by Jana DeLeon
Ida Belle nodded. “Why?”
I was trying to figure out how to tell them that I needed to go sift around in Cam’s ashes when Ida Belle’s phone rang. She checked the display.
“It’s Maisey,” Ida Belle said before she answered.
“I hope she’s not calling for bail,” Gertie said. “I don’t like her that much and it’s not like the woman doesn’t own clothes and four walls she can dance naked in.”
I nodded. “I’m glad she lives on the other side of the neighborhood from me. Ronald is enough weird for one person to live close to. And that whole drumming-at-midnight thing would probably have me opening fire.”
“Maisey, hold on,” Ida Belle said. “I’m putting you on speaker. I want the others to hear this firsthand. Go ahead.”
“Okay, so you know how you told me to call if I remembered anything else about that dreadful St. Ives?” Maisey asked.
“You remembered something?” I asked.
“Yes, well, I don’t know if it’s something,” she said. “In fact, now that I’ve called it seems rather silly, but you said anything might be important, so I consulted my tea leaves and my crystal ball—”
“Get on with it,” Ida Belle said.
“Sorry,” Maisey said. “Anyway, remember how I said St. Ives would sit in his backyard all the time without a book or radio or anything—just staring at the fence?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, I remembered the thingy on the table and thought maybe I was wrong about that,” she said.
“What thingy?”
“I guess it was a satellite dish,” she said. “Looked like one, anyway. He moved the picnic table into the back corner of the yard right after he moved in and sometimes, he’d climb up on it and stick that satellite dish in the tree. I mean, it’s not facing the same way as my satellite, but I thought maybe he had a different service. Anyway, he never left it there. Always took it back inside, but since he sat with his back to me, I suppose he could have been watching something on his phone with some of those ear thingies with no wire. You know what, I’m really sorry I wasted your time. Good Lord, all this rambling and the man was probably just watching some sexy videos or something and didn’t want it to show on his internet history. I better let you go. I’m cooking up a spell and one of the cats just dipped his paw in it.”
The call disconnected and I looked at Ida Belle and Gertie.
“What does that ‘thingy’ remind you of?” I asked.
“A parabolic microphone,” Ida Belle said.
I nodded. “So, who else besides terrorists and creepers might take photos of people without their knowledge and attempt to listen in on their private conversations? And all while complaining about the job that they’re ready to be done with?”
“The government?” Gertie asked.
“Besides the government,” I said.
Gertie’s eyes widened. “A private investigator.”
“Exactly.”
Things had just gotten clearer and more confusing at the same time.
Chapter Eighteen
Ida Belle and Gertie were fairly stoic about my search of the urn. It definitely wasn’t the most pleasant of tasks, but it was a necessary one if I wanted things as thorough as possible. Unfortunately, there was nothing testable, so a familial DNA match was as close as we were going to get, which I supposed ultimately didn’t matter as Carter’s dad had been an only child. One born to much older parents, too, who, according to Carter, thought they’d never get that chance. I supposed that was one more thing that Cam and Emmaline had bonded over, given they both had parents well beyond the normal age for back then.
Brandon beat us to the testing place and hopped out of his truck when he saw us pull in. He watched as we all exited Ida Belle’s SUV then gave me a confused look. “Where’s Carter?”
“He’s still at the hospital,” I said. “But don’t worry. I pulled out some of his hair last night.”
Brandon shook his head. “How do I know you’re not substituting someone else’s hair just to get rid of me?”
“Would it be that easy?” I asked.
“I doubt it,” he said.
“Well, there you go,” I said. “It doesn’t benefit anyone to revisit this. We need to find out the truth, then everyone can move on. If this comes up negative and you think we cheated, then you can ask Carter for a redo. But this is a onetime offer from me.”
“Dude,” Gertie said. “If Fortune just wanted to be rid of you easily, you’d be gone. Don’t waste our time with elementary school nonsense. We’re not the shady murder suspects in this equation.”
He must have remembered that whole CIA thing because his eyes widened and he gave me a single nod. I headed for the door and everyone trailed in behind me. I introduced myself to the receptionist, and she jumped up before the last syllable had even left my mouth and hurried through a door behind her, calling out, “Right away” as she ran off.
The Hebert magic at work once again.
The receptionist returned and a rather nervous-looking man stepped into the lobby behind her.
Midforties. Five foot ten. A hundred twenty pounds with the goggles and the plastic lab coat. Glasses that were thicker than a bulletproof windshield. Threat level zero unless he came up with a match on this DNA.
“I’m Dr. Pyers,” he said. “Do you have the samples for me?”
I pulled a Ziplock bag from my pocket and passed it to him. “I pulled these from Carter’s head last night. Will this work?”
He looked closely at the strands and nodded. “Good. You got the root ball. This is perfect. And the second gentleman?”
“Is right here.” I pointed to Brandon.
Pyers reached into his lab coat and pulled out tweezers. “I just need to get a couple strands, if that’s all right. Just a little tweak on the scalp.”
Pyers didn’t bother waiting for an answer. He just reached over and yanked a couple strands from Brandon’s head. “I’ll get on this right away. I should have results in about an hour.”
