Heart of Ice

Chapter Sixteen

Cherrystone

The silvery fringes of his thick, wavy hair askew from the winter wind, Chris Collier stood at Emily Kenyon’s front door, a smile on his face and an overnight bag in hand. With barely a hello, Emily planted a deep kiss on his lips and led him inside. He smelled of the cologne she’d given him for his birthday. She was happy to see him for a thousand reasons, not all of them business, of course.

But business was on her mind.

“You feel like a movie?” Emily asked, pouring a glass of garnet-colored merlot from Stone Ridge, a local vintner that had once won a gold medal at a competition in Napa. It was the first winery in Cherrystone to be so honored. After a bacterial blight killed the largest of six remaining cherry orchards in the 1980s, some farmers jumped on the grape bandwagon. Signs were encouraging. Cherrystone might soon be better known for something other than cherries.

A glass for her. A glass for him.

Chris grinned. “I know what movie you’re talking about,” he said. “And I thought you were going to try to get me drunk.”

Emily retrieved a DVD from her purse and slipped the disk into the player. “I don’t need to get you drunk for that.” Their eyes met and she smiled back. “But I thought I might have to in order to get you to look at this Crawford interview with me.”

The blue screen of the flat-screen TV—which had been her sole splurge the previous year—turned black, then the image of Mitch Crawford came into view. She picked up the remote control and pressed the button that froze the image.

“You already know that I think he’s your guy,” Chris said, settling on the couch, facing the TV. The Christmas tree twinkled from across the room.

“We all think so,” she said.

Emily pressed PLAY. The video display showed a small conference room with acoustic-tiled walls and an oversize clock. A voice—Emily’s—could be heard, but it was slightly out of range. It seemed she was giving instructions on where Mitch Crawford was to sit.

“Nice interrogation room,” Chris said. It was a gentle jab, meant to make Emily smile.

It did. “Thanks. We try out here in Podunkville.”

Mitch took a seat facing the table-mounted camera.

“He looks like he’s ready to go out to dinner or something,” Chris said, noting the man’s deep gray suit, red silk tie, and silk pocket square. “Who wears a pocket square, anyway?”

“Except to a wedding.”

“Or maybe a funeral.”

From the couch, the pair sipped their wine from large balloon goblets and watched as Mitch Crawford alternately kept and lost his cool as Emily, off camera, asked him about Mandy’s disappearance.

“He’s a peach all right,” Chris said. “The last bit was interesting to me.” He reached for the remote and backtracked on the DVD.

It was Emily’s voice asking the question. “I need to know more about Mandy. Did she ever leave like this before?”

“No. She was very reliable.”

“Why did she leave, Mitch?” Again, Emily.

Mitch’s eyes darted to something off screen. There appeared to be a slight wetness on his upper lip.

“I have no idea.” He hesitated. “This interview is over. I’ll look for her myself. Thanks for nothing.”

Chris got up and poured himself some more wine, and then returned to the couch. Mitch Crawford’s face was frozen on the flat screen. “All right. He’s everything you’ve said he was, including a world-class liar. He’s holding it together pretty well, but you can see he’s starting to sweat. That’s probably the reason he ended the interview—not that you weren’t pushing him hard, because you were.”

“I tried. I think I did push too hard,” Emily said. “His holier-than-thou attitude brings out the worst in me.”

Chris shrugged. “No worries, Em. I find it interesting that he never mentions the baby.”

“Me, too. It’s as if the baby doesn’t figure into his worries whatsoever.”

“I also noticed how he says Mandy is so reliable, yet says he has no idea where she’d go, and that she’d never done that before.”

Emily agreed. “Reliable people don’t run off.”

“Not without a reason, they don’t.”

She locked her eyes on Chris. “You don’t think she left him, do you?”

“Not at all. But I wouldn’t have blamed her if she had.”

“The more I get to know him, the more I wonder why she stayed with him at all.”

“You know the answer, don’t you?” He looked over at Jenna’s portraits taken with Santa Claus from babyhood to high school. They were set in a row on the mantel among sprigs of holly Emily had plucked from the backyard before she’d given up on fighting the couple across the street for best decorated house on Orchard Avenue.

Emily followed his eyes to the pictures.

“Of course,” she said. “She wanted a baby. She’d waited for the SOB probably to tell her when the right time would be for her to have one. Not the right time for her. But—”

He cut off Emily. “Right. The time that suited him.”

“Maybe there was no right time.”

“Exactly.”

“Most pregnant women who are murdered are victims of the men who fathered their babies.”

Chris finished his wine. “He didn’t want that baby, did he?”

Emily set her glass down, too. “He probably never wanted the competition a baby would bring.”

Emily Kenyon adored Chris Collier. She loved being with him, loving him. That part of their relationship had always been fulfilling, exciting, and something that fueled all of her fantasies when she was alone and longing for his touch. He was her dream. He was a broad-shouldered six-footer, with lively eyes and wavy dark hair that had begun to silver at the temples.

“I like it this way,” he once told her, “kind of reminds me of my dad. He was gray by fifty-two.”

Chris had often told Emily that after he retired, he wanted to sell his downtown condo and buy a farm in the rural part of the state.

“Maybe I could find a place out near you?”

“Are you a stalker or just looking for cheap real estate?”

He winked at her. “Oh, a stalker, for sure.”

Emily knew that she’d once used Jenna as an excuse to forestall talk that she and Chris should be something more than lovers. There had been very good reasons for the delay of her own personal happiness. Jenna was sixteen when she’d been traumatized by the bizarre events that led her into the web of a serial killer. That crime had brought Chris and Emily back together after having been partners on the Seattle police force earlier in their careers. She loved Chris, there was no doubt about that. Loving him, however, meant carrying that old burden.

But Emily also knew that Jenna was right, that Chris was good for her, and she for him. Listening to a twenty-two-year-old never seemed like a good idea, but Emily knew her daughter never failed when it came to wanting Emily to find the joy in her life that had eluded her since she and David divorced.

Why don’t I allow myself happiness? Love?