The Plane and the Parade (Veronica Barry Book 3)

by Sophia Martin

  “So let me see if I have this right,” Daniel said, and Veronica could almost see the notepad in his hand. “You’ve been in contact with Eric for some time—”

  “No, not really!” Veronica interrupted. “He friended me on Facebook a couple of years ago, but I haven’t communicated with him at all since then. He’s never on Facebook. I never see anything from him, no photos or anything.”

  Daniel gazed at her without saying anything for a moment. It made Veronica feel like he was peering into her mind—did he use this trick on suspects? A giggle formed in her throat and she suppressed it. Nerves; his technique certainly was effective. Digging her nails into her palms helped stave off the giggles that arose at this thought.

  “Okay,” Daniel said at last. “So you’ve been in contact with Eric for two years—”

  “Daniel, being friends with someone on Facebook isn’t really contact unless you actually interact with them—”

  “Nevertheless,” he pushed on, “you reconnected with him two years ago. And a few days ago—what, Friday?”

  Veronica bit and released her upper lip. “Thursday.”

  “On Thursday you got a message from him announcing his imminent arrival in Sacramento, in which he requested your aid in locating an apartment.”

  Veronica nodded, chewing on her lip some more.

  “You didn’t do anything for two days—”

  “It was more like a day and a half.”

  “Right. And on Saturday morning you woke up from a dream in which you saw Eric on a plane with some worried flight attendants. This was enough to push you to answer him, and in this answer, you didn’t mention the plane, but asked when he was coming.”

  The threat of giggling had evaporated. Using her fork, Veronica began carefully separating the elements of her salad onto different parts of the plate. Grated carrot at twelve o’clock, purple onion slices at three.

  “At which point you attempted to call me several times in order to tell me about the exchange of messages…?”

  “Yes.” Two cherry tomatoes at six o’clock.

  “But you didn’t get a hold of me, and when I called you, you… forgot to say anything about it?”

  With a sigh, Veronica met his eyes again. “I didn’t forget. You said you wanted me to come to a crime scene. It didn’t fit to say, ‘Oh, by the way, an old friend is coming to visit from France.’”

  “Really?” Daniel said, eyebrows raised. He turned the corners of his mouth down and tapped on his chin. “Cause that seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to say.”

  “Daniel…”

  He held up a hand. “No wait, I’m not done. So yesterday afternoon, when I called you, you decided not to tell me about the messages. Then you came out to the crime scene. And from there we went to the hospital. We spent, what, three hours together on Saturday? And at no point during those three hours did you say anything about it. There was not one moment where you could have slipped in the ‘My friend is coming to visit’ news.”

  Veronica was beginning to get annoyed. She crossed her arms over her chest and watched him without answering.

  “So all this, it leads me to one conclusion,” Daniel said. His coffee eyes glittered at her. “You still have feelings for this guy.”

  Veronica made a scoffing noise, but she felt the flush rising in her face again.

  “It’s the only explanation. I’m not a jealous guy, Ronnie. I don’t freak out when you talk to other men or whatever. I don’t care how many male friends you have on Facebook. But it does bother me that I didn’t know until now that Eric was one of them,” he said, leaning over his plate. “And it really bothers me that you felt so awkward about this whole exchange of messages thing that it took you this long to tell me about it.”

  Veronica cocked her head to the side. “But I am telling you about it, Daniel.”

  “You haven’t owned up to still crushing on the guy.”

  Veronica rolled her eyes. “I’m not crushing on him. And even if I was, being attracted to someone and acting on that are two different things. I haven’t deceived you about anything.”

  “You kept vital information from me for three and a half days!”

  “‘Vital information’?”

  “The fact that the famous Er-eek of Paris who you were desperately in love with, enough to ignore a premonition of danger and walk into a mugging to still be with him—”

  “That is not what happened!”

  “That Er-eek contacted you and wants to get together—”

  “You’re making it sound like he wants to have a fling! He wants help finding an apartment!”

  “Oh yeah, I’m sure that’s all he wants.”

