His Partner's Wife. Janice Kay Johnson

John would have been over there cleaning out her gutters no matter what. She was his partner’s widow. Stuart would have done the same for John’s children, if he’d been the one to go.

      Natalie seemed to understand and accept that. She’d let John hold her when he brought the news of Stuart’s death. He had stood beside her at her husband’s funeral, kept an arm around her as Stuart’s casket was lowered into the ground and the first, symbolic chunk of earth was flung down onto its shining surface. That was John’s place, and she hadn’t tried to keep him from it.

      Huge dark circles under her eyes, she’d gone back to work a week after the funeral. She hadn’t asked to be held again, and wouldn’t. Admiring her strength, John had found himself talking to her as if she was another man.

      He knew she was a woman, of course. Her ripe curves and leggy walk might have fueled a few fantasies under other circumstances. But that wasn’t how he thought of her. It was her laugh and her wisdom and her grave dignity that characterized her. He’d never been friends with a woman before, but somehow it had happened with her, perhaps because he’d known her for several years as his partner’s wife. That was another page out of John’s book: you didn’t lust after a friend’s wife.

      The end result was that he’d quit noticing her looks. He liked talking to her. He’d call just to see how things were going, stop by casually to do small jobs around the house he figured she wouldn’t get to. She seemed to enjoy his kids. As far as he knew, she hadn’t begun to date. No possessive man had taken to hanging around questioning John’s presence. He and Natalie had an easy relationship that he savored. He didn’t know when—if ever—he’d been able to relax around a woman.

      But she wasn’t going to like having new reason to be grateful, he reflected.

      The damn ferry traffic was still bumper-to-bumper up the main drag. Drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, John strove for patience.

      His mother had been just the right medicine tonight, he decided. Strong herself, Ivy McLean expected everyone else to be as well.

      He’d left Natalie in his mother’s competent but not tender hands. Her brand of coddling, he suspected, would suit Natalie Reed fine.

      Ivy McLean hadn’t been the most sympathetic of mothers when her three sons took turns being heart-broken by high school femmes fatales or suffering knee injuries on the football field. Get over it was her sometimes impatient message. Stand up tall, focus on what’s important. Football was not. Neither were teenage romances.

      Swearing when he didn’t make it through an intersection before the light turned red, John grimaced. Come to think of it, not much that had mattered to seventeen-year-old boys had been truly important in Ivy MacLean’s eyes. Grades, she cared about. Living honestly and with integrity. Accepting the duty their father’s murder had laid on all three boys.

      In Natalie Reed’s case, Mom would understand a degree of shock and would respect outrage. She would be kind in her brisk way, without encouraging an excess of tears or self-pity or fear. Hell, John thought ruefully, most likely Mom would buck Natalie up and have her ready to rip down the crime scene tape and move home tomorrow morning, to hell with the murderer on the loose.

      Maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea.

      Earlier, when Ivy had seen her son out, they’d left Natalie listening to Maddie chatter about a roller-skating party.

      “You’ll find out what happened and why,” Mom said, chin set and gaze steady. It wasn’t a question. This was what counted. She’d raised her sons to believe that any one man could make the world a safer place and now she was expecting him to get on with it.

      She hadn’t said, Make an arrest tonight, but she might as well have.

      A frown stayed on his brow until he reached Natalie Reed’s tri-level house. The crime scene techs were here, he was glad to see. A flash popped upstairs. The coroner hadn’t yet arrived. She was probably stuck in ferry traffic. Every time one of the giant ferries docked, hundreds of cars poured out, clogging Port Dare’s narrow streets.

      After parking behind the Investigations unit van, John got out of his car and stood on the sidewalk, making no move to go up to the door. He tried to put himself in the shoes of a stranger and see her house and this neighborhood with fresh eyes.

      The paint job—forest-green with cream trim, his doing—didn’t look half-bad. All the same, 2308 Meadow Drive was not a showplace. It was an average house in an average neighborhood, one of many developments that had sprung up around the nineteenth-century port town. In this middle-income neighborhood, yards were generally well cared for but standard issue. Most of these were single family homes, owner occupied, not rentals. Bikes with pink tassels on the handlebars lay on their sides in driveways. Gardening was carried out in traditional flower beds mulched with bark, edging lawns that varied from the Porters’ velvet green to the shaggy, brown-spotted grass surrounding the corner house. The Porters, John was willing to bet, wouldn’t like those fluffy dandelion heads. Or the neighborhood eyesore that sat out in front of the same house, a rusting junker resting on blocks instead of wheels. Nonetheless, even at that house, a tricycle listed half off the driveway, and in the backyard a swing set shared pride of place with a barbecue grill. The lawn got mowed, just not often enough.

      Ordinary people.

      A neighborhood like this wouldn’t have crack houses or marijuana-growing operations in the spare bedroom. Nor did these houses suggest real wealth. The cops would get called here when a mountain bike was stolen out of an open garage. Teenagers committed the few break-ins. Maybe a car prowl from time to time. Serious burglaries would be few and far between. Murder? Never.

      So why was there a dead man in Stuart’s den? Why had two people broken in, and why had one of them been killed? A quarrel mid-crime was the obvious answer, but then again, why Natalie’s house? Why hadn’t two burglars carried the obviously expensive electronic equipment out before they risked taking the time to check out the upstairs? Had they parked right in the driveway, a truck backed up to receive stolen goods?

      Or were they after something else? Something small?

      What? he wondered in frustration. He’d have to ask Natalie whether Stuart had any collections that might be valuable. Coins? Stamps? Hell, he’d collected enough junk to have lucked out and hit on something worth taking. Or did Natalie have jewelry? She hadn’t said, and John thought she would have. He remembered seeing her at the Policeman’s Ball, drop-dead gorgeous in a simple green velvet sheath, but the only jewelry he could picture were sparkly earrings. Diamond, maybe, but tiny, not ones worth killing over.

      Figure out why murderer and victim were in this house and not the neighbor’s, and he could as good as snap those handcuffs on. Unfortunately, the why was the true mystery here. Murders happened all the time, even in Port Dare. Just not this kind.

      He sighed. Better find out what the neighborhood canvass had turned up. Too bad the Porters hadn’t seen anything. According to Natalie, they were the only near neighbors who were stay-at-homes and nosy to boot.

      Geoff shook his head when John tracked him down a block away.

      “Nada. Zip. Nobody was home. Not even latchkey kids.”

      “Why am I not surprised?” John rocked on his heels and looked back. Meadow Drive curved, and this was the last house from which anyone could have seen Natalie’s. “You get everybody?”

      “A few haven’t come home yet.” Geoff glanced down at his notebook. “Four. No, three. The place down there is for sale, and empty right now.”

      “What about the houses behind hers?”

      “I sent Jackson. But what are the odds?”

      Nada. Zip. Of course. But they had to try.

      “Looks like the coroner is here. Shall we go hear what she thinks?”

      Elected in this rural county, Dr. Jennifer Koltes was a pathologist at St. Mary’s, serving in addition as part-time public servant. Hereabouts they didn’t