“Oh, I’m glad you’re here,” Sadie said when she entered the house a minute later. She locked the door behind her, wanting very much to feel safe and secure in her cozy little home. She put the papers from the library on the kitchen counter.
Breanna looked up from the amassed Alfredo sauce ingredients next to the stove and smiled. Her long brown hair was darker, straighter, and thicker than Sadie’s had ever been and Breanna had pulled it into a ponytail at the base of her neck. As usual, she didn’t have any makeup on; she was a zoology major and didn’t bother with much fanfare when it came to looks. It helped that she was a natural beauty, having inherited all the most beautiful features of her birth mother’s Polynesian heritage.
“So tell me what happened,” Breanna said as Sadie pulled a head of broccoli out of the fridge and started chopping. They never had fettuccine without broccoli.
Sadie took a breath and told her the whole story—sans Ron’s part in it. She wasn’t ready to put that information out there yet. She did, however, mentally commit to call Detective Cunningham as soon as she had a free minute. She couldn’t keep what she knew to herself any longer—but that didn’t mean Breanna should be the person to hear the details.
“So then I was late getting home and now Mindy’s mad at me and I’m sick to my stomach over Trevor.”
The big pot of water on the stove had come to a boil and Breanna put the dry noodles into the pot, pushing them down into the water as they softened while the Alfredo simmered on another burner. “Have you told Shawn?”
“Not yet—I better call him right now,” Sadie said, thinking of her twenty-year-old baby boy. He was studying to be a professional sports trainer at the University of Michigan. Why he chose Michigan, Sadie would never know. They spoke on the phone once a week or so but he was pretty caught up in college life. She put the broccoli in the microwave and headed for the phone. He didn’t answer so she left a message for him to call as soon as possible.
“Should I set the table?” she asked when she hung up the phone.
Within a few minutes, Breanna had finished the noodles and Alfredo, and Sadie had successfully sautéed the steamed broccoli in brown butter and topped it with grated Mizithra cheese. They had a nice meal, despite the fact that it wasn’t yet five o’clock in the afternoon.
Sadie was grateful to have someone with her—especially Breanna. She’d always been solid, such a great support. Though she didn’t know how she’d been so lucky, Sadie was eternally grateful that her kids didn’t seem to suffer the bouts of rebellion and anger that she saw in so many other children of single mothers. So many children, period, she thought, amending her judgment. Jack and Carrie’s girls had put them through the trenches many times and they had two parents who loved them. Sadie knew she was greatly blessed.
After dinner they did the dishes together and Breanna finally asked if Sadie had talked to Ron. Sadie paused, but she couldn’t hold it back any longer and wasn’t willing to lie about it. She took a breath and told Breanna everything she’d learned about Ron today—down to her flight from the restaurant.
“Are you going to turn him in?” Breanna asked, levelheaded until the end. Through Sadie’s explanation, she’d only made noises of surprise with an “oh my gosh” now and then.
“I’m going to tell the detective what happened. They’ll take it from there.” The knot in her stomach had returned and she blinked back the threatening tears.
“Wow,” Breanna said as she closed the dishwasher door. She turned and looked sympathetically at her mom. “I’m so sorry. What a day you’ve had.”
Sadie nodded. What a day indeed.
“So what’s next?” Breanna asked.
Sadie lifted her eyebrows in a gesture of innocence. “What do you mean?”
Breanna rolled her eyes. “I’m sure you’re not giving up now.”
Sadie smiled. Breanna knew her so well it made trying to hide her plans a waste of time. “I need to figure out where Anne came from—I mean I know she lived in Boston.” She paused, picturing for a moment a pregnant Anne opening her apartment door and smiling at Ron, the father of the child she was carrying. It brought bile to Sadie’s throat and she pushed the image away. “I’d like to find her parents, friends—something.”
“Aren’t the cops already doing that stuff?”
“Probably,” Sadie said with a shrug. “But I doubt very much they’ll tell me anything, and I think I’ve already proven that I can get an awful lot accomplished by being sweet and naïve.”
She flashed her daughter an innocent smile and batted her eyelashes. Breanna laughed. “Right now, however, I need to make some brownies for Mindy. I feel so bad about not following through.”
“It’s probably the first time in your whole life you’ve not done exactly what you said you’d do,” Breanna said by way of justification. “And if you ask me, the circle relies on you too much already. If she had any idea what this day has been like for you then I’m sure she’d understand.”
“I don’t think I’m ready to tell her everything I’ve learned,” Sadie said, moving to the drawer next to the stove and opening her little black book—a rather ordinary journal she’d used to record her favorite recipes over the years. Most people used recipe boxes, but Sadie liked something more portable. No recipe went into the little black book without having been tried three or four times so she knew it was worthy of the honor. She ran her finger down the nonalphabetical contents, hovering over Sadie’s Better Brownies—a recipe she’d perfected several years ago. “Sometimes baked goods say it all.” She paused. “Do you think brownies are the right thing for a death in the neighborhood?”
“Well, chocolate has calming properties,” Breanna said.
