By the end of the Monday school day Jazz was too wiped to even think about mysteries and murder. She took Wally for the world’s shortest walk, then collapsed on the couch. When she woke up and realized it was nearly eight, she swore she’d be better the next day. More energetic. Sharper. Ready to take on the world.
She had to remind herself of that—twice—on her way to Raab Antiques after school on Tuesday.
Inside the shop, Jazz took a quick look around. Meghan, the clerk who’d greeted her the first time she visited, was nowhere in sight. For all Jazz knew, the poor girl had been fired because she’d let Jazz into Lisa Raab’s inner sanctum without permission. Now Jazz knew where Lisa’s office was and didn’t need an escort.
As it turned out, Lisa wasn’t in her office, but there was an employee break room next to it. The door was open, and Lisa was sitting inside, bent over a table filled with boxes of delicate glass Christmas ornaments.
Jazz was tired, achy, and in no mood for formalities. She walked right in.
“I told you I didn’t want anyone to—” Lisa sat up like a shot and carefully set down the translucent glass pinecone she was holding. As if she wasn’t sure she was seeing clearly, she ripped off her tortoiseshell glasses and tossed them on the table. Her lips pinched. “Oh, it’s you. What makes you think you can just barge in here?”
There were chairs all around the table, but Jazz didn’t sit. This wasn’t a sitting kind of conversation. “We need to talk.”
She expected a snappy comeback. Or a call up front so someone could get the cops. Instead, Lisa’s gaze traveled to Jazz’s sling. “What happened to your arm?”
Yeah, it was a long shot, but Jazz was in a what-the-hell mood. “I thought maybe you knew. You have a bike, don’t you?”
Lisa burrowed back into her chair. “What are you talking about?”
“Biking in the park. Lovely afternoon. Beautiful scenery. If you said it was an accident—”
“It wasn’t anything. I have no idea what you mean. Your arm—”
“It’s my wrist, actually,” Jazz told her. “Broken. And even though I had surgery three weeks ago, it still hurts like hell and I told myself I’m not going to take any more pain pills so I’m running on ibuprofen and let me tell you, that’s not quite cutting it. What all this means is I’m really not in the mood for any more of your bullshit.”
Whatever Lisa was going to say, she snapped her mouth shut. Reconsidered. She cleared her throat. “I don’t imagine we have anything to say to each other, Ms.…” She pretended to have to think about the name, and since Jazz wasn’t in the mood for games she went right on.
“You told me you didn’t know Dan Mansfield.”
“And you know what, honey? I have zero reason to lie to you.” Lisa raked a look over Jazz’s utilitarian black pants and the black-and-white shirt she’d worn with them simply because it buttoned down the front and that made it easier to get dressed. Jazz was standing. Lisa was sitting. She still looked down her nose at Jazz. “Quite frankly, you’re not in the same class as my customers. You’re never likely to be. That means I don’t need to coddle you, and I don’t need to compliment you, and I don’t need to impress you. I also don’t need to lie to you. So listen up and listen up good. Maybe this time, it will sink in.” She leaned forward. “I did not know Dan Mansfield.”
“You visited him in prison.”
Lisa froze with her palms flat on the table. Suddenly, she looked as fragile and as easily shattered as those Christmas ornaments in front of her, and it was that, Jazz told herself, that made her take pity on Lisa. “They have visitors’ logs,” she explained.
As if she’d been punched in the solar plexus, Lisa sucked in a breath. Something told Jazz Lisa would have done anything to hang on to her lies. If only she had the energy. “And you felt the compelling need to look through those logs.”
“Actually, as it turned out, I didn’t need to. Bob Burke, he knew all about your visits to Dan.”
Lisa shook her head. “I don’t know any—”
“Prison buddies. And Dan, remember, he was in for a long stretch. He had a lot of hours to kill, and according to Burke, he used that time to talk about the women in his life.”
Lisa’s cheeks shot through with color and Jazz couldn’t help but wonder exactly what she feared Dan Mansfield had to say about her. The stories. The details. Reality, or fantasy, or some combination in between. Jazz could only imagine how one con might try to impress another.
And how that might make Lisa queasy.
Until that moment, Jazz hadn’t intended to feel sorry for Lisa Raab.
Her pain dampened by compassion, her determination muffled beneath the overwhelming sadness that made Lisa suddenly look years older, the starch went out of Jazz’s shoulders and her voice. “Burke says you went to Mansfield’s parole hearings, too. Every single one of them.”
