A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(64)

She had to think about this carefully. Accusing somebody of a crime as serious as rape was a big deal. The evidence she had found so far was that she didn’t remember being with him, but that didn’t mean rape. She hadn’t been handled roughly, or there would be marks on her, and there weren’t any. Her clothes had been laid out the way she would have left them.

Chelsea worked hard, and reconstructed what she could of the sequence of her thoughts from last night. She had been thinking about Dan, and his house, and his tastes, and how much better he had looked in his own place. She had been gazing at him through wine goggles. How did she get in his bed? She was pretty sure she must have invited herself. Maybe when they visited this bedroom suite on the grand tour.

She turned off the water in the shower and took one of the oversized thick, soft towels from the rack. As she dried herself, she looked around. The master bathroom was a bit larger than her bedroom at the house where she’d lived with Nick, and it was covered floor to ceiling in beautiful marble, with two sinks that looked like ceramic bowls. The shower was big enough for six people, with four dish-size shower heads on the ceiling and others spraying from the walls. Every-thing matched and looked as though it had been hand polished a moment ago.

Dan had a lot of money, and he was generous with it, and good at thinking of tasteful ways of spending it. She searched further in her memory. Had she gone to bed with him because she was attracted to his money? No, she decided. What might have happened was that he was a trusted friend, she was grateful for the good time he had given her, and the wine had swept away her restraint and inhibitions. She had observed that when a person was drunk he did what he’d wanted to do all along. But he went further than he would at other times, didn’t wait, or consider, or speak quietly, or think about consequences.

With that word a horrible thought came to her, but she pushed it away. She had not been careful last night, but she definitely wasn’t pregnant. She had not made any plans to ever have sex with anyone after Nick had died, but she had not stopped taking her pills. She hadn’t made any changes to any part of her life, because change would have taken energy and thought, and she’d been too busy grieving.

She supposed that wasn’t entirely true. Without knowing it, she must have been thinking about Dan Crane. She used Dan’s hair dryer and the brush from her purse to dry and brush her hair, dressed in the clothes from last night, and looked in the mirror. The damage was done. She had thrown herself at Dan Crane. Now she would have to carry herself as well as she could and see if there was anything in that relationship to salvage, or if she had to break it off and refuse to see him ever again. She put on her makeup, taking special care to get it exactly right.

She opened the bathroom door and stepped into the bedroom. On the table by the window were a tray with a coffee pitcher and a small glass of orange juice, and a couple of small pastries on a plate. But beside them, dwarfing the tray, was a glass vase with a dozen long-stemmed yellow roses. How had he gone to a florist already? She looked around for a clock, but there was none, so she took her cell phone out of her purse. Ten fifteen. Of course. He hadn’t gone, he had simply made a phone call and they’d been delivered. She saw there was a little envelope. She plucked it out of the flowers, opened it, her chest feeling hollow with dread, and read the card.

“Good morning, Chelsea. I hope you’ll join me for breakfast at Semel’s.” Not so bad. No gushing, and no humiliating references to the sex. She put the note in her purse and prepared for the next challenge. She would have to see him and talk to him. She stepped out of the bedroom.

He was sitting on the bench in the Japanese garden drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. There was Dan Crane under glass, still unaware of her watching. He was hers to study, like a rare specimen sitting motionless in a terrarium. He looked slim but strong, and the way the sunlight filtered through the overhead bough of a pine tree and fell on his head and shoulders made him seem contemplative, sensitive.

She decided that when the time came, she would have to go out with him again. Next time she would avoid alcohol and keep her eyes wide open. After that she would figure out what she had done to herself—something bad, or something good. She walked to the sliding glass door and opened it.





16



It was late—nearly morning—and Jane lay in a clump of maple saplings near the back of the large plot of weedy land around the small old farmhouse near Avon. The only sounds were the breezes rustling the leaves of the tall maples that shaded her thicket. She had spent the night making -visits to some places she’d thought might help her understand Jimmy Sanders’s problem.

When she left Slawicky’s, she had driven to the bar in Akron where Jimmy and Nick Bauermeister had fought. She had stayed outside to watch the door and the parking lot for a couple of hours to get a sense of what sort of place it was and what its patrons were like. Both the bar and its customers had seemed pretty ordinary. It was just a typical Western New York place that drew a steady stream of locals who drank beer and sat around talking. There was no band, no pickup scene, no bouncers, nobody hanging around the lot outside. When it was very late she had driven to this small farmhouse, the address of the victim and the scene of his death.

When Jane arrived, she had parked in the lot of a closed gas station and walked the rest of the way. The house was set far back from the road in the middle of an expanse that had once been a farmer’s field, so it would have been risky to bring a car. Instead she moved across the field in her black clothes, hip-deep in brush and weeds, no more visible than a shadow, and then stopped at the back of the house. She’d looked in the windows, one by one, and found that nobody was inside. Nick Bauermeister’s girlfriend, Chelsea Schnell, had left a few dim lights burning—a table lamp in the bedroom beside her undisturbed bed, another in the living room, and a small fluorescent over the stove in the kitchen.