by Jessa Archer
We agreed, and he went back to his car to make the call to Grady, while I stepped outside to call Paige and let the Whitley siblings continue their talk in private. Andrew was still really angry at Audra, and I didn’t blame him. I wasn’t sure if she’d broken any actual laws, however. At least, I didn’t think so. Is it illegal to pay your boyfriend to marry your mother so that you can get back in her will? Unethical, sure, and maybe it could be prosecuted under fraud, but that was a stretch. Audra could probably be charged with failing to report what she’d discovered about the murder, but the fact that there was a hostage situation going on with the dog would make it hard for anyone with a heart to hold that against her.
I called Paige to give her a heads-up that an officer would be stopping by in the next few minutes to pick up the dust container from our vacuum. She laughed when I told her thanks for not emptying it. I’d said that often enough in the past, but the words had always been dripping with sarcasm.
When Travis finished his call, I walked over to his car. “Are you going to be in trouble about this? I mean, about not going out to Mayor Winstead’s place when he snapped his fingers?”
“Not now,” he said, as a smile spread across his face. “I can now tell Winstead that I had an active hostage situation going on.”
“Might not want to admit that the hostage is a dog.”
“True. I just hope we can deliver Rebecca Whitley’s actual killer without any harm coming to the little guy. Like I said before, you have to admire his spunk. Attila is twice his size.”
“True. But you didn’t know we had a hostage situation—even of the canine variety—when you turned the car around,” I pointed out gently. “You could have gotten all the way down here and discovered that we hadn’t even located their cars.”
He shrugged. “I decided to listen to my cop instinct, I guess. It was screaming at me the whole time that the Gonzalezes didn’t have anything to do with this, but I didn’t listen, because I had the mayor and Alicia screaming in my other ear. When you chimed in earlier in the parking lot, you helped drown out the noise from Winstead and Alicia. I trust your instincts more than I do theirs, so I decided not to fight it. It was like those cartoons where you have the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other.”
“So, I get to play the angel in this little drama? That’s a bit of a stretch. But hey, I like a challenge.”
He laughed and pulled me closer. “This whole chief of police thing is still kind of new to me, Tig. I’ve barely been in the job a year. Before that, I always had someone else as a buffer from the pressures of the political types. Mayor Winstead needs to back off and let me do my job. And I think he will, but I have to learn to push back harder.”
“Except, he could fire you,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, but he’d have to make a case to the city commissioners. And at least a few of them don’t like the way he’s been trying to politicize law enforcement around here. Plus, we’re going to bring Rebecca Whitley’s killer in tonight. Even Alicia will have a hard time spinning that in a negative light.”
I laughed. “Oh, wow. You’re getting all sunshine and lollipops with the optimism there, Chief Lamm. Alicia can spin absolutely anything in a bad light.”
“Then I guess we’re lucky that most of Caratoke is too smart to take her so-called journalism seriously.”
That also sounded a little optimistic to me, but I kind of liked this look-on-the-bright-side attitude coming from Travis. So I didn’t argue the point, and I definitely didn’t argue when he kissed me. “I’m sorry for listening to them instead of you at first,” he said. “I’ll try to do better. I really don’t want this to be one of those relationships where you feel like I’m a constant work in progress.”
I shrugged. “Everybody is a work in progress.”
We moved the cars closer to Audra’s apartment building, but still well out of sight, and went over the details of the plan while we waited for Grady to arrive. Rick had Audra’s keys, so she would have to talk her way in. Most of the work of selling this was going to fall on her shoulders, so I really hoped that she was a decent actress. Leo’s fate was hanging on that almost as much as it was hanging on his hatred for my cat.
There was a stairwell two doors down from the unit that Audra was leasing, on the same side of the hallway. The plan was for her to convince Rick that she was sorry for walking out earlier. He’d been right, and she didn’t want to sleep in the car. She’d give him the jewelry she’d taken from the house now, if he let her in. And if Leo started barking, which he might do just from hearing her voice, then she would remind Rick that it was a no-pets building and add a caution that if he hurt Leo, the whole deal was off.
