“I’m Marjorie Briggs. Old women living alone can’t be too careful. Everyone thinks we’re ripe for the latest scam. Come in. You’re not allergic to cats, are you?”
“I’m not. Thank you for seeing me on such short notice.”
If Giulia had been allergic, Marjorie would be calling 911 any second. Even with the windows open, the house smelled of litter boxes, canned cat food, and flowery air freshener. The carpet pile showed the reverse-nap streaks of recent vacuuming, but cat hair of every possible length and shade clung to the baseboards and the bottoms of chairs.
“Come on into the living room. Can I get you something to drink? I’m so glad you’re trying to find Joanne. The cats miss her.”
Giulia sat in an armchair upholstered in yellow fabric plus cat hair. A trip to the Dollar Store for a lint roller was in her near future. The chair Marjorie sat in had the same upholstery scheme.
“Ms. Briggs, I found your phone number in Joanne’s pocket calendar.”
“Just Marjorie, please. Ms. Briggs is my older sister, the banker. I remember that calendar. Joanne lived by it. She said calendars on those smart phones couldn’t be trusted.”
Marjorie answered Giulia’s next leading question before she asked it: “If Joanne left behind that calendar, she may be dead after all.” Marjorie’s wrinkles scrunched together and tears appeared in her eyes.
Giulia cut them off. “Not necessarily. There’s also the chance Joanne wanted to start a new life.”
“Horse puckey.”
Giulia smiled. “Why?”
“Joanne had everything a girl could want if she wasn’t out hunting for a husband. She had two good jobs and lots of friends. She had boyfriends too. She used to tell me all about them when she came here for the ferals.”
“Ferals?”
“Stray cats. Wild cats. Any cat too skittish to want to be queen of a household.” A calico strutted into the room and sat at Marjorie’s feet. She reached down to scratch its head. “I’m the crazy feral cat lady. Joanne used to make cat food from the discarded vegetables and meats at the nursing home. She’d bring two big buckets of her own creations every Sunday and we’d feed the cats together.”
A short-haired tuxedo cat jumped out of nowhere into Giulia’s lap. Its gold eyes scrutinized her before its paws kneaded her thighs and it settled into her lap, purring.
Marjorie pointed. “Groucho likes you. Now we’ll see if Tallulah approves.”
Giulia looked around. A long-haired white cat strolled into the room followed by a gray with mismatched eyes and a tabby with a fox tail. The tabby didn’t acknowledge Giulia’s presence. The gray sniffed her shoes and moved on. The white cat inspected the occupant of Giulia’s lap, sprang onto the arm of the chair, and swatted the tuxedo cat with one long paw. With a huff, Groucho moved to Giulia’s left leg and Tallulah took possession of Giulia’s right.
Marjorie settled back against a yellow and white checkered cushion. “That’s all settled. When Groucho and Tallulah approve, I know you’re a trustworthy person. They sat on Joanne’s legs like that every week. Now how can I help you find her?” She stopped petting a one-eared orange cat. “I’ve been worried she might have been kidnapped, but the police haven’t said anything about a ransom note.”
Giulia had considered and discarded the kidnapping idea yesterday. Also, she didn’t want Marjorie panicking and clamming up. “It’s extremely unlikely. Joanne’s been missing since early April, yet her family received no ransom demand.”
“True. Joanne wasn’t rich. You don’t work two jobs if you don’t have to. Did you ever see one of her cakes?”
“Yes, I’ve seen pictures.” Giulia steered the conversation into a useful direction. “Can you tell me if Joanne seemed different the last few Sundays before she disappeared?”
“That nice young detective asked me the same question, but I’m sure the police don’t share their information with private investigators.”
“They sometimes don’t.” Not too much of a lie.
