During a lull in the afternoon, I went into the office. Dep was sleeping on the newspaper. She didn’t open an eye even when I phoned the number for the Fallingbrook News and asked if Philip Landsdowner was in the office.
The receptionist said, “We don’t have anyone by that name working here.”
In a way, that was the answer I wanted—I hadn’t been sure what I was going to say if he actually came on the line. However, calling the newspaper had not given me the name of the man who had appeared near me several times and had claimed he’d seen me light that firework. I thanked the receptionist and ended the call.
I probably should have phoned Brent the night before and told him about the photographer’s accusation. By now, the photographer could have told investigators about it.
However, if I didn’t also tell Brent, he might wonder why I hadn’t. His personal line went to message. I asked him to call me.
Although I wasn’t certain she was asleep, Dep was still using the newspaper as a bed. Maybe she thought that if she didn’t open her eyes, I wouldn’t see her. Grinning at her transparent tactics, I went back out to the dining room.
After we closed Deputy Donut for the day, Tom, Jocelyn, and I packed our Fourth of July decorations away. We decided we didn’t need supplies except for blue star sprinkles, and they could wait until we ordered other trimmings. We tidied the shop. The Jolly Cops Cleaning Crew would come in during the night and do the heavy cleaning, including removing the cooking oil we’d used during the day and scrubbing the deep fryers. Tom and Jocelyn left.
I tried to corral Dep. I rattled her halter and leash, but she must have decided it was a good time to play hard-to-get. The pupils of her eyes huge, she stared down at me from her catwalk.
Maybe she guessed that I wasn’t sure I felt like going home yet. Brent hadn’t returned my call. Dep could always cheer me, but without other humans around, I might dwell on the shock of Taylor’s murder.
It was Friday. Gabrielle had told me I should go to Frisky Pomegranate for their Friday Happy Hour.
That probably wasn’t the best place, especially if Gabrielle was working there that evening, to be distracted from thinking about Taylor. Worse, a pub happy hour sounded a little too much like a singles event, something guaranteed to make me want to run away screaming.
However, if that photographer was trying to convince readers of the Fallingbrook News, and possibly the police, too, that I had lit the firework that killed Taylor, spending some time around Taylor’s best friend might be useful.
“I’ll be back for you later, Dep,” I told my wide-eyed cat.
She didn’t stir from her perch even when I opened the back door.
Feeling almost guilty for trying out a new pub, I bypassed the Fireplug, where I often hung out with friends, and walked north on Wisconsin Street to the village square. The reviewing stand looked empty and desolate now that the cheerful red, white, and blue bunting and the four jewel-encrusted thrones had been removed.
Frisky Pomegranate was across from where the bouncy castles and other inflatables had been. I took the kitty-corner flagstone pathway through the square. Windows spanned the front of Frisky Pomegranate below an awning that spelled out the pub’s name and featured a pomegranate with arms, legs, and a toothy grin. The pomegranate appeared to be dancing.
The sunny patio in front of the pub was crowded with tables topped by jaunty pomegranate-red umbrellas. People sitting at the tables were laughing, drinking, and talking. I saw couples, groups of friends, and possibly a few singles, too.
Singles. Without conscious effort, I slowed down.
What could Gabrielle tell me that the police or I didn’t already know? Maybe grief had kept her at home, and looking for her would be a waste of time.
It turned out that I wasn’t going to be able to use that excuse to avoid Friday Happy Hour at Frisky Pomegranate. Wearing a short-skirted ruby-red uniform and balancing a tray of drinks, Gabrielle came out of the pub onto the patio. I didn’t know if she’d seen me, but if she had, I was committed. Crossing the street, I hoped that no one would think I was on the prowl for eligible men.
The patio was surrounded by a shoulder-high railing with boxes of flowers hanging from it facing the sidewalk. I stepped into the enclosure and halted. The tables appeared to be full.
Gabrielle breezed past. She didn’t seem to recognize me, maybe because I wasn’t wearing my Deputy Donut hat. “There are seats inside at the bar,” she told me.
