Page 22 of Nowhere to Hide
“If I could come in for a moment. I’m here with questions about Teresa Crawford.”
Mary poked her head out into the hallway and looked up one end and down the other.
Interesting reaction…“Is there something?—”
“What about Teresa?” She leveled her gaze on Cindy.
“Just a few minutes, ma’am, that’s all it will take.”
The woman hesitated but eventually backed up and gestured for Cindy to come inside.
“Thank you. Would you have someplace we could sit?”
“This way.” Mary led the way to a round kitchen table with seating for four. She set one of the chairs right that was sticking out on an angle. Cindy would guess it was what Mary got into an altercation with on the way to the door. “Sit wherever you’d like. Would you like a tea?”
Time was of the essence, but accepting might put Mary at ease and make her more likely to open up. “Sounds nice. Thank you.”
Mary hobbled across the room and flicked on the kettle.
“I could have gotten that.” Her mother’s voice was in her head. From the time she was a little girl, it was instilled in her to care for those older than herself. Not to mention this woman was injured.
“Nah. I’m fine. I will be anyway. I ran right into that blasted chair trying to get to the door.”
As I thought…“Sorry if I played any role in that.”
Mary smiled. “We’ll just blame the chair.” She walked to a nearby cabinet, took out a shoebox, and set it on the table. “Have a look. Photographs of Teresa and me. We went all the way back to six years old when her family moved next to us. It’s been three weeks since she passed, and it’s still hard to believe she’s gone.”
Cindy’s first thought was the box contained a selection of tea bags. “Sorry for your loss, Ms. Ellison.” Cindy genuinely meant that, but she was also trying to curb her excitement at this potential goldmine. Who knew what information Mary mightgive her to aid negotiations?That detective badge is getting closer, I can feel it!
“Please, just call me Mary. Otherwise, it makes me sound so old.”
Cindy smiled. It didn’t matter if someone was twenty-nine going on thirty, most people didn’t like to think about aging. Regardless of it being better than the alternative. She took the lid off the box. A memorial card sat on top with a photograph of Teresa front and center. It made Cindy’s heart pinch. As Cindy dug into the box, she found it contained a lifetime of memories captured in several hundred photographs. The two girls at different ages, different poses, different places. She shuffled through and plucked out one of them as teenagers and held it up to face Mary. The image was faded, and the edges were creased.
“God, we were so young.” The kettle clicked, and Mary dropped a teabag into two mugs and poured water over them. Then she set the timer on the microwave for three minutes and sat at the table with Cindy. “I suspect you’re fine with Earl Grey.”
“Sounds lovely.” It had been her grandmother’s favorite, and the smell wafting over from it steeping swept her back in time. Peace, security, contentment, love. All those feelings rushed over her with a memory. She was seated at her grandmother’s kitchen table, eating orange cake while her grandmother sat across from her, drawing in her sketchbook and drinking the tea.
“What is it you want to discuss about Teresa?”
“Did she talk much about her sister?” Cindy would start there and work her way to talking about Ryan.
“Susan? Enough, I suppose. They were rather close, though more so as adults. As kids, the three-year age difference seemed like far more than that. Teresa was the older of the two. She took in her boy after she passed, felt that was the right thing to do. She really took her sister’s death hard.”
“Obviously growing up next door to Teresa, you got to know Susan too?”
“A bit.”
“She died in a tragic car accident,” Cindy said, laying out the groundwork for the direction she wanted to steer the conversation.
“That’s right.”
“Did Teresa think there was more to it than it just being an accident?”
Mary narrowed her eyes. “I think Teresa was having a hard time accepting her sister was here one day and gone the next. Honestly, it was a miracle in her state she was approved to care for Ryan.”
Cindy took out her notepad and pen.Ahardtime…That was the second time Mary parted with the adjective. Was there more buried in that statement than Teresa struggling to come to grips with her sister’s loss? Had she suspected Susan was helped along to the grave? Before pressing the subject, Cindy probed the latter part of Mary’s comment. “Why was it a miracle she was approved as Ryan’s guardian?”
“I don’t like speaking ill of the?—”
