And Death Goes to . . .

by Laura Bradford

  I gave some thought to chastising him for that caveat, but something told me to let it go. And (surprise!), I listened.

  Sam, in turn, reached my desk, turned back to the window, stopped mid-way, and then sighed as he swung out and around my grandfather to reclaim his chair. “I guess I wasn’t supposed to see them behind that one building, but Mom had asked me to check in with her when I had a chance and so I stepped away from the models and stuff to find a place and… There they were.”

  “Who?” Grandpa Stu and I asked in unison (a very impressive one, I might add).

  “That lady’s husband and the one you were so sure was going to win your category on Saturday night.”

  I stared at Sam as my brain worked to not only catch up with my ears, but to also make some sense out of—

  “Wait! Are you talking about Lexa Smyth?” I asked. “The bleached blonde in the royal blue gown?”

  My grandfather stopped me with his best impression of a crossing guard (minus the whistle) and leaned across the divide between their chairs. “The bleached blonde in the low cut royal blue gown?”

  I tamped down the impulse to roll my eyes and shifted my attention back to an emphatically nodding Sam. “Mrs. Callahan was so nice to her, too. I mean like, super nice the whole time I was taking my shots. Mrs. Callahan even invited her to come out to her place to see her horses after work tomorrow. Told her to come alone so they could bond.”

  “You lost me again, Sam.”

  He leaned forward against my desk and then threw himself back against the chair, clearly agitated. “Sorry. I guess I just keep thinking about those kids. And…” He stopped, swallowed, and took a deep, audible breath. “He had her pressed up against the building when I walked around the corner, and her blouse was almost completely unbuttoned. And if that wasn’t gross enough, they looked to be playing a pretty intense game of tonsil hockey.”

  I was no longer lost.

  Only now, I wished I were.

  “You’re talking about Kevin Callahan, aren’t you?” I asked, although I knew the answer without Sam having to say a word.

  Mary Fran had been right.

  The interaction between Kevin and Lexa in the bathroom hallway of the funeral home hadn’t been two colleagues chatting. No, it had been a snippet of something much bigger.

  Suddenly, Sam’s agitation made all the sense in the world.

  So, too, did the fact that I now felt the same way.

  “Do you think she knows?”

  I pulled myself out of my own funk to meet Sam’s troubled eyes. In them, I saw a young man who wanted to believe the world was good—that people didn’t knowingly hurt one another, and children didn’t have to suffer the ill effects of a parent’s deplorable behavior.

  “I don’t know, Sam.” But even as I said the words, I found myself wondering if maybe Susan did know. If she did, it would explain the exchange between her and Mavis at the funeral home when Susan expressed a need for a break. It could also explain Mavis’s promise that she would never let Cassie—another well-known flirtatious type—work for Callahan.

  I snuck a peek at my grandfather to see where he was in all of this, but if he’d been paying attention when Sam dropped the bomb about Lexa Smyth and Kevin Callahan, he’d since moved on to something different based on the way he was looking off. There would be time to ask for his feelings on the subject when we headed back home in just a little over an hour. For now though, I needed to find a way to help Sam.

  “Sam, I—”

  He stood, crossed to his camera bag, and hiked it onto his shoulder. “I’m okay, Tobes. I just want them to be okay, too.”

  ~Chapter Twenty-Four~

  The car ride home from work was quiet, with me thinking about Sam, Mavis’s daughter-in-law, and Deidre, and Grandpa Stu likely thinking about the same things based on the way he was thumbing through his notebook and running his finger down an occasional page.

  “I feel like we’re getting close, Sugar Lump,” he said as I pulled to a stop in front of my house and turned off the car. “Like we just might wrap this up before I leave on Friday afternoon.”

  I pulled the key out of the ignition and sank back against the driver’s seat. “I thought we talked about this. About you staying through the weekend as originally planned. Or, even better, staying another week.”

  “I think you’re right. About what you told me you told Andy… About the killer being angry.”

  “Grandpa, I—”

  “The fact that he set it up so it happened in such a public way really smells like revenge. Which makes me think we’ve been going about this the wrong way.”

  I reached around the back of his seat, retrieved my backpack from the floor, and hoisted it onto my lap, the note from Ms. Rapple deliberately placed in an outside pocket for easy removal. But just as I was pulling it out, my phone rang inside the cup holder between our seats.

  A check of the screen revealed JoAnna’s name and face.

  “I’m sorry, Grandpa, I’ve got to take this. It’s rare for JoAnna to call me after hours.” I pressed the green button and held the phone to my cheek. “Hey, JoAnna, is everything okay?”

  “I’m not sure, but I figured I’d let you decide.”

  “Okay…”

  “I was just heading out when I heard the phone ring. I almost let it go to voicemail since it was after closing, but, well, you know me.”

  I did, and it’s why I smiled despite the little voice in my head that was telling me to brace for cover at the semi-ominous tone to my secretary’s voice. “So who was it?”

  “Cassie Turner.”

  “Cassie Turner?” In my peripheral vision I could sense a straightening of my grandfather’s posture and held him off with a flash of my index finger. “Why?”

