The Deepest Water by Kate Wilhelm Page A

regular checks? But what if there’s a woman out there somewhere, maybe with a child, someone Jud had to pay off over the years? What if Willa found out about her, about a son or daughter he never acknowledged but had to support? What if he was married to her? You don’t know and neither do I. But someone was raking in a lot of money. And if it was anything like that and Willa realized she was going to be dumped the way all the others were over the years…”
    Aghast, she stared at him. She had forgotten about the cashier’s checks, over a hundred thousand dollars unaccounted for. Could Jud have been paying off a woman, supporting another family? She remembered the two bottles of champagne. A celebration. To introduce her to her stepmother? Maybe that was who was with him that night. And he told her it was over? Why champagne if that was the case? They were being reconciled? Her headache had come back.
    “Honey,” Brice said, “I didn’t mean to upset you all over again. And that might be way off base, but the fact is we don’t know what those checks were for, and I think you should let the police do their own work, and just not be talking about it with anyone.”
    She nodded. “I’ll tell the lieutenant that in the past a woman did go over and spend the night and leave the following day. It happened, and could have happened again. Someone could have stayed and left at daybreak.”
    “Good. And now, let’s talk about food. Out, or order something in? I choose ordering in. Sound okay to you?”
    “Okay,” she said.
    She felt as if days and days had passed with her in a drugged state, unable to keep anything in conscious memory long enough to consider what it meant. Next week, she thought then, she might sign a contract that would eventually bring in more than a million dollars, and she had not given it a single thought. Of course, she wouldn’t see a penny of it until six months had passed, but even so, a million dollars! And then she thought about the two codicils her father had added to his will, another datum she had not wondered about, had simply accepted as given. Why had he done that? Why, why, why…? All the things she had ignored seemed to be surfacing in waves, and they all ended with the same question: why?
    7
    The trouble with their neighborhood, Abby said on Sunday, was that there was no good place to walk a dog. It was a neighborhood for rising young professionals: doctors and dentists, who, like Brice, were still paying off their school loans, lawyers who had not yet been made partners in prestigious firms, financial advisers on the way up. Landscaping was meticulous everywhere, with gardeners who came in regularly to maintain it, houses modestly up-scale, SUVs in abundance, soccer moms the norm, a good neighborhood. Although Abby had blanched when she first saw the size of their mortgage payments, Brice had insisted, this was the place to be, and they managed to keep up payments, to keep up with all the Joneses, but if Jud had not footed her education expenses with checks twice as big as her school costs, she would be working full time, she knew.
    Cars were not that numerous, and bikes not too bad, but there were no sidewalks and Spook flinched when anything on wheels got near. She was a forest dog, a cabin dog, a recluse of a dog, not a city dog. Spook did not like this neighborhood.
    “I’ll take her to the Arboretum,” Abby said, picking at a sandwich at the kitchen table with Brice. He had been working all weekend, still catching up, he said, but since she had little real knowledge of what he actually did at work, she couldn’t imagine how he could catch up at home. The stock market had to be open and running for him to buy and sell, that much she knew. He often talked about his clients, but aside from buying, selling, or advising them about investments, trusts, annuities, what else was there for him to do? Record keeping, for one thing, he had said tiredly, research investment