Grady arrived a few minutes later, pulling his police car into the space next to us. Then he carried over the vacuum canister, which was packed with gray cat hair.
Audra sniffed when she saw it. “I’m allergic to dust. And cats. So someone else is going to have to handle that unless you want me sneezing through my negotiation with Rick.”
“I can do it,” I told Travis. When his mouth tightened, I added, “You and Grady need to be on alert in case you have to use your weapons. I’ll get back into the stairwell as soon as I dump it. If Leo doesn’t start an uproar because he smells Attila, I’ll cue up the YouTube video. I can guarantee that hearing Attila will send him into orbit.”
“Assuming he’s still okay,” Audra said.
“He’s okay,” Andrew said, squeezing his sister’s shoulder. “He’s Rick’s insurance policy until he has the money and the jewelry you have in your bag. I just wish I was going to be up there with you.” He’d agreed to watch the back exit and had his cell phone out, ready to dial the local police if Rick managed to get out of the building.
Travis led us through the whole thing once more, and then we walked over to Audra’s building. We made a brief stop at the back so that I could pull the trash cans I’d knocked down earlier into the area directly behind Rick’s car. It wouldn’t stop him, but it might slow him down a bit. This had Travis very much on edge, since Audra said that the stretch of drive where the cans were currently was visible from a window inside her apartment. Having uniformed officers pulling in the cans would be kind of a giveaway, though, and Rick would be more likely to recognize Audra or Andrew than me.
I felt very exposed as I piled the bags back into the four cans and moved them toward the building. My eyes—and Travis’s, I was quite sure—kept flicking up to the fourth-floor window that Audra had pointed out. But if the blinds moved, I didn’t notice.
We reached the front door of the building a few minutes later. Audra pushed the buzzer for the guard, and Travis gave him a basic breakdown of the situation.
“I’ve got a civilian watching the back exit,” Travis told him. “This should go smoothly, but in case the guy upstairs does get past us, try to keep him from getting out of the building. Even slowing him down would help.”
The guard was in his early twenties. His eyes grew wide as Travis spoke. This was probably the closest the kid had come to actual police work since he took the job.
“Is he armed?” the guard asked.
“That’s an excellent question,” Travis said. “We don’t know. So let’s go on the assumption that he’s armed and dangerous.”
“Yes, sir,” he said. “I’ll do my best.”
Audra took the elevator to the fourth floor, while we hurried up the stairs. The elevator doors were on the opposite side of the hallway, and if Rick happened to be looking through the peephole, we didn’t want him to see all of us parading out behind her.
“We probably should have had her wait a few seconds before heading up,” Travis said. “She’s going to be in there before we are without any sort of cover.”
“It won’t be too unbelievable that she’d hang out in the hallway first,” I said, quickening my pace. “They argued. She’s about to beg to get back into his good graces. Hesitation would be natural.”
What wasn’t
natural, however, was Audra standing outside the elevator, with her hands on her hips, staring expectantly at the door as she waited for it to open. Pinning Leo’s hopes on her acting skills now seemed a bit naive, because this girl would never be landing a role at the Coastal Playhouse.
Travis muttered something under his breath, and then motioned us all into position.
I pressed against the wall a few feet away from Audra, ready to open the canister once we heard Rick coming to the door. She raised her hand, knocked, and then said, “Rick, let me in, okay? I’m sorry, baby. Let me in.”
When he didn’t answer, she rang the bell and knocked again. “Come on, Rick, please? You made the right choice. She might have made us wait for years. And I don’t want to sleep in the car. I want to be with you.” She said the last words in a pouty little baby voice that made me cringe inside, but while her body language had initially been all wrong, this part seemed more authentic. I suspected that was because part of her still felt this way. She had loved the guy, and until this morning, she’d assumed they would eventually be together.
