Hush: A Thriller Part 12

TWELVE.

After Bill left, they ate ice cream, the three of them. Or, rather, Riley and Margaret ate ice cream, spooning it up (with Margaret making the occasional exaggerated little sound of pleasure as if she were trying to encourage a baby to eat), while Emma, after taking a couple of tiny bites to please them, stirred her spoon around the melting contents of her bowl as if they wouldn't notice what she was doing.

It was a desperate attempt at normalcy, undertaken solely for Emma's benefit.

And, except for the fact that Emma wasn't eating and Jeff wasn't there and they were sitting at a secondhand table in a small, crowded kitchen in a dreary ranch house rather than a custom-made banquette in the bow-windowed breakfast room of a mansion where they'd once habitually adjourned to eat ice cream, it was almost like old times.

Also, back then there hadn't been a squad car parked in their driveway that might possibly be all that stood between them and being murdered in their beds. And Riley hadn't had a perpetual knot in her stomach. And Margaret hadn't had that haunted look in her eyes.

And none of them had been afraid. She knew they were both thinking the same thing: What have we done?

"So who sent the ice cream?" Emma asked, stirring.

Glad to have something so innocuous to talk about, Riley swallowed her mouthful of chocolate peanut b.u.t.ter crunch. The flavor wasn't her favorite, but she hoped that seeing her enjoying it would encourage Emma. Anyway, the cold smoothness of it felt good going down her bruised throat. "I told the FBI agent who drove me home that I'd meant to pick some up. I'm sure it was him."

"That was thoughtful of him," Margaret said in a falsely bright tone.

"We're never going to get away from this, are we?" Emma asked in a subdued tone. "People think we were part of what Dad did."

"No one thinks that," Margaret protested.

Emma looked impatient. "Oh, yes, they do. Even the kids at my art program keep asking me things like, so where's the cash? They all think we know. Everybody thinks we know." She looked at Riley. "That's the reason that a.s.shat hurt you. That's why somebody killed Jeff. That's why there's a cop car parked outside right now. We're all in danger because Dad scammed all that money and everybody thinks we know where it is."

"The cop car's a precaution," Riley said. "The a.s.shat who attacked me was after Jeff's phone. You heard me go outside and tell everybody in the whole world who's interested that I gave it to the FBI. I don't think anybody's going to come after me again, because I no longer have anything they want. I don't think anybody was ever going to come after you, or your mom."

Emma said, "But you don't know."

Margaret was looking distressed. "Honey, it won't always be like this. Time heals. People will forget."

Emma looked from her mother to Riley and back. "That is such bulls.h.i.+t," she burst out. "This whole thing is such bulls.h.i.+t. Everything is ruined. For the rest of my life, people are still going to be calling me 'that crook George Cowan's kid.' And Jeff will always, always be dead. And we didn't even do anything wrong."

With that she shoved her chair back, jumped up, and ran from the room. A moment later, the slam of her bedroom door echoed through the house.

Margaret's shoulders slumped. There were circles beneath her eyes that hadn't been there before, and the lines running from her nose to her mouth suddenly seemed more p.r.o.nounced. She appeared utterly defeated.

Riley hurt for her. For Emma, too. For all of them.

"You're right, you know," Riley said quietly. "People will forget, and time does heal. Emma's just too young to realize it."

"I wouldn't say this to anybody but you but-oh, I hate George for what he's done to us." Anger blazed suddenly from Margaret's eyes. Riley's own eyes widened. In all the time she'd known her, she could count on one hand the number of times she'd seen Margaret angry. Margaret's voice shook as she continued: "He's the reason Jeff's dead. And the reason you were almost killed tonight. And Emma-dear lord, what if someone comes after her?"

Her pale, slender hands lay palm down on the table on either side of the bowl that held the melting mound of pink ice cream. As she finished they clenched into fists.

"There's a cop car in the driveway," Riley reminded her. "With two armed cops in it. And no one could think Emma knows anything."

Margaret wet her lips. "They could hurt George through Emma. Far more than they could through Jeff. He-she was his little girl. We've got to do something."

Fear twisted inside Riley like a knife. Meeting Margaret's eyes, she could see the same fear reflected back at her.

Panic did no one any good. Covering one of Margaret's clenched fists with her hand, Riley said steadily, "There's no way anyone could think that any of the three of us know anything. What happened to me tonight was strictly about what was on Jeff's phone."

The fear in Margaret's eyes didn't abate. "What was on it?"

