The Good Neighbor. Sharon Mignerey

Чтение книги онлайн.

      By the time Wade headed back toward her, Megan had finished her call. Her boss, Sarah Moran, had told her not to worry about a thing, saying that she’d notify all the patients on Megan’s schedule for the day.

      Detective Prescott’s posture was all tense again, she noted, deliberately thinking of him by his title. Finding that her hands were once more trembling, she clasped them on top of the table. She remembered this from before, and it seemed to her that she’d spent a long time shaking, especially when she had tried to go to sleep.

      Stop it, she mentally scolded herself. She was no longer a child, and she’d be able to handle this.

      “Are you up to showing me how you found the body?” he asked, pulling out a notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket and coming to a stop a few feet away from her.

      She stood and came toward him, determined to get everything out in the open. Better he hear it from her than someone else. “I helped Doc Wagner put him—Robby—in the body bag.”

      He looked at her steadily as though she’d simply told him something banal, like it was a nice day. “Is that when you got the blood all over you?”

      She looked down at herself. “I don’t honestly remember.” How could she have not noticed the blood before now? “I remember touching Robby’s neck to see if there was a pulse. There wasn’t.”

      Over the next few minutes she explained to Wade how she had found Robby while he drew a sketch, adjusting the lines on the drawing as she struggled to remember as many details of those awful minutes as she could.

      When they were finished, he thanked her, then said, “We need to get a formal statement from you, and for that, Chief Egan is going to take you down to the station.” He paused. “And, we’re going to need your clothes as possible evidence, so he’s going to go inside your house with you while you get something to change into after you get to the station.”

      Megan felt her lips go numb. This was more than a witness statement. “Am I a suspect?”

      He seemed to weigh his words before answering without anything close to a reassuring smile to ease his somber expression. “Let’s take this one step at a time, Megan.” He said her name the way a friend might, only she knew he wasn’t, couldn’t be, her friend. “The sooner we get your statement and process the crime scene, the sooner we’ll have an idea of who did this.”

      With that, he introduced her to Chief Egan, whom she had seen at quite a few different civic functions over the last three years. If he recognized her, he didn’t indicate it at all. He was silent as they went inside her house and she retrieved clothes to change into.

      As stern as Detective Wade Prescott had seemed to her, Chief Egan was even more so, his gaze avoiding hers as she climbed into the back seat of his cruiser. When he closed the door, she looked across the street to the shocked faces of her neighbors. Was it her own rampant imagination, or had their eyes narrowed in suspicion? She wanted to bow her head and cry, but instead she lifted her chin, managed what she hoped would pass for a reassuring smile and waved at them. Only Angie Williams, her youngest child riding on her hip, waved back.

      On the short drive to the police station, Chief Egan was quiet, his gaze meeting hers in the rearview mirror only once. When they arrived, he barked an order to Caroline York, the dispatcher, to accompany her to the restroom where she was to collect Megan’s clothes.

      “Hi, Caroline,” Megan said as the woman came around her desk.

      “I’m so sorry for what happened this morning,” Caroline responded. “Are you okay?”

      “Wait,” Chief Egan said. “You two know each other?”

      “Sure,” Caroline said. “We go to the same church.”

      “Uh-huh,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “You’re the only female on duty today, so you’re stuck with collecting the evidence whether she’s a friend or not. Understood?”

      “Yes,” she replied evenly, leading Megan down the hall and rolling her eyes when they were out of sight of Chief Egan. “My gosh, he’s acting as if you’re a suspect, instead of the person who reported the crime.”

      Megan didn’t say anything about the chief. Instead, she asked Caroline, “How’s your grandfather?” He had been a patient last winter when he’d suffered a mild stroke.

      “Testy as ever,” Caroline replied in her cheerful tone. “He likes making me think that he doesn’t want Billy and me living with him. And I’d almost believe him if he didn’t light up like Christmas when Billy gets home from school. Billy can’t wait to show his great-grandpa his papers, and Gramps can’t wait to see them.”

      Caroline’s description of a family that took care of one another, even as they meddled and interfered in one another’s lives, made Megan envious. She thought of the void in her own life. Helen Russell СКАЧАТЬ