by Judi Lynn
The front room was getting crowded when Olivia joined them.
“Sorry, Thane had to work today. I got a little bit of a late start.” Her sister looked around the room and braced herself. Jazzi understood. Everyone looked wired.
Underlying tension buzzed in the air, so Jazzi said, “Let’s eat. Everything’s ready.”
To make life easier, she’d divided the seafood pasta into two huge bowls, one for each end of the table. People jostled into their seats and passed platters. Jazzi put bottles of wine and beer on the table, and everyone grabbed for what they wanted.
Arnie didn’t waste time. “Doogie called and told me about Lynda’s body in a trunk.”
The conversation took off from there, rehashing all of the details for him.
Mom’s voice cracked when she blurted, “She’d had a baby. Did you know that?”
“Whose?” Arnie obviously hadn’t known. His shoulders tensed.
Dad put his hand over Mom’s before he answered his brother. “It was before she met you, Arnie. When she went to New York, it must have been to have the child and give it up for adoption.”
Arnie visibly gathered himself. “So whoever got her pregnant wouldn’t claim the baby and make it legitimate? He left Lynda on her own?”
“It looks that way.” Dad patted Mom’s hand again. “There was a picture of the baby in the locket Lynda wore.”
Arnie shook his head. “No wonder she didn’t trust men. Some loser got her pregnant, then walked away. She must have been desperate, afraid.”
Heads turned toward Grandma. “She never said a word to us, only asked for money to go to New York.”
“Why did she say she wanted to go?” Jazzi asked.
“She said she had a good job waiting for her there, that she was tired of living in a stick-in-the-mud town, that she wanted something bigger than River Bluffs.”
“And it was all a lie.” Mom’s hands curled into fists. “She wrote to me every week, told me all the fun she was having. All lies.”
Arnie’s expression looked so sad, Jazzi wanted to hug him. “But what else could she do, Cyn? She was too proud to admit she’d slept with someone who kicked her to the curb. Her reputation would be ruined.”
Mom barked a harsh laugh. “Would you have cared about her reputation when you met her? Would you have ignored her as a tainted woman?”
“No, it wouldn’t have mattered to me. But if she told people, some of them would put pressure on her to keep the child. What would that have done to her life?”
Mom’s expression pinched in anger. “If she’d have been honest with me, I’d have never told anyone. Lynda knew that.”
“Her dad and I would have helped her raise it if she wanted to keep it,” Grandma said. “Or we’d have supported her giving it up, but my Raymond wouldn’t condone an abortion.” She glanced at Doogie, Eli, and Arnie. “Not like you Catholics, but he was against it.”
Arnie leaned his elbows on the table, even more determined to make his point. “See? She couldn’t get rid of the baby, so she gave it away.”
Jazzi wasn’t sure what to think.
Mom pushed her plate away, her food uneaten. “I’d love to know who knocked her up. I’d like to give him a piece of my mind.”
Arnie wasn’t eating either. “I’d like to know where the baby is, who raised it, and where the kid lives today.”
Ansel spoke for the first time. “Maybe the kid’s better off not knowing that his mother gave him up. Maybe he’s had a happy life, and people should leave him alone.”
Franny agreed. “What good would it do him to know that his mother’s dead and his dad didn’t want him? It’s selfish to burden him with that.”
Arnie leaned back in his chair and sighed. “You’re right. I’m thinking about what I want, not what’s best for the kid.”
Jazzi pushed to her feet. The pasta was gone, the food platters empty. “Hand your plates down and I’ll put them in the kitchen.” Should she tell them now? She decided to go for it. “Cal found the boy. He hired a detective. Noah had a good life with loving parents and was happy to meet Cal.”
Mom sat up straight in her chair. “Cal found Lynda’s son?”
“He flew to New York to see him.”
Jerod’s dad, Eli, took the leap and said what Jazzi had been thinking. “What if Lynda didn’t want the boy? She never struck me as the nurturing type.”
