“Oh, you,” Mary said, clearly disbelieving the compliment. “What can I do for you, sweetie?”
“I need a background check on this person.” She handed her a piece of paper with Ben White’s pertinent information. Mary squinted at it and glanced around the room.
“Where are my glasses? I can’t see a thing.”
“They’re on your head,” Sadie pointed out.
Mary felt on top of her head and rolled her eyes as she pulled her glasses onto her nose. “Are you dating this man? Don’t be embarrassed. I think it’s smart to check men out before you get serious. You can’t be too careful these days.”
“No, nothing like that. He’s a client.” The word felt odd on Sadie’s tongue, but it also brought a strange sense of pride. She had always enjoyed working. The lack the past few weeks had left her feeling vaguely despondent.
“I see,” Mary said. Sadie wondered if she really did. “I heard about your new business. I keep up on you Coopers. How’s Gideon? Still miserable?”
“If he has a mood other than miserable, I’ve yet to see it.”
Mary laughed. “Believe it or not, he was at his best when he was here and working on a case.”
“I believe it,” Sadie said. Like her, her father liked to work. It was no big secret that he loathed retirement. Why he chose to retire so soon was anyone’s guess.
“You know why he retired as soon as he was eligible?” Mary asked as if she had been reading Sadie’s mind.
“I have no idea.”
“Because of you. He wanted to spend more time with you. He had this whole road trip to Nebraska planned. I think he would have considered moving there if you had stayed.”
Sadie bent over laughing.
“I’m serious,” Mary said when she could get in a word over Sadie’s guffaws. “He talked to me about it at lunch one day. He might not know how to express it, but he feels bad about the way things are between you, Sadie.”
Sadie stood upright and wiped her eyes. “You and Gideon had lunch?”
Mary turned to her computer, busying herself with work. “We lunched together a lot when he was working. We were friends.”
Her father had fishing buddies and poker buddies, but he had never mentioned Mary as a friend. “Friends? With Gideon?”
“Is that so hard to believe?” Mary asked. “We worked together for fifteen years.”
“But Gideon is so…”
“I know what Gideon is,” Mary said. “Believe me.”
She was blushing, Mary was blushing. “Mary, you like Gideon.”
The blush intensified. “Keep it down, Sadie, or the whole office will start to gossip. And I do not like Gideon. Anyone past the age of forty is not allowed to have schoolgirl crushes; it’s the law. Gideon and I were work friends. I haven’t seen him or spoken to him since he retired.”
Female translation: Gideon hadn’t made contact in three years and Mary’s feelings were terribly hurt. “If it counts for anything at all, Mary, you have my vote. Why Dad didn’t seize on you and make a move is beyond me.”
Mary picked up a pamphlet and fanned herself. “Gracious, Sadie. It wasn’t like that. And your dad wouldn’t be interested in me anyway. Have you seen him? He’s a very handsome man.”
“You’re beautiful. And ew, I don’t like to think of my dad in those terms.”
“I’m just saying that if your dad is ever interested in someone again, it will be someone like your mom; now she was a beauty.”
“And we all saw how well that worked out. Look, I’m not often in the position to stand up for Gideon, but I think his reluctance to date has everything to do with him and nothing to do with you. Let’s just say he has plenty of reason to be gun shy.”
“I know that,” Mary said. The warmth and sympathy in her tone were heartrending. Impossible as it was for Sadie to imagine, Mary really did seem to care about her dad. She shook her head. Someone had a thing for her dad; the new information was too much to take in.
“I also need information on any missing persons’ reports from this year, the unresolved ones, I mean.” Lots of people were reported missing without ever making the news. Usually because they had simply run away and come back.
“Off the top of my head I can think of three that are still open, but I’ll double check on that. It’s going to take some time to find them and make copies.”
Sadie did some lightning-quick plotting. “I have a super busy schedule today. Would it be an imposition to drop them by my house? I live next door to Dad now.” She watched the wheels in Mary’s head turn as she caught up to her scheming.
“I suppose I could do that,” she said. “What time?”
“Any time after six should work.” Gideon mysteriously disappeared during the day sometimes, but he was always home by six to watch the evening news.
“Sounds good,” Mary said with a smile.
Sadie turned to go, but Mary had a final word. “Sadie,” she called. Sadie paused and turned back. “You’re just like your dad, you know that? You two—always thinking and plotting something.”
What was a compliment to Mary wasn’t one to Sadie, so she smiled and nodded without reply. With the ball officially rolling on her investigation, she pulled out her phone and dialed Ben White. She hoped he would be available to meet and offer up more information. After she had a chance to think about things, she realized how little information she had to go on. He suggested she come to his house. Luke’s ominous warning about predatory men popped into her head, and she suggested they meet somewhere for coffee instead.
