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“I’ll be sure to do that, George. Thanks.”
He quickly rolled his window up and drove through the gate before George decided he wanted to chat a little more.
Lights blazed from every single window of the grand pink stucco McMansion he had always secretly thought of as a big, gaudy wedding cake. There was no trace of his sister’s elegant good taste in the house. It was as if Lloyd had stamped out any trace of Frannie.
The interior of the house wasn’t any more welcoming. It was cold and formal, white on white with gold accents.
Ross knew of two rooms in the house with a little personality. Josh’s bedroom was a typical teenager’s room with posters on the wall and clutter and mementos covering every surface.
The other was Frannie’s small sitting room that hinted at the little sister he remembered. It was brightly decorated, with local handiworks, vivid textiles and many of Frannie’s own photographs on the wall.
Lloyd had a habit of changing the security system all the time so Ross didn’t even try to open the door. He rang the doorbell and a moment later, Julie Osterman opened the door, her soft, pretty features looking about as exhausted as Frannie’s had been.
“I’m sorry I’m so late,” he said. “I never expected things to take this long, that I would have to impose on you until the early hours of the morning.”
“No problem.” She held the door open for him and he moved past her into the formal foyer. “Josh tried to send me home and insisted he would be okay on his own, but I just didn’t feel right about leaving him here alone, under the circumstances.”
“I appreciate that.”
“He’s in the kitchen on the telephone to a friend.”
“At this hour? Is it Lyndsey?”
Josh’s young girlfriend had been a source of conflict between Josh and his parents, for reasons Ross didn’t quite understand.
“I think so, but I can’t be certain. I was trying not to eavesdrop.”
“How is he?”
She frowned a little as she appeared to give his question serious consideration. Despite his own fatigue, Ross couldn’t help noticing the way her mouth pursed a little when she was concentrating, and he had a wild urge to kiss away every line.
He definitely needed sleep if he was harboring inappropriate fantasies about a prickly busybody type like Julie Osterman.
“I can’t really tell, to be honest with you,” she answered. “I get the impression he’s more upset about his mother being detained at the police station than he seems to be about his father’s death. Or at least that appears to be where he’s focusing his emotions right now. On the other hand, his reaction could just be displacement.”
“Want to skip the mumbo jumbo?”
She made a face. “Sorry. I just meant maybe he’s not ready—or doesn’t want—to face the reality of his father’s death right now, so it’s easier to place his energy and emotion on his mother’s situation.”
“Or maybe he just happens to be more upset about Frannie than he is about Lloyd. The two of them didn’t exactly get along.”
“So I hear,” she answered. “It sounds as if few people did get along with Lloyd Fredericks, besides Crystal and her sort.”
“And there were plenty of those.”
Her mouth tightened but she refrained from commenting on his bitterness. Lloyd’s frequent affairs had been a great source of humiliation for Frannie. “How is your sister?” she asked instead.
“Holding up okay, under the circumstances.”
“Do you expect them to keep her overnight for questioning, then?”
He sighed, angry all over again at the most recent turn of events. “Not for questioning. For arraignment. She’s being charged.”
Her eyes widened with astonishment, then quickly filled with compassion. “Oh, poor Josh. This is going to be so hard on him.”
“Yeah, it’s a hell of a mess,” he answered heavily. “So it looks like I’ll be staying here for a while, until we can sort things out.”
She touched him, just a quick, almost furtive brush of her hand on his arm, much as she had touched Josh earlier. Through his cotton shirt, he could feel the warmth of her skin and he was astonished at the urge to wrap his arms around her and pull her close and just lean on her for a moment.
“I’m so sorry, Ross.”
He cleared his throat and told himself he was nothing but relieved when she pulled her hand away.
“Thanks again for everything you did tonight,” he said. “I would have been in a real fix without you.”
“I’m glad I could help in some small way.”
She smiled gently and he was astonished at how that simple warm expression could ease the tightness in his chest enough that he could breathe just a little easier.
“It’s late,” she finally said. “Or early, I guess. I’d better go.”
“Oh right. I’m sorry again you had to be here so long.”
“I’d like to say goodbye to Josh before I leave, if it’s all right with you,” she said.
“Of course,” he answered and followed her into the kitchen.
In his fantasy childhood, the kitchen was always the warmest room in the house, a place scattered with children’s backpacks and clumsy art work on the refrigerator and homemade cookies cooling on a rack on the countertop.
He hadn’t known anything like that, except at the occasional friend’s house. To his regret, Frannie’s kitchen wasn’t anything like that image, either. It was as cool and formal as the rest of the house—white cabinets, white tile, stainlesssteel appliances. It was like some kind of hospital lab rather than the center of a house.
