A Woman Betrayed, page 1
As always, to Eric, Andrew, Jeremy, and their dad
Contents
Chapter 1 The silence was deafening.
Chapter 2 Daphne Phillips was, in Laura’s view, one of the. . .
Chapter 3 Jeffrey Frye came awake to a fierce throbbing in his. . .
Chapter 4 I’m sorry, Mrs. Frye. I know this is difficult for. . .
Chapter 5 Movement on the bed woke her. Feeling as. . .
Chapter 6 Restaurants were a dime a dozen in New. . .
Chapter 7 Taylor Jones left the Northampton Police Station. . .
Chapter 8 Laura was at the island, staring in horror at the. . .
Chapter 9 Tack wasn’t surprised when Daphne Phillips. . .
Chapter 10 Jeff normally hated hot weather, but he. . .
Chapter 11 If Christian ever retired, he would retire to. . .
Chapter 12 Money mattered. For the first time in her life,. . .
Chapter 13 “Peace on earth, goodwill toward men.”
Chapter 14 Tack hadn’t seen Daphne since the morning. . .
Chapter 15 The waves hit THE SHORE with stunning force. . .
Chapter 16 Laura continued to strike out on the loan. . .
Chapter 17 Jeff’s betrayal cut to the quick.
Chapter 18 “No,” Laura said and backed up to the wall.
Chapter 19 It took Scott longer to enter the kitchen.
Chapter 20 Scott was arraigned the next morning. After entering
Chapter 21 Christian singled out the key from the others. . .
Chapter 22 Daphne spent hours interrogating Scott.
Chapter 23 Tack came out of a light doze to bring Daphne. . .
Chapter 24 If Daphne was tense on the morning of the hearing,. . .
Chapter 25 Wakefulness came slowly.
Chapter 26 “Why did you marry Jeff?” Christian asked.
Chapter 27 Laura and Christian arrived in Northampton. . .
Chapter 28 Christian had never felt the responsibility for. . .
Chapter 29 Christian was the one who found her.
Chapter 30 Lydia’s death was reported as a human interest. . .
Chapter 31 It rained for three days after the meeting at. . .
About the Author
Praise for Barbara Delinsky
Fiction by Barbara Delinsky
Novels by Barbara Delinsky
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
THE SILENCE WAS DEAFENING. Laura Frye sat in a corner of the leather sofa in the den, hugged her knees, and listened to it, minute after minute after minute. The wheeze of the heat through the vents couldn’t pierce it. Nor could the slap of the rain on the windows, or the rhythmic tick of the small ship’s clock on the shelf behind the desk.
It was five in the morning, and her husband still wasn’t home. He hadn’t called. He hadn’t sent a message. His toothbrush was in the bathroom along with his razor, his aftershave, and the sterling comb and brush set Laura had given him for their twentieth anniversary the summer before. The contents of his closet were intact, right down to the small duffel he took with him to the sports club every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. If he had slept somewhere else, he was totally ill equipped, which wasn’t like Jeffrey at all, Laura knew. He was a precise man, a creature of habit. He never traveled, not for so much as a single night, without fresh underwear, a clean shirt, and a bar of deodorant soap.
More than that, he never went anywhere without telling Laura, and that was what frightened her most. She had no idea where he was or what had happened.
Not that she hadn’t imagined. Laura wasn’t usually prone to wild wanderings of the mind, but ten hours of waiting had taken its toll. She imagined that he’d had a stroke and lay unconscious across his desk in the deserted offices of Farro and Frye. She imagined that he’d been in an accident on the way home, that the car and everything in it had been burned beyond recognition or, alternately, that he had hit the windshield, climbed out, and begun wandering through the cold December rain not knowing who or where he was. She had gone so far as to imagine that he’d stopped for gas and been taken hostage by a junkie holding up the nearby 7-Eleven.
