by Cathy Tully
“Dr. Shine,” she said. Susannah noticed a pencil drawing of a horse before the girl flipped her sketchpad closed and maneuvered between the desks. “I want to thank you for helping my father.”
Susannah neared her, grasping two leftover handouts she had retrieved. She had not recognized Hayle Jones, Billy’s daughter. Hayle took a step closer and grasped Susannah’s hand and gave it a light squeeze. She shared Billy’s friendly grin.
“It was my pleasure to help him. I hope he’s doing better.”
“He is,” she said. “Mom says he’s got to stop eating so many French fries and lose some weight,” she added, snorting as she chuckled. Her hand flew to her face.
Susannah agreed. “I also have a lot of thin patients who have back pain. His weight is not the only issue. He needs to come regularly. So tell your dad to come get adjusted.”
Hayle picked up her pad, wrapping her arms around it. “I will,” she said. “He and my mom get so busy at the store, it’s hard for both of them to be gone at the same time. I told him I would drive him over to your office before I go to work.”
Susannah nodded. “You work at the Long Branch Stable?”
“Yes, ma’am.” She glanced down again, and Susannah noticed how she clutched the sketchpad close to her body as if she were trying to protect it. “But I have my own car. I could take him to see you before I go to the stable. I know Ms. Fiona wouldn’t mind if I was a little late. She told me how much you helped her neck.”
Susannah nodded and switched off the light as they left the room and entered the stream of students rushing to their lockers. The noise in the corridor rose, and Susannah smiled, coming to a sudden decision. “I’ll probably see you at the stable,” she said. Though she had no desire to get within ten feet of a horse, it made sense to speak to some of Fiona’s staff. “I’m going to be taking some lessons if Fiona can fit me in.”
“Oh, Dr. Shine, could I give you lessons? Ms. Fiona said I’m ready to work with clients, and I could use the extra money.”
Susannah offered Hayle her hand, and she shook it vigorously. “You have yourself a deal.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Tina Cawthorn finessed a file into the overstuffed cabinet and stared. An aging, chewed-up manila file folder had wedged itself into the corner, preventing the drawer from moving. She placed her hands on the hips of her skinny jeans and scowled.
Thursdays were dress-down days, and Susannah peered at her from the doorway, noting that her own outfit of well-worn denim, a white blouse, and sneakers matched Tina’s. Clean lines favored Tina’s petite figure.
Susannah stepped into the room as Tina dislodged the file and banged the drawer closed with her foot. She noticed her boss and blushed. “Oh, I, uh—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Susannah said, taking in the room dedicated to processing insurance. A few charts sat on one side of Tina’s desk along with a wire basket that just a short time ago had been brimming with piles of paper awaiting filing. In the days since Anita’s death and the slowdown of patients, Tina and Larraine had busied themselves filing and posting payments, and the room was tidier than she had seen it in years. She tucked her hair behind her ear, surprised to find herself wishing for the return of piles of filing. Susannah inspected the cabinet. It was a sturdy behemoth. “Those drawers have taken worse than that.”
Larraine walked by. “There will be no abuse of my file cabinets in this office.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Susannah said. “I’m simply passing through.”
Tina scooped up two of the charts and followed her boss down the hall, balancing a clipboard under her chin as she walked. Susannah entered her office, turned, and arched a brow at her assistant. “If I ignore you, will you go away?”
“I know, you hate this HMO.” Tina smiled. “But I need you to go over these treatment plans today.”
Susannah had always been fond of Tina and Keith, but her sense of loyalty toward them had increased exponentially since Anita’s death. Their support of her had been unwavering, and she took comfort in that.
Tina took a tentative step toward Susannah, her head lowered and shoulders tucked as if she were trying to make herself invisible.
Susannah made a sweeping motion with her arm, and Tina deposited the files on the corner of her desk. She turned away from Susannah and waved to Henry the Eighth, who swished his tail and swam behind the filter. “See! I knew Henry liked me.”
