“Me?” Bellamy exclaimed.
“You were as close to Susan as anyone. You were with her all that day until just before she was killed. Talk me through everything that happened from your point of view.”
“I did that with the lead character in my book. I wrote it from the viewpoint of a twelve-year-old girl.”
“I skipped the long paragraphs and only read the dialogue.”
“You still know what happened.”
“Not the behind-the-scenes stuff.”
“That’s the stuff in the long paragraphs.”
“Is there something you don’t want me to know?”
“No, of course not.”
“Well, then. I wasn’t at the barbecue, remember? I need details.”
“You could go back to the book and read the parts you skipped.”
“Or you could just tell me.”
She gnawed her lower lip. He cocked his head to one side, prompting her. Then she suddenly began to talk, as though fearing she might change her mind if she didn’t.
“Daddy had initiated the company-wide Memorial Day barbecue two years earlier. It was the first party he and Olivia hosted as a married couple. Daddy used the occasion to establish Olivia as the new Mrs. Howard Lyston and to introduce Steven as his adopted son.”
Dent held up his hand. “Detail. If your dad adopted him, why didn’t he change his name to Lyston?”
“Olivia would have preferred it, I think. But Steven wanted to honor his late father by keeping his name.”
“Hmm. Okay. So the barbecue became an annual event. Brisket and ribs, kegs of beer, live music, dancing. Red, white, and blue banners.”
“Blue Bell ice cream. Fireworks at nine-thirty.”
“Quite a shindig.”
“Nevertheless, it had its detractors.” With her fingertip she followed a trickle of condensation as it slid down the side of her glass of tea. “There was a row at the breakfast table that morning. Steven didn’t want to go to the barbecue. He called the whole thing dumb. Olivia told him, dumb or not, he was going. Susan was acting like a bitch royale because…” She shifted her gaze up to him. “Because of the fight she’d had with you.”
“I came over on my motorcycle early—”
“Waking everyone up.”
“Someone inside the house had to activate the gate so I could get in.”
“It was me.”
“See? A detail I didn’t know. Anyway, I had to come early because Susan hadn’t answered her phone. I didn’t want to leave a message, but I had to tell her that I’d be late to the barbecue.”
“You were going flying with Gall.”
“He’d been doing some repairs on this guy’s plane and wanted to take it up, check things out. He asked me if I wanted to go along. I jumped at the chance. I told Susan I would hook up with her at the barbecue when we got back.”
“That didn’t go over well.”
“To put it mildly. She blew a gasket and issued an ultimatum. Take her to the barbecue when it started, or don’t bother coming at all. I told her I was going flying with Gall. She said fine, she’d have more fun without me.”
“She was in a snit. She told me…” She hesitated, then said, “She said she’d rather die than play second fiddle to that nasty old man.”
Those portentous words silenced them for several moments, then Bellamy picked up the story. “She was determined to teach you a lesson. Over Daddy’s protests, she drove her own car to the park. She left ahead of us, and I remember thinking how gorgeous she looked when she sailed out the door.
“She was wearing a new sundress, one that Olivia had bought her for the occasion. The blue color set off her eyes. Her legs were smooth and tan. Her hair was golden, shiny, and perfect. In fact, everything about her looked perfect to me.” She laughed softly. “Probably because I was so imperfect.”
“You improved. A lot.” He teamed his drawled compliment with a lazy-eyed once-over that he could tell flustered her.
“I wasn’t fishing for a compliment.”
“Well, you caught one anyway.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” He shot her a teasing grin, then returned to the serious nature of the topic. “Susan went on ahead.”
“Yes, despite Daddy and Olivia’s wishes that we arrive together and present a solid family unit. She insisted on having her own way. I admired her daring, because I was just the opposite. I never disobeyed, never went against what my parents wanted and expected of me. I was the Miss Goody Two-Shoes of the family.”
“Cooperative by nature?”
“Or simply a coward. I was also so happy to finally have a mother, I didn’t want to do anything to disrupt the new family.”
“How old were you when your real mom died?”
“Three. Susan was seven. Mother left us with the housekeeper while she went to the supermarket. She collapsed in the store aisle. A brain aneurysm had burst. They said death was instantaneous.” After a moment’s pause, she added, “I hope so. Realizing that she was dying and leaving us without a mother would have been awful for her.”
