continued, fork and now knife working at his lunch creation, “I just remember having lots of mixed feelings when mine was final.” He looked up, checked her eyes and paused with fork in midair, as if waiting for a confession that might be prompted by his own admission.
“Yours didn’t drag on for almost two years. I’ve had plenty of time to get okay with this.” He was still looking at her. “I’m fine. Really. It’s understandable that you had mixed feelings. You and Caroline still have to raise Emma together. At least Greg and I didn’t have kids. That’s probably the only thing we did right in our marriage.”
Maggie started unwrapping the tacorito, wondering at Arlene’s overuse of cellophane. She stopped. She couldn’t help herself. She took her napkin from her lap, reached across the table and dabbed at the gravy on Tully’s cuff. He no longer got embarrassed when she did these things, and this time he even held up the errant wrist for her.
“How is Emma, by the way?” she asked, going back to her lunch.
“Good. Busy. I hardly ever get to see her anymore. Too many after-school activities. And boys … too many boys.”
Maggie’s cell phone interrupted them.
“Maggie O’Dell.”
“Maggie, it’s Gwen. Is this a good a time to talk?”
“Tully and I are just having an early lunch. What’s wrong?” Maggie knew Gwen Patterson well enough to recognize the urgency in her friend’s voice, despite Gwen’s attempt to disguise it with a clipped professional tone. She and Gwen had known each other for almost ten years, having first met when Maggie was in Quantico’s forensic program and Gwen was a consulting psychologist frequently called in by Maggie’s boss, Assistant Director Kyle Cunningham. The two women, despite their age difference—Gwen was thirteen years Maggie’s senior—had become instant friends.
“I was wondering if you might be able to check on something for me.”
“Sure. What do you need?”
“I’m concerned about a patient. I’m afraid she might be in some kind of trouble.”
“Okay.” Maggie was a bit surprised. Gwen rarely talked about her patients, let alone asked for help with one. “What kind of trouble?”
“I’m not sure. It may be nothing, but I’d feel better if someone checked on her. She left a disturbing voice message late Saturday night. I haven’t been able to reach her. Then this morning she missed our weekly session. She never misses a session.”
“Have you tried contacting her employer or any of her family?”
“She’s an artist, self-employed. No family that I know of other than her grandmother. Actually she was out of town for her grandmother’s funeral. Another concern. You know how funerals can be emotional triggers.”
Yes, Maggie did know. Over a decade later and she still wasn’t able to go to one without visions of her heroic, fire-fighting father lying in that huge mahogany box, his hair combed to the wrong side, his burnt hands wrapped in plastic and tucked at his sides.
“Maggie?”
“Could she simply have decided to stay an extra day or two?”
“I doubt she would do that. She didn’t even want to be there for the funeral.”
“Maybe her car broke down on the trip back?” Maggie couldn’t help wondering if Gwen was overreacting. It made sense that the woman may have wanted to be away from everyone and everything for a day or two without running back here for a session with her shrink to dissect how she was feeling. But then Maggie knew not everyone reacted to stress and tragedy like she did.
“No, she rented a car up there. See, that’s another thing. The car hasn’t been turned in yet. The hotel told me she was scheduled for departure yesterday but she hasn’t checked out, nor has she contacted anyone about staying longer. And she missed her flight yesterday. She’s not like this. She has problems, but organization and reliability are not on the list.”
“You said yourself that funerals can be emotionally draining. Maybe she just wanted a few more days before coming back to the everyday routine. By the way, how were you able to find out that she missed her flight?” Airlines didn’t just hand out their passenger manifest. After years of Gwen lecturing her about playing by the rules, Maggie waited for an admission of guilt. Now that she thought about it, Gwen had managed to get a lot of information that wasn’t usually handed out freely.
“Maggie, there’s more to it.” The urgency returned to Gwen’s voice, dismissing any confession to rule breaking. “She said she was meeting someone … a man. That was the message and she was calling me to talk her out of it. She has this … this tendency …” She paused. “Look, Maggie, I can’t share the intimacies of her case. Let’s just say that in the past she’s made some bad choices when it comes to men.”
Maggie glanced across the table to find Tully watching her, listening. He looked away quickly as if caught. She had noticed recently—although he tried to disguise it—that he seemed interested in anything related to Gwen Patterson. Or was it simply her imagination?
“What are you saying, Gwen? That you think this man may have done something to her?”
Silence again. Maggie waited. Was Gwen finally realizing that perhaps she was overreacting? And why was she being so overprotective with this particular woman? Maggie had never known Gwen to baby-sit her patients. Her friends, yes, but not her patients.
“Maggie, is there some way you could check on her? Someone you might be able to call?”
Maggie looked at Tully again. He had finished his lunch and now pretended to be watching out the window, another group of recruits down below in sweaty T-shirts and jogging shorts snaking through the woods.
Maggie picked at her own lunch. Why had Gwen suddenly decided to become this patient’s caretaker? It seemed like a simple case of a grieving woman shutting herself away from her world for a while, perhaps even finding solace in a friendly stranger. Why didn’t Gwen see that?
“Maggie?”
“I’ll do what I can. Where was she staying?”
“The funeral was in Wallingford, Connecticut, but she was staying at the Ramada Plaza Hotel next door in Meriden. I have the phone numbers and addresses right here. I can fax over some other information later. All I know about the man she was meeting was that she called him Sonny.”
Maggie’s stomach gave a sudden flip while she took down the information. All the while she kept thinking, “Not Connecticut.”
CHAPTER 4
Sheriff Henry Watermeier shoved his hat back and swiped at the sweat on his forehead.
“Fuck!” he muttered, wanting to walk, to pace off his frustration, but reminding himself to stand in one place. And so he did, hands on his belt buckle, waiting and watching and trying to think, trying to ignore the stench of death and the buzzing of flies. Jesus! The flies were a pain in the ass, miniature vultures, impatient and persistent despite the plastic tarp.
It wasn’t the first body Henry had seen stuffed into a strange and unusual