  The server arrived at that moment with their entrees, but she stopped short when she saw their salads untouched. Looking at the steaming, creamy plates of linguine in clam sauce, Veronica realized she wasn’t hungry.

  “You know what, I’m going to call it a night,” she said, standing.

  “Ronnie,” Daniel said.

  “No, really. I’ve lost my appetite.”

  Slinging her purse over her shoulder, she headed out of the restaurant, dialing 4-1-1 on her cell.

  “Sacramento,” she told the operator. “I need a cab service.”

  Daniel caught up to her as she exited. “Ronnie, you can’t go. Let’s talk about this.” He sounded remorseful, but Veronica wasn’t in a forgiving mood. He reached out for her hand.

  “I’m going home, Daniel.”

  With a sigh, Daniel let his hand drop. “At least let me drive you.”

  “No thank you,” Veronica said in a clipped voice. The operator came back on with the number, and Veronica waited to be connected.

  Stuffing his hands into his pockets, Daniel scowled. “You have to admit you do have feelings for the guy. You did hold off for days before you told me what was going on.”

  Veronica shot him a look. A gruff voice came on the phone saying “Hello Taxi Cab.”

  Veronica gave him the address of the restaurant, eyeing Daniel as she did. When she hung up, she said, “I have a cab coming.”

  Daniel shook his head and walked away towards his car.

  Although the evening air was still quite warm, Veronica wrapped her arms around herself as she waited for the cab. Well, she thought miserably, at least my plan to keep him from proposing to me worked.

  ~~~

  As a way to get her mind off the evening, Veronica spent an hour online, trying to find a good prenatal yoga class. She looked at each gym and yoga center within five miles of Melanie’s house, read all the reviews, and took down their schedules and fees. She couldn’t afford a gym membership, much less a membership to one of the fancy yoga studios she found, but all of them had day passes or guest passes she could spring for. One class at a studio took place from five thirty to six thirty on Mondays. Circling it, she decided she would drag Melanie to that one tomorrow.

  Sleep came more easily than she expected. The walk at Folsom helped, no doubt, because on a normal day she might have spent at least an hour bothering Blossom with her tossing and turning, and driving herself crazy going over the evening in her mind. As it was, she did think about it for a bit—how could she not? But she felt the heavy promise of sleep in her limbs and eyes, and gave way to it gratefully, with a brief wish for a dream about the airplane, so maybe she could message Eric again and stop him from boarding it somehow.

  As it turned out, her night was relatively dreamless. At least it was devoid of any prophetic dreams, and any ordinary ones she had, she didn’t remember when she woke the next day. Her first instinct, as she shut off her alarm and lay back in her pillows, was to call Daniel and try to laugh off their fight. But the more she thought about his reaction, the more annoyed she became with him all over again.

  So what if Daniel was right? So what if he’d gleaned the truth about her hesitation to talk to him about Eric, and its root cause: her unresolved feelings for him. Daniel had cross-examined her like a suspect and t
hen accused her of deceiving him. She hadn’t deceived him, she’d just waited a bit to tell him the truth. And who didn’t still have feelings for someone in their past? Just because she was with Daniel didn’t mean she was going to just forget about every other person in the world. It did mean she wasn’t going to have a fling with anyone else. Their relationship was serious. They weren’t seeing other people. She respected that. But it was totally unreasonable to expect her to never be attracted to anyone ever again.

  Veronica blew a puff of air out of her mouth, startling Binky, who was curled up on the pillow next to her again. He tensed, digging his claws into the pillow, then relaxed, propping himself into a sitting position and beginning his morning bath. Veronica watched him lick his paw and rub it over his face in the rhythmic way of cats.

  “You’ve got it easy, Bink,” she told him. Binky continued washing his face.

  Taking this as a cue to get up and start her own day, Veronica pulled off the covers and swung her feet out of the bed.

