Second Chance at Love

by Joanna Campbell Slan

  As Lou watched from behind the two-way window, his stomach took an elevator dive down to his shoes. He was still in his probationary period as a new hire, so he couldn't interview her himself. If he had, perhaps he could have reminded Sarah that he knew how Bucky treated her. That he'd rescued her once, and he'd gladly do it again. But as she sat there silently, he knew she was going down. No way would the judge let her off. Not when the checks had totaled two grand.

  She thought she was doing the smart thing. Sarah believed that by keeping her mouth shut, she was being loyal to her husband, Bucky. What she didn't know was that Bucky didn't understand the meaning of loyalty. He didn't deserve a woman like Sarah.

  Lou's fists had burned with the urge to go get Bucky and knock some sense into that little twerp. He wanted to yell through the two-way glass, “Your husband set you up, Sarah! Don't fall for this!”

  In the end, he could do nothing to save her.

  However, Lou did show up at court and listen as the judge handed down the inevitable verdict. Sarah Teafer was sentenced to three months behind bars. The young woman's sorrowful moan hurt Lou deeply. He vowed then and to visit her regularly.

  Every Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday, he'd spend an hour at the Martin County Jail. At first, Sarah had nothing to say. She would stare off into space. He understood. She'd been stunned by the verdict. Bucky had promised her that as a first time offender, she'd be put on probation. His betrayal shocked her, and she didn't feel like trusting another man. Especially a law enforcement official.

  Over the course of her jail time, she learned to trust Lou.

  Especially after Bucky distanced himself from Sarah, refusing to visit her.

  Lou was the only constant in her life. He told Sarah over and over that he'd help her get back on her feet when she got out.

  “But no one will hire me as a waitress. That's the only job I've ever had. Look! I don't have any front teeth!” she'd sobbed, cupping her hand over her mouth.

  He pushed an appointment card her way. It showed a scheduled visit with a local dentist who would fix her up with dental implants.

  “I'll pay you back,” she said.

  “Don't worry about that,” and Lou turned red.

  That's how it happened that Lou stood beside Sarah when she went to court for her divorce hearing. In fact, he'd secretly paid a local attorney to represent her—and to say he was doing the job gratis. When the judge asked her if she planned to change her name, Sarah glanced back at Lou. He gave her a low “thumbs up.”

  “Your Honor, from now on I want to be known as Skye Blue. Because from now on, there's gonna be nothing but blue skies in my life,” said the woman formerly known as Sarah Teafer.

  So here they were. Skye Blue and Lou, the waitress who had a new smile and the cop who loved her but couldn't bring himself to admit it.

  CHAPTER 66

  After I sent that first email to Cooper, I did not turn off the computer. Instead, I did a bit more poking around, despite the fact I’d already had a long day. The Internet is a seductive alternative universe. A time giver and a time waster. Pinterest is like crack cocaine for adult women. We simply can't get enough of those alluring images. I told myself I was looking for hot new décor ideas. Somehow I went from there to checking out recipes and jewelry projects.

  I had completely lost track of time. It was half past eleven at night when Jack pricked up his ears as Detective Murray and Skye walked in through the back door. I cuddled Jack as he sniffed curiously at the big cop.

  “Nice watchdog you've got there. You need that security light fixed,” Detective Murray said. “Show me where the light bulbs are.”

  “I'll grab one,” Skye volunteered. “MJ bought us a bunch of yellow bug lights. I know where she put them.”

  Detective Murray followed her with dreamy eyes as she disappeared into the supply closet. I wondered if they realized they loved each other. More importantly, I wondered what kept them at arms' length, because to my mind, they seemed perfectly suited. Her sweet nature balanced his terse manner perfectly. It couldn't have been the age difference, because it wasn't that great.

  Jack's little black nose was working overtime, tasting the air. The detective offered the back of his hand for Jack to sniff. The dog was tentative at first, but after an initial hesitation, he shivered with delight and started licking the detective's skin.

  “Did you come by to question me?” I asked. “Because I can give you the phone number of my attorney.”

