6

The motorcade wound its way through the early afternoon traffic of downtown Raleigh to historic Oakwood Cemetery. Val had unearthed the cemetery plot receipt from Frank’s files. He’d never asked where Alison wanted to be buried. Not Frank’s style. He made the important decisions.

Actually, he’d made all the decisions.

She could count on one hand the things that were truly her own. Her garden. Her friendship with Val. Her books. And she’d believed then he’d outlive her by the sheer force of his personality like the way the Colorado River had worn away at the Grand Canyon.

But she was still here. And he was not. Funny to realize Frank was never going to tell her what to do again. Never walk through the door of their home.

Was she glad or sad about this?

She took a deep breath. She wasn’t sure yet.

Leaning her head against the window of the hearse, she observed the other motorists, who—true to a vanishing Southern tradition—pulled over to the side of the road out of respect for the deceased and family. The funeral procession moved off the asphalt and onto the graveled drive that ran in a grid between weathered gravestones. At the top of a slight incline, the hearse halted at an open-sided blue tent.

During the drive to the cemetery, her children and the Prescotts remained silent, lost in their own thoughts. They waited as the funeral director supervised the unloading of the casket and the arrangement of the floral tributes around the site.

The director opened the limousine door, and they all spilled out. She was the last to leave the safety of the car. Of everything this day, this was what she dreaded the most. Car doors slammed as occupants streamed toward the tent, congealing in their dark blacks and blues a few feet behind the folding chairs reserved for the family.

One foot resting on the running board, she gripped the open doorframe, shaking as she gazed across the grassy expanse of graves to the turned red clay that marked the newest grave, Frank’s grave. The children hurried forward and paused at the tent.

Val grabbed her, pulling her free of her death grip on the car. “It’s going to be okay,” she whispered. “Breathe and relax. Claire and Justin need you at this moment more than any other. You must help them to get through this.”

A gentle breeze ruffled the strands of hair cupping her face. A caress?

God, is that you?

She glanced through the leafy, saffron branches of the overhanging oak to the dappled sunlight of the sky. Fighting the fog of pain and bitter memories, she came to herself, the rational self none of them had seen much of since the policemen rang her doorbell. She took a deep breath and let it out bit by bit.

Alison disentangled herself from Val’s strong clasp. “You’re right as usual. I can do better than this. I must do better than this.” She shot Val a pointed look. “I will not be my mother today. I will not abandon my children at the grave of their father on the worst day of their lives.”

She crossed the distance separating her from the children, taking each by the hand.

Not a bad day for a funeral, Mike supposed, as funerals went. The October afternoon sunshine was warm but without the humid stickiness that hovered over the city less than a month ago. The faint scent of burning leaves perfumed the autumn air. He still missed the ever-present tangy aroma of evergreens from his native Blue Ridge. But Raleigh, as far as his career and murder went, was where it was happening.

From a distance and taking detailed notes, he assessed the attendees. Unless it was a random murder—uncommon in Raleigh—most of his homicide victims knew their killers. Often, like the firebugs that returned to view the blaze they’d set, murderers liked to frequent their victim’s funeral. Whether out of a sense of gloating accomplishment, or to make sure the person was truly dead, he wasn’t sure.

One day he’d finish that psychology degree he’d started before finances forced him to drop out and he’d enlisted in the army. On the other hand, his criminal justice degree—he had painstakingly finished while still in the reserves—served him well. He’d risen through the Raleigh police ranks due to a combination of ambition, tenacious stubbornness (pigheadedness his granny had called it), and a sharp mind.

He’d tried not to darken the door of any church since he escaped his granny’s clutches, leaving the only home he’d ever known. The way the pastor from the Redeemer church presented himself had been outside the scope of his experience. His granny had preferred the hardcore hell and damnation variety in the vain hope of arresting the telltale signs of adolescent wild oats in his younger self.

