Glossed and Found

by India Ink

  Auntie had already headed to the office, but stopped as Tawny popped out from the spa room, Betsy Sue in tow.

  They were chatting like old friends. They’d met at the same beauty convention where I’d met Killian, but I had no idea if the two had maintained contact. Speaking of which, Killian should be at his meeting by now.

  “Hey, Betsy,” I said, giving her a little wave. “Glad to have you aboard.”

  “Persia, Miss Florence, thanks for taking me on. You don’t know how much this means to me.” She beamed, perky as ever, but there was something so unassuming about her cheerfulness that it never felt grating or annoying.

  Auntie gave her a nod. “Come on, girl, come back to the office with me and fill out your paperwork. Then Tawny can finish showing you the ropes.”

  As they disappeared into the back, I turned to Tawny. “Has Lisa called?”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said, her expression serious. Both she and Seth knew that Lisa was missing. “Should I call her clients and reschedule?”

  I pressed my lips together. “Yeah . . . tell them something came up, and that we’ll call this afternoon to reschedule. Hopefully by then, Auntie will have gotten Maxine to agree to take over her place on a temporary basis.”

  Tawny looked like she wanted to ask more questions, but I shook my head and headed for my station. My morning was free from consultations, but I had to inventory my supplies and match them against what we would need over the next few weeks for the shop lines that I’d created. Not a good idea to run out of Peppermint Panda lotion during the Christmas season, not when it was currently our best-selling item. On the other hand, I’d cut down on how much Vermillion Verve I was making because it seemed to sell best during the summer months.

  After I made a list of oils and other supplies I was running low on, I took a break to get myself a cup of tea. Seth had just finished up with a haircut, and he was shaking his head. I glanced at his client, a woman I didn’t recognize, as she wandered out to pay Tawny. She was sporting a jaunty cut that made her look ten years younger than when she’d walked in the door.

  “Nice job,” I said. “You really know your stuff.”

  Seth snorted. “Yeah, but she’s a real piece of work, that one.” He sighed, then got the broom and began sweeping up hair. “I tell you, Persia, I hear the damnedest things in my line of work. Do you get that with your clients, too?”

  Frowning, I dropped my tea bag in the garbage and took a sip of the hot drink. “What are you talking about?”

  “Lisa and I were just discussing this last Friday.” His voice dropped, and he stared at the floor for a moment. He and Lisa worked side by side on a daily basis, and I knew they’d developed a friendship. “Being a hairdresser or beautician, you hear the wackiest stuff from your clients. We get the lowdown on affairs, hidden scandals, PMS bouts, husbands who can’t perform. I swear, some of my clients forget I’m just a person and not some psychiatrist.”

  I blinked. “My clients aren’t quite the same. I guess I don’t spend long enough with them to build up that kind of trust.” As I glanced over at Lisa’s empty station, a light-bulb went on in my head. “Listen, you say that Lisa gets the same thing?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, we’ve talked about it before. Makes things awkward sometimes. For example, one of my clients is having an affair, and she told me about it, along with the name of her lover—God only knows why, but she did. Then, three days ago, I ran into her at Georgio’s Restaurant. She was having dinner with her husband and his best friend—who happens to be her lover. You would not believe how uncomfortable I was. I had no idea what to say. Her husband looked so happy, poor schmuck.”

  “Jesus, that’s a nasty situation,” I said. “Do you think Lisa might have overheard something she wasn’t supposed to know?”

  “I don’t know about that, but she gets the same thing.”

  With a shrug, he finished cleaning his station. “Sometimes we exchange war stories.”

  I finished my tea and headed to the front counter, where I tapped Tawny on the shoulder. She had just finished showing Betsy Sue how to run the cash register. “Where’s Lisa’s appointment book?”

  “Over there. Why? You want it?” She made room for me to slip in behind her so I could grab the planner.

  Betsy gave me an excited smile. She was blonde, perky, and her tummy showed a little rounded bulge. Killian hadn’t been kidding when he said that she and Julius were expecting. “Persia, thanks so much for this opportunity. It means the world to me right now.”

