"I'm sorry, but I don't involve myself in cases the police are actively investigating," Patience told the well-dressed but twitchy woman seated across the desk from her.
"But Captain Svoboda has no objections," Jeanette Carter said eagerly. "My father particularly liked your ad in the phone book: Patience Smith Investigations: Licensed, Experienced, Quiet. So I called Captain Svoboda and asked him about you, and he gave you a strong personal recommendation."
And who better? thought Patience, mildly amused. "Mrs. Carter, I'm not quite clear on what it is you want from me. Are you looking for evidence that this this young woman did rob your father, or that she didn't?"
"Well, you see, that's the problem. I'm not sure."
"I beg your pardon?"
"The police have not found sufficient evidence for bringing charges against her," Jeanette Carter said.
"Then I think you'd be wasting your time and money hiring me. Port Silva has a highly capable police force."
"But my father insists he saw her!" the other woman said in a voice that trembled. "But that may be just illusion, or stubbornness, because he was so furious with her. And that's partly my fault, you see, because I never approved of that relationship, and may even have said something like, you know, 'I told you so,' when she broke it off."
"Mrs. Carter, I don't think..."
Jeanette Carter didn't hear her. "But whatever the truth, you just have to help me find it, because if he continues this vendetta, he's going to get himself in terrible trouble."
* * *
"Tell me about... the new case." Verity, just in from a late-afternoon run, was moving her tall body through her chosen cool-down of yoga Sun Salutations. Patience, much shorter and rounder, sat at the kitchen table sipping wine and admiring her daughter's energy as well as her figure.
"The client is the daughter of Tom Gunderson, the retired contractor who was assaulted and robbed in his home two weeks ago. I have an appointment with him tomorrow."
Verity did her last stretch, paused with hands palm to palm before her face, then dropped into a chair. "I remember. He accused his nurse?"
"His trainer at the Y. He had a heart attack last spring, and his doctor advised strength training as a follow-up. Mr. Gunderson is seventy-five, Darcy Kelly is thirty-three."
"Do I hear a note of disapproval?" asked Verity.
"Jeanette Gunderson Carter's, not mine. She says her father, a longtime widower, went totally out of his aged mind over Ms. Kelly. She and her husband were afraid he was going to marry her."
"Aha. As I recall the story, Mr. Gunderson is a well-known and by inference well-off local citizen."
"And accustomed to being the boss, according to his daughter. She says she doesn't know the details, but suspects his habit of giving orders and expecting instant obedience finally caused Darcy Kelly to break off what Mrs. Carter called 'that relationship.'"
"I bet that cheered the Carters right up," said Verity.
"I think they were greatly relieved," Patience admitted as she got up and went to the refrigerator. "For a short while. Would you like some Chardonnay? Or a beer?"
"Beer, please."
Patience brought her daughter a brown bottle and an opener, then topped off her own glass of wine.
"But one night two weeks ago," she went on, "according to Mr. Gunderson, he was awakened by a noise around eleven-thirty, got up and went downstairs to look. Someone hit him and knocked him out, then took ten thousand dollars from his safe. He told the police that the robber was Darcy Kelly.
"However, it turned out to be he-said, she-said. No one else saw anything, and Darcy Kelly has witnesses to her being somewhere else at the time. The police think the robbery was committed by a gang, probably young locals, who've pulled off several household burglaries recently."
"Let me guess. Mr. Gunderson is unhappy."
"Mr. Gunderson is convinced he's being ignored or lied to, and his daughter is afraid he's going to work himself into another heart attack or maybe even a harassment suit." Patience paused for a sip of wine. "So I agreed to give it a look. Are you free tomorrow?"
Verity, thirty-year-old refugee from a bad marriage and a powersuit-and-briefcase position in San Francisco, now worked several part-time jobs in the little northcoast town of Port Silva, one of them for her mother's detective agency. "Friday? I'm busy in the morning, but the afternoon is all yours."
