by E J Cochrane
“What are you doing here?” she asked gently and squatted near the crying and (based on the powerful aroma wafting from Leigh’s general vicinity) drunk woman. “Is everything all right?”
“I’m here about the story,” Leigh slurred, and Maddie wondered how far gone she was. “I need to read the story again. I need help.”
“What kind of help? Is Rufus okay?” Her thoughts instantly flew to Leigh’s French bulldog Rufus, a loveable little comedian and one of her favorite dogs to walk.
“He’s fine. He’s good. He loves me. He’s a good boy.” Leigh smiled, her tears abating for the moment.
“Yes, he is.”
“He doesn’t think I killed anyone, but I need to see the story again and get help.”
“What? What story, Leigh? Who thinks you killed someone?”
“The police.” Leigh sighed. “They keep asking me questions, and I keep telling them I didn’t do anything to that stupid hatchet-faced lady stealer, even if I wanted to. And now,” Leigh heaved another sigh as her tears started up again. “Now Lindsey’s gone, and I have no one. But you can help me. You’ve done it before. I saw the story when I was here last time.”
She groaned as at least part of Leigh’s ramblings began to make sense. Undoubtedly, she was referring to the oversized framed copy of the newspaper article about Maddie’s brief foray into sleuthing. Maddie hated it, hated its prominence and the reminder that she’d ever been foolish enough to pretend to be a private investigator. But Dottie had specially ordered it for her and hired a handyman to hang it. She’d even visited Little Guys headquarters to oversee the proper placement of her gift, so Maddie couldn’t get rid of it without the risk of unleashing the Wrath of Dottie.
So there it hung, drawing every kind of unwanted attention, including (if she understood the current situation correctly) requests for her questionable detective skills. That was not happening again.
“You can fix this for me. Show the police I didn’t do it.”
“Leigh, I’m no detective.”
“But I saw—”
“I was incredibly stupid and got extremely lucky. I can’t help you, Leigh. I’m sorry.”
“I’ve got no one left, Mads. I don’t know what to do.” Leigh dropped her head into her hands and wept, and Maddie’s heart broke at the sight of her friend’s pain.
“Why don’t we start by getting you home?” she said and guided Leigh toward her Jeep. She didn’t know what else this day had in store for her, but she knew she was in for a long night.
Chapter Five
Rufus greeted them eagerly, his small body a tawny blur as he raced around their feet and spun in excited circles. His sharp barks pierced the air, and Maddie suspected he would benefit from a good walk. Doubting that Leigh was up to the task since she’d barely been able to walk herself, Maddie took him for a quick trip around the block. She hoped she would come back to find a somewhat more collected version of her friend with an explanation that would make sense.
What she found instead was Leigh at her dining room table, crying and nursing a beer Maddie would have discouraged her from opening. The last thing this situation needed was less coherence. A vision of the remainder of the night unfolded, and she felt certain it would be a long, frustrating, unproductive affair.
“Tell me what’s going on, Leigh,” she said once Leigh’s weeping tapered off into an intermittent stream of tears.
“I’m in trouble.”
Based on the evidence strewn about the normally tidy house, evidence of one hell of a bender, she would have to agree with Leigh’s assessment. But sitting across the table from her friend, who sniffled while absentmindedly stroking Rufus, Maddie needed the specifics. What had driven her friend to this state of despondency?
“What happened?”
“I don’t know where to start.” Leigh ran her fingers through her hair and dropped her gaze.
Maddie exhaled loudly, her frustration getting the better of her. As much as she wanted to help her friend, Leigh wasn’t making it easy. Desperate to get to the point before her next birthday, she latched on to one of Leigh’s more jarring comments from earlier.
“Who do the police think you killed?”
“Terry.”
She had no idea who Terry was, but before she could continue her plodding interrogation with an impatiently worded question, Leigh clarified. “A former friend. The woman Lindsey left me for.”