  ~~~

  After an hour spent making unsuccessful attempts at starting a painting, Veronica pulled on shorts, a halter top and flip-flops—it was already in the nineties again—and headed over to the police station to track down the sketch artist, Marisa. She was lucky; Marisa wasn’t there all the time and when she was, she was often busy, but she had time to meet with Veronica that morning. They spent twenty minutes on Marisa’s sketch of the murderer from the alley as Veronica described him, and then twenty more as Marisa worked with a computer program to try and fine-tune it. When they were done, Marisa promised to get the sketch to Daniel, and Veronica escaped without running into him herself. She drove back home, but found she couldn’t face spending any more time in the house. She took Harry to the dog park and called Melanie once she was there and Harry had met a pair of nice golden retrievers to play with.

  “Hey, V.”

  “Mellie, how’s it going?”

  “Meh. Dealing with nausea and Denise’s creative grammar on the latest brief is a lot to manage.”

  “I’m sorry. She’s still allergic to spell-check, huh?”

  “Listen to this: ‘Property liquidated in order for pursuance of leverage in a timely completion of said project may represent the owner’s opinion of the best option.’ I mean, what is that?”

  “Wow.”

  “I know, right? And three of the words in that sentence—if you can call it a sentence—are misspelled. ‘Liquidated,’ ‘leverage,’ and ‘completion.’”

  “Why does Darnell put up with this?” Veronica asked as she found a spot on a bench. Harry and the retrievers were striking puppy-poses and going through all the etiquette of dogs getting acquainted.

  “Because most of the time he sees the copy after I’ve fixed it.”

  “So you’re pretty much the reason Denise still has a job.”

  “Pretty much. Anyway, hon, what’s up?”

  Harry wacked one of the retrievers on the nose with a paw, and got tackled for his efforts. “Got plans for five thirty?”

  “No… I get off at four. And I have news. But tell me about five thirty, first.”

  “Okay. I want to take a yoga class. I’ll treat if you come with me.”

  “A yoga class?”

  Veronica swung her legs out of the way as Harry, a blur of black, white, and tan fur, barreled past, leading the two retrievers on a chase. A beagle bugled at them from a few yards away and a black lab ran over to join them. “Yeah,” Veronica said. “I’ve always wanted to try yoga.”

  “I don’t know, V…”

  “Come on, just try it with me one time.”

  Melanie sighed. “Okay. You want to meet at my place?”

  “I’ll be there at five. So tell me your news.”

  “Well, I made an appointment with my OB for tomorrow afternoon, and then I called Chris, you know, to see if maybe he wanted to come. And he said yes.”

  “That is awesome, Mel.” Harry and the other dogs ran into the muddy water of the pond at one end of the dog park. A man in Bermuda shorts was tossing a red plastic stick for a big shaved Newfoundland, and the retrievers split off to race for it. “I’m so glad he’s going to go. Maybe this is the beginning of him coming around.”

  “Oh god I hope so,” Melanie said.

  Veronica stood and made her way over to the pond to keep an eye on Harry, who was prancing along in the shallows of the water, biting at his reflection every so often. “So I went out to dinner with Daniel last night,” Veronica said.

  “Oh my god did he do it?” Melanie’s voice lowered to a whisper. “Did he propose?”

  With a groan Veronica looked up at the sky. “No,” she said, then gave Melanie a summary of the conversation and how she’d left the dinner early.

  “Wow,” Melanie said. “I really didn’t think he’d be so bothered by the whole Eric thing.”

  “Daniel’s sharp. He figured out I have feelings I don’t want to admit to.”

  “Yeah,” Melanie said. “I bet that’s what really bothered him.”

  Veronica fiddled with strap of her canvas purse. “Yeah. I guess I can’t blame him. I was pissed because it just seems unreasonable to be mad at me when I didn’t act on any of those feelings, but I can’t pretend I’d be fine with it if I found out he had feelings for someone else. And didn’t want me to know about it.”

  “And V, it kinda sounds like you bailed on him pretty quick. I mean, he might have calmed down about it if you’d stuck around to talk.”

