Chapter 14

Monday morning, Mac woke up with a dark cloud of worry hanging over her from a sleepless night. She threw off the covers and checked her ankle, which she'd left unwrapped overnight and was encouraged to see some of the swelling had gone down. Rotating her left foot carefully, she could almost make it full circle without that breath-catching stab of pain. Progress.

She made herself toast for breakfast, thought about the upcoming day. The Beckwiths didn't want her searching for Mia and the Stanhopes were divided on anyone searching into Ethan's fatal accident. Overall, the lot of them appeared to blame The Sorority, at least on some level, and Brighty Knowles also blamed them for Tim's death and Gavin's accident. A lot of finger pointing with no real evidence.

Her cell rang as she was just getting out of the shower and she hurried to answer it where she'd left it on her bed. She tweaked her ankle a bit in the process, stopped, swore, then swept the phone up.

She didn't recognize the number, but it had a local area code. "Mackenzie Laughlin."

"So, you approached the Stanhopes yesterday, at church, no less, and got a taste of Coral's sharp tongue," a male voice drawled. "Thought as a friend , you were looking for Mia. You're going pretty far afield, if that's all it is."

"Mason," she said, recognizing the voice and realizing he must be calling her on his personal cell.

"What are you really up to?" he asked curiously.

"How did you know I spoke to Coral?" She set the toast on a plate and put her cell phone on the counter, turning it to speaker, before putting the slices in the toaster and pressing the down button.

"Sam called me. You didn't say you were a private investigator when you were talking to my parents. Tsk. Tsk."

"You know Sam Stanhope?" asked Mac.

"Ethan and Mia dated a while. I know the Stanhopes pretty well. So, what are you after?"

"I barely spoke to Coral."

"Yeah, well, she apparently spoke at length to Brighty Knowles, whom I'm guessing you've met as she had some choice things to say about you."

"Sam relayed all that to you?" Mackenzie was a little taken aback by how swiftly the three households had spread the word about her. She didn't trust Mason much and Sam not at all. She'd looked through the laptop the night before, examining some of Ethan's pictures, and a few class assignments, but hadn't found anything of true interest.

"You're not answering my question. I asked you to be a witness in case my parents killed each other, but maybe I chose poorly. You have your own agenda and I really don't know what that is, so it would be great if you could tell me."

"How are your parents doing?"

"Madly in love," he said sarcastically. "So, what are you doing?"

She decided to be honest. "I am looking for Mia, but Gavin Knowles also asked me to look into Ethan's accident."

He scoffed. "You'll do anything for money."

What an ass. "Did you call just to malign me?"

"What's Mia got to do with it all?"

"Nothing . . . maybe . . ." She heard the toast pop up in the toaster and smelled the faintly burnt scent that said she'd gotten them too dark. "I just want to talk to her, make sure she's all right. And I'm planning to talk to all of The Sorority."

"You're part of that group."

He wasn't listening and she was getting pissed. "I'm going to have to go, Mason." She plucked the partially charred bread from the toaster and placed it on a plate, opening the refrigerator and pulling out the butter, which she started to spread atop the two slices, silently lamenting the fact she had no jam.

"Level with me and . . . maybe I can help you," he said.

"Yeah? How?" She bit into the piece of toast and started chewing.

"I'll help you find Mia. I have a number for her. Haven't tried it in a while, but I think it's still good."

"Really? So, you've had this number all along?"

He made a sound of frustration. "I wasn't going to give it to Leigh. I'm not sure I'm giving it to you, but let's talk, then I'll see if I want to get involved in all this."

Mac swallowed her bite and asked, "Do your parents know you have a contact for Mia?"

"What do you think? Of course not. I don't want to be kicked out of the house, or disowned, or any other shit my parents might pull, so, no, they don't know. You want my help? Let's meet somewhere where we can really talk."

Clearly he wasn't going to hand over the number without his pound of flesh. "Okay. Where?"

"I'll ask Sam, and I'll call you back. He'll want to be there, too." And he hung up.

Mac started choking on a second bite. She wanted nothing to do with Sam Stanhope.

She started to phone Taft and then stopped herself. He had that meeting with the lawyers for Mitch Mangella's estate this morning and it would probably be better to leave him alone until it was over.

She waited on pins and needles for Mason's return call, staring out her kitchen window at the parking lot below. No blue car turning around today and the parking lot was fairly empty on a Monday morning. She checked Google on her phone to see how long it took for fentanyl to take effect and realized the poisoning must have happened sometime while Ethan was at home, or maybe right before they drove off.

When her phone rang again and it was Mason, she exhaled.

"Do you know the Waystation?" he asked.

"I've heard of it," Mac said dryly. She suspected Mason thought it was one of those secret places where no one they knew would recognize them, but she'd spent many hours there in the course of work.