Maddie remembered the shock, confusion, and anger she’d felt when Leigh’s partner of six years had jettisoned their ostensibly happy life to pursue a different relationship. Leigh had come home from work one day to find a loaded moving van at the curb and Lindsey’s children from her first marriage, whom Leigh had loved and raised as her own since they were three and four years old, weeping in the front seat. The only explanation Lindsey had offered was that she’d grown too content and wanted something else. Leigh had been understandably devastated.
She hated that Leigh was reliving that pain, but at least now they were getting somewhere. Not far or fast but somewhere. At this rate she might learn what was going on by the end of next week. Over the next twenty minutes (during which Leigh finished her drink and, despite Maddie’s protests, stumbled into the kitchen for another unnecessary round), Maddie learned that about a week and a half earlier Terry had died under suspicious circumstances. Not long after, the cops had called on Leigh for the first of many visits, asking about EpiPens and Leigh’s whereabouts on the date in question.
“What about the EpiPen?” She interrupted Leigh’s meandering drunken narrative.
“Anyone with Internet access and half a brain could tamper with an EpiPen,” Leigh offered a partial explanation. “But since I’m a pharmacist with nothing but hatred for that no-neck, hatchet-faced home wrecker, I’m an obvious suspect. Never mind that I kept my distance from the she-beast—I didn’t want to look at her butt face when we were friends. That didn’t change after she tore my family apart. I certainly wasn’t about to bake her brownies, even if they would kill her.”
Leigh was getting worked up, but at least information was forthcoming. It didn’t entirely make sense, but she crossed her fingers for clarity before dawn.
“Brownies?”
“Someone gave the hag with severe peanut allergies one of my special brownies.”
Leigh’s peanut butter chocolate chip brownies were legendary. Almost every young woman in their dorm (including Maddie) had been brought back from the brink of heartbreak by Leigh’s brownies. They cured hangovers and fueled frantic cramming for finals. Their medicinal properties rivaled Granny Doyle’s no-raisin oatmeal cookies, and Leigh reserved them for special occasions or extreme circumstances. While murder would certainly fall under the heading “Extreme Circumstances,” she believed the brownies would only be used for good, not evil.
“But it wasn’t me. The last time I made them was when Lindsey married that…thing.”
“Who else could have made them?”
“Anyone. It’s not like I kept the recipe a secret.”
That was true. She had a copy though she rarely used it. The brownies tasted better when they came from Leigh’s need to lift someone’s spirits.
“I didn’t do it, Maddie. I never even went near her.”
Maddie believed her. Leigh was too kind, gentle, and generous to ever hurt someone, even if that person had hurt her. She had known Leigh since her freshman year of college when a rare stroke of good luck had paired them up as roommates in Sargent Hall. She would never believe that the young woman who had shown her around campus, introduced her to friends and helped her survive her first year of college had grown up to be a cold-blooded killer of philandering debauchers.
However, she also understood how things looked from a law enforcement perspective. Unless Leigh had an irrefutable alibi, she made the perfect suspect, and the police had little reason to doubt her guilt.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do, Maddie.” Leigh’s voice cracked as the
tears that had dried up came rushing back. “And now that Lindsey’s dead, I’ve got no one,” she wailed and then dropped her head into her hands.
“Wait.” Maddie’s head spun at her friend’s most recent bombshell. “What happened to Lindsey?”
“She killed herself,” Leigh managed to choke out before breaking down completely.
Not knowing what else to do, she gently rubbed Leigh’s back and waited for another sodden, piecemeal revelation.
Eventually she learned that Lindsey’s ex-husband had sued for custody of the kids. “I guess he didn’t like Terry any more than I did.” Leigh laughed bitterly. “With the drawn-out legal battle and Terry’s death, I guess Lindsey just gave up. She jumped off her balcony.”
“When?”
“This afternoon.”
“Oh god,” Maddie gasped, impossible suspicion dawning. Though she knew it was not the best time to press for details, she had to reassure herself that she was leaping to ridiculous conclusions. “Where did she live?”
