Hooking for Trouble

by Betty Hechtman

“Fine, whatever you can do. I’m sure you realize the group is accustomed to more sophisticated treatment than this.”

  I’d found the best way to deal in a situation like this was merely to apologize. He appeared surprised, probably expecting a bunch of excuses, and his expression softened. “That’s okay. I’m sure you’re doing the best you can.” He waited while I started getting cups of water and putting covers on them.

  I had never really talked to him before. I wondered what he knew about the night the nanny left. I couldn’t ask him directly, but I’d noticed that people seemed to appreciate a sympathetic ear. Maybe all I had to do was to get him to start complaining about Jennifer’s leaving and he’d spill some information.

  “I was sorry to hear about your problem with your nanny,” I tried.

  He appeared surprised by my comment. “How did you know?”

  “You know how it is when a bunch of women get together and crochet—we all talk about our problems. Cheyenne told us how your nanny left in the middle of the night.”

  “Leave it to my wife to make it sound more dramatic,” he said. “It wasn’t the middle of the night. We were at the taping of Cheyenne’s show and Jennifer had a family emergency. I suppose I should be grateful that she had a replacement take over. It was still a hassle, though. The kids went to sleep with one nanny, and a different one got them up the next morning.”

  I was afraid that was all he was going to say, so I rushed in, hoping to keep him talking about it. “It’s always hard dealing with help,” I said, glancing toward the bookstore as if I were in charge of hiring and firing.

  He nodded ruefully. “That’s the truth. The weird thing is that our nanny never let on anything about having to leave. I had to come home to pick up a change of clothes for Cheyenne, and Jennifer was reading a bedtime story to the kids. I didn’t want to get the kids riled up right before bed, so I didn’t go in the upstairs den, but I’m sure she saw me.”

  “Why did Cheyenne need a change of clothes?” I asked, hoping to stir the pot of conversation.

  He explained that they were taping two shows back-to-back, and she needed a different outfit for each show. “She’d left it on the bed. I just picked it up and ran.” He grabbed a couple of cups, and we walked back to the stage area together.

  “Cheyenne said someone sent the police to your place that night, too.” I left it hanging, hoping he would pick up the thread.

  “There’s some crazy neighbor who needs a life. Twice the cops have showed up thanks to him or her,” he said with annoyance. I found myself shrinking back, as if somehow he would know it was me. It took all my courage to keep talking.

  “Why does that neighbor keep calling the cops?”

  “They seem to have an overactive imagination.” He completely ignored the first appearance of the cops and went right to the second. “They claimed to have seen someone lying in the backyard. I asked the cop who called me which neighbor it was, but he wouldn’t tell. You’d think he had some kind of personal interest in keeping their identity secret.”

  “So then you weren’t home when it happened?” I set the tray of cups down on a table in the café so everyone could help themselves.

  He shook his head. “I was already back at the taping when that detective called me. Of course, I checked with our nanny, and that’s when she broke the news to me.” He turned to face me. “Personally, I think her taking off had to do with the cops showing up, since she left right after they were there. It’s all that nosy neighbor’s fault,” he said with annoyance before he walked back into the bookstore.

  I added a handful of straws and followed him back into the bookstore.

  Once the refreshments were settled, ChIlLa started the rehearsal. Lauren accompanied them on the guitar, and they did their songs a couple of times. There wasn’t much for me to do, so I went back to the yarn department. Elise had taken out the bin of supplies for the toys, and I thought I’d use the time to clear it up. Matt Meadowbrook was sitting at the table and appeared rather fidgety. He seemed glad for my company as I began straightening up the yarn bins.

  “I came along for moral support,” he said, sounding bored. “But I’d rather be the performer than doing all this waiting around.” He checked out the area. “What is this?”

  “A yarn department,” I said with a smile. “I know it seems odd to have one in a bookstore.” I told him about the Hookers, which got a laugh as usual, and then mentioned that two of the members of ChIlLa were our customers. “Maybe Ilona would like to learn how to crochet,” I said. “Or you. It’s a good thing to do when you’re waiting around.”

