by Julie Miller
The detective took a break from putting notes into her phone. “Make it quick.” Then she nodded past Amy to the uniformed officer waiting in the hallway. “When you’re done, would you show the laundry and food items to Officer Marquette?”
“Joss’s laptop won’t be there.”
“I’d like someone to have a look anyway,” the detective explained. “We’ll check her office at the university, and with the ex-boyfriend, too.” Amy’s phone burned in her hand. “Not finding that laptop, or locating it in an unexpected place, could be as important as finding it.”
“I understand. Excuse me.” Amy stepped into the hallway and swiped the answer button. With half the upstairs landing draped in paint tarps and the stairwell itself lined with ladders and scaffolding from her remodeling efforts, it was almost impossible to find a private corner to have this conversation. So, she drifted to the railing overlooking the downstairs entryway and dropped her voice to a whisper. “Derek?” How, exactly, was she supposed to start this conversation? It wasn’t going to be by announcing that KCPD wanted to talk to him. “Are you sitting down?”
He laughed. “Of course I’m sitting down. I’m driving my car.” She could hear another voice in the background, and supposed he had the news on his radio or was listening to a podcast. The background voice suddenly went silent. He must have turned off whatever was playing. “Why are you whispering? I can barely hear you.”
“Where are you? I need you to pull off onto a side street or parking lot.”
“Are you kidding? I’m halfway to your place on I-29.” She heard the change in his tone as he realized she wouldn’t have made her request if something wasn’t seriously wrong. “What’s happened? I called you because I’ve been trying to get a hold of Joss all afternoon, and she’s not picking up. I’m not even getting her voice mail. Is she okay?”
Amy could barely squeeze the word past the tightness in her chest and throat. “No. She’s not. There’s been...an accident.”
Several seconds passed before Derek spoke again. “How badly is she hurt? Are you at the hospital? She didn’t get trapped by the fires, did she?”
“Not exactly—”
“She was supposed to evacuate with you. Why didn’t you make sure she got back to civilization—”
“Derek.” She interrupted him as accusation filled his voice. “Someone killed her.”
“What?”
“I discovered the body. The fire was a forensic countermeasure to hide whatever happened to her.”
She imagined he drove another mile in silence, or maybe he’d finally pulled off onto the shoulder of the road, before he answered. “She was murdered? Why?”
“That’s the question of the day, it seems.” Amy wound her fingers around the polished oak railing that framed the landing, needing its solid form to lean on for a moment until she could compose her thoughts. “The police want to talk to you since you and Joss were so close. And because you know about her research, what she might have had on her laptop. Any chance you know where that is?”
“Her laptop? Why would I know that?”
She glanced over her shoulder when she realized both Officer Marquette and Detective Beck had tuned in to her conversation. She turned her back to them, trying to reclaim a little privacy. “Look, I need to wrap this up.”
Suddenly, his voice dropped to a whisper to match hers. “Are the cops there right now?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Why would the police investigate a murder? “They’re asking questions. Looking for leads.” She exhaled a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding when Detective Carson called Detective Beck back into the room to look at something. “You can come on out to the house if you want to hang out and commiserate. Or if you want to be with me when I call Jocelyn’s parents.”
“I can’t deal with that right now. I can’t deal with any of that.”
She moved her hand from the railing to the steel pipe of construction scaffolding that rose above it from the foyer below. The metal felt shockingly cold in her grasp. It had picked up the chill of the air-conditioning, no doubt. Or maybe she was the one who was losing any remnant of warmth.
“I’m turning this car around,” Derek announced. “I’ll talk to you later, Amy. I need some time alone to process this first.”
Man, did she understand that impulse. “Derek, Jocelyn really did care about you.”
“Yeah. She cared so much that she didn’t want to be with me.” Amy didn’t know what to say to that. If KCPD saw him as a jilted lover or jealous grad student, would they consider him a suspect? “Don’t tell the police I said that. Okay?”
“Okay. But you should tell them.”
She heard the extra voice in the background of the call again. He’d turned on whatever he’d been listening to and was tuning her out. “Thanks for giving me the heads-up. Call me if you find out anything else.”
“I will. Derek, are you okay to be driving? Will you call me when you get home, so I know you’re safe?”
“Sure. Whatever.”
“I’m so sorry to be the one to tell you. I know you must hurt as much as I—”
The call abruptly disconnected. And Amy doubted it had anything to do with a dropped call. Hadn’t anger been one of her initial reactions to losing Jocelyn? Why should the man who’d loved her be any different? If Derek didn’t contact her later, Amy would call him to make sure he was all right. For now, she’d give him his space to get past the shock and start to grieve. Pulling her hand from the unbending steel that suddenly reminded her of prison bars rising up in front of her, she slowly slipped the phone back into her pocket, inhaled a couple of deep breaths and then gestured to the uniformed officer to follow her down the wide oak stairs.
“The laundry room is this way.”