“One of those high-rises on Sheridan.”
“Oh god,” Maddie said again.
“Her note said she couldn’t face life without her loves. I guess that doesn’t include me.” Leigh sniffed and then began wailing in earnest.
As Maddie tried to console her friend, she realized that, peripheral though the connection might be, she had somehow ended up linked to another untimely and violent death. On top of that, she knew her friend was in real trouble.
What she didn’t know was what she planned to do about it.
Chapter Six
For a brief, beautiful moment upon waking the next morning, Maddie let herself believe that the events of the last eighteen hours had been a particularly vivid nightmare, that her Saturday hadn’t gone down in flames, leaving her exhausted and apprehensive about the calamities that might befall her in the days ahead. She didn’t question that her uptick in misfortune would last longer than a day. Once the turmoil started, it would keep coming and probably increase. Just the thought of dealing with the unholy mess that would likely unfurl in the coming days made her want to stay in bed for the foreseeable future.
Of course, not all of her Saturday had been dreadful—given the option to relive the last twenty-four hours, she would keep the weather. It seemed Mother Nature agreed. Goading her into meteorological optimism, the early morning sun peeked through her window, filling her head with visions of another wonderful day, at least as far as the temperature was concerned. But not even the prospect of late-season climatic perfection inspired within her a desire to get up.
Then there was the other not entirely awful scrap of her day—Nadia. Reluctantly, she admitted that, after the shock and anger abated, seeing her ex again had been an unexpected highlight. She found herself regretting the abrupt end to their incomplete conversation (and not only because of the decided downturn the evening had taken from that point). If it had ended there, her bad day would have been only somewhat irritating, a designation she happily would have accepted.
But as the fog of too little sleep lifted (aided by a pained sigh from Goliath, who rested his chin on her pillow, favoring her with a warm, steady, kibble-scented breeze on the side of her face), the bleak reality of the previous day descended on her. Her life truly had gone from mildly frustrating to disturbingly chaotic in a matter of just a few hours, and no matter how hard she wished she hadn’t, she knew she really had spent the better part of her night comforting her hysterical friend, even while the details of Leigh’s story made comfort seem like an impossible dream.
Worse, the more Leigh drank, the stronger her conviction grew that Maddie alone could magically fix her life by finding the real killer and proving her innocence. Maddie doubted Leigh could come up with a worse solution to her problems, but Leigh refused to believe her. She had more or less successfully evaded Leigh’s begging the night before—every time Leigh had pleaded with her to search for the truth, she had changed the subject, a typically fruitful strategy made considerably more trying by Leigh’s unrelenting hounding. Though she’d escaped her company without acquiescing to her endless requests, she didn’t imagine that sobriety and the harsh light of day would prevent her from asking again. Maddie needed a strategy other than avoidance.
Goliath sighed again, and her hair fluttered across her face in the gust of his hot dog breath. When the normally patient Bart added a pathetic whine to the mix, she knew she couldn’t loiter much longer. The boys had taken umbrage with her last night when she arrived home too late to take them on their customary nighttime walk around the neighborhood. Apparently taking grudge-holding lessons from their Aunt Dottie, they seemed no closer to forgiving her now. The doubt and judgment she read in their eyes made her momentarily question her qualifications as their guardian.
It was barely seven o’clock, and already the day felt endless.
After a quick text to let Dottie know she hadn’t succumbed to a homicidal lunatic, she leashed her dogs and headed out the door. As she expected, the boys steered her to the beach (their favorite place on earth), and as they romped and frolicked and explored, her thoughts again drifted to the story Leigh shared the previous night. Certainly, her friend needed help, and Maddie would provide whatever support she could, short of volunteering to incur the wrath of the police again by interfering with another of their investigations. Not that she could offer much in the way of interference. Even if she wanted to look into Terry’s death, she had no idea where to begin. She had a thousand questions but no answers.