  I winked. “So how’s the bun? And how’s Julius?”

  She blushed, her hand dropping to her stomach. “I’m fine. This job will sure help take the stress off. I’m really starting to show now. Julius’s thrilled, but of course, we were hoping to get married before the baby arrives. If Killian can get his funding, maybe we’ll still have a chance.”

  “Well, you just take it easy, and Tawny will help show you what you need to know. And if your ankles start to swell, we can get you a stool to sit on behind the counter.” I picked up Lisa’s appointment book and returned to my station.

  Seth’s comments about clients spilling secrets made me wonder if Lisa had told any of her makeovers what she’d been planning on. I was flipping through Friday and Saturday’s appointments when I was interrupted by the sound of my cell phone ringing from the muffled depths of my purse. I scrambled to answer and caught Kyle just before he was about ready to hang up.

  “Any word from Lisa yet?” I asked after his “Hello” boomed into my ear.

  He paused, and I heard him let out a long sigh. “No, we haven’t. Amy’s frantic. She’s been gone two nights now, and I told Amy to file an official missing person report today. She’s coming in this afternoon.” By the sound of his voice, I could tell that there was some friction going on in lovebird city.

  “You really do think she’s dead, don’t you?” I could hear it in his voice. He was ready to close the door based on where Lisa’s car had been found.

  Kyle cleared his throat. “Look at it from my perspective. Lisa’s car was found at Lookout Pier. There was a horrible storm the night she vanished. Lisa can’t swim. It adds up, yes, but I’m not going to mark the case closed, if that’s what you’re thinking. We’ll treat this like any missing person case that we get.”

  “Have you told Amy you think she drowned?”

  Another pause. Apparently he had, and apparently Amy hadn’t taken it very well. “Yeah, I did,” he said after a moment. “She’s convinced that I’m going to just let it drop.”

  “But you aren’t, right?”

  My question had apparently pushed his buttons, because Kyle exploded. “God damn it, Persia, you know that I’ll do everything I can to find out what happened to Lisa. I’m not writing the girl off, even if I do think she drowned. But you’ve got to understand, my department is swamped. With the budget cuts going on, I can’t spare anybody for overtime unless it’s an emergency.”

  He came to an abrupt halt, and I had the feeling that he was debating whether to tell me something. I let the silence hang and, after a moment, he spoke again. “I’m going to tell you something, but you damned well better keep it under your hat. Don’t even tell your aunt, you understand?”

  “Sure, I promise,” I said, crossing my fingers behind my back.

  “Persia, I have to lay off two of my men next month. Every person on my staff is necessary, but the city just isn’t approving enough money to keep up with all the crap going on around here. It’s like the city council is sticking its head in the sand. Gull Harbor’s growing, and so is our crime rate. But they expect me to be able to cut corners and make do with less, even though they complain when we can’t get out to calls right away because we’re tied up somewhere else.”

  “Oh cripes, Kyle. That sucks. Who are you going to fire?”

  “Lay off, not fire. They’ll be able to get unemployment easier that way. And I don’t know who yet. Grady’s got a kid on the way. Shanna�
�s a single mother. Roberts is nearing retirement; if I lay him off now, it’s going to wreck his pension. And it goes on and on like that.” He let out a sound like a strangled gulp. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. So a missing person case . . .”

  “If Lisa was a kid, we’d be out there combing the streets. But she’s an adult, and there’s no real evidence that anything’s happened to her, other than maybe falling off the pier. Mitch Willis hasn’t heard from her, and he’s got an alibi for Saturday night. For every hour we spend on her, we take our investigations away from other cases. Right now we’re hunting down an armed robber, an ATM thief, a rapist . . . there were two car thefts over the weekend, and we’ve got one verified missing person who’s seventy years old with Alzheimer’s. He wandered away from his daughter’s house last night in his bathrobe.”

  I leaned back in my chair and rested my head on the wall. Kyle was right, but he was also headed for a train wreck. He and Amy were obviously hitting it off. How was he going to balance his requirements of being the chief of police with the fact that it was his girlfriend’s sister missing?

