PENITENCE: An Andi Comstock Supernatural Mystery, Book 2 (95,893 words)

by Ann Simas

The priest’s eyes widened. “Oh, dear God!”

  “Exactly.”

  The server brought their salads. “More bread?” she asked.

  Andi looked at the empty basket in surprise. “Please.”

  As soon as the bread had been replenished, the server took off for the kitchen again.

  “He hired someone to kill his wife? Why?”

  “He thought she was having an affair, when really, she was learning portraiture. She wanted to paint a family portrait for him for his birthday next month.”

  Riley froze, a fork laden with salad halfway to his mouth. “He couldn’t just ask her where she was during the times he thought she was sneaking off to be with another man?”

  “I guess it never occurred to him. He automatically assumed the worst and now he regrets it.”

  “I’m sure he does. What is wrong with people, anyway?”

  Andi shrugged. “Beats me. After twelve years of marriage, you’d think they could talk about anything.”

  Riley finished chewing and said, “Believe me, I’d be out of a job if that actually started happening.”

  Andi stared at him. “Really? I can’t think of anything I wouldn’t discuss with Jack.”

  “So you’ve told him about Naylor.”

  “Not yet. He’s in Iowa, remember?”

  “And phones don’t work there?”

  “The man he’s picking up was in an altercation with another prisoner this morning over a sexual overture. He’s in the hospital for two days and asked to talk to Jack this evening. With any luck, he’s confessing everything so he can get the heck out of the Hawkeye State and return to Edgerton without anyone else trying to make a girlfriend out of him.”

  To his credit, Father Riley showed no signs of being shocked. “Prison is prison.”

  “He should have thought of that before he hit and ran.”

  “Harsh, but true.” He finished off his salad and reached for another piece of bread. “All right, you can’t discuss it with Jack right now, but you will, right?”

  She nodded. “I really don’t have anything to tell him yet, except that the guy hired a hitman to take out his wife. I don’t know who he hired, when it’s supposed to happen, or even how.”

  Riley refrained from commenting when the hostess approached to clear their salad plates.

  The server was right behind her with steaming entrées. She placed the chicken picatta with spaghetti in front of Andi and the chicken parmigiana with linguini in front of Father Riley. The hostess came back with a chunk of romano and grated it over both plates. “Anything else I can get you?”

  Andi glanced at the priest, who shook his head, and smiled up at the hostess. “Thanks. We’re good.”

  Father Riley murmured a quick prayer over their meal and they dug in.

  “If Naylor is anything like Sherry, he’ll be back to talk to you tomorrow.”

  “I hope so! Otherwise, how can I stop it from happening?”

  The priest shot her a look of reproach. “It’s not your job to stop anything.”

  “I know that, but I could talk to someone whose job it is to do something.” She waggled her fork at him. “By the way, now you’re sounding like Jack.”

  “Jack, who isn’t here.”

  Like she needed the reminder. She tumbled other possibilities around in her brain. “I could go talk to his LT. Stacy told me I can come see her anytime.”

  He stabbed a piece of chicken with his fork. “You won’t have any choice, if Naylor comes back and gives you more information before Jack returns.”

  “Agreed.”

  “You may have to pump him if he doesn’t give up the particulars.”

  “I know. I took the initiative this afternoon and he was completely forthcoming until he dropped his bombshell and poof, he disappeared in a puff of smoke.”

  Riley gave her a droll look. “Ha, ha.”

  Andi grinned. “Sorry, I couldn’t resist.”

  “What’ve you found out about his wife?”

  “She’s two years younger than he is. She’s a stay-at-home mom and their kids are Aria, age six, and Christian, age eight. Clem says he didn’t even want children to begin with, but as soon as they arrived, he was over the moon about them. He also says he fell more deeply in love with his wife after each child was born.”

  “It happens that way,” Father Riley said. “People don’t realize how important children are, both to love and to carry on the family line. Once a child arrives, the entire world changes for the person who becomes a parent.”

