Dawn Stewardson - Close Neighbors

“Well, that’s hardly surprising,” Anne told her. “And who knows? Maybe a cop is somehow involved.”

It must have been apparent that she was only trying to humor Rachel, because Chase said, “Rachel’s intuition is surprisingly good.”

“Okay,” she said slowly. “Then let’s assume there is a cop. Let’s even assume he could find out if Chase contacts those detectives.”

Rachel nodded for her to go on.

“After Chase has told them what the guy threatened to do, they’d hardly be surprised if the murder weapon turned up someplace that seemed to incriminate you. Or if it had been wiped clean. And they—”

“They might not be surprised,” Rachel interrupted, her voice quavering a little. “But it would give them one more piece of evidence against me. And even though everything they’ve got is circumstantial, if they end up with enough…”

“Everything?” Anne glanced at Chase, wondering what—and how much—he hadn’t told her.

“We didn’t really get beyond talking about the phone call,” he was saying to his sister. “That and what happened in the park. She doesn’t know about your clothes—yet.”

WHILE ANNE WAITED TO HEAR about Rachel’s “clothes,” Rachel sat looking as if that was the last topic in the world she wanted to discuss.

Finally, she said, “When Graham and I were arguing…Chase told you the details about that?”

“Everything you told me,” he said before Anne could reply.

“Well…my shorts got torn when I fell, and my top ended up with a grass stain on it. So I just pitched them in the garbage after I came home—didn’t even bother trying to get the stain out.

“Maybe that sounds like an overreaction,” she quickly added, “but I was really upset. And I knew that every time I looked at those clothes they’d remind me of how badly we’d ended things. Of course, I had no idea that Graham…So it just didn’t occur to me that anyone would care about what I’d had on. Not until those detectives asked.

“They said it was strictly routine, that they just wanted to have a look to verify my statement. But as soon as I started explaining that I’d thrown the things away, I knew they were thinking there’d been bloodstains on them. That…I killed Graham.”

“You mean your clothes weren’t still in the trash?” Anne said. “You couldn’t have dug them out and—”

“The garbage gets collected first thing Thursday mornings,” Chase told her. “It was picked up long before they arrived.”

“I see.” The more of this story she heard, the better she understood why the police would consider his sister a serious suspect.

“They wanted to look at the underwear I’d been wearing, too,” Rachel murmured. “They said that maybe there’d be a grass stain where my shorts tore or something.” She shook her head. “They might as well have just said that maybe some blood spatters had soaked through.”

“But at least you still had the underwear to show them, didn’t you?”

“Yes, only I’d washed it. I put a load in the machine before I went to bed on Wednesday. They were suspicious about that, too.”

Hardly surprising. Rachel seemed like an intelligent-enough woman that—if even a speck of Graham’s blood had gotten on her—she’d have disposed of every stitch she’d had on. And, for all the detectives knew, she could have shown them any underwear fresh from the wash.

But if she was guilty, if her clothes had actually been evidence that she’d killed Graham, why admit to throwing them out?

She’d have realized that would make the police suspicious. So why wouldn’t she have done the obvious? Produced clothes that looked similar to what she’d been wearing? Eyewitnesses were notoriously inaccurate, which meant that even if people had seen her in the park…

Chase had been home when she left, though. If she’d tried lying, he’d have known.

Anne glanced at him, remembering he’d also been there waiting when Rachel returned. If she’d arrived back with blood on her clothes, he could hardly have helped noticing. Which meant her story had to be true—unless there’d been only a few, inconspicuous, traces of blood. Or unless Chase was trying to help her cover up what she’d done.

That thought had barely formed before it was joined by another, even more disquieting, one. What if Chase had played a role in Graham’s death?

She licked her suddenly dry lips and surreptitiously looked at him again. She could almost feel his distress, but was he just worried about Rachel? Or was he afraid those detectives figured he might have been involved in the shooting?

He’d admitted going to the park. And she only had his say-so that he hadn’t found Rachel and Graham there. What if he actually had? While they’d been in the midst of their argument? Or maybe after Graham had pushed her down?

Of course, every one of those questions, and then some, would have occurred to the cops. They’d have suspected that Chase might have done a lot more than simply drive around—which was undoubtedly the real reason they’d questioned him at length.

Lord, for all she knew, she was sitting here with not one but two people who were at risk of being charged with murder.

Despite the warmth of the sun, she suddenly felt chilled. She’d barely met Chase and Rachel, knew virtually nothing about either of them. What if they were both lying to her?

She had to figure out whether they were, and to do that she needed more information, so she said to Rachel, “Why don’t you go over what else the detectives asked about. Aside from your clothes. Start at the beginning and try to remember everything.”

“Well…they wanted to know about my relationship with Graham. How long we’d been seeing each other and why we broke up. Then they had me go over what happened on Wednesday. Minute by minute, from the time I met him until I got back to my car.”

“All right, let’s hear what you told them.”

Rachel leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table, and began.

Her account proved to be a fill-in-the-blanks elaboration of Chase’s. Graham had wanted them to get back together. She’d said it wouldn’t work. That led to their argument, his shoving her and her leaving.

“The detectives already knew I’d fallen,” she continued. “At least they knew someone had. The crime-scene team established that the leaves had been disturbed not far from his body.”

She took a deep breath, then added, “That means he was killed right in the clearing where I left him. And every time I think about that I wonder whether he’d still be alive if I hadn’t just walked away.”

“Don’t do that to yourself,” Chase said quietly. “You had no way of knowing anything would happen.”

When Anne glanced at him, his dark eyes were filled with concern. It seemed genuine enough to make her almost certain that he knew nothing about what had happened in the park except what his sister had told him.

But her father’s voice was whispering in her ear, saying, Never trust a brown-eyed man, darling.

It was one of the bits of advice he’d been giving her since he’d first realized she was noticing boys—always delivering the line straight-faced, waiting a beat, then adding, And never trust a blue-eyed one, either.

Turning her mind back to the moment, she focused on Rachel again. “If Graham was killed right in that clearing,” she said, mentally sorting through her thoughts as she spoke, “it couldn’t have happened long after you left. He wouldn’t have just stayed standing where he was indefinitely.”

“It was after I got back to my car and drove off, though. Because I didn’t hear the shot.”

“A few people in the park did,” Chase interjected.