Marjorie jerked her head toward the TV. “I’ve seen a lot of private eye movies. They do like to rub the police’s fur the wrong way. Right, Lucille?” She dragged her palm backwards along the cat’s spine and the cat arched and hissed. “Joanne had self-esteem issues. I’ve seen the doctors on Ellen and Oprah talk about self-esteem, and Joanne was like one of their patients they bring out as an example. She said she was too fat and she dressed like she was trying to fade into the wallpaper. But here’s the thing.” She picked up the meowing cat and deposited it on the carpet. “Lucille, you won’t starve while I talk to the private eye.” An all-black cat immediately took Lucille’s place. Marjorie began stroking it as she talked. “Even though Joanne put herself down and dressed herself frumpy, she was savvy enough to build her fancy cake business and to be angling for a promotion at work.”
Giulia stroked both her thigh-busting felines as her legs went numb. “Perhaps she felt unattractive only in personal relationships?”
Marjorie rolled her faded brown eyes. “Men. Give me cats any day. Joanne had her troubles with men, sure. Some thought she’d be easy—you know—because she weighed a few pounds more than Hollywood says she should. One of her boyfriends dumped her right before Christmas.”
“So he wouldn’t have to buy her a present.”
“Bingo.” Marjorie nuzzled the black cat’s nose. “You’d never dump me unless I couldn’t work the can opener anymore, right, Rudolph?” Rudolph twisted himself upside down and presented his belly. Marjorie obliged with more petting. “When the gutless wonder tossed Joanne away, she got real mopey for about a month. One Sunday at the end of January she told me she’d given in and registered on some dating sites.”
“More than one?”
Giulia didn’t know whether to rejoice or cringe at the research in her future.
“She said sites, plural. But that’s not the point.” Marjorie leaned forward. “In the middle of February, she came here all excited. She wouldn’t say who the man was, but she dropped little teasers like ‘Dating sites weren’t always the refuge of the hopeless.’ She started to dress differently too.”
Marjorie stopped talking to comb Rudolph’s fur, and Giulia said, “In what ways did Joanne dress differently?”
“Right, we’re up to February. She started to wear hunting clothes when she came to visit. She used to wear t-shirts and shorts or sweaters and jeans. Regular casual clothes, you know. After a few more weeks she started to act differently. Joanne was always sweet and friendly. When the middle of March hit, she got all secretive and superior.”
Giulia would have given a week’s allotment of coffee to record this on her phone. She kept her attention on Marjorie like she was wearing mental blinders. “That doesn’t sound good.”
“I know. I used to wonder if she’d knock on my door one Sunday with a new greeting. See, she’d always announce ‘Crazy Cat Lady in training,’ and I’d say, ‘Enter and be instructed, acolyte,’ and we’d both laugh. But those last few Sundays she dropped the greeting altogether. She gave me the cat food like it was a chore.” Marjorie’s wrinkles drooped. “I miss who she used to be.”
Nine
The Nunmobile made it two entire blocks before Giulia made a hard right into a mall parking lot. Phantom flea itches and four different colors of cat hair covered her body and clothes. She parked and yanked up the legs of her khakis and pulled out the waistband. No bites. Now to convince her body of their absence.
She hadn’t wanted to spook Marjorie by creating a voice memo while parked in front of her house, so she fell back on her old teaching trick of mnemonics. As soon as she established her flea-free state, she whipped out her phone and repeated every word Marjorie had said to her.
Ten minutes and thirty-seven seconds later, she hit Save and opened Google Maps for the nearest purveyor of lint rollers.
After her successful acquisition of the Holy Grail of wardrobe rescues, she found a Remington Steele rerun on the hotel room TV and allowed herself a twenty-minute break.
Her cell phone rang and Sidney’s picture filled the small screen.
“Oh, good; you’re not driving. The new client called. She forgot to give you her sister’s social media accounts.”
Giulia smacked herself in the forehead. “Can I claim baby brain this early on?”
Sidney laughed. “You can milk baby brain as soon as the pregnancy test stick shows two pink lines. Do you have a pen and paper?”
Giulia pulled the hotel notepad and pen toward her. “Go ahead.”
Sidney spelled out the usernames and passwords to Joanne Philbey’s Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts.
“Thanks. May you return home to a shiny new tooth in Jessamine’s mouth.”
