Whitley stopped painting and met her eyes. “What do you mean?”
“I have to tell him about the dress and about our suspicions.”
“You’re going to tell him that she had a property showing the day she died?” asked Whitley.
“Yeah, what do you think?”
Esmerelda hopped back up onto the vanity. “Do you like him?”
Johanna grinned. It embarrassed her to have to answer that question. “I mean, sort of…”
Esmerelda nodded. “Thought so. Then I think lying is the best policy.”
Whitley’s green eyes widened as she turned to gawk at her sister. “Where did Mom and Dad go wrong with you?”
“No, I’m serious. If he finds out that you’re seeing ghosts and talking to cats, he’s going to think you belong in the loony bin.”
“I think I’d rather have him think that than to keep withholding that information from him. If someone knew something about James’s death and they didn’t tell me, I’d be furious. I can’t have Mitch furious with me.”
“What happens when he doesn’t believe you?” asked Whitley.
Johanna thought about it for a second. She had no idea how it would all play out, but whether Mitch thought she was a crazy woman or not, she had to give him all the facts of Felicia’s case. “I don’t know. I’ll just have to figure that out as I go.”
Bundled up in her black wool coat and her trendy black newsboy cap, Johanna practically skipped down the Midtown streets at seven the next morning. The air, so cold that it stained her cheeks a scarlet red color and made her nose numb to the touch, puffed out in front of both her and Rocky in thick clouds and forced her to shove her mittened hands deeper into her pockets. She looked up into the sky and once again wondered where the snow was.
Knowing exactly where Bagels and Beans was located, Johanna turned a corner and then crossed the street at the next intersection. She’d visited the small coffee shop on more than one occasion, and the thought of the shop’s bacon, egg, and cheese blueberry bagel made her almost as giddy as the thought of getting to see Mitch again. From a block away, Johanna could see the walnut-colored storefront and the black awning with festive green garlands draped beneath it.
“Almost there, buddy,” she said, fighting back a squeal.
“Woof!” Rocky seemed almost as giddy as she felt.
As they passed the windows in front of the shop, she could see Mitch already inside, nursing a mug of steaming coffee. Her stomach flip-flopped.
“Oh man, Rock. I’m not sure I can do this. Where’s one of Whit’s motivational speeches when I need it?” she asked despite the fact that Whitley had stayed home at her own request. She hadn’t wanted the constant monitoring; she’d thought it would only make her more nervous.
Rocky chuffed into the frosty air.
The line at the counter stretched all the way to the front door. A bald man in a tweed blazer opened the door for Johanna and Rocky. “Thank you,” she said with a smile.
The minute they’d stepped inside the festively decorated shop, Mitch stood up and waved with a broad smile. Gosh, he’s handsome, she thought as she made her way towards him.
Rocky saw him too, and as he dashed forward to greet his new friend, his path cut in front of Johanna. She stumbled over his hind legs and began to nosedive over the top of her beloved horse-dog. Jumping to her rescue, Mitch was quick to catch her and set her upright.
“Oof! Oh my goodness!” she said, thoroughly embarrassed, but thankful she hadn’t doused him with hot coffee again. Seriously, Rocky. Dude. You’re making me look bad here. And I don’t need any more help in that department.
“Do I need to wear a football helmet when you two are around?” Mitch asked, displaying a set of perfectly straight white teeth.
Johanna grabbed her hat from the floor and then raked her hair back into place. “I’m afraid you’re getting to know the real me right away.”
Mitch grinned from ear to ear. “It’s possible that might just be what I like about you the most.”
Johanna’s eyes widened. “That I’m the biggest klutz you’ll ever meet?”
He chuckled softly. “No, that you’re just being you. If you can meet someone like that in this city, it’s sort of like winning the lottery.”
Johanna’s cheeks felt like they were going to burst from the smile his statement put on her face.
Mitch gestured towards his table, where two mugs of coffee lay in wait. “I hope you don’t mind, but the line was so long that I went ahead and ordered you a cup of coffee and a bagel.”
