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CHAPTER
46
AROUND THREE THAT SUNDAY afternoon, in the community of Arbutus, a suburb of Baltimore, Tess Aaliyah parked on Francis Street in front of the modest bungalow where she’d grown up. The blue and white paint was fresh. The lawn looked like it had been cut that morning. Her late mother’s flower beds were tended. And the dogwoods and the first azaleas were in bloom.
At least Dad’s keeping the place up, Aaliyah thought, though she remained upset that he had not answered any of her phone calls last night or this morning, which was what had prompted this visit.
Aaliyah got out of the car. But before she started toward the house, she checked the bandage that wrapped her throbbing right forearm, looking for blood or something worse, a yellow or green discharge.
Yellow or green discharge?
Aaliyah shuddered at the thought.
On a day-to-day basis, not much bothered the detective. But the idea that she might have gotten an infection from Claude Harrow’s Rottweiler had nagged at her ever since the emergency room physician mentioned the possibility. The nurses had stuck her with more needles than she cared to remember, and she’d been given a powerful antibiotic. Still, you never knew what might be festering in a neo-Nazi dog’s mouth.
To her relief, except for a slight dark red discoloration—normal seepage—the bandages looked fine. Fortunately, it turned out that her arm wasn’t broken. Even the wounds on her face weren’t all that bad—mostly just superficial abrasions.
She crossed the lawn diagonally, heading toward the side door to the kitchen. Her dad’s Chevy Tahoe was parked in the driveway. His surf-casting rods were in the ski carrier he used to transport them to the beach.
That’s where he’d been. Fishing again. He’d probably been out all night.
Sighing with relief, she climbed the stoop, and she was reaching out with her good arm to knock when she heard a woman chuckle.
“Bernie, you’re awful,” she said, and chuckled again.
“I swear, Christine,” Aaliyah heard her father reply. Then he chuckled.
For a moment, the detective was so stunned she didn’t know what to do. She stopped herself from knocking.
Christine?
Aaliyah felt a pit open up in her stomach. Her mother had been dead fourteen months. Christine?
She’d known the day would come, of course, when her father would move on, find someone else to spend his life with. He was only in his late sixties. It made sense. But she’d had no inkling of … Christine?
“Oh, hello,” said the woman, startling Aaliyah.
She hadn’t heard Christine walking over, but there she was on the other side of the screen door, a very tall and very pretty redhead in jeans, a denim shirt, and pearls. Aaliyah guessed she was somewhere in her fifties, maybe early sixties, if she’d had work done.
“I’m looking for my dad?” Aaliyah said.
The woman let out a quiet shriek of pleasure. “You’re Tess?”
“That’s me.”
She grinned widely, opened the door, and extended her hand, saying, “What a wonderful surprise. I’m Christine Prince. Your father’s been telling me so much about you.”
“Has he, now?” Aaliyah asked.
“You’re all he talks about,” she said, and chuckled that chuckle.
“Tess?” her father said, coming up behind Christine Prince, limping slightly from the wound that had ended his career.
Seeing the rods on the car, she’d expected to find her father in his fishing clothes: the canvas pants, the windbreaker, and that goofy hat he wore with all the lures on it. But he had on a starched white shirt, creased khakis, and his shoes were shined.
“Hi, Dad,” she said. “I was just in the neighborhood and—”
“What the hell happened to your arm and your face?”