“Do you remember her?”
“Sometimes I think I do,” she said wistfully, “but it might just be images formed from pictures of her and stories that Daddy told me. When I started school, being without a mother made me different from the other kids. I didn’t like that. I was thrilled when Daddy and Olivia married.”
“What about Susan?”
“She was more wary because she was older and could remember our mother. But to Olivia’s credit, she was tactful and patient with us. With Steven, too, who was suddenly no longer an only child, but the middle child having to share his mother with two stepsisters. As an adult I can appreciate how dicey the merger could have been. But there were no major upheavals.”
Dent’s family background suffered by comparison. He didn’t want to think about what he would have become if Gall hadn’t taken him under his wing. So to speak.
He resettled in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. “Miss Goody Two-Shoes goes to the barbecue.”
She winced. “Not in a new sundress, mind you, but a pair of white slacks that were too big in the seat, and a red top with straps that kept slipping off my knobby shoulders.” She gave a self-deprecating laugh. “I didn’t have the most graceful adolescence.”
He smiled, recalling how awkward she’d been. “I remember one time Susan and I passed through the kitchen where you were sitting at the table doing homework. Susan called you a dork for being such a conscientious student. You told her to shut up. But she kept teasing you. You picked up a bag—”
“Of colored pencils. I was working on a map of Europe.”
“You hauled it back to throw at her, but you knocked over your glass of milk instead. You burst into tears and ran from the room.”
“I can’t believe you remember that.” She buried her face in her hands. “I was so humiliated.”
“Why? Susan deserved to be smacked for making fun of you. I thought you showed a lot of backbone by standing up to her.”
“But I flubbed it and spilled my milk instead. In front of you. That was the worst of it.”
“Because of the crush you had on me.”
Her face turned bright pink. “You knew?”
He raised one shoulder. “Sensed.”
“Oh, God. Now I’m really embarrassed. I didn’t think you knew I was alive.”
He’d known. But her adolescent crush on him hadn’t become noteworthy until that Memorial Day, and then it had taken on a significance that disturbed him even now.
But he wouldn’t go there. Not until she did.
Instead, he smiled. “What did you like about me?”
“You were so much older. Eighteen. You rode a motorcycle, flew airplanes, used bad words. You broke all the rules, and my parents called you reckless, rude, and undisciplined.”
“And they were right.”
She laughed lightly. “You were the dangerous bad boy. Every Goody Two-Shoes’s fantasy.”
“Oh yeah?” He leaned toward her and lowered his voice. “What do you think of me now?”
Instantly she sobered and held his stare for several seconds, then replied quietly, “I think you’re still dangerous.”
Quickly she scooted back her chair and began to clear the table. He watched her as she moved about the kitchen and noticed how nicely she was filling out the seat of her pants these days. She also filled out her soft, stretchy top. Not too much. Just enough.
Today she had worn her hair down. It was dark, thick, and glossy, and, whenever she moved, the longest strands grazed those not-too-much-just-enough breasts, and every time that happened, he felt a warm, pleasant tingle below his belt.
Yesterday, once she’d ditched the sunglasses, he’d noticed that her eyes were light blue, set off by black eyelashes. Her skin was fair, and he was really coming to like that sprinkling of freckles across her nose and cheekbones, which was an impudent contrast to an otherwise solemn face. When the time was right, he would enjoy teasing her about those freckles, as well as her girlish blush.
He wondered what had gone wrong between her and her ex, and if their divorce had been as amicable as she’d claimed.
She returned to her chair across the table from him and, as though aware of his scrutiny and the track of his thoughts, she resumed immediately. “The barbecue was exactly as you described it. Susan was the life of the party, which wasn’t anything unusual. But that day she seemed to court attention.”
“She wanted to make sure I’d hear about it.”
Bellamy gave a curt nod. “She laughed out loud at everything and spread herself thin on the dance floor, dancing with every man who asked her, no matter how old or how young.”
“Allen Strickland.”
“Yes. But they didn’t link up until later in the day, after Susan had had quite a lot to drink. She and a group of older kids had left the main pavilion and had gone down to the boathouse. They were sneaking beer down there and Susan was swilling it.