Susannah gave her a thumbs-up and watched her back out of the room and scamper down the hall. She gazed at the charts. Since Anita’s death, she had lost her ability to concentrate on the mundane details of life. Every time her mind calmed down enough to sort through these issues, something else happened to throw her off balance. She thought about Detective Withers. Was she going through something similar, trying to make a way for herself? Or was she an evil woman wielding the power of her office to the detriment of all? Susannah didn’t know, but she had to stay out of the detective’s way long enough to find the killer.
She resisted the urge to flee the office and closed her eyes. As Bitsy had said, her investigation looped back on itself like a dog chasing its tail. Since reviewing all the suspects with her friends on Sunday, she found herself daily reanalyzing what she knew. Perhaps brownies and latte had made her giddy with the belief she could solve this thing. All week, names and motives had been swirling through her head. She slept so poorly that she was becoming exhausted.
A feeling of lightheadedness made her grasp the desk. Stress was messing with her body. The ever-present threat of a vertigo flare-up terrified her, and she shuddered at the memory of that first and worst episode.
“Hold it together, Sister Shine,” she said to herself, mocking the Brooklyn accent of her former partner, Anthony “Tone” Mancuso. “It ain’t over till it’s over.” He would tell her that dwelling on the past wasn’t the answer.
She forced her thoughts back to the present, where the slowdown in patients meant she had to be extra scrupulous with all the documentation that this HMO demanded. She couldn’t afford to let any payments slip through the cracks.
She slurped at the dregs of her coffee and got to work. An hour later, a sense of accomplishment accompanied her as she hustled down the hall and dropped a stack of charts on Tina’s desk and squinted at her. “I’ll be back,” she said, in her best Arnold Schwarzenegger accent.
Tina grinned, but before she could reply, Larraine’s voice came from the front office.
“Dr. Shine?” she called. “It’s Billy Jones. I know you aren’t dressed for seeing patients, but he’s doing poorly.”
“Have him come in,” she replied, trotting back to her desk, aiming to make the pile on Tina’s desk higher before Billy arrived.
Fifteen minutes later, Susannah entered the treatment room steeled to see Marcie Jones, but she was not there. Billy was alone, wearing his Wing Shack polo and a pair of khaki trousers, which were dusted with flour. He sat at the edge of the chair, leaning on its arm.
“Thank you for seeing me.” He rose, pushing himself to a standing position by walking his hands up his thighs. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in blue jeans.”
“Dress-down Thursday.”
Though he was in pain, Susannah noted that he was not nearly as tender to the touch as he had been the last time she worked with him. She was relieved that he was healing. “I see you’re doing better,” she said.
“No, not really. I’m in so much pain, I had to leave work.” He grimaced. “I’m sorry you had to come in on your day off.”
“It’s no problem. It’s not my day off. Tina has made sure I have enough insurance reports on my desk to keep me busy late into the night.”
Billy chuckled. “I’m sorry to hear it. Still, I hate to be a bother.”
“You’re not.” A hiss escaped as a movable segment on the chiropractic treatment table rose into place, lifted by pneumatic pressure.
“I heard you visited Colin’s auto body shop,” Billy said, sp
eaking face down.
“I wouldn’t call it a social visit. I went along with Bitsy because she needed an inspection.”
“I didn’t know that Bitsy was with you.”
“Well, I was with Bitsy,” she said, not willing to admit the true reason for going had been to snoop around and question Colin. The table dropped, and she completed the adjustment.
“Be careful around him, Doc. The man is dangerous.”
Susannah stopped to make some notes. “He doesn’t seem dangerous to me,” she said, as she wrote. “He seems like a man who is unhappy and worried.”
“He should be worried. Randy and the new detective must know by now what he’s capable of. It’s only a matter of time.”
Susannah looked up. “What is?”
“Before they find a way to arrest him. You know he has a criminal record.”
Susannah gripped her pen. “No, I didn’t.”
“I guess it’s not common knowledge. You’d think Randy would have given you and Bitsy a heads-up, seeing as how y’all are friends.”
