skin on her body alternated between extreme heat and extreme cold.

Dead.

Peter’s dead.

She waited for the wave of sorrow, of devastation to hit. But it didn’t. In its place, instead, was guilt. Guilt that she didn’t feel grief over his death, other than the kind of grief she might have experienced after hearing of a neighbor’s death.

What kind of a person was she? Suzy silently demanded.

“You were right,” Suzy said to the older detective, her voice sounding rather tinny to her ears as the words seemed to echo in her head.

“Right about what?” Nick asked, puzzled as he looked at her.

It was getting hard for her to breathe. “About this being easier to take on a sofa.”

It was the last thing Suzy remembered saying before the bright, sunny world filtering in through her doorway went completely black.

Nick prided himself on the fact that his reflexes had always been quick. This time was no exception.

One minute he was talking to the unfortunate, freshly minted widow. The next he was stretching out to catch her and keep her head—as well as the rest of her—from hitting the floor.

Beside him, Juarez stood frozen, almost in as much shock, in his own way, as the sheriff’s widow. His partner was definitely in need of a crash course that would teach him exactly how to be a useful member of the police force. Right now, the man was undoubtedly well meaning, but also rather useless. The man had a great deal to learn before he could be considered a good detective.

Nick was fairly convinced that Jason Juarez had found himself in his present position only because he was related to someone either on the force, or someone who was embedded within Vengeance’s less-than-dynamic town counsel. Whichever it was, the so-called guardian angel might be trying to be kind to the young man, but in the interim, he or she was setting the course of detective work back by half a century.

Juarez, he knew, was relieved when the FBI special agents had descended on the town and, specifically, the “dig” where the bodies had been found. They’d been summoned by the town fathers because one of the victims was Senator Merris. The special agents had been set to take over the entire crime scene, but he had managed to get them to agree that this would be worked as a team effort. That meant that information would be shared—supposedly.

Nick turned his attention to the woman he’d just caught. When he’d made his initial assessment of her, he’d judged that she weighed under a hundred pounds. If he wasn’t right on target, he was close. Suzy Burris felt as if she weighed next to nothing at all.

Striding into the house ahead of the flustered Juarez, his arms full of unconscious damsel in distress, Nick headed straight for the sofa.

“Get the door, Juarez,” he tossed over his shoulder at his partner.

It took the detective a second to process the order, and another second for embarrassment to creep up his lanky torso, reaching his cheeks and turning them a faint shade of pink.

“You want it closed?” he asked.

“No, I want you to take it off the hinges and take it with us when we leave,” Nick bit off sarcastically as he lay the woman down on the sofa. “Yeah, I want it closed,” he snapped quickly before the befuddled, wet-behind-the-ears detective took him at his word and started removing the door from its hinges. He wouldn’t have put it past him.

The door shut and then he heard Juarez hurrying over to the sofa.

“Is she—is she all right?” the younger man asked nervously. He shifted slightly from foot to foot as he hovered about like a confused hummingbird, searching for a destination where he could alight.