“Being curious and, I admit, a bit jealous, I went down there to spy on them. Susan saw me sneaking around and threatened to kill me if I tattled to Olivia and Daddy. I told her that I wouldn’t have to tell them, that if she continued drinking like that, they would know by her behavior. She told me to get lost. So I did.”
“Did you tell on her?”
“No.” This time as she lapsed into thought, her fingertip followed the rim of the tea glass. “Later I wished I had told. If she hadn’t been half drunk, she never would have looked twice at a guy like Allen Strickland.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He was so blue collar.”
“And I wasn’t?”
“Well, you… you were different.”
“I rode a motorcycle and flew airplanes. He drove a company truck. Appears to me that the difference between us was the vehicles.”
“In terms of boyfriends, that’s huge.”
“Okay. Continue.”
“Where was I?”
“You were blaming yourself for Susan’s actions. You shouldn’t. She made her own choices that day.”
“But she was my sister. I should have watched out for her.”
“Was she watching out for you?”
She lowered her gaze and must have decided not to venture too far in that direction, because she moved past it. “I returned to the pavilion and tried to remain inconspicuous. Susan’s group eventually began trickling back from the boathouse. I became worried when she didn’t come back with the rest. I wondered if she’d drunk so much she’d gotten sick. I went back to the boathouse to check on her.
“Or…” She closed her eyes and rubbed her temple. “Or am I confusing that with later?” She gave a small shake of her head. “It was so long ago that sometimes I have trouble piecing together the sequence of events.”
Watching her closely, he said, “You didn’t have trouble with the sequence when you wrote the book. The girl in it didn’t return to the boathouse until the tornado was on top of her.”
“Right,” she said vaguely. Then more definitively, “Right.” Still, frowning, she paused before continuing. “Susan was among the last stragglers to return to the pavilion. She looked more vibrant and beautiful than ever. Most women don’t hold up too well when they overdrink, but the alcohol had made her look… aglow.
“Allen Strickland asked her to dance. He was a great dancer. One of those men who can really move, make the steps look fluid and effortless. In full control of himself and his partner. You know the kind?”
“Not really,” he said wryly. “I usually don’t watch men dance.”
“Then take my word for it. He was good. Susan, too. One song segued into another, and Allen Strickland stayed her partner. The way they moved together was in-your-face sexy, and everybody noticed. His hands were all over her, and she wasn’t doing anything to discourage him. The opposite, in fact.”
She paused for a length of time, lost in the memory.
Then, speaking softly, she said, “Considering how the two of them had been grinding against each other on the dance floor, it wasn’t at all surprising that Allen Strickland was the first man the police questioned.”
“You’re wrong there, A.k.a.,” he said bitterly. “I was the first.”
Several hundred miles away, former Austin PD homicide detective Dale Moody was also remembering his first interview with Denton Carter. All these years later, he remembered it like it had happened yesterday. It played like a recording inside his head.
“Son, you’d just as well tell us what we know to be the truth, ’cause we’re gonna find out anyway, sooner or later. It would save you some trouble and earn our good graces if you came clean now. How ’bout it?”
“I had nothing to do with it.”
“You and Susan snuck off into the woods so you could be alone, am I right? Things got hot. Then, like girls sometimes do, she called a halt to it. Hell, I understand how mad that must’ve made you, Dent. I myself hate when that happens.”
“I’ll bet you do. And I’ll bet it happens to you a lot. But it doesn’t happen to me. It sure as hell didn’t happen at the barbecue because I wasn’t even there.”
“You were, Dent, you were.”
“Not until after the tornado ripped through! Before that I was flying with Gall. Ask him.”
“I’ve got an officer out there now, talking to him.”
“Well, then that should be the end of it. I wasn’t at the barbecue, and I didn’t kill Susan. She was my girlfriend.”
“Who you’d had a fight with that morning.”
Silence.
“Her family has told me about that quarrel, Dent. They said the two of you really went at it. She slammed back into the house. You tore away from their place on your motorcycle in a huff. Right or wrong?”
“Right. So what?”
“What did you and Susan argue about?”
“About me not going to the barbecue with her. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I wasn’t fucking there.”
“Watch your language, boy. Do you know who you’re talking to?”
“Oh, sorry. Let me rephrase that. I wasn’t fucking there… asshole.”