While relieved that she didn’t have to wait in the long line, she was also a tad bit disappointed. She’d been looking forward to her favorite treat the entire way there. “That’s very sweet of you.” She rubbed her hands together and peered at the little paper bag on the table. “What do we have?”
With a big grin, he opened the bag. “Well. I got two things and you can pick which you’d prefer, and I’ll eat the other.”
Johanna slumped back in her seat, “Well, I hate to make you eat something you don’t like.”
“Oh no. I’d be happy to eat either of these.” He slowly pulled out a small wrapped bagel. Rocky put his chin on the table and his eyes swung upwards to stare at the bagel covetously. “Okay, this one is their new sandwich. It’s a grilled cheese bagel with sliced apple, pear, cheddar cheese, caramelized onions, arugula, and a sunny-side-up egg.”
Johanna’s jaw dropped. “I’m surprised you remembered all that.”
“Oh, trust me. My stomach has a good memory,” he chuckled as he pulled out the other sandwich. “And this one is a little more conventional. It’s a cheese bagel with bacon, egg, and cheese.”
She brightened and reached across the table to snatch that one out of his hands. Rocky’s eyes followed the bagel and a little whine emanated from his throat. “Oooh, I’ll have that one. I usually order a blueberry bagel with bacon, egg, and cheese, but I’ve never had a cheese bagel before. It doesn’t sound too bad.”
He fake-gasped. “You’ve never had a cheese bagel before? Oh, Johanna, you’re missing out! Especially theirs. Theirs are the best.”
Hearing her name roll off his lips sounded so sweet that she couldn’t help but smile. “Am I? Well, then, I cannot wait to try it.”
He clapped his hands together. “Good. Because my stomach and mouth were in agreement. They wanted that grilled cheese bagel.” He lifted the paper bag to remove it from the table and then realized there was something else weighting down the bottom of the bag. “Oh! I almost forgot!” He pulled out a little paper-wrapped item. “I got Rocky their blueberry bacon dog treats. I hope that’s okay?”
Rocky heard his name and swiveled to look at Johanna as if to say, Please, Mommy, can I have it?
Johanna felt sudden tears spring to her eyes. She had to blink and then swallow hard to shove them back. “Of course,” she whispered softly. Where in the world has this man been all my life?! “That was very sweet of you.”
“I didn’t want him to feel left out,” he said, dismissing Johanna’s praise. He opened the small package and then put it on the floor, where Rocky immediately devoured his treat.
Johanna felt herself at a loss. Here she was with this amazingly sweet and attractive man and she didn’t know what to say. It occurred to her then that he was too far out of her league. As his eyes lifted off Rocky and swung towards her, Johanna shoved the bagel into her mouth so she wouldn’t have to think of something brilliant to say.
“What do you think of that cheese bagel?” he asked.
With a mouthful of food, Johanna nodded. “Mmm-hmm!”
“Oh good, I’m glad you like it.” He unwrapped his own sandwich but took the plastic silverware on the table to slice off a piece of it and put it in his mouth.
Johanna looked down at the sandwich in her hand. Oh. So we’re being fancy?
They chewed for a few moments, and when he’d swallowed his first bite, he looked at her curiously. “So. You�
�re a writer. Tell me about that.”
Johanna fought to swallow the enormous bite she’d taken without choking. She held up a finger to ask him to wait as Rocky sat up and rested his chin on Mitch’s lap to thank him for the snack. Mitch patted his head while Johanna gathered her thoughts.
“Well,” she said, swallowing the last dry bite, “I write mysteries under the pseudonym Hanna Hughes.”
“I wondered if that was you,” he admitted, nodding his head. “I’ve heard of you.”
Johanna felt her face flush red. Why it always seemed to embarrass her when someone had heard of her, she wasn’t sure. “Oh, really?”
He nodded and smiled at her.
