He remembered the night he had first shown it to Beth. It looked much the same then as now, at least from this vantage point, right outside the gate. The night was very similar, too, cloudy and cool with a fine mist in the air. But things between them were beginning to change. Morgan was still in diapers. Gus was an eager young partner at Preston & Coolidge. They were on their way home from dinner, celebrating the fact that Gus had just been elected to the firm's executive committee. Gus was on the right track--the fast track. He took a detour through Magnolia driving from the restaurant and stopped right before the gate.
"Why are you stopping?" asked Beth.
Gus glanced toward the estate, then back at Beth. "We're here."
"Where?"
"Home."
"Whose home?"
"Ours."
She laughed. "What bank did you rob?"
"You like it?"
She gazed across the manicured lawn in the moonlight, toward the huge Tudor-style house on the hill. It looked like something out of a fairy tale. An expensive fairy tale. "What's not to like?"
"Someday soon I'm going to buy it for you."
She smiled, but it wasn't as wide as he'd expected. "I mean it," said Gus. "I'm going to buy this house." "I don't doubt that for a minute."
"You don't sound all that sure."
"I'm completely sure." She looked away, toward the house again. "It just scares me a little."
"What scares you?"
"You. And this job. This new position."
"It's a great opportunity. I'm the youngest lawyer ever elected to the executive committee. I swear, I'm going to run this damn law firm. Next step, managing partner. And then I'm going to buy this house."
She looked out the passenger-side window. "Let's go, okay?"
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing."
"No. Something's wrong. Tell me."
She looked at him coolly. "Have you noticed lately how often you talk about what you are going to do?"
"I'm sharing with you. These are my plans. My dreams." "It just seems they used to be more about us."
"They are about us."
"What? Because you plan to buy me things, that makes it about us?"
He nearly groaned. "I just took a huge step up at the firm. Can't you be happy about it? Share it with me?"
She blinked, lowered her eyes. "I'm sorry. You're right. I should be happy for you."
"But you're not."
Her eyes were moist, glistening in the flickering light from the lanterns. "Do you ever look back on our days in that one-bedroom apartment and think those were our happiest times together?"
"It wasn't the apartment that made us happy."
"Exactly. So why should I be happy about moving into a house so big my husband has to work seventy hours a week to pay for it? A house so damn big that when you close the front door you actually hear an echo.-It's like a constant reminder of how alone you really are. I don't want that. I don't want to hear the echoes."
The iron gate started to open, rousing Gus from his memories. Carla must have seen him on the security camera and opened it from inside the house. The gate was fully extended, inviting him home. But he didn't pull forward. He was still thinking of Beth's words, so clear in his memory. His response was just as clear, chiseled in his mind. He had leaned across the console, brushed her cheek, and kissed her. Then he looked her straight in the eye and spoke softly, "I promise you, Beth. I will never let that happen."
Only now, years later, did it finally occur to him. Yet again he had been telling her what he was going to do.
Chapter Thirty-Two.
Half of Andie's brain was still fried from the meeting at the hotel; the other half was swirling from the confusing exchange with Isaac. He had been right to nip things in the bud. Isaac was rising fast in the bureau and didn't need a reputation for hitting on female agents. She considered taking the onus off him and asking him out on a real date, but that wouldn't be fair either. If he was going to be put in the position of dating a subordinate, it should be on his own initiative. Why tempt a friend to go somewhere he really didn't want to go?
She picked up a pizza on her way home, flopped on the couch, and caught the tail end of a Sonics basketball game on television. They were winning by eight, but she would have bet her last two slices that they'd blow another fourth-quarter lead.
The phone rang with less than a minute to play. The score was tied. The bad guys were closing. With the game in the balance she was tempted to ignore the phone, but she had watched this unhappy ending unfold too many times this season anyway. She rolled from the couch and answered. Good thing. It was the crime lab.
"Got a read on those fingerprints," he said.
She sat up immediately. "Which set?"
"The thumb and index finger from the phone. It took a while to isolate something readable. That's just the nature of a public phone."
"What did you pull up?"
"The buttons were too smudged, but we got a read and a match from the mouthpiece."
"Who is it?"
"You're gonna be surprised. Beth Wheatley."
Andie was stunned into silence. She thanked him for the quick work and hung up, confused. Little over an hour ago, she had convinced Isaac and everyone else at the meeting that the killer was a mind-control expert who had crawled inside Beth's head, gotten the secret code she and Morgan used to communicate, and dialed the number himself. Now this. She wracked her brain, but her theory and the facts were irreconcilable. Fingerprints generally don't lie. Beth had held the phone in her hand. One way or another, she had been there.