  “Want some advice, Kyle?”

  “No, but I’m sure that I’m going to get an earful.” After a grunt, he added, “Okay, what is it?”

  Unable to believe I was about to volunteer my time, I blurted out, “Use me. Let me do some quiet investigating on the side. Amy likes you a lot, but if you slack off on the search for her sister, she’s going to get real pissed real soon, no matter what the reason.”

  Kyle cleared his throat. “You think she really likes me?”

  “Yes, you dolt, of course she does. It’s obvious, if you’d take your head out of the sand. Listen, I was thinking that maybe some of Lisa’s clients from this week might have a clue as to what she was up to. I was talking to Seth—”

  “Seth?” He sounded clueless.

  “Get with the program, Kyle. Seth’s our hairdresser. Anyway, he told me that clients are very touchy-feely. They talk about everything with their hairdressers and beauticians. I was thinking maybe Lisa told one of her clients on Friday or Saturday what she was up to. I could go talk to them. Since Lisa worked for us and she’s a good friend of mine, it wouldn’t seem out of the ordinary for me to do that.”

  He was quicker to take me up on my offer than I’d expected. “You’d do that? Because her car checked out—no strange prints inside, no sign of foul play, no sign of anything out of the ordinary. And the sand didn’t look like there was a tussle, though with the wind and rain that night, who knows?”

  I blinked. “Sounds like I’ve just been deputized.”

  “More or less. No prowling, no getting yourself in dangerous situations . . . just ask a few questions if you would, while I try to figure out where to look from here. Oh, and Persia?”

  “Yeah?” I glanced at the clock, thinking about my to-do list for the day. I’d just have to push a few of my errands back until tomorrow.

  “Thanks.” He hung up, and I stared at the receiver. So the department was in a budgetary fix that was impacting police services. It figured. People could be so short-sighted. Save a few taxes today but lose your shirt in the process. Wait until some of those city council members dialed 911 and came up with a busy signal. I decided to set Auntie to work on the situation, whether Kyle wanted me to say anything or not. She was persuasive. While I looked for clues to Lisa’s disappearance, Auntie could start badgering the town leaders into coughing up more money for Kyle and his crew.

  I made two calls: one to Barbara, asking her to come help us at Venus Envy if she wasn’t going to work at the bakery for the day. As I suspected, she was happy to have something to do, even if it meant being right next door to the Baklava or Bust Bakery. I had the feeling she was hoping Dorian would see her and rush over to apologize.

  The other call was to Amy. “Listen, I thought I’d go out and ask a few questions about Lisa. Sort of get a head start on things. I’m going to check out some of her clients from last week, see if she said anything to them about her plans. And what did you say the name of her ex-boyfriend was?” She told me, and I jotted down his name.

  “Persia,” she said, and I could hear the hesitancy in her voice. “Why are you doing this? Isn’t this Kyle’s job?”

  I thought fast. “Kyle thinks I’d have a better chance of getting them to open up to me, since I’m one of the owners of Venus Envy, and friends with a number of our customers.”

  She murmured an assent, though I wasn’t sure she was thoroughly convinced. When I hung up, I called Kyle back and filled him in on the excuse I’d given Amy so he wouldn’t blow it when she came in to file the missing person report. After I finished, I picked up my notes and Lisa’s appointment book and stuffed them in a spare tote bag I kept under the counter.

  Auntie was sitting amid a pile of invoices and spreadsheets six inches high. She glanced up at me and saw that I had my coat on and purse over my shoulder. She let out a little huff of irritation. “No, no, no! You aren’t going out, are you?”

  “For a little while. Barb’s coming in to help, though. I’m going out to talk to some of the clients who Lisa saw last week. They might know something, and they’ll be more willing to talk to me rather than to Kyle.” I hesitated, remembering my promise to keep quiet about the layoffs. “Another thing . . . you might want to talk to some of your friends on the city council and tell them to loosen the purse strings on the police department.”

  “Why? What do you know?” Aunt Florence gave me that look that said she knew I knew something she didn’t. And Auntie wasn’t happy when she was kept in the dark.

