Tuesday March 29
10:30 a.m.
It had taken some doing, but she’d finally managed to track down a few facts about Hannah Daltry. Including her age, which Madelyn Conner had guessed dead-on.
At forty-two, Hannah Daltry resided in the same town in which she’d been raised. She’d attended Paleville Elementary School, Paleville Middle School, and Paleville High School. She’d left the area for college, earning a degree in education from the University of Maryland. After teaching at a variety of schools within a forty-mile radius, the victim had finally settled at Ocean Point Community College twelve years ago.
Elise looked up from her notes long enough to open her top desk drawer and grab a handful of pretzels from the stash she kept inside. Not much of a breakfast eater, the urge for munchies tended to kick in around this same time every day.
“You sure you want to eat those?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Elise shut the drawer with her empty hand, set the pretzels down with the other. Dean, as usual, had a built-in homing mechanism when it came to food. Which meant he could sense the presence of it from about sixty yards away. Without fail. Once he found it, he was relentless until he scored a few scraps for himself.
“You sure they haven’t been tampered with?” Dean leaned against her desk, pushed a strand of long stringy blond hair from his face and batted his eyelashes angelically.
She glanced at the pretzel in her hand, her stomach flip-flopping with a sudden dose of uncertainty. “You wouldn’t . . .”
He lowered his camera bag to his feet and rested his palms on her desk. “I wouldn’t?”
She looked from Dean to the pretzel and back again. Crud. “Oh, here, take it.” She pushed the tiny mountain of pretzels across the desk, her stomach gurgling angrily in response.
Dean’s poker face gave way to a devilish smile as he leaned over and popped all five pretzels into his mouth. “’Anks, ’ise.”
If she thought she could get away with it, she’d have strangled him right then and there. With one of his prized heavy-metal concert T-shirts . . .
“Now that’s not a nice look, missy.” Dean pushed off her desk, picked up his bag and slung it over his shoulder once again. “Certainly not one you’d want Mitchy boy to see.”
Elise pulled open her top drawer again, fumbled around with her hand. Feeling the softness beneath her fingers, she pulled out a white paper napkin and waved it above her head.
“God, Elise, you are so easy to break, you know it?” He reached his hand around her body, took hold of the half-empty pretzel bag, and pulled it from the open drawer. “Thanks, kiddo. These are yummy.”
“Scram, Dean.”
The photographer flashed a salty grin in her direction then disappeared around the floor-to-ceiling pole in the middle of the newsroom. It was hard to be angry at Dean for long. Sure, his brashness could push the most stoic of personalities to drink, but beneath that ornery surface was a heart as big as Texas.
Unfortunately Texas had just walked off with her breakfast.
Ignoring the growing hunger in her stomach, Elise turned back to her computer. The facts she’d managed to compile on Hannah Daltry thus far were fairly basic. The woman had never married. She was preceded in death by her father and older brother. Her mother, Genevieve Daltry, was a resident at Paleville Gardens—an assisted living facility for senior citizens unable to live on their own, yet not so sick they needed a nursing home.
She jotted Genevieve’s name and residence into her notebook. Why, she wasn’t entirely sure, but it didn’t hurt to have the information nearby. Just in case.
“Hey, Elise!”
Debbie.
In the interest of the auditory health of her fellow coworkers, Elise scooted back her chair and headed toward the receptionist’s desk, covering the total distance in less than five seconds. Dean was right. The woman needed a muzzle.
“What’s up, Debbie?” She rested her elbows on the counter that separated the newsroom from the waiting area and waited for Debbie to answer the telephone and direct the caller to the right extension.
“Yes, ma’am, we received your subscription.” Debbie punched a few buttons on her keyboard, moving from one screen to the other with a practiced hand. “You should start receiving your paper this coming Sunday.”
Within seconds, she was off the phone, eyeing Elise with surprise. “You didn’t have to come up, I could have just told you what I wanted.”
“That’s okay. I needed the exercise.” As cool as Debbie was, she hadn’t seemed to figure out that her method of inner-office communication grated on her colleagues’ nerves.
“Oooohhh, I love that top.” Debbie jumped up from her desk and came around the counter. “And those pants are to die for.”
“Really? You like it?” Elise looked down at her new pink ribbed sweater and charcoal gray pants. She’d swung by the Short Hills Mall on the way home from Newark Airport on Friday evening. Desperate to buoy her spirits after dropping Mitch off, she’d wandered aimlessly past shop after shop, not seeing much of anything. The outfit had been an unexpected find.
“I love it. Has Mitch seen it?”
She shook her head, nibbling on her lower lip. “Not yet.”
“He’ll love it. Trust me. Hugs in all the right places.”
She felt her face warm at the thought of Mitch. “Thanks, Deb. So what’s up?”
“Sam wants a sec when you can.” Debbie retraced her steps around the counter and plopped down in her chair.
“Is he in his office?”
“Last I knew, yeah.” Debbie shrugged an apology as she reached for the ringing phone. “Duty calls.”
Elise waved and headed back to her desk, grabbing her notepad and pen before making her way to the walled office on the other side of the newsroom.
When she reached Sam’s open door she stopped, observed the man seated behind the computer, his hands flying across his keyboard. In his early to mid forties, Sam appeared much older, his balding head an instant deceiver.
“Sam?”
He swiveled around in his vinyl writing chair, his pale blue eyes twinkling. “Good morning, Elise. C’mon in, take a seat.”
She walked into the room, her gaze immediately drawn to the dozen or so plaques displayed on the walls, each one representing public accolades her boss had received for either his writing or his editing. The kind of documentation she hoped to earn for herself one day.
