Frannie talk about Ron Beaumont, his kids, Bree’s death, anything that might relate.
Moses stopped walking, folded his arms and scowled. He loved his sister, but between his work as owner of the Little Shamrock bar and his family, they didn’t spend a lot of time sharing special moments.
Hardy’s eyes went to Erin. She shifted where she sat and looked somewhere off into the middle distance. “Erin?” he prompted her. “What?”
She came back to him. “I don’t know. I’m not sure it’s anything really. She never mentioned anybody by name.” She hesitated and Hardy forced himself to wait until she figured out how she was going to say it. “From the way she talked, I assumed it was another woman, one of the mothers from Merryvale, but it could have been part of this.”
“What?”
Erin sighed, hating to betray her own confidences, if that’s what this turned out to be. “This is all nebulous, but one of her friends—it might not have been this Ron or Bree—evidently had had a marriage go bad a long time ago, years. Now they had a new life here and suddenly this person was afraid the old spouse was going to show up and start causing problems.”
“What kind of problems?”
Erin shifted again, picked at some thread on her bathrobe for a few seconds. “Custody problems, I think.”
“But how could that be? Divorces don’t get final until all the custody issues are settled. How did this come up, anyway? If this is her giant secret, I don’t know why—”
“I didn’t say it was, Dismas. I don’t know if it had anything to do with this. That’s about as far as it went anyway, then suddenly she didn’t want to talk about it, maybe as though she remembered she couldn’t.”
“That could be it,” Moses said.
Hardy wasn’t so sure, but at this point he’d take anything. “How did the whole thing come up in the first place?”
Erin shook her head, as though she were unsure herself. “We were just sitting watching Rebecca and Vincent in the backyard here—it couldn’t have been more than a couple of weeks ago. They were having one of their great afternoons, just playing and laughing and being wonderful.
“Anyway, suddenly, really out of the blue, Frannie said she couldn’t imagine maintaining any kind of normal life if she thought someone were going to try to take away her kids. I told her she didn’t have to worry—why was she thinking about that? So she started to say something about this friend of hers, just what I’ve told you, not anything really. She didn’t mention a name, but now tonight when you asked, it occurred to me it could be this Ron.”
Moses piped in. “It might explain why he ran.”
Hardy was desperate for answers, but he didn’t think this was one of them. “We don’t know that he did run, Mose. He might be staying at grandma’s house for all we know.”
“Well, how can we find that out?”
Hardy was done in. “I’m working on that,” he said.
7
On his best day, David Freeman would never qualify as debonair and charming, and this wasn’t close to his best day. He sat now in the pre-dawn at his ancient kitchen table, which was laden with yellow legal pads, pencils, wads of Kleenex, open and closed lawbooks, and a dozen or more unwashed (perhaps from the look of them never washed) coffee mugs. He wore the frayed remains of a maroon bathrobe that had been new during the Nixon years. Gray chest hairs peeked out the top of a similarly graying T-shirt. Of course he hadn’t shaved—Hardy had buzzed him awake only five minutes before. His jowls hung, his hair rioted, and for good measure he was chewing the stub of last night’s cigar.
“You know, David, if the law business ever fades out on you, I think you could go into the movies, become a leading man, maybe marry Julia