“I imagine they might,” Wayne agreed. “But it’s gone now. And they’re not going to tell me what it was. Especially if they killed Miss Shaw over it.”
“I guess we’ll just have to find out what it was on our own,” I said.
He gave me a beady stare. “You mean that I’ll just have to find out on my own, don’t you? Since this is a police matter, after all.”
“Of course,” I said. “That’s exactly what I meant.”
“Humph,” Wayne said, and made no effort to make it sound like he believed me.
—8—
Wayne headed upstairs, and so did I—to our condo to have a look around without Derek’s distracting presence.
I love him, but he can be loud, with his sawing and banging and swearing, and apart from that, I’m usually pretty aware of his presence anyway. It can be hard to concentrate on anything else when he’s around. So I welcomed the opportunity to take a look at the space by myself, and to get some thinking done on what I might do to make it look fabulous.
The hallway was small and dark, since it opened on an interior staircase and had no windows. We’d paint the walls a light color to make it appear bigger. Not white, though. White is blah, and it gets dirty quickly. And not eggshell, either. Every unimaginative renovator in the universe paints the walls eggshell white, because it is supposed to appeal to the greatest number of people. I hate eggshell white. Much better to make a statement, and if that alienates a few potential buyers, then those were probably people you wouldn’t want to do business with in the first place.
So light walls, pale blue or pale green maybe, or yellow. Pale gray if Derek wanted bland—and sometimes he does. A big mirror on the wall to reflect what little light there was, and to make the space appear bigger. Maybe we could mount it right on the sliding door to the bathroom. It’s nice to have a full-length mirror you can look in right before you walk out the door. Most of us like to make sure we look OK before we take on the world. And from that location, it would catch any light coming in both from the living room and the kitchen. Maybe I could do something fun with it, instead of just buying one at the store. Glue seashells or beads or glass tiles around the frame, maybe. Or etch it. Something unique. It’d look great.
I’d already designed the kitchen—on paper—and it would look fantastic, too. Painted cabinets that’d look lacquered after copious amounts of shellac. Maybe some white subway tile on the backsplash; it’s classic, all-purpose, and goes with any style, from cottage to industrial. Concrete counter, or maybe a bright and colorful Formica?
The possibilities were endless…and for another day. I moved on.
The bedrooms would be simple: carpeted floors maybe, to cut down on noise, and painted walls, light and airy. And the living room/dining room combo…
I stopped in the middle of the floor, hands on my hips, to look around.
It wasn’t a bad-sized room for a small apartment. Fairly generous for a living room. Not quite so big when you took into account that you’d need to fit in a dining room area as well. But sufficient for both.
Pivoting slowly, I did a visual 360-degree of the space. There should be wood floors; an unbroken expanse of the same flooring throughout the condo would make the space flow better and appear larger. Derek could hang a chair rail around the part of the room that would serve as the dining area, from the hallway door to the door to the back bedroom. The vertical line would visually extend the space. The wall on the right was unbroken, so we’d probably have to leave that wall bare, since we couldn’t very well stop the chair rail in the middle.
Or could we?
Maybe we could do something funky. Like extend the chair rail through the dining area and then turn it in a different direction. Down. End the rail at the baseboard instead. And then perhaps fill in with something. Like a pattern of other rails. A fake paneling of sorts, something almost like a half-timbered look. Or—here was a thought!—aluminum. Corrugated. Industrial.
Head spinning with the possibilities, I made another half turn. If we painted the ceiling the same color as the top of the wall, that would serve to open the space up even more. Metallic paint, possibly. And outside on the balcony—I pushed the door open and walked out—maybe a bench. There really wasn’t enough room out here for a table as well as chairs; someone would have to be really thin or else a contortionist to make it past any table I put out. But a bench would fit perfectly. One of my recently acquired DIY magazines had instructions for a slender bench with metal legs and an upholstered lid for seating with a shallow compartment underneath for storage.
Making a mental note to dig out the magazine and take a look when I got back to Aunt Inga’s house, I sat down in one of the hard plastic chairs that populated the porch currently, and looked out onto the darkening lawn. A few stars were starting to appear overhead, along with a slim sliver of a moon. I put my feet up on the railing and inspected my toes. It was still warm enough to wear sandals to tomorrow’s wedding, and I might have to touch up my polish after wearing sneakers to work all week.
My toes were watermelon red. And in spite of the rough treatment of the past few days, they didn’t look bad at all. I might just want to give them a quick coat of extra polish when I got home, but other than that, I was good to go.
The dulcet tones of “Saturday Night Fever” cut through the air, and took my attention away from my toes. Moving my feet down and leaning forward, I peered over the railing. I’d thought I was alone out here, but maybe I was wrong.
Or not. There was still no sign of anyone below, so unless the unknown cell phone owner was downstairs on Hilda Shaw’s porch, where he or she had no business being, I was still alone.
“What took you so long?” a female voice said, and I leaned back on my chair as I realized the truth. The person with the cell phone was above me, not below. Over my head, where Candy must be sitting on her own porch. It was her voice I was hearing. “I called you hours ago!”
