by Misty Simon
Mark had been looking to the side, or down the street, when I first spotted him, but now his gaze zeroed right in on me. I paused in mid-step as his smile bloomed across his face. I wasn’t more than three feet from the door, and I could feel the power of those curved lips. At least I could console myself with knowing the attraction was in no way like it had been before. Now the zing was only pure appreciation for God’s talent instead of trying to find some deeper meaning.
I made my decision in the brief moment of contemplation, figuring I would deal with the consequences later.
Opening the door wide enough to fit my head in the crack, I peeked out and gave him a pretty darned good smile of my own. “Hang on a sec. Ben wanted to talk to you.” Yes, I didn’t even say hello, but I wanted to get things moving in the right direction from the outset.
I dug my cell phone out of my pants pocket and hit the speed dial button for “Lovey.” I know, disgusting, but the label was from when I was still trying to figure out what cutesy name to call him.
Lovey answered on the first ring.
“I thought you were going to get rid of whoever was at the door.” Impatience rang in his tone, and did not make me feel any happier about how this whole morning was going, despite the very good beginning.
“Hi, to you, too.” I barreled on after his little reprimand. “I have Mark out here, and he’d like to talk to you as soon as possible.”
For his part, Mark made little shooing motions, but I wasn’t put off by the gesture. I was not going to be the one to make the mistake of turning him away again. And if Ben thought he could do better, then let him have at it. Let’s see what he was made of.
I kept the phone to my ear even after Ben hung up on me because I didn’t want to be in the awkward position where I would have to make a few seconds of small talk with Mark while Ben pounded his way out here.
And Lovey was making enough noise to wake dead Great-Aunt Gertie at the cemetery down the road as he ran. Jeez. Even I didn’t sound so bad.
“Mark,” Ben said. Actually he nearly shouted it.
Which had Mark backing up a step and almost falling backwards off the curb.
“Calmly,” I murmured under my breath. “Remember your cool.”
“Of course,” Ben murmured back, but at least he toned down the smile and the volume.
“Ben.” Mark teetered on the edge of the cement as if he weren’t sure what to do—stay or bolt like a deer during hunting season.
“Why don’t I take you down the street to Mad Martha’s, and we’ll get a cup of coffee? You can tell me what you stopped by for.”
“Actually, I only came by to say I was sorry for being rude yesterday to Ivy.” He shuffled forward a little, and I breathed easier. I didn’t need two incidents on the same day, to be honest.
“Thank you,” I said before Ben could. Actually, I wasn’t sure he would have been so polite anyway, so maybe I merely said it before Ben could say anything. Who knew? Who cared?
Ben’s next words didn’t exactly make me feel like I had cut him off at the pass.
“I’d still like to take you for a cup of coffee. We can talk without interference.” He shot a glance my way. “If you know what I mean.”
I didn’t know what he meant, but I had better not be the interference he was referring to. Then I remembered Charlie and Debbie in the back room and shrugged my shoulders. I could only be in one place at a time. And I didn’t think my place was with Mark. Or with Ben right now, for that matter.
Interference, my ass.
I pretty much shoved Ben out the front door, not caring too much if he fell off the curbing. He was a tough boy. Flipping a wave to Mark through the front window, I made my way back to my injured assistant. I doubted he hadn’t said a word to Debbie about what had happened in the time I’d been gone.
Sure enough, her notepad was out, her little pen scratching away, as Charlie told her he had been surprised from behind when he opened this morning. He shrugged when I shot him a look.
Debbie didn’t even acknowledge my return but simply kept rolling with the questions. “Did you have the safe open already?”
Good question, and one I hadn’t even thought of. I fought with myself about running back out to the front to see if all the money was gone.
“No, fortunately, I hadn’t gotten that far yet.”
I breathed out a sigh of relief.
“But I remember the door was locked and the person, whoever it was, was already in here, so I don’t know if anything else was disturbed.”
Which sent me into panic mode again. There wasn’t much to be taken except for costumes and lingerie and so on. I didn’t have any precious gems in here, and Charlie had already confirmed the money was safe. Those facts made me feel a little better, at least.
“Ivy, why don’t you start looking for broken windows or some other point of entry?” Debbie flipped to the next page in her notebook without looking at me. “If you find something, don’t touch it, for God’s sake.” Then at last she looked at me, even if it was only to give me the evil eye.
Yeesh! She didn’t have to be so mean. I told her as much, though it came out something like, “Um, okay. I wouldn’t have touched anything. I think I know that much.” But I got the continued evil eye, so I scurried out without saying anything else. It was pointless to argue, anyway. And yes, I did still have those days where my backbone was nowhere in existence. I didn’t think I’d ever truly change all the time; it was something I still worked at, just not as often as before. So sue me.
I trundled out of the room, checking all the windows in the front, then moving to my office. As far as I could tell, nothing had been disturbed except for some paperwork on the counter up front. Then again, the papers could have been messed up when Charlie fell. Though I didn’t know precisely how he had fallen, only where he had ended up. And I still didn’t know what had happened to make him fall. Yes, there was an assailant, but had the person hit Charlie on the head, tripped him, jumped up and scared the crap out of him? I had no idea and would need to ask later. At this point, I didn’t feel like I knew anything of any significance.
