Free The Guilty One by Sophie Littlefield Page A

the front door with a key. They went up the stairs to the left of Pet’s door. Another key, a neat shiny brass lock. Inside wasn’t what Maris expected. The furniture was tidy, simple, almost Danish-looking. The floors were refinished, and there was an Oriental rug that looked, if not valuable, at least hand-knotted of real wool. A hutch held row after row of fussy cut crystal and teacups hanging from little hooks.
    â€œDown here.” Norris was back to being gruff. They passed a small, tidy kitchen, two closed doors. At the back of the apartment, the second bedroom, as spare as a convent. Two twin beds, the mattresses still in their plastic. The headboards would look at home in a little girl’s room, curved and painted cream with pink rose bouquets. There was nothing else in the room except an entire wall of neatly sealed and labeled moving boxes.
    Mom Dining Room.
    Mom Pictures.
    Mom Papers 2001–2003.
    Like that.
    Another two trips down the stairs. Maris insisted they lean the mattress and box spring against the kitchen wall where the sofa was. On closer inspection they looked like they’d been purchased long ago, the labels yellowing, the plastic cracking. At least the plastic would protect them from the filthy floor until she could get the little bedroom cleaned. “I’ll be able to get them onto the bed myself,” she said, needing Norris to leave so she could be alone, and he didn’t argue.
    â€œThere’s some cleaning supplies in the garage, if you want to use them,” he said. “Just remember to put them back when you’re done.” He wrote down the code to the padlock on a pizza flyer that he found on the counter, using a pen from a drawer.
    â€œJust one thing,” he said, on his way out the door. “Seeing as this is just short term, anything you buy for this place, I can’t reimburse you.”
    And then Maris was alone, the kitchen finally cooling off as the sun slid down across the bay.

eight
    RON HAUNTED THE halls of the office as people left for the day. The company had been renamed after he sold it, and half the current staff had been hired since, but his presence still had the power to intimidate. It was Karl too, of course; he had been forced to accept that no one ever looked at him anymore without the knowledge of what his son had done in their eyes. Instead of making him a pariah, though, it seemed to have had the opposite effect: people were deferential, even awed.
    Ron alone knew how little he actually did anymore. That was a result not so much of any intention on his part but of the shell game of responsibility in the upper reaches of the company, especially since they had acquired two smaller competitors in the last eighteen months. After the arrest and during the trial, Ron had been excused from many responsibilities and given credit for work others had done. But even after he’d made it clear that he was back full time, people treated him gingerly and made allowances he never asked for.
    Sometimes he was grateful for this extended recess. It allowed him to participate in the rituals of the workplace and, more important, keep him out of the house while what he was really doing was . . . processing , he supposed, to borrow a term from the airy-fairy folks in human resources, people he’d personally put in place because he knew the supporting statistics even if he’d never personally felt the need for such coddling and hand-holding. His involvement in the various team-building and workplace enhancement exercises was genial, even avuncular, popping in occasionally but always slipping away before he could be called upon to share, to feel, to emote.
    So he walked the halls, tapped at his keyboard, dropped in on meetings, kept his door open for consultation. A part of him was present—was even, occasionally, the nimble strategist he used to be. And the rest: a gentle, quiet, whirr; a damping down, a wall carefully