Dale clicked his tongue as though switching off a playback machine. He knew the dialogue by heart. Like everything else relating to the Susan Lyston case, it had stayed with him. He was cursed with total recall. But, if he was rusty on a point, all he had to do was consult his well-thumbed copy of Low Pressure.
Which he did now, flipping through the pages until he found the scene where the character patterned after him was trying to squeeze a confession out of the victim’s boyfriend. Bellamy Lyston hadn’t been in that interrogation room, but she’d come pretty damn close to telling it just like it had been.
In fact, every scene in her book was eerily accurate. The lady had a talent for telling a story in a way that kept the reader glued to the pages. Dale just wished her captivating story hadn’t been this story. His story.
It was happenstance that he’d even learned about her book. His TV had been tuned to a morning news show. He’d been waiting for his coffee to brew and hadn’t really been paying much attention to what the guest and the host were talking about. But when he realized the pretty novelist was Bellamy Lyston Price, all grown up and dressed fit to kill, he’d stopped what he was doing and gave a listen.
She was saying that her novel was about the murder of a sixteen-year-old girl at a Memorial Day barbecue. That was when Dale’s stomach had begun to roil, and, by the time the interview had concluded, he was swallowing hard to keep down the whiskey he’d drunk the night before. It had come up anyway, scalding and sour, searing the back of his throat.
He pulled himself together and drove to the nearest Walmart, bought a copy of the book, and started reading it as soon as he got home. It wasn’t as bad as he was afraid it would be.
It was worse.
He’d felt like his belly had been ripped open with one of those instruments of torture they’d used back in the Middle Ages and his guts were on display for anybody who wanted to dig around in them to see what they could find.
His hands shook now as he lit a cigarette, poured a glass of Jack, picked up his pistol, and carried it and the drink out onto his front porch, which wasn’t a befitting name for the sad-looking, warped wood platform. It matched the rest of his cabin: old, neglected, and deteriorating a noticeable degree each day.
Which also described Dale Moody himself. It would be interesting to see which would give out first: the porch, his lungs, or his liver.
If he got lucky and the porch collapsed beneath him, the fall might break his neck and kill him instantly. If he got lung cancer, he’d let it take him without putting up a fight. Same with cirrhosis. If none of that happened soon… Well, that was why the S&W .357 was always within easy reach.
One of these days he just might work up the nerve to put the barrel in his mouth and pull the trigger. A few times, when he was really drunk, he’d played Russian roulette with it, but he’d always won. Or lost. Depending on how you looked at it.
It was a hot, breathless afternoon, the thick silence shattered only by the screech of cicadas. The shade found beneath the tin roof overhang on the porch provided little relief from the sweltering heat. Through the cypresses, the still surface of Caddo Lake looked like a brass plate.
The cabin in which he’d lived alone for fifteen years was situated on a densely wooded peninsula. The cove it formed looked dark and malevolent with its low canopy of moss-laden trees and viscous swamp waters. Few fishermen ventured into the uninviting inlet. Dale Moody liked it that way. Solitude had been what he was after when he’d bought the place, paying cash, filing the documents under a name he took off a hundred-year-old gravestone.
He sat down in his creaky rocker with the fraying cane seat, sipped the whiskey, drew on the cigarette, and enjoyed the reassuring weight of the loaded revolver resting on his thigh.
As he sat there, barely putting forth the effort to rock the chair, he asked himself, as he did most days, how his life might have been different if Susan Lyston hadn’t been killed that day. Would he have distinguished himself as a homicide detective, received commendations and handshakes from the mayor, stayed on with the Austin PD until he could draw full retirement? Would he still be married and have contact with his children? Would he know what his grandkids looked like?
But Susan Lyston had been killed on that dreadful Memorial Day eighteen years ago. The date not only marked her murder, it was also meteorologically significant. The first tornado to strike Austin in almost half a century had roared through the city and torn it all to hell, leaving destruction and death in its unforgiving path. One of the hardest-hit areas was the state park where the Lystons were hosting their annual company party.
The attendees had been having such a good time that few took notice of the threatening clouds beyond hoping that rain wouldn’t cancel the fireworks display scheduled for that night. Eventually, though, people became concerned about the premature dusk, the noticeable change in the barometric pressure, the supernatural stillness, and the greenish cast of the sky.