"Good. Now, who's cooking tonight?"
* * *
Thomas Gunderson lived at the north end of town, where lumber barons had built themselves family homes around the turn of the century. His house was one of the largest, a two-story, brown-shingled structure with deep eaves and many windows. Patience rang the bell and was admiring what was surely the original door, with an oval panel of etched glass set in a brass frame, when it swung wide; the tall old man standing there had a cane in his hand but was making an effort not to lean on it.
"Patience Smith. You look like a sensible woman," he said, eyeing her gray hair and nice wool skirt and jacket before stepping aside to admit her. She moved through the flagstone entry hall into a spacious room with a high, beamed ceiling, dark wood, and an enormous fireplace.
As Gunderson closed the door, Patience took note of heavy mission-style furniture with leather upholstery predominating, and patterned rugs in deep tones. An antlered head looked down from the wall to the right of the fireplace; on the left, racks held three long guns. The room was polished and orderly and gave Patience an uncharacteristic longing for pink ruffled curtains.
Gunderson gestured her forward through an archway into what had probably been a dining room but was now clearly an office. "Sit down, sit down. My daughter tells me you can help me out."
"I agreed to try." Patience took the seat he'd indicated and pulled pad and pen from her handbag. Gunderson settled into a big leather chair and fixed her with a stern gaze. The chair belonged to a monster of an antique rolltop desk; next to that was a table with a computer and its peripherals. Across the room, two filing cabinets framed a wall safe.
Gunderson had followed her gaze. "This is where it happened," he said. "I came down in the middle of the night and found Darcy Kelly here with my safe open, and she hit me with something I didn't see." He lifted a hand to his head, where a shaved patch still bore a small bandage. "And left me bleeding there on the floor and robbed me."
"Was Ms. Kelly living here at the time?"
"No!" Gunderson's weathered face, pale from winter or illness, now reddened. "I'd asked her to move in. Didn't see any reason to keep paying rent on that dump she lived in and paying a housekeeper here, too. She wouldn't do it, said she was grateful for my help but she needed to keep her own place."
Patience waited.
"Help, she called it! I bought her a car, dressed her like a lady, took her places. Paid to send her foul-mouthed bastard to private school in up Trinity County, get him off the streets and teach him some discipline.
"So I told her, okay, I wouldn't be paying any more of her bills. I figured she'd think that over, and come around," he added in plaintive tones; for a moment he looked not angry, but confused. "I sure didn't expect her to turn on me the way she did."
"I haven't spoken with the police yet," said Patience. "But Mrs. Carter told me that they'd not found sufficient evidence to charge Miss Kelly."
"Lady, I'll tell you like I told the cops, there's not a goddamned thing wrong with my mind or my eyesight!" Age and illness had melted flesh from Tom Gunderson's big frame, but his long jaw was firm, his ice-blue eyes piercing. "Streetlight's right outside the window, I saw that slut clear as I'm seeing you. Smelled her, too, the perfume I bought her. She's taking the cops in, same as she did me."
"Did she have keys to this house?"
"Damn right she did! She told me she'd lost 'em, but it's obvious that was a lie."
"Did she know the combination to your safe?"
"She knew where to find it, right there under the desk pad. I sometimes had her fetch stuff from the safe, and she had no head for remembering numbers. And she knew I always had cash on hand!" Gunderson slashed the air with his cane for emphasis.
"Do you know, Mr. Gunderson, whether Ms. Kelly had any kind of criminal record?"
"The cops say she didn't," he said, sullenly. "But I don't know how hard they looked." He took a deep breath and faced her squarely. "Fact is, I figure I pissed the cops off, gave them the idea that I'm some rich old fart demanding special service. But what I really am is a sick old man who got taken advantage of."
What you are is an old man who wants to have it both ways. "The money hasn't turned up?" she asked.
He shook his head.
"What do you think became of it?"
