Don't Cry Now by Joy Fielding Page A

something to me?” her brother asked after a lengthy pause.
    â€œYou tell me, Nick. The police found your name in Joan’s address book.”
    The phone went dead in her hands.
    â€œNick? Nick?” She shook her head, handing the phone over to Rod. “He hung up.”
    Rod sat up, running a tired hand through his tousled hair, and dropped the phone back into its carriage. “You think he could have had something to do with Joan’s death?”
    â€œJoan calls first thing in the morning to warn me that Amanda and I are in some kind of danger,” Bonnie said, thinking out loud. “A few hours later, she turns up dead, and my brother’s name turns up in her address book. I don’t know what to think.”
    â€œI think we should let the police handle it.”
    â€œThe police think I did it,” she reminded him.
    Rod put his arm around his wife, hugged her close to his side. “No, they don’t. They think I did it. I’m the guy with the life insurance policies on all of you. Double indemnity, remember?”
    â€œThanks.”
    â€œAny time.” They settled in against the pillows, Bonnie’s backside pressed into her husband’s stomach, Rod draped, spoonlike, around her.
    â€œOf course, there’s also Josh Freeman,” she said several seconds later.
    â€œWho?”
    â€œJosh Freeman, Sam’s art teacher. He’s also in Joan’s address book, and he’s another link between us.”
    â€œGet some sleep, Nancy Drew.”
    â€œI love you,” Bonnie whispered.
    â€œI love you too.”
    â€œI love you more,” Bonnie said, and waited. But Rod merely squeezed her arm and said nothing.

8
    J oan’s funeral took place at the end of the week.
    Bonnie sat in her front-row seat in the small chapel beside Rod and his children, amazed by the large number of mourners, trying to figure out who each one was, to determine what, if any, relationship each had with the deceased.
    Rod had said Joan had no friends, only “drinking buddies.” And yet, the room was literally filled to the rafters, well over a hundred people crowded into the narrow benches and pressed against the walls, and they couldn’t all be casual acquaintances with whom Joan had merely shared a few glasses of wine. Nor could they all be business associates, although the back row’s coterie of immaculately dressed women whose hair never moved were unmistakably Joan’s cohorts from Ellen Marx Realty. True, there were probably a number of people present who hadn’t known Joan at all, who were there out of morbid curiosity, intrigued by the newspaper and television coverage, aroused by the specter of sudden, violent death in the midst of their normally peaceful community.
    Bonnie’s gaze stretched across the room, like an elastic band, gathering all those present into her line of vision, and then slowly popping them out, one at a time. Captain Mahoney and Detective Kritzic stood near the rear door, the captain in dark blue, the detective in light gray, their eyes alert for any movement that might seem even slightlyout of place. There were several undercover officers, and, like the agents from Ellen Marx Realty, they seemed fairly easy to spot: the young man with the brownish-blond hair and blue-striped tie who sat near the back of the room and trailed after everyone with his watery brown eyes; the two balding men in casual dress, standing near the rear door, whispering to one another through loosely spread fingers. Who were these people, if not the police?
    But what of all these others, these men and women with tears in their eyes and catches in their throats? Who was the middle-aged couple consoling one another in the third row on the other side of the center aisle? Who were these people immediately behind her, sharing hushed memories of the dear friend they had lost? Could they really be talking about Joan? Bonnie pushed back in her seat,