Parents started gathering up their children, who had scattered to various areas of the park to take advantage of the games and activities organized by the Lystons. The face-painting lady packed up her pots and brushes. Band members stopped playing and loaded their instruments and speakers into their van to wait out the storm. Caterers put covers over their trays of potato salad and baked beans.
But these trifling safeguards were spitballs against a juggernaut. Even if there had been time to implement more safety precautions, experts later agreed that they would have done little or no good against a twister that was a mile wide and packed circulating winds of nearly two hundred miles an hour.
Austin was located south of the geographical band known as Tornado Alley, so many who lived there weren’t as attuned to the dangers as were their neighbors farther north. They’d seen pictures of devastation, sure. They’d watched films on TV and marveled at these most vicious and unpredictable offspring of Mother Nature.
But one couldn’t really be prepared for the power and the fury that a funnel cloud was capable of. It was something one had to experience to really know what it was like, and many who did experience it didn’t live to tell about it. Several fools ignored the warning sirens and went outside to watch the cloud. Two of those disappeared entirely. Nothing of them was ever found.
City-wide the death toll was sixty-seven. Nine of those casualties were recovered from the site of the barbecue at the state park.
Twelve hours after the storm, the city was still in a high state of emergency. All of Travis County was declared a disaster area. The entire police force was working search-and-rescue, along with the fire department, the sheriff’s office, the National Guard, the Red Cross, and a multitude of volunteers.
They had their hands full trying to reunite families, search for the missing and dead, convey the injured to medical facilities, restore law and order where looters were wreaking havoc, set up shelters for survivors whose homes had been demolished, and clear debris-blocked roads so emergency vehicles and public utility trucks could get through.
Around dawn the following morning, after a night spent in the midst of pandemonium, Dale had received a summons to the morgue, which, considering the state of things, was a major pain in the ass.
But he’d heeded the call. When he arrived, he’d been met by the chief ME, who’d looked frazzled and near exhaustion himself. His staff was overwhelmed by the number of bodies still being brought in, some in pieces, making identification a challenge that strained the objectivity of even the most hardened pros.
Leaving Dale even more puzzled as to why the doc had called for a detective to drop what he was doing and rush right over.
“We’re both busy, Detective, so I’ll make this quick. We’ve got a girl here, in her teens, whose body was recovered from the state park.”
“She was at the Lyston Electronics party?”
“She was a Lyston. Their daughter Susan.”
“Jesus.”
“I’m told her body was discovered under the branches of an uprooted tree. But the thing is, the reason I called for a detective, that’s not what killed her. The injuries she sustained during the tornado were postmortem.”
“Come again?”
“Cause of death was asphyxiation. She was strangled.”
“Are you sure?”
He’d shown Dale the cadaver. “The bruising here on her neck indicates strangulation. Where she was scraped and cut by the falling tree, she didn’t bleed. She sustained blunt trauma to several organs, which could have been fatal, but she was already dead.”
It had fallen to Dale to impart that news to her parents, who were already reeling from shock and grief over what they believed was a storm-related death. He’d watched Howard and Olivia Lyston shatter. Learning that their daughter had been murdered compounded their heartache a thousandfold.
Their tragedy had landed Dale Moody a murder case.
Combing the crime scene for evidence had been an exercise in futility, a joke. The tornado had ravaged the entire area. Trees that weren’t completely uprooted had been stripped bare of leaves, their naked branches ripped off and tossed to the ground like toothpicks. Investigators had to hack through the natural debris just to get to the scene of the crime. The area had also been trampled by first responders and panicked survivors searching for missing loved ones.
If the perp had planned it, he couldn’t have done better than to have an F-5 tornado sweep through the place where he’d killed Susan Lyston.
Dale and other detectives had tried to question everyone who’d attended the barbecue and had been in the vicinity at the time of the slaying. They’d interviewed as many as they could locate. But both the pavilion and the boathouse had been flattened. The gravel lot where over two hundred vehicles were parked had been turned into an apocalyptic landscape of twisted steel and shattered glass.
Consequently, dozens who’d narrowly escaped death had sustained serious injuries. Many were hospitalized with internal injuries, head trauma, compound fractures, cuts and contusions, and shock. It had taken weeks to track down and question everyone.