  Veronica slipped her foot out of her flip flop and dug a toe into the mud. “You weren’t there, Mel. He was in full Detective-Interrogation Mode. It was really unpleasant.”

  Melanie sighed. “Yeah, I can see that. It’s just—I like Daniel. I don’t think he’d just be unreasonable and refuse to talk it out.”

  An uncomfortable feeling of remorse twisted Veronica’s insides. She slipped her flip flop back on and she kicked at a tuft of grass at the water’s edge. “I hate it when you’re right about stuff.”

  “You’d think someone as wise as I am in the ways of romance would have it all perfectly sewn up for herself, wouldn’t you,” Melanie said. “Oh, hey, V, Darnell’s coming out of the meeting he was in, I better look busy.”

  “Enjoy the brief.”

  “Oh, sure, rub it in.”

  “I take my shots where I can get them. See you at five,” Veronica said.

  “See you then.”

  ~~~

  “This is a prenatal yoga class,” Melanie said as they came to the door of the studio and she saw the sign for the class.

  Shrugging, Veronica pushed open the door. “I never said it wasn’t.”

  “You said you wanted to try yoga like it was for you,” Melanie accused.

  “I may have implied that, but I really want to try it for you, Mellie.”

  “You’re as devious as Angie.”

  “Well, I’m just thinking you might enjoy a good stretch, and some breathing and relaxation. You still in?”

  Melanie scowled at her. “I suppose. But I’m not going to forget that you tricked me, Veronica ‘I’m a con artist’ Barry. There will be retribution.”

  Veronica raised her eyebrows at Melanie. “Retribution? What are you going to do, trick me into taking a Pilates class?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Melanie said, still scowling as she chose a mat from those rolled up and piled against a wall. “I’ll think of something.”

  However, by the time the class was over and they had finished with a ten minute relaxation, Melanie was looking much happier.

  “This was a great idea,” she said. Her voice sounded easier than it had in weeks.

  Allowing herself a moment to mentally pat herself on the back, Veronica smiled. “Yes, I feel amazing. I might have to get a second job so I can afford to join this place.”

  Melanie rolled up her mat and Veronica followed suit. They put them in the “used” bin and left the studio. In the foyer, Melanie stopped and picked up a brochu
re. “I am definitely doing this again,” she said.

  “Good,” Veronica said. “You need to take time out for yourself, Mellie. You’re not just doing it for you. You’re doing it for little Veronica, there.” She patted Melanie’s stomach for emphasis. With a half-hearted swat at Veronica’s hand, Melanie smirked at her.

  “Little Veronica, huh?”

  “Well, you missed your chance to honor me by naming Angie after me, and I guess since we didn’t know each other yet when she was born, I can forgive the oversight. But this one…”

  Melanie laughed. It was really nice to hear. Veronica wondered how long it had been since the last time. She beamed at her friend and crossed her fingers that Chris was going to come to terms with becoming a dad and make some sort of commitment to Melanie at their doctor’s appointment tomorrow.

  Chapter 10

  Sitting on her couch later that evening, with the TV playing an old Bogart movie, the sound down low, Veronica eyed her cell phone, which lay on the coffee table between her and the TV, and considered whether to call Daniel. She hadn’t heard a peep from him, and that annoyed her.

  Maybe Mellie was right, and she had left too abruptly the night before. Maybe she should have stayed and talked. But that didn’t change that his behavior had been out of line.

  One of them was going to have to make a move, though, and Daniel could be stubborn. If she called, she didn’t have to apologize right away. Although at this point, she was pretty sure she was going to apologize. But he’d better apologize too.

  The cell buzzed and danced an inch to the left. Scooping it up, she expected to see ‘Daniel’ on the screen. It was a number she didn’t recognize. She almost let it go to voicemail—she had some unpaid medical bills from when she landed in the hospital with a broken arm the winter before—but something told her to answer it.

  “Hello?”

  “Vero?” came a man’s voice with a distinct French pronunciation.

  The bottom dropped out of Veronica’s stomach. “Eric?”