Rage splotched his face with red, put a quaver in his voice, even, it seemed to Patience, made his thin gray hair bristle. "I figure she had her boyfriend waiting, and gave it to him."
"Name?" asked Patience, pen poised over her notebook.
"Maybe Doolittle, who runs the rehab program for the Y. I saw her rubbing up against him one time when I first started going there. Or the guy who teaches tennis at the community college. Or one of the other coaches in the soccer league; she wouldn't give that up even when I said it was taking too much of her time."
Patience jotted down a few words. "Did you suspect Ms. Kelly of having other relationships before the robbery?"
"No, because I was a fool. All I know for sure is, she's the one hit me and robbed me."
"Mr. Gunderson ..."
"Now you get out there and find out who's lying for her. Because I want to see her..." The cane slashed the air twice, in a giant X. "... punished."
* * *
"We believe Gunderson's mistaken." Hank Svoboda, Port Silva police captain and Patience's good friend, leaned back in his desk chair and shook his burr-cut gray head. Patience thought she heard a faint hesitation before the word "mistaken" and put that interesting possibility aside to pursue later.
"That Saturday night," Hank went on, "Darcy Kelly was at the monthly dinner meeting of county-league soccer coaches, at the Carson Hotel in Ukiah. Finished around nine, then she and two of the guys from the coast division drank coffee at Denny's until after ten-thirty."
"Sixty or seventy hard nighttime driving miles from here," noted Patience.
"Right. With the help of God and a strong tailwind, she might just have made it. But. No evidence. No prints on the door or the safe; no money on her or in her car or house. No keys; she'd told him weeks earlier that she'd lost them. No criminal record in Fresno, where she lived until two years ago."
"Mr. Gunderson seemed so sure."
"He's pissed. Maybe at being robbed, maybe because he thinks his paid-for woman was short-changing him."
"Was she?"
Hank shrugged. "She knew a lot of guys, but the ones we talked to say they saw her as a buddy, a tennis or racquetball pal. A woman who works with Kelly says she's a real pushover for a sad story, and that old man put the moves on her so fast and hard, he was running her life before she knew it."
"Then who? This local gang?"
"Good possibility; there was a hit in that neighborhood just a week earlier. We've got our eye on one kid maybe involved who's younger than the rest and real nervous."
"Mr. Gunderson feels he may have offended you—the police, that is—by acting as though he deserved special treatment."
"Mr. Gunderson doesn't know how hard it is to offend cops used to facing down loggers and university professors. He send you in here to make an apology for him?"
"That's probably what he thought he was doing," she said with a grin. "But I have a question instead."
He raised his eyebrows.
"How do you feel about Gunderson himself?"
He let the silence stretch, and finally shrugged. "Nobody on the street heard or saw anything that night until the police arrived. Kelly's friends, and she has quite a few, say he'd been bad-mouthing her publicly from the time she broke off with him."
Patience waited.
"According to the doc, the rap Gunderson took on the head was real, and hard. Its position was such that it could have been self-inflicted, but he thought probably not by a seventy-five-year-old man with a damaged heart."
Damaged in more ways than one, thought Patience. "Well. I have a few more people to talk to, to earn my fee. I thank you for the recommendation, I think."
"I couldn't stop them from hiring an investigator, and I figured you'd handle Gunderson—and that poor girl, too—without raising many hackles."
"Poor girl?"
He brushed a hand over his hair. "Oops. Maybe the old guy did piss me off."
"He's not a nice man," said Patience as she got to her feet. "But I think he's sad as well as angry."
Svoboda got up, too. "I'd tell you to be careful with him, if I didn't know you'd spit in my eye. Patience, if you find something I've missed..."
"I know the rules, Captain Svoboda."
"Yes ma'am."
"And I'll see you tonight."
"Probably around seven, if that's okay. Our reservation at Mary's is for eight."