“Coffee sounds perfect,” he agreed. “I could use a pick me up. I stopped taking the medicine and I’ve had insomnia again. Do you have a place in mind?”
She gave him the location of her favorite coffee shop and dialed Abby to see if she wanted to join the meeting. “I’m serving meals at the senior center today,” Abby said. “But I can be there if you need me.”
“No, I’ll fill you in,” Sadie said. In truth, she preferred for Abby to pick and choose the portions of the business she wanted to be involved with. An octogenarian should be able to work whenever she wanted, and Sadie was happy to do more than her fair share of the footwork.
Ben was waiting on her when she arrived at the coffee shop. She congratulated herself on being more professional today, at least in dress. She had wanted to beat him to the shop, but she should have known he was the type to get there first. Technical writers, engineers, and soldiers were all known for being precise, and he was all three.
He stood as she approached the table, sitting again only after she sat. He was handsome in a debonair kind of way. Today, like before, he wore a sport coat and khaki pants which made the meeting feel formal, but his demeanor was melancholy, borderline anxious. She could picture him as a brooding literature professor, one for whom the coeds would form a line. He was thirty four—younger than she first thought.
“Thank you for meeting me on such short notice,” she said.
“I’m happy to. You have no idea how anxious I am to figure out what’s going on, although I have to admit that I feel a little sheepish about seeking help. I’ve been trying to figure things out on my own, but I keep hitting dead ends. No, scratch that, I don’t even know where to start.”
“Let’s start with some facts, if you don’t mind.” She pulled a pad of paper and a pen from her purse. “When did the dreams begin?”
“Not too long after I started taking the medicine. That was last October. I think the dreams started sometime after Thanksgiving. They were mild at first, typical nightmares. I remembered them, but it wasn’t anything that left me disturbed. They began to accelerate around Christmas. I chalked that up to stress. I don’t have what you would consider to be a happy family. I had some visits with my mom that ended in our usual warfare, and that’s when the dreams really started to amp up in intensity. They continued at that level for a while—disturbing, but not haunting. And then I guess it was sometime in the spring when I began to won
der what I was doing in my sleep.”
“Did you ever try to get help, to figure out what was going on?”
“Of course,” he said. On the table, his hand wadded the napkin and let it go, over and over. “I recorded myself sleeping night after night, but nothing happened. I went to a sleep clinic, and it was the same thing. My REM cycles were perfect. I didn’t even flail. After that I felt better, and I tried to let it go. Then there was the incident with the…” he leaned forward and lowered his voice to a whisper even though they were the only people in the shop. “The blood.”
“Do you remember what date that was?”
“June thirteenth.”
“It’s September,” Sadie declared.
He ground his palms into his eyes and let out a breath. “Look, Sadie, I know. I know how all this sounds, okay? That’s why I waited so long. I tried to forget it, tried to convince myself it was nothing, tried to come up with a rational explanation. But I can’t let it go until I know for sure I’m innocent. If I’ve done something, even something while I was asleep, I’ll never forgive myself.”
“Let’s take it a step at a time. Hold on to the conviction that it’s probably nothing,” Sadie said. The guy was in misery, and she felt for him. Not bad enough to return his deposit, but still bad.
He looked up from behind his palms. “Do you think that? Do you really think it might be nothing?”
“I really do. Murdering someone in your sleep is so fantastical. The physicality required to do something of that level, to say nothing of your motivation, would have to be off the charts. Even under duress, if medicine could be considered duress, I don’t find it feasible.”
A smile tugged the corner of his lips and she found herself staring at it in surprise. Ben had a nice smile. “Those were a lot of big words. My private investigator is smart.”
“You should always hire the best,” she said, feeling a little flustered at the compliment. She was used to men complimenting her looks, not her brains.
“I think I did,” Ben said. Was he flirting with her? Before she could decide, he flagged down a waiter and ordered coffee for both of them.
“Tell me about your time in the army, if you can,” she said.
He smiled again. “I probably made it sound like I thought I was Rambo the other day. Most of the time it was your basic military career—a lot of marching, a lot of order taking, getting shuttled wherever I was sent without putting down roots. The bad parts were such a minor episode, but they bothered me more than the other guys. I don’t know how I made it through the training videos. They showed us a bunch to desensitize us. I put on a brave face, and then I went around the corner and puked my guts out. I should have given up then; I should have realized I wasn’t cut out for what they wanted us to do. But I was young, stupid, and full of bravado. I thought I had a lot to prove to a dad who never thought I was worth very much. I wanted to be a Ranger to make him proud.”
“I’m guessing by your tone that it didn’t work,” Sadie said.
“If it did, he never told me. He took my discharge hard, and then he died a year later. All I ever wanted was for him to be my dad and me to be his kid, but he had all these expectations. I was supposed to be everything he never was—a recipe for disaster from the beginning.”