Pastor Fleming and the Prescotts intrigued him in the way a fascinating and unfamiliar species might intrigue a scientist. Not the usual bunch he dealt with on a daily basis as a homicide investigator.

The autopsy revealed Frank Monaghan died instantly. The .22 caliber pistol pressed against his left temple left a scorched area around the entry wound. Pinpointing a precise time of death in real life was difficult, unlike the depictions on television shows. External parameters could narrow the time frame but rarely proved conclusive.

Monaghan left the airport at 6:15 in the evening, when an airport security camera clocked him leaving the parking garage. At eight o’clock, one of the veterinarian interns—finishing poop duty in the distant cow stalls off Orchard Farm Road—remembered seeing Frank’s car pull into the dead-end street. So far, no witnesses to what happened next.

Hurried at the time, the intern was late for a date and hadn’t paid the car much attention. Hard to say for certain whether the driver was alone or not. None of his business anyway, he’d explained. Mike had resisted the urge to smack the pimply-faced, smart-mouthed college kid into Sunday.

Where Frank had been in the intervening hour and forty-five minutes had yet to be established.

Mentally, Mike reviewed the evidence he’d gathered thus far. The first responder had noted in his report a faint trace of cigarette smoke hanging in the enclosed vehicle when he reached the crime scene at one a.m. A cigarette stub lay, encircled by a smeared ring of lipstick, underneath Frank’s foot. Bright red lipstick.

He’d checked. None of the Monaghans smoked. Nor seemed to own any red lipstick.

A crumpled tissue contained traces of Frank’s saliva and a smudge of orange lipstick. As if, he speculated, Frank had wiped it from his lips, wadded it into a ball, and tossed it under his seat. Again, no orange lipstick at the Monaghans.

For him, a picture was beginning to emerge of the lifestyle of the deceased involving multiple liaisons. He was sorry for the kids, but the jury was still out in his mind on the mother.

Despite his unusual lapse the first day, he was back to a professionally neutral opinion regarding his number-one suspect, Alison Monaghan. Doing his job right was all that mattered in the end. The evidence, not him, would prove her guilt or innocence.

Until he’d seen the presentation the children had put together, he hadn’t cared too much for the late Frank Monaghan. A jerk if ever there was one.

Generally speaking, there were the “wrong place at the wrong time” victims and victims who for various reasons had broken or twisted relationships resulting in their own deaths. Monaghan was a man who’d invited violence.

He’d interviewed Valerie Prescott the first day when he found her alone in the kitchen. He’d asked her who would want to kill Frank Monaghan.

She’d given a short, incredulous laugh. “The better question would be, Detective Barefoot, who didn’t want to kill that—” She’d bitten off her last words. “Not that I’d include Alison in that group . . .”

If Alison Monaghan was the perp, he’d get her one way or the other. He always did.

Lots of mourners at the jerk’s funeral. Obviously, he was a pillar of the community, or he owed a lot of people a lot of money.

Mike leaned against a nearby tree trunk, his hands in his pockets, to all appearances a casual observer. But he missed little. He watched from a safe distance at the edge of the historic cemetery as Alison Monaghan, standing under the funeral tent next to the coffin, personally greeted each mourner. The Prescotts and the Monaghan children stood over to the side. The children drooped with fatigue.

The last picture on the PowerPoint left him with a disturbing awareness of his own frailties, aspects of his life he wouldn’t have wanted his strict Bible-quoting granny or anyone else to ever discover. Images of desert sands and oxygen-choking oil wells on fire with the flames of hell. A feeling-sorry-for-myself-what-are-you-doing-later-tonight binge at the Wagon Wheel last month with some blonde.

Mike rotated his head from side to side to free the scenes from his mind and loosen the cricks in his neck. Not Granny-rated material. Much less God-rated. And in his line of work more than most, he understood there was no guarantee of tomorrow.

