by ACF Bookens
I sighed. Clearly, my best friend and my mother had similar thoughts about boundaries.
“You do, Harvey? Oh do tell. You know I love a good adventure, especially with my girl. My girls, I mean.” She slid her arms around our shoulders. “Who are we interrogating today?”
* * *
By the time I’d had coffee and a bowl of cream of wheat, Mom and Mart had expanded on my plan to call Tiffany. Now, Mart was going to call her about helping her beef up the running section at the store before going on a run. “Runners are always looking for new running partners, especially if we do distance. She’ll say yes.” Then, we were going to go for dinner.
I groaned. Now dinner conversation would probably be about mileages and routes, times and running shoes. But we were going to a steak house with great margaritas, and Mom was coming, so there would be baked potatoes and someone to kick under the table when Tiffany and Mart started talking too long about pronation. I had long ago exhausted my interest in understanding which direction my feet rolled when I walked. The answer, for me, was always Birkenstocks.
Still, I was eager to get more information about what Tiffany knew and to see if her bond with Mart about running might get us closer to the killer. Plus, expanding our running section was a good side benefit. Woody had finished some new bookcases for us a few weeks back, and I was slowly filling them up with eye-catching titles that were great to face out. I couldn’t yet afford to stock them with multiple copies of big sellers, but I didn’t want the shelves to be empty, even if they were up above the main stock area.
By noon, Mart had the plans made. She and Tiffany were meeting at the store at three o’clock before they did a ten-mile run – “Just a short one today to try out how our paces work together,” Mart said as my ankles began to hurt at just the thought – and then they would go to our house to shower and come back to the shop to meet Mom and me to talk books before dinner.
I made Mart promise to stop by and pick up Mayhem for protection before they went home. I didn’t like the idea of her alone in our house with someone who might be a murderer. I didn’t know that Tiffany was dangerous, but Elle had been unnerved by her tone – I wasn’t taking chances. Tiffany didn’t need to know that Mayhem was far better as a paperweight than an attack dog.
Sometime in the early afternoon, as I stood on the beautiful library ladders that Daniel had asked Woody to make for me to go with the new shelves facing out the gorgeous Penguin Classics versions of Amy Tan’s books, I briefly entertained the idea that maybe I should tell Sheriff Mason what I knew. But then, I dismissed the idea because, well, I didn’t really know anything. I couldn’t very well share my knowledge when mostly I had the gossip of two teenagers and some harsh words overheard by someone else. He clearly would not be interested in that lack of information . . . at least that’s what I told myself.
When Tiffany showed up in neon Lycra, I smiled. As much as I wanted to catch a killer and get them off the streets, I also hoped that Tiffany might turn out to be awesome just so she and Mart could share running. I did my best to listen and support Mart, but I really just didn’t have that much to say about the beds of running shoes.
Tiffany had brought a list of the running books she’d found most helpful, and I promised to review them while she and Mart ran so that we could talk when they came back. Her list turned out to be great – some books on technique and some on mindset, a few titles for beginners and some for more advanced runners, too. By the time she and Mart stopped by about four forty-five to get Mayhem, I had already placed an order for a copy of each suggestion.
“Thanks for that list. I’ll be glad to have more useful titles to suggest to the runners who stop in,” I said as I handed her and Mart cold bottles of water. “See you guys soon.”
“I cannot wait for some sour cream,” Tiffany said with a wink at me as she held the door for Mart, and once again, I hoped she wasn’t a killer. I liked a woman who appreciated sour cream.
Mayhem gave me a brief glance as she trotted out the door with the women as if to say, “They’d better not expect me to run home.” I smiled. I was not making any promises.
* * *
At five, as planned, Mom showed up, looking every bit ready for a steak house with her pink cowboy boots and T-shirt that said, “Big Miss Steak” next to a picture of an animated steak carrying a purse. My mother never was one to disappoint.