More rational explanations for his absence had worn thin as night had waned. By no stretch of the imagination could she envision him holed up with a client at five in the morning. Maybe in April, with a new client whose tax records were in chaos. But not the first week in December. And not without telling her. He always called if he was going to be late. Always.
Last night, they had been expected at an opening at the museum. Cherries had catered the affair. Though one of Laura’s crews had handled the evening, she had spent the afternoon in Cherries’ kitchen stuffing mushrooms, skewering smoked turkey and cherries, and cleaving baby lamb chops apart. She had wanted not only the food but the tables, the trays, and the bar to be perfect, which was why she had followed the truck to the museum to oversee the setting up.
Everything had been flawless. She had come home to change and get Jeff. But Jeff hadn’t shown up.
Hugging her knees tighter in an attempt to fill the emptiness inside her, she stared at the phone. It had rung twice during the night. The first call had been from Elise, who was at the museum with her husband and wondered why Laura and Jeff weren’t there. The second call had been from Donny for Debra, part of their nightly ritual. Sixteen-year-old sweethearts did that, Laura knew, just as surely as she knew that forty-something husbands who always called their wives if they were going to be late wouldn’t not call unless something was wrong. So she had made several searching calls herself, but to no avail. The only thing she had learned was that the phone worked fine.
She willed it to ring now, willed Jeff to call and say he had had a late meeting with a client and had nearly fallen asleep at the wheel on the way home, so he’d pulled over to the side of the road to sleep off his fatigue. Of course, that wouldn’t explain why the police hadn’t spotted his car. Hampshire County wasn’t so remote as to be without regular patrols or so seasoned as to take a shiny new Porsche for granted, particularly if that Porsche belonged to one half of a prominent Northampton couple.
The Frye name made the papers often, Jeff’s with regard to the tax seminars he gave, Laura’s with regard to Cherries. The local press was a tough one, seeming to resist anything upscale, which the restaurant definitely was, but Laura fed enough luminaries on a regular basis to earn frequent mentions. State Senator DiMento and his entourage were seen debating ways to trim fat from the budget over steamed vegetables and salads at Cherries this week, wrote Duggan O’Neil of the Hampshire County Sun. Duggan O’Neil could cut people to shreds, and he had done his share of cutting where Laura was concerned, but publicity was publicity, Jeff said. Name recognition was important.
Indeed, the police officer with whom Laura had talked earlier on the phone had known just who she was. He even remembered Jeff’s car as the one often parked outside the restaurant. But nothing in his records suggested that anyone in the department had seen or heard of the black Porsche that night.
“Tell you what, Miz Frye,” he had told her. “Since it’s you, I’ll make a few calls. Throw in a piece of cherry cheesecake, and I’ll even call the state police.” But his calls had turned up nothing, and, to her dismay, he had refused to let her file a missing persons report. “Not until he’s been gone twenty-four hours.”
“But awful things can happen in twenty-four hours!”
“Good things, too, like lost husbands coming home.”
Lost husbands coming home. She resented those words with a passion. They suggested she was inept as a wife, inept as a woman, that Jeff had been bored and gone looking for fun and would wander back home when the fun was over. Maybe the cop lived that way, but not Jeff and Laura Frye. They had been together for twenty good years. They loved each other.
So where was he? The question gnawed at her. She imagined him slain by a hitchhiker, accosted by Satanists, sucked up, Porsche and all, by an alien starship. The possibilities were endless, each one more bizarre than the next. Bizarre things did happen, she knew, but to other people. Not to her. And not to Jeff. He was the most steadfast, the most predictable, the most uncorruptible man she’d ever known, which was why his absence made no sense at all.
Unfolding her legs, she rose from the sofa and padded barefoot through the dark living room to the front window. Drawing back the sheers that hung beneath full-length silk swags, she looked out. The wind was up, ruffling the branches of the pines, driving the rain against the flagstone walk and the tall lamp at its head.