“I’ve had a few write-ups in the local papers,” she admitted.
“So do you go by Hanna?”
She shook her head as she cut off a small piece of her sandwich. “Not really. I have one friend that calls me Hanna, but pretty much everyone else calls me JoJo.”
“JoJo, huh? That’s cute.” His blue eyes twinkled when he smiled, and a new Christmas song fired up in the background. “You look more like a JoJo than a Johanna.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s why hardly anyone calls me Hanna. I only used Hanna as my pseudonym because I wanted a little bit of anonymity.” She leaned forward then to admit something deeply personal. “I’m not much of a people person.”
He leaned backwards in his seat with a fake look of shock on his face. “You? No! I’d have never guessed.”
That made her smile. She giggled. “Is it that obvious?”
“Maybe a bit,” he said, pinching one eye shut and holding his finger and thumb up parallel to each other about an inch apart. “It’s alright. I’ve been described as a bit of a recluse myself,” he admitted.
“I was better before James died. After that, I kind of holed myself up in my apartment, and days would go by and I’d realize I hadn’t even felt fresh air on my face in a week. That was when I decided living like that wasn’t healthy, so I got Rocky. I figured having to walk a dog every day would force me to get fresh air.”
“And you had someone to talk to.”
She nodded. “And I got Rocky out of the deal, and we’ve been best friends ever since.”
“I think there’s probably no better best friend to have.”
“I agree.” Johanna scratched Rocky’s long body. “So did you find you wanted to hole up at your place too?”
He looked thoughtful for a moment and then began. “After Felicia passed, I wanted to just disappear and like go to a remote island somewhere and live the rest of my life carving coconuts into bird feeders or something.”
“Bird feeders?” asked Johanna with a chuckle.
His eyes crinkled in the corners. “I saw a documentary on that once. It looked peaceful.”
They laughed comfortably together, and for the first time, Johanna felt her shoulders loosen up slightly.
“But then work called one day. It was an emergency, and I needed to go in. They got their initial condolences out of the way when I walked in, but then once that was over, it was like back to business as usual, and I realized that the world had continued to turn while I was gone. While I was burying my fiancée, the world hadn’t even taken a pause. And I realized that I could keep up my existence, keep up my job, without having to be fully awake. I could keep going in this mind-numbed bubble that my conscious had settled into and I could just work. And time would pass. And so that’s what I did.”
Johanna felt her heart tug for him. She knew that mind-numbed bubble well. “Did going to work every day ever pull you out of that funk?”
“Oh, I suppose eventually I began to wake up more and more, but I don’t know if I’ve ever really reawakened. You know?”
Johanna’s head bobbed as she stared down at her sandwich. “I do.” She didn’t know if she’d ever really reawakened either. She swallowed and tried to summon any inner strength she had. “Mitch. There’s something I need to tell you.”
18
He leaned back, crossed his legs, and looked at her curiously. “I’m all ears.”
It was now or never for Johanna. She couldn’t do this to herself. She couldn’t start… whatever this was… with this wonderful man—the first man she’d met and liked since James—and then lose him down the road because he discovered the truth that she’d been keeping from him. She had to tell him now. But truths were so hard!
Johanna felt her palms go clammy and her mouth go dry. She took a sip of her black coffee. Then she looked up at him. He blinked back at her. His blue eyes were serene and easy. He tilted his head to the side, no doubt wondering what was up with the psychopath sitting in front of him.
“I got a wedding dress,” she finally blurted and then struggled with what to say next, but Mitch cut in.
“A little presumptuous, but hardly the end of the world to justify the way you’re sweating,” he said with a light chuckle.
It occurred to her what he meant. She waved a hand in front of her face and smiled. “Oh, no, I didn’t mean for us—I mean, I…”
“It was a wedding dress for your wedding to James,” he said knowingly. “I get it.”
“No, I never got around to picking out my wedding dress for my wedding to James,” she admitted. “I got this dress on the evening that Rocky and I bumped into you in the park.”
