Body Movers Books 1-3

“No.”

His mouth twitched downward. “Do you remember the date?”

“December second, three weeks before Christmas.” She heard the bitterness in her own voice.

He sipped from his coffee. “Does that have something to do with the little Christmas tree in your living room?”

She looked up sharply.

“I noticed it when I went there to take your brother in. It’s hard to miss.”

She picked at the éclair in front of her. “Yes. Wesley wouldn’t let me take it down.”

“Even after all this time?”

“Even after.”

He made a rueful noise in his throat. “When did you first hear from your parents?”

She looked off into the distance, and tried to make her voice sound detached from the information she conveyed, as if it had happened to someone else. “It was about six months later, in June. We received a postcard from Michigan, I think.”

“Do you have family in Michigan?”

“None that I know of. My mother’s parents were deceased before I was born, and she was an only child. My father’s parents died when I was in grade school. He has a half brother in New Zealand, and a couple of extended cousins somewhere in Utah, but he wasn’t close to them. I believe the police followed up with them, though.”

He scribbled on a piece of notepaper. “Where did your family go on vacations?”

She shrugged. “Where didn’t we go? All along the eastern coastline, north and south, France, Germany, England and Ireland, cruises to the Caribbean. My father liked to live large.”

The only vacation she and Wesley had taken since then were the three days they’d spent at Walt Disney World when he was eleven. It had taken months of saving every dime and had been marred by Wesley’s conviction that Carlotta was holding out on him—that their parents were going to join them in Orlando as a big surprise. Of course that hadn’t happened, and Wesley had cried the entire eight-hour drive back to Atlanta. She straightened. “How much longer, Detective? I’m rather tired, and I haven’t eaten yet.”

“Jack.”

“Hmm?”

“Why don’t you drop the detective stuff? My friends call me Jack.”

She glanced at the notes in front of him and reminded herself that the man was manipulating her to get the information he needed to bring her father home, which would only plow another furrow through her and Wesley’s lives. She stood and smiled down at him. “Goodbye, Detective.”

He nodded. “Ms. Wren, before you go…was there something you wanted to tell me about the Angela Ashford case?”

Her hand moved automatically to cover her neck as she tried to look innocent. “Uh…no.”

His gaze went to her neck. “Really? Because if you know something…”

She knew she had reached the point of now or never. “W-well, it probably doesn’t mean anything.”

He slurped his coffee. “Why don’t you let me decide?”

“Angela was a customer of mine,” she blurted before she lost her nerve. “She purchased a man’s jacket last week. A couple days later I ran into Peter at a party and asked him about the jacket, but he didn’t know anything about it.” She decided to leave out the fact that she’d asked Peter about the jacket again last night and he hadn’t corrected her when she’d said it was brown.

The detective frowned. “I don’t get it.”

“Well, I started thinking that…perhaps she had bought the jacket for…someone else.”

“You mean a lover?”

“I have no idea. I’m just telling you what I know.”

“You mean what you think.”

Carlotta gritted her teeth. “Anyway, she returned the jacket yesterday.”

“When yesterday?”

“In the afternoon.”

“Was she acting strangely?”

“She’d been drinking,” Carlotta admitted. “The man’s jacket had been worn and when I told her I couldn’t give her a refund, she became…verbally abusive.”

“What did she say?”

“She had the idea that…Peter and I were having an affair.”

He lifted his cup to his mouth. “Why would she think that?”

Carlotta fidgeted. “Perhaps because he and I were engaged before they were.”

“But you said that happened years ago.”

“Yes. Peter ended our relationship about the same time my parents left.”

He frowned. “He dumped you when the going got tough, huh?”

“He was just a kid,” she said defensively. “I was hurt, but I eventually understood why he did what he did.”

“So maybe Mr. Ashford has been pining for you all these years?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“But Mrs. Ashford seemed to.”

She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Look, what I’m trying to tell you is that Angela might have been the one having the affair. I don’t know if it means anything, but I felt obligated to tell you, so there.” At this point, mentioning that the woman had also tried to strangle her seemed like overkill.

He leaned back in his chair and shook his head slowly. “You want to know what I think? I think that you imagined this thin story of Angela Ashford having a lover to make yourself feel better over the fact that whatever was going on between you and her husband might have made her take a flying leap into that pool all on her own.”

Carlotta’s mouth opened, then closed as denial washed over her.