A few minutes later, when Mart and Tiffany hadn’t returned, I texted Mart but got no response. Assuming she was still in the shower, I suggested to Mom that we walk to our house and meet them. “We can take my car. Scooby-Roo needs a drive once in a while,” I said.
The air was crisp, so we walked quickly down Main and over the couple of blocks toward our house. As we turned the final corner, I saw blue lights flashing and started to run. The police cruiser was at our house, and I just knew something terrible had happened.
A deputy put his arm across the door as I ran up. “I live here. Move,” I shouted.
“Harvey Beckett, your manners, please,” Mom said as she caught up. “Officer, this is my daughter’s home. Could you please explain what is happening here?”
“Everything is okay, Harvey.” I felt a surge of relief when Tuck’s voice came from the hallway beside the front door. “It’s okay, Officer.”
The deputy gave me a sheepish shrug, and I tried not to glare at him as I passed. “What is going on, Tuck?”
“Someone broke in,” Mart was sitting in the living room, her hair still wet from her shower. “I was just about to text you.”
“Someone may have broken in,” Tuck corrected. “A window from your backyard was broken, but it could have just been an accident.”
“How does a window in our fenced backyard get broken by accident?”
Tuck grinned. “Baseball. You’ve got some pretty good sluggers in your neighborhood.” Tuck regularly coached baseball for the little league teams, so he would know if we had kids in our neighborhood. I supposed that was a possibility, but since we’d lived here for almost a year and never even had as much as a stray frisbee in our yard, I doubted it.
“Really, Tuck? What’s going on?” I grimaced. My voice sounded harsher than I intended.
Tiffany cleared her throat from my reading chair. “Oh, Tiffany. I’m sorry. I forgot you were here.” The woman looked frazzled, even in her sleek, high-waisted jeans and Boho shirt.
She smiled weakly and said, “I found the glass.” I stared at her, not quite understanding.
“I told her to have a look around while I showered,” Mart added. “So she saw the broken window before I did and called Tuck.”
Tiffany stood and walked toward the window. “The glass was broken in. On the TV shows they always say that means someone was trying to break in, right?”
She looked at Tuck for confirmation. “Typically,” he said quietly.
I looked at the usually confident sheriff but decided not to ask about his hesitation. He was still gathering information after all. “Any sign of what broke it? A baseball maybe?” I looked at the sheriff with a wry grin. We both knew this wasn’t a baseball.
“No,” he said. “It appears that whoever broke the window took whatever they used with them.”
“Sheriff, over here.” The young deputy from the front door was standing by the broken window. “Looks like blood.”
“Oh, that’s good, right?” I said hurrying over. “You can type it and run it through CODIS to find a match.”
“Slow down there, Castle,” Tuck said with a shake of his head. “You didn’t touch the window, did you?” he asked turned toward Tiffany.
“No, of course not. Why would I touch the window?” Her voice was squeaky. “I didn’t want to get cut, I mean.”
I stared at the woman. She was clearly on edge, but then, it’s possible she was just uneasy because of the police presence. Some people really didn’t like cops.
“Okay. Did you see anything else?” Tuck took a step closer to Tiffany, and she t
ried to back away but bumped her calves against my chair.
“No, nothing. Just the glass.” She dropped into the chair. “I guess I probably did look out, but if I saw anything, I didn’t remember.”
I looked over at Mart, and she shrugged. Clearly Tuck had some questions about Tiffany’s story, and if he was leery, I was leery. Especially since he didn’t even know about her conversation with Elle yet.
“Alright,” Tuck said, turning back to Mart and me. “We’ll finish up here and be in touch. If you want to go—”
Mom interrupted. “We were on our way out to dinner anyway. We’ll leave you to it.”
Tuck nodded. “I’ll lock up, and you can pick up the key on your way home?” He held my gaze until I agreed.
Then, the four of us loaded into my truck and headed south. The steak didn’t sound quite as good anymore, but it took a lot more than broken glass and a spot of blood to turn off my appetite completely.
