“Well?” Matt said, putting his sandwich down on the plate. “Come on. Quit with the silent treatment. Talk to me.”
The deli was crowded, and the tables were packed tightly together. A mother at a table next to theirs was trying to coax a preschooler into eating his peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Two elderly women to their left were complaining loudly about the deli’s lack of a senior citizen discount.
Mary Bliss twisted her paper napkin into a tight roll. She had been concentrating on her lunch, tuna on rye, listening, nodding.
“It’s not that I don’t want to know,” she said slowly. “Maybe I just don’t trust myself to ask the right questions. Or maybe I don’t know what I’ll do once I know something.”
Matt took a gulp of iced tea. “My investigation isn’t that far along yet,” he said. “I’ll find Parker. But I haven’t yet. He’s still two or three steps ahead of me.”
“What do you know?” Mary Bliss asked.
A muscle in Matt’s cheek twitched. “While you’re riding around in a half-dead ten-year-old sedan, Parker has bought himself a new car. I did a title search. He’s driving a brand-new black Range Rover. And he paid nearly seventy-three thousand dollars cash.”
Mary Bliss stared down at her plate, picked at the potato salad with the tip of her fork. “When was this?”
“Three weeks ago. He bought it at a dealership in Jacksonville.”
She nodded. “What else?”
“He’s moving around a lot. I’ve found two more bank accounts for his graveyard employees—one in Birmingham, another in Orlando. I’ve got photos from ATMs in both places. It’s Parker, all right.” He reached for the briefcase he’d brought into the restaurant.
“No,” Mary Bliss said. “Don’t show me. I don’t want to see.”
“He’s grown himself a cute little mustache,” Matt said. “And he’s wearing a gold chain with what looks like a diamond ring around his neck.”
“Maybe it’s my engagement ring,” Mary Bliss said.
Matt gave her a sharp look. “He took that too?”
She nodded. “He told me he was having the prongs on the setting tightened. I didn’t know until I called the jeweler that he never took it in there.”
The muscle in Matt’s cheek twitched again. “The next thing is something you’re not going to want to hear.”
She gave him a sad smile. “I don’t really want to hear any of it, you know. But I guess I need to, don’t I?”
“Yeah,” he said. “You do. So here it is. Parker’s not traveling alone. He’s got somebody with him.”
Mary Bliss raised one eyebrow. “So there is somebody else. Katharine is right. She said a man never runs off by himself. There’s always another woman involved. Do you know who it is?”
“Not a clue,” Matt admitted. “But in two of the five ATM photos we’ve recovered, there’s somebody waiting in the front seat of the car parked directly in back of Parker. The car is the Range Rover. All we can see of the passenger is a silhouette. But it’s the same silhouette in both photos. Both times, the passenger is wearing a white baseball cap, with chin-length blonde hair visible. The rest of the face is hidden under the ball cap.”
“A blonde,” Mary Bliss said. “Why is it that the other woman is always a blonde? Is she young?”
“Hard to say. The ball cap shades all the facial features.”
Mary Bliss pushed her plate away. She felt nauseous. “Where do you think he’s going? What’s he done with all that money?”
“I don’t have any idea where he’s going. But at least he hasn’t left the country. Yet. And I don’t know what he’s done with the money, either. The graveyard bank accounts only have a few hundred apiece left in them.”
“What would you do?” Mary Bliss asked. “Where would you run if you were Parker?”
“Me?” Matt grinned. “I would have stayed home with my beautiful wife. And if I had run off, I would have taken her with me.”
“That’s not fair,” Mary Bliss said, twisting her napkin again.
“You said you wanted me to be straight with you. I’m being straight. If I were running away with you, we’d go somewhere beautiful. Tropical, remote. Ever been to Hawaii?”
She shook her head. “Parker never liked to travel that much.”
“Until now,” Matt said. “I think you’d like Hawaii. Gorgeous flowers, beaches, waterfalls. Great deep-sea fishing. Do you like to fish?”
She smiled. “The last time I went fishing was with a cane pole on the banks of a creek back in Alabama. I guess I liked it. I was probably six or seven years old. My daddy showed me how to bait my hook, and how to take the fish off and let it go, so it wouldn’t get hurt and die.”
He cocked his head. “Are your folks still around?”
“No,” she said lightly. “Mama died when Erin was a baby. Daddy died when I was just a kid. He’d been out of our lives a long time by then.”
“Divorce?” Matt asked.
“No. He just up and left us. Daddy wasn’t real big on paperwork.”
“I see,” Matt said. She could tell he did.
“Can we change the subject, please?” Mary Bliss asked. “You’ve told me what I needed to know about Parker. I hope you catch him, I guess. But I can’t think that far ahead.”
“Does the insurance company know? That he’s really alive?” Matt asked.
“Charlie is handling that,” Mary Bliss said. “Let’s talk about something else. Something pleasant.”
“Us?”
She clamped her lips together, tried not to smile. “There is no us.”
“Yet.”
“I’m legally married to Parker McGowan.”
“You could get a divorce,” Matt suggested.
“I wouldn’t know where to start,” Mary Bliss said. “How can I divorce somebody I can’t even find?”
“Ask Charlie,” he said. “He’s the man with all the answers.”
“I’ve been depending too much on Charlie. He’s been so wonderful to me. And he’s not out of the woods yet, you know. He looks a lot better, but you never know.”
“All right,” Matt said slowly. “Forget the divorce. Everybody thinks Parker’s dead. As far as the world is concerned, you’re a widow. You can do as you please.”
“But I’m not a widow,” Mary Bliss said. “You know it, and I know it. And so do Charlie and Katharine. And there’s Erin to consider too.”
“Excuses,” Matt said. “You keep coming up with excuses to stay away from me. Am I that ugly?”
“No,” she said. “That’s not it and you know it.”
“Give me another chance,” Matt said. “We’ll take it slow, I promise. Just one night out. Please? You won’t even have to be alone with me.”
“I can’t,” she said reluctantly. “It just wouldn’t look right.”
“To who?”
“Whom,” she said, automatically correcting him. “To the world.”
“The world can take a flying leap,” Matt said. He leaned across the table and kissed her gently on the cheek. “I want to spend time with you. Is that so wrong?”
The two blue-haired old ladies the next table over had been staring and actively eavesdropping. Now the older of the two started to giggle. Mary Bliss felt herself blush.
“You’re making a spectacle of me,” she protested. “Please behave.”
“No,” he said. He pushed his chair back. “If you don’t agree to go out with me, I’m going to get up and come over there and give you a bend-over-backward Rhett Butler–does–Scarlett O’Hara kiss. And the whole joint will see it. It’ll be all over Fair Oaks in no time at all.”
“All right, all right,” she said hastily. “But no more intimate dinners at home. No more red wine and candles.”
“I’ve got just the place,” Matt said. “The country club dinner dance is Saturday night. What do you say?”
“I don’t know,” Mary Bliss said, biting her lip.
He pushed the chair out a little farther, stood up and walked over to her, pulled her out of the chair.
“Yes,” she said, laughing, pushing him away. “I give in.”
One of the blue-hairs at the next table beamed at her. “Good for you, dear,” she said. “He seems nice. Give him a chance.”