A woman at a table beside me said, “Here, we’re just leaving.”
She and the other three women at her table gathered their bags and stood. I sat down and scooted the chair closer to the table.
Gabrielle brought me a small bowl of salty mixed nuts. “Happy Hour is almost over. Drinks will be full price in five minutes, so order as much as you’re going to want now.” The corners of her mouth twitched upward in something resembling a smile. Her eyeliner was smudged, and wisps had escaped from her pinned-up hair.
Frisky Pomegranate offered my favorite craft brewery’s light beer on draft. I asked for a mug of it.
“Is that all?” Gabrielle’s question was tinged with disbelief.
“I can’t stay long.” Dep, when she finally came down from her just-below-the-ceiling playground, would agree.
While Gabrielle was inside drawing my beer, I wondered how to go about asking questions about the day before.
Gabrielle solved the problem. With a clunk, she set the frosty mug in front of me and said, “Hey, I just realized where I saw you before. You drove Nicholas and me in the parade in that adorable old police car.”
“Yes. How are you doing?”
“Fine. Yesterday was fab. I’m keeping my tiara forever.”
“Did you enjoy the fireworks?”
“They were okay. I left before they were over so I could avoid the crowds. Did you see me there?” Those big brown eyes looked completely guileless. Someone at the next table called to her, and she turned away. “Gotta go,” she called over her shoulder, “and get their drink orders in before I have to charge them full price. Enjoy!”
I finished my beer and nuts in record time. Unless she was pretending, Gabrielle did not know about Taylor’s death.
I didn’t want to be the one to tell her, and I wasn’t sure how to go about asking if she knew of anyone who might have wanted to kill Taylor. I tucked a nice tip underneath the nut bowl and left.
“Coward,” I muttered to myself as I cut across the green.
My phone rang.
It was Brent. “Sorry for taking so long to return your call, Em. Can I come talk to you this evening?” He sounded tired. Defeated, maybe.
Chapter 9
Had Brent learned new and disturbing details about Taylor’s death? Maybe the investigation wasn’t going well and he hadn’t slept much. Or eaten, probably, either.
“Sure,” I answered. “Come for dinner?”
He hesitated. “I have to ask you some questions.”
I bit my lip. Brent seldom came across as formal, at least with me.
Something was wrong.
Maybe that oily photographer had told Brent or other investigators that he’d seen me light the firework’s fuse. “I’ll try to answer. We both have to eat. Hamburgers will be quick. Dep and I should be home in about ten minutes.”
“That would be great.” To my relief, warmth crept back into his voice. He seemed to thrive on helping people whose lives were impacted by crime, but being close to others’ tragedies had to take a toll.
We disconnected. As I walked, I stared toward the two large buildings across the road from the south end of the square. The modern one with large garage doors was the fire department. Beside it, a magnificent limestone-trimmed yellow brick Victorian building housed the police station.
Had Brent seen me from the police station, either a few moments before he called or earlier, when I was on my way to Frisky Pomegranate?
Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that he had questi
ons for me.
Dep was waiting just inside the back door of our office in Deputy Donut. “You didn’t want to be left behind, after all?” I asked her.
She yawned.
I went out to our display counter next to the kitchen. We still had a few orange marmalade–filled donuts. I put them into a bag, gathered Dep, armed the alarms, and locked up.
Carrying the bag in one hand and holding the end of Dep’s leash in the other, I walked. Dep pranced and pounced.
We arrived at our cottage before Brent did. In the kitchen, I fed Dep and then formed six thick but not too thick patties from lean ground beef. I put a dollop of beautifully blue-veined Roquefort cheese on three of the patties, placed the remaining three patties on top of the first three patties, and squeezed the edges of all three double-thick patties together. “It’s almost like one method of filling donuts,” I informed Dep. She didn’t pause her wrestling match with a catnip-stuffed fake-fur donut. I washed and dried my hands just in time to answer the door.
