Easy Loving

She had a career and a neatly ordered life. She always imagined she didn’t need anything else. Easy’s startling reemergence made her see the lie. She did want a husband and children, but she was afraid, simple as that. Afraid to love, afraid to lose again, afraid of a broken heart.

Bearing an illegitimate child didn’t brand her as a fallen woman. She’d been sixteen, a child who made a mistake. She rubbed her flat belly, dismayed by the emptiness she felt inside.

She slid the ring onto her finger. It was weighty, flashy, alien.

Certainly Jeffrey would understand. What’s more, she felt, he would still love her.

INSIDE THE PEAK CAFÉ, Easy looked toward the booth where he and Trish usually sat. The small café off Academy Boulevard sat halfway between his office and hers, so they often met here for lunch. Trish waggled her fingers at him. He joined her.

“I ordered you a Peak burger,” she said.

“Thanks.” He wondered if he’d be able to eat it.

She searched his face. “Oh God, Catherine doesn’t believe you about Jeffrey Livman.”

A waitress arrived with two iced teas. She smiled at Easy. He tried to smile back at her, but failed. His gut ached as if he’d been kicked.

“We never talked about Livman.”

Trish’s face twisted in a puzzled frown. She dumped Sweet’n Low into her iced tea. “She wasn’t home?”

“She was there all right.” He huffed a long breath, staring at the iced tea, repulsed. He’d been a confirmed soda drinker until Catherine introduced him to the pleasure of a glass of icy cold sun-brewed tea.

“What happened, Easy? Was Livman there? He’s not supposed to see you. You’ll spook him.” She launched into a diatribe about how Easy was supposed to operate. John had tried to convince the police to investigate Roberta’s death, but they’d found no evidence of foul play and there had been no witnesses. Romoco Insurance, which had carried the life insurance policy, had worked with John, but despite the large benefit, they had turned up nothing to suggest Roberta’s death was anything other than an accident. When the coroner declared the death accidental and closed the file, the insurance company had been forced to pay out, and John’s hope for a police in-■ vestigation had died. They needed a confession. The only way to get it would be to lull Livman into believing he’d gotten away with his crime.

Easy waited until his sister ran out of steam. “Livman wasn’t there. Remember when she left town?”

“Yeah, junior year. She moved.”

“Her parents threw her out. She was pregnant.”

Eyes wide, mouth opened, Trish stared at him.

“I didn’t know. We had that big fight before she could tell me. I can’t believe how stupid I was. I should’ve known.”

“I’m an aunt?” A slow smile brightened Trish’s face. Her eyes glowed. “Boy or girl? Name? Did—”

“She gave the baby up for adoption.”

Her smile winked out like a blown lightbulb. “Oh no. How could she do that? It’s your baby, too. Why didn’t she ever tell you? You guys were so much in love. You’d have married her, right? I know you would have.”

“Why don’t you use a bullhorn? I think some of the people in the parking lot didn’t hear you.” Embarrassed as if he were eighteen again, caught doing something nasty, he glanced around the small restaurant to see if anyone paid attention.

“Sorry,” she mumbled. She leaned over the table and lowered her voice. “I thought she was so smart. Why didn’t she tell you?”

He shook his head. “I was mean to her. When I joined the army, she thought I ran out on her.”

The waitress arrived with their lunch. She set a steaming burger covered with onions, mushrooms and Jack cheese in front of Easy. The knots in his belly jerked tighter. He averted his gaze.

Trish stole the dill pickles off his plate, arranged them on her burger, then sliced the sandwich in half. “You better not tell Mom and Dad.” Her voice reverberated with dire warning.

Their parents bemoaned the single status of their children. They wanted them married, and the house filled with grandchildren to spoil. News of a lost grandchild would crush them.

Trish bit into her burger, chewed and swallowed. She wiped her mouth with a paper napkin. “You can find your kid. You find adopted kids all the time. Shoot, it’s so easy, I could do it.”

Tempting, very tempting. He imagined his daughter looking like a miniature version of Catherine. She probably insisted on being called Elizabeth, never Lizzy or Beth or Betsy. Maybe she was artistic, she was definitely a brain, pulling straight As.

“You have to,” Trish insisted.

Shaking away the images in his head, Easy grunted irritably. “Right now the problem is Livman. I did some research. Catherine paid cash for her house in Black Forest, so she’s got some money of her own. Livman won’t have to shell out for insurance premiums in order to turn a nice profit.”

Trish shuddered. “You can’t let her marry him.”

He poured ketchup on the plate and swirled a french fry through it.

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” he snapped.

She reached across the table and placed a slim hand atop his. “She really got to you, didn’t she?”

“It’s weird. Seeing her again…” He pulled his hand away from hers—he deserved a good kick, not comforting. “She hates me. She thinks it’s my fault she lost the baby. She won’t listen to me.”

“I’ll talk to her. We were friends. Sort of. She’ll listen to me.”

He considered the offer, but discarded it. He suspected one more blast from the past would cause Catherine to run out and buy a shotgun in order to shoot any trespassing Martel on sight. “I have to dig up some dirt on Livman.”

“John already looked. There’s nothing.”

Easy had been impressed by the amount of information John had dug up on his former brother-in-law: schooling, job history, finances, family. None of it, unfortunately, pointed to murder. “There has to be a pattern somewhere. He didn’t decide on the spur of the moment to push Roberta off that rock.”

Trish scrunched her face into an expression of distaste. “You think he killed someone else?”

“Who knows? But I’m thinking Roberta isn’t the first woman he abused.”

Chapter Three (#ulink_14515524-9d8b-542b-86a3-d6031ee08f25)

Easy smiled at the elderly woman who answered the door of the small brick bungalow in Arvada. This quiet neighborhood in a suburb of Denver consisted of tract homes built in the 1950s. Mature elm trees shaded the sidewalks. In this house Jeffrey Livman had grown from a boy into a man.

“Mrs. Vera Livman?” He looked up from the clipboard he carried and glanced at the metal house numbers attached to the bricks next to the door. “I’m from the utility company.” He flicked a finger against the identification badge clipped to the pocket of his coveralls. A computer publishing program, a Polaroid camera and a small laminating machine made producing identification badges and cards a snap. At the moment he was Earl Spencer, employee number 187 with the gas company.

“We’ve got a suspected gas leak in this block. May I come in to check your lines, ma’am?” The lie slipped smoothly from his mouth—he’d used it before. It rarely failed, especially with older women who lived alone. He held up a toy laser gun. Shaped like an oversize television remote, it had an impressive array of dials, switches and lights. It made a terrific “gas detector.” “It won’t take five minutes, ma’am.”

“Gas? I haven’t smelled anything.” She blinked owl-ishly from behind thick bifocals.

“With any luck, you won’t. Safety first, though. It’s nothing to mess around with.”

She unlatched the storm door and pushed it open. “Certainly.”