Thursday, 3:44 a.m.
The phone rang.
Okay. This was definitely not a coincidence.
Three out of three nights she’d been here, a call in the middle of the night on the guesthouse phone.
Noting the time and resolving to find out more about the calls Laurel might have been receiving — and to check if Pan had experienced anything similar — Maggie concentrated as she picked up the receiver.
She said nothing.
Breathing. Audible, but not loud. With a faint, faint sibilance.
She closed her eyes, trying to sharpen her ears.
It didn’t match J.D. Carson. Not the sound, not the rhythm.
She shook her head.
For God’s sake, thinking she could recognize someone’s breathing? Make an ID by breathing? It was nuts.
“Carson?” she demanded.
An intake held the breathing, then it released in a soft hiss.
Click.
She replayed that reaction in her head. Surprise? Displeasure?
Could it have been Roy?
True she had dented his considerable ego, but would he resort to such childish tactics? Absolutely. He’d certainly know how to avoid leaving a trail in the phone records.
Or could the reaction have been something altogether different? Pleasure…?
Shit.
She could no more interpret that sound than she could ID breathing. She was grasping at straws.
What if he’s innocent?
The voice spoke in her head as it had at the trial.
Except it wasn’t the voice she’d first heard while she’d awaited the verdict in Commonwealth of Virginia v. J.D. Carson. That voice she would never forget, always hate.
This was the unknown voice from the second time she’d heard the question.
Where had that come from? Why now and—?
“No.”
She said it aloud, breaking the thoughts.
It was a memory. Stirred by rereading the transcript.
Sleep. She needed sleep.
* * * *
Maggie jolted awake to blood-thudding, ears-humming, muscle-tensing physical preparedness. Her brain tried to catch up.
The phone rang a second time, and she recognized the cause of her reaction.
That pissed her off — at herself, at the caller.
“What?” she snapped into the receiver, refusing to grant a polite “Hello.”
“Well, shit, don’t take me head off,” groused Vic Upton, as she realized it was her phone she was answering, not the guesthouse phone.
“Oh, for God’s sake.” She slumped against the pillows. That put her in position to see the alarm clock. “Six o’clock? You can’t be serious.”
“I’m already up and on the way to the gym. If you got on a regular schedule, you’d be up being productive, too. That’s what I called about.”
“My circadian rhythms?”
“Being productive. You’re not. Not while you’re there.”
“You agreed to Sheriff Gardner’s request for me to help.”
“Not indefinitely. You’re too good to go off on a tangent like this, Frye.”
Nancy would be screaming — or at least mouthing — manipulator at this point. And she’d be right.
But Vic might be, too. Was this brief sabbatical derailing her hard-built career? Probably not. Though she might be putting a kink in the rails. But she’d survive. She was sure she would.
“I’m staying through the weekend, Vic. There are a number of lines of inquiry we’ve started.”
“We?”
She pushed the pillow more firmly behind her back. Fog turned the windows into blank walls. “That’s the investigatory we, similar to the royal we. Judge Blankenship’s well-connected in the state. It doesn’t hurt to have a representative of the office here.”
He humphed, but she’d scored. “At your desk, first thing Monday morning.”
He hung up.
* * * *
8:18 a.m.
The Addingtons would not only not hear her apologies for imposing on them so early, they insisted on feeding her breakfast.
It wasn’t quite Evelyn’s standards, but it sure beat her usual small carton of old yogurt, if she remembered at all.
And they were pleasant company.
Seeing and listening to them here, interacting, it was almost like she could imagine the Pan Wade of the static wedding photo brought to life as a blend of these two people, with a dash of her special individuality, walking and talking … and living.
That made it harder to contemplate shifting the focus to the circumstances that had ended Pan’s life.
As if sensing her reluctance, Theresa said, “Well, now, what did you want to ask us about?”
The talk with the Addingtons mostly gave her more background, several strikeouts, and one possible nugget.
The background included that the animosity between Carson and Wade went back to childhood. It also confirmed that they remained certain Carson hadn’t harmed their daughter.
Their recollections of Pan interacting with Laurel remained sparse and vague.
They had no memories of Pan talking about a new person in her life, someone who might have been a mystery arrival at the clearing. Their daughter would have told them if there had been someone important. She always did.
The nugget was that, yes, Pan might have been receiving odd phone calls before she was murdered. How bad was it that she considered might have been a nugget?
That came after she’d heard herself telling them about the calls she’d received.
First, Kevin said, “She didn’t talk to me about any. Theresa?”
“I think there were calls,” she said slowly. “But it was mostly an impression. They didn’t scare her. More like an annoyance. And a puzzle.”
How many calls or when or anything else about them was not in their memories.
“But if we think of something, we’ll call. In the meantime, you be careful.”