  “No,” he said. “I thought I should stop by and make sure you were okay. That vandalism has me worried. Skye tells me you've had workmen in and out all day.”

  “That's right.”

  “Good. It's best if you aren't here alone. I suggest you buy a 'Beware of Dog' sign, too. It's a cheap deterrent. A creep might think twice about hanging around the building.”

  “Speaking of creeps, any luck on finding the person who threw Jack out of their vehicle?”

  “As a matter of fact, we did finally narrow down the license plate. The owner lives in Palm Beach County. Since it's out of our jurisdiction, we're working through the proper channels. But rest assured, I plan to nail his backside to a wall.”

  Jack pawed the cop's arm as if to say he'd like to be there when Detective Murray found his abuser.

  He scratched Jack under his chin. “Hey, little buddy. You deserve better, don't you? Looks to me like you've got a nice home here. Two nice ladies to cater to your every whim. Not bad.”

  Skye handed the detective a light bulb. He took it and smiled at her. “No rest for the weary, huh?”

  “You volunteered.”

  They bantered like old married people, but they also kept a respectful distance from each other, as if the slightest touch might ignite them. I understood exactly how that felt.

  “You have blue paint on your fingers, Cara,” said Skye. “Want to show me what you did?”

  I stood up, keeping Jack under my arm, and led her to the freshly painted end tables.

  “They aren't quite there yet, are they?” I asked. “They're lacking something, but I don't know what.”

  “The paint is a big improvement, but what do you think they need?” She studied them.

  “I stenciled grapevines on the walls of our restaurant. Although grapevines wouldn't work, I bet starfish might.”

  “Yes!” She shouted. “That would look mah-vel-ous, dah-ling.”

  I gave her a high-five. “What color?”

  “A golden-yellow. I'll pick up a small container tomorrow. Where are you planning to get a stencil?”

  “I don't know.”

  “If you find an image you like online, I'll show you how to turn it into a stencil,” Skye said. “We'll have a lot of nice things to sell when we open our doors in two weeks.”

  Detective Murray wandered up behind us. He stood with his hands in his pockets staring at the messy sales floor. “The light's changed, and your back door is locked. Did I hear you say two weeks? That's ambitious. I like the new flooring. What's the plan for the walls? You aren't going to leave them like this, are you?”

  “I hope to put a coat of paint on them. A soft off-white color to match the tile and brighten up the place.”

  “You need help?”

  “You're running a murder investigation,” said Skye. “Wouldn't that take priority?”

  “For me, yeah,” he said with a shrug, “but we have six teenage boys who need to fulfill their quota of community service. Seems to me that helping a new business get off the ground should qualify. Especially one that’s already suffered through vandalism. I'll tell Officer Dooley to bring them over here first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “You mean that?” I felt an easing of the tension in my solar plexus. My dream seemed one step closer to coming true. This was really, really going to happen. How sad that Mom and Dad wouldn't be here to share this with me!

  “I never say anything I don't mean. But don't get all yippee-skippee on me yet. You get your busines
s license? Because if not, you better.”

  “Yikes. I'd almost forgotten,” and I could have sworn that he winked at me.

  CHAPTER 67

  I didn't rest much that night. I kept tossing and turning in the sleeping bag. At one point, I woke up in a cold sweat. I dreamed that Dom was spray-painting the front of The Treasure Chest, and the words he wrote were unbelievably cruel. He laughed at me while I sat in a jail cell. Next to me was my mother, and she was dying. Then I dreamed that Detective Murray was putting handcuffs on me.

  Jack must have had bad dreams, too. I heard him whimpering in his sleep. I finally picked him up and brought him to bed with me. I'd resisted doing that because I worried I'd bump into his leg and cause him pain. But both of us needed the comfort. Once he burrowed down beside me, I finally got some sleep.

  I woke up with dark circles under my eyes, and I was tired.

  However, my mood brightened when promptly at eight, a polite knocking on the front door signaled the arrival of six teenage boys armed with paint rollers and tarps. The officer who accompanied them couldn't have been more than a couple years older than they.

