“Not fake. Legally changed.”
“Was it so bad to be Jeffrey Bloom?” I drew up my legs until I was sitting cross-legged, not an easy task in that cramped tent.
“Not as bad as I thought at the time . . . until it became impossible. There’s so much you don’t know. Audrey, I’d love to be able to explain what happened back then.”
“I’m listening.” I leaned forward, resting my forearms on my knees.
His jaw quavered for a moment. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“Let’s work backward, then. Why are you here? I know you used to work for Brooks. Did you come back to settle an old score?”
My father shook his head. “I didn’t even know Brooks would be here. If I had, I might have . . .”
“What? Avoided him like you tried to avoid me? You seem good at that. Why would you not want to see your former boss?”
My father looked up, apparently studying an empty corner of the tent. Was he trying to remember past events? Or make up a new version? “He wasn’t exactly my boss. Look. Back then I was an accountant for Brooks Pharmaceuticals. Barry was an employee, just like me. Supposedly. He worked in my office. Or whatever it is the boss’s son called work.”
“Oh, a loafer. And you didn’t get along?”
“We didn’t not get along. I didn’t really know him all that well.”
I tilted my head.
“Okay, perhaps I was a little jealous. He had just come back from a stint in the military. All kinds of rumors swirled around the office. Some said he was a Navy Seal. Others that he was taken prisoner and released in some hostage exchange. Some of the secretaries had heard that he’d been injured in a clandestine operation that he wasn’t allowed to talk about. They acted like he was a mix of John Wayne and Oliver North, with a hint of Batman. His father asked me to take him under my wing, give him light work to help him reacclimate to normal society.”
I nodded. That could fit with what Raylene had said about Brooks being in the CIA.
“All the girls swooned around him.”
“And that bothered you? Jealous of that, too?” I bit back another accusation and I was immediately ashamed of the contentious tone in my voice. Not only would it not entice my absentee dad to open up to me, but I was beginning to sound like my mother.
Instead of clamming up or shouting back, he actually laughed. “Believe it or not, I wasn’t interested in the women. Maybe I was a little jealous about how people looked up to the guy. And the way things were going between your mother and me added to the stress. I supposed it wore on me, because I started finding accounting errors I don’t know how I could have made. I made good the difference from my personal account and swept it under the rug as best I could. It wasn’t much—a few hundred here. Once a couple of thousand.”
“You put your own money into Brooks Pharmaceuticals? Isn’t that like reverse embezzlement?”
“It’s not quite kosher. I figured it would cost less than losing my job. The old man, Brook’s father, was a stickler when it came to money. Well, most people are sticklers when it comes to money.”
“Was that why you left?”
He adjusted the folds of his cassock and paused before speaking. “I never intended to leave. At least not permanently.”
“Your clothes were all gone. What? Did you take them all to the cleaners and get lost on the way back?” There was my mother again. I mentally slapped myself.
He stopped for a moment and studied the ground. If he were really a friar, I’d have thought I caught him in the middle of prayer. Then he raised his head and looked me squarely in the eye with a gaze so intense I had to resist the urge to look away. “It’s hard to see you so bitter. I guess I deserve that. But the truth was that I just needed to get away for a few days.” He swallowed. “Your mother and I had just had another row. I’m sure you were old enough to remember them.”
I nodded.
“I wanted to scare her a little. So she’d know I was serious. So I packed up all my things, took a few vacation days, and checked into a hotel. I never even left town. I figured she’d calm down and then we could talk it over.”
He stopped and fingered a loose thread on his sleeping bag before continuing. “Only I was watching television in the hotel, and my picture flashed on the screen. At first I thought your mother had reported me missing. It turns out I was wanted. Me. Wanted by the police.” His eyebrows went up to show he considered this an absurdity.
“So I turned myself in. Apparently I was suspected of embezzlement. More money had gone missing from the company when I did, tens of thousands of dollars this time, so I was their lead suspect. Only I didn’t have it in my bank account. I don’t think they ever found anything to connect it to me, so they never pressed charges. I asked to see Brooks, to help go over the books to try to figure out what happened, but the old man picked that moment to have a stroke, so it was Barry who came to talk to me.”
“And?”
“It was chilling. He said he’d make sure I was never charged, but only if I took off. Just disappeared. It became pretty clear where the money had gone at that point. And probably all the missing funds before that.” He shook his head. “In trying to cover those unexplained losses, I was covering for him. I’m sure he replaced me with one of his cronies and probably kept right on bleeding his old man dry.”
“And you left, just because he told you to? So he could rip off his father?”
He shook his head. “You don’t understand. Brooks boasted about his powerful connections in the government. He didn’t say, but strongly implied, that the money was needed for some covert operation . . . like he was still an active agent or something. That the government would replace it in time. And if I got in the way, I was expendable. Pity if something were to happen to me or my family.”
“Brooks said he was in the CIA?”
My father shrugged. “Never said it outright, at least not to me. Just all these oblique references. But if he was CIA, he was dirty. Money laundering. Black ops. I was frightened.”