Those three rings Lisa wore on each hand knocked a discordant beat against the table. “You can’t possibly know…” She shook her head to clear it. “It’s so hard to explain. You can’t possibly understand what it’s like to have a father who’s been murdered.”
Jazz had arrived itching for information and ready to scrap with Lisa for it. But those few words from Lisa caused the last of her eagerness to drain out of her and her knees gave way. She dropped into the nearest chair. “My dad was a firefighter. He was killed in an arson fire. The person who started that fire has never been caught.”
“I’m sorry.” There were tears in Lisa’s eyes. “When I talk about how my dad died, I never expect anyone to understand.”
“I do.”
“Then you know—”
“Yeah.”
They sat in silence, lost in their memories. In the three years since her dad’s death, Jazz had talked to clergy and counselors. She’d spent hours with her brothers reliving memories, sharing regrets. Sometimes, she and her mom tiptoed around the subject, each afraid of wounding the other, but mostly these days they were able to talk about Dad without too many tears. The happy memories won out, even over talk of the fire. That was Michael Patrick Ramsey’s legacy and it was Jazz’s job to honor it.
That didn’t stop her from sighing. “Do you ever have nights you can’t sleep?” she asked Lisa. “You know, because you’re thinking about that last time you saw him?”
Lisa nodded. “And then there are the birthdays, of course. My fortieth, my fiftieth, those were the ones where I found myself waiting for him to walk through the door with cake and ice cream. Dad loved a good party.”
Jazz’s laugh was bittersweet. “And there are the regular days, too. When you get a quick look at someone in a car you pass and of course you know that other driver can’t be him. But you slow down anyway just so you can take another look.”
Lisa sniffled. “That’s when it hits. All over again. It’s been a long time for me. You think I’d be used to him being gone. But sometimes at night or early in the morning when I’m just waking up—”
“You hear his voice, right?” When Lisa’s registered understanding, Jazz nearly whooped with relief. She wasn’t the only one. She wasn’t crazy.
“I know I’m just dreaming,” Lisa said.
“I like to think it’s real,” Jazz confessed.
In the silence that settled over them when they considered this, Jazz didn’t hear Michael Patrick Ramsey’s voice. But she did sense a change in the atmosphere. The cold chill that had washed over her like an icy wave when she walked in was gone. Things weren’t exactly warm and fuzzy between her and Lisa. But there was a thaw. A pulsation, like the flash of summer sun seen through trees.
For now, maybe that was enough.
“You did know him, didn’t you?” Jazz asked.
As if she had to think about it, Lisa bit her lower lip. “Dan? He used to come in here. Window-shopping.”
“Everything I read about him, he never struck me as an antiques kind of guy.”
Lisa’s laugh was sharp. “Dan was…” Her voice faded on the memory and Jazz knew when she pulled herself away from it, because that’s when Lisa flinched. “Dan was a first-class burglar. No doubt you read about that.”
“I did.”
“He was also plenty smart. If you’re going to break into some snazzy mansion while the owners are away, you can’t waste your time scooping up what isn’t valuable.”
“That’s why he showed up here and—”
“Well, I didn’t catch on. Not right away, anyway. At first, he was just like any other customer. He looked at our merchandise. He asked questions. Lots and lots of questions. If there’s one thing that’s true about every single person I’ve ever met in this business…” She pulled in a breath and let it out over a staggering sigh. “We do love to talk about our junk! For Dad, it was clocks. Ask him one simple question about tall case clock finials and he’d go on for hours. Me? I’m a porcelain snob, myself. Meissen, Wallendorf, Le Nove, Staffordshire if I have to, though it’s not my favorite.” She raised both hands in a gesture of resignation. “Dan could be charming and he was so handsome, it sometimes made my chest ache just looking at him.” She shot Jazz a look. “You ever feel that way about someone?”
She did. But Jazz thought it best not to mention Nick at this point.
“I was young,” Lisa said. “And I’d had every advantage in life. Good schools, the right sort of friends from the right sort of families who belonged to the right sort of country clubs. Then along came this guy. He was easy to talk to, but there was an edginess to him. He had a dark side. And you know what? It only made him more interesting. I’d like to say I was impressionable. But I guess I was really just naive. Dan Mansfield wanted someone to teach him all he needed to know when it came to what was worth stealing and what wasn’t and he found her, all right.”
