Lethal Outlook

by Victoria Laurie

  Candice squeezed my arm. “Okay, Sundance. Thanks for the reminder.”

  We got out of the car and headed up the walk to the middle town house, and I asked, “How’d you know where Bailey lives, anyway?”

  “I had to root around a little, but I found it in tiny print at the bottom of the Bucket List.”

  “I guess the girls weren’t making enough off the site to afford a professional office yet.”

  Candice shrugged. “Why would they ever need one? I mean, as long as they had enough room to prepare and send off their buckets, everything else could be run from a personal computer and a printer.”

  I let Candice step in front of me, and she rang the bell. The front door had an outer rim of wood, but the inner door was mostly beveled glass, and it allowed us to make out shapes inside.

  We saw someone approach—a shadowy figure at first, but then she took on a clearer form. I could see a slender build and long blond hair, but once she’d pulled open the door, I couldn’t help but be a little surprised; Bailey Colquitt was truly lovely. “Hello?” she said, welcoming us with a question.

  Candice introduced herself formally as Candice Fusco, private investigator, then motioned to me without looking and said, “And this is my associate, Abby Cooper.”

  Bailey’s long eyelashes fluttered while she, no doubt, tried to make sense of our appearance on her doorstep. “Ah,” was all she said, while her eyes continued to bounce back and forth between Candice and me like she was watching a tennis match.

  Candice decided to be helpful. “We understand that your best friend, Kendra Woodyard, is missing.”

  More eyelash fluttering followed by a jerky head nod.

  “And my partner and I are considering taking the case,” Candice added, no doubt hoping that would get the dialogue flowing.

  “Uh…?”

  My partner and I exchanged a quick look, and I could see that Candice thought the same thing I did, namely, that Bailey Colquitt was really lucky she was pretty, because we were laying odds that she was no mental giant.

  “May we come in and talk to you about Kendra?” Candice asked after an awkward silence.

  Bailey’s brows rose even higher on her smooth, unlined forehead, and it was like you could hear the gears in her head turning before she finally exclaimed, “Oh! Oh, yes! Please, y’all, come in.”

  Bailey stepped aside as we entered. The first thing I noticed were the moving boxes. They were stacked everywhere—some open and erupting with white packing paper, others closed and bulging.

  Candice and I exchanged another quick look. This one said, “Innnnnteresting.”

  “Sorry the place is such a mess!” Bailey apologized, closing the door behind us and motioning with her hand for us to head down the hallway. “I’m in the middle of packing.”

  “Moving somewhere close?” Candice asked.

  “Sorta,” Bailey called over her shoulder as we reached the kitchen. “We’re…I mean, I’m moving closer to my folks in Dallas next month.”

  I kept my mouth shut but made a point to raise my brows at Candice. I knew she caught that whole “We…I mean I’m…” thing too.

  Bailey indicated two seats in front of the kitchen island, and I had to move a small box to take my seat. “Can I get you something to drink?” our host asked politely. “I’ve got soft drinks and water and iced tea. Or if you’d like I could squeeze some lemons for lemonade. Or I could make y’all some coffee?”

  That’s one thing I really liked about living in the South—most everyone’s got good old-fashioned manners. “Thank you,” Candice said. “But we just had some coffee. I think we’re fine.”

  Bailey nodded again and fidgeted with a dish towel on the counter. She seemed nervous to me. “Well, I’ll just get myself some iced tea, then.” Bailey turned away from us to get herself some refreshment, and Candice and I exchanged a whole new series of knowing looks.

  Once we had Bailey’s attention again, Candice got right down to business. “As I said, we’re looking into the disappearance of your best friend, Kendra, and it’s come to our attention that you two were in business together. Is that correct?”

  Bailey took a big ol’ sip of tea before she answered. It almost seemed like she was stalling. “The Bucket List was mostly Kendra’s idea,” Bailey told us. Right away I caught how she used the past tense, but I wasn’t sure if she meant it for Kendra or the Bucket List. “She came up with it right after she saw that movie, and before I knew it she’d hired a guy to design the Web site, and then she did all the research and the marketing and stuff that she needed to do to get it off the ground. Really, it was her baby all the way.”

