Part 22 (1/2)

Morgan hadn't come out of her room in two days. When Nate knocked on her door, she wouldn't answer. Or she told him to leave her alone.

They'd buried Kevin. Just a quick get-him-in-the-ground. A minimal group had shown up. The kid hadn't had any friends.

Morgan had held up, like a stone holds up, until after they'd gotten it done. Closed casket. He hadn't been that disfigured, but who'd really wanted to see the dead kid?

The question was who wanted to see the kid dead. Now, you might draw a bunch from that pool, he rationalized. Not just Morgan. Put him in a crowd, and the kid was like Raid on an ant hill.

Nate hadn't a doubt that it had been something Kevin said or did that drove away the third maid in the last five months. Maybe Kevin had just looked at her the wrong way. Those minority types could be pretty sensitive.

The one who'd left after just three days had been b.u.t.t-ugly and a lousy cook. Maybe it hadn't been her cooking, just to look at her had taken his appet.i.te. But the one before her had been a real good worker. Kind of cute, too. He'd considered calling her and saying, It's okay, you can come back now. He's dead. But he'd thought better of it. As soon as Morgan was out of her latest funk, they'd run another ad. This time he would do the hiring.

The fact that Beth came and went freely from Morgan's room a.s.sured him she was still alive and not in need of medical attention. Then he asked himself if it was prudent to depend on the judgment of a fifteen-year-old.

But the kicker was the fermenting memory of the partial conversation between Sam and Morgan. The more he replayed it, the more he came to believe that Morgan had been there in Sam's office, not on the speaker phone. That's when Nate admitted the truth: he was afraid of what he'd see in Morgan's room. If he opened that bedroom door, Morgan's spider eyes might snap him up like some fly. He knew this was totally illogical, but the longer silence hung between them, the bigger his fear grew.

Beth took Morgan food, but told him she just picked at it. When she ate even a little, her migraines made her throw up. Beth said Morgan didn't want him to see her like that. What was new to see? He'd seen her bare face, cleaned barf off it many a time during her killer migraines throughout the early years of their marriage. The only thing he couldn't do was the shots. Something about putting a needle into somebody's flesh creeped him out.

What was new was that Deidre was dead and Kevin was dead. When Morgan's mom and granddad had died she hadn't taken to her bed. The migraines had returned when Deidre died. Nate kept circling back to that point, the repet.i.tion forming a deep rut in his thought patterns.

The inertia of it all was doing a number on his head. Why hadn't that s.e.xy Detective Sanchez called him about his lead? Maybe the Esposito woman had forgotten to give her the paper...the lease application that tied JJ Camacho to Detective Reggie Navarro.

Now on the afternoon of the second day after they planted Kevin, Nate sat in the kitchen, thinking about making some tea for Morgan. The thing inside him was ballooning. He had to break the barrier of silence between them.

As he got up to find the tea bags, the phone rang. He hesitated, and in his hesitation the ringing stopped. But the red light was still on. Beth had gone somewhere with Josh. Morgan was the only other person in the house.

Nate wavered, his hand hovering over the receiver. Then he carefully picked it up, covering the mouthpiece with a potholder.

He heard Morgan's voice. Numbers. She was reading off numbers.

”We can have that for you in about an hour, Mrs. Bayfield,” a man's voice said.

Mrs. Bayfield. Not Mrs. Farris. He was her husband and he was all but invisible. Jerome Bayfield was dead. Why didn't she chuck that Bayfield name?

”Thank you.” Morgan's voice, even-toned, no tears in it.

Her migraine prescription. That's what the numbers were.

The inertia was suddenly gone. Something clicked in Nate's head-besides an urgent need to get out of that house.

At work, he tried to act normal in front of Sam and Fredricka.

Then he shut himself in his office-as if either of them would barge in and look over his shoulder. But what he was doing was so far from anything he'd ever planned.

Nate paused before opening his laptop. No, he had to do it. Self-preservation was a basic instinct. He stared at the open laptop for only a moment, logged on, then went on the internet.

Colorado Revised Statutes. He scrolled until he came to what he was looking for: Section 13-90-107. Who may not testify without consent.

After printing out what he considered relevant, he went to the section concerning Marital Property. More particularly, division of marital property upon divorce.

Rae listened to the rest of Freddie's message.

”What happened was I got sick on that Friday...the flu, I guess. But I had already written my paycheck that morning, like always. I forgot. I'm really sorry.”

In a pig's eye! Rae pressed call return. After five rings, she got Freddie's generic voicemail. s.h.i.+t!

Dueling alternatives vied for control in Rae's head. This is the key. They got to her and made her lie about it. Rae, you're being paranoid. It's a little thing. It means nothing.

When in doubt, sort it out.

Thanks, Grandma.

Rae sorted. If the check was no big deal, why did Freddie get so fl.u.s.tered in the first place? Why even bother to call? Why not just wait until Rae asked again?

What reason was there to want the check to appear to have been written on Friday? No stretch. Sam was on record as having admitted that Kevin was in the office on Friday, the 25th and that the boy picked up a check for $100,000.00.

Reason for not writing the check to Kevin on the 25th: Dead kids don't need checks. Reason for going back, after the fact, and writing the check: Oops, somebody might want to see the canceled check. But there is none. Next best thing, at least dummy one up in the check book.

On the other hand, maybe Freddie was an airhead who really didn't remember until later that she'd written her check before she took the rest of the day off. Maybe she really had been sick, feverish even. Bunch of c.r.a.p!

You don't know that. You're just trying to make it something sinister to put a feather in your own cap.

G.o.d, when had she heard that old saying? A feather in your cap? Not since Grandma. And then the loneliness dropped on her, unexpected, like a summer snow. One minute it's hot, the next you get dumped on. Everybody's gone. Parents, grandparents, kids out living their own lives. As they should.

Anthony.

Rae stood up and shook herself. Shaking off the self-pity was a constant battle.

Get a life, Rae.

I've got one, Grandma.

To prove it, Rae went to her office and pulled out the Bayfield file, all the stuff she'd acc.u.mulated and was supposed to be drawing conclusions from.

She took another look at the page from the three-ring check stub binder that she'd scanned into her computer, then printed it out.

Kevin's was the third check on the page, Fredricka's the second. She'd ignored that first check stub with Void printed diagonally across it.

Rae ran a fingernail over a couple of small specks on the void check stub, though it was a printout and not the real thing. d.a.m.n flies. Then she took a closer look, remembering the papers had been inside one of those legal file boxes.

About halfway up the check stub were two tiny black dots, maybe half an inch apart. Staple holes.

What did the bookkeepers do in the olden days before computers? She knew from watching her mother keep books for clients part-time, when Rae was growing up. They were so precise, those old-timers. When they voided a check, they carefully tore off the signature if it had been signed, folded the check in thirds, so that when stapled to the back of the stub, the check number would be visible, and the boss would know they hadn't played hanky-panky with the check-it really was void.

The key concept here being: When stapled to the back of the stub.

Rae stared at the printout of the stub as her imagination went into overdrive. Why would someone go to the trouble of stapling the void check to the stub and then remove it so carefully that there were no tears on the sheet?

Habit. Either Sam or Freddie. Both appeared to be from the generation that would have this habit. But Freddie would never take it upon herself to destroy a check. It had to have been Sam. There had to be something on that check he didn't want anyone to see. Like that check was made out to Kevin, but void because Kevin didn't need it any more. Because he was dead.