Free Magic Hour by Susan Isaacs Page B

No one else with a grudge?"
    "I'm pretty sure." I waited while she thought. "Nope," she said at last. "No one else. Definitely."
    I stood and faced her. She lowered her head so I was looking down at her dark, shiny hair. Her breathing became quick, shallow. I knew I was getting to her. Not just the cop: the man.
    "Bonnie, you're smart, observant. Sweet too, and I mean that as a compliment." She tried to look me in the eye—casual. But her face had flushed bright pink. "You're not being straight. I get the feeling you're holding back, and that concerns me."
    "I'm not holding back anything." Just for an instant her voice caught in her throat.
    I moved in closer. "You could help me solve a murder, Bonnie."
    "I can't. Honestly. I've told you everything I know."
    "Listen, if things were going lousy with Sy Spencer's movie, with Lindsay, who would he confide in? Who knows the business? Who knows him? You."
    "Please. I've told you everything he told me."
    "I've got to tell you: something about you doesn't feel right. What are you hiding?" She turned her head away from me. "Come on, do you want me to start thinking maybe you were involved?"
    "Why would you think that?" She wasn't exactly scared, but she wasn't at ease either.
    "Open up, Bonnie." I stepped toward her. She inched backward, until she was pressed against the sink. I moved in until we were almost touching. "Tell me what you're not talking about. Be smart. Because if I start to think you were involved, I'll go after you—and I won't stop."
    I had a few minutes after Bonnie, so I drove down to the beach. I hadn't liked the way the interview had ended. A little official charm is one thing. That final minute, that simultaneous coming on to her and threatening her, was another. And I hadn't come on to her just for leverage; I'd really wanted to be close to her. I needed to clear my head.
    Down at the beach, a stiff wind was whipping up the sand, blowing sharp, scratchy grains against my face and neck. Summer people were scuttling around, on the verge of hysteria. Nature was behaving badly. They closed their inside-out umbrellas, folded their chairs, picked up their coolers and rushed past me, back to their cars. There could be no grain of sand under gold spandex bikinis, or in eyes that had to be wide open for the next hostile takeover.
    I took off my shoes, squatted down by the dunes near a patch of jointweed, pretty much out of the worst of the wind, and watched until all the
New York
bodies had run away. Back in the late fifties, when I was a kid, people still slept on the beach, right where I was, on hot summer nights. Grownups would pitch tents, but the rest of us would lug out the blanket rolls we'd learned to make in Boy Scouts. Sometimes we'd tell scary stories about the Cropsey Maniac or whisper dirty jokes, but by eleven, we'd fall silent and just lie on our backs, staring up at the night sky. The stars were so beautiful they shut us up.
    I must have been about ten when I started sneaking out of the house one or two nights a week to sleep on the beach after the summer was over. I did it all year round, except for the winter months. Once the house was dark, I'd tiptoe down the steep back staircase and out the door, grab the blanket roll I kept in the toolshed behind the house, take my bike and race like hell for three quarters of a mile over the pitch-black road.
    I don't know why I had to get out. Okay, even back then, my brother and I didn't exactly revel in each other's company; but our relationship was more mutual annoyance than animosity. At his worst, Easton was just a pata-in-the-ass prig who ironed his T-shirts.
    My mother? A lady. She didn't hit me or scream at me. She just didn't like me, and probably didn't love me. I was the mirror image of the drunk farmer who'd fucked her over and then taken off. Just being myself—dangling my legs over the arm of the couch while I read, whistling a tuneless few notes when I was doing something mindless like washing