Had Monaghan had a split-second warning or a glimmer of intuition, before the cold steel was placed to his head, that his second chances had run out? What changes would Frank have made had he driven straight home from the airport? What changes would Mike make if the truth his granny had pounded into his head ever made it down to his heart?

Mike shook the disturbing thoughts out of his mind. He made his own choices, and he lived with the consequences. He enjoyed his life. Most of the time. Frank Monaghan probably had, too.

And he’d ended up dead.

What was wrong with him today? Though she’d been dead for over a decade, he could still imagine the smirk his granny would’ve given him at the direction of his thoughts.

“God’s got big plans for you, son,” she always said, her face crinkling with the wrinkles of age and a smile in her quicksilver eyes. “You can run, but you can’t hide from Him.”

Mike clenched his jaw. Go away, Granny.

His gaze returned to Alison Monaghan. His pulse raced when he thought of her. He clamped his mind shut on the direction of those thoughts, deliberately replacing her image with the image of her dead husband. And relaxed. Murder, a comfortable topic.

Spur-of-the-moment killings were notoriously hard cases to clear. It was premeditated murderers, in their detailed, well-thought-out plans, who unwittingly revealed themselves in some way. The arrogance and egotism that drove them to murder in the first place often trapped them into exposure. His job was a matter of gathering the clues and putting the pieces of the puzzle together.

Easier said than done, of course, but in his five-year stint with the Raleigh police, he’d developed a reputation for figuring out the inscrutable and putting some cold cases to rest. And if this case didn’t develop a few more leads, he was going to be in trouble. The first seventy-two hours were critical in solving a crime.

With the clock ticking on this murder investigation, he was long overdue for a break in the case, operating now on borrowed time. Something had to give and soon. Or, this case would go down in the books as unsolved. And as much as his pride hated to admit defeat, his sense of justice demanded recompense for a murderer still out there on the loose in his city, free to strike at will again.

He glanced over the crowd at the gravesite once more.

And recalling his experience as a soldier in Iraq, it was only hard to pull the trigger the first time around.

Her gaze traveled to the detective and then roamed around the cemetery. For inexplicable reasons, the Lawrences were still hanging around, Linda lighting up a Marlboro. Claire, Justin, and the Prescotts stood talking to Bryan Fleming, his wife and their daughter, Sandy. Sandy, Alison remembered, attended the same school as her children, a sophomore like Claire.

A tall, distinguished man approached them, embraced by Val. He appeared familiar, but she was too tired at the moment to place him.

A wave of pungent and exotic perfume enveloped Alison, reducing her to a fit of coughing.

“Darling Alison!”

She found herself overpowered, her face pressed against the large and ponderously displayed bosom of Natalie Singleton. The release was so sudden, she stumbled backward.

The statuesque Natalie had a dark exotic beauty. A stunning brunette in her mid-thirties, with mesmerizing violet eyes, Natalie had already been married and divorced lucratively, four times. The daughter of a retired army brigadier general and an Italian contessa, Natalie was the envy of most women and the desire of most men. And to say Natalie liked men was like saying some cats liked cream.

Natalie, with her multitude of political and social connections in Raleigh, was also on the TAP board. Had she and Frank been—?

What a nerve.

“Dear Frank! How I shall miss him!”

Exactly how much would she miss him?

“What a loss to our whole community!” purred Natalie in that sultry voice of hers.

Did she always speak in exclamation marks? Alison couldn’t resist a small smile.

Natalie, apparently not just beautiful, frowned, perhaps suspecting Alison of mocking her. Alison wiped the smile from her face. Time to hunt and gather, not antagonize. Maybe later, she promised herself, if Natalie and Frank had truly been involved.

Just remember, a little voice in her head reminded, it takes two to tango. Frank wasn’t exactly innocent in all this. But Frank was dead and beyond the reach of all but God.

Natalie was another matter entirely.

“You and Frank served together on the TAP board at Weathersby, I understand.”