  “And yet,” Candice said, pretending to refer to her notes, “according to the Web site, the headquarters for the Bucket List are located here at your house.”

  Bailey seemed surprised that we’d figured that out. Her fidgeting took on a whole new energy. “Well, yeah. That’s true. See, Kendra was real sweet, you know? She always wanted to include me in everything she did, so she convinced me to be her business partner. I wasn’t really interested in it, but she swore it’d make money, so I went along with it.”

  Again Bailey was using the past tense to describe her friend, and that made me wonder how she knew that Kendra was dead. I started to feel out her energy and tapped into a mix of stuff, much of it surprising.

  Discreetly digging through my purse, I came up with a small notebook and began scribbling in it so I wouldn’t forget anything.

  “So did it?” Candice asked after jotting down her own notes.

  “Did it what?” Bailey asked.

  “Did the site make money?”

  Bailey’s face flushed. “Only a little.”

  Liar, I thought. I jotted that down too.

  “And you’re running the Bucket List while Kendra’s MIA, is that right?”

  Bailey squinted at her. “Huh?” she said.

  “The Web site,” Candice said slowly. “You’re running it, while Kendra is away.”

  The squint deepened. “No,” she said. “I’m not running it. It runs itself. Well, except for fulfilling the orders for the buckets, but most of that Kendra set up to come through a distributor so that we wouldn’t get bogged down by it. Once a week I just go through the list and make sure that a bucket has been sent out for everyone who booked something on one of our links.”

  I scanned Bailey’s energy. That part was true.

  Candice made another note to herself, then asked, “When was the last time you saw Kendra, Bailey?”

  Our host took another long sip of tea. “Maybe…two weeks ago?”

  Candice cocked her head and snuck a look at me. I nodded. The last time Bailey had seen her BFF was at least two weeks before. Still, Candice pressed Bailey on that. “Two weeks? But I thought you guys were best friends. Why would you go a whole two weeks without seeing her?”

  “It’s not like we were tied at the hip or anything!” Bailey snapped.

  Whoa. Candice had pushed a button. “Sounds like the last time you two saw each other, there might’ve been some friction,” Candice said, taking a stab at the obvious.

  Bailey’s beautiful face turned down in a scowl, making it considerably less attractive. She combed her fingers through her hair nervously. I could see that she was trying to rein in her temper. “Lately we haven’t been gettin’ along so well.”

  “Why’s that?” Candice asked.

  Bailey rolled her eyes. “You know how it is with girlfriends. Sometimes they get along; sometimes they don’t.”

  Candice looked down at her notes. “It sorta seems like you’re not really worried about her, Bailey.”

  At this, Bailey’s attitude changed dramatically, from petulant to distraught. “Of course I’m worried about her!” She put a hand to her mouth as her eyes welled up, and big wet tears began to leak down her cheeks, smudging her eye makeup. “She was my best friend, you know? What if she doesn’t come back?”

  For the life of me I couldn’t
figure this chick out. One minute she was happily talking about her BFF in the past tense like Kendra had simply moved away and didn’t keep in touch much, and the next minute she was sobbing hysterically because she might never see her best friend again. None of it made sense to me.

  Candice appeared puzzled too. After waiting for Bailey to dab at her eyes with the dish towel and collect herself, she said, “Do you know what might’ve happened to Kendra, Bailey?”

  At this, Bailey only shook her head vehemently, but the lie was so evident in the ether around her that it was really hard for me to keep my mouth shut. Still, I managed, and when Candice snuck another look at me, I motioned for us to go. Bailey was clearly in no condition to continue the conversation, and I had a lot to share with Candice. I wanted to fill her in on what I’d picked up out of the ether before she pushed Bailey too far and the girl stopped talking to us.

