Quiet as the Grave

Suzie set the bowl back down carefully, replacing it in its same circle of dust. She looked over her shoulder toward the circular staircase. A shadow lay on the checkerboard marble floor, and it had a watery quality, as if something or someone just out of sight was stealthily moving.

“Mayor Millner?” Suzie walked to the edge of the room and looked out.

There was no answer. The shadow was perfectly still now, bisecting one white and one black square. She scanned the hall and realized that it came from a door, which was propped half open and cut off the light from the etched-glass front entry.

“Dork,” she told herself, and went back into the room.

She twisted her watch on her wrist and looked at the face. Where the heck was Millner? She didn’t like being down here all alone.

At least she hoped she was all alone. A half-naked gardener, who clearly believed he had come into the world gift wrapped and labeled To Women, From God, had opened the front door. He had licked her all over with his eyes, and then, when she’d given him her best no-way-in-hell look, he’d deposited her in this room and ambled out the back door.

He’d told her he needed to put out some poison for the rabid raccoons, which she had to admit was pretty funny as a response to her rejection. She did have on a lot of eye shadow today.

But who knew what he was really doing? Any dude who liked to strut his six-pack and his five-o’clock shadow at nine in the morning simply couldn’t be trusted.

He was probably the murderer himself.

She shivered. That didn’t come out as funny as she’d meant it to.

She looked out the big bay window toward the lake, which shimmered so violently under the bright morning sun that it seemed to be on fire.

And then, for the very first time, she realized that this wasn’t a scary story; it wasn’t a dream. And it wasn’t a joke.

Justine was really dead. Her body had been found right out there, between the marble house and the fiery lake.

There really was a murderer.

Suzie’s stomach tightened, which made her mad at herself. When did she get to be such a bundle of nerves? No one was after her. At any given moment, there were probably a hundred people in Justine’s life who might have been driven to murder. Ten years ago, Suzie could have been one of them. It wouldn’t necessarily follow that those people would ever kill anyone else.

Justine had always been a law of her own.

Suzie sat on the piano bench, her legs oddly weak. Back in Albany, when she’d heard about Justine’s body being found, she’d thought, oh, poor Mike. And then, poor Gavin. And then, though she wasn’t proud of this, good riddance.

But never once had she truly assimilated the reality. A real, breathing woman, a woman with laughter and dreams and passions and fears, was dead. All her possibilities for good or bad were extinguished.

And a son was motherless.

Much as she’d disliked Justine, Suzie wished that the beautiful blonde would saunter into the room, tossing her wavy hair and laughing through her full red lips at what a gullible dork Suzie Strickland was, falling for yet another of Justine’s mean practical jokes.

But it would never happen.

Suzie flipped open the sheet music and hit a few keys, thinking the noise might chase away the image of Justine’s red lips rotting in the garden just a hundred yards away.

The piano was so out of tune it made her ears hurt. She wondered whether Justine had been tone-deaf. Mike had been musical, she remembered that. Probably, after Mike moved out, no one had touched the piano at all.

“Suzie?”

She looked up at the sound of Mayor Millner’s voice. He stood in the entryway, and for a minute they just stared at each other, as if neither one could believe their eyes.

“Suzie Strickland?” He squinted. “Is that really you?”

She stood, smoothing her long hair, her blue cotton skirt falling around her shins. She was used to this stunned double take when she saw people who’d known her back in Firefly Glen. Sometimes it annoyed her. Had people really been so blinded by her purple hair and black glasses that they didn’t recognize her without them?

But it didn’t annoy her today. She was too shocked herself. The last time she saw him, Mayor Millner had been black haired, bold and big chested, in his prime and enjoying it. Exuding importance.

The man she saw now looked fifty years older, not ten. His hair was thin, unkempt and the color of unpolished silver. His shoulders were rounded, sloping in, like a person carrying a boulder on his back.

She flushed with instinctive shame, remembering her callous “good riddance” when she’d heard of Justine’s death. How could she have been such a bitch? To Suzie, Justine was little more than a bitter memory, a cartoon caricature of aggressive breasts and predatory lips.

To this man Justine had been life itself.

“Hello, Mayor,” Suzie said, about ten times as gently as she’d intended to. Mayor Millner had treated Suzie like dirt in the old days, and she’d been looking forward to a little payback. But that was unthinkable now.

He came into the room. His left arm seemed to be trembling, and he held it close to his side.

“Thank you for coming,” he said. “I wouldn’t have recognized you. You look lovely.”

She ignored the barb. Though she knew it hadn’t been intentional, it was true. She hadn’t been exactly “lovely” back in her high school days. She’d gone out of her way to avoid it. She’d been making a statement, or so she’d thought.

Mostly, she knew now, she’d just been hiding behind it.

“I know this must be a terrible time for your family,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you.” His eyes, watery from the beginning, glistened in the light from the bay window. “It’s been a two-year nightmare, but in my heart I’ve always known she was dead. She would never have put her mother through this.”

Suzie nodded, though she wasn’t quite as certain about that. In the past, Justine had rarely seemed to concern herself with the fallout from her outrageous behavior. But she had to allow that perhaps Justine’s parents knew her better than Suzie did.

“Why did you want to see me, Mayor?”

She couldn’t imagine calling him anything else, though he wasn’t the mayor of Firefly Glen anymore, she’d heard. When Justine disappeared, he had resigned that job and come to live alone here, in this house, for eighteen months, looking for his daughter and waiting for her to come home.

She wondered if that haunted him now, knowing that, every time he walked down to the lake, he had passed within feet of Justine’s dead body.

If Suzie had ever needed proof that there was no such thing as ghosts, this would be it. Surely Justine’s ghost would have called out to her father as he tromped by, supervising the divers who dragged Tuxedo Lake.

“I need you to help me,” Mayor Millner said with more force than Suzie had seen yet. “I want justice for my daughter.”

Something invisible skittered down Suzie’s spine on tiny cold feet. What was he talking about? Did he think she had done something to Justine? Exactly how crazy had grief left this guy?

“Justice?”

“Yes. I want that bastard Mike Frome arrested, but the police say they don’t have enough evidence.”

Suzie frowned. “Mike? You think Mike killed Justine?”

“I don’t think he did. I know he did. And I’m going to make him pay for it, if it’s the last thing I do. I need you to help me.”

“Mayor Millner, I don’t think—”