Billy’s comment hung in the air. It seemed Anita’s death had ignited a bonfire of gossip under normally reticent people. In the past, she wouldn’t have encouraged it, but the town had changed, and she had changed with it. Yet while Colin was an unhappy man who drank too much, he didn’t appear dangerous, except to himself.
She finished the treatment, and Billy stood up without using his thighs for support. Susannah suppressed a frown at the traces of flour on the adjusting table. “Doing better?”
He shifted his weight and then cleared his throat. “A little,” he said. “I know I should come back more often. I get so busy at work.”
“I understand,” Susannah said. “But you need to follow up regularly until the pain is under control. And I think I figured out a way to help.”
“How’s that?”
“I met your daughter at Career Day yesterday. We had a pleasant chat.”
Billy stiffened, grimacing at Susannah, his brow pulled together in pain.
“Are you okay?”
“I got one of those sharp pains is all.” He bent forward, his hands again on his thighs, and took a few ragged breaths.
“Why don’t you sit down and I’ll get you some water.” She stepped toward the door.
“No, no. I’m fine.” He waved her suggestion away. “It grabs when I stand up. It’s gone now. You were saying you met Hayle at school?”
“Yes. She was in my Career Day presentation. I saw her at the Long Branch Stable a few days ago, but I didn’t realize who she was.”
“I didn’t know that you ride.” He reached for his back brace, and Susannah lifted it from the chair and handed it to him.
“I’m learning,” Susannah replied, as he cinched the brace and came to an upright position. “I want to take lessons, and Hayle offered to help me learn. Providing that Fiona will assign her to teach me.”
Billy nodded, listening.
“Hayle volunteered to get you here for your appointments before she goes to the stable.” Susannah chuckled. “It’s a win-win for all of us. Hayle will make some extra money, Marcie won’t have to leave the Wing Shack to help you, and I’ll get over my fear of horses.”
“Win-win,” Billy echoed, his face pale and drawn.
“And you’ll get better faster.” Susannah penned a final note and then placed her hand on his shoulder. “Let me walk you out.”
“Thanks, Doc, you’re a lifesaver,” he said and took a few tentative steps. At the doorway, he turned and looked back. His sandy blond hair fell across one eye. “If you don’t mind me giving you some advice, you be careful now. Colin is not as innocent as he pretends to be.”
“Why do you say that?” she asked. She wasn’t sure if the Peach Grove PD had released the information about Anita being poisoned, but she decided not to let on that she knew. It was doubtful that Colin could have poisoned her, but he spent enough time drinking at the restaurant’s bar to make it a possibility. “You know, he was in his shop when Anita was killed. Stevie Duncan was with him.”
“I’ve known Stevie a long time.” He waved his hand for emphasis. “He’s attached to Colin and would say anything to make sure Colin stays in business and keeps writing him a paycheck.”
“You think he would lie for Colin?”
“Dr. Shine, Stevie is a simple guy, bless his heart,” he said, using the Southern adage that could be interpreted as a put-down. “I think he’d say whatever he has to say to keep his job.”
Susannah hadn’t considered Stevie. She didn’t know him well enough to be familiar with his personal history, but it was clear he had some kind of cognitive or developmental disability. Did she think he was above telling lies?
“Colin blames Tomás for causing his problems, but Tomás is voicing what a lot of us already think.” He moved his bulk off the doorframe. “Be careful around him.”
He left the room in halting steps.
She completed her notes and let her thoughts wander. Colin was around Anita enough, but would he have been able to poison her? Anita served him at the bar. Could she have been drinking or eating too? In all the times that Susannah frequented the Cantina, she had never noticed Anita eating while she worked. She sipped a café con leche at the PGBA meetings, but at the last meeting, Colin was far from both the kitchen and Anita’s drinks. Then again, if he was the killer, it would not have been difficult for him to meet her the day she died. His shop was close by, and Susannah imagined there were plenty of reasons for him to jump into a car he was working on and take it for a spin.