Josh sat on a white bar stool, his cell phone up to his ear.
“I told you, Lyns,” he was saying, “I don’t have any more information than I did when we talked an hour ago. I haven’t heard anything yet. I’ll tell you as soon as I know anything, okay? Meantime, you have to get some rest. You know what—”
Ross wasn’t sure what alerted the boy to their presence but before he could complete the sentence, he suddenly swiveled around to face them. Ross was almost certain he saw secrets flash in his nephew’s eyes before his expression turned guarded again.
“Um, I’ve got to go, Lyns,” he mumbled into the phone. “My uncle Ross just got here. Yeah. I’ll call you later.”
He ended the call, folded his phone and slid it into his pocket before he uncoiled his lanky frame from the chair.
“How’s my mom? Is she with you?”
Ross sighed. “No. I’m sorry.”
“How long can they hold her?”
“For now, as long as they want. She’s being charged.”
His features suffused with color. “Charged? With murder?”
Ross nodded, wishing he had other news to offer his nephew.
“This completely sucks.”
That was one word for it, he supposed. A pretty accurate one. “Yeah, it does. But there’s nothing we can do about it tonight. Meanwhile, Ms. Osterman needs to get on back to her house. She came in to tell you goodbye.”
He was proud of the boy for reining in most of his outrage in order to be polite to Julie.
“Thank you for giving me a ride and staying here and everything,” Josh said to her. “And even though I told you I didn’t need you to stay so late, it was…nice not to be here by myself and all.”
“You’re very welcome.” She smiled with that gentle warmth she just seemed to exude, paused for just a moment, then stepped forward and hugged the boy, who was a good six inches taller than she was.
“Call me if you need to talk, okay?” she said softly.
“Yeah, sure,” he mumbled, though Ross was pretty sure Josh looked touched by her concern.
They both walked her to the door and watched her climb into her car. When she drove away, Ross shut the door to Frannie’s wedding-cake house and wondered what the hell he was supposed to do next.
He would just have to figure it out, he supposed.
He didn’t have any other choice.
This was just about the last place on earth he wanted to be right now.
In fact, given a choice between attending his despised brother-in-law’s funeral and wading chest-deep in a manure pit out on the Double Crown, Ross figured he would much rather be standing in cow honey swatting flies away from his face than sitting here in this discreetly decorated funeral home, surrounded by the cloying smell of lilies and carnations and listening to all the weeping and wailing going on over a man most people in town had disliked.
It would be over soon. Already, the eulogies seemed to be dwindling. He could only feel relief. This all seemed the height of hypocrisy. He knew of at least a dozen people here who had openly told him at separate times over the last few days how much they had hated Lloyd. Yet here they were with their funeral game faces, all solemn and sad-eyed.
He glanced over at his nephew, who seemed to be watching the entire proceedings with an odd detachment, as if it was all some kind of mildly interesting play that had no direct bearing in his life.
Josh seemed to be holding up well under the strain of the last five days. Maybe too well. The boy’s only intense emotion over anything seemed to be rage at the prosecuting attorney for moving ahead with charges against his mother.
It had been a hellish five days, culminating in this farce. First had come the medical examiner’s report read at Frannie’s arraignment that Lloyd had been killed with a blunt instrument whose general size and heft matched the large piece of pottery his sister had purchased shortly before the murder. Then reports had begun to trickle out that the heavy vase had several sets of unidentified fingerprints on it—and one very obvious identified set that belonged to his sister.
Added to Crystal’s testimony that Lloyd had a heated phone call with Frannie shortly before the murder, things weren’t looking good for his sister.
A good attorney with the typical cooperative client might have been able to successfully argue that Frannie’s fingerprints would naturally be on the vase since she had purchased it just a short time earlier, and that a hearsay one-sided telephone exchange—no matter how heated—was not proof of murder.
But Frannie was not the typical cooperative client. Despite the high stakes, she refused to confirm or deny her involvement in Lloyd’s murder and had chosen instead to remain mum about the entire evening, even to her attorney.
Ross didn’t know what the hell she was doing. He had visited twice more since the night of the murder in an effort to convince her to just tell him and the Red Rock police what had happened, but she had shut him out, too. Each time, he had ended up leaving more frustrated than ever.
As a result of her baffling, completely unexpected obstinacy, she had been charged with second-degree murder and bound over for trial. Even more aggravating, she had been denied bail. Bruce Gibson had argued in court that Frannie was a flight risk because of her wealthy family.