Sidney whimpered. “I need sleep so bad.”
Energized by the prospect of learning about Joanne in her own words, Giulia turned off the TV before Laura and Remington caught the killer.
But first, her notes from the police files. She spread them out on the king-sized bed and booted her laptop. The Wi-Fi connection fetched a small mountain of emails, but she dealt with them so efficiently it smacked of ruthlessness.
Her handwriting was a true casualty of her police station visit. She’d had to cover so much information in minimal time, not counting the time lost to the angry girlfriend with gun interlude. Her notes looked like a hungover chicken had tried to write to her dictation. She regretted not giving in to her impulse to take surreptitious pictures of the documents with her phone.
Talk about squandering goodwill. She was definitely not that stupid.
Half an hour later, she finished transcribing Marjorie’s interview. Frank would be wrapping up at the precinct and preparing for another night on stakeout. Sidney would be hoping to find that first tiny white bump in Jessamine’s mouth when she got home, the herald of several hours of unbroken sleep.
What would Joanne be doing at three o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon if she was home? Breakfast shift at Sunset Shores meant no late-night partying.
Giulia logged on to Joanne’s Facebook page.
Enough cat memes to rival I Can Has Cheezburger. Pictures of her own cats, Wilton and Springsteen, plus pictures of Marjorie’s herd. Giulia scrolled past eleven cat albums until she found one of hunting trips.
Joanne in camouflage with a hunting rifle. Another with the same eight-point buck in the framed photo on her bookshelf. With a group in various shades of camouflage around a bonfire toasting each other with bottles of beer.
Her About page gave Giulia one piece of information she didn’t already have: A link to “Cakes by Joanne.” Clicking on it brought up a separate website whose main page ought to have one of those yellow triangle pop-up warnings for dieters. The longer Giulia looked, the more pounds she added to her thighs.
Giulia read through the comments. The most recent one had been posted on April third. She returned to Joanne’s Facebook page. Her last status update had been on March thirtieth.
“Tired of shopping. Does that make me less of a girly-girl?”
A winking emoji followed, with several friends adding laughing cat stickers and comments like “You’re only a girly-girl if you hunt deer in Jimmy Choos” and “Does buying ammo count as retail therapy?”
Then nothing. Friends posted variations of “Happy Birthday! Don’t bake your own cake!” but Joanne never responded. On April sixth, the same friends who had joked about shopping posted “Where did you run off to?” and “Are we still on for bar-hopping tonight?”
A week after that, the posts were no longer casual. “Has anyone heard from Joanne?” “Did anyone call that nursing home where she works?”
Giulia opened a second tab for Joanne’s Twitter feed and a third for her Instagram. Joanne hadn’t been as prolific on Twitter as on Facebook, and her Instagram account was eighty percent cakes and twenty percent cats.
No boyfriend pictures on any of the three. Yet Diane and Marjorie specifically mentioned Joanne’s boyfriends, plural.
Back to Facebook. Sixty days after Joanne’s last post, one of her friends tagged her in a hunting photo and posted, “May 30. Joanne’s been missing two months today. When was the last time anyone saw her with Louis Larabee?” That name was also a tag.
A few replies, all pointing fingers at Louis Larabee. Six hours later, their target replied with a picture of Elmer Fudd flipping the bird. The veiled accusations escalated. Larabee answered in words rather than memes, calling them whores and vultures. After two hours of back and forth, he yelled at them: “DROP DEAD. I’M OUT OF HERE.”
Joanne’s friends kept taunting and accusing him, but when he didn’t reply, the friend who started the thread posted:
“There once was a hunter named Louie
Who snuggled with cows that said ‘Moo-ey.’
He liked number nine
Also four was just fine
Oh, what a nice night for a view-y.”
No further replies. Giulia’s finger hovered over the touch pad to go back to Twitter. She reread the limerick. Read it a third time.
Clicked on the friend’s name to get to her home page.