Detective Beck stuck her head out the bedroom door with one last directive for the uniformed officer. “Check any pockets. Signs of trace. You know the drill.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Careful. The stain on that railing might still be tacky.” Urging the black woman in the KCPD uniform to stick to the wall on the right side of the stairs, away from the construction scaffolding, Amy led her down to the foyer. The main part of the house, inside and out, felt like a barricaded fortress, with honeycombs of metal framework circling the interior of the two-story entryway and the front of the house so that she and the two workmen she’d hired could repair and refinish the century-old interior oak paneling, as well as repaint the exterior of the old farmhouse. “Watch your head.”
Amy ducked beneath the wood planks that formed a squared-off archway between the foyer and the rooms in the back that had already been modernized and repainted after a year and a half of hard work and restoration. While she enjoyed working with her hands and bringing out the beauty of the old home, it had proved to be too big a project to complete on her own. She had her own contracted art pieces to finish, including her metal sculpting and jewelry work. And with Dale O’Brien breathing down her grandmother’s neck with monetary offers and subtle threats to drive them off the land he wanted to build on, the need for speed had grown even greater. She planned to turn the house into a historic masterpiece of turn-of-the-century architecture and petition the state and national register of historic places to give her gran’s house protected status, preserving the only home her grandmother had ever known and protecting the natural beauty of the land where her great-grandparents had once grown apple trees and raised cattle.
Provided these wildfires—whether accidental or deliberate—didn’t burn them out first.
As she straightened on the other side of the arch, she collided with a string bean of a man in faded blue jeans and work boots. Handyman #1, Brad Frick. Brad put his hand out to grab her shoulder to keep them from bumping into each other. “Careful there, Miss Amy. Look out.”
“Brad.
You startled me.” Flattening her palm over the drumming of her heart, Amy offered the construction worker a friendly smile. Brad compensated for the receding points of his hairline by growing a long ponytail that nearly reached his waist in the back. Along with his beakish nose, he’d always reminded her of a long-legged bird—one who’d be easy to sculpt into a humorous garden decoration with the scrap metal and welding equipment she stored in her art studio.
“Hey, Miss Amy.” His partner, Richie Sterling, who was changing out the paper on a hand sander on the sawhorses behind him, was too nondescript to spark any obvious artistic inspiration. Richie was average height, average weight and hid his average blond-brown hair beneath a paint-stained ball cap. About the only thing unique about him was the streaks of sunburn that seemed to perpetually stain his cheeks.
She widened her smile to include Richie in her greeting. “Hey, Richie. What are you two doing here?”
“We’re w-w-working,” he answered, cutting the excess sandpaper off with the blade of a box cutter. His gaze skipped from her to the female officer beside her before dropping to the gun strapped at Officer Marquette’s waist. “Is that real?”
Officer Marquette nodded, resting her hand on the butt of the weapon. “Yes, sir. Very much so.”
“Do you know how to use it?” Richie asked.
The woman’s impassive professional face softened with a smile. “I’d better know how if I’m going to be carrying it.”
“Cool.” Richie lifted his gaze, although it danced over the other woman’s face without making direct eye contact. “Did you ever shoot anyone with—”
“Richie!” Brad chastised his friend. “Back to work.”
Nodding at the command, Richie lowered his head to attach a battery pack to the cordless sander.
“Sorry about that, ma’am.” Brad turned his attention back to the nail hole he was filling with Spackle. “Sometimes, his curiosity gets the better of him. He’s harmless.”
Officer Marquette exchanged a quizzical look with Amy at the odd addendum before sharing her smile with Brad, as well. “That’s all right, sir. Sometimes, folks are curious about a woman in uniform.” The smile was gone when she looked back at Amy. “Ma’am? If you could show me the items you mentioned?”
“Sure.”
But the alleged brainy half of Frick and Frack here moved a sawhorse table out of his way so he could move closer to the paneling, effectively blocking Amy and the female officer’s path. “The Copper Lake construction site is closed down for the rest of the day because of the fires. I’d hate to lose whatever daylight we have left when we could still put in a couple of hours and make a few bucks.” He smoothed the Spackle with his putty knife, focusing on his handiwork while he kept talking. “Don’t worry. We’re staying out of everybody’s way. We even answered a few of the arson investigator’s questions. We were hanging out on the other side of the lake when all the fire trucks showed up. Looks like that fire came pretty close to your house.”
“A couple of hills away.” Technically, he was in her way. Amy swallowed the temper flaring inside her. Wigging out right now would only draw KCPD’s attention, and she was doing her very best to remain the cooperative witness and not become a person of interest. She gently nudged the sawhorse table back toward the wall, taking care not to spill the Spackle bucket or cans of stain on it. “The house would have been in trouble if the fire had jumped the creek bed.”
“No water in the creek,” Richie added before turning on the sander and drowning out any further conversation with the machine’s high-pitched drone.