He apparently was laboring under two huge misconceptions: one, that Frannie would ever have it in her to run off and abandon her son and, two, that any of the Fortunes would willingly help her escape, no matter how much they might want to.
In the bail hearing, Bruce had been full of impassioned arguments about the Fortune wealth and power, the entire time with that smirk on his plastic features that Ross wanted to pound off of him.
The judge had apparently been gullible enough to buy into the myth—either that or he was another old golfing buddy of Lloyd’s or his father, Cordell. Judge Wilkinson had agreed with Bruce and ordered Frannie held without bail, so now his delicate, fragile sister sat moldering in the county jail, awaiting trial on trumped-up charges that should never have been filed.
And while she was stuck there, he was forced to sit on this rickety little excuse for a chair, listening to a pack of lies about what a great guy Lloyd had been.
Ross didn’t buy any of it. He had disliked the man from the day he married Frannie, when she was only eighteen. Even though she had tried to put on a bright face and play the role of a regular bride, Ross had sensed something in her eyes even then that seemed to indicate she wasn’t thrilled about the marriage.
He had tried to talk her out of it but she wouldn’t listen to him, probably because Cindy had pushed so hard for the marriage.
When Josh showed up several weeks shy of nine months later, Ross had put the pieces of the puzzle together and figured Lloyd had gotten her pregnant. Frannie was just the sort to try doing what she thought was the right thing for her child, even if it absolutely wasn’t the right decision for her.
In the years since, he had watched her change from a luminous, vivacious girl to a quiet, subdued society matron. She always wore the right thing, said the right thing, but every ounce of joy seemed to have been sucked out of her.
And all because of Lloyd Fredericks, the man who apparently was heading for sainthood any day now, judging by the glowing eulogies delivered at his memorial service.
Ross wondered what all these fusty types would do if he stood up and spoke the truth, that Lloyd was just about the lousiest excuse for a human being he’d ever met—which was really quite a distinction, considering that as an ex-cop, he’d met more than his share.
In his experience, Lloyd was manipulative and dishonest. He cheated, he lied, he stole and, worse, he bullied anybody he considered weaker than himself.
Ross couldn’t say any of that, though. He could only sit here and wait until this whole damn thing was over and he could take Josh home.
He glanced around at the crowd, wondering again at the most notable absence—next to Frannie’s, of course. Cindy had opted not to come, and he couldn’t help wondering where she might be. He would have expected his mother to be sitting right up there on the front row with Lloyd’s parents. She loved nothing more than to be the center of attention, and what better place for that than at her son-in-law’s memorial service, with all its drama and high emotion?
Cindy had adored her son-in-law, though Ross thought perhaps he’d seen hints that their relationship had cooled, since right around the time Cindy had been injured in a mysterious car accident.
Still, even if she and Lloyd had been openly feuding, which they weren’t, he would have thought Cindy would come.
He was still wondering at her absence when the pastor finally wrapped things up a few moments later. With the autopsy completed, Lloyd’s parents had elected to cremate his remains, so there would be no interment ceremony.
“Can we go now?” Josh asked him when other people started to file out of the funeral chapel.
Ross would have preferred nothing more than to hustle Josh away from all this artificiality. He knew people likely wanted to pay their respects to Lloyd’s son, but he wasn’t about to force the kid to stay if he didn’t want to be there.
“Your call,” he said.
“Let’s go, then,” Josh said. “I’m ready to get out of here.”
As he had expected, at least a dozen people stopped them on their way to the door to wish Josh their condolences. Ross was immensely proud of his nephew for the quiet dignity with which he thanked them each for their sympathy without giving away his own feelings about his father.
They were almost to the door when Ross saw with dismay that Lloyd’s mother, Jillian, was heading in their direction. Her Botox-smooth features looked ravaged just now, her eyes red and weepy. Still, fury seemed to push away the grief for now.
“How dare you show your face here!” she hissed to Ross when she was still several feet away.
Chapter Five
Several others at the funeral stopped to watch the unfolding drama and Ross did his best to edge them over to a quieter corner of the chapel, away from the greedy eyes of the crowd.
“My nephew just lost his father,” he said calmly. “I’m here for him, Jillian. Surely you can understand that.”
She made a scoffing sort of sound. “Your nephew lost his father because of your sister! If not for her, none of us would be here. He would still be alive. You have no right to come here. No right whatsoever. This service is for family members. For those of us who…who loved Lloyd. You never even liked him. You probably conspired with your sister to kill him, didn’t you?”
