Chapter Five
“I can’t believe they let that man go! He killed my baby!” Darinda pressed a wadded tissue to her reddened eyes and sniffed. They had all spent a restless night, but the Monday-morning news that the only suspect in Sharee’s murder was released had done nothing to improve anyone’s mood.
“They let him go because they didn’t have enough evidence to hold him,” Chloe said. Though she had stepped into her meeting with Brian ready to believe he was her sister’s murderer, his protestations of innocence had seemed so genuine.
“They found his glove!” Darinda said. If the sheriff’s office had thought to keep this information secret, they had failed miserably. Everyone in town seemed to know about Brian’s ski glove being found next to the body.
“He lost the glove several days ago,” Chloe said. “His fellow ski patrollers all said so.”
“He could have pretended to lose it, knowing he was going to use it when he murdered Sharee,” Darinda said.
Maybe. Except why leave a glove that he knew had his name written inside?
“The sheriff’s department is testing for DNA,” Chloe said.
“If Chloe was killed by someone wearing that glove, her DNA will be on it.” And the wearer’s would be on the inside—Brian, or whoever had framed him.
Chloe would reserve judgment until DNA confirmed or ruled out Brian’s involvement.
Though she had a hard time believing the easygoing ski patroller would be so evil.
“Why are you defending him?” Darinda snapped.
“I’m not defending him. But they can’t hold someone for murder if they don’t have evidence.”
“He hated Sharee,” Darinda said. “That’s motive.”
Did he? Brian had admitted to being annoyed with Sharee, but Chloe had detected no real heat behind this admission. “Why do you think he hated her?” she asked.
“He’s exactly like that teacher. He led her on, then tried to dump her.
” She looked up toward the ceiling and her voice rose.
“An innocent girl cut down in the prime of life.” Fresh tears streamed down her cheeks, and she dabbed at them delicately.
Chloe had the eerie sensation of having seen this before.
What was that role Darinda had played a couple of years ago—something with a grieving mother?
That last sentence sounded like one of the lines from that play.
Chloe looked at her dad. He shook his head and patted his wife’s back. “Don’t get yourself so worked up, Darinda,” he said. “It isn’t healthy for your heart.”
“I need my pills.” Darinda looked around her. “Where are my pills?”
“They’re in your purse,” Chloe’s dad said.
“I’ll get them.” Chloe stood and retrieved the purse, found the bottle of Xanax, and passed it over.
She was trying hard to make allowances for Darinda’s grief.
No parent should have to lose a child, and Sharee was Darinda’s only offspring.
Chloe was the stepdaughter. She didn’t have the same kind of relationship with Darinda.
Darinda gulped down one of the pills and drank from the half-empty glass of water beside her. “I need to lie down,” she said, then rose and staggered from the room.
When she was gone, Chloe moved to sit beside her dad. “How are you doing?” she asked.
“I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck.” He wiped his hand down his face. “How could this have happened?”
“I keep asking myself the same thing,” Chloe said. “I don’t know. Sharee could be impulsive sometimes. Maybe too trusting. She didn’t have sense where men were concerned. Maybe she met the wrong person and got in over her head.”
“Do you know this Brian person well?”
“Not at all, really. He came to me to ask me to talk to Sharee about leaving him alone. She kept following him at work, making suggestive comments. She wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
“Like with that teacher,” her father said.
“Is that how it happened with the teacher?” Chloe asked.
Her father slumped lower in his seat. “In the beginning. Then it progressed. Sharee started calling his cell phone. She stopped by his house after school and on weekends—uninvited, according to him. He was married, with two children. He ended up filing a complaint and got a restraining order. Sharee couldn’t continue to go to school after that.
” He sighed, and his shoulders sagged further.
“Darinda thinks the whole thing was an overreaction on the part of the teacher and his wife. I wanted to believe that, too.”
“But maybe it wasn’t,” Chloe said. She picked lint from her leggings, avoiding her father’s gaze.
“Someone called the ski resort and complained about Brian,” she said.
“A woman. She used fake names. That kind of thing could have cost him his job. I can see how the teacher would have felt threatened, too.”
