Diane Pershing - Whispers and Lies

“Yes, sir,” the young man said and went pounding down the stairs again. So much energy, Will thought with a smile.

Kevin said to Lou, “Your mother? Maybe she had something valuable here, something you didn’t know about.”

Shaking her head, she returned to the couch and sat down again. “I guess it’s possible.”

“Did you go through all her effects?” Will persisted.

“Her effects?” She snorted. “Her clothes and a couple of boxes in the attic, that’s all. Baby pictures, my school report cards, stuff like that.”

“Did she have a safe-deposit box?” Kevin asked.

“One at our bank. It contained her will, leaving everything to me. A small insurance policy.” She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands.

“You holding up okay?” Will asked Lou.

“I’m tired, but I’m fine,” she said. “And now that the initial shock is over, you’re right, I’m starting to get pissed off.”

Kevin nodded. “Good. Can either of you describe the two men who rushed by you?”

Lou shook her head, but Will closed his eyes, pictured the scene. “Both wore black. One had longish brown hair tied at his neck. The other wore a baseball cap, black also, didn’t notice a logo. Their heads were lowered as they ran so I couldn’t see their faces, but I got the impression they were mid to late twenties.”

Kevin jotted down some notes, returned the pad and pen to his back pocket and stood up. “Well, it’s a start. I’ll check and see if there’s any kind of recent pattern in the area, two men breaking in when the owner isn’t home.” He headed for the front door. “Meantime, let’s close up the place. I’ll put a man on outside all night. My fingerprint guy will be back from vacation tomorrow. I’ll get him up here then. He’s good. Although they probably wore gloves.”

“Close up the place?” Lou said.

“You can’t stay here,” Will told her.

“But—”

He cut her off. “Absolutely not.”

“Hey, Dr. Lou,” Kevin explained, “if they were interrupted before they finished, they may come back.”

Her face went white again. “Oh.”

“Come with me to Nancy’s place,” Will said. “She’ll put you up.”

“No, that’s too much for her, with the wedding and all. I’ll go to a hotel.”

“You will not. You shouldn’t be alone. You’ve had a shock.”

“I’m fine now, Will,” she insisted stubbornly.

“Bull. You’re running on empty and you need to collapse someplace safe.”

With that, he took out his cell phone, contacted his sister, briefly explained what had happened and then handed the phone to Lou. Adjusting the kitten in the crook of her elbow, she put the phone to her ear. Whatever his sister said to her made her smile, then nod. “Okay, okay, you’ve convinced me.”

As she gave him back his phone, she said, “If I don’t come over, she’ll never speak to me again. I gave her enough grief refusing to be a bridesmaid, so I’m treading on thin ice as it is.”

Nancy Jamison was tall and bony, not beautiful, but the kind of woman who would grow more attractive with age. She had the Jamison dark hair and pronounced bone structure, but her eyes were light blue instead of green like Will’s. When she threw open the door and opened her arms, Lou went right into them, and, just like that, she was on the verge of tears again. She really had thought she was okay, had thought Will was fussing needlessly, but it turned out he was right.

He stood behind her, carrying everything—her overnight case, the cat carrier, litter box and litter. He wouldn’t hear of her lifting anything.

“You poor thing,” Nancy said, patting her on the back.

Lou withdrew from the hug. “I didn’t want to bother you so close to the wedding.”

“Stop it,” she said sternly, ushering her into the same house Lou had considered a second home for twenty years. As far as the eye could see, there were white boxes of all sizes opened, half-opened, still sealed. Wrapping paper was strewn all over the floors. Wedding gifts were taking over the place.

Will came in, closing the door behind them.

“You’re my friend. Of course you can stay,” Nancy said. “As long as you want. The place will be empty after the wedding while we’re on our honeymoon and my brother goes back to Washington.”

“Just tonight, thanks.”

“We’ll see about that.”

Oscar, obviously just awakened from a snooze, wandered into the foyer from the kitchen. The minute the pug saw and smelled the kitty box, he began to bark.

“Hush,” Nancy said.

“Oscar, behave,” Lou said sternly, and the sniffling, snorting dog stopped barking and backed off, his head lowered as though his feelings had been deeply hurt.

“What’s all the ruckus?”

Nancy’s fiancé Bob wandered from down the hall, dressed in an old robe, his glasses perched at an odd angle on his nose and his hair mussed. “Oh, hi, Lou,” he said with one of his sweet smiles.

“Bob, I’m so sorry I woke you up.”

“Go back to bed, honey.” Nancy shooed him away.

“Really?”

“Really.”

Nodding, he smiled one more time, turned right around and walked back down the hall.

Lou was shown to the guest room, just off the service porch connected to the kitchen. Then Nancy left her to join her brother, while Lou set up a little area for Anthony. She poured food in a bowl, gave him water, filled the litter box, and patted the sweet little thing until he stopped quaking.

As she was shutting the door behind her, she heard Nancy’s voice in the kitchen. “Imagine my surprise to hear that you and Lou had been out together.”

“Yeah. Funny, huh.”

“Strange, really. I never heard a word about the two of you being, you know, friendly.”

“There is no ‘two of us,’ Nan. When I took Oscar in this morning, I invited her to dinner tonight. You were busy with Bob and the wedding, and she’s good company. No biggie.”

Lou barely had time to be disappointed by Will’s answer before she heard Nancy reply, “Well, it’s just strange, you know, considering how she’s always—”

Lou so did not want her to finish that sentence; Nancy knew all about Lou’s long-ago crush on her brother, and Lou would be mortified to hear it revealed. Closing the bedroom door louder than necessary, she joined them in the kitchen, saying, “Poor Anthony, he’s totally traumatized. We found him in a Dumpster a couple of weeks ago. Heaven knows how he got there. And then he had to be isolated for a while, while he got over a bad wheeze. And he’s cross-eyed, poor baby, so no one seemed to want to adopt him. Then just last week, I decided to take him upstairs to live with me. And now this. Too much shuffling and moving around. It will be a long time until he can settle down and trust anyone.”

Nancy, who stood, hip propped against the stove, indicated the round wooden table in the corner. “Sit. I’m making tea. You want some?”

“Yes, please.” Lou sank into the soft cushion covering the chair, then gazed around, feeling thoroughly at home. All the warmth in this room had been created by Will and Nancy’s late mom, Lorna Jamison, a devoted homemaker and terrific cook, who had died two years after her husband’s untimely death in a railroad crash.

Nancy had not inherited her mother’s propensity for cozy homemaking; instead, the kitchen counters were strewn with books, file folders, old copies of the Courier. A pile of take-out pizza boxes were stacked on an old wicker chair in the corner.

As Lou turned to the other occupant at the table, he stood. “Excuse me for just a moment, will you?” Will said. “I need to make a couple of phone calls.”

After Lou had filled Nancy in on the break-in details, she managed to defer any questions about her evening with Will by asking how the wedding plans were going, which opened up a much more pleasant topic of conversation. As they sipped their tea, and Lou felt the hot liquid reaching the cold places and warming them up, Nancy explained that there was some kind of last-minute problem with the flowers. As the editor of a paper, Nancy was used to putting out fires and improvising solutions, so she was taking it all in stride; Bob, her fiancé, wasn’t. He wanted it all to be perfect, Nancy told Lou, and they both agreed that he was, by nature, both more detail-oriented and more romantic than Nancy.