Dad squirmed in his chair. He’d obviously thought the same thing.
Mom stared. “But every mother—”
“Isn’t like you,” Olivia said. “Some women make crappy mothers. Your sister might have been one of them.”
No one spoke. Finally, Mom admitted. “My sister wasn’t perfect.”
That was an understatement, but Jazzi and everyone else let it ride.
Mom repeated, “I’d still like to know who got her pregnant. And how did she end up in a trunk? I wonder if the same person was responsible for both those things.”
That seemed highly likely. As Jazzi carried the dishes to the kitchen, she called, “Let’s have dessert. Mom brought pies.”
“Wait a minute,” Arnie said, silencing them. “You said Cal found Lynda’s son. Can we meet him? Would he ever come to River Bluffs to get to know us?”
Jazzi regretted the next news. “He was going to come here to meet Cal but changed his mind.”
Arnie’s shoulders sagged. “I can’t say I blame him. It must have been a shock when Cal called him.”
“Especially when it wasn’t even a relative who looked for him,” Eli chimed in.
Arnie’s face drained of color. “You don’t think Cal killed Lynda, then hired a detective to find her son?”
Jerod shook his head. “Cal wasn’t even in River Bluffs when Lynda disappeared.”
Arnie relaxed. “You’re right. He’d left for Europe, hadn’t he?”
Jazzi put the pies on the table and purposely steered the conversation to other topics. The air conditioner was struggling to keep the rooms comfortable with so many people jammed into them. The men kept running their fingers around their shirt collars. Jazzi felt sticky. Usually, they’d go outside and sit in the backyard, but the temperature was uncomfortable, and flies buzzed around glasses and bottles.
People stuck it out another half hour, then started to leave. Grandma came to hug Jazzi good-bye. “You cooked a wonderful meal, Sarah. Thanks for having us.”
Jazzi smiled. Grandma’s eyes had that fuzzy look again, like she’d moved miles or years away. When she called Jazzi “Sarah,” she’d reverted to her younger days and was spending time with her dead sister. Today must have been too much for her. “Love ya, Grams.”
Ansel stayed until the last person left. “Let me help you with cleanup.”
While they rinsed dishes and loaded them into the dishwasher, Jazzi asked, “Does Emily work tonight?”
“No, I’m taking her to a restaurant for supper. She’s sleeping now, so I try to stay out of the apartment and give her some quiet.” He took an uneaten shrimp off a plate and tossed it to George.
George snarfed it down.
They finished with the dishes and then went to fold chairs and put the table’s leaves in the linen closet. Everything was back to normal, but Jazzi put her hands on her hips and looked around her apartment. “It’s time I find someplace bigger. It’s getting more and more crowded when we get together.”
“What about Cal’s place?” Ansel pushed the table back into the center of the dining room. “I haven’t seen too many houses with as much room and charm.”
Jazzi wrinkled her nose. “But I’d always remember finding Aunt Lynda in the attic.”
“So? That was a good thing. You can finally give your family a little closure.”
“There’s too much property.”
Ansel shook his head. “I’d lov
e that. George would have a place to run.”
Jazzi looked at the pug and laughed. He was stretched out on the kitchen floor under the air conditioner. “Yeah, I’ll believe that when I see it.”
Ansel grinned fondly at his dog. “Look, you helped Jerod fix up his place to sell, and then he decided to keep it and you didn’t mind. You two got Cal’s house at a great price. You should think about it.”
“I do love the house.”
“See?” He helped her finish swiping down the kitchen, and then they went to plop on the sofa and watch Sunday sports. George jumped between them to put his head on Jazzi’s lap. Their Sunday ritual. They’d coast until Ansel had to pick up Emily.
Chapter 11
On Monday, the real fun began when Jazzi and Jerod started scraping layers of tile off the bathroom floors. There were three of them. They’d be lucky if they finished at a decent time today. Jerod rammed his crowbar too close to the master bath’s wall and it left a hole. He was cussing when Detective Gaff came.