Setting her notepad and pen on top of his desk, Elise sat down across from Sam, her stomach growling loudly.
“Hungry?” Sam snapped a sizeable chunk from his granola bar and held it out in her direction. “It’s not the best flavor combination I’ve ever had, but it’s edible.”
“I’m okay.” It was a lie, and they both knew it. The only food offer she ever sheepishly accepted involved chocolate—in either liquid or solid form. “Debbie said you wanted to see me?”
Sam rested his left foot across his right knee and leaned back in his chair, his gaze both pensive and curious all at the same time. “Anything on the Daltry investigation yet?”
She shrugged and flipped her notepad open. “Not much. The preliminary autopsy report isn’t back yet, but I talked to a few of the cops on the scene yesterday and there’s little doubt that she was murdered. I’ll check in again with Mindy this afternoon, see if the official report is available. But regardless of how, it looks more than likely she was a casualty of a robbery gone wrong.” Elise traced a figure eight beside the notepad with a closed pen, her mind running through the bits of information she’d uncovered so far. “She was forty-two, grew up in Paleville, taught at O.P.C.C for the past twelve years and is survived by her mother, Genevieve.”
Sam nodded, his gaze fixed somewhere above her head—a look known around the office as “the thinking face.” When he spoke, his words were pensive. “She was working on a novel, you know. A thriller. She was about three-quarters of the way done and it was spectacular.”
She considered her boss’s words for a moment, her thoughts quickly traveling to the powerful writing the victim had shared with Elise’s class. “Let me ask you a question. I know you grew up here, in Ocean Point, but Paleville is what? Thirty, thirty-five miles away?”
Sam’s gaze locked with hers. “Twenty-five. Why do you ask?”
“I realize you’d have been just a kid yourself, but do you happen to remember a bank robbery in Paleville about thirty-five years ago?” It was a long shot, but if she’d learned anything over the past ten months on the job, it was that long shots often paid off. In spades.
He raised a fist to his mouth and exhaled against his skin, his cheeks puffing to twice their normal size. “Vaguely. Mostly what I remember is talking my buddies into playing cops and robbers afterward so I could run around and interview both sides.”
She laughed. “Your friends thought you were crazy, didn’t they?”
He shrugged. “Nah, they liked it. Less competition for the cop and robber roles.” He leaned forward, his elbows planted on the desk. “So why the questions about a robbery from thirty-five years ago?”
“It’s what you said, about Ms. Daltry’s writing. She gave my class an assignment. To create a scene ripe with emotion—one that allows the reader to feel and experience it as if they, too, were there.” Her figure eights turned to tapping, her ballpoint pen bopping up and down on the top of her notepad. “She gave us a sample she’d written and it was absolutely mind-blowing.”
She pulled her gaze off the pen, focused on her boss as he waited for her to continue.
“Anyway, if I’m reading correctly, I think Ms. Daltry was in that bank when it was robbed.”
Sam’s eyes widened, his eyebrows arched. “She would have been, what? Five? Six?”
“Seven.”
Her boss lifted his hand from the desk, made a rolling motion with his right index finger. That, coupled with his thinking face, meant he was intrigued and wanted to hear more.
“While the adults were locked in the bank vault for the duration of the crime, Ms. Daltry hid under a desk in the middle of the action.”
A long low whistle escaped Sam’s mouth. “If that’s true, she must have been terrified.”
“She was. According to the writing sample, anyway.” Elise raised her arms into the air in an effort to push away the heavy thoughts that had weighed on her mind since news of the woman’s murder. “I guess what I’m struggling with is how she got herself through a robbery as a small child, only to be killed during another one thirty-five years later. Seems a bit cruel, doesn’t it?”
Sam’s hand reached across the desk, closed over hers. “Yeah, it does seem cruel. But you know as well as I do that Mitch and the department won’t rest until they find justice for Hannah.”
She blinked against the sudden wetness in her eyes, swallowed over the lump growing in her throat. “I know. It just stinks, that’s all.”
“That it does.” Sam squeezed her hand quickly, then reached for the top page on his printer stand. “I thought you might like a heads-up. Your creative writing class will meet as scheduled on Saturday morning. Any chance you can help get the word out to your classmates?”
She took the sheet of paper from Sam’s outstretched hands, her eyes skimming the email quickly. “You’re taking the class over?”
“Yup. I was trying to figure out what I could do to help out. I thought the world of Hannah and feel awful about what’s happened. Taking over her Saturday class seemed a good place to start.”
She pointed halfway down the email that had gone out to Jeff Wilder, president of O.P.C.C. “This says you’re going to do it for free?”
“Keep reading.” He leaned back in his chair, his gaze once again fixed on the wall above her head as she looked back down at the email in her hand.
And then she saw it.
My only request in this offer is that my paycheck be sent to:
Genevieve Daltry
409 Maple Tree Lane, Apartment 2B
Paleville, N.J.
“Wow.” She brushed the back of her hand against the tear that escaped down her cheek.
Sam waved his hand in the air. “It’s nothing, really. I love writing—you know that. And it’s something I can do to help. So, can I count on you to let your classmates know?”
She inhaled deeply, willed her voice to be as steady as possible when it emerged from her mouth. “Absolutely. A bunch of us are getting together tomorrow night at Mia’s to talk about what happened and share what we wrote. I’ll tell everyone then.”
Sam flashed an appreciative smile in her direction, his eyes once again twinkling from within. “Thanks, Elise, you’re the best.”