by Nancy Bush
But then Sadie asked, “Should I stop them?”
Them?
Jules’s shaking legs managed to carry her to where Sadie was standing. Outside, a motorboat was just docking, a trim woman at the helm. Jules could count six women and a girl inside, each holding a potluck dish. When they saw her, they waved frantically, then helped each other out of the boat.
“It looks like dinner has arrived,” Sadie said, lifting her brows at Jules, silently asking her what she wanted to do.
Chapter Sixteen
The neighbors. The Fishers . . .
“It’s all right,” Jules said, trying to still her heart, to calm down. It was nothing. She’d panicked for no reason. Sadie was staring at her as if she’d lost her mind, which wasn’t that far from the truth. Jules managed a smile. “It’s . . . fine.” Then she turned to the window and lifted her left arm to hail the group as they came en masse toward her sliding glass door. Joanie Bledsoe and her daughter Alexa were in the front, the rest packed behind them. “I remember them.”
“Want me to be your taster?” Sadie asked as she stepped forward to unlatch the door.
“Maybe,” Jules said, only half joking. Like high school, she’d never been all that close to the Fishers, but she’d always put on a good front.
“Should I call Sam?” A thread of eagerness had entered Sadie’s voice.
“Uh . . . yeah, maybe. Did you call a locksmith?” They’d discussed Sam’s directive to get the locks changed, and Sadie said she would make the call as she’d shooed Jules off to bed.
“Yup. Guy from Doorworks coming Monday. Earliest he could.” Sadie was walking away, putting her phone to her ear. Her interest in Sam was pretty clear. Maybe Sam felt the same about her, Jules thought, not liking the idea at all.
Joanie Bledsoe was the first Fisher through, Alexa right on her heels. Joanie carried a salad in a clear plastic bowl with a lid and Alexa held a square, glass pan with corn bread, the aroma filling the room, reminding Jules of Thanksgiving and the stuffing her mother had made with crumbled, day-old corn bread. The memory was oddly disquieting.
“I couldn’t leave Alexa home alone, so I brought her along,” Joanie said. “I hope you don’t mind.” She shifted her salad bowl to one side and gave Jules a half hug, mindful of her sling. “Julia, oh, my gosh, we’ve been so worried about you. Are you okay? It’s all so terrible. Joe . . . dear God, Joe . . .”
Joanie had always fashioned herself as Jules’s good friend, but there was an insincerity to her sweetness that had caused Zoey to dub her “Phony Joanie.”
Now, Joanie looked past Jules, searching the room. “Where are Xena and Georgie? Aren’t they here?”
“They’re in Georgie’s room. You can join them,” Jules added to Alexa. “It’s right down the hall.”
“I know where it is,” Alexa said. She hastily set the corn bread on the counter and hurried away, as if she couldn’t wait to beat feet away from them.
Zoey stepped around Joanie and said, “Girl, you look like hell,” to which Joanie gasped, “Don’t say that!”
Zoey Rivera was still as pert and sassy as she’d been when they were in high school. Jules hadn’t known her well. She’d been a Hawk, not a Triton, but all the guys had been acutely aware of her. Her dark hair was short now and clipped back. Real estate agent, Jules recalled. Her husband was in real estate development . . . not husband, boyfriend. Brian . . . nope, Byron. Byron Blanchette . . . and they’d moved to the canal around the same time she and Joe had, about a year earlier. Now Zoey, ignoring Joanie, held out an opaque cream casserole dish with a snug plastic lid toward Julia. The unmistakable scent of baked beans wafted into the room as Zoey asked, “Where can I put this?”
“On the counter, or the stove top if it’s too hot?” Jules responded.
“Not too hot anymore. Counter’s fine. You know what I meant about how you look, right? That you look just like you should, like you’ve been through hell, because you have.” Zoey set the beans beside the corn bread and gave Joanie a look, before adding, “We all decided on a Texas barbecue kind of thing, and Tutti said we should all descend on you at once.”
“I said no such thing! I said we should go together so Julia knows we’re all thinking of her!” an aggrieved voice behind Zoey declared.
