“I know,” I said. “I can’t concentrate.” I turned on my stool. “How’s business out there?”
“Good,” she said. “Busy. Line out the door just like you predicted. First break I had; otherwise, I would have been back here long before now to check on you.”
I frowned. “I don’t need checking on.”
“Okay,” she said, thoroughly unconvinced.
“Did Aunt Jack see the crowd?” I asked.
“Oh, that crowd tuckered her out a long time ago,” Maisie said and waved a hand.
“Good,” I said and let out a huff.
“So you want to tell me what’s wrong with you?”
“No,” I said, knowing better than to let Maisie in on what I’d been thinking.
“Does this have anything to do with your friend rushing out?”
I let my eyes drift off past Maisie. It had everything to do with that. But I thought it better to keep my lips tight.
“You can tell me,” Maisie said. “I am one of your best friends.”
“You are,” I said and gave her a warm smile.
Riya, Maisie and I had known each other since kindergarten and didn’t miss a day seeing each other until we left for college. But we didn’t miss a beat once I got home. I could count on her through thick and thin. Riya, too. Our friendship had transcended those bounds long ago—now they were family.
I eyed Maisie. She was going to run with what I’d been contemplating. Fuel for her fire. But she was right, I could share anything with her.
“I hate saying this,” I said. “And you have to promise that you are not going to freak out and jump to all kinds of conclusions. Okay?”
She frowned and sucked her tongue. “You know I can’t promise that,” she said and grabbed my arms, giving me a shake. “Anybody who knows me would know I can’t promise that.”
“That’s true,” I said.
“But I will try,” she said and pulled up a stool.
I blew out a breath. “I think Rory knows something about the murder.”
“I knew it!” Maisie said and jumped up.
“Oh my, Maisie, I’m just getting started.”
“Oh, right. Sorry.” She sat back down. “Continue.” She made a rolling motion with her hand, prompting me.
“When we went to eat at Molta’s last night,” I said, ready to spill all I’d been thinking about, “Ari acted as if he’d seen her the night before we saw her at the coffee shop.”
“I thought you told me she didn’t get in until just before we saw her?”
“That’s what she told me,” I said. “And even Mr. Mason said he saw a red ball bouncing the night before.”
She nodded, her face seemingly not registering that observation.
“Rory is the red ball,” I said, helping her get what I meant.
“Oh,” she said, nodding her understanding. Her hands went up to her head. “Her hair.” She pretended to pat the bushy red mane that was Rory’s hair.
“Yes,” I said. “And there’s another thing.”
“What?” Maisie said, scooting to the edge of her seat.
“Rory, for as long as I’ve known her, has worn Louboutins. She bought a pair once and didn’t pay her light bill because she couldn’t afford to do both.”
“Red-bottomed shoes?” Maisie questioned.
“Red-bottomed shoes,” I confirmed. “Although I looked it up and the news report didn’t say anything about them having a red bottom.” I squinted my eyes at her, silently questioning if she was sure that was what she saw.
Maisie nodded her head, telling me that was what they were. “I saw them, Win. They had red bottoms to them.”
I sucked my teeth. “I believe you,” I said. I really hadn’t doubted what she saw, I was just hoping that maybe there was a chance . . .
“What?” Maisie prompted me to continue.
“It’s those red-bottomed shoes.” I inhaled a breath. “They just really have me worried.”
“Why?”
“Rory loves Louboutin shoes. She has this one favorite pair that I know she would have brought to Cleveland, and I haven’t seen her in them yet.” I bit my bottom lip. “Not to say she doesn’t have them with her.”
“Those are her shoes.” It didn’t sound like Maisie was asking a question. I gave her a snarly look, so she said it again, this time forming a question. “The shoes found in that dumpster. You think they’re hers?”
“Oh, Maisie, I don’t know.” I slumped down in my chair. “I hope not. I hope those weren’t Rory’s shoes.”
“So you were right,” Maisie said, appearing to be proud of me for some reason. A broad smile emerging across her face and her eyes brightening.
“I was right about what?” I asked.
“That it might not be a shop owner who killed Zeke Reynolds.”
I had to think about that comment for a moment to get what she meant. “Maisie!” I shrieked. “I am not saying that.”
“That what?” she said, egging me on to say what she meant out loud.
“What you’re saying,” I said. “You know what.”
“That Rory is the killer!”
“Oh!” My head fell to the desk with a thud. It hurt, but I didn’t care. I wished I could knock such a thought out of my head.
“If those were her red-bottomed shoes that they found in the trash . . .” Maisie stood up and walked in circles as she laid out her theory. She sounded like she was telling a scary story. “Red-bottomed shoes, and red blood all over the top of them, then . . .” She stopped and looked at me, eyes wide. “Your friend Rory Hunter would be the murderer.”
I bounced out of my seat. “Don’t say that!” I said. “Don’t say it.” I turned around in a circle and wiped the sweat I could feel beading up on my head with my hand. My heart was racing and my mouth was dry.
