Читать книгу The Girl Who Cried Murder - Paula Graves - Страница 12

Chapter Four

If there was one thing Charlie was good at, it was making lists. Grocery lists, to-do lists, Christmas lists—she found satisfaction in writing down things that needed to be addressed and marking them off when she’d tackled and conquered them.

Today’s list was a to-do list of sorts, though marking off the items would take more than just a few hours of concentration and dedication.

First item on the list was already underway, at least. Learn the basics of self-defense. Couldn’t really mark it off yet, since she was only two classes into her lessons. But maybe if she agreed to Mike Strong’s offer to join his intermediate class, she’d reach that particular goal more quickly.

On the other hand, what if he turned out to be a problem? He was already giving her strange looks, as if he knew her reason for taking a self-defense class wasn’t as simple as the fact that she lived alone and wanted to be able to protect herself.

Was there something else on the list she could start to tackle before she was finished with her self-defense classes?

The second item was a possibility: make another attempt to talk to Mr. Bearden. Alice’s father.

She knew there wasn’t any chance of talking to Alice’s mother, Diana. The woman hadn’t been able to look at Charlie at the funeral, even though she’d always been kind to Charlie before Alice’s death.

To be honest, Charlie hadn’t been that eager to face Diana Bearden, either. Fair or not, Charlie had always felt a great deal of guilt for what had happened to Alice, too.

But maybe she could handle Craig Bearden. Assuming she could get the man to talk to her after all this time. It had been years since she’d seen Craig Bearden, if you didn’t count the signs and billboards that had cropped up all over eastern Kentucky since he’d announced his run for the US Senate. And even if they’d been closer, how easy would it be to get any face time with a political candidate?

Besides, they hadn’t exactly parted company as friends. He’d never said the words aloud, but Charlie believed he’d blamed her for Alice’s accident. Most people had. After all, Charlie was one of the Winters from Bagwell. The wrongest of the wrong sides of the tracks.

And her childhood talent for elaborate story fabrication hadn’t exactly helped her case, had it? That Charlotte Winters never met a truth she couldn’t gussy up.

Mr. Bearden hadn’t wanted to listen when she’d told him she thought Alice had met up with someone else that night at the bar. Facing the tragic death of his eighteen-year-old daughter had been horrific enough.

He’d never been willing to contemplate the idea that what happened to his little girl might not have been an accident.

Charlotte hadn’t wanted to believe it, either. It was one bald truth she’d had no desire to doctor up and make more interesting.

But after a while, the nightmares had started. It had taken a while to realize the fragmented scenes of fear and confusion were actually memories that had been buried somewhere in her subconscious.

That night at the Headhunter Bar, three sips of light beer were all Charlie could remember for years. After that, nothing. No memories. No sensations or sounds or smells. Nothing but a terrifying blank.

Until the dreams had started.

She didn’t imagine she could have gotten drunk that night, because she had never been much of a drinker. Thanks to her two jailbird brothers, she’d taken her first taste of alcohol at the age of twelve. The hard stuff, hard enough to turn her off alcohol for years. When she hit high school, she’d occasionally drunk a beer when she was with other people—peer pressure, she guessed—but she had no taste for it, and she certainly wouldn’t have drunk enough to get so wasted that she’d black out.

But the alternative had been far more horrifying to contemplate, so she hadn’t. She’d gone along with the accepted story—two teenage girls buy fake IDs and go drinking. One passed out and the other wandered drunkenly into the path of a car and died of her injuries. Alice’s blood alcohol level had been elevated—.09, which was over the legal limit to be considered impaired.

But had she been impaired enough to walk in front of a car without trying to escape?

The police had used a breathalyzer on Charlie when they’d shown up to ask questions about Alice’s death, but several hours had already passed since she’d awakened, half-frozen and disoriented, in her backyard.

Charlie rubbed her forehead, feeling the first grind of a tension headache building behind her eyes. She drew a line through goal number two—speaking to Craig Bearden—and rewrote the goal several steps down the page. It was way too early to talk to Alice’s father about her death, especially now that he had made increasing penalties for both serving alcohol to minors and reckless driving laws a significant part of his political platform.

Besides, she’d called him not that long ago, without getting any response. Well, unless you counted brake tampering. And did she really think Craig Bearden would do something like that?

Nellie looked up with alarm when Charlie scraped her chair back quickly, bumping up against the bookcase where she perched. His Highness merely blinked at her, uninterested, from his sunny spot on the windowsill.