“Sounds great.” I looked over at Ida Belle and Gertie. “I saw a café next door. You want to have some breakfast while we wait?”
“I would love breakfast,” Gertie said. “Not that the Danish at Ida Belle’s wasn’t good.”
“It came out of a box,” Ida Belle said. “My ego doesn’t hinge on whether it was good or not.”
“Okay, then it was a little dry and I really would like a mess of scrambled eggs and cheese,” Gertie said.
“Uh, I gotta get to work,” Brandon said.
“No problem,” I said. “You can stop by later and get a copy of the results.”
“I, uh, okay,” he said. “I guess I’ll leave now.”
He headed out and Ida Belle shook her head. “If that guy is a criminal with a plan, he’s the most awkward criminal I’ve ever met.”
“Fortune is scary,” Gertie said.
“Which makes my point,” Ida Belle said. “There is nothing about Carter or Fortune that isn’t general knowledge around Sinful. If you’re trying to pull a scam and then find out the target has a son who’s a deputy and is former Force Recon, who just happens to be dating a private detective who’s a former CIA operative, wouldn’t you just move on to an easier target?”
I frowned. The way Ida Belle had framed it, the whole thing did seem rather a stretch for someone as inexperienced as Brandon appeared to be. And even the target was all wrong. Emmaline was comfortable but not wealthy, unless she had money under the floorboards that I didn’t know about.
I didn’t like this new take on things at all. It was going the wrong direction.
Brandon walked out in front of us and headed for his truck. As he passed the café next door, the door flew open and a young woman hurried out and ran right into him. They stared at each other, their eyes widening, and I realized the young woman was Amber, the new server at Francine’s. And based on the looks on their faces, they knew each other.
“What are
you doing here?” she asked.
“I work here, remember?” he said, glancing back at us. “What are you doing here?”
“Just trying something new. You know, getting out of the city for a while…anyway, I have to run. Gotta get to work.”
She hurried over to her car and jumped inside. Brandon didn’t even give us a backward glance before climbing into his truck and revving the engine. Amber backed out and took off, her tires squealing as she tore out of the parking lot and onto the access road, but instead of going under the highway and heading for Sinful, she went the opposite direction. Based on the tension level we’d witnessed, I half expected Brandon to pursue her, but he got on the highway in the opposite direction, headed toward the fairgrounds.
“What the heck was that about?” Gertie asked.
“I don’t know but it was interesting,” Ida Belle said.
“She looked scared,” Gertie said. “Do you think Brandon is the reason she’s hiding?”
“Could be,” I said.
“She didn’t head toward Sinful,” Ida Belle said.
“And she said she was getting out of the city for a bit,” Gertie said. “But she told us she was staying at a motel up the highway.”
“Apparently she doesn’t want him to know,” Ida Belle said.
“He’d have to be the world’s biggest fool if he believed her story,” Gertie said.
Ida Belle shook her head. “I’m afraid Francine might be looking for help again.”
“Well, we’re not going to solve this mystery standing out here,” I said. “Let’s get inside. Maybe some coffee and breakfast will clear things up.”
“I don’t think Windex would clear this up,” Gertie said.
I nodded as we walked inside. Things were getting messy. Very messy.
I’d been doing this job long enough to know that most things that happened surrounding one big event were related to that event in some way. But there were so many oddball things in this cluster that I couldn’t see how it fit together. Maybe for the first time in my life, I’d come across coincidence.
But I wasn’t going to bet on it.
We lingered over breakfast and it was about an hour and a half before we headed back next door. We were all anxious for an answer but also afraid of what that answer might be. But finally, we were so caffeinated that we couldn’t sit any longer, so we headed back to the clinic. The receptionist ran to get Dr. Pyers as soon as she saw us outside the glass door, and he was in the lobby seconds later.
“Would you please come with me?” he asked. “The results are confidential so it’s against policy to say them out here in the lobby, and I would like to show you a little of the science behind what I’ve done. Just in case you or Mr. Hebert have any doubts about the accuracy of the testing.”
I held in a smile at his nervousness. I knew the Heberts as benevolent friends who helped me make Sinful a better place, but the rest of the area looked on them akin to the way Moses had the burning bush. It always reminded me that a healthy dose of fear often got results faster than good manners.
We followed him into a room mostly filled with lab equipment and a small desk pushed into a corner. He waved us over to a large screen and pulled up a file.
“This is an example of what the results look like when we get them,” he said. “Then we compare the results against the other person or persons being tested. See, here are the profiles of two people, one beneath the other. You can see some similarity between the two but the software does a much better job than our eyes can do. And it calculates probabilities. Does that make sense?”
We all nodded and I tried to control my impatience.
“So here’s Mr. LeBlanc’s profile, and below it,” he said as he pulled up a different set of data, “I’ll pull up the other gentleman’s, then I ask the software to make a comparison of the two.”
We all leaned in as the computer did its thing, then a number popped up—eighteen percent.
“Eighteen percent isn’t a lot, is it?” Gertie asked.