  “Officer Doug Dooley, ma'am. We're here to paint. Detective Murray sent us.”

  I got them started and put on the coffee while Skye ran out to buy the golden color she thought would make great starfish and a few other supplies, including ten-penny nails for her tin can project. She'd also agreed to buy an assortment of breakfast sandwiches from McDonald's. MJ arrived five minutes later with more cream, a quart of skim milk, sugar, and paper cups. On a second trip from her car, she carried in a toaster oven.

  “Good thinking,” I said, as she started the coffee machine. The heavenly aroma filled the store.

  “I have an old boyfriend who runs an appliance store.”

  No kidding? Why was I not surprised?

  “Could you find us a washer and dryer?” I asked. “Pretty soon I'll be totally out of clean clothes. I'm thinking that we'll need a dishwasher too. I can imagine having guest artists and open houses. Anything that would encourage shoppers to come in regularly. If we do that, it would be cheaper to buy an inexpensive set of dishes and glasses than to keep buying paper products.”

  “I'm way ahead of you,” she said. “I've already ordered a washer and dryer that will fit in that nook by the back door, and a dishwasher. I told Ronnie to sharpen his pencil and give me his best price. Then I convinced him to knock off the delivery fee. He also threw in this toaster oven. The other stuff should be here Monday afternoon, unless you want to cancel.”

  From her back pocket she withdrew a sales slip and handed it to me. I looked it over.

  “Sharpen his pencil? Girlfriend, this man probably isn't making a penny on this order!”

  “I promised to go with him on a dinner cruise of the Jupiter Inlet,” she said. “That's all the profit he needed. We'll need to get an electrician to check the wiring first. Don't want to overload the circuits with all these new appliances.”

  “Could you talk to Bobby about it?” I said. “He told me that he could do the electricity upstairs.”

  “Really? Huh. That's a new one. When we were married, he'd fix anything as long as electricity wasn't involved. Had a carpenter friend who got himself electrocuted messing around with a ceiling fan. After that, Bobby wouldn't touch anything electrical.”

  “Maybe I misunderstood him,” I said. I was feeling muzzy headed after getting so little sleep.

  “Since we're planning on being open in two weeks, I put together a list of everything you need to do to legally run a business in Martin County,” MJ said as she handed me a second list. On it was the application for a business license, sales tax forms, and other important tasks.

  “Is this what you did for Essie? You are so organized,” I said to her back as she poured herself a cup of coffee.

  “Pretty much. She was the person with the money and the vision. She also knew more about antiques and collectibles than I'll ever know. But she could get distracted and disorganized. I kept things going, and I handled the paperwork.”

  MJ paused while stirring the drops of low cal sweetener into her black coffee. “Why are you asking? I thought we went over this yesterday.”

  “I've been thinking. Could you dig up all the paperwork for the month preceding and following that first stroke she had? Any statements dated that year? If those paintings went missing, I wonder if anything else disappeared.”

  Holding her coffee cup carefully, she took the chair next to my desk. Her work-a-day outfit of tight jeans and men's shirts tied under the bust now seemed familiar to me, as did the gingham bows in her pigtails. Funny how quickly you develop a comfort level with people.

  “Are you thinking Hal Humberger's murder is linked to Essie's stroke? The first one she had? That doesn't make much sense. Twelve years have passed.”

  “You are right. It doesn't,” I agreed. “I'm grasping at straws.”

  “Is there some reason you want to play Nancy Drew?” MJ asked, raising a speculative eyebrow.

  “This living under suspicion is wearing me down. Every time Detective Murray drops by, my stomach knots up. I worry that he's going to accuse me again.”

  “He hasn't cleared you?” MJ asked.

  “No, and it's starting to keep me from sleeping at night. Sometimes I find myself thinking, 'Who is the killer? Is he watching me? And why did the crime happen here?' I feel like I'm looking over my shoulder all the time. I hate to admit that I'm scared, but maybe I am.”

  “Sounds to me like you're having some sort of delayed reaction to finding the body,” MJ said, as she sipped her coffee.