He winked at her. “Okay, so we’re back to presumptuous?” He held up two hands. “Kidding, kidding. Continue.”
Johanna wrung out her wrists and avoided eye contact with him. She wasn’t sure how much of the mystical stuff to include or conversely, to leave out. “Right. So… it was a wedding dress. I got it from a secondhand shop,” she fibbed, deciding in that instance to leave out all of the magical stuff. She already had so much working against her, she didn’t need to add mental patient to her dossier. “I don’t know why I bought it. Something just seemed to call to me. It was so beautiful.” She glanced up at him, wondering what he was thinking.
But he didn’t look the least bit concerned at hearing that the woman he was having coffee with had bought a wedding dress the day she’d met him.
“So, anyway, I got the dress home and realized that it had never been worn, and I started to wonder who would have gotten rid of such a beautiful dress without ever having worn it? I noticed that it had a dry cleaning tag stapled to the manufacturer’s label, so I thought maybe I’d just go see if the dry cleaners knew who it had belonged to.”
“You seriously decided to go track down the owner of the dress?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Yeah. You know, I thought maybe it had been mistakenly sent to the secondhand shop and, I don’t know, I guess the mystery writer in me had her interest piqued.”
“I see. So did you find anything out at the dry cleaners?”
“I actually did. I spoke to the woman who had altered the dress. She said she’d altered it years ago, and then the owner had never picked it up. It was the dry cleaners that had given it to the secondhand store.”
“Someone took a wedding dress in to have it altered and never picked it up? That sounds like a giant waste of money.”
Johanna smiled, her stomach doing flip-flops as she got closer to the painful punch line. “Right. Yeah. So I asked the seamstress if she knew who had owned the dress, and she gave me a name and a number and a little bit of information.” Johanna swallowed hard. “I did some digging with that information, and I got some bad news about the woman who owned the dress.”
He frowned. “Do I really want to hear it?”
“Probably not,” whispered Johanna. But she had to tell him. She had to get everything out in the open and see whether or not he still wanted to talk to her, knowing the real reason she’d been to visit him at his office. “I found out that the woman died before she could pick up her wedding dress from the dry cleaners.”
He nodded knowingly. “I was going to guess that by the look on your face. I bet that hit you pretty hard since James died before the two of you could g
et married.”
Johanna swiped a hand across her forehead. “Yeah, it was very painful to hear,” she agreed. “But there’s more…”
“Oh man. More?”
She nodded. “I Googled the woman who passed away. I thought maybe it would be best to return the dress to her family or something. You know, to give them some closure. Maybe it would even answer some questions,” she added, preparing him for what was to come.
“Oh. Well, did you find her family?”
Johanna nodded. “I did, actually. I went to see her mother yesterday.”
He winced. “Ooh, I bet that was hard.”
“Excruciating, actually.” Her voice was tiny then. She wasn’t sure if she could continue.
He reached a hand across the table and covered her hand with his. “I’m so sorry. I can tell it opened a wound for you.”
“I also went to see her fiancé,” she whispered, without making eye contact. She wasn’t sure that she could look at him while she was telling him.
His hand went stiff and he was silent. She wasn’t sure if it was because he could guess what she was going to say next or if the idea of what she had done opened his own wounds.
She glanced up at him. His eyes were damp. “And you told him this whole story?”
Johanna shook her head, her eyes rimmed with red as tears poured down her face now. “I couldn’t tell him,” she admitted. “So I told a lie.”
He refused to allow her to break eye contact with him. “What lie did you tell, Johanna?” he asked, and then she could see him damming his next breath in his lungs.
“I told him I was there checking on his muddied suit. I told him I’d found his business card on a path in Central Park. But I hadn’t. The truth was, I didn’t even know that man’s name in Central Park. I’d seen him for years on the path, but I’d never known his name.” She stopped talking and swallowed hard.
Snow Cold Case_A Mystic Snow Globe Romantic Mystery Page 14