Quiet as the Grave

“No. Stop the car. I’m getting out.”

He was already applying the brakes, but he had to be careful. She had one leg out. He didn’t want to fishtail on these narrow, curving roads. He was mad as hell at her. He might wish he’d never met her, but he didn’t want her to get hurt.

He maneuvered the car to a safe spot. His heart racing, he turned to her. “Are you insane? Do you want to kill yourself? Shut the damn door.”

She didn’t answer. She just picked up her purse and got out of the car, slamming the door shut behind her.

He rolled down the down the window. “Justine, for God’s sake.”

“Go to hell,” she said without looking at him. “Just go straight to hell where you belong.”

He looked at her, so messed up with contradictory, heart-racing emotions and adrenaline that he couldn’t even decide what he felt. It was about five o’clock, and the trees behind her were already full of shadows. She had on high heels, the better to impress the other Volunteer Mommies with, but no damn good at all for walking along an uphill cliff road.

“Justine. Okay, look. I’m sorry. Get back in the car.”

She didn’t even answer. She just began to walk.

He trolled along behind her for a few yards, leaning over to beg her through the window and steering the car with one hand. He felt like a fool, which was bad enough, but when another car came up behind him and honked impatiently, the embarrassment of it was just too much.

“Justine, get in the car right now, or I’m going to drive away, and you’re going to have to walk the rest of the way home. It’s nearly a mile.”

No response, except another short toot from the car behind.

“Justine, I mean it. It’s getting cold. I’m not coming back to get you.”

She didn’t even turn her head. She shifted her purse to her other shoulder and kept walking. The people behind him probably thought he was a stalker, or a serial killer.

Honk…

Well, screw her, then. If she wanted to walk all the way home in a snit, fine. She logged about five miles on the treadmill in the home gym every single day of her life. He figured she could handle half a mile out here.

He rolled up the window and hit the gas. He watched her in the rearview mirror, getting smaller but never once looking his way or acknowledging her predicament by the slightest twitch of a muscle.

Finally he came to a curve, and when he looked in the mirror again she was gone.

That was the last time anyone—except perhaps her killer—ever saw Justine Millner Frome alive.

CHAPTER TWO

Two years later

“HOLD STILL. You’ve got a spot of green paint on your face.”

Suzie Strickland waited while the man in front of her reached up and teased the bridge of her nose with his fingernail. She didn’t believe for a minute that she had any paint there. Ben Kuspit just wanted to touch her. He’d been flirting with her ever since she arrived an hour ago to take pictures of his son.

He was paying her four-and-a-half thousand dollars for a painting of Kenny, the youngest of his four kids. It was the largest commission she’d landed yet, and she needed it. Still, if they’d been alone, she would have made it very clear that the price didn’t include groping rights.

Unfortunately, nine-year-old Kenny was still in the room, and she was reluctant to embarrass Daddy in front of his kid.

And, to be fair, maybe Ben wasn’t inventing the speck of paint. She had been using viridian paint this afternoon as she finished up her current project, a pair of adorable two-year-old twins with green eyes, green dresses and green ribbons in their hair.

She’d come a long way since the early years, when, after a day’s work, she’d find splattered color everywhere. In her hair, under her fingernails, even on the soles of her shoes. She still painted with passion, but she’d learned how to harness that intensity. Today, her sunny workroom on the third floor of her Albany townhome was the cleanest, best-organized space in the house.

Still, paint was paint, and it had a way of insinuating itself into some pretty strange places.

“Thanks,” she said, smiling politely at Ben, though her voice was tight. He needed to back up. He was seriously violating her personal space. And that smile was gross. The man was fifty, for God’s sake. His kid was staring right at him.

She lifted her camera up between them and moved to the far side of a gold chair, the kind of fragile, frilly thing Mrs. Kuspit apparently loved. The huge room was full of them.

“I’ll just get two or three more shots, and then I think I’m done here.”

“Great.” Ben looked over at Kenny, who stood next to the living room mantel, where trophies were arrayed like a metallic rainbow, catching light from the overhead chandelier and tossing it onto the flocked ivory wallpaper in little oblongs of silver and gold. They didn’t match the frilly gold chairs, but apparently Mrs. Kuspit didn’t make all the decorating decisions.

“Hey, I’ve got an idea,” Ben said, snapping his fingers. “Kenny, pick up the football. Make like you’re getting ready to toss a long one.”

Kenny grimaced, but he bent down and retrieved the football at his feet. He lifted his arm awkwardly, glancing sideways at his father. “Like this?”

Ben made a disgusted sound. “Damn it, Kenny, why are you flashing us your armpit?” He strode over to the boy and began twisting his skinny elbow into a better position. “If you think I’m paying four-and-a-half thousand dollars to have you look like a geek, you’ve got another think coming.”

The boy flushed, but he didn’t protest. He just stared at the floor while his father adjusted him like a mannequin. Suzie lowered her camera and tried not to hate the man. Throwing a football in the formal living room? Come on. His ego had to have some limits, didn’t it?

She didn’t say anything, though. She’d had weirder requests, like the woman who wanted her parakeet’s picture painted as if he lived inside a genie’s bottle. She’d like to meet the psychiatrist who could figure that one out.

She had taken that commission, too. She needed every job she could get. If the Kuspits liked her painting—and she could already tell she’d have to add about ten pounds of muscle to the little boy in order to please Daddy—they would hang her picture where their rich friends could see it.

Their rich friends would then decide that their own little darlings deserved to be displayed in a big, beautiful rococo gold frame, too.

And voil?! Suzie could pay the mortgage on her town house, and everyone was happy.

Except Kenny.

Poor kid.

Ben was big and beefy, a good-looking former athlete. Kenny was scrawny and appeared to have about as much athletic ability as a scarecrow. Most of the trophies on the mantel were inscribed with phrases like Most Improved or Best Sportsmanship.

“Okay, that’s good, hold that. Don’t move.” Ben gestured impatiently toward Suzie. “Get one of him like that.”

Suzie lifted the camera, although the image she saw in the viewfinder was hardly inspiring. Kenny looked like he was being tortured.

He must hate football, but Ben obviously didn’t care. The three older Kuspit offspring were girls. Suzie would bet that, the minute Ben saw the little manly splotch on the ultrasound, he had scrawled “live vicariously through my son, the awesome high school quarterback” into his engagement calendar. He wasn’t going to let the dream die easily.

If he only knew what a mistake he was making. Look at Mike Frome, the most “awesome” jock in Suzie’s high school. At seventeen he’d landed Justine Millner, the prettiest girl in Firefly Glen. By eighteen, he’d been forced to marry Justine—because she’d had his kid—though he no longer even liked her. By twenty-five they were divorced.

Not that Suzie was keeping tabs on his life or anything. She knew all that only because, right after the divorce, Justine had hired Suzie to paint her son Gavin’s portrait.

It had probably merely been Justine’s way of spending Mike’s money as fast as she could, but Suzie didn’t care. She would have taken a commission from the devil himself to jump-start her career. And Gavin had actually been a pretty neat kid in spite of having been scooped out of a scummy gene pool.

“Suzie?”