Tutti Anderson. Real name, Kathy. She lived directly across the canal. Her two sons were just a little older than Georgie and obsessed with video games. Their father, Tutti’s ex, was in insurance . . . or something like that, and Tutti said she couldn’t stand him . . . the bastard . . . except she talked about him all the time.
“You really didn’t have to go to all this trouble,” Jules started to say.
“Of course we did,” Tutti responded. “I’ve got the skirt steak, and it’s done up right. I had to practically rap Sean and Devon’s hands with the back of my wooden spoon to keep them from eating it all before I got it over here. They’re monsters, that’s what they are, with monster stomachs,” she said affectionately as she set a large metal pan covered with foil across several stove top burners.
Jules was beginning to feel a bit overwhelmed and it didn’t help that Sadie was laughing and joking on the phone to Sam.
“We were told you were having trouble remembering things,” Joanie said, drawing close to Jules.
“. . . don’t worry, she’s fine,” Sadie’s voice was saying warmly. “We’re good. The neighbors just brought enough food to feed an army. . . .”
“The accident’s still a blur, but it’s all coming back,” Jules told Joanie. That was a bit of a stretch, but it seemed important that she keep up the fiction of being back to herself as much as possible.
Bette Ezra was next, her closest neighbor to the south, owner of the dogs, she thought. Mutt and Jeff . . . no, More and Less. Yeah, that was right. She was the woman who’d been at the helm of the motorboat. But . . . there was something wrong there. The boat, Jules was certain, belonged to another couple. Bette was compact with smooth skin and a toned body. Yoga instructor, Jules remembered. Bette said, “You know me, if it isn’t store bought, it just isn’t. This is gluten free.” She was carrying a lemon meringue pie.
Jules thanked her and then looked past her to the redheaded woman who was diffidently entering the house, carrying a brown paper sack from which the necks of several bottles sprouted up. Martina Montgomery . . . Sam’s ex-wife. Jules’s heart sank. She remembered Tina all right . . . and she remembered Joe saying Hap’s girlfriend was moving in with him. She hadn’t known who that girlfriend was until Tina had walked onto Hap’s deck in the skimpiest of bikinis, her body still as taut and sculpted as when she’d been on the squad with Julia.
Some things in life were just not fair.
And what the hell was she doing here tonight? She and Jules weren’t friends. Hadn’t been since she’d moved in on Sam.
“Hey, Julia. Hope you’re feeling better,” Tina said a bit sheepishly, holding up the sack. “Tequila and triple sec and lime juice.”
“Patrón?” Zoey asked, interested.
“Yes, I was thinking of you, Zoey,” Tina said dryly, moving into the kitchen. She seemed as uncomfortable as Jules was.
“Only the best for our Zoey,” the last woman said with a tight smile. She wore a skintight black tank top with equally skintight workout pants, which she’d teamed with silver high heels. Jules struggled with her name for a second, but it all came back as she turned her head and Jules caught her in profile. Jackie Illingsworth. Unhappy . . . working on being a full-blown alcoholic . . . possible affair with . . . Stuart Ezra. Jackie and her husband—what was his name?—Rob. That was it. Jackie and Rob owned the boat that Bette had driven to Jules’s dock.
Jules suddenly had a knife-sharp memory. Jackie snuggled up to Stuart Ezra underneath the overhang of the Ezra eave, just beyond Jules’s deck. “Shhhh . . .” his voice had warned, and then the rustle of clothing and a soft mewl from Jackie’s lips....
Jules returned to the moment to find Jackie squeezi
ng her hand, saying, “. . . terrible, just terrible. You need anything, anything at all, you hear? Rob and I are here for you.”
Rob Illingsworth, Jackie’s husband. In a quicksilver flash, Jules remembered Zoey telling her in an aside, “Byron’s got this development deal that Rob wants to go in on, but Jackie holds the purse strings. Rob tells everyone that he sold his family’s dairy farm, but Jackie’s the one with the family moola. If I was really catty I’d tell you that’s why he married her, but I’ll save that story for another day.”
