The Friday Edition (A Samantha Church Mystery) Read online

Sam kept her attention fixed on Brady. He looked calm and unimposing, a pear-shaped, soft-spoken gentle man, with a beleaguered way of laying his head to one side. Sam thought Brady always looked as if he was perpetually on the brink of a sigh.

  Before Wyatt could answer Sam said, “Brady, I’m sorry I haven’t called, but it’s been so hectic and I’ve been ...”

  Before she could finish her sentence, Brady pounced on her with an assault of words.

  “No!” he shouted. “You’re not sorry! You’re not! It’s all your fault Robin’s dead! It’s all your fault! Robin’s dead and I hate you! I hate you! I wish you were dead. You …” he pointed at the open grave, “should be down there, not Robin! It’s all your fault. You’re nothin’ but a drunk and you couldn’t help her even if you tried!”

  Brady’s ears were glowing red and his cheeks were flushed with fury. Before he could say another word, his father intervened.

  “Brady! That’s enough, son! Go to the car!”

  Brady ignored his father’s command and continued his verbal barrage. Sam stood mutely, biting her bottom lip. Jonathan and Todd watched Brady in surprised silence, experiencing a side of him that they had never known.

  “And you weren’t going to call me! You weren’t! You’re a liar!” Brady shouted.

  Those who remained after the services had now turned and were watching Brady’s outburst with growing interest. He suddenly grew quiet.

  “Robin needed you,” he whimpered softly and his eyes were glassy with tears. “Robin needed you. She … she needed you.”

  His words reached Sam’s soul, finding places that yawned deep and wide, where few people, including her, had ever visited. His words found a place, dropped anchor and settled. She felt as fragile as thin ice. She could hardly hold herself up as she watched Brady storm toward the Caprice. Todd, Jonathan and Wyatt were speechless and watched helplessly with Sam as Brady reached the car, opened the door and fell inside. He slammed the door so hard the car shook.

  Finally, there was silence.

  “I’m sorry, Sam,” Wyatt said. “He’s upset about Robin.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said, not wanting to meet anyone’s eyes.

  “I’d better get over there and calm him down,” Wyatt said and looked at Jonathan. “I’ll be in touch.”

  As Wyatt was about to retreat, Sam’s pager chirped loudly, catching everyone’s attention. The men silently stood on as Sam fumbled for her pager. They watched as she read the message several times, moving her lips as she read. She looked at them, feeling her face flush with heat.

  “Sam,” Wyatt asked. “Are you all right?

  “Sam? What’s it say?” Todd asked.

  Sam had enough sense to say nothing. She was determined not to let anyone see her surprise, and hoped she was not failing miserably at masking her emotions.

  “Sam? What is it? You’re pale. Are you all right?” Jonathan asked and put a reassuring hand on her elbow to steady her.

  “It’s … it’s a … nothing,” she stammered. “Just something I need to check on later.”

  Sam glared at Jonathan as she saw him trying to catch a glimpse of the message and folded her hands around her pager.

  “Would you please just leave!” she said and pulled away from his grasp.

  Jonathan and Wyatt left and walked toward the Caprice. Sam was shaking so hard inside that she could hardly stand. Her hands trembling, she clipped the pager to her waistband, her worst fears confirmed.

  The text message in the phone’s window was etched in her mind:

  Your sister’s death was not an accident

  Trust me

  Todd put a comforting hand on her shoulder.

  “You’re shaking, Sam. Are you sure you’re all right?”

  She ignored his question and crossed her arms tightly across her chest, looking at the green awning covering the hole over Robin’s grave. The folding chairs were empty now, turned this way and that. Someone would come soon to fill the hole with dirt. She closed her eyes and turned away. It was something she did not want to witness.

  “Want to get a cup of coffee?” Todd asked.

  Sam shook her head and managed to turn the thin line of her lips into a small smile.

  “I just want to go home.”