* * *
By the time we reached the restaurant, Mom’s steady determination to keep the evening fun and light – at least until we began to pry about a murder – had paid off. Mart and Tiffany were regaling us with a detailed account of their ten-mile run, and I was hoping my half-hearted “ohs” and “uh-huhs” were placed appropriately because I wasn’t really paying attention. Instead, I was trying to figure out what that broken window was about. Had someone broken in? Or were they just sending a message? The latter didn’t seem likely because a pile of broken glass didn’t say much that was specific. But it seemed odd to break the glass in a six-by-eight-inch square of window that wasn’t close to a door if you were trying to break in. I was stumped.
After I parked behind the saloon-themed restaurant, Mom nudged me hard with her shoulder as we walked into the steakhouse. “Get your head in this game, Harvey. You have a real chance at some answers with Tiffany. You can figure out the window stuff later.”
My mother had always struck me as partially psychic, but I didn’t always love it, like now, when I really wanted to focus on who had broken our window. I sighed, though, and nodded. She was right. This was probably the only chance we were going to get to figure out what Tiffany knew and what she thought of Coach Cagle. If she was possibly a suspect, I had to have my head on straight so I didn’t tip her off.
The hostess seated us in a booth so wide that I had to slide three times to get to the other end of it and could only point to the menus at the end of the table. I spotted a bright pink margarita on the page facing me, and before anyone else even got their menus open, I said, “I’ll take one of those. A big one.”
“You got it,” the young woman said with enthusiasm, even though I realized, just then, that maybe she wasn’t the person who would take our orders. Still, she didn’t hesitate when she asked, “Anyone else?”
“Do you do pitchers?” Mom asked.
The question “Everybody want salt?” got a round of nods, and the hostess headed off to order a pitcher of pink margaritas.
“Watermelon? Grapefruit? Strawberry? Raspberry? It’s anybody’s guess,” Mart said. “I like a little mystery.” She winked at me, and I smiled.
“Sorry. Guess I jumped the gun a little bit there?” I said.
Tiffany winced. “Actually, now that you say it, I think I heard a gunshot before the glass at your house broke.”
“You what?!” Mart nearly shouted. “A gunshot? You think someone shot into our house? Why didn’t you tell the sheriff that?”
Tiffany shook her head and squeezed her face with her hands. “I don’t really know. I just wasn’t sure, and I thought maybe I’d been wrong.”
“Actually, that makes a lot of sense,” I said. “I couldn’t figure out why someone would break that particular window, but if they were shooting, well, then maybe what they were aiming at was through that particular pane of glass.”
Mart tilted her head back and looked at the ceiling. “You mean who? Who they were aiming at?”
I sucked in my lower lip. “Yeah, I guess. I mean there’s not much value in shooting into a house unless you’re aiming at something.”
“Unless you’re trying to scare someone,” Mom added as a different young woman walked up with the largest pitcher I’d ever seen full of the pinkest drink imaginable. “Put her down right here, ma’am. And thank you.”
The server then placed four tall-stemmed salt-rimmed glasses with bowls as big as my fully-spread hand on the table. “I’ll give you ladies a few minutes to get started on these and come back to get your orders soon, okay?”
I nodded, and as the young woman left, Mart said, “She smart. She knows that the more we drink, the more we’ll eat.”
“The more we’ll drink, too,” Tiffany added with a sly grin.
“Just half a glass for me. I’m driving,” I said, regretting that the Eastern Shore didn’t have a robust public transit system.
“Oh, I think we’ll be here long enough for you to have a full glass, Harvey,” Mart said.
I eyed the giant glass and decided that the worst that could happen was we would have to eat dessert and let Mom fill the whole thing. I took a long sip, smiled, and then remembered what we were talking about. “So were either of you in the room when the glass broke?”
Both Mart and Tiffany shook their heads. “I was in the shower,” Mart said.
