think she was scared of the strangler.”
Liv frowned. “What do you mean?”
“You’re still blaming me,” he spat out. “Just like you told the police.”
“I don’t—”
“Deborah and I had that fight,” he interrupted angrily. “That’s all. It got physical. I told the police all about it after you turned them on me.”
“Turned them on you,” Liv repeated. “I was six years old!”
“Those bastards ran me through the wringer, all right,” he growled. “Didn’t matter that Deborah gave as good as she got.”
“You’re making this about you, and it’s not. It’s about my mother. I think she was scared of the strangler, and she sent me this because she was . . . I don’t know . . . scared for me, too.”
He lifted both arms and tossed them down as if he were completely through with Liv and her issues.
“Can’t we ever put this to bed?” Lorinda asked tiredly.
“She hanged herself,” Albert said. “That’s all there was.”
“You shouldn’t have brought this here,” Lorinda declared, waving a hand toward the package.
“I didn’t expect to see the two of you,” Liv reminded them. “Like I said, I thought maybe Hague would remember something.”
“It’s just so disrespectful of you to bring all this up again!” Lorinda declared.
Liv counted silently to ten. All this was her father and mother’s physical fight. Her parents had been furious with each other that night and Albert had left in a silent rage, banging out the back door. He told the police he didn’t remember leaving it open, but it hadn’t been locked, either, so the consensus was the door stayed open after he left. Liv half-believed someone had come back inside after she’d been banished to the den, and that someone had then killed her mother and staged the suicide. And Liv still thought it was a good bet the killer was the same one who’d left several women’s bodies in the rocky foothills of the Cascades twenty years earlier, too. That’s where she wanted to start looking for her mother’s killer. That’s where this trail led.
She hadn’t realized she was planning to reopen her own past, but since the package had arrived, the thought had been coalescing in her mind. That’s what she wanted to do. And with the new information her mother had sent, she was going to find out what really happened to her. Good, bad or ugly. Suicide, or something more malevolent . . .
She said as much to Lorinda, Della, her father and Hague, if he understood, and they looked at her as if she’d truly lost her mind.
“You’re seriously going to investigate this?” Della asked in undisguised disbelief.
“My mother sent the items in this package to me for a reason,” Liv said. “I’ve always wondered. Maybe it’s time I got some answers. Investigators are opening up cold cases and catching killers all the time. Why not this one?”
“But it was a suicide. There was no crime!” Lorinda declared. “Why can’t you let this go and give your father and brother some peace!”
“I don’t think it was suicide,” Liv argued. “Maybe I’m wrong, but I have to know. I thought Hague might be interested in helping. We’ve talked about those unsolved strangulations, and whether Mama was one of them. Hague’s the one who first questioned whether she committed suicide. You remember what he said when he was little? About Mama having a friend?”
“Deborah Dugan’s Mystery Man,” Albert said darkly.
She pulled out the picture of the angry man again, the one where he was stalking toward the camera. “Hague said, ‘There he is again,’ when I showed him this.”
“He said ‘zombie,’” Della reminded her. “And he said the man followed him.”
“Hague says a lot of wacko stuff. None of it means a damn thing,” Albert growled.
Liv didn’t want to go into the whole “zombie” thing. “Do you think this guy could be the ‘Mystery Man’?”
Albert’s eyes slid toward the photo again. “I don’t know him.”
“Did you put Hague into this state with these photos?” Lorinda asked Liv, throwing a thumb in Hague’s direction.
“I wanted to talk to him about the contents of the package,” Liv said, defending herself.
Lorinda lifted an “I told you so” eyebrow to Albert, who ignored her.
“None of you seem to care about Hague at all,” Della said angrily. “None of you! Maybe it’s time you all left. When Hague’s like this, it’s pointless to try and talk to him anyway.” She bustled them toward the door and Lorinda, Albert and Liv reluctantly moved into the hallway.
“Tell him I’ll come by again soon,” Liv said, just before Della slammed the door shut behind them. Not wanting to deal with Lorinda and Albert any longer than she had to, Liv headed quickly toward the lift. She wanted to get into it before her father and Lorinda could join her. She didn’t think she could stand being squeezed into that small space with both of them there as well.
As Liv was lowering the elevator bar Albert and Lorinda moved slowly her way. If they wanted to climb in with her, they sure didn’t act like it, and they let her take the rattling cage down on her own, which was a relief. When Liv reached the street floor, a young mother with three children traded places with her, and by the time Liv got past them, out of the building and into the street, she gulped down fresh air as if she’d been strangling.
She was nearly run over by a guy racing down the sidewalk in a rush. He jostled her and she grabbed the envelope closer to her chest as he put out his hands to steady her.
“Sorry. Are you all right?” The dark-haired stranger peered into Liv’s face. “You look familiar?”
Liv pulled herself together and tried to sidle away.
“Can I buy you a beer to make up for it? Please?” He inclined his head toward Rosa’s Cantina with its glowing green and yellow script. “I promise I’m not a homicidal maniac. I own the place and I’m late. Come on in.”
“You own the place?” Liv asked cautiously. She’d been planning how to blow him off, but maybe he wasn’t trying to hit on her.
“With my better half.” He moved toward the bar. “I am really, really late.”
“Do you know my brother? Hague Dugan? I think he comes here . . . sometimes?”
“Hague . . . ah . . .” One hand on the door, he peered at her through the gathering gloom from drifting fog off the river.
Liv could feel the censure, and she could well imagine why. “I’m not like him . . . much . . .”
He smiled faintly and inclined his head as he opened the door and happy music and loud voices spilled from inside.
Liv followed