  Eight

  On the way home from the funeral Sam was thinking so intently that she couldn’t have begun to sort everything out. One phrase rang, like a bell, over and over.

  Trust me. Trust me. Trust me.

  The anonymous text message had confirmed what Sam had known almost from the beginning: Robin had been murdered.

  But who wants my trust?

  And how could she trust anyone? The text message at the cemetery was unnerving, but the first message — the voice mail that came from Robin on Christmas Eve — set her on edge.

  Robin needed help. She must have sent me a message Christmas Eve and I didn’t know it.

  Sam pulled to the side of the road to check the number again, to make certain it was Robin’s home phone number. Two dashes and another number followed it:

  555-8809 — 911.

  911, Sam thought. The three numbers spun around in her head like a whirlpool.

  “Something was urgent. Robin was trying to tell me something,” she said aloud.

  She thought of Brady’s outburst at the cemetery.

  You’re a drunk.

  Many people had called her a drunk, but not Brady. Never Brady. Maybe it was because of Robin, but he had always treated her kindly, though she suspected he had never much cared for her.

  A drunk.

  “What does he know?” Sam said as she steered her Mustang on to Sixth Avenue. “So I like to have a few drinks once in awhile. Big deal. It helps to take the edge off life. So what? What the hell’s wrong with that? I don’t have to have a drink every single day.”

  She drove in silence a moment, fuming. “And now you’re talking to yourself, Sam. Do drunks talk to themselves, too?”

  She realized she was griping the steering wheel hard. She took a deep breath and relaxed her grip. The drive gave her time to think. It was as if Brady’s words had opened a floodgate, and she allowed thoughts to creep in that she usually kept at bay. Nothing seemed to work anymore. She was having more bad days than good, more days that she didn’t remember how she had made it to the place she was.

  She had lost track of the times she had become aware of herself at the wheel of her car, staring at her apartment building, wondering how she had made it home alive. Relief would flood over her that she hadn’t hurt someone in an accident, or worse.

  Then there were times that she would wake up at home, often on the floor, and not know how she got there. She began to wonder lately how much longer she’d have her job at the Grandview Perspective. Only last week she was trying to write an article and couldn’t remember her source’s name. As if that wasn’t enough, she had filed the story only to have her editor send it back. She had the name of the company spelled two different ways. That’s what got her into trouble at the Denver Post.

  Sam ran through the examples in her mind with detached abandonment as she drove by the liquor store a few blocks from home. She didn’t stop.

  She turned on the radio. A button on the radio dial was programmed to her favorite oldies station. One of the sister’s favorite songs was playing. Sam’s gloomy mood brightened and she turned the volume up as loud as it would go. She smiled widely and began to sing along softly at first, her fingers tapping lightly against the steering wheel. Then she couldn’t help herself and began to sing louder. Before she knew it, she was snapping her fingers and singing at the top of her lungs. The song faded and Brady’s angry words came rushing back. They were deafening. She turned off the radio.

  Robin needed you.

  “I know she did, Brady, I know she did,” Sam said and she was crying now and did nothing to stop the tears rolling down her cheeks.

  She pulled into the numbered slot behind her apartment building,
switched off the lights and turned the key. The engine died. Sam sat still in the seat listening as the car settled.

  “911 ... What is your emergency?”

  Sam remembered the graveyard shift she had spent once at the Denver Police Department’s emergency dispatch center. The endless calls for help; the constant, calm response from dispatchers: “911. What is your emergency?”

  Sam opened the car door, swung her legs out and stood up.

  “Robin,” she said as she shut the door, “what’s your emergency?”

  Nine – Reporter’s Notebook

  My thoughts go round and round. Reflecting. Remembering. The day Robin called and told me to come to the hospital. She was in such a panic. Her voice rising and falling with each breath she took that I could hardly calm her down.

  “Which hospital?” I asked.