“But you didn’t—”
“Know what he was up to?” Lisa’s laugh contained zero humor. “Absolutely not. Not at first. Though I have to admit, even if I had, I’m not sure it would have made much of a difference. Dan was…” Lisa’s voice faded and she sat with her gaze unfocused. When she shook away from the thought, lifted her chin, and squared her shoulders, she looked more like the powerhouse Jazz had seen on her first visit to the shop. “Just so you know, I’m not especially proud of being a sucker.”
“Which makes me wonder why you visited Mansfield in prison once you knew what kind of man he really was. By then you knew he was a burglar, right? By then, you’d watched him kill your father.”
Lisa scraped her chair back and stood. “Coffee?” She crossed the room to where a gleaming rosewood pedestal table held a state-of-the-art machine. “My son is something of a coffee snob. He tells me today’s Blonde Roast is special.” She filled a china cup for herself and another for Jazz, then led the way out of the break room and into her office. Once they were inside, Lisa closed the door.
She took a long drink before she set her cup on her desk and turned to face Jazz. She didn’t say a word. She didn’t have to. It didn’t take a genius to put two and two together.
“You and Mansfield were involved,” Jazz said.
Lisa’s laugh was filled with acid. “Back in the day, we would have said we were screwing regularly. That’s not what you kids call it now.”
“So the night you ran into the Twilight Tavern—”
“What I said in court was true. My dad and I had an appointment for an appraisal. I followed Dad, saw him park at the Twilight, and wondered what was up. Then I saw Dan’s car in the parking lot and panicked. I knew there was bound to be trouble. See, Dad didn’t know about me and Dan. I knew he wouldn’t approve. I also knew my dad and Dan had some sort of falling-out. Dan was plenty mad about it, and when Dan was mad, things could get ugly. I was worried he’d throw our relationship in my dad’s face.”
“That’s why it got so ugly so fast when you walked in.”
Lisa hung her head.
“And when you visited Dan in prison?”
This time, Lisa shrugged. “I started out wanting an apology. For what he’d done to my dad. For what he’d done to me. That never happened. Then, I don’t know.” She trailed one finger along the surface of her desk when she rounded it and sat down. “I just kept going. It sounds crazy, I know, but maybe it was because Dan and I had a bond. And I’m not talking about the sex. We had my dad’s death in common. Nothing was ever going to change that.”
Just like Jazz had a bond with some faceless arsonist.
She didn’t even like considering it, so she got back to the purpose of her visit. “You went to his parole hearings, too.”
“I did. Over and over again. I honestly don’t know if I wanted to hear they were keeping him there or setting him free. I still wonder.”
“That means you knew when his parole was approved. You knew he was out of prison.”
Lisa’s gaze snapped to Jazz. “And you think what? That means I killed him?”
“You had lots of good reasons. He murdered your dad. He played you for a sucker. Did you see Mansfield once he was out?”
As if Jazz had slapped her, Lisa reared back. “You think I have nothing better to do than—”
“Meghan said it.” The memory popped into Jazz’s head and out of her mouth before she could remind herself it was likely to get poor Meghan—if she still worked at Raab Antiques—into even more trouble. “She told me you weren’t around here much in that week before Mansfield was killed.”
“Meghan needs to mind her own business. So do you.”
“Stop asking questions?”
If Jazz hoped to get a reaction from the warning in the note she’d found in her pocket, she was disappointed. Lisa simply shook her head and kept on shaking it. “What I do on my time is my own concern. Not Meghan’s and certainly not yours. What do you think, I spent my days keeping an eye on Dan? Mooning over him? That I killed him? No. I can think of a million reasons I would have liked to. The nightmares. The guilt I felt for falling for Dan in the first place. He may have had a hold on me but—”
“As long as you’re being honest, tell me, did he have a hold on your father, too?”
Just like that, the implied truce between them dissolved. Lisa’s nostrils flared. Her eyes flashed.
“If you’re talking about my father being a fence for Dan—”
“If Dan spent a lot of time here—”
“He spent a lot of time here with me. Not with Dad.”
“But if there was some sort of connection—”
“There wasn’t.” Lisa stood, her hands trembling, her rings clacking against each other. “I’m done talking about this. To you. To anybody. If you think I could actually believe anything like that about my own father, then you obviously don’t know what family is all about.”
Lisa Raab was wrong.