  “She didn’t say. She just asked to speak with you, and when I told her you’d just left, her voice got fidgety.”

  I pulled the phone closer to my face. “Did you just say her voice got fidgety?”

  “Yes.”

  For some reason, Carter appeared in my mind’s eye, his hands propped on his hips, his mouth doing that twist-thing it did just before he gave the kind of retort that left me in stitches. But I wasn’t Carter, and I certainly wasn’t as funny. So, instead, I drummed the fingers of my free hand on the steering wheel and waited for more.

  “I told her you’d get back to her in the morning, but figured I’d let you know now in case you want to follow up sooner.”

  I looked at the note peeking out of my backpack and thought about the conversation I knew I needed to revisit with my grandfather, but when I turned my head to look at him and ended up grazing his chin with mine, I knew he’d kill me if I waited.

  “Get her number so we can call her back,” he whispered.

  “Tell Stu to get his pencil ready and he can write it down as you repeat what I say.”

  My grandfather whipped his pencil out of the front pocket of his flannel shirt, thumbed forward in his notebook until he found a clean page, and gave me his best I’m waiting face.

  Alrighty then…

  “Okay, he’s ready.”

  “It’s her mobile number: 555-2463.”

  I repeated the number back, checked my grandfather’s chicken scratch for accuracy, thanked JoAnna, and told her I’d see her first thing in the morning. Then, I slipped my phone into the pocket with Rapple’s note and motioned toward the house with my chin.

  “Aren’t you going to call her?”

  “I don’t know…maybe. Later. After we talk. There’s something I need to—”

  “Call her now, Sugar Lump. She might be ready to confess.”

  I didn’t mean to laugh, but the second I did, and the excitement drained from his face in response, I regretted it. My grandfather lived for this kind of stuff. I knew this. Besides, hadn’t I already caused him eno
ugh pain?

  “Actually, you’re right. JoAnna did say she sounded…fidgety.” I grabbed my phone back out of the pocket, swiped my way into the keypad, and pressed in the digits my grandfather rattled off.

  Cassie picked up on the first ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, Cassie, it’s Tobi, Tobi Tobias. My secretary called and said—”

  “I remembered something!”

  I didn’t need to look in my rearview mirror to know my eyes had widened to the size of dinner plates. A glance to my right showed the same expression on Grandpa Stu just before he picked up his pencil again and prepared to write.

  Closing my eyes quickly, I sent up a prayer of forgiveness to my grandmother for the lie I was about to tell, and then hit the speaker button so my grandfather could hear all. “I’m driving right now so I need to put you on speaker, okay?”

  My grandfather’s mouth opened only to close again (thank God) when I shook my head and held my fingers to my lips.

  “Whatever.” Cassie’s inhale filled the space between us and I matched it with what I hoped was a quieter version. “Remember earlier? When you mentioned the envelope for your category being different?”

  “I do.”

  “The writing wasn’t in gold, remember?”

  “I do.”

  “It was black.”

  “I know. I saw that in Sam’s picture. It was why I asked you about it—”

  “A few categories before ours, I saw Callahan’s wife in the restroom.”

  “Mavis?”

  “No. Kevin’s wife.”

  A peek at my grandfather showed his hand was no longer poised to write. Instead, he was leaning so close to the phone I was afraid he’d topple onto it. I tapped his shoulder, swept him back into his seat, and then continued the conversation. “Susan, right?”

  “I don’t know. I guess that’s it. I just know she has two kids, does nothing but the whole wife/mom thing, and is either the most clueless woman on the face of the earth or loves money more than one might guess looking at her clothes.”

  Grandpa Stu rolled his finger forward and I verbalized the sentiment. “So you saw her in the restroom…”

  “She had the kid on the changing table but she must have finished before I walked in,” Cassie said. “Because he was just lying there making gurgling noises and she was capping up a black marker.”

  I hoped my answering gasp helped mask my grandfather’s, but in the event it didn’t, I skipped the whole processing step and went straight to blabbering (okay, lying). “I’m sorry, I…uh…just got cut off by an idiot. Did you say a black marker?”

  “Uh huh. Weird, right?”

  That was one word for it.

  My grandfather’s hand practically flew across the page on his lap. When he was done, he turned it so I could read it from my seat.

  As if envy.

  I looked at my grandfather and waited. He, in turn, tapped his pencil next to his chicken scratch.

  I muted the call.

  “Grandpa, I have no idea what that says.”

  “Ask if she saw an envelope.”

  I nodded and shut off the mute feature. “Any idea what she’d been writing on? I mean was there any sort of paper or—”

  “I didn’t really look because, honestly, I really didn’t pay her much mind other than the usual pity job. But today, at work, when I walked past Lexa’s old office, something about it triggered the memory about the marker and it made me wonder. You know, in light of the whole envelope thing.”

  “Did you see an envelope?”

  “No. But that doesn’t mean she hadn’t already stuck it in the bag or her pocket before I walked in.”

  My grandfather shrugged.

  “Okay, so then what?” I prodded. “After you saw her?”

  “I went into a stall, and she was gone when I came out.”