  He chuckled at my suggestion and said he’d keep it in mind. “Cheyenne always says it saved her life,” he said.

  “Really?” I said, surprised. She’d been vague about how she’d learned, and when. “Do you know what she meant?”

  He was lounging back in his chair now. “I’m not sure if that’s my business to talk about,” he said. “You ought to ask her.” He picked up a hook that was on the table and started to play with it. “Maybe I’ll take you up on that offer. You could give me a lesson right now.” He patted the seat next to him.

  How awkward. I was trying to think of a graceful way to say no.

  “Matt!” Ilona said in an angry voice. “What are you doing?”

  “Hey, babe, I just thought I could make use of my time.” He had a slow, sexy way of talking. “I could make one of these for the kids.” He reached into the bin and plucked a bear out of the bin that I had left as a sample. “It looks just like Mr. Snuggles.” He looked up at his wife with an innocent smile.

  “Don’t even mention Mr. Snuggles,” she said in an angry tone. It seemed as if they’d forgotten I was there and had jumped into what sounded like an unfinished argument. I knew I should slip away, but I was too curious, so I stayed.

  I listened, trying to make sense of it. I gathered that Mr. Snuggles was a favorite bear of one of their children that had gotten lost. “I had to find it at Cheyenne’s the other day,” Ilona said. “Did you even look when you went there that night, or remember to ask the nanny?” She made a grrr sound. “Or were you too busy showing her how to hold a guitar?”

  “C’mon, honey, there was nothing going on with her, or anyone.” I was pretty sure Ilona wasn’t talking about Ursula, so it had to be Jennifer. What Ilona said next made me almost choke.

  “What happened? What did you say to her? You came home without Mr. Snuggles, and I heard she took off that night.”

  “There you two are,” Garrett said in a loud, friendly voice, clearly trying to drown out their arguing. He saw me standing there and gave me a dark look. Still in the upbeat voice, he said it was time for them to go.

  When I was alone at the table I picked up the bear. “So Matt Meadowbrook was there the night Jennifer left. Good detective work,” I said to it with a smile. “Maybe I’ll make you a deerslayer hat.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Thank heavens for best friends who stay up late and don’t mind surprise company. It took a while to shut everything down and clean up after the rehearsal, but instead of going to my car, I walked down the block to Dinah’s. When I knocked at her door, it wasn’t a complete surprise—I had called first.

  “C’mon in,” she said. “You sounded like you had a lot to tell when you called.”

  I glanced around her living room. “Do you have a dry-erase board?” I asked. She seemed surprised by the request and was still processing it when I suggested maybe we should go to my place if she didn’t.

  “How about a cup of tea first? You seem a little wired.”

  “Wired? Me? I don’t know what you mean.” Then it was as if I was observing myself from the outside. I’d rushed over there and was talking fast and making demands. Yes, I was wired. I flopped on her chartreuse sofa and forced myself to take a slow, deep breath and let it out the same way.

 
; “Tea would be good,” I said. “You’re right; I need it.”

  Dinah was wise enough to figure out that I needed tea with no stimulants in it and pulled out a box of honeybush tea. I was far calmer by the time she handed me the steaming mug of sweet-smelling drink. “Why do you need a dry-erase board?” she asked, sitting next to me on her couch.

  “I was thinking we could use it to write down everything I know about that night at Cheyenne’s. We could make a time sequence.”

  Dinah looked a little sheepish. “I do have a dry-erase board, but there’s something on one side of it. Maybe we could use the other side.” She got up. “I’ll just flip it and bring it in.”

  “Here, let me help you carry it,” I said, following her. It wasn’t like her to hide things from me, and I was curious.

  “Okay, you might as well know my secret,” she said, flipping the light on in the spare bedroom. The whiteboard was on a stand, and there seemed to be three lists. When I got close enough to read them, I saw one was marked “Commander’s,” one “Here” and the last “New Place.”