At least it wasn’t snowing. She remembered times, early in her marriage, when she had been home with the children during storms, waiting for Jeff to return from work. He had been a new CPA then, a struggling one, and they had lived in a rented duplex. Laura used to stand at the window, playing games with the children, drawing pictures on the glass in the fog their breath made. Like clockwork, Jeff had always come through the snow, barely giving her time to worry.
He worked in a new building in the center of town now, and they weren’t living in the duplex, or even in that first weathered Victorian, but in a gracious brick Tudor on a tree-lined street, less than a ten-minute drive from his office. It was a fast drive, an easy drive. But for some unknown and frightening reason he hadn’t made it.
“Mom?”
Laura whirled around at the sudden sound to find Debra beneath the living room arch. Her eyes were sleepy, her dark hair disheveled. She wore a nightshirt with umass coe
Aware of her racing heart, Laura tried to smile. “Hi, Deb.”
Debra sounded cross. “It’s barely five. That’s still the middle of the night, Mom. Why are you up?”
Unsure of what to say, just as she’d been unsure the night before when Debra had come home and Jeff hadn’t been there, Laura threw back a gentle, “Why are you?”
“Because I woke up and remembered last night and started to worry. I mean, Dad’s never late like that. I had a dream something awful happened, so I was going to check the garage and make sure the Porsche was—“ Her voice stopped short. Her eyes probed Laura’s in the dark. “It’s there, isn’t it?”
Laura shook her head.
“Where is he?”
She shrugged.
“Are you sure he didn’t call and tell you something, and then you forgot? You’re so busy, sometimes things slip your mind. Or maybe he left a message on the machine, but it got erased. Maybe he spent the night at Nana Lydia’s.”
Laura had considered that possibility, which was why she had driven past her mother-in-law’s house when she had gone out looking for Jeff. In theory, Lydia might have taken ill and called her son, though in all likelihood she would have called Laura first. Laura was her primary caretaker. She was the one who stocked the house with food, took her to the doctor, arranged for the cleaning girl or the exterminator or the plumber.
“He’s not there. I checked.”
“How about the office?”
“I went there too.” To the dismay of the guard, who had looked far more sleepy than Debra, she had insisted on checking the garage for the Porsche, but Jeff’s space—the entire garage under his building—had been empty.
“Is he with David?”
“No. I called.” David Farro was Jeff’s partner, but he hadn’t known of any late meetings Jeff might have had. Nor had Jeff’s secretary, who had left at five with Jeff still in his office.
“Maybe with a client?”
“Maybe.”
“But you were supposed to go to the museum. Wouldn’t he have called if he couldn’t make it?”
“I would have thought so.”
“Maybe something’s wrong with the phone.”
“No.”
“Maybe he had car trouble.”
But he would have called, Laura knew. Or had someone call for him. Or the police would have seen him and called.
“So where is he?” Debra cried.
Laura was terrified by her own helplessness. “I don’t know!”
“He has to be somewhere!”
She wrapped her arms around her middle. “Do you have any suggestions?”
“Me?” Debra shot back. “What do I know? You’re the adult around here. Besides, you’re his wife. You’re the one who knows him inside and out. You’re supposed to know where he is.”
Turning back to the window, Laura drew the sheer aside and looked out again.
“Mom?”
“I don’t know where he is, babe.”
“Great. That’s just great.”
“No, it’s not,” Laura acknowledged, nervously scanning the street, “but there isn’t an awful lot I can do right now. He’ll show up, and I’m sure he’ll have a perfectly good explanation for where he’s been and why he hasn’t called.”
“If I ever stayed out all night without calling, you’d kill me.”
“I may well kill your father,” Laura said in a moment’s burst of anger. Given what she’d been through, Jeff’s explanation was going to have to be inspired if he hoped to be spared her fury. Then the fury died and fear returned. The possibilities flashed through her mind, one worse than the next. “He’ll be home,” she insisted, as much for her own sake as for Debra’s.
“When?”
“Soon.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know.”
