All Night Long (9 page)

“Webb may be powerful, but he’s still a father whose daughter just took her own life, either deliberately or by accident. Your dad once told me that families usually try to keep suicide very quiet. I’ve dealt with a couple in the past few years, and I can tell you that he was right. It’s amazing the lengths folks will go to in order to hush up that kind of thing.”

Irene sighed. “I know.”

“Far as I’m concerned,” Sam said, “unless there’s a good reason for thinking otherwise, a family is entitled to keep its secrets.”

He looked to Luke, obviously seeking some backup.

Luke shrugged. “Depends on the secrets, I guess. But one thing’s for sure, every family’s got ’em.”

F
orty minutes later, Sam escorted them out the door of the municipal building. Irene was still fuming, but a renewed sense of resolve was setting in. She reminded herself that she had known from the outset that the odds of convincing McPherson to conduct a full-scale investigation were less than zero.

“Give it some time, Irene,” Sam said. “I know it wasn’t easy, finding her like that. But when the shock wears off, you’ll realize that it really was an overdose, not a murder.”

“Sure,” she said.

Luke said nothing, just took her arm and steered her down the steps to the SUV. He opened the passenger-side door. Irene climbed in swiftly.

Luke got behind the wheel and drove out of the parking lot. Irene could see that every head in the Ventana View Café was turned in the direction of the SUV.

“Pack of ghouls,” she whispered.

“Give ’em a break,” Luke said quietly. “This is a small town. The death of someone like Pamela Webb, a senator’s daughter and former local bad girl, is bound to grab everyone’s attention.”

She gripped her shoulder bag very tightly in her lap.
“They stared at me in exactly the same way at the funerals of my parents.”

He gave her a quick, sharp, searching look before returning his attention to the road.

“For what it’s worth,” he said after a while, “I think McPherson is right. Your friend’s death was either an accident or suicide.”

“I’m not buying it.”

“Yeah, I can see that. Give McPherson his due, though. He’s not cooperating in a cover-up. He laid out the facts for you. There’s nothing that warrants further investigation.”

“There’s still that e-mail note she sent to me. How can he ignore that?”

“He didn’t ignore it,” Luke said patiently. “Like Webb, he thinks that Pamela was planning suicide and going through a process of saying farewell to some of the people in her past.”

“Then why didn’t she wait until after she had actually said good-bye to me before she killed herself?”

“People who are planning to commit suicide don’t follow the same logic that the rest of us do. They’re focused on their own pain and suffering. That’s all they can grasp.”

The too-even way he spoke sent a chill through her.

“You sound as if you’ve had some personal experience with suicide,” she said.

“My mother killed herself when I was six years old.”

She closed her eyes briefly against a rush of sadness and sympathy. “Dear God, Luke.” She raised her lashes and looked at him. “I’m so sorry.”

He nodded once, saying nothing.

“Last night must have been especially bad for you,” she said.

“It was my choice to follow you, remember?”

She frowned. “Why
did
you follow me? You still haven’t explained that.”

His mouth curved faintly. “When I see dots, I feel this overwhelming need to connect them.”

“I’m a dot?”

“Uh-huh.” He gave her a quick, assessing look and then shook his head, resigned. “You’re not going to let it go, are you?”

“Pamela’s death? No.”

“Mind if I ask why you’re so damn sure there’s a mystery here? Is it just that e-mail you got from Pamela? Or is there more to it?”

She thought about that. “It’s a feeling I’ve got.”

“A feeling.”

“Yes.”

“A feeling isn’t a lot to go on,” he said neutrally.

“That’s almost funny, considering it’s coming from someone who just admitted that he followed me last night because he sensed that I was a dot waiting to be connected to another dot.”

“Okay, I’ll give you that one,” he conceded. “Moving right along, what was your take on Ryland Webb this morning? Think he believes there’s more to his daughter’s death than pills and booze and wants to cover it up?”

She hesitated. “He certainly doesn’t want an investigation, does he?”

“You may not like his reasons, but he does have a few.”

“I know.” She folded her arms. “I told you, he’s an ambitious man, completely focused on his career. He didn’t have any time for Pamela seventeen years ago, and he sure doesn’t want to waste much time on her now.”

“Listen to me, Irene Stenson. If you’re thinking of going up against Ryland Webb, you’d better be real sure you’ve got a big club. Webb is a powerful man.”

“Don’t you think I know that?”

Luke drove in silence for a while.

“Sam McPherson knew Pamela fairly well, I take it?”

The question caught her by surprise. “They were friends in the old days. I don’t know what their relationship has been like these past seventeen years, though.”

“Ever have the feeling that he was romantically fixated on her?”

She pondered that for a few seconds. “I certainly never
took it that way, and I’m pretty sure Pamela didn’t either. Sam was several years older, of course. She was only sixteen. Sam was in his early twenties at the time.”

“That’s not a big age gap.”

“It would have seemed like it in high school.” She drummed her fingers on the seat. “But looking back, I think it was the way she treated him that made me assume that there was no romantic link between them.”

“How did she treat him?”

“Like a friend, not another potential conquest.”

He raised his brows. “Pamela had conquests in those days?”

“Pamela always thought in terms of conquests.” She smiled wryly. “What’s more, there was never a shortage of males offering themselves up to be conquered. She was beautiful and she had a talent for flirting. Guys fell like flies. But it wasn’t just her looks and sex appeal that made her popular.”

“She was a Webb.”

“You heard Maxine this morning—the family is local royalty.”