  Candice closed her notebook and stood from the chair. I did the same. “We should get out of your hair,” she said to her. “Is it all right, though, to call or stop by if we find out anything about Kendra that you might be able to shed a little more light on?”

  Bailey shrugged, then nodded, the tears continuing to leak down her cheeks creating black smudgy streaks from her mascara.

  We thanked her for her time and waited until we were back in Candice’s Porsche to talk about Bailey. “Go,” Candice said the minute I’d shut the car door.

  I smirked. “You don’t waste time, do you?”

  “Nope,” she said, already flipping to a fresh page in her notebook.

  I went back through my own notes to find the starting point and rattled off the tidbits I’d been able to pull out of the ether. “First, the reason Bailey is moving back to Dallas is because she’s getting a divorce.”

  Candice’s brow shot up, but otherwise she didn’t look at me; she simply scribbled that down.

  I went on. “And the Web site that Kendra started with her BFF is pulling in more money than ‘only a little.’” I scoured my notes and found the next point, “Also, there’s this really weird thing going on in her energy, and I’m sure you picked up on it with the way she spoke about Kendra in the past tense. See, I think she thinks that Kendra’s gone, but I don’t know that she had anything directly to do with it. She feels involved, but tangentially, and I can’t figure out how.”

  Candice lifted her eyes to me. “She’s also feeling super guilty. The fidgeting and the nervousness—that speaks of a guilty conscience.”

  I nodded. “Agreed. There’s more to the story.” I remembered that in the ether I’d felt Kendra’s killer might have acted on behalf of a woman. I wondered if Bailey might have been the woman I’d felt was involved in Kendra’s abduction and murder.

  “What about that whole ‘I haven’t seen my best friend in two weeks’ deal?” Candice asked next.

  “That part was true,” I told her. “She hasn’t seen Kendra in at least that long. So again, I don’t think she was present when Kendra was kidnapped and murdered, but that doesn’t mean she couldn’t have otherwise been involved.”

  Candice pointed her pen at me. “You had mentioned that yesterday when you were first focusing on Kendra.” I nodded. Candice chewed on the tip of her pen for a minute, then said, “What if Bailey hired someone to kill Kendra? Bailey’s going through a divorce and she doesn’t strike me as the working type.”

  I remembered the fine clothes, perfect hair, fresh manicure, and fit figure on Bailey. It all spoke of super–high maintenance, something most working women don’t have a lot of time for. Plus, we’d visited her on a weekday, when just about everyone else was at work. Granted, she could’ve taken the day off to pack her stuff up, but I didn’t think that was the case. “Let me guess where you’re headed with this,” I said to Candice. “You think that maybe she saw how much money was coming into the Web site and she decided to get greedy? Maybe she hired somebody to abduct and kill Kendra?”

  “People have killed their BFFs for a whole lot less,” Candice pointed out.

  I sighed. “For the record, I’d never kill you over money.”

  The corners of Candice’s mouth lifted. “Good to know.” Then she seemed to linger on what I’d just said because she added, “By the way…where’s your gun?”

  That made me laugh. “At home in my closet. Where it’s going to stay.”

  “Also good to know,” my partner said. Then she motioned with her pen at my notebook. “Anything else in there you want to share?”

  I looked down. “Yes and no. There’s something about the argument between Bailey and Kendra that we need to focus on. Something significant sparked their fight, and my radar is suggesting that it’s part of the key to unlocking this mystery.”

  Candice’s eyes swiveled to Bailey’s door. “No time like the present,” she said, getting out of the car.

  I had to scramble out of the car to hurry after her. By the time I caught up, Candice had already pressed the doorbell again.

  Bailey answered it a bit warily. “Hey, y’all. Did you forget something?”

  I had this feeling like she’d been watching us the whole time, waiting for us to leave, and she maybe didn’t like so much that we’d come back to her door so soon.

  “Just one more question, Bailey,” Candice said. “I was wondering; that argument you and Kendra had two weeks ago—what was that about exactly?”

  Bailey blushed crimson and began to twist a ring on her right hand nervously. “How exactly is that important?”