“I have bad news.”
Jazzi and Jerod laid down their tools and followed him to the kitchen. They sat in their usual circle in the lawn chairs there.
“When I called New York to ask about Noah Jacobs, the cop at the station looked up his name and told me he’d been reported as a missing person.”
Jazzi held her breath. A missing person? “But Noah lives in New York, doesn’t he?”
“He has a wife and a kid there, plays in a band, but he left to visit a friend in Indiana seven months ago, and no one’s seen him since.”
Seven months. “That would be about the time he came to visit Cal.”
Gaff nodded. “The case went cold after a while, but when we started digging again, we found his car in Ohio, close to Cleveland.”
Jazzi blinked, trying to picture Noah’s drive to River Bluffs. He’d left New York and must have stopped in Cleveland. That seemed a little out of his way, but not that much. Maybe he meant to spend a few nights there before he stopped in town. It wasn’t unreasonable.
“Was there anything in it?” Jerod asked. “Luggage?”
“We found two suitcases and a guitar in the trunk. I called his parents and they confirmed he’d taken his guitar with him. Took it everywhere, I guess. He was a musician in a band and was doing fairly well. He was married with a little boy. His wife’s a Web designer, so can work from home. He did odd jobs on the side when gigs got slow.”
Not anymore. It didn’t sound good. It sounded as though Noah Jacobs had disappeared just as thoroughly as his birth mother had. “How old is he?” Jazzi asked.
“Twenty-eight. His parents said he was well liked. All that he told them was that a friend of his moved to Indiana, and he was going to stay with him a week to help him fix up his house.”
“Except he never made it.”
Gaff shook his head. “It doesn’t look like he did.”
“Poor him. Poor Cal.” Cal had been waiting for another person who disappeared on him. She sighed. “His body isn’t lying in a morgue somewhere, unclaimed, is it? What if someone mugged him and took his ID? Can you trace things like that?”
“We’d have found him. I talked to Isabelle and she said that Cal could hardly wait for Noah to get here. It was a horrible blow when he never showed up. She even hinted that might be part of the reason Cal had his fatal heart attack.”
“Have you checked hospitals? Clinics?” Jazzi couldn’t stand the idea that Noah had just disappeared. Just like Lynda.
“What do you think?” Gaff gave her a look. “Tell me about your Sunday meal. How did that go?”
They filled him in and he made notes.
“Did anyone have any theories about Noah and Cal?”
Jazzi bit her bottom lip. “At first, Arnie suspected Cal, but we decided against that.”
Gaff looked surprised, but then shrugged. “Noah’s parents are sending a picture for us to post for missing persons. That might help.”
The baby in the locket had looked like Lynda. Jazzi wondered what the grown man would look like.
Gaff tried again. “And no one in your family had any idea who the father of Lynda’s baby might be?”
“No one even knew she’d had a baby, and you said there was no father’s name on the birth certificate.” When Lynda wanted to keep a secret, she did.
Scowling, Gaff shut his notepad. “Well, I’d better get going. This is an old case, but it intrigues me. I have plenty of new ones, though.” He paused at the door. “I’ll tell your mom this time. She knows me now. It might be better if this came from me.”
They watched Gaff leave, then went back to work. At the end of the day, the bathroom floor was cleaned down to the base and the wall between the kitchen and dining room was gone and a new beam had taken its place. The open space was big enough to host dinners for twenty people, if you wanted to. Jazzi eyed it with greed. It would be a perfect place to have her Sunday dinners.
Jerod raised an eyebrow at her. “You gave up more profits when you helped me fix up my place and buy it. If you want this, it’s yours for half what we paid for it.”
She could feel herself blush. Her cousin knew her too well. “We hardly made any money on our last job.”
“But we made a bundle on the one before that. This is a perfect house for you. Think about it.”
“Thanks.” She did like this property. If worse came to worse, she’d buy a big tractor to mow the yard.
“Ansel likes it too,” Jerod said.