But in the meantime, Dale had grilled Denton Carter.
As the boyfriend with whom Susan had quarreled that morning, his name had gone to the top of the list of possible suspects. Right off, Dale and his team of detectives thought they had their man. The eighteen-year-old was a surly wiseass who had issues with authority. Dale heard that from faculty members of the high school from which Dent had graduated only the week before.
“He’s an intelligent kid,” a school counselor had told Dale. “He finished with a three-point-two GPA and probably could have done better if he’d wanted to. But that was the problem. He didn’t want to. Terrible attitude. The boy carries a big chip on his shoulder.”
Dale had discovered that for himself the first time he hauled Dent Carter in for questioning. After the vulgar language, Dale had put him in jail, thinking that a night in lockup might improve his manners. But the following day he had smirked at Dale and shot him the finger when he was released.
Dale had hated watching him saunter out, but he didn’t have any evidence with which to hold him. Not then, and not days later, after conducting a thorough investigation and repeated interrogations. The boy’s story never deviated from what he had initially told Dale. No one could testify to seeing him at the barbecue, and the old man from the airfield provided him with an alibi. Dale had had no choice but to let him go.
His interest had shifted to Allen Strickland.
Now, Dale hefted his pistol in his palm while mentally enumerating all the facts that had pointed to Strickland’s guilt. There had been enough to charge him. But there wasn’t a single, solid piece of hard evidence to prove that he’d killed that girl.
The ADA assigned to prosecute the case, Rupert Collier, an eager bloodsucker if ever there was one, had built a case out of circumstantial evidence. His summation had been delivered with the fervor of a tent revival evangelist. As though fearing hell for themselves if they didn’t convict, the jury had brought in a guilty verdict in under two hours.
Allen Strickland had gone to prison.
Dale Moody had turned to drink.
Eighteen years later, Bellamy Lyston Price had written a book that underscored every doubt Dale had ever entertained about what had happened in the woods that day just before the historic tornado.
And what made him mad as hell was that that damn book might conjure up doubt in the minds of others as well. The ending left a lot open to speculation. Readers might start wondering if maybe the criminal investigation had been sloppy, if maybe the ambition of the ADA had outdazzled that of the accused’s court-appointed defender, if maybe Allen Strickland hadn’t been the last person to see Susan Lyston alive after all.
It was one thing for Dale to rethink the Susan Lyston case all day, every day. But he didn’t want anyone else to.
It had made him feel only marginally better to learn that Bellamy Price’s book had made Rupe nervous, too. Rupe Collier was a bigshot in Austin these days. He couldn’t be happy over having himself portrayed in the book as a ruthless young prosecutor who would go to any lengths to get his belt notched with a felony conviction, although that was exactly what he’d been and precisely what he’d done.
And he was looking for Dale.
Donald Haymaker, a buddy from Dale’s days on the force who still had ties to the Austin PD and was one of the few people among his acquaintances who knew how to reach him, had called him a few weeks ago, days after T. J. David’s true identity became known.
After they’d swapped trite pleasantries, he’d said, “Uh, Dale, have you heard about this book?”
He didn’t need to specify which book. Dale told him he’d read Bellamy Price’s Low Pressure.
“Me, too,” Haymaker admitted with noticeable awkwardness. “I think everybody in the country has. Rupe Collier included. He, uh, he called me, Dale. He hem-hawed for ten minutes or so, then casually—way too casually—asked me if I knew where you were and how to get in touch.”
“You didn’t give him my number, did you?”
“Hell no! But what do you think that slippery sumbitch wants with you after all these years? It’s gotta have something to do with that book, don’t you think?”
That was precisely what Dale thought. The book would have caused Rupe’s sphincter to pucker. He would be hating it and the hype surrounding it even more than Dale did, and Dale hated it like hell.
Bellamy Lyston Price, that homely, gawky titmouse of a girl, had stirred up a damn fucking mess. It had all the potential of becoming the crowning touch to Dale Moody’s miserable life.
He finished his whiskey in one slug, dropped his cigarette butt on the porch, balanced the pistol in his hand, and wished with every decaying fiber of his being that, just once before he died, he could enjoy a moment when he would know with one hundred percent certainty that he had helped convict the right man.