  Candice smiled breezily. “It’s probably not important. It’s just that at this point, we don’t know if Kendra disappeared on her own, or if someone else was responsible. Assuming that she went off on her own, maybe the fight you two had contributed to her leaving?”

  Bailey’s expression became pinched. “You think maybe she was really upset about our fight and that’s why she left without telling anybody where she was going?” She practically whispered that question, and I could detect just a hint of hope there, which confused me even more.

  “It’s possible,” Candice told her.

  Bailey bit her lip, and she seemed on the verge of telling us something when her cell phone rang. We stood there patiently while she pulled it out of her purse by the door and glanced at the screen. “Sorry,” she said, already shutting the door in our faces. “I gotta take this.”

  Candice and I stood on the step for a beat, staring at the door. “Well, that was helpful,” I muttered when we both turned and headed back down the steps.

  Candice growled with frustration. “Basically we learned nothing today.”

  I patted her on the shoulder. Candice wasn’t used to her investigative efforts being wasted. She was used to asking people questions and getting results. I could already tell this case was gonna challenge her in all the wrong ways.

  Chapter Six

  Half an hour later I left Candice still grumbling in the confines of her office, digging into Bailey’s financials and looking for proof that she’d filed for divorce.

  As I had an appointment with Dave at the new house, I had the perfect excuse to quit early and boogie across town. I didn’t think I’d ever been so happy to go look at tile and carpet samples in all my life.

  Pulling up behind Dave’s truck, I found workmen all over the dusty drive. No lawn had been planted yet—there was still too much traffic from the crew going in and out—so I had to step carefully with my cane to avoid the pitfalls of tripping over the usual trash you find at building sites.

  I found Dave inside with a mug of coffee in his hand, telling a few dirty jokes to a couple of guys. When he saw me nearby with raised eyebrows, he quickly cleared his throat and shuffled away from his work crew. “Abs!” he said brightly.

  “Dave,” I said with a weeeeee bit less warmth.

  “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “We had an appointment today at four,” I reminded him. “It’s four.”

  Dave nodded. “Oh, I know we had an appointment. That�
��s why I didn’t expect to see you.”

  I cut him a look but had to admit that he was right. I’d blown off more appointments with him than I could count. “Yeah…well…,” was all I could think of to say in return. Rapier wit I am not.

  Dave chuckled and motioned for me to follow him into the kitchen, which was quite bare and dusty. Dave pulled a large piece of plastic off the floor to get to all those samples I was going to have to decide between, and as he did so, something small and black flew off and landed right on my upper arm. In the next instant I felt a stinging sensation like nothing I’ve ever felt before. “Yeeeeeow!” I shrieked, slapping at the thing on my arm. It plopped to the floor and began to scuttle away in that really creepy way that makes your skin crawl. Except of course that my skin wasn’t so much crawling as it was…on fire!

  “Mother fecking fecker!” I shouted, clamping my hand over my arm and gritting my teeth hard. “What the freaking feck was that?”

  Dave hurried over to me, and for a minute he didn’t seem to know what to do. He still had the mug in his hand, and he sort of half turned, looking for a place to put the coffee down, then thought better of it and turned back to me, then went back to trying to figure out what to do with his coffee.

  I made his mind up for him. “Throw it down and help me!”

  Dave dropped the mug. On his foot. “Ow! Damn!” he swore when hot coffee splashed up his leg.

  I made a kind of primal snarling sound, whirling around and hobbling away from him, but the pain in my arm was so intense that I couldn’t use my right hand to hold my cane, and I didn’t get very far before he caught up to me. “Abs!” he said, still dancing a little from his own mishap. “Let me see it!”

  “Get away from me!” I blubbered through the tears that had started to fall. The pain in my arm would not subside. It stung like a thousand hornets, and I could feel a few of my fingers begin to go numb.

  “Abs!” Dave tried again, clamping onto my uninjured arm and halting me. “That was a scorpion. You gotta let me take a look!”