“After lunch.” She picked up her glass of iced tea, just delivered by Mr. Pete, now wearing a bright red apron and chewing on a toothpick. He called her Ms. Sheriff. “Rob is working nights right now, sleeping during the day. He should be awake soon. I want to hear him go through what happened again so I’ll take you with me. You very slickly asked me why I wanted to talk to Paul.” She shrugged a bit. “I want to know who or what sent Jilly over that cliff. If anyone should know, it’s Paul.” I couldn’t face that, not just yet. “They’ve only been here about five and a half months. Paul grew up here, you know.”
“Yes, but he has no more relatives here. His parents died about three years ago in a private plane crash over the Sierras near Tahoe. They were big-time skiers. Their bodies were never recovered, which is odd since most of the time planes that go down are found pretty quick. But not this time.
“Paul’s uncle died of cancer about two years ago, and his cousins are all scattered across the country.
“Why’d he come back here? No offense, but it’s the middle of nowhere and there isn’t, frankly, much of anything here to interest two big-time researchers, which Jilly told me they both were.”
My salad was delivered, a huge bowl filled with lettuce, red peppers, boiled potato chunks, and green beans, all topped with a heap of ranch dressing. I thought it looked wonderful. “Go ahead, get started,” she said, and I forked down a big bite. “It isn’t bad,” I said, closed my eyes, and shoveled down six more bites. “Much better. When Jilly called me six months or so ago, she told me that VioTech–the pharmaceutical company where both of them worked–didn’t want Paul to continue with the project he was involved in. Jilly said he was pissed and wanted to come back here and continue his work.”
“What about Jilly? What were her plans?”
“She said her clock was running out. She wanted to have a kid.”
“Jilly said that?” Maggie Sheffield was just swiping butter on a dinner roll. She stopped cold and stared at me, shaking her head even as she said, “Oh, no, that’s impossible.”
“Why?”
“If she told me once, she told me half a dozen times,
that neither she nor Paul had ever wanted rugrats. She said they were too selfish for too long a time now to think about changing to accommodate a child.”
Well then, she’d obviously changed her mind since she’d spoken to me about it.
“Meatloaf s all gone,” Mr. Pete announced, as if he was pleased as punch about it. “Pierre didn’t make enough. It got eaten mostly by the breakfast crowd. How about some nice fish ‘n’ chips smothered in onion rings?”
All that fat swimming around in my arteries didn’t sound like such a bad thing at that moment.
Chapter Four
Rob Morrison lived in a small wooden clapboard house tucked in among a good dozen spruce trees about two miles south of town. A narrow dirt road, posted as Penzance Street, snaked through the valleys and hills, and his house was at the end of the road. A wide gully lay just beyond. I turned when I got out of the car and stared over the western horizon. I felt a moment of deep envy. When Rob Morrison awoke in the morning, it was to an incredible view of the Pacific Ocean through the skinny spruce trees. It felt like being at the edge of the world.
Maggie knocked on the unpainted oak door. “Rob? Come on, wake up. You’ll be on duty again in another four hours. Wake up.”
I heard movement from within the house. Finally, a man’s deep voice called out, “Maggie, that you? What are you doing here? What’s going on? How’s Jilly?”
“Open up, Rob, and I’ll tell you everything.”
The door opened and a man about my age stood there, wearing only tight jeans with the top button open and a heavy morning beard. The sheriff had been right, this guy was in awesome shape. Thank God he’d been there at exactly the right moment. “Who are you?”