In His Wife's Name. Joyce Sullivan

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СКАЧАТЬ sob caught in his chest, building until the pain of it vibrated through his body and throbbed in his brain. His fingers clutched the magazine like a lifeline to sanity. Would this address lead him to Mary’s killer?

      THERE WAS SAFETY living in a small town. Shannon Mulligan could look out the window of Glorie’s Gifts Galore—one of the many shops in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley where her handmade crafts were sold—and easily scan the six-block length of Blossom Valley. She knew the proprietor of every store in the Western-style business district by name and every face that belonged here. Strangers stuck out like palm trees in a desert and made her hackles rise until she assured herself that the stranger couldn’t possibly be her ex-husband.

      Surely the fact that Rob hadn’t found her in sixteen months meant he likely never would. She and Samantha were safe.

      As if knowing she was the object of her mother’s thoughts, nine-month-old Samantha gurgled and cooed with delight as her plump sweet fingers latched on to a bright red apple appliquéd to the green gingham skirt covering a nearby display table. A basket filled with vegetable-and fruit-shaped napkin rings nearly slid off the table as Samantha tugged on the tablecloth. Shannon expertly grabbed the basket to prevent it from crashing to the floor, then worked the gingham cloth from her daughter’s grasp.

      “Oh, you silly girl!” she admonished gently. “The apple is so pretty and colorful, isn’t it?”

      Samantha beamed up at Shannon from her stroller, her cap of silky dark hair mussed and her dark eyes glinting with smoky-gray and mottled-brown flecks of mischief. Eyes so like Rob’s, Shannon’s ex-husband, that they irrefutably confirmed the truth of Samantha’s sordid conception. Shannon prayed daily that her baby hadn’t also inherited her father’s tendency to fly into rages at the slightest provocation.

      So far, Samantha’s temperament had been as meek as a lamb’s. Despite the terror and uncertainty that had hounded Shannon during the days and nights of her pregnancy, she loved her daughter more than life itself. Because of Samantha, Shannon had found a courage inside herself she hadn’t known she possessed. She’d taken risks, impossible risks, but they’d all been worth it. Rob would never be able to lay a hand on her again.

      Her eyes stung with tears as she bent to kiss her daughter’s brow. Samantha deserved a safe and happy childhood. That was all that mattered.

      “Not to worry, Mary,” Glorie assured Shannon, bustling up beside them and breaking Shannon’s train of thought. “I should have offered to get the door for you, but I just couldn’t take my eyes off that batch of birdhouses you just brought in. I promised to put one aside for a customer.”

      Shannon could see by the genuine softening of Glorie’s careworn face that the gift-shop proprietor truly didn’t mind Samantha’s inquisitive fingers. Glorie’s heart was as generously proportioned as the body that housed it, and sometimes Shannon felt certain the residents of Blossom Valley would forgive her for assuming another woman’s identity. It wasn’t as if Shannon was doing Mary Calder any harm. She was just borrowing her name and her likeness.

      Shannon eased Samantha’s stroller out of the aisle as Glorie pulled the door open. “Now don’t forget, Mary, you promised you’d drop off a dozen welcome signs and at least three letter boxes before the long weekend. I can’t keep them in stock. Your Garden Patch collection is just taking off.”

      “And I couldn’t be happier,” Shannon replied with a sigh of contentment, feeling grateful that her new career fulfilled both her creative and her financial needs. She was making plans to buy additional tools and to hire someone with woodworking experience to cut the wooden pieces for her crafts so she could concentrate on the finishing and painting. Unfortunately the business loan she’d applied for at the bank to allow her to move her business out of the lakeside cottage she rented and into a larger place of her own had been denied, but Shannon was sure that had more to do with her short residency and lack of employment history. Her income was steadily improving. She just had to prove to the bank she was a good risk.

      Promising Glorie she’d be back in a few days with her order, Shannon pushed Samantha’s stroller out onto the sidewalk. July sunshine bathed her face and bare arms with ovenlike warmth. The newspaper office was two doors down. She entered and made arrangements for her Help Wanted ad for a woodworker to be inserted in the upcoming Weekly Gazette. Now all she had to do was make a quick trip to the lumberyard for supplies, then head home to put Samantha down for her afternoon nap. Shannon did all her cutting while her daughter napped, looked after business details and sketched designs during the mornings, then painted at night after Samantha was in bed.

      Her step quickened and she felt like singing with happiness as she pushed Samantha’s stroller toward the beat-up green pickup truck she’d embellished with decorative artwork advertising her Garden Patch collection. A billboard on wheels.

      She’d fastened Samantha into her car seat and was climbing behind the steering wheel when she noticed the toy rattle tucked beneath the windshield wiper. What on earth?

      Shannon climbed out of the truck and removed the pastel-pink bear-shaped rattle. She’d never seen it before in her life. It looked brand-new. Had someone found it on the sidewalk and assumed it belonged to her because they’d seen a car seat in the truck?

      Shannon glanced up and down the street. There wasn’t a person in sight. So why, then, did she feel vaguely uneasy as she climbed back into the truck?

      FROM A DISTANCE the woman leaving the newspaper office bore a striking resemblance to Mary—bare shoulders tanned a golden brown, the sun glinting off flaxen hair carelessly sweeping sculpted cheekbones. The exuberant bounce in her step as she pushed the stroller down the sidewalk seemed so bitingly familiar that Luke’s heart twisted with an impossible wish that the past sixteen months of his life had been some cruel hoax. But reason told him that Mary’s death was real. He’d identified her battered body.

      Still, from the moment he’d spotted her double leaving the cottage at nine-fifteen this morning, the back of her truck loaded with boxes, this woman with the baby—whoever she was—affected him like a channel surfer punching the remote control of his emotions. Luke experienced flashes of white-hot rage, stomach-knotting confusion and sharp pangs of unsettled longing as he tracked her movements to three different gift shops in the area. Was it mere coincidence that she shared his wife’s name and likeness? Had the credit bureau made a bureaucratic error? Or was something else going on? How many Mary Tatiana Calders with the same birth date could there be in one country?

      He was going to call Ottawa on his cell phone and have her license plate run when he got back to the motel. He dropped a tip on the coffee-shop table where he’d sat the past half hour conducting his surveillance and hustled outside to his rental car. The woman in faded jeans and a white sleeveless cotton blouse was just starting the engine of a brightly painted pickup that made following her child’s play.

      Before he’d been granted emergency leave and hopped the first flight he could to Penticton, the Okanagan city nearest Blossom Valley with an airport, Luke had called Detective Sergeant Zach Vaughn, the lead investigator in Mary’s murder, to inform him what was up. Vaughn had tried to dissuade him from checking out the lead. Department policy discouraged officers from investigating cases involving family members. But since they both knew Luke had a right as a citizen to investigate his own case, Vaughn had agreed, with certain conditions. Luke was an informant traveling on his own time, with his own funds—though he still had a badge that could grant him certain privileges with the local police. Luke was to keep in constant touch with Vaughn. The minute Luke found any evidence linking this woman to Mary Calder’s murder Vaughn would call in the local police to take over the investigation.

      After Luke had agreed to the conditions, Vaughn had СКАЧАТЬ