The deafening whine severed the last thread of Amy’s polite patience. There were already too many people in the house, invading her space, wrecking any opportunity to mourn and plan the next tasks on her things-to-do-for-Jocelyn list. The police had already contacted Jocelyn’s parents in Nebraska, but Amy wanted to call them personally to share her condolences. And someone needed to notify the university and insurance adjusters to take care of the research equipment and personal belongings that had been destroyed in the fire. The house was already filled with criminologists and detectives, an arson investigator, and uniformed officers, all poking through Jocelyn’s things and asking questions. She didn’t need Brad and Richie here, too, acting as though it was a regular ol’ workday and she hadn’t lost her best friend, and that the property she was trying to protect for her grandmother hadn’t almost been destroyed.
Squashing the urge to call them Frick and Frack out loud, Amy dredged up one more smile for her part-time employees. “Hey, guys. I appreciate your work ethic—” she thumbed over her shoulder to the front door “—but I need you to call it a night. We’ve had a rough day here. Hopefully, everyone will clear out soon, and Gran and I can have a quiet evening.”
“Is Mrs. Hall here yet?” Brad asked, scanning the foyer from the front door to the rooms off the back hallway—as if her grandmother’s presence could persuade him in a way Amy’s request could not. He attacked the next hole with the Spackle, refusing to take the hint.
“No. But she called, and she’s on her way.” Not that it was any of Brad’s business, but she added, “Friends are driving her home. I really need you both gone before she gets here.”
“S-s-sorry about Miss Jocelyn.” Richie stuttered an apology. “She was a nice lady.”
“That she was,” Amy agreed, raising her voice to be heard over the sander.
“She baked me cupcakes,” Richie continued. “They weren’t v-very good.”
Despite Richie’s effort to be sympathetic, Brad huffed a curse under his breath at being dismissed. His dark eyes narrowed when they came back to her. “I said it was no trouble to be here. We were just getting started. The clock’s tickin’ on your deadline. How the hell do you expect us to get all this woodwork and the exterior siding stained and painted by the end of the month?”
Amy bristled at the accusation in his tone. “Go ahead and log the time you were here this evening. But I need you to leave.”
A thump from the ceiling above them made Amy wonder if the detectives and CSIs had flipped the mattress off Jocelyn’s bed or were moving furniture now. With the whine of the sander, the drone of voices on every floor of the house and the footsteps of all these strangers, Amy wanted to run from the chaos and lose herself in the vast solitude of the scorched wilderness or hide away in the privacy of her art studio.
But she needed to stay. For her gran. For Jocelyn. For the truth.
The sander whined like an assault against her eardrums. “Richie!”
He instantly turned the sander off, his smile sheepish as he faced her. “Yes, Miss Amy?”
Hugging her arms around her waist, she wondered at the sudden chill she felt. She hated not being in control of her environment, not having all the answers she needed. She hated that she had secrets that any one of these people might uncover if she couldn’t get a grip on her panicked thoughts and emotions. “Just go,” she pleaded. These two men worked for her. They weren’t authorities she needed to obey, and she refused to be bullied by any man.
“We’ll be back tomorrow.” At last, she’d gotten through to Brad, even if he didn’t seem particularly happy about being sent home. “Bright and early if O’Brien doesn’t have any work for us.”
“We’ll be back tomorrow,” Richie echoed. With a nod from Brad to put away the tools they’d gotten out, Amy wondered, not for the first time, if Richie had a diminished IQ, or if he was just a really, really shy guy with a stutter who got even more tongue-tied around women.
She couldn’t fault him on his flawless work, though. The parts of the interior and exterior that had been touched were transforming the house into a beautiful, classic showplace. But despite Dale O’Brien’s determination to tear it and all the outbuildings down, she needed time to recover from today’s tragedy.
“Call first. You have my number, right?”
“I do,” Brad conceded. “If that’s what you want.”
“It is. Thanks for understanding.”
“Yes, ma’am. Whatever you say,” Brad answered, putting on his own paint-stained ball cap and cursing under his breath. “Pack it up, Richie. We ain’t wanted here, either.”
“It’ll only be a couple of days,” Amy insisted.
“A couple of days without work means there’s a bill I won’t be able to pay,” Brad groused. “But you do what you need to do.”
Thanks for your compassion, Mr. Frick.
Amy’s frayed patience took a turn into Get the hell out of my house territory. She bit down on the inside of her lip to keep the angry words roiling inside her from spilling out. She knew the two men weren’t licensed like most of Dale O’Brien’s other workers, and often took odd jobs to make ends meet. When they’d come to the house and offered their services three months ago, she’d been happy to hire them. No way was she finishing everything that needed to be done on the house by herself. Their work was solid, and their rate affordable. But right now she just needed some peace and quiet so she could try to figure out who hurt Jocelyn, and then have a good cry or cussing session to vent her grief.
But she refused to freak out or bawl in front of any of these people. Revealing her true emotions to the wrong person had made her far too vulnerable in the past. And she was done being vulnerable to anyone again.
As Brad picked up a mallet to hammer the lid back onto the can of stain they had opened, Richie stood up from the tarp he’d been folding. His cheeks glowed red in the waning daylight streaming through the windows on either side of the front door. And even though his gaze didn’t linger on hers, he touched the brim of his cap and murmured, “S-sorry for your loss, Miss Amy.”
Amy rewarded the compassion his partner had lacked with a smile. “Thank you, Richie.”