Had I shared my house with a murderer? Did I really consider a friend someone who was capable of murder?
Oh my goodness!
“You know she did it, don’t you?” Maisie said.
I turned and stared at her. “No. No, I don’t know she did it.” Something was telling me she hadn’t done it. “And neither do you.”
“A lot of evidence is pointing toward her.”
I held up a hand to stop her from her further speculations. “There was a lot of evidence pointing to my father when Stephen Bayard was killed. A family nemesis injected with succinylcholine, a drug that only surgeons should have access to. And my father,” I said, talking fast, my words spewing out, “with no witnesses other than my dead grandmother to corroborate his whereabouts.”
“Yeah, but everyone knew your father couldn’t do something like that.” Maisie wasn’t going to be easily persuaded from the decision she’d come to.
I knew I shouldn’t have shared my thoughts with her.
“I know Rory couldn’t do something like that,” I said.
“Do you?” Maisie asked.
“I do,” I said. “You don’t know her like I do and she wouldn’t kill anyone.” I had lowered my voice and was talking fast. I had pointed a finger at Maisie but pulled it back. I was getting upset with her. “And, Miss Agatha Raisin from Acorn TV, why would Rory kill Zeke Reynolds?” Maisie was standing looking at me wide-eyed. “How in the world would she come all the way to Chagrin Falls, just happen to run into someone she hates enough to kill and then have the opportunity to do it?”
“I don’t know,” Maisie said. “But that sure looks like what happened.”
chapter
NINETEEN
I hadn’t the faintest idea of where Rory had gone when she left, and I worried about her the entire time I waited on customers alongside my mother and Maisie. Wilhelmina had called in sick. I hoped it didn’t have anything to do with the old-lady-you-can’t-have-my-man face-off she’d had with
Rivkah. She was a good employee. I’d hate to lose her.
I wanted to talk to Rory. To find out why she kept running when things about the murder or her whereabouts the night it happened were brought up. I could have kicked myself for not having that conversation when I first started thinking that something was wrong with her. Now she may have gotten away, and I’d never be able to talk to her about it.
It bothered me so much that I told my mother I needed to leave.
“Leave?” she said.
“I need to find Rory.”
“Where is she?” my mother asked, lowering her voice and looking over her shoulder at the customers lined up.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I need to find her. Check on her. See if she’s okay.”
“Oh,” she said, nodding thoughtfully. “You think she went back home?”
I raised my eyebrows and gave her a look that said I hoped not, but she may have.
“Yes, then go,” she said. “You think something’s wrong?”
“I don’t know that either,” I said, pulling off my apron. “That’s what I want to find out.”
This was one of the days I wished I’d driven to work, I realized as I left through the front door of the ice cream shop. My little car was tucked on the side of the house where I rented space. I needed a quick way to search a lot of places because I didn’t have the foggiest idea where she’d go. A coffee shop down Chagrin Boulevard. The art gallery. Home.
I wasn’t chasing her if that was where she went. But I had to admit that it was a possibility that she hopped on the highway and headed back to New York.
Especially if she had something like murder to hide.
I shook that thought out of my head. Like I told Maisie, I knew my friend.
And then I saw that red mop of hair and I released a breath I didn’t know I was holding.
“I thought you had left,” I said.
Rory was sitting on the steps in front of the Victorian where I lived. Technically, those steps belong to my landlord and she was trespassing, but I didn’t care. I was happy to see her, and I know it was easy to see the relief on my face. Her face, however, wasn’t easy to read at all.
Her eyes were puffy and her cheeks tear stained. Her usually fully gloss-covered lips were bare and she sat motionless, arms wrapped around her like she was cold.
“Your door was locked,” she said. “I couldn’t get my bag.”
“You were going to leave?”
“I can’t convince you to come back, so why not?” She shrugged.
I sat down next to her and put my hand on her knee. “Were you just going to sit here until I closed the shop and came home?”
“I really hadn’t decided,” she said. “I was thinking I could leave without my bag. Let you send me my things later.”
“You were going to leave that Dooney and Bourke here with me? I can’t believe it.” I tried to make light of the conversation to see if I couldn’t get her to feel better.
She tried to chuckle at my comment, but it got caught in her throat. And the hiccup that came out of it seemed to bring tears, too.
“I really don’t know what I was going to do,” she said. Talking to me, she couldn’t seem to let her eyes meet mine.
“Then it’s a good thing I came home early, huh?” I said. “Maybe I can help you figure out what to do.”
“I don’t know how you could,” she said.
“Why don’t you let me try?”
She straightened out her arms and rested them on her knees. “I don’t even know where to start.” The words bubbled out with a sob. A sob that took control of her entire body. She folded her arms so that her hands rested on either side of her head. “How cliché, huh?” she said through tears. “I don’t want to be cliché.”
“Aww. Don’t cry.” I leaned forward to make my head even with hers. “You have been acting too crazy to be cliché,” I said. I wanted so much to make her feel better. For her to tell me what was wrong. To tell me that how she’d been acting had nothing to do with Zeke Reynolds’s murder and that Maisie was crazy.