"Sam and I will be there tonight. Seven?"

"Okay," she said.

* * *

"Haynes."

Cooper looked up from his desk to see Humph standing in the doorway to his office, his long face looking even longer than usual.

Verbena drew a breath from her desk and said softly, "Chief doesn't look happy."

No, he doesn't , thought Cooper as he crossed the room. Humph disappeared back inside the glass-walled office and Cooper followed. All the blinds were already drawn, pretty much the way Humph kept it all the time.

He glanced down at a note he'd scratched on a piece of paper and said, "You ordered tox reports on Ethan and Ingrid Stanhope."

Cooper had known there would be a record of his request and had expected to have to explain. He just hadn't expected it to happen so soon. "I did," he admitted.

"Why?"

"Because the tox report was never made public and I had questions about that accident."

"Why?" Cooper hesitated and Humph stepped in. "This has something to do with Tim Knowles and his brother, Gavin, whose car was driven off the road in Laurelton city limits."

Cooper had no way to explain that he was getting the information for Mackenzie Laughlin so he just nodded.

"I believe I made myself clear about what your role in the Knowles investigation is, but maybe we oughta go over that again."

"A reporter called in about Tim's murder, trying to make it more than it was. I made certain they knew the case was closed," said Cooper.

"Closed with the department. Closed with you?" Humph's bushy gray eyebrows lifted in question. He didn't wait for a response. "There's a flag on the Stanhope file. Still in effect after all these years. The family doesn't want anyone looking into that file and there are some pretty powerful people who helped make that possible."

"They don't want the scandal," suggested Cooper stiffly.

"They don't want the public to know their kids died of fentanyl poisoning."

"You read the reports," said Cooper.

"What's this got to do with Tim Knowles? You're still chewing on that case."

"The two cases are unrelated, as far as I know. But Gavin Knowles was running his mouth a lot before the hit-and-run that put him in the hospital. Talking about Ethan Stanhope's death. Blaming it on some of his classmates."

"It was a one-car accident."

Humph had been doing a lot of reading, Cooper realized. "If and when we can talk to Gavin, we can ask him if he knew about the fentanyl."

"Not according to the file. It's not for public consumption."

"Do you really think the fact that a nine-year-old girl died from fentanyl should be covered up?" Cooper demanded. He knew he was pushing, but Gavin's insistence that Ethan had been murdered was gaining some traction. Yes, he still wanted to know more about Tim Knowles's death, but with Mackenzie Laughlin's request for toxicology on Ethan and Ingrid Stanhope, a whole new can of worms had been opened. "You'd think the family would want to know. Why are they covering it up?"

"I spoke to the ex-mayor. Told her what I'd learned," said Humph.

"What did she say?" Cooper asked in surprise.

"That the Stanhopes were stunned with grief and didn't want to turn the accident into a circus. That their children were dead. That they didn't want the press all over them."

Cooper chose his words carefully. "Hiding the cause of their deaths is dangerous."

"I'm not saying I agree with those decisions, but if we're going to investigate, we've got to make our case."

"So, you want to go ahead."

He shook his head dolefully. "Yes, and no. Mostly no, right now. Don't talk about the tox report while I work this out on my end."

When Cooper didn't respond, the chief looked up at him, his bushy brows lifting. "Unless it's too late."

Biting the bullet, Cooper said, "I would suggest working this out on your end quickly."

"Shit." Humph waved Cooper out of his office and picked up the desk phone receiver.

* * *

Taft sat in the law offices of Tormelle & Quick and again faced Veronica Quick, this time across Martin Calgheny's desk as he was unavailable. Veronica worked for one of the partners, her father, Jonas Quick. Jonas's name was on the door and was in turn the son of one of the now deceased founders, Alexander Quick.

"It's just some paperwork," she assured him, sliding some papers across the wide mahogany desk his way. As he began signing, she said, "I can tell you that Prudence Mangella is contesting the will."

Taft smiled. "And?"

Veronica looked at him as if she were assessing him. She was about five seven with dark brown, shoulder-length hair, and wore a black pinstripe suit jacket over a cream-colored V-neck blouse that emphasized the small bones at the base of her throat.

"We'll keep you informed as we progress," she said. "It's going to take a while."

"Take all the time you need," Taft said with a shrug. "If I win, I'm donating all of it to charity anyway."

"That's admirable, Mr. Taft, but in my experience, people say those kind of things until they actually get the money in hand."

"Are you a lawyer?"

"No, I'm an assistant, sometimes an advisor."

"So, your advice is . . . ?"

"Take care of yourself."

He lifted his brows. "Meaning . . . ?"

"This is a marathon, not a sprint."