Susannah left the room and found Larraine and Tina, heads together in the insurance room. Tina glanced up. “I heard what Mr. Billy said about Colin,” she said, picking up a few papers. She tapped them into order and placed them in the wire basket. “Do you think he’s right that Mr. Colin is dangerous?”
“We did keep him on the suspect list,” Larraine reminded them, looking over her glasses at Susannah.
Susannah nodded. “We just have to keep looking for evidence. You can’t judge a book by its cover, and right now we have no reason for Colin wanting Anita dead.”
“Amen to that,” Larraine said and made her way back to her computer at the front desk.
Susannah rubbed her wrist. “I’m not sure that he is dangerous,” she said to Tina, who was now seated at her desk. The insurance room was Tina’s domain, and the wall above her desk held a few pictures; a calendar featuring puppies and kittens was attached to a file cabinet with plastic smiley-face magnets. Susannah’s gaze stopped at a framed picture that sat in a clear area on the edge of the desk. Keith in his military dress uniform smiled down on Tina, who grinned back in an off-the-shoulder white wedding gown. Soon there would be baby pictures next to the wedding picture. “But he is worked up, maybe even desperate. That could make him dangerous.”
Tina shook her head. “I don’t even know. Keith told me that with a crime like this, there would be a lot of gossip. From what I heard, Mr. Billy is living proof of that.”
Susannah nodded, hoping he wasn’t proof that she was totally off the mark in her assessment of Colin and Stevie. Her theories all had their flaws, but she didn’t think Colin and Anita had been an item. Given that she had also seen a blue sedan outside the Cantina, she believed that the mystery person was not Colin. But could he have another motive to want her dead?
Tina interrupted her thoughts, bringing her back to the present. “Ms. Larraine is paging you.” She handed Susannah the phone.
When Susannah finished speaking to Larraine, she turned back to Tina. “When you’re done with what you’re doing, why don’t you pick up something for us to eat? You must be hungry now that you’re eating for two.”
“One and a half,” Tina corrected.
Susannah laughed. She watched Tina brighten at the thought.
Tina said, “The first thing my doctor told me was to not get carried away with that ‘eating for two’ idea. But I’ve been so good on my diet,
I’m going to treat myself to a tea. I’ve cut way back on the caffeine and sugar, but I think I deserve a big glass of iced tea. Unsweetened, of course.”
“I think you do.” Susannah beamed. At least there was one positive event on which to focus. She looked forward to being an unofficial aunt.
Tina sprang up and grabbed her purse. Susannah said, “Larraine will give you some cash. Make sure you get something for her, too. Don’t let her tell you she’s watching her figure.”
Tina chuckled and left.
Half an hour later, Susannah looked up from a file, the rumbling from her stomach spurring her into action. Tina should have returned by now. She picked up the phone and buzzed Larraine.
“Any word from Tina?”
“No.” Larraine paused. “Come to think of it, I thought I heard a car come into the parking lot a while ago. Let me go look.” The connection went silent; then, soft rock came through the speaker.
Susannah moved her mouse back and forth as she worked through an online insurance preapproval for a patient. Suddenly, a scream reverberated through the office. The mouse shot across her desk as she jumped to her feet.
“Call 911!” Larraine yelled. “Tina’s been hurt.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Susannah picked up her mobile phone from the desk, dialing 911 as she ran. As the dispatcher’s voice came on the line, she felt lightheaded and came to a stop. Steadying herself with a hand on the wall, she moved out of her office and down the hall, searching for Larraine, who she found standing in the open doorway waving her out to the staff parking lot. Susannah’s mouth went dry.
“911, what is your emergency?” the dispatcher repeated.
“I need an ambulance.” She struggled to get the words out as she flew through the back door, pulse pounding. Tina lay sprawled on her back, her face ashen and her breathing labored, gravel powder dusting her gold hoop earrings. A disposable drink cup spilled its contents onto the ground. “My assistant is ill. She’s unconscious.”