Don't Go Home by Carolyn Hart Page B

swiped a familiar name.
    Rae collapsed onto a patio chair. She gripped the arms with fingers like claws.
    Police Chief Billy Cameron’s wife, Mavis, answered. “Hey, Annie.” Mavis sounded relaxed. She was at home, enjoying a summer evening. When she responded to a call at the police station, she spoke formally, as a dispatcher should.
    Annie spoke carefully, kept her voice steady. “Billy needs to come to Seaside Inn. Suite 130. Alex Griffith—the author—back on the island—is dead. I’m afraid—” Annie felt shaky. Was there any doubt? That blood . . . “—he’s been murdered.”
    â€œStay on the line.” Mavis was crisp, all business. Mavis also doubled as a crime scene tech. There was the sound of brisk steps, Mavis’s muffled call. “Billy. Trouble.” Mavis’s words drifted to her. “. . . writer dead. Annie says murder. Suite 130, Seaside Inn.”
    Annie was painfully aware of Rae, huddled in a brightly striped canvas chair, staring emptily at nothing, the muscles of her face slack. How awful to sit alone, her world transformed from golden days to numbing horror.
    Billy’s deep voice was brisk. “On my way. Stay on the line.” Billy always sounded calm. The island’s police chief had grown up on Broward’s Rock, beginning as a young patrolman, moving up through the ranks. His sandy hair was now touched by silver, his broad face seamed with lines of good humor but bulldog toughness as well. “Start at the beginning.”
    She was still talking when she heard the wail of sirens. Possibly Billy had arrived. He lived not far from the inn. And likely Mavis had summoned off-duty officers to join him. Annie kept talking. She hoped Billy didn’t sense that she was parsing her words. Perhaps Billy thought her simple, unelaborated sentences reflected her status as a bystander.
Famous author supposed to speak . . . didn’t show up at the podium . . . wife went to get him . . .
Here was where she avoided full disclosure . . .
I was coming up behind her . . . she went into the room . . . out in an instant . . . said he’d been hurt . . . went in and I knew he was dead . . .
    She said nothing about her determination to disrupt Alex’s evening. She simply reported facts. Implicit was the message that the sudden death had nothing to do with her. She was a bystander. She pushed deep inside the achy feeling that she owed Billy better. But she was torn. The law or Marian. People who could be hurt . . . And she knew nothing for a fact, only inferences drawn from a book, except for the quarrel she’d heard between Marian and Alex. The law or Marian . . . Otherwise, she was only a bystander, not involved.
    Annie held fast to that thought. She had no real connection to Alex Griffith or his wife. What she surmised, well, she was under no obligation to point fingers. Let Rae Griffith fill that role. Annie pushed away the memory of morning heat and standing on the other side of the patio wall and Marian’s husky, desperate voice.
    The fact that Annie had come to the Seaside Inn tonight didn’t involve her in anything, and definitely not an investigation. She would contribute what she knew of this evening, which was very little. She would keep her answers simple.
    â€œ. . . so I called you—”
    â€œWe’re here. Wait for us.” Billy ended the call.
    More sirens rose and fell, growing nearer and nearer, abruptly cut off in midsqueal. Even from this small patio at the end of the wing,she saw the flash of red lights at the far end of the wing, knew patrol cars had arrived in front of the inn. Car doors slammed.
    Billy knew his island, knew the inn, knew where to park for quickest access to a patio in the east wing. Footsteps crunched on oyster shells. Light from lampposts