“Yes,” she added a second later, “I know I’m not supposed to call you at home, but this is important!”
That sounded like my cue to leave. I leaned down, soundlessly, and grabbed my shoes.
“Yeah, it’s over,” was the next thing I heard. “The chief of police said it was an accident. That’s not the problem here.”
I wiggled my toes into a shoe while I tried not to make any noise. It was a tricky situation to be in. I didn’t want to eavesdrop on Candy’s conversation. She probably had no idea I was here, or she’d have gone inside when her phone rang, to speak in private.
Or maybe she did know I was here, and it wasn’t a confidential conversation. Maybe she had heard me come outside and she didn’t care whether I overheard or not. After all, I hadn’t heard the door upstairs open or close, so she must have been here before me.
Nonetheless, I started fussing with my second shoe. Other people’s conversations, whether personal or not, are not something I feel I need to overhear.
That was until I heard Candy say, “Not on the phone. I want to meet in person.”
There was a pause while the caller spoke, and then Candy’s voice came back, petulant. “What do you mean, we decided? We didn’t decide. You did.”
If I concentrated hard, I thought I could hear a faint quacking noise that must be the other person in the conversation. Or maybe I was just imagining things.
“I know that’s what you said,” Candy continued. “But you’ll get in more trouble than I will. And don’t you forget it!”
Another pause ensued, longer this time. I waited, holding my breath.
“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Candy said. “And if you know what’s good for you, so will you!”
And that salvo must have been the end of the conversation, because the next thing I heard was the balcony door closing upstairs. Hurriedly, I finished slipping my foot into my other shoe and followed suit: ducked through the door into the living room and closed and locked the balcony door behind me. Then I scurried across the condo to the f
ront door, snagging my bag from the floor of the hall along the way.
I opened the front door and listened for a second. There were no sounds of steps on the stairs, neither above nor below me. Candy must have either been super fast, and was already down and out, past my floor and outside in the parking lot, or she was still upstairs, preparing to leave.
I took a chance that it was the latter and headed down myself, after quickly locking the door behind me. Every second I spent standing there, and every step I took down the stairs, I expected to hear Candy coming, but she didn’t, and by the time I reached the parking lot, I fully expected to see her car already gone.
But it wasn’t. The small hybrid was still there, like a smear of white in the gathering dark, parked in front of the building. I hurried over to the Beetle, three spaces down, unlocked the door and slid behind the wheel, and snapped off the overhead light just a second before the front door opened again, and Candy came through.
She was dressed in her usual tight jeans and a Barnham College hooded sweatshirt, with the ubiquitous ponytail and pink bubble gum. I could see her jaw moving from where I was.
She stopped for a second just outside the door and looked around, as if she thought she might have heard something. I slid down in my seat until I could just barely see her above the dashboard, hoping that if I could hardly see her, maybe she wouldn’t notice me.
After a moment she took a left and headed for her car. I watched her go past the Beetle without a sideways glance, and heard the sound as she beeped off the hybrid’s car alarm. She slid behind the wheel and closed the door gently, and after a moment, the engine purred to life.
I expected her to turn on the headlights, but she must have forgotten about that little detail, because she just reversed out of the parking space and rolled slowly across the lot over to the road. There was no traffic to speak of this time of night, and a second later, she was on her way down the Augusta Road in the direction of town and Barnham College.
I left my own lights off as I followed, just in case she happened to look in the rearview mirror. When I got out onto the road itself, though, I thought I’d better adhere to the law, so I flipped them on. Candy had done the same; I could see her taillights a hundred yards or two up ahead.
With her lights on, she was fairly easy to follow in the dusk, and there wasn’t enough traffic on the road to cause a distraction. And as it turned out, she didn’t go far. Once we hit the Portland Highway and took a right—away from downtown Waterfield, toward Barnham College—only a minute or two passed before she signaled a right turn. I slowed down and followed. Right into the parking lot of Guido’s Pizzeria.
Well, that was a disappointment. She must have been talking to a friend on the phone, someone who knew what had happened in Candy’s building and who wanted to hear about the meeting with Wayne. There wasn’t anything sinister about it at all, no matter how adamant she had sounded on the phone.
Nonetheless, I slotted the Beetle into a parking spot and turned off the lights.
There was no sign of the hybrid, so after a brief battle with myself, I exited the car.
Guido’s is a low one-story cinder-block building that looks exactly like what it is: a roadside tavern. There are no windows save the one in the door, and no landscaping or other attempt to prettify the place. What you see is what you get: a squat, square building surrounded by parking spaces, and a neon sign flashing HOT-HOT-HOT, like a strip club.
That made me think of Derek, who was in Portland by now, probably into his third or fourth beer—or other alcoholic beverage—and who, for all I knew, was at a real strip club, toasting Ryan’s impending nuptials, with big-bosomed women strutting their stuff in front of him.
Not that I was worried. Derek isn’t the cheating type, and if he were, it wouldn’t be with someone whose bra size is bigger than her IQ. No offense.
