AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The look of sheer hope on her face pulled at my heart and my conscience. Was that her daughter in the body bag? I didn’t know, and if it was, it was not my job to tell her. Right now I had to learn whatever I could about Alan Beam.
“Let’s just talk for a few minutes,” I said.
We took seats at a pine farm table in the kitchen, and Alicia Beam told me that her marriage of twenty years to Alan had been dissolved a year before.
“Alan has been depressed for years,” Alicia told me. “He felt that his whole life had been about money. That he’d neglected his family and God. He became very religious, very repentant, and he said that there wasn’t enough time . . .”
Alicia Beam stopped in midsentence. I followed her eyes to the counter, where an unfolded sheet of blue paper was lying beside an envelope.
“Maybe that’s a note from Val.”
She stood and walked to the counter, picked up the letter, began to read.
“Dear Val, my dearest girl. Please forgive me. I just couldn’t take it any longer . . .”
She looked up, said to me, “This is from Alan.”
I turned as Hanni leaned through the doorway and asked me to step outside.
“Lindsay,” he said. “A neighbor found a message from Alan Beam on her answering machine saying he was sorry and good-bye.”
It was all coming clear, why there were no Latin come-ons. No fishing-line ligatures. And the victims were not a married couple.
Pidge hadn’t done this.
Pidge had nothing to do with these deaths. Any hope I had of tripping him up, finding a clue to his whereabouts, was dead — as dead as the man in the car.
“Alan Beam committed suicide,” I said.
Hanni nodded. “We’ll treat it as a homicide until we’re sure, but according to this neighbor, Beam had attempted suicide before. She said he was terminal. Lung cancer.”
“And so he chained himself to the steering wheel and set himself on fire?”
“I guess he wanted to make sure he didn’t change his mind this time. But whatever his reason,” said Hanni, “it looks to me now like his daughter tried to save him — but she never had a chance.
“The poisonous gas and the superheated air brought her down.”
Chapter 109
BY THE TIME I got home that evening, I had too much to tell Joe and hoped I could stay awake long enough to tell him. He was in the kitchen, wearing running shorts and a T-shirt, what he wore when he went for a run with Martha. He was holding a wineglass, and from the scrumptious smell of garlic and oregano, it seemed he’d cooked dinner, too.
But the look on Joe’s face stopped me before I could reach him.
“Joe, I was at the hospital all night —”
“Jacobi told me. If I hadn’t found wet footsteps on the bathmat this morning, I wouldn’t have even known you’d been home.”
“You were sleeping, Joe, and I only had a few minutes. And is this a house rule? That I have to check in?” I said.
“You call it checking in. I call it being thoughtful. Thinking of me and that I might worry about you.”
I hadn’t called him. Why hadn’t I called?
“I’m drinking merlot,” he said.
Joe and I rarely fought, and I got that sickening gut-feel that told me that I was in the wrong.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re totally right, Joe. I should have let you know where I was.” I walked over to him, put my arms around his waist — but he pulled away from me.