"I don't know," Riley replied wearily, and made a gesture indicating that she didn't want to talk about it right then. She'd been right in her suspicions so far. It wasn't that much of a stretch to conclude that someone-like, say, Agent Finn Bradley of the FBI-might be listening in on everything they said, even inside the house.

"This is a nightmare," Margaret whispered, and closed her eyes. Riley could see that she was fighting for composure. Riley knew that Margaret was being shaken by the same terrible thought that had hit Riley earlier-had their actions somehow brought Jeff's killer down upon him?

A hard, cold knot formed in her chest.

The next question-would it bring a killer down upon them?-sent a s.h.i.+ver down her spine.

After a moment Margaret's eyes opened and her hands unclenched. Riley patted those pale fingers then pulled her own hand away. Glancing toward the hall that led to the bedrooms, Margaret said in a more normal tone, "Emma's like me. We tend to stick our heads in the sand in times of trouble. We've both been thinking that one day things would get back to normal. Now that Jeff-" Her voice quivered, and she didn't finish the thought. "I guess Emma and I are both just now facing up to the fact that nothing can ever be normal again."

"Things won't be the same," Riley said around the sudden constriction in her throat. "But you'll adjust. So will Emma. We all just need to hang on."

Margaret pushed back from the table and stood up. "I'm going to go talk to her. Even though she probably doesn't feel like talking to me right now."

Riley nodded. As Margaret left the room, Riley saw that for once her usually perfect posture had forsaken her. Her head was bowed, her shoulders hunched. She walked like she was carrying the weight of the world on her back.

With Margaret gone, Riley did the only thing that was left for her to do: she cleared away the ice cream bowls, rinsing them and putting them in the dishwasher. Then she headed down the hall to get ready for bed. Through Emma's closed door she could hear the murmur of Margaret's voice, along with other m.u.f.fled sounds that she thought had to be Emma, sobbing. Riley's stomach turned inside out all over again.

No matter what any of them did now, the hard truth was there was no going back.

An hour later, Riley tossed aside the light blanket she'd been curled beneath on the living room couch and stood up. As exhausted as she was, sleep refused to come. The house was quiet and dark, except for the light she'd left on in the kitchen because darkness now made her uneasy.

Lifting one edge of the closed front curtains, she peered out to rea.s.sure herself that the cop car was still in the driveway. It was: she could see the shape of it, pale against the night. She felt a rush of grat.i.tude toward Finn for sending it, but as quickly as it came she s.h.i.+ed away from it: he was the last thing she wanted to think about right now. She looked past the cop car to see that the TV trucks were gone. As far as she could tell, no one was out and about. The street was still. A lighted window here, a porch light there, provided only small points of illumination in the blackness.

Letting the curtain drop, she turned and padded into the narrow hall. Her destination was the bathroom, which was the first door on the right. Margaret and Emma each had bedrooms at the end of the hall. The other bedroom, the one Jeff had used, was almost directly across from the bathroom. Like the others, its door was closed. She couldn't bring herself to sleep there, in the bed he had used, so she'd been sleeping on the couch. Since she was the first one up every morning, she wasn't sure the others even knew.

She had almost reached her destination when the sound of a door opening made her glance swiftly toward the end of the hall.

Margaret stood in her bedroom doorway, shadowy and indistinct except for the faint gleam of her white satin robe as it reflected the dim glow of the kitchen light. The kitchen was behind Riley, and her pale blue nightgown was soft cotton and wouldn't reflect the light; still, she had no doubt Margaret could see her, too.

Margaret came toward her. Riley stopped, waiting.

"I can't get it out of my mind," Margaret whispered as she reached her. "Was Jeff killed because-?"

"Shh." Catching the other woman's arm, Riley pulled her into the bathroom, which was tiny and ordinary: white tub, sink, toilet, fifties-era avocado green tiles on the floor and walls. She flipped on the light, closed the door. Putting a finger to her lips, she then turned on the tap in the sink as high as it would go. Cold water so it wouldn't steam up the room, making it even warmer than it was because the central air-conditioning unit was in the last stages of its life cycle. Like she'd told Finn earlier, she watched TV, and sometimes even learned from it: in one of the police procedural shows she favored, the sound of running water had been used to provide the kind of white noise that could foil eavesdropping devices. Not that she was convinced that the shows were accurate, and not that she was convinced that they were being eavesdropped on, but under the circ.u.mstances she thought it would be smart to do what she could, just in case.