“So you ran because you were afraid.”
“Afraid for you, peanut. Of the cloud you would grow up under. Frightened for your mother. Frightened of what would happen if I tried to stay to fight him. I guess I convinced myself I was doing the right thing for all of us.”
“But you never wondered what had happened after you left?” I swallowed a lump from my throat, but it crept right back.
“Of course I wondered. I wrote you tons of letters.”
“I never got any.”
“I never sent them. After a while it just seemed better to let you live your life in peace.”
“Peace? Is that what you call it?”
He answered with only a pained expression.
Meanwhile Nick’s cheerful—and loud—voice filtered in from outside the tent. “Well, hello, Chief Bixby.” Nick was clearly giving me a warning that the chief was headed this way. He needn’t have bothered. The sneeze that followed would have given him away just as well.
“I’ve been trying to avoid him,” my father said. He grabbed the phone from my hands and stuffed it into his cassock. “He doesn’t need to see that. Does he? At least not without a warrant.”
By the time Bixby’s head poked into the opening of the tent, my father looked every bit the angelic friar.
“Oh, there you are,” Bixby said, his gaze fixed on my father. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
“For me?” He put on his most beatific expression. Gag. I tried not to roll my eyes.
Bixby must have noticed my effort, because he seemed to be studying me more than he was my father. I can’t claim the acting skills my father exhibited. But I smiled pleasantly all the same.
“Audrey, it appears you’ve beaten me to it,” Bixby said. “Were you having a nice discussion?”
“She was as
king me about this Brooks fellow,” my father said. “I’m afraid I really couldn’t shed any light on the matter. I have no idea who might have wanted to kill him.”
Bixby squinted at me. I sent him what I hoped was my most innocent smile, but my throat was hot and my eyes probably glistened with unshed tears, so I’m sure it looked pretty scary. “Well, I should probably be going and leave you to it,” I offered.
“You don’t want to stay while we talk?” Bixby asked.
“No. No, I think I’ve had enough.” I pushed my way out of the tent and down the pathway.
“Audrey, wait up!” Nick called.
I slowed but I didn’t turn and didn’t speak. I’m sure my expression and voice would have betrayed me.
Nick fell into step next to me. “I hope I did the right thing. I saw Bixby headed this way and tried to warn you.”
“Thanks.” I slowed my pace just a little more.
“So what were you and the friar talking about for so long?”
I stopped and turned to face him. “You were watching me?”
“I was a little worried. The other day you were asking questions about the friar, and today you were alone with him. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
I stood, looking into Nick’s warm brown eyes, unsure whether to be mad that he had followed me, or glad that he was watching out for me. Instead of deciding, I leaned into him for a hug.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
I nodded into his chest. “Just a trying day, is all.”
I sighed and he pulled me closer. “Want to talk about it?”
“I think maybe I just want to go home.”
* * *
The bright blue roof was new. But as I got closer to the cottage, I realized it was just a tarp placed over what little remained of my roof.
Chester bounded up to the door as soon as he heard me and circled my legs until I relented and gave him the last few tablespoons of wet food I had in the house. No sooner had he taken a bite than the black kitten appeared out of nowhere and nosed him out of the way. Before long the food was gone, and Chester sat there on his haunches, eyeing the empty dish then giving me a reproachful look, before he headed to the larger dish and crunched on a few pieces of the hard food.
“Well, sometimes life’s tough that way,” I told him, and then slid a frozen pizza into the toaster oven and plopped onto the sofa. I checked my phone, which was jammed up with new messages from Liv and a few from my mother. They could wait. I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk with anyone.
I refused to get all maudlin and gloomy about the conversation with my father. Only moping on the sofa encouraged that sort of thinking, so I stepped outside to the front garden and started pulling weeds, loosening the roots with a trowel. This job would be a little harder when all the blooms died back, although I was pretty good at differentiating the flowers from the weeds based on their stems and leaves.
Here I recalled one of Grandma Mae’s lessons. Only she wasn’t talking about flowers. Not really.
“The soil is where the plant comes from,” she’d said. “Everybody comes from somewhere. Some of it’s good and some of it’s bad. But a plant is so much more than soil. It’s water and sunshine and all the promise in the seed.” I could almost feel her fingers ruffling my hair.
I closed my eyes to relish the feel of her fingers.
“The same soil can grow weeds or beautiful flowers. It depends on what you plant, what you water and tend to. You are so much more than the soil from which you come.”
I swallowed hard. I hadn’t understood what she was getting at then. But I understood it now. She didn’t want me limited by anything that happened in my childhood.
I took a deep breath and sat in the garden cherishing those memories until the smoke alarm called me back in to dine on what was salvageable from my burnt pizza, which was basically the charred pepperoni from the top.
I was shuffling around in my fridge to find a cheese stick or something else to go with the pepperoni when the knock on my door made me jump and hit my head. Once I’d extricated myself, I could make out Nick’s frame through the wavy glass.