An angry little yip came from inside, and I opened the lid of the vacuum canister. Taking a few steps closer to the door, I poured the contents onto the rug a few feet behind Audra. Leo’s whining and yowls ratcheted up immediately.
“Shut up, you little rat,” Rick said from the other side.
“Come on, Rick. Let me in.”
“Go away, Audra,” Rick said. “You’re just getting Leo riled up. Someone is going to report it to the guard if he starts barking. Come back when you’re ready to make the trade.”
“But I don’t want to trade, Rick! I want to go with you, like we planned. If you let me in…” Audra lowered her voice. “I’ll give you what I got from the safe…” She stopped, and then sneezed loudly, twice. Guess she wasn’t lying about the allergies. “And then we’ll get the rest in the morning,” she continued. “Please, Rick, I’m sorry I didn’t trust you. I was just in shock, but…you were right. You’re always right, baby. I should have known.”
Ugh. I exchanged a look with Travis and was glad to see that he had the same reaction to this dialogue. Good thing we had gone with improv instead of trying to script it, because I would have tried to give her a little more dignity.
Travis then looked pointedly toward the stairway door, and I remembered my promise.
There was a long whine from Leo, followed by a sigh and the sound of a hand on the doorknob. As I retreated toward the stairwell, I pushed play.
The speaker on my phone isn’t very loud, but you could tell the instant Leo heard the recording of Attila. He let out a high-pitched growl. As soon as the door was open wide enough for his tiny body to squeeze through, he wriggled out of Rick’s clutches and launched himself into the hallway. Pausing briefly to grab a mouthful of cat hair from the carpet, he barreled toward the stairs and through the half-open door to the landing where I was waiting.
“Police!” Travis shouted, followed by the sound of the apartment door banging against the wall as he shoved it open.
Leo latched his tiny teeth into the hem of my jeans and pulled, growling ferociously. He’d apparently caught on to the fact that he’d been tricked into thinking his nemesis was waiting here in the stairwell. I think he would actually have torn my pants if Audra hadn’t arrived to scoop him up. His snarls shifted to whimpers as he turned to lick her face.
“Let’s go home, little guy. Andrew is waiting downstairs.” Leo’s body, which I’d already assumed was at maximum wriggle, cranked it up to eleven at the sound of Andrew’s name. “Oh, yes,” Audra cooed, “you want to see Andrew, don’t you, you good, good boy.”
Chapter Twenty
After Travis and Grady got Rick into handcuffs and down to the main floor, the rest of us followed the two police cars in a small caravan back to the station in Caratoke. Travis had another officer take my full statement, both because he was busy with Rick Ramsey and because it might give him some extra cover if he wasn’t the one questioning his girlfriend. I called Paige, Melinda, and Ben to fill them in on everything while I waited.
When I finally got back to the house just before midnight, an episode of Stranger Things that I knew Paige had seen multiple times was playing in the background. Paige and Nathan were asleep on the couch, and Delaney was sprawled out in a recliner with Attila in her lap, confirming my suspicions that none of them had slept well the night before. Good thing they were on spring break, even if I wasn’t.
I roused them and told Nathan that he could take the couch if he wanted, but he managed to wake up enough to drive the three miles home. Paige and Delaney stumbled off to bed once Nathan left.
In the kitchen, I found a single wedge of the cake in a Tupperware container with the note Reserved for Antigone Alden. I had a vague recollection of promising a slice to Travis, but I had the recipe, and most of the ingredients were still in the pantry. Right now, I needed chocolate, and the promise to him would just force me to bake another one after classes were over tomorrow. I was kind of okay with that.