In the process of moving along, Natalie teetered on her six-inch stiletto heels to a stop. Natalie smoothed out her puckered brow with one expensively manicured nail. “At great sacrifice to my personal well-being, I came today to offer my respects to dear, departed Frank. Funerals are such a downer.” She sighed. “Yes, it is true, as a committee member-at-large, I serve in whatever capacity I can be most useful. Frank and I were involved . . .” She smiled, showing unnaturally white, even, and as perfect as cosmetic dentistry could make them, teeth. “Involved in a great number of projects together.”

Alison felt like grinding her teeth. On Natalie Singleton’s neck.

Natalie laughed and unsheathed one tangerine-lacquered claw to smooth the resulting frown away on Alison’s forehead. She flinched at Natalie’s raking touch.

“Stress, my dear. How it does age the face!” Natalie gave one parting shot over her shoulder as she walked away. “That’s why I am so careful with whom I associate. How I shall miss those happy times with dear Frank.”

Taking enough deep breaths to hyperventilate, she tried to calm her fuming nerves. Why did she care if Frank and Natalie . . . ?

Alison’s wedding snapshot from the PowerPoint presentation flashed across her vision, stabbing at her heart. The anger and the hurt were like two faucets turned open at full throttle.

Was it better to get both feelings out of her system once and for all? Which one was the way toward healing? And could she channel them to prove her innocence and uncover Frank’s true killer? Weariness engulfed her. She swayed.

A diminutive brassy redhead seized her arm.

“Alison . . .”

In her mid-forties with protuberant light green eyes, Ivy Dandridge was executive director at Weathersby. Her much older husband, a retired history professor, Henry, was writing a definitive work on the history of the house and the flamboyant Weathersby family, an ongoing project. Most of the volunteers, while liking the shy, balding professor, jokingly referred to his always future book as the Ivy’s-keep-Henry-busy-and-out-of-her-hair project.

“I was so sorry to learn of . . .” Ivy began, but Henry coughed beside her, one arm looped, possessively or for steadiness, through Ivy’s.

“We were so sorry to hear of Frank’s passing.” She gestured to her husband. “I believe as a garden docent you’ve already met my husband at Weathersby.”

Henry inclined his head, and Alison, trying in vain to pluck her arm free of itty-bitty Ivy’s fierce grasp, smiled in return.

A human dynamo, Ivy convinced the last remaining Weathersby heir, Ursula, to sell the decrepit house and all that remained of its once lavish estate to the city of Raleigh under the supervision of TAP to restore it to its former glory. She’d single-handedly launched a committee of concerned Raleigh patrons to act as board members to supervise the extensive and expensive renovations on the structure. The Dandridges’ painstaking research resulted in the historically accurate showplace that had garnered a multitude of preservation awards.

Her tireless efforts resulted in last year’s formal opening of Weathersby House to the public for the first time in its two hundred-year-old history. The five-acre grounds, however, with which Alison had been associated, were still a work in progress, renovations dependent upon massive fundraising promotions.

Despite Ivy’s obvious devotion to Weathersby, her intensity to push, push, push did not exactly win friends. There was scuttlebutt, Alison remembered, about the board wishing to oust Ivy from her exalted position and replace her with a more amenable personality.

A motive for murder? She wished she’d paid more attention to gossip for once. What had Frank’s stand been on that issue?

“Thank you, Dr. and Mrs. Dandridge, for coming today. I’m sure it would’ve meant so much to Frank.”

Ivy dabbed at her eyes with an antique lace handkerchief. “Frank meant the world to both of us. He’ll be sorely missed in our Weathersby family. Such a giving man, sparing neither his time nor his talents for the greater good of our beloved Cause.”

Alison arched her brows. Comparing Ivy’s passion to a religious fervor, she found Ivy as oddly disturbing as Natalie Singleton.

Interesting mix, this board on which Frank had served for the past two years. Like dynamite and flame.