Bette was saying to Martina, “. . . take them to Dina’s Doggy Day Care in Rockaway. They’ve got that red and white building with the paw prints painted all over the siding, just off the highway.”
“Sounds horrifying,” Tina drawled.
Bette shrugged. “Hey, I’m grateful because they take Less and More and I know they can be a handful sometimes.”
“Those German shepherds are rabid beasts,” Jackie said with a brittle smile. It was supposed to be a joke, but Bette’s return gaze was glacial.
“They’re just big pussycats. They’ve never hurt anybody, and they absolutely love Georgie,” Bette retorted, turning away and sharing a “Can you believe her?” look with both Tina and Tutti, who seemed kind of embarrassed to be caught in a quiet conversation betwen themselves as if they were gossiping.
And Jules had another spark of memory, Joe telling Georgie, “All I’m saying is be careful. The dogs respect you, but they’re huge, and strong, and Bette and Stuart make excuses for them.” Georgie had been incensed by Joe’s assessment, but Jules could see the dogs in her mind’s eye and Joe hadn’t been wrong.
Jackie was holding an appetizer tray with salsa, guacamole, and corn chips, and for the first time Jules noticed that Jackie seemed to be fighting tears as she crowded into the kitchen with the others. She met Jules’s eyes and then, as if embarassed, stiffened her spine and joined a conversation with Tutti.
Strange, Jules thought, just as Sadie came to Jules’s elbow and said, “Sam said he’s uncomfortable having them in the house. He wants me to stay. What do you think?”
A little shiver of fear slid through Jules’s blood and her mind tripped to the man who’d come for her in the hospital. Could he be one of these women’s husbands? Boyfriends? But why? And who? And . . . weren’t they all acquaintances, if not friends? Still, she didn’t feel a real connection to any of them and she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was very wrong.
An unfamiliar ringtone filled the air and Jules realized it was her new cell. Sam. Had to be.
“Uh, yes, please stick around,” she told Sadie, then she took the call and headed down the hall to her bedroom. She closed the door behind her and pressed the answer button. “Sam?” she asked.
“Yeah, it’s me. I just got a call from Sadie. She says your neighbors are there.”
“With food. Yes.”
“I told Sadie I’m on my way, but I asked her to stay.”
“Good . . . um, Sam? One of them’s Martina.”
“Yeah, I learned that last night at Tutti’s barbecue. They said they were going to bring you food. I didn’t know they were going to come all together.”
“You knew Martina was on the canal?”
“Well, I learned it yesterday. And that she’s cohabitating with Hap.”
“Does that bother you?” she couldn’t help asking, and looked out the window to the canal, the water clear and rippling just beyond their dock. Calm. Peaceful. And seeming right now to be such a lie. Jules felt there was nothing calm and peaceful on this slow-moving waterway.
“Nope. She’s my ex for a reason. But, Jules . . . if you’re remembering that, it sounds like your memory has really returned.”
“It’s coming,” she admitted.
“Anything about the accident?”
She hated dashing his hopes. “Not yet. And I can’t talk long. They’re all in the kitchen, getting everything ready, some kind of Texas potluck, Zoey told me.” Still gazing out the window, her eye caught an osprey circling over the water, searching the depths, looking for prey. The bird suddenly folded its wings and dove. It surfaced in a spray of water, a wriggling fish caught in its talons. She shuddered as she watched it flap its great wings and fly away. “How soon will you be here? Should I tell them to wait? Martina brought tequila and I think they’ll be here awhile.”
“Whose idea was it to make it a party when you’re just getting out of the hospital?” he asked, sounding annoyed and not waiting for an answer. “I’ll be there soon.”
“Okay. Oh, and Sam, I found Joe’s laptop. Not sure if he had another computer, but this is one he slid between the mattress and box springs.”
“Good! Great. I was certain Mayfield took it, but maybe not. Funny he put it under the mattress.”
“I think he thought something bad was coming.”
Get to the boat!
“Hmm. Okay. See you soon. None of the husbands are there, right? Of the neighbor women?”
“No.” Maybe he was thinking the same way she was, that it was a man who’d sneaked into her room at the hospital.