Interests: shopping, the New York Times Crossword Puzzle, WWII, Cryptography. All right. What was this angry friend who liked word games really saying? Giulia unpacked it line by line.
Line one she ignored. She already knew the ex-boyfriend’s first and last names.
Line two: Snuggle. Cows. Was Larabee a farmer? No, a hunter. People don’t hunt cows. What did snuggle mean, then? Hug? Pet? Sleep with? Only if he was too poor to afford his own house and secretly lived in someone’s barn.
Snuggle also meant to cuddle. When people snuggled, they…hugged. Spooned. Sat or lay next to each other. Next to.
Larabee lived next to a farm? Possibly.
Line three: Numeral nine.
Line four: Numeral four.
Ninety-four [something] Street.
Cows lived on farms. Giulia opened a new tab and pulled up Google Street View. A search for Farm Street, Avenue, Boulevard, and Lane yielded a lot of nothing. She tried actual farms, but none had an address near ninety-four anything.
Cows say moo. Good Heavens, she was already thinking like a See ’n Say.
Okay, cows who say moo, where are you hiding Louis Larabee?
Barn Street, Avenue, Boulevard, Lane—zilch.
Field Street, Avenue, Boulevard, Lane—the same.
Meadow Street, Avenue, Boulevard…Lane.
One more notch on the sleuthing tiara.
Ten
At three thirty, Giulia parked the Nunmobile in front of the smallest house she’d ever seen. Address: 94 Meadow Lane. Neighbor on the right: A ranch house surrounded by alternating red and white azaleas. Neighbor on the left which was also the corner: A working dairy farm whose address was listed on the cross street.
The house was smaller than small. A Tiny House, that was it. She’d read about them online. This box with windows on a postage-stamp plot of land couldn’t be more than three hundred square feet. Instead of a sidewalk to the door, a dirt path bisected a lawn of dandelions and clover. More vegetables and weeds surrounded the sides of the house. She could even see a short way around the back from where she stood.
She banged the deer-head shaped knocker.
“Who’s there?”
A mixed martial arts type appeared in the space between houses. Giulia walked toward him. Because he wore only a tight black t-shirt and camouflage pants, she got an eyeful of his arm tattoos and well defined torso. A scar split his left eyebrow; Giulia guessed from a bullet graze. His dark hair was cut in a military-style buzz.
“
Good afternoon. I’m with Driscoll Investigations and we’re looking into the disappearance of Joanne Philbey. May I have a few minutes of your time?”
“You sound like a door-to-door Bible-thumper.” He knocked dirt from the trowel he was holding. “You can talk to me while I weed.” He glanced at his watch. “I don’t have to leave for work until four thirty.”
Giulia followed him into a regimented vegetable garden. A row of broccoli, a row of cauliflower, rows of beans and peas, tomatoes in cages, eggplant, corn, and carrots.
He knelt next to the first row of beans. “I like my privacy. How did you track me down?”
“I’m afraid you’ve been doxxed,” she said.
“I’ve been what?” He tossed crabgrass into a compost bin.
“In this case, it means your home address is out on the web. I found it on Facebook.”
The trowel stopped moving. He cursed. “I haven’t been on that troll pit in months.”
“You may want to log in and report it. It’s part of a discussion on the two-month anniversary of Joanne’s last post. The person who doxxed you disguised it in a piece of poetry.”
He indulged in unflattering comments about the women in that particular thread. The weeds got the worst of it. When he wound down, he refocused on Giulia. “Guess I should be glad you were the one to figure it out and not some random stalker. Fine. What do you want to know?”
Giulia opened her mouth, and he cut her off before the first syllable. “Wait a minute. First I bet you want my side of that argument. The one on Facebook.”
“As a start, yes.”
“You got something to write on? This one has a long history.”
“Of course.” She brought out her iPad. Holding it in her left hand and typing with her right wasn’t ideal, but it was better than having to remember everything for a voice memo later. But first, setting the potentially hostile interviewee at his ease.
Nun But The Brave (A Giulia Driscoll Mystery Book 3) Page 4