Deep down, in her heart and in her soul and in that still place where truth lives in spite of the way the world tries to spin it and dishonor it, Jazz knew all about family.
Family was the bedrock of her life.
But maybe—no, it wasn’t a maybe; she knew it for sure—there was more to family than just those precious people she was related to by blood.
That was the truth, even if sometimes it was an inconvenient truth.
It was what made her stop at Kim’s.
She’d seen Kim a time or two since her surgery. Once, Claire and Peter had come over to collect her, bless them, and brought her to Jazz’s house. Another time when Nick had a few hours to spare, he and Jazz picked up Kim and they went to dinner.
Neither visit was especially pleasant, but both, Jazz knew, were essential to Kim’s mental health.
Reminding herself not to forget it, she parked in front of Kim’s and walked around to the back.
There was no answer at the door.
“Come on, Kim!” She knocked again in an attempt to draw Kim out of whatever bourbon-soaked haze she might be steeped in. When there was still no answer, she tried the door.
It was open.
“Hey, Kim!” Jazz stepped into the kitchen. “It’s me. Jazz. You home?”
If she was, she didn’t answer.
Jazz took a quick look around. There were dishes in the sink, glasses on the table where the pile of photographs still leaned precariously toward the edge. She pushed them back to the center of the table and looked into the dining room.
No one in there.
No one wrapped in the blankets heaped on the couch in the living room.
“Kim!” Jazz stood at the bottom of the steps and called upstairs before she mumbled to herself, “Answer me. Come on. I don’t want to walk up there and find…”
She couldn’t make herself say it.
She couldn’t make herself think it.
Instead of doing either, she climbed the steps to the second floor she’d never visited and pushed open the first door on the right side of the hallway, just because it seemed the most logical place for Kim to have her room.
Her guess was right. But aside from an unmade bed, piles of clothes on the floor, and an empty bottle of Old Crow on the top of the dresser, the room was empty.
So was the bathroom. And the tiny room at the end of the hallway where boxes from what looked to be a lifetime’s worth of small appliances were piled.
The door to the third bedroom was closed. It was silly, Jazz told herself, but she knocked anyway.
There was no answer.
It meant nothing, she reminded herself, except that Kim wasn’t home. She’d gone to the Little Bit for a couple of shots and beers. She’d gone to the grocery store, though heaven knew she’d never eat whatever food she bought. It was a nice evening. She’d gone for a walk.
Jazz knocked again.
“Kim?” She inched open the door and froze in the doorway. It was nearly dark and she wanted to make sure her eyes weren’t playing tricks on her. She flicked on the light.
Unlike the rest of the house, this room was as pristine as if it had been preserved in amber.
The walls were chocolate brown. At least where they showed around posters of Eminem, Rage Against the Machine, and Kid Rock.
The dresser was shiny and spotless, empty except for a Sony Walkman that looked as if it had just been set down by its owner and a Grand Theft Auto game. Vintage.
There was a Cleveland Indians spread on the bed, a matching carpet right where, she had no doubt, the boy who called that room his own got out of bed each morning. Did he greet each day as a gift and handle what it threw at him with smarts and courage like he did now that he was an adult? Or was every day just another in a long line of endless, grueling challenges that sapped his spirit and stifled his soul?
Jazz sank down on the bed and hugged her arms around herself, imagining what it was like to be the kid who messed with video games one minute and had to be the grown-up of the house the next.
How many nights had he sat here alone in his room waiting for Kim to come back from the bars? How many times had he walked downstairs and found her passed out?
“Oh, Nick!” Her heart squeezed and her throat closed, and at the same time she looked around she reminded herself to ask if he’d been up there since he left home.
He needed to know. About the Walkman and the video game. About the fact that the dresser was clean and polished though nothing else in the house was, about the bedspread that celebrated his favorite team, and—
The slap of the door and a thud from downstairs brought Jazz to her feet. She hadn’t realized there were tears on her cheeks and she dashed them away and headed into the hallway.
“Hey, Kim!” she called down the stairs. “It’s me, Jazz. I was up here looking for you. Kim? Kim?”
Kim didn’t answer.
In fact, the only sound Jazz heard was that of footsteps from the kitchen, followed by the slam of the door.
She raced down the steps, but by the time she got there it was already too late.
The only thing left of whoever had been in Kim’s house was a shadow that slipped through the gathering darkness in the backyard and was gone.