  She told me and I was there within the hour. I found Robin in the emergency room standing against a wall. Head back. Eyes closed. I called her name. Gently. Softly. She opened her eyes and looked at me and fell heavily into my arms, heaving great sobs. To this day, some ten years later, I can feel the emptiness of her despair.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “B … Brady,” she managed between gasping breaths. “Brady.”

  “What about Brady?” I said trying to encourage her to continue.

  “He … he dived off the platform into the water but didn’t come up.”

  It was the end of May, first of June. They both had just graduated high school with honors. Their future was in front of them, both eager to tackle it. They had been planning the outing with friends at the Boulder Reservoir for weeks. To this day we still don’t know what really happened to Brady under the water. Only that he was without oxygen for twenty minutes, maybe more before they could get him to the surface.

  I remember watching Robin those first few weeks after his accident. The days, the long days Brady spent in ICU. Then the rehab, which was painstakingly slow, if some days it came at all. He was so frustrated with his progress that he asked Robin to stop coming.

  “I don’t want her to see me like this anymore,” he told me in a halting voice one evening.

  And she did. Stop going to see Brady.

  One quiet afternoon a year or so after Brady’s accident, Robin and I were sitting on our balcony smoking and drinking beer, watching the foothills cloud up with the anticipation of a late spring storm. Thunder rumbled in the distance and we could smell the thick richness of rain coming our way.

  “Sometimes it seems,” Robin began by saying, “that I’ve gone beyond the sound of his voice, moved past his smile, and forgotten what it feels like to have his hand in mine.”

  She looked at me for a long moment, but I said nothing. Then she said, “I’ll hear someone utter a phrase, something like he might have said, or when I go to visit him now and he moves his head a certain way or smiles I catch a glimpse of the old Brady. And I’m back with him all over again.”

  She stopped and added her own smile. “It was the first thing I remember about him, you know, was his smile.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I know.”

  “He was coming down those steps holding his tennis racquet and wearing a baseball cap and smiling in my direction. That was the first thing we did together, you know, play tennis.”

  “Yes,” I said again, “I know.”

  I smiled when she said, “I let him win.”

  She was in a reflective mood that afternoon as the storm moved closer. She took my attention from the foothills, which were gone now, covered by brooding clouds, when she spoke.

  “Now when I go into a restaurant and see a couple sharing a pizza and he’s holding her hand over the table, I want that to be us so bad that my heart aches to the point that it hurts to breathe.”

  She stared off into the distance unseeing. It seemed as though she had gone somewhere deep inside herself where I could not follow. I could do nothing except wait for her to return.

  “I remember sometimes we’d be driving somewhere and he’d have one hand on the wheel, and the other was in my lap, doing things he shouldn’t have been doing,” Robin said and arched her right eyebrow at me as if to say ‘know what I mean?’

  “Or sometimes,” she said and shrugged, “he’d just want to hold my hand. Or we’d be lying next to each other and he’d just curl into me.”

  I took a long drag on my cigarette, then flicked the butt over the balcony. The approaching storm had cast the city in a premature twilight. A long, jagged streak of lightning left the sky and struck something far off in the distance. The loud crack of thunder that quickly followed made us both jump.

  “I love a good storm,” Robin said.

  “Me, too,” I said. “There’s something mesmerizing about them.”

  Indeed. Something powerful. Something commanding.

  Before long we saw large dots of rain begin to cover the balcony railing, turning the light wood dark. For a long time neither of us spoke, caught up in our own thoughts.

  “Remember the day Brady broke his leg playing softball, Sammie?”

  I nodded and said, “You were just up to bat and had grounded out.”

  “Remember how bad the break was?”

  “Yes,” I said, knowing what was coming next. I was there that day, watching their game from the bleachers.

  For a moment Robin was quiet and I wondered if she wasn’t replaying that afternoon over again in her mind.

  “I was standing at the corner of the dugout,” Robin began by saying, “Brady hit the ball right back to the pitcher. No one else on our team would have bothered to run to first base. Not Brady. He took off in a dead run.”

  I saw what happened next. Though Brady had hit the ball hard, the pitcher scooped it up and tossed it effortlessly to first base.

