Missy DeMeanor Cozy Mysteries Boxset

by Brianna Bates

  He sipped his water.

  “So back to the run last night,” Missy prompted.

  “Oh. Right. She had the look when we ran into each other. I was getting ready for her to say something outrageous. All I kept thinking about was how she’d stolen my idea and never admitted or apologized for it.”

  Missy was on the edge of her seat. Adam was a little more animated now that he was talking about last night.

  “She said she wanted to talk to me tomorrow—which would have been today.”

  “What about?”

  “She whipped right past me because she was running so fast, so there was no time to talk about it.”

  “Did you respond?”

  “You bet I did.” Adam nodded. He was starting to get agitated now. “I told her I had nothing to say until she admitted she stole my idea.”

  “Oh wow.”

  “Oh yeah.” Adam grabbed his plate and stood. “And you know what she did? She just kept running.”

  “It sounded like she was trying to set a PR to me,” Missy said.

  “Of course she was.” Adam shook his head. “She was more worried about a PR than she was about anything else. That woman was so …”

  He stopped talking, as if embarrassed to be speaking negatively about a recently-dead woman.

  “I didn’t mean to upset you,” Missy said. She kept what she was thinking to herself. Eliana wanted to talk to Adam to apologize to him. But he didn’t know that.

  “You didn’t upset me,” he said, sounding very upset of course. “Eliana did. She just …”

  He stopped again.

  “She was difficult,” Missy said.

  Adam nodded. “I better not say anything else. I’m too angry right now.”

  Missy watched him stalk off and throw his plate of barbecue chicken into the trash can. Adam had gotten pretty angry by the end of their conversation over something that had happened a few years ago. Then again, maybe seeing Eliana last night and talking to her for the first time since had made the old injury feel new again.

  Was her stealing one idea from him enough of a motive?

  Maybe.

  And thinking back to the classes she’d attended at WiredFit, Adam was a good runner. Not a great one. He was better than the average male member at WiredFit. He’d just gotten to the hill before Missy and Marie, meaning he’d been on pace to run a little better than an eight minute mile.

  If he ran that pace Friday night, he would have been in the general area of Eliana’s fall. And right after it had started to rain.

  ***

  “Hey, Gabby,” Missy said.

  “How are you feeling?”

  Missy smiled. “I feel great.”

  “You looked great out there.”

  “So did you!” Missy said. “I feel like you’ve gotten a lot faster since I joined WiredFit.”

  Gabby smiled proudly. “Not to brag, but I have.”

  Missy pointed at the swing. “You mind if I?”

  “Please.”

  Missy sat on the porch swing next to Gabby. It had been a hot day but now it was turning into a chilly night. A half-moon rose through the trees in front of them. It was about nine o’clock now. The bonfire was still going. Everybody was still going strong.

  The porch swing creaked a little when Missy sat. They gained equilibrium and then started a slow, lazy swing. It felt good.

  “So what did you do to get faster?” Missy asked.

  “I tried everything,” Gabby said. “Anastasia hooked me up with Jeremy at first to change how I ran, if you can believe it.”

  Missy nodded. “She just tried to do the same thing with me.”

  “She made it sound real easy, but seriously? Changing the way you run is like asking somebody to change how they breathe.”

  Missy laughed. “Pretty much.”

  “After you run a certain way all your life, it’s really hard to change.” Gabby shook her head. “I don’t know how Jeremy did it, because I sure as heck couldn’t.”

  “So you didn’t? Change the way you ran?”

  “I tried. For three months. I kept getting shin splints, then my ankle started to hurt, and then my lower back was tender … the body is a system. Change one thing and it affects everything else. I would try to run on my toes, get sort of hurt, stay off my feet for a few days, then try again … it was a vicious cycle. After three months of not making any progress and only feeling worse, I said enough was enough.”

  “You run on your heels then?” Missy asked.

  “Yep. Proud heel-striker here.” Gabby laughed. “I did change one thing though.”

  “What?”

  “I shortened my stride.”

  “How’d you do that?”

  “You focus on turning your feet over more quickly,” Gabby said. “The easiest way is to count how many times one foot hits the ground in a minute while you’re on a treadmill, then try to increase that by a certain number while running at the same pace. You end up quickening your feet.”

  “That sounds just as hard.”

  Gabby laughed. “It probably was! But I didn’t get hurt and after a few months it felt good. Less wear and tear on your joints if your strides are shorter. Six miles doesn’t wipe me out anymore.”

  “Maybe I should give it a try.”

  “I think you need new shoes.”

  “I do?” Missy wasn’t expecting to get advice.

  Gabby nodded. “You pronate a little too much when you run.”

  “Pronate?”

  Gabby smiled and explained how the foot was supposed to move when walking or running. Missy listened and got lost a bit in the details. Throughout the conversation, she’d been trying to think of ways to steer Gabby toward the topic of Eliana. No real opportunity had presented itself. So she just had to be blunt.

  “Gabby, I talked to Anastasia and I have to say I’m impressed with how you handled the Eliana situation.”