“Mama needs to get out of here,” Charlie told them, going as far as to grab her jacket before she realized she couldn’t leave. Beyond the work she still had to complete before quitting time this afternoon, she no longer had a car at her disposal. And the bike wasn’t exactly a safe alternative, was it?

An image flashed through her head. Alice lying dead on the road, her body battered and broken from the collision with a car. Blood seeping from her head, thick, dark and shiny on the pavement.

She sat down abruptly, her limbs suddenly shaky. Why was that image of Alice’s broken body in her mind in the first place? She hadn’t been there when Alice died.

Had she?

* * *

MIKE REACHED THE Craig Bearden for Senate headquarters in Mercerville with only a few minutes to spare, but he used every one of those extra minutes trying to get his mind off those terrifying moments when he’d thought he wasn’t going to catch up to Charlie Winters before her runaway car slammed into the line of vehicles waiting at the four-way stop.

It had been close. Too close. And strangely, the time that had passed between their close call and now only seemed to intensify his memories of those heart-racing seconds.

Catching up, then passing her to get in front. Trying to time his slowdown—not too sudden, or the impact of her car against his might have injured her. But if he hadn’t slowed down soon enough, they might have run out of pavement between them and the cars on the road ahead.

It had been a nerve-racking few minutes, and he was in no hurry to repeat the experience anytime soon.

The clock on his dashboard clicked over to 5:59. He made the effort to shake off the unsettling memories. Put on his game face.

It was showtime.

Bearden’s campaign office was a storefront with wide plate glass windows and a glass door, all imprinted with Bearden for Senate in big red letters. The place was still bustling with staff and volunteers, including an energetic young woman in jeans wearing a large round Bearden for Senate button on her sweater. “Bearden for Senate. Would you like to sign up to volunteer?”

“Actually, I’m here to see Randall Feeney. Is he here?”

The girl looked sheepish. “Oh no, I’m sorry. You’re Mr. Strong, aren’t you? Mr. Feeney was called away unexpectedly and I was supposed to call you to ask if he could reschedule for another day, but it just got so busy.”

Mike suppressed his irritation and pulled his wallet out of his back pocket. He withdrew a card and handed it to the woman. “Please see that Mr. Feeney gets this card. He can call and reschedule when his calendar is less crowded.”

“Will do,” the girl said brightly. “Sure you don’t want to volunteer to work for the campaign?”

“Yeah, I’m not very political.” He’d been in the Marine Corps long enough to avoid politics like the plague. It just got in the way of doing his duty. He supposed now that he was a civilian again, it was time to start thinking about his civic responsibilities.

But not today.

He returned to his truck, wondering if Feeney would bother to get back to him. Probably not.

Mike would just have to follow up later.

He called Heller and told him about Feeney’s no-show. “The girl at campaign headquarters said he was called away, but I have to wonder if that wasn’t just an excuse to blow off the appointment.”

“Maybe Feeney agreed to meet with you before he had a chance to talk to Craig Bearden.”

“And then Bearden told him to cancel?”

“Politicians are careful to control the message,” Heller said. “He may want to know more about you before his people answer your questions.”

“I left my card. It’ll tell him my name and who I work for.”

“That might make it less likely he’ll talk to you, not more,” Heller warned. “What are you doing next?”

“I’m not going to quit, if that’s what you’re asking.” Mike had a feeling Heller—and maybe Quinn and Cameron, too—had been testing him with this impromptu investigation at first. He suspected they hadn’t been all that interested in finding out why Charlie Winters had decided to take his self-defense class. They were more interested in seeing how well Mike was able to investigate Charlie and her motives.

But that had been before someone had cut Charlie’s brakes.

“By the way, Strong, Cameron wants a word with you tomorrow after your afternoon class. Can you drop by her office around five?”

“I’ll be there.” He ended the call and opened the calendar app to jot down the details of his appointment with Rebecca Cameron. Heller was an old friend from the Marine Corps, and Alexander Quinn, the wily spymaster who had been a legend during his time in the CIA, had crossed Mike’s path from time to time during his tours of duty. But Cameron, a former diplomat, was a virtual stranger. She’d been an assistant to the American ambassador in Kaziristan during Mike’s two years in that war-troubled country. But he’d met her only once, briefly, under difficult circumstances.

Why did she want to talk to him now? Was it something to do with what happened to Charlie?

