But his hand had closed over hers, immensely comforting, as was the deep timbre of his voice. “What, Beth? Things frightening to you then can’t be so bad now.”
No. Her mother had been murdered, and her body squished behind a new sheet of wallboard in the garage, to stay there hidden all these years. Not much rated, compared to that.
“No. You’re right. Um, I got sick one day. My English teacher—” now, why did she remember what class she’d been in? “—gave me a pass to go to the office and call home, but Mom didn’t answer. I didn’t want to be stuck with the nurse, so I claimed I felt better and…just left. I knew I’d be in trouble later, but I didn’t care. I threw up partway home, right in someone’s flower bed. I tried to cover it with bark, but…”
The humor in Tony’s eyes would have made her laugh at her young self, if the rest of this memory wasn’t so hateful. “What a dumb thing to have been so humiliated about.” She huffed out a breath. “Well, I made it home—it was only about a mile—and then realized that, without my key, I couldn’t get in with Mom gone. Except her car was there. The door wasn’t even locked, so I went in and called, ‘Mom!’ I heard this weird thud. She…she half opened her bedroom door, and I could tell she didn’t have any clothes on, except she was sort of clutching her bra to her front. She said she was just getting out of the shower. She told me to hop into bed, and she’d be there as soon as she finished getting dressed. So that’s what I did.” She fell silent, realizing how incredibly naive she’d been for a teenager. Mom hadn’t even looked damp. “I suppose she pushed him off the bed so she could head me off. I didn’t really suspect, except later I got to thinking.”
“What did you ask Matt?”
“Just…whether he’d noticed Mom being kind of strange lately. And he made me tell him what I was talking about.”
“She took some serious chances.” As he thought, Tony rubbed his jaw in that way he had. “With three kids and a husband who must have had lots of breaks during the day. Professors don’t teach more than, what, three or four classes a quarter?”
“If that. Even if he only had a couple of classes in a day, Dad didn’t usually come home between, though. I mean, he had office hours, too, and he could write or plan his next lectures there as easily as at home.” She grimaced. “Probably better. Given the three kids.”
Tony chuckled. “Okay. Still.”
Beth bit her lip. “You’re thinking that it would have made more sense for them to have sex at his place. Unless…”
“Unless he was married, too. That’s my guess.”
She nodded unhappily. That made sense.
“What kind of clients did your mother have at work? Do you know? Did she handle businesses or individuals?”
“I think both. I know she did Dr. Schuh’s clinic—he was in with a family doctor and a nurse practitioner—as well as his and his wife’s personal taxes. So there might have been others like that.”
“Was in? Did you not continue going there?”
“No, even Emily was old enough to start seeing our family doctor, whose office is by the hospital.”
“Back to your mother’s clients. Doctors, lawyers, other professionals, not to mention the wheat farmers or early vineyard owners, all would have had more money than your parents did. Would that have appealed to her?”
It made Beth really uncomfortable to dissect her mother this way, but it wasn’t as if she could ever know. Or…deserved her children’s loyalty? Hadn’t she been betraying them as much as she was her husband, in a way? As it turned out, the betrayal had killed her and left all of her kids damaged, too.
“Maybe,” she said finally. “Dad didn’t care about money at all. Mom never would have overspent. You have to understand that. She was really meticulous paying bills and keeping records.”
“You’ve looked?”
“I took over the bill paying after she disappeared.”
Tony shook his head. “A fifteen-year-old girl. Of course you did.”