“Oh, that’s right, it does,” she said, bending the book open to the right page, an easy thing to do since the journal had been so well used over the years. She began pulling ingredients out of the cupboard. Then she remembered the e-mail from Riggs and Barker. She felt her determination, which had been slowing down, speed back up again.
“Will you do the brownies?” she asked Breanna as she crossed to the counter where she’d deposited the papers she’d brought in from the car. She found the e-mail and scanned it, reorienting herself with the information. Then she sat at the computer, did a Google search for Riggs and Barker, found the home page, and within seconds of the idea forming in her mind, she had the contact information for the Boston office. She copied the e-mail address for the human resources person, a woman by the name of Marianne Humphry, and pasted it into a new e-mail message.
“What are you doing?” Breanna asked from the kitchen, twenty feet away from the computer station. She was measuring out the salt.
“E-mailing the Boston office of Riggs and Barker,” Sadie said as if it were obvious. “I wonder if they can give me any more information.” She knew what she was doing wasn’t exactly right, but she didn’t know what else to do. It took her a few minutes to figure out the best lie to tell, though she preferred to think of it as investigative work.
Ms. Humphry,
I’m contacting you in regards to a mortgage I’m processing. Anne Lemmon is attempting to buy a home and claims she worked for your company a couple of years ago and was recently rehired. In light of the new federal bankruptcy laws, and because of the volatile market, we are attempting to determine whether her employment with your company is secure, where she worked before coming to your office, and under what conditions her employment with you was terminated. Any information you can give us would be helpful. The cosigner for the mortgage is one Ronald Bradley, who also works for your company. I need to verify his employment status as well. Thank you for your assistance.
“Mom!”
Sadie jumped and looked over her shoulder where Breanna was reading her message. “I just need a little information,” she explained.
“By lying about her buying a house?” Breanna said. “Can’t you get in trouble for that?”
Sadie shrugged, and then cha
nged the Sadie Hoffmiller in her signature line to S. Hoffmiller. “I’m just covering my bases,” she said. “I like to think that’s why the information came to me in the first place—a kind of fated happenstance that will lead me to find justice for Anne and find Trevor before it’s too late.”
Breanna shook her head and returned to the kitchen. “You’d kill me if I ever did something like that. Remember the time you dragged me to the principal’s office because you found out I’d spent some of the money I was supposed to donate to the fund-raiser on buying a pop?”
“That was different,” Sadie said, hitting send. “You have to understand why the rules are made in the first place before you can break them.”
“I’ll keep that in mind the next time I’m tempted to break the law,” Breanna said, shooting her mother a look that showed she wasn’t impressed. “You’re going to get in trouble,” she added.
Sadie shrugged and let out a sigh as the message disappeared from her outbox. The sun was setting, and true to the sunsets of northern Colorado, the sky was lit up in a hundred shades of pink and orange, filling the house with colored light. It seemed strange that such beauty should be cast when a day such as this was coming to an end.
“So what if I do get in trouble?” she said. “Can it matter that much in the grand scheme of things? Anne was murdered, Trevor was kidnapped, Ron’s been lying to me the whole time we’ve been together—what’s a little mixed up e-mail in relation to all that?”
Homemade Alfredo Sauce
1 cup heavy cream*
1 cup butter
1 cup Parmesan cheese, shredded (Shawn likes more cheese)
Salt and pepper, to taste
Combine all ingredients in small saucepan (not Teflon-coated) and simmer on low until melted and mixed, stirring continually (about 20 minutes). Whisk until smooth before serving over pasta. Can be refrigerated and used again if reheated on low heat. (Remember to whisk again!)
Makes 4 servings.
*Half-and-half or evaporated milk can be used for some or all of cream to reduce fat but the consistency won’t be as rich or as thick.
Chapter 17
Breanna didn’t say anything but she was stirring the brownies at a contemplative speed. “You haven’t even told the police about Ron. You’re so dead set on getting this solved but you don’t give the information to those who can do something about it.”
Sadie hated that her daughter was right. She let out a breath. “Okay, I’ll call Detective Cunningham,” she said. “I’m just not sure what to tell him.”
“The truth, for starters,” Breanna said, glopping the dark brown batter into the 9x13 pan and obscuring the word Hoffmiller that had been etched into the glass; Sadie had taken a workshop at the high school with a friend last year and had put her name on all her glass dishes.
Sadie almost smiled at the role reversal between her daughter and herself, but it wasn’t that funny. “This will sound horrible,” she said, coming over to help scrape the remaining batter from the bowl. “But it seems like I should get something for giving them the information—doesn’t it?”
“You should be rewarded for doing the right thing?” Breanna goaded her. “Wow, you’ve left all ethics in the dust today, Mom.”
“Not like that,” Sadie said. “But Detective Madsen seems determined to connect me to this—he even set me up specifically to get me in trouble. No one has called to tell me what they’ve found, and they only have one cop protecting Anne’s house even though there could be some madman out there. And here I have this bombshell information that I technically shouldn’t have anyway. Who’s to say telling them won’t get me in more trouble—assuming they even believe me. It just seems there ought to be some kind of benefit in my helping them, that’s all.”
“Maybe the benefit will be catching Anne’s killer and finding Trevor.”