“Keep it that way. If one of ’em shows up, call me immediately.”
“But you’re on your way, right?”
“Be there within minutes.”
* * *
Phoenix drove her Mini through Seaside, heading north toward Astoria. She’d just wrapped up her meeting with Mr. P. J. Simpson, an odd duck if there ever was one. Now she was on her way to try and meet with Walter Hapstell Senior at one of his properties. Outside the city limits, she wound down a back road and meandered east and into the Coast Range foothills, keeping one eye on her phone where Google Maps was displaying her route.
Simpson had asked her to meet him at an old chowder house in Seaside that had nothing much to recommend it, especially not the food. Located on a narrow dead end street at the edge of a residential district, the restaurant was an old coastal institution that had lost customers and appeal long before, but it was his choice, so she figured, what the hell. She’d agreed to meet him out of curiosity, and had walked in to find him seated in a booth at the back, a middle-aged man with a shock of gray hair and a dark, nearly black, Magnum P.I. mustache that Phoenix hadn’t been able to take her eyes off.
A waitress who looked as if she’d been with the place since its inception had taken their orders without much interest, and had actually frowned when neither of them had wanted more than coffee. “Coming right up,” she’d said in a voice raspy from cigarette smoke. She’d brought the coffee, then left them alone.
During the course of their short conversation Phoenix had then determined that the mustache was a fake. In fact, Simpson had all the earmarks of a fugitive: the way he kept watching the door, the nervous manner in which he clenched and unclenched his fists, his careful conversation, the way she could almost see him study each question she asked, turning it over in his mind for a full minute before responding. She’d almost called him out on the disguise and whatever else he might be hiding, but she’d decided instead to hear him out, listen to whatever story he’d spun, and take it all with a grain of salt.
What she’d learned, as she’d sipped her watery coffee and taken notes, was that he knew next to nothing about Joe Ford, Ike Cardaman, or anything to do with the widening financial scandal. He just wanted his money back. And he wanted it back yesterday.
“Joe Ford stole all my money,” he’d insisted in a whispery voice.
“But you invested with Ike Cardaman,” Phoenix had reminded him. “Your name’s in a file with other Cardaman investors. That’s how I found you.”
“What file?” he demanded, for once raising his voice above a whisper and reacting instantly, half rising out of his seat in alarm.
“The file I told you about. The reason I called you.” Phoenix had then reiterated how she’d come to have the file from an unknown source, and how she’d been going down the list and had just come to his name.
“That’s confide
ntial information!”
“Yes, it is.”
“How do you have it?”
“Through research,” she said, trying to fob him off. She also didn’t tell him that he was the only investor she’d actually met in person. Most just wanted to complain about Cardaman and/or eagerly ask if she could help them recover their savings, either via e-mail, text, or phone calls. Nothing face to face. She’d asked Simpson, “So, were all your investments with Cardaman, or were some with Joseph Ford Investments?”
“I’d like to see this file.”
“Like you said, it’s confidential.”
That had put them at a stalemate. Simpson had blustered and said how heads would roll if that information got into the wrong hands, and Phoenix had tried to assure him she was just trying to find out if Joe Ford and Walter Hapstell were as guilty as Cardaman about misusing funds.
Finally, Simpson had stopped grousing and come to some kind of decision. He said, “The real crook is Walter Hapstell Senior. He got his young pup of a son to make some shaky deals and kept all the money. Joe Ford was in on it, too, but he’s gone. Died in that boat accident the other day.”
“There’s an ongoing investigation into that accident,” Phoenix had said.
“There should be,” he harrumphed. “Boat exploding. Something wrong there.”
“There are theories that it might not have been an accident. That Ford’s death could be related to the very investment tangle we’re discussing.”
“Poppycock.” He peered at her intently. “Who says that?”
“If it hasn’t been reported on the news yet, it will be. It’s a prevailing theory.”
She’d been kind of winging it by then, sensing Simpson had something to say but just couldn’t get it out. Several times he’d started to say something, then stopped, his eyes darting around the nearly empty restaurant where only a handful of patrons occupied tables and the waitstaff was practically nonexistent.