* * *
At noon on a chilly, drizzly March Friday, Verity slid into investigator's mode and headed for the Port Silva YMCA, to find it crowded and noisy. She buttonholed any employee she could pry loose for a minute or two, and got a breakdown of four in Darcy's corner to one vehemently not. ("What do you expect from sports-trash?")
Number six was Jill, who led the aerobics class Verity attended when she had time. "Poor kid. She cut her hours here way back and then finally quit, because that old goat insisted. She came in last week and asked about working again, but the manager had already replaced her."
"Maybe he believed she committed that robbery," suggested Verity.
"No way, not Darcy. She's a sweetie, never loses her temper with even the worst whiners, wouldn't hurt a fly. Well, except in a contest. On the tennis court she's a killer."
* * *
An hour later, after sharing a deli-sandwich lunch with her mother at the downtown office, Verity pulled to the curb in front of a ratty little stucco bungalow set close among others of its kind. It struck her as just the kind of place where an undereducated single mother given to bad luck might wind up. And commit robbery to escape?
Her knock on the door was answered by a willowy six-footer with boyishly short fair hair, tired brown eyes and glorious cheekbones. Darcy Kelly took Verity's card, listened to the explanation of her presence, and said, "Shit, I knew I shouldn't answer the damned door. I don't have to talk to you."
"True," said Verity.
"Oh, hell, you might as well come in out of the rain. But you'll have to grill me while I work." She closed the door and led the way across a small, low-ceilinged living room, through a narrow hall, and into a kitchen just big enough for its appliances, a rectangular pine table, and two chairs.
"This is all crazy," she said, and bent over something on the table. "I spent months working with Tom Gunderson to make him stronger; I wouldn't hurt him."
"I'm told he's absolutely sure it was you," said Verity.
"But that's just Tom, he's mad because I wouldn't... Damn! I'm never going to get this right!"
In the center of the floury table lay a sorry-looking piece of pastry, its edges split and its surface uneven. Darcy dropped her rolling pin, scrunched the dough into a lump and flung it into the nearby plastic garbage bin. Where others had preceded it, Verity noted.
Darcy sank into a chair and rubbed her hands together, scattering dried flakes of pastry. "My kid is coming home tomorrow, just for the weekend."
"Oh?" Verity pulled out the other chair and sat.
"Yup, first time since Christmas." Her mouth curved briefly in a sad-edged little smile. "He's in this school up in Trinity County, that Tom thought would be good for him."
"What's the name of the school?"
"Why would you need to know that?" Darcy demanded.
Oh ho. Sweetie Darcy had her tiger-mom side. "A friend of mine is looking for a good boarding school for her son."
"Well, this isn't it. Aaron hates the place, but the tuition is paid through the semester and it's not refundable, and I'm so broke I just told him he had to tough it out till June. But I really miss him, so I scraped together a few bucks for a bus ticket.
"Anyway, apple pie's his favorite thing, and I was trying to make him one," Darcy went on. "But the store was out of those ready-to-bake crusts, so I decided to try from scratch." She gestured sadly toward cluttered sink counter, where everything including a bag of apples was dusted with flour.
Verity had been cooking since childhood, when her policeman father received the injury that put him in a wheelchair and her mother went to work. "Tell you what," she said, getting to her feet. "I'll make the piecrust, you tell the story."
"Could you make enough for two?"
"I can." As Verity wiped out a big metal bowl, scooped flour into it and added a dash of salt, Darcy set her feet neatly together and folded her hands in her lap, like a good child ready to recite.
"Okay. I was in a real bad place when Tom met me. My kid was giving me trouble, the landlord raised the rent on this dump, my old car died. So what looks now like sex for money, I saw as two people helping each other out."
Verity said nothing, and Darcy flushed. "So okay, I guess it was sex for money. But I'd been looking around for a second job, trying to get things together. I'm not real smart, but I'm not a tramp."
Verity added a big lump of shortening to the flour and decided that anyone who'd buy piecrusts would not own a pastry blender. Knives and fingers would have to serve. "Weren't there any other men in your life?"