Dang, Breanna was good at this. Sadie felt sufficiently guilty. “Okay,” she sighed, taking the scraped-out bowl and putting it in the sink. “I’ll call him.”
Breanna nodded sharply, a satisfied smile on her face. “Good,” she said. After sliding the brownies into the oven she washed her hands. “In the meantime, I think we ought to look for Anne on findpeople.com.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a web site that helps you find information about specific people. You enter whatever information you know and it helps track them down.”
“But I know where Anne is,” Sadie said, saddened to think of her neighbor in the morgue. Even though Sadie now doubted the friendship they’d had, she was still sad Anne was dead. She also couldn’t help but think that if Anne had told her the truth, she’d still be alive today.
“Yeah, but you can find out other stuff like old addresses and police records. It’s really amazing.”
Sadie turned to look at her daughter. “You sound like you know this firsthand.”
Breanna’s cheeks went pink and she opened the freezer, taking her time to give an answer. “I may have used it,” she said casually.
“May have?” Sadie repeated, laughing at her daughter’s embarrassment.
Breanna took out the pineapple sherbet, a staple in their home, and put it on the counter. “Well, there’s this . . . guy.”
Sadie’s eyebrows rose. Breanna wasn’t one to pursue the opposite sex, at least not at this point in her life. She dated a little, but her real focus had always been her career. She’d take an afternoon with a Siberian lynx over most men any day of the week.
“You were looking for some guy online?” Sadie said, forgetting about the promised call to Detective Cunningham. “And you didn’t tell me?”
Breanna’s cheeks got brighter and she finally met her mom’s eyes. “It’s no big deal,” she said.
“Who is he?” Sadie asked. “Why did you have to look for him online?”
Breanna sat down at the kitchen table with the sherbet and some bowls. “Calm down, Mother.” She only called Sadie “Mother” when she was trying to rein her in. “Remember that first internship I did at the San Francisco Zoo right after high school?”
“Of course,” Sadie said, nodding. It had been a great way for Breanna to get hands-on experience before choosing her major. She’d roomed with five other girls doing the same thing. Sadie had been scared to death letting her baby girl go so far away at the age of 18, but it was impossible to say no. Since then, Breanna had spent every summer at a different zoo around the country. After she graduated, she hoped to return to the Brevard Zoo in Melbourne, Florida—it had been her favorite. She was especially fond of big cats such as tigers, jaguars, and lions.
“Well, there was this guy that worked with the interns, his name was Liam. We didn’t date or anything.” Her cheeks refused to return to their normal hue.
“You must have done something for you to go to all the trouble to find him again.”
“Mom!” Breanna said.
Sadie laughed but didn’t say anything, inviting Breanna to continue by staying silent. “We got along really well—but he was twenty-four and I was only eighteen. We were just friends, I swear, but he gave me his number when I finished the program. When I got to CSU I started seeing Brandon and by the time things were sufficiently fizzled with him, I’d lost Liam’s number.”
“But he was still in your heart,” Sadie said with a romantic sigh, playing it up for all she was worth. Who knew when she’d get this chance again.
“Mo-om,” Breanna said, shaking her head and pushing the bowl of sherbet she’d dished up across the table. “He was especially fascinated with bats.”
Sadie grimaced. “Bats?” she repeated, automatically suspicious. What kind of man had a fascination with bats?
“I know that probably sounds creepy, but it wasn’t. He just loved bats. They are quite a unique animal, ya know. A mammal that flies with limited vision and has such a wide variety of species. Their echolocation is incredible, and did you know you can find bats anywhere, in every region, because they are so adaptable? In fa
ct—”
“Okay, I’m convinced they’re amazing. So what do bats have to do with your romantic interest in this guy? Does he have his own Batmobile?”
“Who says I’m interested in him romantically?”
“Uh, your red cheeks, the fact you never mentioned him before, and of course, your assurance he’s not a romantic interest. But let’s get back to the story.”
Breanna paused, but she had a light in her eyes that well communicated how eager she was to discuss this. “So in my Climate Ecology class we have to do a research paper and I chose to do it on the ecological qualities of the small tube-nosed bat in relation to the quantitative research in woodland demographics and the relation to Aves anatomy.”
“Huh?”
“Basically, in what ways are woodland bats like birds.”
“Oh, I can tell you that,” Sadie said, taking a bite of her sherbet and swallowing quickly. “They fly.”
“Ha-ha,” Breanna replied dryly. “They also fly in flight patterns, they have similar diets, and certain roosting and hunting similarities suggest that bats might be the missing link in bird evolution rather than the more commonly held theory that they evolved from birds.”
“Fascinating,” Sadie said, simulating a yawn. Breanna scowled and smacked her spoon on Sadie’s bowl. Sadie put another spoonful of sherbet on her tongue and let it melt.
“So I thought I’d track down Liam to see if he was aware of any lesser-known research on the subject.”
“And you found him?”
Breanna smiled wide and full, showing her beautiful teeth, the result of four years in braces. “I did.”
“And did he have this amazing and unique knowledge of resources you were hoping for?”
“He did.”
“And when do I get to meet him?” Sadie was no fool. There was something special about this guy.
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