  Brady collided with the first baseman and somehow ended up near the chain link fence, screaming in agony, his leg bent in a way that made me think of a pretzel.

  “I remember watching him run down the first base line. I not only heard Brady slam into him, but I felt it. I remembered standing where I was and I may have been too shocked to move, Sammie, but I am certain of one thing.”

  I knew what that one thing was. She told me that day we waited in the ER. Robin felt his pain and it had pierced her heart in a way nothing ever really had.

  “I realized then how much I really loved him and always would,” she said and her voice cracked a little.

  And I think that had she lived to be eighty, that moment in time when she knew what it was like to love Brady so deep that his pain was hers, would have always stayed with her.

  The storm marched in with an instant and ferocious beauty. It raged on for almost an hour, thunder, lightning, driving rain. It took hold of our attention and sent us into stillness and silence.

  The storm passed eventually, leaving us with a gentle rain. Something refreshing, something quiet, something soothing.

  But I wondered if it was enough to quench the longing in Robin’s heart.

  Or in mine.

  It is funny what stays with you over time.

  Ten

  Robin had given Sam the code to her office and a key to keep as a spare. Tonight, both would come in handy.

  Sam felt as if sludge were moving through her veins as she drove to the Truman County District Attorney’s Office. It was after 9 p.m. when she steered her Mustang into the parking lot. Sam knew from what Robin had told her that the security guard would be taking his cigarette break. He would be in the employee smoking area, so the main lobby would be deserted. From her Mustang, she could see that the guard was gone and the lobby was empty.

  She got out of her car feeling as if Robin had been gone forever, not just a week. The raw wind did nothing to improve her spirits. She cursed the wind and hurried to the building. She punched the code in and let herself inside. She wore tennis shoes and hurried silently toward the elevators. She pressed the up arrow. A car arrived within seconds and Sam stepped inside.
She punched the button, the floor number illuminated and the door slid shut. She checked her watch. It was 9:15 p.m. when she stepped from the elevator. She walked on cat’s feet toward Robin’s office. Despite the thick carpet the silence seemed to magnify every step she took.

  Robin’s office door was closed. Sam wrapped her hand around the knob, but hesitated. She took a deep breath and held it as she tried the door. It was unlocked. Quickly stepping inside, she allowed her eyes to adjust to the darkness. The air in the room was stale and Sam guessed that the office door had probably been closed all week.

  The blinds were drawn slightly. Sam saw that Robin’s desk was spotless and that her black leather chair was facing the foothills. Sam laughed to herself as she thought of her own desk filled with piles of newspapers, reporter’s notebooks, files for stories and coffee cups stacked anywhere she could find room. Robin used to tease Sam about the way she kept her workspace. Sam said a reporter’s trademark was a messy desk.

  Sam stayed in the doorway, afraid to move. A telephone ringing in a nearby office startled her and she turned in the direction of the sound. She exhaled, realizing that she had been holding her breath. She stepped further into Robin’s office and closed the door with a soft click. She locked the door and became aware of her heart thudding what seemed like in her throat. She felt like a spy on a secret mission. She was momentarily safe now, behind enemy lines.

  Sam moved toward Robin’s desk, pulling on a pair of Latex gloves as she crossed the carpet. She sat in Robin’s chair and caught sight of the two photos on the desk. One showed the sisters standing shoulder to shoulder on a bridge over the Arno River.

  Sam smiled as she picked up the photo of Todd. She couldn’t see his eyes hidden behind sunglasses, but she could see his wide, sweeping smile. He was leaning over a pair of ski poles, beaming into the camera. The outing had been their first of many long weekends together skiing in the Colorado mountains.

  Sam tried to open the center drawer. It was locked, but she knew where Robin kept the key. She reached beneath the drawer where Robin kept it hanging on a small nail. As she reached for the key, several pieces of tattered newspaper scattered on the floor next to the trashcan distracted her.