  “Did you see her anywhere backstage after that?”

  “Nope. Best Overall was almost up and I had to get ready.”

  In a flash, I was back in the banquet hall, sitting next to Andy, waiting for my category to be up, and, sure enough, I’d seen Susan and the baby returning to the Callahan table just as Carl Brinkman stepped back onto the stage to announce Cassie. And just like it had that night, my stomach roiled. Only this time it had nothing to do with nerves and everything to do with a growing sense of dread.

  “Anything else?” I managed to ask as I leaned into my headrest and held a groan in check.

  “Maybe Susan figured out Deidre was the bitch behind Bitch Pitch.”

  I felt the weight of my grandfather’s glance and tried hard not to let it derail me. “Excuse me?”

  “Think about it. That little bitch could try to smear me in one of her clever little posts, but prattling on about getting even after losing a campaign eight years earlier could refer to anyone in this business. It’s just the way things are done in our field, am I right?”

  Before I could dispute her statement though, she continued. “But a post about a floozy who slept her way into a primo office at one agency only to leave and start fooling around with a top level exec at the most prestigious firm in the city? Trust me, people would know the identity of the floozy before the end of the first paragraph. And as for the top level exec she was sleeping with? That, too, would be a no brainer if our blog writing bitch made the whole like father, like son correlation.”

  I felt my mouth go dry as I stole a look at my grandfather. He, in turn, mouthed two single words.

  Motive.

  Means.

  “But I didn’t see a post like that,” I countered.

  “Not yet. But maybe Susan had reason to think one was coming. And if she did? She certainly wouldn’t be the first woman to show loyalty to a person who has none for her in return.”

  I tried Cassie’s words on for size and realized they could fit.

  “Okay, well thanks for telling me this.”

  “Yeah, no problem.”

  I waited until I was sure she was gone from the line before I ended the call and turned my head to look at my grandfather. “I wanted to figure this out, but I didn’t want it to go this way.”

  “Maybe it’s not what it seems,” he said in a tone that held little belief in the words making their way out of his mouth.

  “Crap.”

  ~Chapter Twenty-Five~

  There were times when no matter how hard I tried to justify my actions to myself, I still felt like a heel.

  Like when I ate Rudder’s kiwi (in all fairness, I had missed lunch and he was being a brat) and he looked as if he’d been struck.

  Like when Carter worked hard to prepare a feast “guaranteed to make me like greens” and I filled up on Cocoa Puffs (I. Hate. Greens.), instead.

  Like when I opened my big fat mouth about Rapple (something I’d done a million times before) without looking to see if my grandfather was near.

  And like now, as I zipped down Highway 40 alone (aka, sans Grandpa Stu) toward St. Charles County and a coffeehouse named Perk-It! I could (and did) try to justify my decision to slip out of the house after dinner without sharing details of my destination in several ways.

  But no matter how I spun my decision to confront Susan Callahan without my trusty mystery-solving sidekick in tow, I still felt like a heel. Hadn’t I done enough to hurt him already? Didn’t I want him to rethink his earlier-than-planned departure?

  I shook off the guilt provoking questions, pushed on the radio, and began flipping stations in the hope a Bruce Springsteen song was playing and I could lose myself in a little singing (or, as my grandfather calls it, screeching). Unfortunately, instead of Bruce, I got Culture Club (hell, no), The Hooters (a wee bit better), and Justin Bieber (there are no words), the latter bringing an immediate end to my station surfing (and radio listening) with one decisive p
ush.

  Dejected, I focused on the GPS app guiding my every mile from atop my cup holder and, before long, I was parked and headed toward the coffee bean-brown door (nice touch) and torn between wanting to find justice for Deidre’s children and worrying about two very different children—children that had left such an impression on Sam earlier in the day that he’d shown up at my office needing to vent.

  A few feet away from the door, I stopped and looked between the P and the E on the large plate glass window. Although not a coffeehouse I’d know living in the Central West End, it was obvious that the people in the immediate area of Perk-It! knew it well. A dozen or so tables, in a variety of heights and widths, were scattered around the well-lit room with all but one boasting at least two patrons if not more. If one party at a two-person table was sipping from their coffee mug, the other was animatedly talking or leaning close as if telling a secret. At the tables where there were more than two seated, there was laughter—the kind of laughter I’m sure would be present at a table taken up by me, Carter, Mary Fran, and Sam.

  I smiled at the image and made a mental note to bring them back here with me another time, assuming, of course, the coffee was good (not that this die-hard hot chocolate drinker would know). And that’s when I spotted Susan Callahan, the room’s lone single drinker, at a small table in the back left corner.

  I stood there for a while, watching her and making the kind of assessments I usually did when people watching. The difference, of course, was for every basic assessment I made (she was preoccupied, she didn’t touch her mug, she swiped at her eyes a few times), there was that follow-up voice in my head spinning it in a direction I really didn’t want to go (she was going through a play-by-play in her head of the moment Deidre fell to her death, the guilt was making it so she couldn’t hold her hand steady enough to take a sip, and now that the deed was done, she felt bad).