* * *

THURSDAY AFTERNOON WAS cold and rainy, the mild warm snap of the first part of the week long gone. Forecasters were even talking about sleet and snow flurries for the weekend, driving out the last of Charlie’s doubts about the wisdom of catching a ride with Mike to Campbell Cove Academy.

He arrived a half hour early, as promised. She thwarted any chivalrous instinct he might have had about getting out of the truck in the downpour by racing out the door the minute she heard the truck. Darting through the rain, she hauled herself into the passenger seat and turned to him with a laugh. “I now officially think catching a ride with you was a great idea.”

He smiled back at her. “I thought you might.”

“So, mind giving me a sneak preview of what we’ll be doing in class today?” She shook the rain out of her hair and buckled in.

“The first part of the class won’t be any different from what we’ve been doing in the beginner’s class. Stretching is stretching.”

“But afterward?”

He just smiled. “You’ll see.”

Even though Mike was able to find a parking place close to the gym entrance, they still were mostly drenched by the time they burst through the doors. Charlie ran her fingers through her wet hair, attempting to tame the curls trying to burst out all over. She could tell by Mike’s amused glance that it was a lost cause.

“You can wait in the gym if you like. I’ve got a little paperwork to tackle in my office and a couple of phone calls to make before class. It would only bore you.”

“That’s fine.” She gave a little wave as he walked out the side door of the gymnasium, quelling the urge to follow him.

She had done most of her stretching exercises by the time some of her other classmates started to drift into the gym. They greeted her with nods in the normal way of strangers thrown together by circumstance and, as she didn’t encourage any further conversation, most settled in a few feet away on the floor mats to follow her lead and do their stretches.

By five minutes until class time, seven other students had entered, almost all of them male. She was also pretty sure most if not all of them were cops or some sort of law enforcement officers. Nobody survived life in her neck of the Kentucky woods without developing the ability to pick out a police officer in a crowd.

As she pushed to her feet, the door from outside opened, and one more student entered the gym, stopping in the doorway to survey the room, as if he expected trouble to break out any second.

His gaze locked with Charlie’s, and she swallowed a groan.

Of all the people to run into here at the Campbell Cove Academy...

The newcomer was tall and well built, with broad shoulders and a lean waist that hadn’t gained any padding since the last time Charlie had seen him almost ten years ago. His gray eyes were hard but sharp, like chips of flint, and his lips curved in a thin smile as he approached the mat where she stood.

“Well, if it isn’t Charlotte Winters.”

She hid her dismay with a smart-alecky grin in return. “Well, if it isn’t Deputy Trask.”

Archer Trask’s smile widened, without a hint of humor making it anywhere near his eyes. “Have you woken up wasted in your backyard lately?”

Across the gym, the side door opened and Mike Strong walked through, his pace full of energy and purpose. His hair had dried during the time he’d spent in his office. In fact, he looked far more unruffled and put together than she felt at the moment.

Charlie turned away from Trask and moved closer to the other cops in the room. At least none of them looked familiar.

“Five more minutes,” Mike called, taking his place at the front of the gym. He gave a little wave of his hand, and the rest of the class continued their stretching exercises.

Charlie continued with her stretches as well, hoping Archer Trask would go somewhere else and leave her alone.

In that, she was disappointed.

“So, how’d you end up here?” Trask’s voice was deceptively casual.

“Here as in Campbell Cove?”

“No, here as in a self-defense course. Picked up a stalker or something?”

Charlie slanted a look at him, wondering for a moment if he’d heard about what happened to her car the previous day. “Only you, apparently.”

“I heard you had a car accident yesterday.”

So he had heard. “Is that the sort of thing people in your department investigate, Deputy Trask?”

“Not drinking that early, were you?”

She shot him a glare. “Go to hell.”

“Something wrong here?”

At the sound of Mike’s voice, both Charlie and Trask took a step back.

“Not a thing,” Trask said, wandering away.

Mike moved closer to Charlie. “You look angry.”

“I’m fine.”

“Do you and Archer know each other?”

“Not really. Not in years.” She made herself calm down. Getting into a fight with Archer Trask after all this time was the absolute worst thing she could do if she was serious about finding the truth about Alice’s death. He’d been one of the first cops on the scene. She might end up needing his corroboration sooner or later.

Mike lowered his voice. “Has he been bothering you before today?”

She looked up sharply, realizing what he was asking. “No. No, of course not. Deputy Trask is just— No. This has nothing to do with what happened to my car. I promise you.”