The Truth About Comfort Cove

“Fine.”

He stared out his bedroom window toward the fenced and very dark backyard that held nothing but a gas grill and lawn that was more dead than alive. “Rough day?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m glad you called.”

“Me, too.” Her tone told him what she would not. She needed a friend tonight.

He couldn’t afford the temptation. And felt like a heel.

His life in a nutshell.

CHAPTER THREE

M onday’s mail brought an invitation from Emma Sanderson and Chris Talbot. The pair were having a wedding and reception on a friend’s boat in Comfort Cove, Massachusetts, on Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend.

The invitation bore a handwritten note from Emma, telling Lucy she’d really like her to be there.

And while Lucy had only met the other woman a couple of times, sitting in on a case of Ramsey’s, this was one wedding she would not miss.

Filling in the RSVP while sitting in her car, Lucy sealed her acceptance and tucked the envelope in the front pocket of her purse to be dropped into the outgoing mailbox at the station.

The wedding wasn’t until the Saturday, so she’d be home to have the traditional holiday dinner with her mother on Thursday—hopefully Sandy would be coherent enough to do the cooking herself. Her mother’s cooking skills were much better than Lucy’s.

And then she’d escape the rest of the painful weekend— Sandy hadn’t had a sober holiday yet—leaving her mother in the care of Marie Kolhouse, Sandy’s caregiver and best friend, whose salary was provided by Sandy’s emotional disability social security.

Marie was a godsend. She got Sandy to her doctors’ appointments when Lucy couldn’t. She helped keep the house clean. Made sure Sandy had groceries.

Had Ramsey received an invitation to the wedding? She couldn’t imagine that Emma and Chris would ask Lucy and not Ramsey, the lead detective on the case.

Would Ramsey accept the invitation?

Picturing the cute black dress she’d purchased on a whim a couple of years before to wear to the chief of police’s annual Christmas party, Lucy put her car in Drive, skidded too quickly down her driveway and sped away. The reception was on a boat. She wouldn’t be wearing high heels.

And what Ramsey Miller thought of anything she might have on her body was not food for thought.

Another trip to the penitentiary was.

Mrs. Gladys Buckley didn’t resemble any convict Lucy had ever seen. Even after six years of incarceration—and two years on house arrest before that while she awaited trial— Gladys had the bearing of a rich and privileged woman.

“New hair color,” Lucy said as she sat down across the standard oblong table in the small, caged interview room at the minimum-security state penitentiary where Gladys would be living out the rest of her days with no chance for parole, thanks, in part, to Lucy.

Lucy had found out about Gladys through Sandy and called the police—not that Gladys knew this.

“There’s a girl on my street, licensed from one of the expensive salons with superior training,” the older woman replied. “She does it for me.”

Gladys spoke like she still lived in her mansion on the hill, when her street, these days, was a cell block on the second floor of the prison.

“I’ll bet you pay her well.” Gladys could use commissary funds, monies given to prisoners for services rendered incarcerated, which went a long way when you were “decorating” a six-by-twelve foot abode.

Dressed in expensive-looking brown slacks, a white blouse and an orange-and-brown flowered jacket, she looked more like a model from the pages of a fashion magazine for older women than a prison inmate as she nodded. “Of course. Good work deserves ample reward.”

And money bought loyalty. A moral code from Gladys’s world that had served her well for more than two decades. Until Lucy, wearing a wire with a direct link to the Aurora Police Department, had posed as an unwed mother and blown Gladys’s black-market baby business, and her world, to hell.

“I have some questions for you,” Lucy said now, looking the older woman straight in the eye. When she’d first met Gladys, when she’d first spent time in Gladys’s home, she’d liked the woman. A lot.

“I’ll answer what I can,” the sixty-three-year-old said as gracious as always, her manicured hands calmly folded on top of the table. She’d been offered a plea deal, minimum-security housing with every freedom she could be allotted while still being a guest of the state, in exchange for full cooperation.