I made my way back to the small bathroom right past my office, and swung open the door. Nothing in there but the usual, no curtain fluttering in the breeze to show a wedged-open window. And there was no other way to get into this room. But to be able to say I was thorough, I checked all the nooks and crannies. I opened the small cabinet where we stored extra toilet paper and cleaners. I didn’t find anything there either, until I tried to shut the door again.
Something was stuck in the hinge down at the bottom of the jamb. As unflattering a position as kneeling was, especially in these jeans, I didn’t hesitate to get down on my knees to get a closer look. No one was going to see me anyway, so what was a little booty in the air?
Of course, I should never even think things like that.
As I was wrenching the door wide open, Debbie and Charlie came in behind me (no pun intended) with Ben a close third. There was not room for everyone in the miniscule square footage, but there was room for everyone to see me with my head in the cabinet and my biggie-sized ass pointed right at the ceiling.
I heard Charlie and Debbie snicker, and Ben’s whoosh of released air. Yes, I could tell his every sound. Don’t ask me how, but I was pretty sure, had we been alone, we would have been doing the nasty on the nasty bathroom floor. I really had to be better at cleaning in here.
With as much dignity as I could muster, I pulled myself off the floor, a small object in my hand. I turned to face the three stooges, dangling the object between my fingers. “What in the hell is this?”
Chapter Thirteen
Books were sprawled over every available inch of the long oak table in the library on Simpson Street. Some had the faint odor of not having been open in years and years, while others looked brand spanking new, as if the spines had never been cracked. And all of them had the word “yarrow” in the text somewhere.
The libraria
n had looked at us a little strangely when we asked for the card catalog, but honestly I hadn’t been to the library in so long that Dewey Decimal was still thriving back then.
Not seriously, but you understand.
Why yarrow? I’ll get to that in a minute.
The second question you might ask is why we wouldn’t have simply looked up yarrow on the Internet. Ben had a laptop, and I had a desktop computer at home as well as one at the shop. The problem was that the object I had pulled from my cabinet was a necklace with a good-sized locket. When I pulled open the locket, a piece of a dried something fell out, along with a piece of paper with a page number and a line number.
I had no idea what the hell we were supposed to get from this little expedition. We didn’t even know who had put the locket in the cabinet, or when, for that matter. It could have been the intruder, but then again, it could have been someone from long ago. It could have even come with the cabinet, like the diamonds I had once found in the fake leg of a chest of drawers I’d bought for the shop’s back room.
But we still didn’t know how the perpetrator had gotten into my shop. There were no opened or broken windows anywhere that I could see, and Charlie had said he had cleaned the bathroom cabinet less than two days ago. He’d found no locket at the time. He swore by it, though I told him swearing wasn’t necessary.
So here we were at the library trying to find some correlation between books about the dried thing Martha said was part of the yarrow plant and the page and line numbers provided on the singularly unhelpful little slip of paper. I thought my eyes might start bleeding at any second. I felt very Da Vinci Code, in an unhappy way.
“How about this?” Ben asked, holding a book in his hand and running his finger down the text. “Page 42, line 13.”
“Before you start reading, might I take a moment to say how truly irritating this is?”
“What?” His eyebrows went up, his surprise kind of funny to me in this boring task.
“Nothing about you, sweetie.”
He exhaled. “Then what?”
“It’s…well…couldn’t this person, whoever he or she is, have chosen a higher page number and line number?” I flipped open several of the books in front of me. “Every single bloody book here has a page 42 and a line 13. If it had been, say, page 427, then at least we could have cut out the majority of these little pamphlets about holistic healing or about making beer. And every one of them has a line 13. It’s frustrating.” I sat back in my chair, prepared to have a small self-pity party. Only for a second. “And how do we even know the library will have the right book anyway? It could be some personal book, or a file on the fricking computer, or an unfinished manuscript, for all we know.”
He sauntered around the end of the table, book still in hand. Once he reached me, he leaned down and kissed me on the nose while putting something on the table in front of me. I grabbed onto his ears and pulled his lips down to mine. Kissing him was always a pleasure, especially when it alleviated some of my stress. But then he took control of the kiss, bringing a different kind of stress to mind.
When he finally drew back from me, I was half leaned backward over the library chair. I had a crick in my neck, but my lips totally tingled. Yum.
I gave him a slow wink before looking down at the table. On it sat the little folded piece of paper with the ridiculous numbers on it. Ben used the tip of his pencil to turn it over. And there on the back was the library’s information. Now I felt kind of silly. We did all this sleuthing and perusing through random books for nothing.
But I valiantly said, “What if that doesn’t mean anything, though?”
With a twinkle in his eye, he plopped a book down on the table on top of the card. “Take a look at that.”
I did, but it still made no sense to me.
And it still didn’t make any sense an hour later when I was closing up the shop early, with Ben’s help. We’d been going over the same information for the past sixty minutes, but I couldn’t get it to fit into the mental box Ben was so desperately trying to cram it into.