  Andi thought about that for a moment. She’d always known she wanted to marry and have kids, but did she really know what life had in store for her when that time arrived? Probably not. “Denise volunteers at the kids’ school. Like her husband, she’s headed up some fundraising efforts for playground equipment, computers, and stuff like that.”

  “Any other volunteer work?”

  “I found her name associated with an artists’ guild, so it stands to reason that she’s drawn to portraiture because she has some talent.”

  “A young mother with two children. We can’t let this happen, can we?”

  “I take it you’re in.”

  “For better or worse.”

  “Let’s hope not worse.”

  “Let’s pray not worse.”

  “Amen to that.”

  Father Riley smirked at her, then twirled some linguini onto his fork, savoring the bite. “I love the marinara here. I tried to buy the recipe once, but Giuseppe just laughed and said he’d sell it to me by the pint.”

  Andi chuckled. “Trattoria definitely serves comfort food for the soul.” She finished off her meal and said, “Want to share a dish of spumoni?”

  He gave her an incredulous look. “You really have to ask?”

  . . .

  The roads were so bad, it took Andi thirty minutes to get home once she dropped Father Riley off at the rectory. Normally, she made the trip in fifteen minutes, even in rush hour traffic.

  Her nerves were slightly frayed by the time she parked under the portico and climbed the stairs to her apartment. To further exacerbate her stress level, the overhead light in the stairwell was burned out and she hadn’t left the porch light on. In fact, she never left it on because it seemed redundant with an overhead light. She made a mental note to call the building manager in the morning to report the outage.

  Inside her apartment, she hung her coat and scarf in the closet, then beelined for the bedroom, where she disrobed and climbed into her flannel jammies, chenille robe, and slippers. Next, she turned on the gas log in the fireplace and put on some easy listening music. She made a hot toddy and situated herself on the floor in front of the coffee table with her laptop.

  The rest of the evening was spent further exploring how to hire a contract killer.

  Just how every single woman wanted to wile away the hours in front of a cozy fire when the tall, dark, and handsome man in her life was halfway across the country.

  Several hours later, the Cops-theme ringtone woke her with a start. Andi scrambled up off the floor to retrieve her phone, surprised that she’d fallen asleep over the coffee table.

  “Hi,” she said, her voice sleepy.

  “Hi, yourself. Did I wake you?”

  “Yeah, but I fell asleep on the floor, so I’m glad you did.”

  After a brief pause, he said, “Why were you on the floor?”

  “It’s still snowing here. I put on a fire when I got home and was doing some Googling on my laptop, which I set up on the coffee table, blah, blah, blah.”

  He laughed. “I can just picture it. “What’re you Googling?”

  “How to hire a contract killer.”

  Jack laughed again. “Did I do something to piss you off?”

  “No.”

  Again, a short silence from him. “Okay, what’s happening?”

  Andi heaved a resigned sigh and gave him the scoop on Clement Naylor.

  “Jesus. He didn’t say who he hir
ed or how to contact the killer or when?”

  “No. I’m hoping he talks to me again tomorrow. I’ll try to get the information out of him.”

  “I should be there,” Jack said, “but I can’t. Look, if he comes clean, go see the LT, okay? She can get something rolling.”

  Maybe it was because she was tired, or frustrated, but Andi couldn’t keep the sharpness from her response. “That’s what I planned to do, since you’re not here.”

  A brief pause later he said, “Hey, I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  Andi sighed. “You didn’t, and I didn’t mean to sound so snarky.”

  “I wish we could kiss and make up.”

  Andi smiled. “Me, too.”

  “I guess you’ve learned a little about butting in where you shouldn’t since the incident with Sherry Hemmer.”

  He should have left well enough alone. “A little,” she said, her tone noncommittal.

  “Andi, don’t go investigating on your own.”

  “I’m just Googling, Jack. No one ever died from that.”

  “That we know of. Promise me.”

  “If you’re going to lecture me, I’m done talking. If you want to whisper sweet nothings into my ear, I’ll keep listening.”

  For the space of several heartbeats, Jack apparently considered his options. He chose door number two and began to whisper sweet somethings into her ear.