“So the sheriff is right—this guy did have a reason to want to get rid of Sharee.”
“Yes, but—that seems so extreme for a couple of prank phone calls. He’s…nice, you know. Easygoing.”
“Easygoing people can snap.”
Yes. She leaned back against the couch cushions and closed her eyes. “I guess all we can do is wait for the investigation to unfold.”
“Darinda and I are leaving tomorrow,” he said.
She sat up straight and stared. “So soon?” They hadn’t even been in town twenty-four hours.
“There’s nothing we can do here,” he said. “And it’s too upsetting. The funeral home will ship the body when it’s ready. Darinda will do better in familiar surroundings, with her friends around her.”
And what will I do? Chloe wondered. She wanted to ask her father to stay here with her. To be here for her. But she couldn’t do that. She couldn’t ask when she already knew his answer would be to choose Darinda over her. “Let me know when the funeral is,” she said.
“You bet, sweetie.” He kissed her cheek, then stood. “I’m going to go lie down now, too. No one ever tells you how exhausting these things are.”
Death was exhausting. Not knowing was exhausting. Trying to solve a puzzle with no solution was exhausting.
But she couldn’t sleep right now. She stood and walked down the hall to Sharee’s room. She had given her parents her room and she had made up a bed on the sofa. None of them had been keen on spending the night amid so many reminders of Sharee. But Chloe needed to feel close to her sister right now.
The room already looked different than it had when Sharee was alive.
The sheriff’s department had taken her computer and phone and a bunch of papers from her desk, but they had left her clothing and jewelry and general teen clutter behind.
Chloe picked up a cropped pink angora sweater from the floor by the bed.
Sharee had worn this several nights ago when she went out.
She had told Sharee she was meeting friends, but hadn’t been willing to provide names.
Had she, perhaps, gone to meet a man—someone Chloe didn’t know about?
She picked up a picture from the desk—the kind taken by a ski area photographer.
It showed Sharee and a friend—Leann—standing on either side of a snowman, grinning and flashing peace signs.
Chloe racked her brain to remember Leann’s last name.
Royberg—Leann Royberg. Her mother had been a client of Chloe’s salon—Morganna Royberg.
A few minutes’ searching turned up Morganna’s number.
The woman answered after three rings. “Hello?”
“Hello, Morganna. This is Chloe Anderson. Could I speak to Leann? It’s about Sharee.”
“Oh, Chloe. I was so sorry to hear about your sister. Such a tragedy. And now I understand the sheriff let the man go who probably did it? What were they thinking?”
“They’re not sure who killed her,” Chloe said. “That’s why I’d like to talk to Leann. Maybe Sharee confided something in her, or she knows someone who threatened Sharee.”
“I’m sure she doesn’t know anything,” Morganna said. “The girls were friends, but I wouldn’t say they were close.”
“Could I speak with her? Please?”
“All right. But only for a few minutes. As you can imagine, this is upsetting for her.”
“It’s upsetting for all of us who loved Sharee.”
The phone went silent, and Chloe feared they had been disconnected, but after a few seconds, a girl’s timid voice said, “Hello?”
“Leann? This is Sharee’s sister, Chloe.”
“Yeah. My mom said. But I don’t know anything about what happened to Sharee. I swear.”
“But you might know something else that would be helpful. Did Sharee mention dating anyone in particular, for instance?”
“She liked a lot of guys. I mean, she paid attention to guys.”
“Any particular guys?”
“Well, not only guys our age—men. Older men. Like, thirties or forties. And they paid attention to her. She was so pretty, and she had, I don’t know, a kind of attitude. Like she liked the attention.”
“She was confident,” Chloe said.
“Yeah. That’s it.”
“But there wasn’t any one particular guy she talked about?”
“She said she was in love with an older guy back in Virginia. She said her parents sent her here to break the two of them up, but Sharee said they were going to get back together.”
“Did you believe her?” Chloe said. “It’s okay if you didn’t.”
“I kind of thought she made that all up,” Leann said. “You know, to look good. Or she wanted to make us jealous. She could be like that. She really liked being the center of attention and that was hard sometimes. But some people are just like that, and you love them anyway.”