  Underneath each heading was a list of pros and cons. “I thought it would help me figure out where we should live.”

  “Why were you hiding it?” I asked.

  “It seems so lame and unromantic. It’s not like it has helped, either. There are pros and cons to all of them. Nothing seems like the right answer.”

  “What about Commander? Where does he want to live?”

  My friend actually blushed. “He said it could be Timbuktu as long as it was with me.”

  We both said awwww together.

  I flipped the board over to the blank side, and Dinah handed me a marker. I wrote “What We Know” and underneath I started to make a list—and then Dinah slipped in and wrote “Barry still cares for Molly” on the board in red.

  “He does not,” I argued and wiped it away with eraser. “We’re getting off the subject.”

  I wrote down that I had seen someone lying in the yard. I tried to remember the time. It was dark, so I guessed it had been about seven thirty. Next I wrote “Called Barry.”

  “I took a while before I made the call.”

  Dinah tried to help by asking what I did before calling him so we could figure out the approximate time.

  “I stood in the kitchen arguing with myself,” I said. “I picked up and put down the phone a few times.” We decided to allow fifteen minutes for my dithering.

  “Did you look outside while you were deciding what to do?” Dinah asked, and I shook my head.

  She asked me questions about the phone call, and I remembered how I had had to talk Barry into it and how, even when he agreed, it had taken him a while to get there. “It must have been after eight when he rang the bell there,” I said.

  “There was certainly time to move whoever was on the ground,” Dinah said. “But to where?”

  “We’ll just put a question mark,” I said. We moved on to how long Barry had been there and came up with half an hour, which put the time at about eight thirty.

  “The flight she took left at eleven,” I said. “The shuttle pickup was at about nine.” I thought about the nine o’clock time. “She had to know before Barry got there that she was leaving.” I regretted that I hadn’t asked the shuttle place what time she had ordered the pickup.

  “She could have called in around seven thirty. They could have added her to a pickup list at the last minute.”

  “I wonder where the kids were in all this,” I said.

  “I thought we were only writing in what we knew,” Dinah said.

  “In that case, Cheyenne wasn’t there, but”—I wished there was some way I could play fanfare music—“Garrett was there briefly.” I explained the taping of her show and his coming home to pick up a change of clothes for her. “He mentioned that Jennifer was reading the kids a story when he stopped home. Barry said that when he talked to Garrett he was at the taping. And there’s something more. Matt Meadowbrook was at their house that night.”

  “What?” Dinah exclaimed. “How did you find that out?”

  I told her the whole Mr. Snuggles story. “But I don’t know when it was.” I simply wrote in that he was there, with a question mark for the time.

  “Maybe we should also write down what we don’t know,” Dinah suggested. That was easy, and the list was long: Don’t know who was on the ground. Don’t know where they are now. Don’t know what happened to them or who did it. If Jennifer was the victim, how was I talking to her? If Jennifer wasn’t the victim, then who was it?

  We both flopped on her couch when we were done. “I’m not so sure that was the help I thought it would be,” I said. “Maybe we should flip the board and work on your problem.”

  * * *

  The She La Las had had another rehearsal at my house. I found the residue when I got home, but left it until morning to deal with. I was glad my mother didn’t know about ChIlLa’s rehearsal at the bookstore, or she would have felt left out. Samuel was off doing his usual late night with his friends. I envied his energy.

  The phone rang as I was about to fall into my bed. “Just checking in, Sunshine,” Mason said. “Two days without seeing you. It feels like forever. Anything exciting happen?”

  When he’d heard about my day, with shopping for Dinah’s wedding dress, finding out the Blood Detector really did work, the rehearsal at the bookstore and Matt Meadowbrook flirting with me and finally the dry erase board at Dinah’s, he let out a whew. Then he backtracked to Matt Meadowbrook and wanted the details so he’d know if he had to challenge him to a duel.

  “I get the feeling he’s not too particular with who he flirts with,” I said. “It seems like he might have had something going with Cheyenne’s nanny.”