“It is when you’re considering DNA,” Pyers said. “A parent and child will only have a fifty percent match, at best. Full siblings can share more, depending on what they gained from each parent.”
“What about half siblings?” I asked.
“The accepted range for half siblings is approximately seventeen percent to thirty-four percent.”
I blew out a breath. “So it’s in range. What other relationships fall in the eighteen percent range?”
“Grandparents, nieces and nephews, aunts and uncles, and greats on all of those, and first cousins,” he said.
“Well, those are all out,” I said. “Can’t be grands, greats, aunts, uncles, or nieces and nephews. And with Cam being an only child, can’t be first cousins.”
Ida Belle shook her head. “Well, it looks like Brandon is telling the truth.”
Pyers’s brow creased and he shoved his hands in his lab coat pockets. “I realize the sensitive nature of this and that the results probably aren’t what you were hoping for. But I can promise you that I took every precaution with the samples, and in fact, I ran the test on three separate sets of samples, just to be absolutely certain. The results were the same every time.”
I nodded. “I don’t think there’s any question of your methods or the evaluation results.”
His shoulders slumped a little and I could see a bit of relief in his expression.
“I’ve printed up several copies of the report—one for Mr. LeBlanc and the other gentleman, and an extra for yourself or the Heberts, if they’d like one for their files. I, uh, I’m sorry this didn’t turn out the way you’d hoped. And I hope I’m not being impertinent by asking, but would you mind telling me how Emmaline LeBlanc is doing?”
“You know Emmaline?” I asked.
He nodded. “She helps every year with the health fair for seniors. An absolutely lovely woman.”
“Yes, she is,” I agreed. “She’s still in ICU but she is regaining consciousness periodically and her memory seems to improve each time.”
“Oh, that’s good to hear,” he said. “If there’s anything else I can do—for you or for the LeBlancs—please let me know.”
“Thank you,” I said as we headed for the door. “And I really appreciate you getting the tests done so quickly.”
“Of course,” he said. “I’ll keep you in my prayers.”
“Because that wasn’t ominous,” Gertie grumbled as we exited.
“I suppose we could use all the prayers we can get about now,” Ida Belle said.
I was silent all the way to the SUV and after we were all inside and in place, Ida Belle looked over at me.
“I need to know where to drive to,” she said.
“I was thinking Siberia,” I said, “but we’d need a plane. Then I thought maybe the funeral home, because the need for caskets could be forthcoming. Then I thought just heading to a bar might be the best alternative.”
“I appreciate the way you think,” Gertie said.
I sighed. “I got a text from Carter while we were eating breakfast. He was headed home. I guess that’s where I need to go.”
“We can do this with you,” Ida Belle said.
“No,” I said. “Just drop me off and I’ll tell him. He’ll attempt to maintain his cool in front of you two. I don’t think he’ll have as much issue letting loose if it’s just me.”
Ida Belle nodded. “You’re probably right.”
Gertie reached up and squeezed my shoulder. “You know he’s likely to shoot the messenger. Carter’s an awesome man but he’s still human. Don’t you let that cause problems with the two of you.”
“I’ve got thicker skin than that,” I said. “And honestly, I know it’s going to be devastating for him, but I’m more worried about Emmaline than Carter.”
I trudged all the way up the sidewalk to Carter’s house. I could hear the television going inside, which I hoped meant he hadn’t gone to sleep yet. I really didn’t want to wak
e up a man who probably hadn’t slept but a handful of hours in the last few days and deliver quite possibly some of the worst news he’d ever had. Of course, delivering it before he slept meant he probably wouldn’t sleep at all. It was a lose-lose situation.
I knocked lightly on the door in case he was asleep in his recliner. Tiny didn’t bark so I assumed he was in the backyard. If Carter didn’t answer, then I planned to just head home and pretend I wasn’t giddy over the temporary reprieve. But the door swung open and an exhausted Carter stared out at me.
“I hope I didn’t wake you,” I said as I walked inside.
“If I’d been asleep, a foghorn in the living room wouldn’t have wakened me, much less that polite knocking.”
When we got to the living room, he slid down into his recliner, then slumped there as if the bones had left his body. I perched on the coffee table in front of him, feeling that with the news I had to deliver, being comfortable when doing it was somehow wrong.
“How’s Emmaline?” I asked.
“Better,” he said. “The last time she was awake for a couple hours. They took her back for some tests, and the doctor said the swelling has gone down considerably.”
“How’s her memory?”
“She’s still confused over some things but at least she’s somewhat up to date. She even asked about you.”
“Does she remember what happened?”
He shook his head. “She keeps asking how she wound up in the hospital. I asked her if she remembered going to the fair, but she said the last place she’d gone was church.”
“That was almost a week ago.”
“I know.”
“What does the doctor say?”
“He says the amount she’s already remembered is a really good sign and he doesn’t see any reason why her memory won’t completely return. But he can’t say how long it will take. He said she might have small lapses for days or even months.”
“Well, at least she’s mostly out of the woods,” I said. “That’s good news.”
“It is, and Walter was there when the doctor told us, so I was glad for that too. I worry about his blood pressure.”