“What did she say about Brian Weeks?” Chloe asked.
“Oh, she was really into him. And she made sure he knew it. The rest of us couldn’t believe how bold she acted sometimes, but we kind of admired her for it. I mean, I’m always second-guessing things I say, and I worry about what people think of me. Sharee was never like that.”
“How did she react when Brian told her he didn’t want to date her?”
“She was mad at him for blowing her off,” Leann said. “She had kind of a hot temper.”
“Did she say what she planned to do to get back at him?”
“She said something about trying to get him fired. I didn’t see how she’d do that.
He’s really popular. A nice guy, you know.
I’ve seen him out here lots of times and he’s always smiling and polite, even to the people who act like jerks.
But he must be almost thirty. Too old for an eighteen-year-old.
” She shuddered. “It’s kind of creepy, you know?
There were plenty of younger guys who were interested in Sharee, but she wouldn’t have anything to do with them. ”
“Anyone in particular?”
“No. Just—you know, guys looked at her and flirted with her wherever we went. A few of them asked her out, but when she turned them down they didn’t get mad about it or anything.”
“Can you remember anyone in particular who paid attention to her when you guys went out together? Were you with her Saturday night?”
“No, I stayed home Saturday night. Sharee and I didn’t really hang out other than at the ski resort,” she said. “If I go out, it’s with friends from school.”
“Who did she hang out with in the evenings?” Chloe asked. “Do you know?”
“I don’t know. She never said. I mean, it wasn’t the kind of thing she would tell us. She skied with us and everything, but other times she acted like we were a bunch of kids who were beneath her. Like she was so much older than us, but she wasn’t.”
If she wasn’t going out at night with local teens, who had Sharee been seeing when she left the apartment after dinner? “If you think of any names of boys or men who were interested in her, let me know.”
“I don’t want to get anybody in trouble,” Leann said.
“I know you don’t. But any names you can give me could be really helpful to the sheriff’s investigation.”
Muffled noises, then Morganna came back on the line. “Leann has to go now,” she said. “Thank you for calling.”
The call ended. Chloe put away her phone and left the room, frustrated.
Leann had revealed some new information about Sharee, nearly all of it troubling.
She wasn’t going out with other teens, at least not teens that Leann knew.
And Sharee had bragged about her and a teacher getting back together.
Had Sharee really believed that, or had she made that up to impress the other kids?
She returned to the living room. Darinda was back and lay on the sofa with an episode of House Hunters on the television, volume low.
She switched off the show when Chloe walked in.
“What are your plans for dinner?” she asked.
“I couldn’t eat a thing, but your father needs to keep up his blood sugar. ”
Chloe glanced toward her father, at the other end of the sofa. “What would you like, Dad?”
“Whatever you have, sweetheart.”
“We’ll have to order in,” Chloe said. “With everything that’s going on, I haven’t had a chance to buy groceries.”
“We could order Chinese,” Darinda said. “Dumplings sound good. I’m assuming this town has a decent Chinese place.”
“It does,” Chloe said.
“Then I want an order of dumplings and hot and sour soup. And egg rolls. Honey, what do you want?” she asked her husband.
Chloe pulled a take-out menu from a drawer in the kitchen. “I’m not really hungry,” she said. “You can call in the order.”
“Really, the least you could do is call it in for us,” Darinda said.
Chloe knew better than to fall for this—last time she got stuck with the check.
“You call them so you make sure to get exactly what you want.” She left and went to her own room and closed the door.
So what if Darinda and her father were staying in this room.
Right now, she needed a break from both of them.
She loved them, and that made it easier for them to manipulate and wound her.
She liked to think her dad only did this unknowingly, though she couldn’t believe the same about Darinda.
Sharee had done it, too, wounding Chloe out of self-centeredness and an unwillingness to ever see her own behavior as wrong.
And now she was dead and still hurting everyone who loved her because they couldn’t understand how such a terrible thing had happened.
Dying wasn’t Sharee’s fault, but was there some way Chloe could have saved her?