Free River Road by Jayne Ann Krentz Page B

here in this house knowing that there was a dead body in the fireplace, one she had put there herself?”
    Mason shrugged. “Maybe it was all that meditation and yoga she practiced. Could be it endowed her with some Zen-like ability to ignore the body in the fireplace.” He paused for a beat. “Or it could be that she was okay with it because she felt justified in killing Brinker—which she was, in my book, by the way.”
    “I wonder if she told Mary?”
    “I doubt if we’ll ever know. But in situations like the one your aunt was facing, the smart thing to do is to follow the Three-
S
Rule. Got a hunch Sara would have figured that out for herself.”
    Lucy frowned. “What’s the Three-
S
rule?”
    “Shoot, shovel and shut up.”
    Lucy turned the water bottle between her palms. “Yes. I see what you mean.” She hesitated. “But I doubt if Aunt Sara actually shot Brinker. She didn’t approve of guns, and she didn’t own one. She must have used some other method.”
    “I think the ME will conclude that Brinker was killed with one or more blows to the skull.”
    “The poker?”
    “Uh-huh.” Mason drank some of his water. “There was some stuff sticking to the end of it.”
    “Stuff?”
    “Hair, I think.”
    Lucy sighed. “Well, finding the body in the fireplace tonight certainly explains why Sara and Mary started doing a lot more traveling after that summer. It also explains why she didn’t want me coming back to Summer River to visit her. To her way of thinking, inviting me to stay here in the house with a dead guy would have been very bad karma.”
    “I apologize, again, for jumping to the conclusion that you had ignored her for the past thirteen years.”
    Lucy gave him a faint smile. “Apology accepted. You’re right, though, there are a lot of questions. The first one that comes to mind is, why hide the body here in the house?”
    “Can you think of a better way to make sure it wasn’t found and subjected to a forensic autopsy? Take it from me, it’s hard to hide a body. Over time they have a way of showing up. They wash ashore. They get uncovered by a heavy rain. Developers stumble onto them when they start building houses on previously unused land.”
    “I see what you mean,” Lucy said. She shuddered. “No wonder she stopped doing major repairs and renovations.”
    “Bringing in a contractor or a handyman or a painter would have been too risky,” Mason said. “Any halfway decent craftsman would have taken one look at that fireplace and started asking questions. He would have offered to give her the name of a good tile man. Sara would have declined. The contractor or the painter would have wondered why she didn’t want it repaired.”
    Lucy contemplated that for a moment. “Were you ever a suspect in Brinker’s disappearance?”
    “The leading theory at the time was that Brinker was the victim of a drug deal gone bad, but Brinker’s father didn’t want to hear that. If you’ll remember, Hobbs was the chief of police back then, and Brinker senior was pushing him hard. A lot of people saw you leave the party with me that night, and at least one other person, Quinn Colfax, knew there was some bad blood between Brinker and me. So, yes, Hobbs came around asking questions.”
    “What happened?”
    “Thanks to your aunt, I was able to tell Hobbs the flat-out truth—I had no idea what had happened to Brinker. Hobbs had no proof to the contrary. I told him what Brinker had planned to do to you that night. But I couldn’t prove it, and Hobbs knew that Brinker’s father wouldn’t want to hear that news, either, so I doubt if Hobbs ever told him.”
    “Did Hobbs talk to Jillian?”
    “Sure. He talked to her, Quinn Colfax, Nolan Kelly and several other people who were known to hang around Brinker. But everyone denied knowing anything about the plan to drug you and rape you.”
    “Including Jillian?”
    Mason finished the water and set the bottle aside. “Including