  I gave a little shrug but winked. “Just call it preventative medicine. I should be back before one.”

  With a sigh, Auntie waved me toward the door. “Go, but give me a call if you’re going to be much later than that so I can rearrange some things I was going to do this afternoon.”

  “Thanks, Auntie. I won’t be too long,” I said, giving her a quick kiss. As I headed out the door, I wondered if I was wasting my time. Kyle thought Lisa was sleeping at the bottom of the inlet. Finding out something of value from one of her clients seemed like a long shot, but we had to start somewhere. And Kyle certainly wouldn’t be able to follow up on all these leads . . . not as quickly as I could.

  Braving the rain, I ran toward my car, closing the door in just in time to avoid being caught in a massive downpour that overwhelmed my windshield wipers. As I waited for the sudden surge of rain to back off, everything took on a bleak edge. My cell phone rang, and I answered, but it was a wrong number. As I stared at my phone, I wondered . . . Lisa had a cell. Had anybody called it? Surely, Amy had, but I still had to try.

  My fingers were shaking as I dialed the number. The ring on the other end told me that wherever her phone was, it wasn’t in the inlet. I waited. One ring. Five, and it switched to voice mail. As I left a message, the downpour eased up. Would she get my message? Was her phone even with her? As I pulled out of the parking space, I found myself praying that Kyle’s hunch was wrong.

  Chapter Seven

  First things first. I was going to drive home and change. My comfort clothes were beginning to feel baggy, and the hangover was starting to lift. I was also hungry, and the thought of a ham sandwich was beginning to sound appealing. From home, I could also call the names in Lisa’s book and ask them if I could drop in.

  As I walked through the door, Dodger, our silver tabby, and Nalu, our black shorthair boy, stopped short in the hallway, where they were playing tug-of-war with a loaf of bread. A little over a week ago, we’d found a loaf of partially devoured bread on the bathroom floor, and we’d blamed the dogs. Now I knew the identity of the real culprits.

  “What the hell are you two doing?” I stomped over, shooing them away from the bag. They watched, all innocent-like, as I picked up the bread and examined it. Yep, teeth marks pointed the finger, all right. Dodger was good at climbing, where Nalu was a little too f
at to scramble up on the counters. Dodger must have pushed the bread off to the waiting Nalu, and together they decided to make tracks with the booty.

  “You twits,” I muttered, carrying the bread into the kitchen. A couple of slices looked munched on, but otherwise everything seemed okay, so I dropped the remaining slices, minus two for my sandwich, into a Ziploc bag and threw away the old wrapper. The slobbered-on slices went in the dog’s dishes, which no doubt Dodger and Nalu would pilfer as soon as I wasn’t looking.

  I fixed my snack, then sat down with the phone book, my sandwich, and a glass of tomato juice at the table. As I ate, I jotted down names and then hunted through the phone book for their addresses. First on the list from Lisa’s Friday appointments was Heddy Latherton. Well, if Lisa had said something, Heddy would be only too happy to tell me. But she wasn’t home, so I left a message on her voice mail and went on.

  Barb had been her next appointment. I could talk to her after work. Third on the list was Karen Sanders. She answered on the first ring. When I introduced myself and asked if I could come over and ask her a few questions about Lisa, she quickly nixed that idea.

  “I don’t mind talking to you, but not at my house. Can you meet me at the Starbucks adjacent to Barnes & Noble in an hour?” She lowered her voice. “I just don’t want to talk here at home. You can understand why.”

  Okay, obviously she thought I was privy to something I wasn’t. Either that, or she was a drama queen. “Sure,” I said, wondering what it would take to pry information out of her. “See you in an hour.”

  The fourth and fifth appointments were Donna and Enid Smith, elderly women who lived out on Ridgerock Road. They were sisters, regulars in our shop, and they loved company, so I was in like Flynn. I told them I’d drop by in a couple of hours, and they insisted I come for a late lunch. Feeling a tad guilty—they thought I was coming over just to be friendly—I agreed. I’d take them a bouquet and spend an hour or so dishing with them so I didn’t appear rude.