He felt a silvery sense of awareness that reminded him of whenever he was visited by his sister's "ghost." He looked around for Helene, but of course she wasn't there. She was his muse, his conscience, a projection that was only in his mind. She'd been gone over a decade and the intense grief and loss he'd felt had faded, but he still saw her occasionally. Seeing her sometimes was a quirk he didn't share with many, though Mac knew.

He heard Veronica suddenly inhale sharply. Her gaze was out the window. He followed her line of sight and saw Helene standing in the lot. The cold wave that swept over him left him momentarily speechless. When he found his voice, he blurted, "Did you see her?"

"Who?" she asked, but her eyes, now trained on him, were wide.

Taft stared at her. He was almost certain she was lying . . . but that would mean . . . he couldn't go there.

His hand was on the door lever. Veronica seemed to be struggling with herself. In the end she said merely, "Sometimes these things get nasty. Be careful."

She'd warned him twice. His heart rate had returned to normal and when he looked out the window Helene was no longer there. In some distant corner of his mind he remembered a conversation with Mitch Mangella where he was saying something about the law firm of Tormelle & Quick. "They keep my affairs in order. Everything legal and tight, just the way it needs to be. They'd bore the shit out of me except for Jonas's daughter. I swear that girl is psychic, the things she seems to know . . ."

"You sound psychic," Taft said to her now and she looked down at the pages he'd signed, her fingers delicately making sure the edges were perfectly even, keeping her expression blank.

He left the offices, feeling on edge. Veronica didn't see Helene, because Helene wasn't there. Maybe her warning was simply because she understood Prudence Mangella's character. Maybe she warned all the firm's clients when an estate was particularly messy.

He'd told Mackenzie that he had no intention of meeting with Prudence, but with Veronica Quick's warning firmly in mind, he decided to face the lioness in her den rather than wait for something to happen.

* * *

Mac drove to Parker Flooring, which was located on the south side of town, just on the edge of the commercial district and close to all the construction going on in Staffordshire Estates, a sprawling River Glen development that butted up to the Laurelton city limits and beyond.

The unprepossessing building was tilt-up concrete with a row of large windows street side, a parking lot on one end and a warehouse that popped up from the back and ran nearly a block behind the business's front offices.

She'd tried to reach Leigh several times and had clicked off when the phone went straight to voice mail. It was damn frustrating not to get through to her. Since Leigh didn't want her husband to know anything about hiring Mac to find Mia, she didn't dare leave a message that he might possibly overhear. She was taking a risk in entering Parker and Leigh's place of business, she supposed, but Parker didn't know her and would have no reason to suspect she was anything but a classmate of Leigh's, and she had a reason to be at the shop anyway.

And the truth was, she kind of wanted to see Leigh in her milieu.

Mac entered the business, which had a short foyer, the floor done in herringbone gray tile that led directly into stacked rows of tile and hardwood and carpet samples with customers desultorily walking through rows of product. She could smell the faint scent of some chemical and decided it was a floor sealant. There was a low hum of voices from the customers and the employees who served them. She could almost taste a woodsy flavor in the air.

An area in front of the windows to the street was set with several large white tables and surrounded by molded plastic white chairs. Offices with curtained windows lined the eastern wall, the doors closed, and two sets of double doors were set into the north wall to what she assumed was the warehouse at the back of the building. An argument was taking place in one of the offices where the door was slightly open. Was that Leigh's voice? She heard "—compete with Marbleworks and we'll go broke. The name's Parker Flooring , but do whatever the hell you want, you always do and—"

The door snapped shut and cut off the rest.

"May I help you?" a young man asked her.

Mac put on a smile. "I'm searching for flooring for my mother. She's redoing her kitchen and was thinking about tile, but it might be too hard to stand on all day? What's that sort of fake stuff that looks like hardwood?"

"Like this?" He tapped his foot on the floor beneath him.

"Exactly like that," said Mac. "I thought it was hardwood."

"I'm Ray," he introduced. "We have several brands. Let me show you some samples." He led her down a row and she barely limped as she moved along. She glanced at the line of offices. Leigh burst out of the office door and headed for the double doors to the warehouse. She happened to glance up and spy Mackenzie on her way and her eyes widened. She stutter-stepped and then circled back toward Mackenzie as Ray kept walking, expecting Mac to follow.

"What are you doing here? Parker can't see you!" Leigh hissed in an undertone. She grabbed Mac's arm and dug her fingers into it.

"I'm picking out flooring for my mother's kitchen renovation," Mac responded evenly, pulling her arm free.

Out of the same office came a tall man with sandy-colored hair, a short, trimmed beard, and a supercilious way of looking over the rows of samples. He saw Leigh with Mac and his brow furrowed slightly.

