A Match Made for Murder Iona Whishaw (pride and prejudice read .TXT) 📖

the bedroom and dumped everything out of her handbag and took up her passport, her wallet, all the change she had, and her room key and distributed them into her pockets. She didn’t want to be hampered by a handbag. About to turn away, she snatched up her handkerchief. Almost smiling, she remembered her German governess telling her a well-brought-up girl never left the house without a handkerchief. They were good for all kinds of emergencies. She was sure her governess had never anticipated a night flight from armed men in cowboy country. As a quick afterthought, she opened the wardrobe and felt inside. With a cry of triumph, she called out, “I’ve found a couple of jackets!”

She pulled them off the hangers. One was a man’s flight jacket with a thick shearling lining, and the other was some sort of fur jacket.

Meg was at the door. She had switched on the flashlight, which momentarily beamed with its old intensity and then began to flicker again. She reached for the fur. “I think this will fit just fine. I’ll need it when I get to back east.”

Happy at Meg’s choice, Lane put on the flight jacket, and though she fairly swam in it, zipped it up, and counted herself lucky. “Do you have those keys? We should lock this room. They might as well imagine I’m still in there. Maybe they’ll stop and make some coffee while they think of what to do with me.”

Meg found the keys, locked the room after some messing about with the wrong keys, took them to a cupboard by the fireplace, and then thought better of it. She pushed the keys into the lock of the front door, locked it, and then left the keys, trying to turn the main key past the lock position to jam the lock.

“No,” said Lane. “That will alert them something is wrong. Let’s lock the door as we leave, like he did.”

Meg shrugged and Lane could see her nodding in the dark. “Good point.” She started for the door.

“That handbag might get in the way. I shoved everything I have in my pockets,” Lane suggested.

Meg stopped and then shook her head. “I love this purse. Rex gave it to me. And it’s real expensive.”

The cold smacked them cleanly as they stepped outside. The sky was reeling with stars in the space above the forest, a great alien canopy that took Lane’s breath away. While it was dark, the night had a kind of luminescence that seemed to shimmer. It was easier to see the outlines of things as they looked out toward where the city lay below. The trees, the road, the boulders.

“Well, here goes nothin’,” Meg said.

God, Lane thought, I hope not nothin’.

Chapter Twenty-Six

It was the hair. It was something to do with the hair. Ames paced his office. A curly blond woman bought the clothes; she was the hitchhiker picked up by the Armstrongs. A blonde in her late twenties or early thirties. A blonde who was not Tina Van Eyck. But it was Tina whom Mr. Van Eyck wanted to protect. Why?

With a bound he was out of his office and down the stairs to the main office where Marcus Van Eyck still sat glumly, waiting to sign his statement.

“Mr. Van Eyck, do you mind? I have a couple more questions.” He waved his hand toward the interview room. On their way past Terrell’s desk, he mimed writing on a pad and signalled Terrell to follow them.

Once they were settled, Ames put his hands in front of him on the table and looked at Van Eyck, who was sitting back in his chair, as if unconsciously trying to pull as far away as possible from whatever was coming. “Now then, I think you’d better tell us why you think Tina killed Barney Watts.”

Van Eyck’s eyes widened almost imperceptibly. He shook his head. “I don’t think that. I don’t think that because I did it, I told you. I want my statement, and I want whatever is supposed to happen next to happen. I won’t sign anything except what I said.”

“Listen, I appreciate a father wanting to protect his daughter. But lying isn’t going to get us any closer to who is actually responsible.”

There was a silence while Van Eyck, with a puzzled expression looked from one policeman to the other. “I don’t understand,” he said finally.

“If I’m honest, neither do I. But I know one thing: you didn’t do it. You don’t even know how he died, though you have the details of the car right. I’m guessing you did see the scene, maybe, and found something that made you think Tina was involved. How’s my guess?”

Crossing his arms, Van Eyck looked away from Ames.

“Look, Mr. Van Eyck, this isn’t going to get us anywhere. We both know it wasn’t you, and if it’s any help, we don’t think it was Tina. The question is why you think it was. And before you continue down this road, lying about what you’ve seen obstructs our ability to solve this case, and that is a crime. If you’re so anxious to spend time in a cell, we may yet be able to arrange it.”

Van Eyck looked back at Ames, a glimmer of something like hope in his eyes. “Then why was this officer out to the garage to talk to her all those times?” He indicated Terrell with a lift of his chin.

Terrell made a small movement, but Ames lifted his hand slightly. “Let’s start again, shall we? How about we go over the whole thing again, and this time you tell us the truth.”

August 1936

Barney Watts leaned over and kissed Amy. They were parked near the beach. A string of lights along the pier reflected on the nearly still surface of the water. They had parked under the trees, which blocked out the light from the town behind.

“You’re sweeter than all them other girls,” he said,