“I thought you’d be over at the encampment,” I said as I yanked open the sticky door.
“Just closed up shop and came by.” He held up a textbook. Daily Life in the Middle Ages. “Carol said you forgot this.”
“Ah, yes. For Opie.” I set it on the table. “You didn’t have to come all the way out here to bring that. Wait, did you sneak through Larry’s place?”
“With his permission.” Nick pulled out a chair and sat at the table.
“Good. He’s getting a little antsy with that shotgun.”
“I think he’s calmed down a bit. He’s now charging five dollars a head.” He stopped as he eyed the brown and black disk on my plate. “And I brought you something.” He whipped out a loaf of bread.
“Oh, I love you!”
“Kind of what I was going for.” He winked.
I went to retrieve a sharp knife and brushed more drywall dust from my cutting board. “Stay to share some with me? I think I still have some butter. Or peanut butter if you’re daring to sneak in some New World food.”
“I think I can evade the anachronism police for an evening.”
I dug out plates, knives, and the peanut butter, and I even managed to find a small jar of jelly. “And wasn’t there something you wanted to talk with me about?”
“That can wait.” He smeared a bit of peanut butter onto his bread. “The book was just an excuse to see you. I suspect there was something about that last conversation that threw you a little. I know you’re trying to keep Liv out of it, so I wondered if you needed someone to bounce ideas off of. But first, I have something more pressing to ask you.”
He looked deeply into my eyes. “Would it be terribly impertinent if I asked to use your shower?”
“My shower?”
“I’m afraid I’m a bit rank from all that roughing it at the camp.”
“My shower?”
“You do have one, right?”
“In a manner of speaking. There’s next to no pressure, though. I’ve mainly been using the tub. But you’re welcome to it.” And I hoped I’d remembered to put away my razor.
“Let’s take a look.” He made his way to the bathroom and turned on the tap, then the shower. A slow trickle made its way out of the shower head and into the old claw foot tub.
“That’s a beauty of a tub,” he said, ignoring the peeling paint and the chipped mismatched tile. “Should last you for another hundred years or so. Do you have a wrench? And some vinegar?”
“I think so.” I ran to collect the tool set that Liv had given me as a housewarming gift and a dusty gallon of vinegar I had seen in the pantry when I moved in. Grandma Mae always did like her homemade pickles. I sat on the edge of the tub and handed him tools for the next twenty minutes while he took my shower apart and soaked several parts in the sink full of vinegar. Eventually the pieces started going together again, and Nick turned on the water. A full spray came this time, instead of the trickle.
I clapped my hands. I still had no roof, but at least I had a working shower. Baby steps.
“May I?” He gestured toward the tub, so I got him a towel and washcloth from the linen closet and then left him to it.
He whistled while he showered. I kind of liked that. I imagined he was enjoying removing the layer of grime from the camp, luxuriating in the warm water and the clean scent of soap bubbles. Then I moved away from the door back into the kitchen, both to give him a little privacy and because my imagination was just a little too vivid. I decided to pop some popcorn, drizzling a little of that new butter on it.
Nick came out wearing a clean tunic that must have been in his bag. “I hand-washed the other clothes and have them hanging up to dry.”
“I gu
ess that means you’re not going back tonight.”
He gestured to the setting sun. “Too late to get back before dark anyway.”
And all of a sudden things got quiet between us. Nick had very old-fashioned manners—which I simply adored—and I didn’t think he was going to change that now.
“So,” he said as he found a spot on the sofa next to me and pulled the popcorn bowl between us. “Tell me about the case. Who are your lead suspects?”
“Well, as far as motive goes, I guess young Melvin Brooks is top on the list. He stands to inherit. And his new wife would get a bit of that since Melvin tore up the prenup.”
He winced. “They seem like too nice a couple.”
“I’d like to think it’s not them, either. But I haven’t ruled them out. Kathleen Randolph is on Bixby’s radar, but I’m not sure I agree she has motive. Too much time to cool off since the divorce.”
“What divorce?”
“Kathleen Randolph was also once married to Barry Brooks.”
“But that would make Andrea and Mel . . .”
“Not blood related. Just awkward at the family reunions.”
“I daresay. Anyone else?”
“Well, of course the current Mrs. Brooks wasn’t here at the time, so she’s out of the running—unless she got sick of him and hired someone to get rid of him while she had an alibi. But my money’s on Raylene Quinn,” I added. “I had a nice chat with her today, too.”
He reached for a fistful of popcorn. “Do tell.”
“She’d certainly have the knowhow. Besides being a trained biochemist and who knows what else, she’s the camp herbalist. She’d also have the opportunity to get close to Brooks anytime she wanted. And she’s got motive in spades. I’m pretty sure she was involved with Brooks.”
“I honestly don’t know how he managed that. I guess I’m not the best judge, but was he really all that attractive? Unless they’re after his money.”
“He was no Cary Grant or even George Clooney, if that’s what you mean. He may have had a little more going for him than just his money. He had an awfully good line.”
Nick raised his eyebrows.
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