  Gabby arched her eyebrows, obviously surprised at the sudden change of subject. “I felt like a snitch, to be honest. I was of two minds there, but when someone else mentioned it to me and was thinking about leaving the gym because she felt uncomfortable, I knew I had to tell Anastasia.”

  “I don’t mean just telling Anastasia. I mean after, when Eliana freaked out on you.”

  Gabby gave her a look. “How did you find out about that?”

  “Marie.”

  “Of course.” Gabby smiled. “Marie knows all.”

  Missy stayed quiet.

  Gabby filled the silence. “She came after me in the parking lot. Actually pushed me up against my car. I was really scared.”

  “You seemed pretty cool about everything when we talked earlier today.”

  Gabby shrugged. “What can I say? It happened a while ago. Water under the bridge. I’d put her friendship with Anastasia in jeopardy. And Eliana had a volatile personality. Looking at the situation objectively, I’m not surprised by how she acted. Especially when I found out what she was taking wasn’t illegal.”

  “It wasn’t exactly legal either.”

  “Right. But either way, Anastasia had a strict policy and Eliana was taking advantage of her friendship by doing something like that in the locker room. It cast a pall over everything else Anastasia had done. The people I talked to started wondering if Anastasia was doing the same thing. If that got out, her reputation would have been ruined and she would have lost everything.”

  “Right.”

  “It wasn’t fair to Anastasia,” Gabby said. “It was really wrong of Eliana to do that. If she absolutely had to take the supplement—rightly or wrongly, I don’t care—then at the very least she should have done it at home. Why put Anastasia in that position by using a needle in the women’s locker room? It was thoughtless of her. Or she knew what she was doing and didn’t care. Either way it made her a bad friend.”

  Missy nodded. “So she attacked you in the parking lot one night?”

  “Attacked is a strong word.” Gabby thought about
it. “No, you know what? Attacked is the right word. I’ve been trying to be nice and I’ve been tiptoeing around the subject because she just died. But the truth is, Eliana came after me. She was screaming in my face about how I’d ruined her life over nothing. Over nothing. I thought she was going to kill me. I was really afraid. I screamed for help, I screamed fire like they always tell you to scream so somebody will pay attention. Thank God Anastasia heard me. She came running out and jumped right between us before Eliana could do anything. And if it had been anyone else, anyone other Anastasia, I’m pretty sure Eliana would have just kept coming.”

  “That must have been scary.”

  “Terrifying.” Gabby looked down for a moment. “After it happened, I started taking krav maga, actually.”

  “Really?”

  “I was totally defenseless,” Gabby said. “And I never wanted to feel that way again. So I actually cut back on my WiredFit workouts to do two nights a week at a dojo. I still go, once a week and once on the weekends just to keep up with it.”

  “I’ve heard that’s pretty intense,” Missy said.

  “Both physically and mentally.” Gabby nodded. “They really work you hard and push you to your limits—and beyond. I’m so much more aware of my surroundings now. Like when it started raining last night. It was like I suddenly had this extra sense and could really focus, you know? I knew I was about to take that high trail in a few minutes, right where … you know where. Anyway, krav maga trains the mind as much as it does the body. I love it.”

  “Not to mention that you could do some serious damage if anybody ever tried to attack you again.”

  “That too.” Gabby smirked.

  Missy made small-talk for a few more minutes then excused herself. While she walked away from the porch, Missy ran down her mental notes.

  Gabby had been near the crime scene too, just a few minutes before it had started to rain. She was a heel-striker. Eliana had attacked her before. Literally, physically attacked her. But only now, Gabby knew how to kick some serious butt. Missy knew a little about krav maga from Tyler. He had taken it sporadically during his years as a police officer, because it was a great self-defense system that had been developed by the Israelis. Gabby wasn’t as strong as Eliana, but now she could fight.

  But at the same time, the bad blood between Gabby and Eliana was old news. Gabby didn’t seem the type to carry a grudge. Missy couldn’t picture Gabby purposely going out of her way to confront Eliana. It was one thing to know how to defend yourself, but it was another thing entirely to throw the first punch on a rainy night in the darkness against a woman who was a little unbalanced.

  Gabby was a suspect, just like Adam. But just like Adam, the confrontation between her and Eliana was old. Why would Gabby just now confront Eliana about the past? What would motivate her to do that? She wasn’t a vindictive person.

  Missy shook her head. Wasn’t that true of everybody here? Sure, Eliana had done or said something to rankle just about everybody but whatever had happened had happened a year, two years, or even longer ago. Who here would carry a grudge that long?

  Nobody at WiredFit seemed the type.

  So maybe it wasn’t an old grudge. Maybe Eliana had done something last night that seriously angered somebody. Maybe Eliana and this person had a contentious history and Eliana did something else last night.

  That made a little more sense. But only a little more. If something that significant with Eliana had happened last night, Missy would have heard about it now.

  As she headed back to the bonfire, Missy went over everything again in her mind. But she didn’t get anywhere. All she had were unlikely suspects and a lot of circumstantial evidence tying certain individuals to the crime scene. She needed something more than that.