Despite the possible seriousness of his visit, Brent’s smile was friendly. “Hey, Em. Thanks for letting me invite myself over.” He was wearing black chinos, a black polo shirt, and a black blazer. He looked dangerous. In a good way.
Often when he wasn’t on duty, we shared a quick hug.
If he was here to ask questions, he was on duty. . . .
I avoided the awkward moment by skirting around him and closing the front door. “It’s better than being questioned at the station.” I tried to make it clear that my serious tone was phony.
“I was going to do that if you didn’t invite me to dinner,” he teased.
I droned in a dramatically ominous voice suitable for a TV announcer reading the day’s worst news stories, “Extortion and corruption in our local police force.” I cocked my head toward the back of the house and said in my normal voice, “Come on back to the kitchen.”
“Where’s Dep?” Brent was one of my cat’s very favorite people, and only one thing would keep her from rushing to him the moment he arrived.
“She has a catnip toy.”
She was lying on her back on the kitchen floor and holding the fuzzy donut with both front paws. Her face was somewhere behind the donut.
“Hey, Dep,” Brent said.
Dep let go of the donut and stretched out invitingly on one side. Still in her catnip-fueled world, she didn’t look at us.
Brent got down on one knee beside her. She flipped up onto her feet and batted the fuzzy donut into the sunroom. Her tail up and all four feet skidding in more directions than seemed possible, she bounced across the kitchen and into the sunroom after the toy.
Laughing, Brent stood. “How can I help with dinner?”
“Light the grill, please.”
I watched him walk through the sunroom. It was one of Dep’s favorite rooms. With windows on three sides and deep windowsills, it had inspired Tom’s and my design of the office at Deputy Donut. A comfy couch against the wall separating the sunroom from the kitchen, a rocking chair, a coffee table, and bookshelves underneath some of those windowsills made the room a perfect place to relax. Because the windows looked out into my paradise of a yard, the view was fabulous. Dep thought so, too.
Brent opened the back door. Dep actually left her catnip donut and went outside with him. I didn’t worry. My yard was surrounded by a high wall constructed of smooth bricks. When she was a tiny kitten, Dep had learned not to try to climb the wall or trees and shrubs. After falling a couple of times while trying to run forward down trees, she’d gotten stuck—or so she thought—clinging partway down a trunk. She had meowed piteously until Alec fetched a ladder and rescued her. After that, she had not attempted to scale walls, trees, or bushes with flimsy branches that sagged almost to the ground when she put her insubstantial weight on them.
I took the plate of burgers and buns outside to the patio.
Standing beside the grill, Brent was watching Dep. My funny feline was hunkered down, staring into a shaded cave between drooping forsythia branches in the back of the yard. She undoubtedly thought she was a lion, at the very least.
Brent turned and faced me. A smile lit those gray eyes, and I was struck again with how caring he was. Like Alec had been. Quickly brushing that thought aside, I made an inane comment about needing to fetch the rest of our dinner and then asked him, “Is eating outside okay?”
“It’s fine.”
Still slightly off balance because of unthinkingly comparing Brent to Alec, I copied Tom’s usual joke about Brent’s last name. “Fine, Fyne.”
Brent shook a long-handled spatula at me. “Watch it, Westhill.” He was smiling but watchful.
Suspecting that he could detect from my expression that a sudden memory of Alec had jolted me, I fled into the kitchen. I loaded a tray with two place mats, two glasses of freshly squeezed lemonade, and a plate of lettuce leaves and slices of tomatoes, dill pickles, and onions. I took the tray outside. Brent appeared to be concentrating on the yummy aromas coming from the grill.
My final trip to the kitchen was for plates, napkins, cutlery, mustard, ketchup, relish, and a bowl of carrot and celery sticks. By the time I arranged everything on the table, the burgers were cooked and the buns were toasted.
We sat down. As usual, Brent had grilled the meat perfectly. After a few delicious bites, I reminded him that he’d said he wanted me to answer questions.
He glanced toward the brick wall surrounding the yard and said quietly, “When we’re inside.”