Their coffee arrived. Sadie sipped so she wouldn’t have to comment. His relationship with his dad reminded her too much of her relationship with her mom. “Ben, please don’t be offended by what I’m about to say, but have you ever considered professional help?”
“I know that every crazy person in the world insists they’re not crazy, but I’m seriously not crazy, Sadie. And I have a signed letter from my psychiatrist that says so. I went to a lot of therapy after my discharge. At first I was really into it, and then when I was spilling my guts one day I realized that there was nothing wrong with me. I just didn’t like killing people. I mean, how messed up is the system if you’re sent to therapy because you have a problem with taking a life? True, my family was messed up, but whose family isn’t? I decided to give up on therapy, stop focusing on myself and my problems, and just live my life. Since then everything was great until the insomnia and the dreams.” He rubbed the spot between his eyes with his thumb. “I’m so sorry. I know how all this sounds because I hear myself saying it and think, ‘Wow, that guy is off his nut.’ But I’m not; I’m just having the world’s worst year coinciding with the world’s worst headache.”
“Would you like some aspirin?” Sadie asked. “I always carry a bottle in my purse.”
“That would be great, Sadie, thank you.”
She rifled through her bag until she located the pills and shook a couple into his hand. He downed them with a long swig of hot coffee.
“What else do you want to know?” he asked. “Please, ask me anything.” He rubbed at the spot between his eyes again, and Sadie felt remorse. She was pelting him with questions when he had a migraine.
“You don’t have to talk anymore if you don’t want to. I hate to talk when I have a headache. It’s the only time I’m ever quiet.”
He gave her another one of those dazzling smiles and she felt a disturbing flutter in her stomach. She should not be attracted to him in any way. Her business was too new for ground rules, but the first should be not getting romantically involved with clients. Shouldn’t it? Yes. She would go home, write it down, and nail it to the wall in order to remember.
“You’re the most self-deprecating gorgeous woman I’ve ever met. I have to tell you that the combination of beauty and humility is lethal. If I weren’t in the middle of a breakdown, I might be tempted to fall in love with you, Sadie Cooper.”
“Yes, well,” Sadie mumbled, flustered again. She was used to being in control with men. Ben was taking her by surprise, and she didn’t like it. And she was confused by her response to him. She sipped her coffee and scanned the interior of the coffee shop as she tried to think of her next move.
“I hate to cut this meeting short, but those pills just aren’t working. I think I’m going to go lie down in a dark room and hope for relief. Thank you for meeting me today, Sadie. I have every confidence in your abilities.” He tossed money on the table, and then he was gone.
Sadie stared at the money, dazed. What had just happened here? Why had he left so abruptly? Was it really because of a headache or, as Sadie suspected, was it Ben’s way of maintaining the upper hand? And if that were the case, why did he feel the need? There had been something between them today. Sadie didn’t know what it was, and she didn’t like it. Had he felt it and been disturbed, too? Should she clarify that she wasn’t interested in him? She was tempted to call and explain. She pulled out her phone and froze. Whether intentional or not, Ben had left her thinking of him and wanting further contact. She had used the same tactic many times on men she wanted to date. She always left during a high point, always left them wanting more, and it always worked. They called. Sadie didn’t know if Ben was playing her or not, but she refused to be sucked in regardless. She tucked her phone back in her purse and finished her coffee. He was her client and nothing more. She wouldn’t be attracted to him, and she wouldn’t be sucked into any games, if that was what he was doing.
She told herself as much even as her hand itched to call him and find closure for their meeting. The abrupt ending had left things feeling unfinished between them, and the unresolved issues made her anxious. She zipped her purse to avoid the temptation of reaching for her phone, and then she finished her coffee and drove home. So intent was she on figuring out her client’s odd behavior that it never once occurred to her that she was being watched and followed.
Chapter 4
The house appeared empty when Sadie arrived home, but she had learned that looks could be deceiving. It was huge and sounds didn’t carry well. Abby was serving meals at the senior center, but where was Luke? She tiptoed to the kitchen in case he was home. With the load he was carrying for his doctorate, he needed all the quiet study time he could get.
Sadie yelped and dropped an apple on her foot. “What are you doing?”
“Proving to you that I can move quietly,” Luke said.
“Sneak up on me again, and you’re going to have to dodge an apple to the head, Jet Li.” She bent to retrieve the apple, washing it in the sink again. “Why are you dressed?”
“As opposed to my normal state of nudity?”
“As opposed to the Doctor Who t-shirt and running pants you wear on the days you don’t leave the house,” she said. They sat at the table.
Luke grinned. “Look who has my routine memorized.”
“Yeah, it was a tough nut to crack, what with all the sleeping, eating, and reading you do.” She took a bite of her apple before he stole it. In retribution, she propped her feet in his lap.
Slumbered to Death Page 4