invited to.” Brick could tell Mo was wishing she didn’t need this woman’s help. He thought Mo might want to try sugar rather than vinegar in this instance, but kept his mouth shut.
“Look, Hope, I didn’t come here to argue with you about some past slight or misunderstanding,” Mo said.
“What? You didn’t come by to apologize?”
As if seeing that her tactics weren’t working, Mo said, “Hope, could we please come in? I need to ask you something about Tricia.”
The woman in the doorway hesitated, her gaze going back and forth from one to the other of them before she stepped back with obvious reluctance.
Once inside, Hope didn’t offer them a chair. Instead, she stood just inside the door, arms crossed waiting.
“Thanks, we’d love to sit down,” Mo said and walked into the living room to perch on the edge of the couch. She looked at Hope and snapped, “Could you drop the drama queen act? I need to know if Tricia had a lover.”
Brick had moved to the fireplace and stood waiting to see how all of this was going to shake out. Hope looked pointedly at him without moving.
“This is Deputy Marshal Brick Savage. He’s helping me investigate Joey’s death,” Mo said.
“Wait, you’re investigating? I heard you got kicked off the force and aren’t a cop anymore.”
“I was suspended, not fired. Are you going to answer my question or just give me a hard time?” Mo sounded tired and weary. Brick knew the feeling. It had been another long day.
Hope must have decided to cut Mo some slack because she dropped her belligerent stance and moved away from the door to take a chair at the edge of the living room.
“If Tricia had wanted you to know what was going on in her life, she would have told you,” Hope said haughtily.
Mo swore. “Tell me who the man was.”
“Tell me why I should? Tricia’s dead. I promised her I wouldn’t tell anyone ever, especially you.”
“How long had she been seeing him?”
Hope looked away for a moment. “Over a year.”
Brick heard Mo emit a painful sound that made Hope smile. But he knew what Mo had to be thinking. There was the possibility that the baby had been her sister’s lover’s and not Tricia’s husband’s—just as Natalie had questioned.
“Was she in love with him?” Mo asked.
Hope shrugged. “At first it was just a fling. She didn’t think it would last. I think she realized that she’d gotten married too young and she wanted to see if she’d missed out on something. Apparently she had. It was thrilling, she said. I think it was fun because it was a secret. No one knew but me. Your sister knew what you’d say if she told you.”
Mo seemed to ignore that. “Did you meet him?” Brick saw the answer. “So you never met him.”
“They had to keep it secret. Billings may be the largest city in Montana, but it isn’t so large that you can have an affair and people don’t find out,” Hope said.
“So you don’t know his name,” Brick said, making the woman look over at him. He got the feeling she’d forgotten all about him until then.
“I didn’t need to know his name,” Hope said irritably. “But why should I tell you even if I did know?” she demanded of Mo.
“Because I have reason to believe Tricia didn’t kill herself.”
The woman’s eyes widened. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“So...” Hope was frowning again. “You think someone killed her?” Mo said nothing. “You can’t think it was Andy.”
“Andy?”
Brick saw that Mo’s eyes had widened in surprise. “Who is Andy?” he asked.
“A friend of Thomas’s.”
* * *
MO COULDN’T BELIEVE THIS. “Andy? It’s Andy?”
“She never told me it was Andy,” Hope said quickly, backpedaling. “Just that it was someone from college, someone she’d had a crush on.”
With relief, she realized that if Natalie had been telling the truth, the man Tricia had been having the affair with was blond and more than six feet tall. Andy was short and dark-haired.
She looked at Hope, wanting to throttle the woman. “So you never saw him, never met him. I’m beginning to wonder if Tricia even confided in you.”
“She did!” the woman cried. “She was in love and heartbroken because she didn’t want to hurt Thomas.”
“She was in love?” This wasn’t adding up. “I thought it was just a fling?”
“At first. She thought it was just for fun, but then it turned into something else and then...” Hope looked away.
“And then she got pregnant,” Mo guessed. All those months of trying