Chapter 10
Later, after Brent had accepted my offer of coffee and we were sitting at the granite-topped island in my kitchen where we often ate when he was my only visitor—the table in the dining room might make a meal feel too much like a date—he polished off a donut and then took out his notebook. “Em, I don’t suspect you of anything—”
“Phew.”
Smiling back at me, he asked, “Can you tell me why you threw out a bag from Deputy Donut after I talked to you last night?”
“I’d brought donuts in it, but they were gone, and that paper bag was jammed inside my pocket while you were talking to me after the fireworks.” Realizing how it sounded, I quickly added, “The donuts around that firework did not come from that bag. But I did wipe my hand on that bag after it got jelly on it from one of the donuts that exploded, so I apologize to anyone who handled that bag. It was probably sticky.”
Without looking at me, Brent wrote in his notebook.
Explaining why I’d taken donuts with me that evening could be slightly embarrassing. Brent knew that Misty, Samantha, Scott, and Hooligan had all been at the fireworks, but it was possible that no one had told him that we’d arranged beforehand to sit together and share snacks.
Brent was also a friend, and I hadn’t included him.
I’d had what seemed to me a perfectly good reason. Brent and I were not, no matter what Misty and Samantha might dream up, a couple. During the almost two years since Brent and I had begun to discover that we could be friends again, I had never invited Brent anywhere except to come play with Dep—when Dep wasn’t occupied with a catnip toy—and have a quick dinner, usually followed by donuts. He never stayed long. And he never invited me anywhere, either. He took his turn feeding us, bringing takeout, steaks, or even a meal he’d cooked in his own home. I hadn’t been inside Brent’s house since before Alec’s death, back in the days when we used to get together with Brent and whatever woman he was dating at the moment. Maybe Brent was as determined as I was to keep his and my relationship casual.
But that didn’t mean he couldn’t feel left out when I got together with people he knew, and I had certainly not set out to exclude him.
He paged back and forth in his notebook as if he thought I hadn’t quite told him the whole story and he was waiting for me to blurt out more. Many of the people he questioned probably found his silence intimidating. So they talked.
And I did, too. I confessed, “I took donuts to the fireworks to share with Misty,
Scott, Samantha, and Hooligan. I was doing a little matchmaking.”
Brent looked up at me then, and something like surprise crossed his features before the detective stone-faced expression took over again. “Matchmaking?”
“I think it’s working with Samantha and Hooligan. And Misty really likes Scott, so that’s half of that battle.” I gave him a thumbs-up.
A slight softening appeared momentarily in the stony face. “You’re trying to throw Scott and Misty together?”
“They’d be perfect for each other, don’t you think?”
His eyes inscrutable, he studied my face until the backs of my ears heated and I decided it was time to stare at my oversized fridge, which, cool as it might be, did not help me control the heat creeping around my scalp and flushing my face.
A couple of times, including the night before, emotionally fraught life-or-death emergencies had thrown Scott and me into temporary closeness, and then Brent had arrived to investigate. He had to have noticed that Scott and I were being more than usually attentive to each other. Scott and I were good friends, and we’d mostly been concerned about each other’s safety.
Scott was a firefighter. Worrying about other people was part of his training. It was also part of his personality, which was probably why he’d gone into that dangerous profession in the first place. And Misty was the same. They cared.
Had Brent thought I was romantically interested in Scott? Brent had to know that I didn’t want to date. I was sure that Scott understood that. Brent and Scott were kind men who looked out for other people, which sometimes included me. I hoped I reciprocated.
“I . . .” Brent began. He stared toward the fridge as if wondering what I’d found so interesting about it only moments before. “I hadn’t thought about whether or not Scott and Misty might be perfect for each other.”
An idea teased at the side of my brain. Until about a year and a half ago, Brent had dated a series of different women, all of them tall like Misty. I hadn’t heard of him dating anyone recently. Had he been biding his time, hoping that Misty would return his interest? Maybe I’d just dashed his hopes.
Jealousy Filled Donuts Page 6