  Andi’s body began to heat up. “You don’t play fair.”

  His seductive laugh came over the phone line and curled through her like a warm caress. “You set the rules, babe.”

  . . .

  Andi arrived at work at 7:00 a.m. again. All the better to give Naylor a broader window of opportunity to show up and spill the rest of his guts to her when no one else was around to hear.

  Only he didn’t.

  By noon, she couldn’t concentrate any longer on Bunnicula. She’d already emailed Brent that she needed to take an extra hour at midday, and had arrived an hour early to compensate. As usual, he had no problems with her request.

  Andi pointed her VW Touareg north, heading toward a high-end neighborhood known as Haven Estates. It wasn’t far from where Vaughn Hemmer, Sherry’s husband, lived with his four kids. If she had time, she’d stop and say hello.

  In the meantime, she was looking for the home of Denise Naylor. She considered signing up to sell Mary Kay or Avon, just so she’d have an excuse to ring the woman’s doorbell. Instead, she had to be satisfied with a slow drive-by. At the end of the block, she made a U-turn and cruised back by, just as slowly.

  Being a real estate magnate, Andi had expected Naylor’s family to live in a McMansion, but instead, the house was a modest Cape Cod style, complete with white Priscilla curtains in the windows, white shutters against the dusky gray siding, and the requisite white picket fence around the yard. Rather than a silver soccer-mom van in the driveway, there was a black Yukon, all the better to transport kids and their friends. A cocker spaniel romped back and forth in the snowy front yard with two children. Apparently, school had been cancelled because of the snow.

  Everything looked idyllic from the outside, but inside would be a different matter. Denise would be grieving for a husband she loved, lost too soon, who would never see his children reach adulthood. None of them would suspect that their world would soon be shattered again if Andi couldn’t do something to stop whoever Clem had hired to kill his wife.

  Torn with both anger and frustration, she was tempted to park her car and march right up to the front door. Denise had a right to know she was a target. She had a right to defend herself. She had a right to hire protection for herself and the kids, because they might very well be in the way when the contract killer came calling.

  Instead of caving into a desire that would be futile at this point, Andi drove on past and headed for the Hemmers. She half-expected to find the oldest twins, Ashley and Etta, sledding on the gently sloped front yard with the younger twins, Micah and Trevor, under the supervision of Dotty Tobias, who lived in as a housekeeper–nanny for Vaughn. They weren’t.

  Andi rang the doorbell and could hear what sounded like a stampede of tiny feet, but which, in reality, was two three-year-old boys hoping to beat Dotty or Vaughn to the front door. It turned out to be Vaughn.

  “Andi! Come in!” He leaned down and gave her a hug.

  “Me, too,” the boys said, tugging on her coat.

  She squatted to give them each a hug. “I think you grew two inches since I saw you at Christmas.”

  That puffed them up and they started to jabber about not only their height, but the toys they’d received from Santa.

  “We’re just about to have hot dogs,” Vaughn said. “Care to join us?”

  “Love to. Thanks.”

  “Go wash your hands,” he said to the boys, who scurried off to the downstairs half-bath.

  She looked around. “Where are the girls?”

  “At school, why?”

  “Oh, I saw some kids playing in the snow and thought maybe the schools called a snow day.”

  “I heard on the radio this morning that one of the charter schools did close, but the public schools are open.”

  That might explain the children in the Naylor’s front yard. Either that, or their mom hadn’t sent them back to school yet, following their father’s unexpected death. “Where’s Dotty?” Andi asked, following Vaughn to the kitchen.

  “She’s been having problems with her knees. I finally had to tell her, if she didn’t get them checked out, she had to quit working for me.”

  “Ouch, you’re a hard taskmaster.”

  “Gotta be, otherwise she’d go twenty hours a day.”

  Andi knew that to be a truism. Dotty had raised a set of twins of her own who were just a couple of years younger than Andi. Both of them lived out-of-state now, so she’d taken on the job with Vaughn, more to keep herself active and sane than because she needed the money. The fact that she knew something about twins came in especially useful with the two sets of Hemmer twins. “I’ve read that a lot of knee-replacement surgeries are being done these days.”