“What if he’s sick, or hurt, or dying somewhere? What if he needs our help, but we’re just standing here in a nice warm dry house waiting for him to show up? What if we’re losing all this time when we should be out looking for him?”
Debra’s questions weren’t new. Laura had hit on all of them, more than once. Now she reasoned, “I looked for him last night. I drove around half the city and didn’t see the Porsche. I called the police, and they hadn’t seen it either. If there was an accident, the police would call me.”
“So you’re just going to stand here looking out the window? Aren’t you upset?”
Debra was a sixteen-year-old asking a frightened sixteen-year-old’s questions. Laura was a frightened thirty-eight-year-old with no answers, which made her frustration all the greater. Keeping her voice as steady as possible, given the tremulous feeling she had inside, she turned to Debra and said, “Yes, I’m upset. Believe me, I’m upset. I’ve been upset since seven o’clock last night, when your father was an hour late.”
“He never does this, Mom, never.”
“I know that, Debra. I went to his office. I drove around looking for his car. I called his partner, his secretary, and the police, but they won’t do anything until he’s been gone a day, and he hasn’t been gone half that. What would you have me do? Walk the streets in the rain, calling his name?”
Debra’s glare cut through the darkness. “You don’t have to be sarcastic.”
With a sigh, Laura crossed the floor and caught her daughter’s hand. “I’m not being sarcastic. But I’m worried, and your criticism doesn’t help.”
“I didn’t criticize.”
“You did.” Debra said what was on her mind and always had. Disapproval coming from a little squirt of a child hadn’t been so bad. Disapproval coming from someone who was Laura’s own five-six and weighed the same one-fifteen, who regularly borrowed Laura’s clothes, makeup, and perfume, who drove a car, professed to know how to French-kiss, and was physically capable of having a child of her own was something else. “You think I should be doing more than I am,” Laura argued, “but I’m hamstrung, don’t you see? I don’t know if anything’s really wrong. There could be a logical reason for your father’s absence. I don’t want to blow things out of proportion before I have good cause.”
“Twelve hours isn’t good cause?” Debra cried and whirled around to leave, only to be held back by Laura’s grip.
“Eleven hours,” she said with quiet control. “And, yes, it’s good cause, babe. But I can’t do anything right now but wait. I can’t do anything else.” The silence that followed was heavy with an unspoken plea for understanding.
Debra lowered her chin. Her hair fell forward, shielding her from Laura’s gaze. “What about me? What am I supposed to do?”
Scooping the hair back from Debra’s face, Laura tucked it behind an ear. For an instant she caught a glimpse of her daughter’s worry, but it was gone by the time Debra raised her head. In its place was defiance. Taking that as part and parcel of the spunk that made Debra special, Laura said, “What you’re supposed to do is go back to bed. It’s too early to be up.”
“Sure. Great idea. Like I’d really be able to sleep.” She shot a glance at Laura’s sweater and jeans. “Like you really slept yourself.” She turned her head a fraction and gave a twitch of her nose. “You’ve been cooking, haven’t you. What’s that smell?”
“Borscht.”
“Oh, gross.”
“It’s not so bad.” Jeff loved it with sour cream on top. Maybe, deep inside, Laura had been hoping the smell would lure him home.
“I can’t believe you were cooking.”
“I always cook.”
“At work. Not at home. Most of the time you stick us with chunky chicken soup, frozen french bread pizza, or microwave meatballs and spaghetti. You must feel guilty that Dad’s missing.”
Laura ignored the suggestion, which could have come straight from her own mother’s analytical mouth. “He isn’t missing, just late.”
“So you cooked all night.”
“Not all night. Just part of it.” In addition to the borscht, she’d done a coq au vin she would probably freeze, since no one planned to be home for dinner for the next two nights. She had also baked a Black Forest cake and two batches of pillow cookies, one of which she would send to Scott.
“Did you sleep at all?” Debra asked.
“A little.”