“And I didn’t even hear the glass break. I was in the guest room drying my hair. I only remember the gunshot because I heard it just as I put the hair dryer down. I didn’t think much of it because where I live, people shoot all the time. Target practice. And hunting season opens soon.” Tiffany took a sip of her pink drink. “But when I saw the glass, I thought maybe . . .”
“So it must have been shot from a ways off. Otherwise it would have been much louder.” Mom sipped her drink as she looked thoughtful.
I stared at my petite, charity board member of a mother. “Since when did you become so gun savvy?”
Mom smirked. “I’ve been going to the gun range with your father.”
“What?! When did Dad start to shoot? You two – we move you out of the city . . . soon you’ll have camo seat covers in your Navigator.”
“Your dad is a little nervous about all your near-death experiences, beloved daughter. Cut him some slack. He just wants to protect you.” Mom put her hand over mine.
I took a deep breath. I had been in a few close calls lately, but seriously, my father was an accountant, a corporate accountant. He wouldn’t even use a pen most of the time. “Too permanent,” he said. I couldn’t imagine him with a pistol. Still, there was something strangely sweet about my daddy wanting to protect me. I’d have to thank him the next time I saw him.
I squeezed Mom’s hand. “We definitely have to tell Tuck. Someone shooting into our house is terrifying,” I said and took another deep swig from my glass.
Just then, the waitress returned to take our order, and we realized we hadn’t even looked at our menus yet. We all scrambled for a few seconds, but then, we got our steaks and potatoes ordered, and I added one of those big fried onions that they try to make look less deadly by fashioning it like a flower. I needed breading and grease, both to comfort myself and to help absorb all the tequila in my drink.
Mom steered the conversation away from a possible shooting once our food order was in. “Harvey, if you’ll text Tuck, maybe we can leave all this worry about earlier to him and get back to girls’ night.”
I nodded and took out my phone. “Tiffany thinks she heard gunshot this afternoon. Could someone have shot out our window?”
His reply was almost instantaneous. “Where are you?”
“Steak Saloon.”
“Good. Still processing at your place, but we should be gone by the time you get here. See you in the morning.”
I felt my heart skip when I read that last message, but I remembered what Mom had said about focusing and put my phone in my back pocket.
The conversation had moved back to running, and Mart wound us right around to Co
ach Cagle. “You know, Coach was a total jerk, but he did know his stuff.” She raised her glass to start a toast. “To Coach Cagle, the best running coach around. May he rest in peace.”
I widened my eyes at my best friend because even for her big personality this was a little much. Still, I played along and clinked my glass against hers and then Mom’s. But when I went to toast with Tiffany, I saw she was just staring into her half-empty glass. “You okay?” I asked.
She looked up at me, and I saw rage behind her eyes. “I’m not toasting that man,” she spat. Then she looked at Mart. “I can’t believe you think he was a good person.” Her voice was full of tears.
Mart put her hand on Tiffany’s arm. “Oh, don’t mishear me. I thought he was repugnant as a person, but he was a good running coach. And while I’m not superstitious about talking ill of the dead, I don’t wish death upon anyone, especially not murder. That’s all I meant.” She met Tiffany’s stare. “I’m sorry if that hurt you.”
Mom kicked me under the table as if to say, “Here we go.”
“So you knew him, too?” Mom asked.
Tiffany took another sip of her drink. “Unfortunately, I did. He was my running coach back in Minneapolis before I moved here. He trained me for the Olympics.”
“You ran in the Olympics?” I blurted.
Tiffany smiled at me. “Almost. I came in fourth in the trials for the ten-thousand meters, so I didn’t get to go. I was close.” Her expression soured. “It wasn’t worth it though.”
“What do you mean?” Mart asked.
I took a long pull on my drink as I watched Tiffany look at each of us before she spoke again.
“Coach Cagle sexually harassed me for years when he was my coach. I tolerated him because he was the best. Like you said,” she glanced at Mart, “he was a great coach. But it took me forever to recover from his treatment of me.” She let out of a long sigh. “And then, he shows up here, in St. Marin’s, out of the blue.”