Leigh said that Terry’s peanut allergy and a faulty EpiPen had caused her death. Maddie’s own allergies made her both shudder at the thought of death by anaphylaxis and praise the angels of affliction that shellfish could more easily be avoided than peanuts. Her own chances of such a wretched demise seemed minimal by comparison. But did Leigh have the facts right? More than once last night she had teetered across the line of incoherence. If that wasn’t enough to call her claims into question, she hadn’t been arrested. Surely if the police thought her guilty they would have acted by now. It was entirely likely that Leigh was jumping to paranoid conclusions about Terry’s death based on the questions from the police.
If she was right, though, then the killer had to have been acquainted with Terry well enough to know about her allergy and have access to her autoinjector. How was Maddie to know who, in a metropolitan area of roughly ten million people, that could be? She had never even met the deceased, so she didn’t have a clue who knew Terry and hated her enough to want her dead. Other than Leigh.
Her head spun from contemplating just that small aspect of Leigh’s situation, and as the boys raced toward her, their feet and bellies caked in wet sand, a cluster of four or five equally beach-coated pups surrounding them, she reaffirmed her belief that this was a matter best left to the police.
Nevertheless, thoughts of Leigh and the tragedy that surrounded her plagued Maddie. She didn’t have an inordinate amount of spare time on her hands—on top of laundry, housework, yardwork, and a run, assuming her schedule and the elements cooperated long enough to squeeze one in, she still wanted to talk to Dottie (while neither one of them was in a compromising position). The sooner she addressed whatever home improvement demands Dottie had in store, the better. And then Granny Doyle expected her for dinner promptly at six. Still, she thought she could spare a few moments to see what information the Internet had to offer about Terry and Lindsey—just to satisfy her curiosity. She could call Leigh for more details, but she didn’t want to risk reigniting her campaign for an extreme amateur detective to solve her troubles.
When they’d been at the beach for almost an hour, Maddie attempted yet again to clear her mind of thoughts of Leigh. Deciding it was time to go home, she called Bart and Goliath to her and was pleasantly surprised that Goliath, who was about fifty-fifty on “come,” actually loped toward her on her first attempt to retrieve the boys from their fun. As she leashed them again, both boys, their tongues hanging out as they happily pan
ted, favored her with loving glances—the kind that dogs seem to specialize in and made pet parenthood especially rewarding. If she accomplished nothing else that day, at least she knew she had earned her dogs’ forgiveness.
Back home, she hadn’t gotten through the door when her cell phone rang. It was too early for Dottie to be awake, so she knew it wouldn’t be her best friend on the hunt for the details of her ordeal. Though she hadn’t anticipated this call either, it wasn’t an entirely unpleasant surprise.
“At least I know you weren’t dismembered, decapitated or disemboweled,” Nadia said.
“I think you may have spent too much time with Dottie last night,” she replied, startled by the vivid imagery.
“She doesn’t lack for imagination. Even so, I was worried about you.”
“You didn’t need to be.”
“Yes, I did. Maybe you’ve forgotten, but the last time you ran off to confront a bad guy, you didn’t fare so well.”
“I haven’t forgotten.” Short of an amnesia-causing blow to the head, she didn’t think she’d ever forget confronting Howard’s killer. “But I’m fine. Really. There was nothing even close to dangerous last night.”
“Good. I’d hate if anything happened to you,” Nadia said, her tone softening. “Especially since I never got to say what I wanted to say last night.”
She smiled in spite of herself. She thought she might still be angry at Nadia and didn’t want to give in so easily, but she liked hearing that Nadia had worried.
“I’m listening now,” she said, both hoping and dreading to hear what Nadia had to tell her.
“I’d prefer to say it in person, maybe tonight over dinner?”
That didn’t sound like the prelude to a let’s just be friends speech, but she didn’t know if that would be better or worse than an official clean break with Nadia. Fortunately, she didn’t have to decide at that moment. She had an out.