  Vaughn pulled four plates from the cupboard and handed them to Andi, who set them out at the table. “If the doc says she needs surgery, Eddie and Sally said they’ll move in for a while and help out. We’ll have to convert the office to a bedroom for Dotty, because she won’t be able to climb the stairs.”

  Andi pulled napkins from a basket on the counter. Sherry’s parents weren’t exactly spring chickens themselves. “I’ll be glad to help out any way I can, too.”

  “Thanks.” He paused for a moment over the hot dogs and buns he was assembling and looked at her. “You’ve done so much for my family already.” He put up his hand when she opened her mouth to respond. “I know you’re uncomfortable with praise of any kind, Andi, so just accept that I will forever be in your debt, okay?”

  Andi’s face grew warm and a proper reply escaped her.

  The boys came racing into the room. “Mustard on mine!” Trevor yelled.

  “Ketchup on mine!” Micah shouted.

  “Sit,” their father instructed them. “Andi doesn’t want to hear a lot of yelling and screaming and neither do I.”

  Both boys climbed up onto their chairs, kneeling to reach their plates.

  “No more booster seats?” Andi asked.

  “We too big,” Trev informed her.

  “Yeah, too big,” Micah echoed.

  “Some battles are better left unfought,” Vaughn added.

  As soon as the boys wolfed down their hot dogs, Vaughn cleaned them up and hustled them upstairs to their room for an afternoon nap. They must have been going at full speed all morning, because they didn’t argue. “They closed their eyes and went to sleep immediately,” Vaughn said when he came back down. “Thank God.”

  Andi, who had cleaned up the lunch dishes and wiped the table, grinned at him.

  “Want a coffee?” Vaughn asked.

  “Sure.”

  He p
oured her a cup and set a sugar bowl and creamer in front of her. She added both to her cup.

  “So, what have you been up to?”

  “Working like crazy on the Wild Hare game. I’ve got ten chapters finished as of this week and started on a new one yesterday.”

  “I wonder if Orion’s Belt needs any capital. I’m looking for a good, solid company to invest in.”

  “I have no idea. I never hear any conversations about finances, thank goodness. I’m happiest just writing code.” She blew on her coffee and took a sip. “Orion is a nice man, though. I’m sure he wouldn’t be offended if you made an overture.”

  “I think I will.” He took a drink from his own cup. “Still talking to the dead?”

  “Yes, and I don’t see any end in sight unless I quit my job and never go back on that block again.”

  “Any more…like Sherry?”

  “Not exactly.” She decided not to mention the Naylors by name.

  “I just wondered because I went to a funeral for a guy I know this week—Clem Naylor? He was cremated and I thought maybe he stopped by to chat.”

  So much for not naming anyone. “He did speak to me in passing.”

  Vaughn tilted his head at her. “I hear a hesitation in there.”

  Andi bit her lower lip in indecision. She trusted Vaughn, but criminy, she still wasn’t privy to all the facts. “I can’t talk about it yet.”

  “I guess that means it’s ongoing, then.” He narrowed his eyes on her. “Like Sherry, but not.”

  “That pretty much describes it.”

  He drummed his fingers on the table top. “He and I were running buddies. We met in the neighborhood on the running paths right after we moved in here. Admittedly, we weren’t BFFs, but I knew him well enough to notice a drastic change in him over the last couple of months.”

  “Umm.”

  He grunted. “That’s pretty noncommittal.”

  Andi fidgeted with the handle of her mug. “I really can’t say more, Vaughn. I barely had a chance to discuss it with Jack, because he’s off in Iowa on an extradition.”

  His head jerked in a quick nod. “You answered my question, anyway.”

  Andi stared at him with owl eyes. What had she said that gave away anything?

  “Don’t worry. I won’t bug you about it, but if you want any insight into Clem, come see me. I may have something stuck away in my brain that you need to know.”