And besides, I had more immediate matters to occupy me than the possibility that Ryan was corrupting my fiancé with women, wine, and song. Peering around the corner of the building, I saw a ghostly shape in the dark corner of the parking lot, under an overhanging tree: Candy’s hybrid.
The rest of the parking lot looked deserted, and she was parked nose forward into the corner. I knew she was meeting someone, so she’d probably be watching the lot in the rearview mirror. If I tried to move closer, she might see me, especially as I was wearing a pale yellow shirt, almost as bright as the neon sign on the roof. If I’d known I’d need to sneak through the dark spying on someone, I’d have chosen something black or navy blue, the better to blend into the shadows, but hindsight’s 20/20 and all that. It was what it was.
So I stayed close to the building, hiding between the cars and getting as close as I could to Candy without crossing the open expanse between the parking spaces around the restaurant itself and the parking spaces around the edges of the lot. I couldn’t get very close, but I comforted myself with the knowledge that I wouldn’t have been able to see anything even if I did. The corner under the tree was dark, and the interior light in the car was off. I couldn’t see Candy at all, not even as a dark outline.
Out on the road a car slowed down to pull into the parking lot. For a moment, the headlights illuminated the narrow space between the two cars, and I threw myself on the ground, heart pounding. If Candy had looked out at that moment, she would probably have seen my head lit up like a halo.
I thought this might have been whoever she was waiting for, but the car parked in a space near the front, and two people got out. A young couple, laughing and holding hands as they walked toward the entrance to the restaurant. I went back to watching and waiting.
There were sounds off to the left, around the back of the building, and for a second or two, the ground lit up. A shadow appeared, the elongated outline of a man, then the whole thing disappeared again, and I heard footsteps—hard soles slapping against the blacktop of the parking lot. Someone had opened the back door to the restaurant and had stepped through before closing the door again. A moment later, I could see the outline of a man walking briskly across the lot toward the hybrid in the corner.
By now it had gotten too dark to recognize anyone. It was a man, and his hair looked dark, but that was all I was able to see. I had no idea who he was, whether he was young or old, employee, patron, or what. He was just a shadow moving through the night. Until he reached Candy’s car and opened the passenger side door. Then the interior light came on for a moment. I saw the top of Candy’s head move as she turned to him, and saw him slide in next to her. The light went off again as soon as he closed the door behind him, but I’d seen enough to recognize him. It was the same man Candy had spoken to last time Derek and I had been inside Guido’s.
They spent five minutes together, nothing more, while I crouched between cars, eyes peeled to see what I could. It wasn’t much. As soon as the light went out, the interior of the car was plunged into stygian blackness again, under the tree. I couldn’t even see movement. Basically, they could have been doing anything at all in there. Although the car didn’t move, so whatever they did involved minimal activity. Chances were they just sat there and talked.
After a few minutes, the passenger side door opened again, and the guy got out. He walked back across the parking lot to the restaurant, his movements quick and sort of angry. After he’d disappeared inside—the light and sound from the restaurant came back for a moment and then was cut off again when the back door closed—everything was still and quiet. Candy’s car didn’t move. The minutes ticked by, and I fidgeted.
Had something happened? Was she OK?
Had the guy killed her?
Should I go check?
I had just decided to stand up and make my way over there when the hybrid’s engine cranked over. I ducked down between the cars again, hurriedly, as the taillights came on and Candy backed out from under the tree. The tires squealed, and I wondered if she were angry, too. She drove as if she was.
She took a right on the road, heading back toward
the Augusta Road and—I assumed—home. I thought about following her, but I was pretty sure I’d just be tailing her back to the condo.
Instead, I thought maybe I should follow the boyfriend.
If that’s what he was. He was much too old for her—late thirties, at a guess, while she was Brandon’s age—but there was definitely something going on between them. They were sneaking around, meeting in dark corners. From what I had been able to make out from hearing Candy’s side of their conversation, they’d been together last night, after the restaurant closed, and Candy had lied to Wayne about it. And besides, the fact that he was a man—good-looking, well-dressed, seemingly well-off—and she was a young, attractive blonde, made the assumption sort of automatic.
What was he doing here? He didn’t look like the type to frequent Guido’s. It caters to the college crowd, with student waitresses, cheap beer, and pizzas. Barnham College was just a couple of miles down the road. A slick professional-looking guy in a designer suit didn’t fit the marketing demographic at all. He wasn’t a teacher, not unless he was brand-new this semester. I’d taught a couple classes at Barnham myself last spring, and I knew pretty much everyone on staff there.
Maybe he was the owner? Guido himself?
I had no idea who owned Guido’s Pizzeria. A lot of Italian places are family-run, with all the relatives pitching in. Stefano works the kitchen, Maria is the hostess, and Tony and Joey wait tables after school while Mamma Rosa folds napkins in a corner of the dining room. New York City’s Italian neighborhood, Little Italy, is full of restaurants like that.
This wasn’t one of them. The waitresses were all Barnham students, and so was the kitchen staff, at least from what I’d seen of it. But someone had to own Guido’s, whether his—or her—name was Guido or something else.
I made my way back to the Beetle and pulled out my phone.
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