"Nope, I've been pretty gun-shy the last few years. Well, except for a bunch of fifteen-year-olds," she said, a momentary note of cheer in her voice. "I started coaching soccer a while back, because Aaron was playing. He lost interest when he got tall enough for basketball, but I didn't."
Verity kept her eyes on her work and her fingers busy; disarm your subject by doing her housework. "Where's Aaron's father?"
"God knows. I've got a history of real bad luck with men, starting with the guy who got me pregnant when I was sixteen and right away left town. And boy do nice guys not have time for a woman who's got a kid. But I kept my kid, and finished high school and worked at whatever I could find. Even got in some community college courses; I figured that once Aaron was through high school, I could go full time. I'd really like to be a junior high P.E. teacher."
Verity looked up, to see the sad brown eyes staring past her. "Then last summer the balancing act fell apart, like I said."
The tiny freezer compartment in the old refrigerator contained no ice trays, only a package of frozen hamburger. Verity let the tap water run as cold as it would, then filled a cup and sprinkled some of it into the pastry bowl. "I believe Mr. Gunderson paid the rent here?"
"Yeah."
"And did he buy that little Honda in your driveway?"
"That, and clothes, and, oh, stuff. A couple rings and a necklace, I gave those back. Oh, and Aaron's school."
Verity turned to face her. "Darcy, suppose Tom Gunderson had presented you with a bill for all he'd spent on you? What would you have done?"
"What I actually did when we split. I promised to pay him back, over time."
Verity didn't think ten thou would have covered it. "Suppose he didn't find that satisfactory?"
The tired face split into a real grin. "Hey, he's gonna put me in debtor's prison? I don't think so. If you've got nothing..." she waved a hand around her "...you got nothing to lose."
Except name, credit rating if any, friends, future jobs, maybe even your son. Verity found a nailbrush beside the sink and concentrated on scrubbing her hands. "My boss says he appears to be absolutely convinced you're the one who hit him and robbed him."
"God, if he'd just let me talk to him... !"
"Not a good idea," said Verity, remembering Patience's description of an angry old man. "There's your pie crust. Wrap it up and refrigerate it for a while. Then make your pies and enjoy your son's visit."
Darcy stood up, a look of panic on her face. "Don't you believe me, either?"
Verity quelled her urge to hug this woman, reassure her. Maybe she should go back to banking for a while, to restore her armor. "Darcy, you have my card. Call me if you remember anything you think might help."
* * *
Saturday morning was gray and cold, yesterday's drizzle replaced by a wet fog. Verity woke early in her chilly studio, gulped a can of grapefruit juice and went out to run five miles, came back for a long, hot shower. When she let herself in the kitchen door of the main house, Patience was just emerging sleepy-eyed from her bedroom.
"Late night, huh?"
"Coffee," croaked Patience.
Verity filled the kettle and set it over a flame. "And how's Hank?" She was mostly amused, only occasionally irritated by the fact that her 55-year-old mother had a life while she did not.
"He's fine. How are you?"
"I think I spent the night with Darcy Kelly."
"Oh dear. I'm sorry." Patience sat down at the table and watched Verity set up coffee cups and filters.
"I worried about my identification with her: another woman who made bad choices when it came to men. But I've decided I believe her. If she bashed that old guy, she's the most convincing liar I ever came across, including bankers."
The kettle shrieked; Verity made two cups of coffee and set them on the table.
Patience inhaled the fragrant steam, took a tiny sip, murmured, "Lovely. Well, Darcy's near-alibi checks out. The men she drank coffee with that night say they left Denny's before she did and did not see her pass them. They know the road, drove well over the limit, got into town at fifteen minutes past midnight; Mr. Gunderson had already called the police by then."
"Okay." Verity found a banana in the fruit bowl and peeled it.
Patience took another sip of coffee. "Her reputation with her male acquaintances is good pal, terrific athlete, no sexual signals. With the women, it's good friend, good mom, clueless about men but doesn't poach. So I think we'll close this out, and present a bill for one and a half person-days."