Margaret looked at her with surprise.

"So we won't be overheard," Riley explained, low-voiced.

"Emma's asleep." Margaret's arms were folded over her chest, and by the bathroom's stark light, without makeup, she looked old. The fine lines in her face were readily apparent. Her lips were pale and dry. Her eyes were red-rimmed. Tension made the tendons in her neck stand out above the lace-trimmed edge of her floral nightgown, which was just visible above the lapels of her tightly tied robe. The running-water precaution wasn't about Emma, but Riley had no time to explain as Margaret rushed on, quietly but with an edge of near hysteria in her voice. "Could Jeff have known? Could anybody know, and think it was him? Oh, dear G.o.d, was he killed because of what we did?"

- CHAPTER -

THIRTEEN.

That was the question that had been hammering at Riley since she'd found Jeff's body. It had chewed holes in her heart, clawed its way through her mind.

It was the primary reason she had originally taken his phone, and, earlier tonight, the SIM card: in case somehow, in some way, there was something incriminating on it, some kind of clue, some kind of link that might lead to what she and Margaret had done. In case there was something on it that might provide an investigator-or someone even worse-with the kind of aha moment that she had experienced.

The idea had terrified her even as she had crouched in shock below Jeff's dead body, and it terrified her still. But having had time to consider, she thought the chance of that being the case was somewhere between slim and none.

At least, that's what she thought when it wasn't the middle of the night and all kinds of horrific scenarios were invading her dreams.

Once she'd had a chance to plug the SIM card into an e-reader and make a thorough search of the contents, she'd know for sure. But she had to wait until she could figure out a way to make certain that accessing the information on that SIM card wouldn't send a flaming look-at-me arrow shooting out through cybers.p.a.ce.

But for now, for the sake of Margaret's peace of mind, she was going to go with pure logic.

"If Jeff had even suspected, he would have said something." Riley had already mentally reviewed the manner in which Jeff had summoned her to Oakwood on that last night, in case he'd stumbled onto something just before he'd died. If so, it had to have been after he'd texted her, because he'd given her no clue in his message. But she didn't think that's what had happened: unless he'd been incapacitated, he would have phone-blasted her with excitement at the discovery as soon as he'd made it. Unless, of course, he hadn't had time. "I'm almost positive he didn't know. That's not why he was killed."

Margaret sat down abruptly on the closed lid of the toilet and looked up at her with torment in her eyes. "Then why?"

Riley had no answer to that, so she just shook her head.

"Jeff's the one who found George's calendar on that cloud thing in the first place," Margaret persisted. "Wouldn't there be some trace of him looking at it?"

"iCloud," Riley corrected automatically, adding, "I don't think so," as she thought back to a Friday night, that Friday night, a little more than a month ago. She'd been giving Jeff a ride home from the Palm Room after he'd stopped in to share the latest results from his investigation into the supposed murders of George's a.s.sociates, and, not incidentally, cadge some free drinks (from one of the waitresses who had a soft spot for him, not from her). Accessing the Internet from his phone while she drove, using old usernames and pa.s.swords he knew his father had once used, he'd unexpectedly hit pay dirt: a cache of George's emails, photos, notes, etc., that everyone had believed no longer existed. They were in an account that apparently automatically backed up to the cloud, which would have floored George if he had realized it, because in the days before his arrest, suspecting it was imminent, he had deleted all his files and then destroyed the devices they were kept on in an attempt to prevent them from falling into the hands of investigators.

Jeff had whooped gleefully upon discovering that at least some of that material was still around. At his insistence, she'd pulled into a McDonald's parking lot while he went through it, looking for clues that might corroborate his theories about the deaths of his father's a.s.sociates being murders, or, alternatively, lead to the missing money. He'd been careful not to download anything since the feds were still suspicious that he'd been involved in his father's crimes. He didn't want to leave any cyber trail that would lead back to him in case an investigator should subsequently come across the files and accuse him of some kind of prior knowledge. But he'd shared bits and pieces with her, probably in a bid to defuse her impatience to get going again.

None of it had seemed to have anything to do with what he was looking into, as Riley had pithily told him. None of it had seemed to have anything to do with anything worth talking about, in fact. It had all been seemingly minor, personal stuff.

One of the items had been George's calendar for the month in which he'd been arrested. All the appointments he'd jotted down were business-related, and if they held some significance other than a frantic winding up of his affairs, Riley was too tired to spot it, or care.