Justin had sent back a single-word response—whaaaaaaaaat?—to my text a few hours earlier, so I called him once I settled in with my cake. It was around dawn in London, but he could never sleep for several hours after a show. Like many people in theater, Justin lived a vampire’s life, rarely in bed before the sun came up. That would be my ideal schedule, too. But motherhood, and more recently, teaching morning classes, had forced me to chew a few melatonin and hit the bed at a decent hour. My eight o’clock class was going to be grueling tomorrow.
“Technically,” Justin said without preamble as soon as he picked up the phone, “the bucket list item is not marked off. Yes, you were in the back of the police car without me. But you never made it to the station in that police car. No arrest. No mug shot.”
“That’s a valid point.”
“I’ve got a break between tours coming up in a few weeks,” he said. “And I hated having to miss Paige’s sixteenth birthday. Maybe I’ll come down and we can mark it off the bucket list for real. There’s no way I could ever convince Jacob to get into trouble with us. The man has no sense of adventure. Alternatively, we could wait a few years until Paige is legal and add her. ”
“I think that would qualify us as very bad parents, Justin.”
He sighed. “You’re right. What are you eating? You just smacked in my ear.”
“Birthday cake. I can wait and call back when I’m done eating, but that means you’ll have to wait to hear how I helped bring in Rebecca Whitley’s killer using only cat hair and one of Paige’s YouTube videos.”
“Hmph,” Justin said. “Okay. You have me intrigued. Go ahead and talk between bites. At least it’s just audible smacking, and I don’t have to be there to watch you eat with your mouth full.”
“We could switch to FaceTime.”
“Nope.”
There was a slight movement in the periphery of my vision. Caroline was on the window seat. Alone, this time, since Attila was in bed with the girls.
“Do you mind if I join you?” she asked. “Since you’ve already told Justin about me, he won’t be too surprised. And that way you won’t have to tell everything twice.”
I relayed her request to Justin.
“You’re just trying to get me to switch to FaceTime to find out if I can see her, aren’t you? No deal. We’ll experiment when I visit.”
“That wasn’t it at all,” I said. “I just wanted to explain why I might be answering some questions you didn’t ask.”
“Okay, then. I’m fine as long as you translate. Or whatever you’d call it in this situation. Tell Caroline I said hello. Or can she hear me?”
“Hello, Justin.”
“She says hello, Justin. And yes, she can hear you. I can’t believe I’m serving as a medium between you, on the other side of the Atlantic, and the ghost of my mother.” I laughed. “But there is a definite upside.”
“And what is that?” they both asked, almost in unison.
I gave them a grin and scooped up a big bite of the chocolate ganache and raspberries. “Neither of you can ask me to share this cake.”
NEXT UP: A sneak peek of OFFED OFF-BROADWAY (Coastal Playhouse Mysteries #3)
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Sneak Peek: Offed Off-Broadway (Coastal Playhouse #3)
The storm swept in quickly, with winds that carried the scent of the ocean and the sting of sand blown in from the barrier dunes. It had barely even been drizzling when I left home twenty minutes earlier. This was par for the course in Caratoke. I’d learned to keep a spare umbrella in the glove compartment in case nasty weather blew in with absolutely no warning.
Huddling under the covered entrance, I rang Melinda’s doorbell and waited to be buzzed in. Several dozen guests were expected, so I was a bit surprised to see that the driveway was mostly empty. It’s not like her guests could have canceled. A wedding rehearsal is a rain-or-shine event.
I pushed the bell again, just in case she hadn’t heard me over the party noise. A few seconds later, Melinda Barry Eastland opened the door to the lower level of her beach house, looking harried but lovely in a navy pantsuit. I stepped into the foyer, then turned back briefly to shake some of the water from my umbrella.
“You could have just buzzed me in,” I told her. “You didn’t need to come all the way down to greet me.”
“If I’d realized the rain was blowing down in sheets like this, I would have. But to be honest, I needed a few minutes’ break from the constant bickering.” Melinda stared out at the pelting rain in amazement. “I know it’s considered bad luck to have rain at your wedding. But what about rain at your wedding rehearsal?”