"Do you think Gunderson is lying?"
"Maybe. And maybe he woke from a dream, went downstairs still bemused, and saw someone who was there only in his head. And promptly got bashed by the real robber."
"That makes sense." Verity finished her banana, and poured herself a glass of milk. "What did Hank Svoboda say about Darcy's kid?"
"Just that he was in bed in his dorm that night—at Trinity Academy for Boys, a few miles north of Weaverville. Why?"
"I don't know. Just something I want to check." She gulped the milk and poured her coffee into a travel cup. "I'll probably be back before you finish breakfast."
* * *
Patience, at the table with her laptop computer, her notes, and a third cup of coffee, glanced up briefly as Verity came in the door. "Already?" When there was no response, she looked up again, hit "Save" and said, "Verity, what is it?"
"Here, you have a look." She handed her mother a folder and waited until Patience had cleared space for it on the table. "I went to the Sentinel office, to see some of the back issues on our people. That's the first story on the robbery, with a picture of Gunderson that makes him look like a mean old bastard."
"Fair enough."
"Then there's the follow-up story, for which Darcy ought to be able to sue him."
Patience scanned the first paragraphs. "Nasty, but not all untrue."
"Oops. Right you are. Okay, here's the Winter Ball, six weeks ago." The photo showed a gaunt but almost-smiling Gunderson, leaning on a cane. Close beside him was a striking woman in a narrow black gown, thick fair hair waving loosely to her shoulders.
"Darcy Kelly," said Verity.
"Handsome."
"Right. And here's soccer-coach Kelly, with the Sharks." A ragged line of teen-aged boys boys grinned or scowled at the camera, Darcy looking like a taller boy behind them.
"Ah. She wears a wig for dress-up," said Patience.
"So it appears. And here's last year's team." Darcy Kelly in another line of boys, the lanky, sober-faced one next to her clearly her son. Aaron Kelly had inherited a masculine version of his mother's elegant bone structure. "I think we might have an Oh Shit here, Mom."
"Interesting." The telephone at Patience's elbow rang; she picked it up, said hello, and Verity saw her mother's face freeze, eyes wide.
"What?" she demanded as Patience put the phone down.
"There's been a shooting at Tom Gunderson's."
* * *
"That stupid woman!" Verity pulled from driveway to road, shifted up and then again too soon, nearly stalling the Alfa's engine. "I told her to stay away from that old man!"
"Apparently she didn't listen. There's a lumber truck," Patience pointed out.
Verity whipped past the truck. "Robbery she might get past, but murder? Stupid!"
"Officer Coates didn't say anyone was dead—yet. Just that it was a shooting and Captain Svoboda wanted us there." They roared across a hump-backed bridge, and Patience put a bracing hand against the dash as the little car went briefly airborne. "Sorry," Verity said, and settled into a just-over-the-limit pace for the remainder of the five-mile trip.
A red Honda Civic occupied Gunderson's driveway. Two black-and-white Port Silva Police Department cars stood nose to nose at the curb, a uniformed cop beside one of them talking into a microphone or a maybe a cell phone. As the two women climbed out of their low-slung car, the cop raised his free hand in their direction; and Verity sent Patience a glance of guilty relief. "You go ahead. I'll talk to Johnny for a minute."
Patience hurried up the walk to a front door that stood wide, revealing flagstones marked with footprints and the tracks of narrow tires: a wheeled stretcher, she thought, from an ambulance that had come and gone. Hank Svoboda's bulk loomed against the wall near the fireplace, where a rug Patience remembered as patterned was now rucked up and wetly red; she had a disoriented sense of steam rising from it. "How bad?" she asked Hank.
"Heavy blood loss, big exit wound. How really bad we'll know when they find out what got torn up inside. Then we'll see whether we've got a murder charge." he said, his voice heavy and his face sad. Patience knew he was seeing disaster on all sides, misery he could perhaps have prevented had he only tried harder.