  “Possibly. Probably. I had bad dreams last night. I'm worried that people are blaming me for Hal Humberger's death. Maybe the graffiti is just the tip of the iceberg. I realize I sound paranoid, and maybe I'm just overly tired, but…” I paused. “What if people avoid the store because of what happened here? You can't blame them, can you? The idea that a killer is roaming around makes everyone jumpy. Shadows seem to come alive. Noises are magnified. Staying home seems like a smart move. What if our grand opening is a big bust!”

  “I think you're letting your imagination get the best of you. There's nothing we can do about what happened here,” she said, in a logical tone of voice. “Except to make the store as inviting as possible. And you're already doing everything you can in that regard.”

  “I know, I know,” I said, rubbing my temples. “I guess I just have a case of the jitters. I'm obsessing about everything. It's silly. I haven't done this for a long, long time.”

  “Look,” she said. “You're not the only one who goes over and over things in her mind. I do, too. I still feel bad about leaving Essie after her stroke. She kept encouraging me to go to Michigan. In fact, she got really agitated about it. Finally, I decided I was doing more harm than good by staying.”

  “Maybe she felt guilty keeping you from your mother, when she'd just had her own brush with mortality,” I said.

  “I'm sure that was part of it.” MJ looked down into her coffee cup. “Our conversation yesterday got me thinking about the paintings. I came up with one other way that they could have disappeared. Right before Essie had her first stroke, Irving's wife Evelyn was diagnosed with MS. He was scurrying around even then trying to find alternative treatments for her. I wonder if Essie gave the paintings to Irving to sell and forgot about it. The stroke did a lot of damage to her brain. Her memory was never the same afterwards.”

  “What about the money? Wouldn't someone have noticed that Irving had come into a lot of cash? Or that he spent a lot on getting help for Evelyn?” I asked.

  “Not really. Essie bragged and bragged that someday her paintings would be worth a mint, but that was pure speculation on her part. Back then they weren't worth much of anything.”

  I said, “Suppose Irving did sell the paintings, right before her stroke—and he didn't get much—then maybe he chose not to remind his mother that he'd sold them. He decided it was better t
o just let her and everyone else think they were stolen.”

  “That's what I'm thinking,” said MJ. “Because she would have been furious with him if he sold them for next to nothing. Even though that's all they would have been worth. She loved those paintings. She cared more about them than she did about Irving.”

  “My mother used to say that Essie was too hard on Irving, that she never had a kind word to say about her son.”

  “That's true. She could be awful to him. Just horrible.”

  “Then you’re suggesting that the cameras didn't record the paintings going out the door, because they left under Essie's supervision shortly before she had the stroke.”

  “That's what I'm guessing,” said MJ. “At least all the pieces fit.”

  CHAPTER 68

  MJ settled in at her makeshift desk. Spread on the surface was a carpet of manila file folders. One of them had to be dated the same year that the Highwayman paintings went missing. The questions was: Could she find it? I went back to working on spreadsheets. We didn't talk to each other as we worked, although I could hear her phoning customers. I couldn't do much about getting a business license on a Saturday, but I could delegate this busy work to Wilson, so I shot him an email.

  As I worked, I heard the wet sound of paint being applied to drywall. I didn't expect my free labor force to do a great job. I figured that even a cursory first coat would be better than nothing, although I'd been pleasantly surprised to see they had brought tarps with them. Officer Dooley had stood over them as they spread the protective cloth over our so-called merchandise. I could hear him pointing out areas they'd missed with the paint and generally overseeing the quality of their efforts.

  I turned my efforts to our grand opening. Getting people through our door would be a challenge. Or so it seemed. On the face of it, Essie's ads produced a very poor result, because the correlation of advertising to sales was pitiful. I was tempted to skip advertising all together. However, I decided that was being penny wise and pound foolish. Essie had not needed advertising because back then The Treasure Chest had been an ongoing concern. I was almost starting from scratch, seeing as how the doors had been shuttered. It would be up to me to re-establish The Treasure Chest's clientele. Reluctantly, I started putting together an ad budget for the store.