  Headlights trapped her for a moment. Missy turned and spotted Lieutenant Simon’s SUV pulling into the lot fronting the cabins. The cop killed his engine and hopped out. He headed for the men’s cabin.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Missy found Anastasia by the oak trees. She was smoking a cigar with several of the guys, including Carl, Adam, and Paul.

  “Missy!” They were all excited to see her, like she’d won the race today instead of coming in dead last.

  “Hey, guys.” She sidled up next to Anastasia. The cigar smoke was heavy and pungent, but she did her best to ignore it.

  They resumed their conversation. The guys were arguing about bodybuilding versus powerlifting and then a sidebar broke out around the efficacy of functional training and then Adam started arguing that he saw most of his gains when he did high reps and high frequency, and Missy’s head was soon spinning with all the jargon and acronyms she didn’t understand.

  Anastasia leaned over. “It’s a bit much. Sometimes I can hardly keep track of what I’m doing in the middle of a workout because I’ve tried literally every approach and methodology that’s out there. And of course, everybody swears by theirs.”

  “It sounds like exercise only gets more and more complicated over time?”

  Anastasia nodded. “If you want to keep making progress, yes. Your body adapts to the stress you put on it. Kind of like that old anecdote about tanning.”

  “I don’t think I’ve heard that one.”

  “Let’s say you decide to work on your tan one summer. So you go to the pool and layout for twenty minutes, ten minutes on your back and ten minutes on your stomach. At the end of the first week, you’ve got the start of a good tan, right?”

  Missy laughed. “For me, that’s the start of a really good burn.”

  Anastasia smiled. “So you stick with that program all summer. Twenty minutes laying out. Ten on your back and ten on your stomach.”

  “Right.”

  “At the end of the summer, how tan are you?”

  Missy’s kneejerk response was: very tan. But before she opened her mouth, she thought about it a little more and changed the context of the hypothetical.

  What if she only ran one mile, three times a week? Would that enable her to run three miles at the end of the year? Not really.

  “I wouldn’t be much tanner than I was at the end of the first week, would I?”

  Anastasia pointed the cigar at her. “Exactly, Miss. Exactly. Your body would get used to that amount of sun and adapt as much as it needed to, but no more. So you see, that’s why we knuckleheads argue about progression all the time. We’re looking for ways to get stronger or faster or more flexible or more functional or all those things combined—we’re trying to figure out how to force our bodies to continually adapt.”

  “I understand.” Missy nodded in Jeremy’s direction. “Jeremy must have figured something out. He set a PR on the course tonight.”

  “He’s been working hard,” Anastasia said.

  “And to think, he was stuck for the longest time, you were telling me.”

  Anastasia nodded. “That’s what happens. Over time, over years, you make progress. But there are stretches where you don’t. Those are the worst. You just have to tough it out and bide your time till your breakthrough.”

  Missy lowered her voice. “Could I talk to you a moment?”

  Anastasia looked surprised. “Sure, Miss.”

  They walked a little bit away from the group. The half-moon was high overhead now, the night getting even chillier. Missy was glad she’d brought a sweatshirt.

  “What’s up, Missy?”

  “I talked to Gabby.”

  “You talked to Gabby?” Anastasia was playing dumb.

  Missy nodded. “Eliana attacked her, and you had to intervene.”

  Anastasia nodded sadly. “Bad night. Just a bad night. It always hurts to see two friends fight.”

  “Yes,” Missy said. “It scared Gabby enough she took up krav maga.”

  “The one good thing to come out of that night,” Anastasia said. “Let’s hope she never has to use her newfound skill set.”

  “Did Gabby and Eliana have another confrontation?”

  “After that?”


  Missy nodded.

  “They didn’t have another chance to see each other till yesterday. I told Eliana she had to leave the gym as soon as I got her under control that night.”

  “They never saw each other again?”

  Anastasia shook her head. “Not in person.”

  “But?”

  Anastasia looked at Missy for a long moment. “Eliana found out where she worked, but fortunately they had security controls in place inside the building. But things worsened. Eliana was disqualified from a few races and barred from the Celtic Games for a year, and she really flew off the handle. She started a blog and said a lot of nasty things about Gabby and she made veiled references to the gym without specifically naming it.”

  “Are you serious?”

  Anastasia nodded. “It got really bad. Gabby was talking to an attorney about getting a restraining order and I tried to intervene again …”

  Missy wondered why in the world Gabby hadn’t mentioned any of this to her, and also why Anastasia had given the woman another chance. Violating club policy was one thing, but publicly trashing the gym on a blog or inside fitness forums was like using the nuclear option.

  “You’re a better woman than me,” Missy said. “For reconciling with her.”

  Anastasia looked away. “She was in a bad place. A real bad place. I’ve been there. We’ve all probably been there, one way or another. And when Eliana reached back out to me, she was very contrite and sincere in her apology. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t an easy decision to make. I labored over it for a couple weeks. But then I kept thinking about how Eliana helped me out of a tight spot many years ago, so I felt like I was paying it back to her.”

  “Gabby didn’t mention any of this,” Missy said. “She seems pretty blasé about the past.”

  “Gabby’s a good woman. She felt horrible about telling me, but it was the right thing to do. She saved me a few of my very good members. And I think she was just trying to move on.”