Actually, I didn’t need her to tell me the last part. I already knew about Maisie.
“Why don’t you just tell me what it is that has you so up in arms? Why do you keep running out on me?”
I waited for her to answer. Getting dizzy from my head hanging to meet her face, I gazed into her eyes. Hoping to see something there. She just stared back. I took my knee and bumped her with it. “Well?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She drew out her words like a petulant child. “What do you want me to say?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said and bumped my knee against hers again. “Maybe you could start by telling me why you lied about when you got to Ohio.”
She looked at me with what seemed like fear in her eyes. “You know about that?”
“Wasn’t hard to figure out,” I said. “Ari saw you. Mr. Mason saw you. Right?”
“Yeah, they did,” she said.
I raised my brow, letting her know she hadn’t been as surreptitious as she thought. “And I’m thinking you lost your room at Dell’s bed-and-breakfast because you showed up a day late, not hours late.”
I finally got out a chuckle. “You are some kind of detective, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know about that because I still haven’t been able to figure you out yet. What is wrong with you?”
She hung her head, and I could see her eyes filling up with tears again.
“Tell me what is giving you so much grief.” I rubbed her back. “Please. Let me try to help.”
That opened the floodgates, and those tears just kept coming. She buried her head in her lap and sobbed. I was worried she was going to be dehydrated she cried so much and so hard. I didn’t have a tissue or any calming words to offer—I had no idea what to say. I didn’t know what was wrong with her, and my trying to get her to tell me just seemed to upset her even more.
After a few minutes, I thought I needed to say something. I opened my mouth a few times to speak, but words didn’t come out. I just took a deep breath and tried again to get her to tell me what could make her so upset.
“Rory,” I said, lowering my voice and trying to exude some compassion. “You have to tell me what’s wrong. I might could help.” She mumbled something and shook her head. I took that to mean she didn’t think I could help. “Is it about your job? You hate your job now that you’re not able to do the artwork?”
I felt like one of those mothers talking to their wailing infant. A child who had no understanding of the language, yet Mom still asking, “What’s wrong?” and expecting an answer.
“Because you can always get a new job,” I said. “I can help you, if you want.” I nodded my head to reassure her although she wasn’t looking at me. “If you want to draw or paint or whatever it is that you want to do then do it. Don’t be sad about it.”
I put my arm across her shoulders and leaned into her. “Rory,” I said. “I want to help you. Please let me help you.” Then I tried the line that Maisie threw at me. “I’m your friend. You can tell me anything.”
That seemed to make the crying slow down.
Rory lifted her head and, sniffing, she swiped the tears from her face with her hands.
“Those were my shoes,” she said. She said it with such a calmness after all that sobbing that it took me aback.
“What shoes?” I asked, knowing full well which shoes she meant.
“The bloody shoes,” she sputtered out. “The ones Maisie was talking about they found in the dumpster.”
“Oh my goodness,” I said. Then the words tumbled out of my mouth. Words I didn’t believe. Words that couldn’t be true. Words I hoped weren’t true. “You killed Zeke Reynolds?”
“No! No!” She sat up and grabbed my hands in hers. I wasn’t sure if they
were just clammy or filled with her tears.
“It’s okay. If you did, it’s okay,” I said, knowing good and well that if she had killed him it wasn’t okay. That nothing was ever going to be okay for her again. It couldn’t be if she killed a man. And nothing was going to be the same for me if my friend did turn out to be a murderer.
“No, Bronwyn!” She stomped her foot. “I didn’t kill him! I could never kill anyone!”
“Your shoes were there. You were there. How are those your shoes, then, if you didn’t kill him?”
“He was already dead when I saw him.”
“Already dead?”
“Yes.” She hissed out the word. “When I found him.” She hung her head and shook it. “When I found him. He was already dead.” She lowered her voice and said the words again. I didn’t know if she was trying to convince me of it, or convince herself. “He was already dead!”
I repeated almost the same thing I’d been saying since I found her on the steps of my house. “Tell me what is going on. Because I don’t understand.”
She sniffed and swiped at her eyes again with both hands. “I came in the night before, you were right. I had a reservation at that bed-and-breakfast on American Street, but I was hungry and didn’t want to turn in on an empty stomach. I didn’t know that there wouldn’t be some kind of fast-food restaurant or all-night diner or something in Chagrin Falls. But when I couldn’t find anything, I thought I’d at least get a cup of coffee at a gas station if I had to. So, I decided to drive around the block but I got turned around and ended up in the alley behind the shops.”
“That’s where they found his body,” I said.
“That’s where I found his body,” she said.
“You saw him when you drove around there.”
“Not at first,” she said. “But then . . . then I turned on my bright lights. So I could see better.” With her arms wrapped around herself, she bent forward like she was in pain. “And that’s when . . . That’s when . . .”
“When you saw his body?”
She sniffed and nodded.
“How did your shoes get there?”
A Game of Cones Page 12