“Oh, Kittery Harbor has the fastest gossip service on the whole East Coast,” Sunny assured him, without giving her source. “That’s lucky. Also it’s lucky that we happened to be nearby. If we’d been a little longer hearing about Jane, you’d have gotten her out before we even arrived here.”
Jane, in the meantime, had finally taken in the way they were dressed. “You were at the memorial.”
“Briefly,” Sunny said. “Dad thought that making an appearance was the right thing to do. We were just on the way out when we got the call.”
“What memorial?” Tobe asked.
Jane explained about allowing Dawn to run a service for Martin.
“You didn’t do her any favor with that,” Sunny told her. “Martin’s snooty clients, or associates—I don’t know if you’d really call them friends—were treating her like one of the servants.”
“I didn’t twist her arm,” Jane said. “She wanted to do it.”
“Looks to me as if she was regretting that.” Sunny gave Jane a sidewise look. “Especially when Christine Venables showed up. A little bit of tension in the air.”
“Really?” Tobe spoke up. “Christine Venables is at this memorial?”
Jane shot him a look. “Before you ask, I don’t want to go there, even if I am on this side of the river.”
Tobe shook his head. “The thought never crossed my mind. I think you should go home.”
“We could give you a lift,” Mike offered.
At the same time, Tobe said, “I’ve got my car here.”
Jane had the grace to look embarrassed. “I don’t want to put you out.”
“It’s no problem, really.” Tobe smiled.
“And I suppose you guys have legal things to discuss,” Sunny added, thinking,
Tobe led Jane off to his Lexus, and Sunny got back behind the wheel of her Jeep. “Okay, Dad,” she said, pulling on her seat belt. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
“Are you going to call Will and let him know how things turned out?” Mike asked.
“Yes,” she replied. “When we get home. I don’t like the idea of yakking on the phone while I’m trying to drive.”
Tobe and Jane pulled out of the parking lot ahead of them, and Sunny didn’t see the dark blue Lexus on her way home. The drive was uneventful. They arrived in time for Mike to catch his nine o’clock shows. Both of them changed out of their good clothes. Sunny pulled on a set of old sweats and went up the stairs to her room and the phone.
When she got Will, he already knew what had happened at the station. “So Phillips did a good job of getting Jane out, but Trumbull is furious. Apparently, they were laughing their heads off at him as they left.”
“That’s not quite true,” she told Will. “Jane was wound pretty tightly after being hauled down to the station and questioned again. Tobe tried to loosen her up by reminding her of something silly that happened back in school. She sort of overreacted, and so did he.”
“And so has Trumbull,” Will said grimly. “He’s riding everybody to eliminate this Venables woman as a suspect so he can go back to concentrating on Jane.”
“Okay, not the best result, but that means he’ll be concentrating on somebody besides Jane—at least for a little while.”
“How was Jane?” Will’s voice got a little awkward as he asked.
“After she stopped laughing, she seemed like her usual self,” Sunny reported. “She declined to go to Martin’s memorial service, even though she wasn’t all that far away. And then she turned down my dad’s offer of a lift to go home in Tobe’s Lexus.”
“Did she?” Will was a good cop who didn’t give much away. But Sunny was willing to bet right now that he was wondering if he’d created a monster.
*
Shadow slammed into the window, bouncing off painfully and falling to the floor below. He tried to shake the pain out of his shoulder and grimly trotted to a new angle, running, leaping, slamming into the glass, and rebounding again. The problem was there was no place level with the window, no place that allowed him any chance at a running start.
He sighed and sprang to the windowsill. Even if he could run straight at the glass, he wasn’t sure he could break it. Certainly, it had held up against his best efforts so far.
Shadow leaned down to lick at his shoulder. But that wouldn’t make the dull ache go away. He tried to distract himself by taking in the view. Outside, a big, snow-covered lawn stretched to a line of trees far away. Shadow pressed a paw against the glass, feeling the chill from outside work its way into the pads of his foot. It must be freezing out there for that much cold to come through the window.
