Sorrow settled in Julianne’s stomach, pushing an acidic taste up her throat and onto her tongue. Her mom wasn’t ignoring her or dismissing her news. She was trying to pretend it wasn’t real. The strain at the corner of her mother’s eyes—which had the wise, evenly spaced crow’s feet someone would add into a digitally enhanced picture of a mature, attractive woman—gave away the incredible effort her denial was costing her. Sometimes the truth was too horrible to accept.
The phone made a soft thud when Julianne’s mother set it on the countertop. They stared at it together in silence until the sound of soft weeping echoed through the large kitchen. Teardrops landed on the granite. When her mom stood and wrapped her arms around her, Julianne leaned into the softness. Together they sobbed, even her mother. Not the uncertain, fearful tears Julianne had cried in the patrol car, but the snotty weeping that elbows its way through crowds, leaving bruises and sore muscles behind. The kind of hot, heavy grief Julianne hadn’t been certain her mom was even capable of.
After their sobs quieted to simple tears, Julianne pulled away just enough to breathe some fresh air. Her mom kept her arms around her, her manicured fingernails skipping over Julianne’s scalp as her hands caressed her hair. Soft strokes lulled Julianne into believing in safety, and she closed her eyes, hoping to fall deeper into the lie. To land in a place where nothing horrific could have happened to Aunt Binnie. To a time before Lewis, before Uncle Winston’s death, to when she still believed that a hug from her mother could erase all hurts.
Her mom’s hand got slower and the hand got heavier, but the movements were still comforting. Her mother’s shoulders relaxed under Julianne’s head.
When her mother finally pulled away, cool dry air filled the void between them, raising goose bumps on Julianne’s arms. All good things end. Soft, gentle pats. Mother’s hugs. The lives of loved ones.
“And they’re sure it’s Binnie?” Her mom picked both pairs of glasses out of her hair, laying them together on the granite. “Not just someone else found in that house because they were... I don’t know what they would be doing.”
The desperation in her mom’s voice pinged through Julianne’s heart and echoed deep in her soul. Not just the sadness, but the realization that Aunt Binnie had often been a problem they had wished away. With her death had come a tinge of relief, and with that relief came a flood of guilt. Because they hadn’t really wanted her gone.
“The detective—” such a bland word to use for the man who’d sat next to her in the car “—I talked to was the one she called every Wednesday. He seemed to know her.”
“And he seemed competent, this detective?” One unsolved murder in the family had caused enough pain. “I could call Tamara and ask for the best detective the police department has.”
“There’s no reason to call the mayor’s wife over this. The detective will be fine.” His hands... Well, if you could judge a man by the strength in his hands, then there was no man more competent for the job than the detective. He’d even gotten her to rat out her brother and his financial problems, which had felt like the right thing to do at the time, with Howie’s handkerchief stretched out on her knee.
Now, in the bright light of her mom’s kitchen with pictures of her niece and nephew on the fridge, the confession felt like a betrayal. “He spoke, um, sympathetically of Aunt Binnie, but not pityingly.” If he’d even hinted that he’d ever made a crazy sign at his temples, Julianne would have called up the police chief herself to insist the case be reassigned.
“Your brother will need to be told, if he doesn’t already know. And I suppose we’ll have to tell Rupert.” Distaste gave her mother’s words elbows. Rupert didn’t know he’d been written out of his grandmother’s will. He would raise a stink to accompany the slime that followed him everywhere.
“We’ll need a statement for the media,” her mom said. “And we should start funeral arrangements.” The act of planning straightened her mother’s back and lowered her shoulders. “Bin bought that space next to Uncle Winston and I think she’s got a whole plan prepared.”
Resignation and sorrow danced together on her mother’s face. She gave Julianne one last pat on the shoulder and then they retreated into the comfort of work and lists and plans, knowing the pain would be still be waiting for them when they were done.
* * *
“HOW WAS THE old lady?” Kia asked when Howie returned from the patrol car. Kitting himself out to tour the breakfast room where Mrs. Somerset’s body lay gave him something to concentrate on besides the uneasy realization that he’d been attracted to the woman he’d been questioning in the back of a patrol car.
Julianne Dawson—wealthy, spoiled heiress to a tobacco fortune and niece of the deceased. He wasn’t sure which one of those facts made sniffing her hair worse.
“Mrs. Somerset’s niece is not an old lady.” Even though Kia hadn’t been with the unit for very long, they’d found a good rhythm. Without so much as a nod, Kia led the way to the wall opposite the kitchen and near the entry from the dining room to the living room. “Mrs. Somerset’s grandniece is Julianne Dawson.”
He should hand in his badge and confess to being a shitty-ass detective for not putting together Somerset and Somerset and getting Julianne. But Somersets were a dime a dozen in this part of North Carolina—he hadn’t realized that Mrs. Somerset was from that branch of the family.
Of course, what had he known about Mrs. Somerset other than that her husband had been murdered and that she called in crime tips? By the time she’d been passed to his care, her calls and the department jokes about them had become background noise and he hadn’t even bothered to look into her husband’s murder and realize that she was the widow of the victim of the most infamous unsolved murder in Durham’s history. A murder for which Julianne’s father had been the prime suspect.
He should walk right into his sergeant’s office and turn over his badge and gun, then walk out with his head hung so low he developed a permanent curve to his neck. Hell, he hadn’t even known how deep Mrs. Somerset’s obsessions ran. He’d been in her house some, those times when she’d been particularly upset on the phone. Yet he’d never stopped to look at the photographs on the mantel or to notice that one of the women in the photographs was Julianne Dawson, who’d been in the local papers since she was a child, tagging along behind her father. Somehow the fact that he’d had his beautiful daughter dressed like a princess and with him all the time was supposed to make his employees feel better when the mills closed and their jobs disappeared. As though Julianne’s angelic presence would make up for the day when a strong wind would blow and the downtown no longer smelled like bright-leaf tobacco.
Whenever her photograph had been in the papers in Oxford, his mama had pointed it out, saying, “You should be next to your daddy like this.”
His relatives in Durham probably looked at those pictures and saw their lost jobs and their struggles to learn new skills. Every time Howie had seen one of those pictures or heard the name Somerset, the memory of being abandoned by his father twisted in his gut. Because Howie was supposed to have grown up in a world of privilege like Julianne, not just brush against it.
He was old enough now to understand that the story his mother had told him wasn’t the real story. David, his father, hadn’t promised his mother anything but a good time. He hadn’t abandoned Howie, either, but had sent regular child support checks and requested visits. But David had been a Somerset Tobacco vice president and resentment had started young with Howie, etched deep, contorting all his expectation of Somersets and the careless way wealthy people discarded others. He should probably hand the damned case over because he was biased against the entire family.
But he wanted a chance to sit next to Julianne again. Not that continuing with this investigation would lead to that. Any further questioning would be done at a physical distance, and it would not involve Julianne climbing onto his lap.
“Nicely done, Henson, nicely done. Only he would stuff local royalty