“Emily said no. That’s why he didn’t bid on it.”
Jerod made a disgusted noise. “Emily never cares about what would make Ansel happy.”
“He’s happy with her. I guess that’s enough.”
Jerod snorted. “Ansel has poor taste in women.”
When they left for the day, they’d patched the wooden floor where they’d taken down the wall, and the first floor of Cal’s house had two huge spaces—the living room on one side and the kitchen/dining room on the other, perfect for entertaining.
Ansel was going to start working with them tomorrow, so the upstairs would go even faster. He’d finished his other job and had taken today off to spend time with Emily. She’d wanted to visit her parents near Chicago, so he was driving her there.
“She’s going to spend the rest of the week there,” Ansel had told her when he called. “Then I’ll drive up on Saturday to bring her back. She doesn’t like to drive in heavy traffic.”
Emily didn’t like lots of things, but that was between her and Ansel. It meant that Jazzi was on her own tonight, though. She decided to make herself nachos and rent a movie. She was browning hamburger and slicing jalapenos when someone knocked on the door. When she went to answer it, Maury Lebovitch shifted from one foot to the other on her front porch.
She knew Maury by sight, nothing more. He was friends with her dad’s brothers. They’d gone to Catholic school together, so she heard about him once in a while. There was only one reason he’d come to visit her: Lynda.
She forced a smile on her face, then opened the door. “Hi, how can I help you?”
Maury walked in and took a seat on the sofa and fidgeted. “I heard about Lynda. Is your mom doing okay?”
“Just give me a minute.” She went to the kitchen to turn off the stove, then returned and sat across from him. “She’s struggling. She never thought Lynda would leave River Bluffs and not talk to her again. It hurts. She always thought she’d get a phone call someday, you know? Now, at last, she knows why. Then we found out Lynda was pregnant when she went to New York, and she gave up a baby. That bothered Mom even more.”
Maury stared. “Are you sure—that Lynda had a baby, I mean?”
“The doctor who examined her bones could tell she’d given birth.”
He sat silent a minute, taking that in. “And she gave the baby away?”
“But she sent letters to your mom every week. She was working, having fun.”
“All lies. Detective Gaff called and the unwed mothers weren’t allowed to leave the premises while they lived there. The home was beautiful with beautiful grounds, but they didn’t want the girls to meet new people, maybe meet new men.”
“So Lynda was stuck there, all alone.” He rubbed his forehead. “What about the father?”
“She didn’t list his name on the birth certificate.”
Maury let out a long breath.
Jazzi realized the news would be upsetting for him. He’d wanted to marry Lynda right out of high school. “I’m sorry. This must be hard for you.”
“It had to be worse for Lynda. We had so much fun together, but we were so young. Stupid young. We thought we were in love, but we didn’t even know what that meant. Then we graduated, and I went straight into full-time work at my dad’s deli. Lynda got a job as a bank teller. She met people, saw what the world had to offer, and she wanted more than getting married and settling down. I didn’t understand at the time. I do now. The last thing she’d want was to have a baby and be tied down. But, boy, to face the pregnancy all by herself . . . that had to be rough.”
Jazzi wouldn’t want to do it. “She had a boy. Cal found him. He invited him to River Bluffs, but he never made it here.”
“What do you mean he never made it?”
“Police found his car abandoned close to Cleveland.”
Maury surged to his feet. “When?”
“They think it happened seven months ago, a little before Cal died. He was listed as a missing person then, and the New York cops followed up, trying to find him.” Jazzi stood, too. “No one knows what happened to him. Detective Gaff’s investigating. You could talk to him.”
“I will. It can’t be a coincidence. What could have happened to him?” Maury paced back and forth across the room. “Lynda didn’t look any different when she came back from New York, not one bit. Did the kid have a good life?”
“It sounds like it. He’s a musician in New York with a band, and he works part-time doing odd jobs when he needs extra money. His parents are desperate. They’ve been looking for him.”