  “That’s a new wrinkle,” Mason said. “Maybe he’s trying to avoid the cliché of being involved with his own kids’ nanny.” Mason punctuated that with a chuckle.

  “I think he had something going with them as well. They have a manny now, and I heard something about the nannies moving through there like it was a revolving door. His wife seemed pretty annoyed, even with his silly flirting with me.”

  “The trials and tribulations of the rich and famous. In other words, my clients.” Mason wanted to make plans for the next night, and we agreed to try to have dinner together. I wondered if I should have mentioned Barry and the dog care that had turned into dinner. But there seemed to be no reason, since I knew it would just upset Mason.

  “Love you,” he said.

  “Me, too.” I hung up the phone and was asleep a moment after my head hit the pillow.

  CHAPTER 19

  I awakened at my usual time even though I didn’t have to get to the bookstore until early afternoon. I made myself some coffee and took it to my kitchen table. Samuel came into the kitchen, and I offered him a cup of coffee.

  “Mother, really,” he said, rolling his eyes and pointing to the brown apron with The Bean and Leaf written across the top. Of course, his job was coffee. I mentioned breakfast possibilities, and he said he’d grab a breakfast sandwich at work. When I said I hoped he wasn’t burning the candle at both ends, I got another roll of his eyes.

  “You should talk,” he said. He touched his head to make sure his dark blond hair was tied back. Felix and Cosmo were at his feet, and the cats jumped up on the table bench to get closer to him. “I forgot to let the dogs out this morning, and I think the cat box might need attention.” He shot me an apologetic look before he grabbed the door handle. “Grandma, uh, I mean Liza, is having another rehearsal tonight.” And then he was gone.

  My plan to languish over my morning brew had just evaporated. I waited until Samuel had cleared the back gate and then let the dogs out. They went racing to the back fence and started barking at two workmen walking around in Cheyenne’s yard. I just saw bits and pieces of them through the ivy growing on my side. T
hank heavens there was no music or singing. I wondered what they were doing, but didn’t feel like being on display if I went to the back fence and looked in.

  I dealt with the cat box and called the dogs back in. After several rounds of treats, I thought about my breakfast. By then my coffee was cold, so I brewed a new pot. The one bonus of my mother’s many visits was that she kept bringing over more of her homemade granola. I found a canister of it and poured some in a bowl. I think she mixed hers with nonfat yogurt and fruit. I poured some half-and-half in mine.

  “Why not be fancy?” I said, taking a fresh mug of coffee and the cereal into the dining room. I sat down with a nice view of the backyard through the French doors. I was just going to concentrate on eating, but then I noticed the detective set on the table.

  I pulled it over and opened the box. I looked at the Blood Detector, realizing that I’d put it back in the plastic bag after Dinah’s and my experiment instead of putting it into the box in the slot made for it. There didn’t seem to be any reason to move it now, though.

  I was surprised at how many evidence bags I’d added to the box. Other than the fingerprints, they were all fibers. I set them where I could look at them as I worked on the cereal. It was so delicious I didn’t know how I’d ever be able to go back to the store-bought kind again. Still, as tasty as it was, I put down my spoon, picked up one of the bags and held it to the light. I could barely make out the bits of fuzz.

  I had no idea how crime scene investigators handled evidence, but I found a piece of white tissue paper from my wrapping stash and laid it on the table. I opened a bag and let some of the fuzz fall on it before using the tweezers that came with the set to capture a piece. I used the magnifying glass to examine it.

  Maybe the Blood Finder was the real thing, but the magnifying glass seemed a little weak. It worked a little better with the fingerprints, and I was actually able to divide them into three groups of patterns. Just like the booklet said, most of the fingerprints had loops. The next most common pattern was whorls, and there was only one print that looked like it was made of arches, which was the rarest pattern. I went back to looking at the fibers, wondering how anyone could match them up. Then I remembered Peter’s old microscope. It was stuck in the back of the built-in cabinets in the den.