Last to Know: A Novel(43)

Bea’s blue eyes widened in panic, words spilled out of her as though she couldn’t wait to tell. “I saw him.” She was talking quickly now. “I saw him do it. I did. I saw him … oh God I don’t know why he did it, there had to be a reason … the poor girl was just … here … maybe she was his girlfriend … or one of them anyway … maybe she was jealous … angry…” Those wide blue eyes met Harry’s pleadingly. “It was Wally.”

Rose had come quietly up to them and now Bea turned her gaze on her. A sob caught in her throat. She moved her cuffed wrists behind her. “Look,” she cried, showing Rose, “look what Wally has done to me. I saw him, Rose, I saw him with her.” She stopped and hung her head, as though in shame. “Oh, God, you were so good to me, you are an angel, you are the mother I should have had, you are everything I want to be. I am so sorry, Rose. I’m just so sorry, about Wally, but you knew what he was like with women. You must have known.”

Bea stopped talking and Rose stood for a long silent minute looking at her. Her blue and white silk caftan made a soft swishing noise as she turned and, without a word, walked away.





31


Harry looked at Wally Osborne standing silently under the birch trees, his hands cuffed behind his back, the dog at his feet. He said nothing when Rossetti reminded him of his rights, did not look at either detective, nor at the dead woman on the ground. Nor did he look at Bea Havnel, whose sobbing rent the night air, a low moaning that Harry had not heard previously, not even when he’d fished her out of the lake with her house exploding in flames behind her, not when he had confirmed her mother was dead, not when he had suggested social services would help her.

Harry had come to the conclusion then that Bea Havnel was a very independent young woman with a kind of inner strength gained through adversity. She had survived life with a drug-addicted “mother” who very probably was not her real mother, survived near-death by fire, seemingly with her innocence intact. Now, though, he was skeptical.

He was aware that Rose was standing next to him. The twins, Roman, and the nosey-parker kid were all standing silent and stunned, looking back at him, at their father, at Bea.

The wail of sirens broke the silence of the night, blue and red lights flickered through the blackness; squad cars; an ambulance, crunching over the sandy lane, squealing to a stop; medics hurrying toward them, dropping to their knees next to Jemima, rolling back her eyelids, a shot of epinephrine, for the heart, tubes, fast, into her arm, an oxygen mask. Harry knew it was too late.

The sheriff’s cars were there now, three of them. The officers stood silently, waiting while the medics did their work. When they had Jemima zipped in the body bag and placed on the stretcher and in the ambulance, they came forward, hands on their guns, looking at the wailing, handcuffed Bea, slumped on her knees, her blond head resting on the hard ground in front of her; at the handcuffed man they all recognized as the famous author; at his family standing in stunned silence.

“So, okay,” one of them said, “let’s get this show on the road.” He glanced at Harry, who nodded. The officer hauled Bea up. She was limp, unresisting. As he walked her to the squad car she turned to look at Harry.

“You’ve got it all wrong,” she called. “I told you what I saw, I told you the truth.” She turned her head and looked directly at Roman. “You’d better get me out of this,” she said, but Roman looked away.

The officer held on to her arm, getting her into the back of the car. “Save all that,” he said. “You can tell us the truth later.”

Watching Bea looking back at him out of the police car window as they drove away, Harry wondered about that.

He turned to Wally. Rose was standing in front of her husband as though to protect him. The twins held on to each other, terrified. Diz stood by himself, staring blankly at his father. Roman was expressionless behind his glasses.

After a moment Diz ran over to Rose. Harry heard him saying over and over, as he ran, “I’m sorry, Mom, I didn’t mean it, it wasn’t true what I said I saw … I’m so sorry, Mom…”

It seemed to Harry that suddenly everybody wanted to tell their version of the truth. He wondered what Diz’s was.

Wally was being put in the second squad car. Harry noticed that Roman did not make a move to help him. Harry went over to Rose. He didn’t know what you were supposed to say to a woman you had come to think of as a friend, and whose husband you had just arrested on suspicion of murder. Her head was bent, her gleaming hair pulled to one side. She gave him a long tired glance from eyes no longer golden brown, but dark with anguish.

“He didn’t do that,” she said quietly. “He didn’t kill that girl. Wally writes those things. He would never, never hurt anyone. He doesn’t even really know her, he was here with us, we had a dinner party … everything was normal…”

“Rose.” Harry was about to say the hardest thing he had ever had to say in his life, because he cared about this woman. “Your husband has been taken in for questioning in the death of Lacey Havnel.” He remembered Jemima’s face as she lay on the ground, alabaster pale, her brave ruby lipstick, her fiery hair and feisty personality. “And also on suspicion of the murder of Jemima Forester.”





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