"I just wanted to talk to him." Darcy Kelly huddled in a big wood-and-leather chair with her hands cuffed behind her and a uniformed cop standing close by. One of the gun racks by the fireplace was now empty.
"Please. See, I brought him an apple pie," she said, nodding toward the sticky mess on the fireplace hearth. "I wanted to tell him I was sorry I'd hurt him, that I'd pay him back what I owed him.
"But he threw the pie on the floor and grabbed one of those guns, he always kept them loaded. I tried to take it away from him, and it went off."
The three of them stood silent, watching her. Unable to raise an arm to wipe away tears, she settled for a sniff. "I didn't mean it to happen," she whispered.
Patience called up an image of Tom Gunderson: tall, gaunt, unable to rise from a chair without the help of his cane. Unable to walk more than a step or two without it. Darcy Kelly, also tall, weighed probably one hundred thirty-five very well-conditioned pounds. The woman was an athlete.
Patience was grateful that working out the probabilities would be Hank's department. "Sorry you'd hurt him? You mean when you knocked him out and robbed him two weeks ago?"
"No way!" She hitched herself up in the chair and lifted her chin. "I mean I was sorry I'd hurt his feelings, made him look foolish. I would never have..."
Low voices came from the direction of the front door, followed by footsteps on the flagstones. Patience turned to see Verity enter, closely followed by Sgt. Johnny Hebert. Darcy Kelly sat straighter and said "Verity!" her hopeful expression fading as she registered the other woman's bleak face. Verity gave Darcy only a brief glance before stepping aside to give Johnny Hebert the floor.
"Aaron Kelly decided to cooperate, Captain," Hebert said. "He admits he borrowed a buddy's car two weeks ago, drove down here and assaulted and robbed Mr. Gunderson, drove back before anyone missed him."
"No," said Darcy.
"A Trinity County deputy is getting ready to bring him down."
"That's bullshit!" Darcy planted her feet as if to rise, but subsided at Hank Svoboda's gesture. "I'm the one who came here to rob Tom Gunderson that night. I needed the money and figured he owed it to me, after the stuff he'd been saying about me all over town." Her voice was firm, her back as straight as she could manage with arms behind her. "My son is just trying to protect me."
"Where's the money now?" asked Hank.
She blinked slowly once, and again. "You aren't going to believe this, but there wasn't any money in that safe. Now I want to see a lawyer. And my son is a minor. I forbid you to talk any more to him until I've seen him and he has a lawyer."
Hank Svoboda stared at her for a long moment. "Okay. Hebert, let's put Ms. Kelly in your car, and you and Coates can take her downtown. I'll be along later."
Patience and Verity trailed the policemen and their silent, unresisting prisoner outside, and watched Hebert and Coataes tuck Darcy Kelly, still cuffed, into the back seat of a black-and-white while Svoboda leaned into the front to use the radio.
"So," said Patience softly when he rejoined them.
"What do you mean, 'So?'" Verity's voice was sharp. "That woman lied and backed off and lied again."
"So which were real lies?" asked Patience, and Hank Svoboda snorted.
"Well, the money. I bet it'll turn up, big surprise all round. And the robbery; Aaron puts his mother's wig on and guess who Mr. Gunderson sees?"
"She did shoot Mr. Gunderson," Patience admitted.
"She'll claim self defense, or accident," said Svoboda. "He's still alive, and has a fair chance of staying that way, the hospital says."
"Oh, well, that's all right, then," snapped Verity. She turned to glare after the departing police car, gritting her teeth against the fact that she'd been conned. She'd provided the crust for what looked to her like an implement in a crime. She was practically an accessory.
The pure silliness of this notion revived Verity. Darcy Kelly had a son and little else. Maybe it wasn't a matter of lies or truth, but of lightning reflexes. Maybe Darcy was simply being tiger-mom.
© Janet LaPierre.