Darkness Before the Dawn (Maggie Bennett 2)

his,” she said in a small voice that was little more than a whisper.

“Come away, Kate,” Maggie said, putting a gentle but inexorable hand on her arm. “We can talk in the living room.”

“I don’t understand,” she said again. And then she made a terrible face. “What is that awful smell?”

Maggie didn’t want to tell her, but Kate wasn’t showing any signs of moving, and the sight in front of them wasn’t the most attractive. “When someone dies violently, their bladder and bowels empty,” she said in her most pragmatic tone.

“Oh, God,” Kate said in a strangled voice. And clapping a hand over her mouth, she stumbled away in the direction of her bedroom. From the gagging sounds she heard, Maggie guessed that Kate was heading for the other bathroom. Reaching out, she shut the door and the body of Francis Ackroyd out of sight and followed her sister.

“I need another drink,” Kate announced when she’d finally managed to stagger from the bathroom on unsteady feet.

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Maggie said. “Some weak tea, perhaps—”

“I need another drink. If we’re going to take care of the body, I need more than weak tea to put strength in me,” Kate said with a trace of her usual self-possession.

“Take care of the body?” Maggie echoed faintly. “What do you mean?”

“Have you forgotten? I’m in the middle of the nastiest custody fight this side of Gloria Vanderbilt. Brian will crucify me if this comes out. We’ve got to hide the body.”

“Kate!”

“I mean it, Maggie. Only for a couple of days at the most. We go back to court on Friday, and the judge has promised a ruling by then. It’ll be too late to do anything about it—”

“Kate, I’m a lawyer. I’m not going to go around obstructing the law by hiding murder victims—”

“Yes, you are,” Kate said. Her brown eyes filled up with tears. “This is my baby we’re talking about. I can’t lose her.”

“But why should you?”

“Francis Ackroyd and I had a huge fight this afternoon,” Kate said in a flat voice, “in the commissary at the studio, with at least twenty-five witnesses. I told him I wanted to kill him. I told him that very, very loudly.”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes. It’s only a couple of days, Maggie. We can dump him somewhere on the south side and cross our fingers—”

“They’d trace him straight back to you, Kate, especially if you had such a public fight. We’re just going to have to make sure no one finds him and starts asking embarrassing questions until the judge has ruled.”

Kate looked at her older sister with renewed respect. “What will we do with him?”

Maggie rose from the king-size bed that Kate had shared with Brian before he’d run off and married a twenty-year-old socialite who had forty million dollars more than Kate Zimmerman had. “Go and empty your refrigerator.”

“Oh, no, Maggie!” she moaned.

“Oh, yes. Anywhere else, and he’ll smell. And decompose, too, for that matter. At least in your refrigerator he’ll keep for a while.”

Kate turned around and headed back for the toilet. She slammed the door shut behind her.

Maggie shook her head. Disposing of Francis Ackroyd was the most immediate problem. But the moment they had him safely stashed, she was going to sit Kate down and get some straight answers out of her. Like what had they fought over? And when had the body appeared in her tub?

Not for a moment did she entertain the possibility that Kate had done it. Kate was strong, sturdy, fearless, and incorruptible—and completely squeamish. She could no more stick a gun at someone’s temple than she could hurt her baby, and Maggie knew that very well. Someone had framed her, but there was no way she could deal with it until Kate had told her absolutely everything.

It must have had something to do with Kate’s job at Stoneham Studios. She’d worked for that small, independent movie studio for the last three years, even when Brian had insisted it wasn’t quite the thing for someone of her social background. But Kate had loved it and had clung to her career through thick and thin. Maggie now had to wonder whether it was going to prove her undoing after all.

Moving Francis wasn’t a pleasant job. Kate had dumped everything from the refrigerator into the garbage and had put the wire shelves in the utility room. Then she tried to beat a strategic retreat, but Maggie needed her to help to drag the late Francis, wrapped in the shower curtain, to the refrigerator. Fortunately, he’d been a small man, and he fit well enough. But the door wouldn’t stay closed, so she propped one of the kitchen chairs against it. Then she sank down into the chair.

It was moments like this, she thought, when one needed a cigarette—even when one didn’t smoke. Life’s little moments that were fraught with discomfort and despair. She’d considered taking up cigarettes after Mack’s death just for something to do, but at the last minute had decided against it. For one thing, every time she inhaled, she choked. For another, it interfered with her suddenly fanatical devotion to making her body as lean and fit as she possibly could. So no cigarettes. But right at that moment, she would have killed for one.

Kate paced back and forth, eyeing the refrigerator with great distrust. “What are you doing, sitting there?” she demanded.