“Maybe Sam McPherson wanted to be one of her conquests but she ignored him,” Luke suggested. “Maybe he developed an unhealthy obsession with her. One of those ‘if I can’t have her, no one’s going to have her’ situations.”

She shivered a little. “If that was the case, why wait this long to kill her?”

“How the hell should I know? This is your project, not mine. I’m just trying to show you that if you’re going to make up a list of potential killers, it could end up being a very long one.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” she said quietly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Everyone seems to think that Pamela summoned me to Dunsley to say good-bye. But there’s no reason to think that in the midst of a severe clinical depression she would have even remembered a girl she only knew well for one summer back in high school. I think she sent me that e-mail because
she wanted to tell me something important about the past.”

“About the deaths of your parents.”

“Yes.”

“All right, let’s take this logically.”

She almost smiled at that. “Translated, that means you’re going to try to argue me out of my conclusion.”

“Sure. But that’s because your conclusion is based on a shaky foundation. What would Pamela know about what happened to your parents? And if she did know something, why would she wait seventeen years to tell you?”

“I don’t know the answers to those questions, but I can tell you one thing. Pamela Webb was the last person I saw that night before I…found Mom and Dad.”

He glanced at her. “The last person?”

“She called me up that afternoon and asked me if I wanted to hang out at her house for a while, get dinner at the café and then go to the movies. Mom said it was okay, provided I made my usual promise.”

“What was that?”

“The deal I had with my folks that summer was that if Pamela drank or did drugs while I was with her, I had to leave immediately and come straight home.”

“But your parents didn’t refuse to let you spend time with her as long as you followed the rules.”

“I think Mom felt sorry for Pamela because Ryland ignored her so much. For his part, Dad trusted me to call him to come get me if Pamela started drinking or doing drugs. But she never did either when I was with her.”

“Never?”

She shook her head. “Not once. For whatever reason, she really wanted me for a friend. She understood that I would never be allowed to spend time with her again if anything illegal went on. Dad was the chief of police, after all.”

“Go on.”

“We had dinner at the Ventana View Café and then we went to the movies. Afterward we got into her car. She was supposed to drive me straight back to my house. Dad had
another rule, you see. I wasn’t allowed to go beyond the town limits with Pamela because she was a new driver who hadn’t had a lot of experience behind the wheel. But instead of taking me home, she suddenly turned onto Lakefront Road and headed toward Kirbyville.”

“What did you do?”

“At first I thought she was just teasing me. She knew Dad would never let me go anywhere with her again if I violated the rule. When I realized she was serious, I pleaded with her to turn around, but she just laughed and kept driving. I got mad and threatened to jump out of the car. She drove faster. Then I got scared.”

“Think she did some drugs without you knowing?”

“I accused her of that. But she said she hadn’t used anything. She was driving too fast for me to bail out of the car, so I did the only thing I could do; I tightened my seat belt and prayed that she would tire of the game and turn around.”

“Is that what happened?”

“No. When we reached Kirbyville she had to slow down. I told her that I was going to get out and call my folks to come get me. But she started to cry and then she apologized and told me that she would take me home. I was furious because she had ruined everything. By the time we got back to Dunsley we weren’t even speaking to each other. She knew as well as I did that I would never be able to spend time with her again.”

“Because you were going to tell your folks what had happened and they would ground you?”

She smiled sadly. “There was no point trying to lie to either of my parents. Pamela knew that as well as I did. In any event, she took me home and dropped me off in the front yard without saying another word. She left before I even got my key out of my pocket. I never saw her again.”

She stopped talking because she had gone very cold, the way she always did when she talked about that night. If she kept going she would start to shake.

Luke turned onto the road that led to the lodge.

“No offense,” he said after a while, “but it just doesn’t seem likely that Pamela would have waited this long to contact you if she knew something important about what happened that evening.”

“Maybe she only recently learned some details or some facts that she hadn’t known before.”

“You’re reaching here, admit it.” He broke off, jaw hardening. “What the hell?”

She realized that he was looking at a car parked in front of the lobby. A good-looking man in his early twenties leaned casually against one of the stone pillars of the entranceway.

“You’ve really got a problem with paying customers, don’t you?” she said.

“He isn’t a paying customer.” Luke brought the SUV to a halt beside the other car and shut down the engine. “His name is Jason Danner. He’s my youngest brother.”

For some reason it came as unexpected news to learn that Luke had a family. Why had she assumed otherwise? Of course he had relatives, she thought. Most people had lots of them. She was the exception to the rule, because after her great-aunt died a few years ago she had no one left. But that was no reason to assume that everyone else she met was in the same situation.

Still, there was something about Luke that had made her think he was also alone, a sense of distance, perhaps, as if he, too, looked out at the world from another dimension, just as she had learned to do.

She examined Jason through the SUV window, aware of an inexplicable sense of curiosity. There certainly wasn’t a great deal of family resemblance, she thought. The two men were very different physically. Jason was not only younger, he was taller and, a picky purist might say, better looking. Not sexier, though, Irene thought, just handsomer. Big difference.

It occurred to her that, given the obvious age difference
between the two and the fact that Luke had said he’d lost his mother when he was six, Jason had to be the offspring of a second marriage. He and Luke were half brothers.

Luke was already out of the SUV. There was a forbidding cast to his face. He was not particularly pleased to see his brother.

“What are you doing here, Jase?” he asked. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

Jason spread his hands. “Take it easy, Big Brother. Just thought I’d come see how you’re doing in the motel business.”