"Leigh?" he asked, with a faint smile.

"I'm . . . with a friend," she said lamely. "Parker, this is Mackenzie."

Leigh might be decent with a script, Mac decided, but she was terrible at ad libbing. "Mackenzie Laughlin," she introduced, speaking loudly so he could hear her across the room. "Leigh and I were River Glen classmates. Feels like a lifetime ago, doesn't it?" she said to Leigh, who stared at her blankly. She turned back to Parker. "My mother's redoing her kitchen, and I was just telling Ray that she likes that faux hardwood. He's just showing me some samples now." Mac smiled and shifted her gaze down the row to Ray, who was silently holding up a square with tan-colored boards. "Oh, I like that color," she told him enthusiastically.

"Ah." Parker lost interest in Mac immediately. He hooked a thumb toward the double doors and said to Leigh, "Thought we were meeting."

"I'll be right there," said Leigh.

He seemed about to argue with her, then pressed his lips together and turned toward the double doors. As soon as he was through them, Leigh released a pent-up breath. "I've got this, Ray," she said, dismissing the employee.

"Sure thing." Ray put the sample back and walked away a little stiffly.

"Can you talk?" asked Mac when they were alone.

"You know I can't," she said peevishly. "Why? Did you find Mia?"

"I think I'm going to get her phone number. Call me tomorrow."

"Oh! Okay," she said. Then, "Sorry I snapped."

"I didn't mean to take you by surprise." Which was something of a lie.

"How're you getting the number?"

"Mason."

"Mason? You said he wouldn't talk to you."

Mac shrugged. "Maybe he's worried about Mia, too."

"Mason wouldn't talk to me. None of them would. I can't talk about this here. I told you that!"

"In the future, can I leave a message on your phone?"

"Um . . . no, just call. If I don't answer I'll see you called and I'll get back to you when I can. I'm sorry you had to see us fighting. This morning I've been . . ." She made a sound of annoyance. "Parker wants to cut employees and have me be here full-time and I've got other things to do. He diminishes what I want, while making sure what he—"

The double doors suddenly slammed open and Parker stood in the aperture, holding both doors so they wouldn't close again. "Leigh?" he called.

"Gotta go," she whispered.

"Can you give me some phone numbers? The Sorority's?"

She blinked at Mackenzie. "Sure . . ." she said, sounding completely unsure.

"I just want to reconnect, you know?" Mac lied, sensing Leigh wasn't going to comply. At this juncture, it wouldn't be wise to admit to Leigh that she planned to look into Gavin's claims that one or all of The Sorority was responsible for Ethan's death. "Text them to me."

She nodded, turning toward her husband, who was still waiting, holding both doors open in an antagonistic stance. She then hesitated, taking her time texting the numbers to Mackenzie before sauntering back toward Parker. She passed through the doors and Parker looked at Mac for a long moment, before turning and following after his wife. The double doors slowly shut behind him with a deep, metallic clang.

No wonder she didn't want him to know anything about her search for Mia. His body language alone said he would be suspicious of anything Leigh might be doing.

"Control freak," she muttered as she headed to her SUV. Parker looked familiar, she thought, but couldn't put her finger on it. She struggled to make the connection but finally had to let it be, counting on her subconscious to work on the problem. Maybe it was just his overbearing attitude.

She got back in her RAV and checked the text from Leigh. She'd given her Natalie's number and Erin's, but there wasn't one for Kristl. Given Kristl's involvement at some level in Taft's investigation into Tim Knowles's death, it was probably better to steer clear of her for the moment anyway. She put in a call to Natalie and reached her voice mail, where she left her own name and number and asked her to call back. She then called Erin and went through the very same routine.

And then she remembered why Parker was so familiar. She'd seen him in a community theater production where'd he'd played the lead in Sweeney Todd , the murderous barber who killed his enemies and, with the help of his partner in crime, Mrs. Lovett, turned them into meat pies. She recalled that Leigh had met him at some kind of musical theater camp, though it appeared now that he'd traded the bright lights of the theater for being in charge of a thriving business with his wife, while everything Leigh seemed to care about still echoed back to acting. Huh.

* * *

She was driving toward Laurelton, on that same stretch of road where she'd been pushed off, and glanced over as she always did to where her vehicle had slammed down off the road into the grassy area that was outside both River Glen and Laurelton city limits, when she caught movement in her rearview mirror.

"What? Shit! "

A car racing toward her. Accelerating. Blue? Blue Accord!

BAM!!!

The vehicle hit the back of her car and Mackenzie was suddenly spinning, trying to hang onto the wheel. Her back tires slid off the road as she whipped the steering wheel. She was suddenly facing backward, tilted skyward, high centered. A truck barreled toward her. She opened her mouth to scream but nothing came out.