"You know, it's after three a.m., and I've been working for something like eighteen hours now. You want to explain to me why I'm sitting in a parking lot looking at this stuff with you?" she'd growled. "Remind me, next time you come to my club and drink too much, to call you a cab."

"You're the one who insisted on driving me home. And I can't afford a cab." Jeff was still paging through the calendar, utterly absorbed. "I don't want to do this at my mother's house. Now they can track everything everybody does online. You know these phones have a GPS, right? You never know if maybe the location of whatever device is looking at this stuff is getting embedded somewhere. I want to make it as hard as possible for them to actually trace it back to me."

"Oh my G.o.d, there you go with the 'them' again. You are totally paranoid." Riley had rolled her eyes and restarted the car. "That's it. I've had enough. We're out of here."

"Riley-"

"Forget it." She drove to the exit, pulled out onto the dark street, headed west.

That's when Jeff had said, "Even in the midst of everything that was going on, Dad put a note on his calendar about Emma's birthday." Which, to add to that particular month's fun, had been only four days before the FBI had hauled George out of his office in handcuffs. "Happy sixteenth to my baby girl. Whatever happens, we'll always have Paris." Riley could still remember the sudden flash of emotion with which Jeff had added, "How did the mean old b.a.s.t.a.r.d even have the b.a.l.l.s to write that, knowing that he'd done everything he could to basically destroy her life?"

Riley couldn't remember what she'd replied to that. Her thoughts were already skipping ahead to three days after that conversation had taken place, when she'd been standing in the doorway of Margaret's bedroom chatting with her while the other woman finished getting dressed. Riley's gaze had happened to rest on the small painting propped on a decorative gilt easel that occupied a corner of Margaret's dresser. It was one of the of-no-value-to-anyone-outside-the-family personal items the government had had no interest in confiscating.

It was a five-by-seven unframed canvas, an oil in soft pastels. Emma had painted it, from a photograph, Riley thought. In it, Emma and Margaret stood arm-in-arm in front of the Eiffel Tower.

Riley remembered that trip: it had been over spring break in Emma's freshman year. Emma and Margaret had gone alone.

Whatever happens, we'll always have Paris.

George had written those words presumably about himself and Emma. But Riley was as sure as it was possible to be that Emma had never spent a day in Paris with George in her life.

George never did anything without a purpose.

Since Emma had painted it, that painting had been on Margaret's dresser, first in the vast master suite at Oakwood and, later, in this small house.

While Margaret slipped into her shoes, Riley crossed to the painting and picked it up.

Even now, she could remember the way her heart had started pounding when she'd looked at the brown paper backing stapled to the wooden frame the canvas was stretched over: four of the staples on the left side were missing. Although the paper still lay flat against the frame, the absence of the staples created an opening.

Being careful not to rip the paper, she slid a finger inside. There was something there, in the s.p.a.ce between the painting and the paper backing. It felt like the cavity was stuffed with tissues. Soft and silky tissues. As in, Kleenex.

Frowning, withdrawing her finger, Riley shook the painting. Nothing. No sound, no movement.

It seemed likely that the tissues were put there for just that purpose: to keep something that was inside from moving around, or from making a sound if the painting was moved around. Riley was familiar with Emma's paintings. To her knowledge, they weren't routinely stuffed with tissues.

"What are you doing?" Having finished dressing, Margaret came to stand next to her, frowning at her through the mirror that hung over the dresser.

"I think something's in here," Riley said.

A moment later, with Margaret's permission and the help of a nail file, she'd removed enough of the staples to allow her to see that the painting was indeed stuffed with ordinary white Kleenex. More tissues were wrapped tightly around a small, flat, rectangular object that was held in place by the wadding.

That object, she saw when she pulled the tissues off, was a small black notebook. Pulse pounding, Riley flipped through it.

"Is that-?" Margaret broke off, swallowing convulsively, clearly unable to finish. She'd seen the small, precise handwriting, too. It was unmistakably George's.

"Yes. I think it is." Riley peered more closely at the neat lines of numbers and scribbled notes on the pages, then looked at Margaret, dry-mouthed.

She was almost certain that what she held in her hand was a list of bank accounts, along with their locations and the information needed to access them. It was, in other words, a map to the missing money.

A twenty-first-century treasure map.

Her heart pounded like she'd been running for miles.

Margaret recognized it for what it was, too. The knowledge was there in her eyes.

"Dear Lord, what do we do?" Margaret sounded like she was short of breath.

"Hand it over to the FBI, I guess."