“So what? The dead guy—Aaron—had a grandfather who made beer and a fortune years ago.” I was surprised he’d gotten so much information out of the book in the first place. The grandfather had a different last name, and the brewery wasn’t even in the state. But Ben had a file filled with various miscellaneous pieces of information regarding all the players in this little drama. Apparently there was a big inheritance Aaron Sylvan wouldn’t be partaking of, like his brother and sister, since he was dead. So we had a motive, but we didn’t have a clear indication of which sibling had bumped off Aaron.
Plus we still had the fiancée and the prego mistress out there who could quite possibly try to claim pieces for themselves. The fiancée would have gained Aaron’s wealth through marriage, and the mistress was carrying the heir.
Speaking of which, I made a note in my spiral notebook to seek those two women out tomorrow. Hopefully not at the same place, since I didn’t know if either knew about the other. That could be awkward.
“We’re not talking only a few thousand or even a few hundred thousand dollars here, cookie,” Ben said, winking at me. “We’re talking tons of cash, more than three people could spend in a lifetime. And neither Heather nor Mark ever mentioned it as a possible reason someone could have offed our poor dead guy. Don’t you find that strange?”
“Okay,” I conceded.
“Not only that, but why the hell was Aaron working at Jerry’s when he was rolling in this kind of cash? He was a waiter, and not a very good one, according to Jerry. So why was he there at all if he could essentially buy and sell Jerry a few times over?”
“He might be able to buy and sell Jerry, but Aaron would never be able to get his food to come out the same way.” Just thinking about Jerry’s pasta and cheesecake made my mouth water, even though I had eaten lunch less than five minutes ago.
“If you’re going to drool, I’d rather you did it over me.” There was a smile in Ben’s voice, so I didn’t really take him seriously.
“Anyway.” I wiped thoughts of cheesecake from my head. “Maybe he was bored with all the money and thought he should do something to fill his time. There’s no telling why, and no way to ask him, at this point.”
“Which reminds me, I need to put a call in to Mark to figure out if he’s in the same boat. Though from his house, I would guess he must be.”
I didn’t remember his house being over-the-top rich. But I suppose, when compared to the bachelorhood of Ben’s days, the place had practically dripped money.
“What do you want me to do while you chase that down?” I told him my feet and head hurt from the walking around in the big library and the musty smell of old books. He, in turn, gave me the rest of the afternoon off. Maybe I could use the time to do a little snooping of my own, on my own, without him leaning over my shoulder looking disapproving. I had a couple of scorned women to meet up with.
Finally, after a snack of some leftover cheesecake from the dinner party the other night, I was able to get out from underneath Ben’s thumb. I know I’d just had lunch, but I was hungry.
I had nearly thrown up after the dessert, though, and now Ben was balking at me going anywhere because he thought I was still sick. But I put my foot down and called Bella to come pick me up and to be my backup, too. He rarely said no to her. I think most people rarely said no to her.
And then there she was, pulling up in her snazzy new little car that she had officially registered under the name Bella Henderson. She’d even given me one of her checks with VOID on it with her new name. She was cracking me up, but she was also so very happy that I couldn’t even consider bursting her honeymoon bubble. As long as she didn’t start talking about herself in the third person like Jared did, we should be fine.
I hopped into her car before Ben could squawk again, and we headed out. October was notorious for getting dark early, so I was glad Bella was driving, in case this took longer than I thought it should. I st
ill didn’t know all the roads around here. Getting lost would suck.
Bella and I caught up on our way to wherever we were going. Someplace on a street called Devil’s Bottom. No joke, seriously. Did these people just not get the whole address thing? Who wanted to give their address as 32 Devil’s Bottom Road? Made me even more thankful for living on Main Street.
Anyway, once I was thoroughly nauseated by the baby talk about how perfect Jared was and how he did everything perfectly and was so wonderful, she finally tossed me over the edge by casually mentioning that he knew where the laundry basket was. Argh! I still hadn’t managed to train Ben on that.
I cut her off before she could also tell me Jared never left the toilet seat up. I had almost fallen in the other night at two in the morning.
“So how do you think we should handle the fiancée?” I asked. I so rarely had gone after a suspect with prepared questions, and look how that turned out last time. So I was a little shaky on the best way to go about this.
“We’ll go in with the notion she is the grieving almost-widow and hammer her for details.” She readjusted the rearview mirror. “One thing we absolutely must find out is if she knew about the mistress. That would change everything if she was aware of the other woman.”
I slipped a lock of hair behind my ear, chewing on my bottom lip. “And we certainly can’t blurt out that question. Right?” Damn, I wish we could just blurt out that question. It would save so much time.
“Right.” She drew out the one word as she gave me a pointed look out of the corner of her eye.
“I know that. I knew that, I mean.”
“So that’s why you asked Mark where he was when his brother was killed?”
Damn grapevine. “I’ll admit it wasn’t my finest moment, but it was all smoothed over the way I told Ben it would be. It all worked out perfectly.”
“If you say so. I guess you’ll have to thank Ben for that, from what I understand.”