Jaimee wiped her fingers on an extra napkin. She let out a sigh. “Todd was there.” This was the point where she acknowledged that I was there by making sure I understood that he was her ex-boyfriend, who was much younger than she was and an athlete, and that she had broken up with him. “He made a big scene right in front of the Housewives’ table, saying that he wanted me to give him a chance to make things right with us. He said he wanted to see how the work on my house was progressing.”
“Maybe you should give him another chance,” Mason said. “It sounds like he really wants to win you back.” I knew Mason was hoping she’d take his suggestion immediately.
“He’s going to have to do a lot more than that for me to give him another chance. Ha! I said I wasn’t born yesterday and that I knew it was all about him wanting to get back his stuff. I bought most of it and I told him that all his equipment was my property and that I had it in storage with the rest of the things from my house.” She seemed pleased with the last part and pulled out her cell phone to lay it on the table. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the Housewives people called me tonight and wanted me back on the show. Maybe they’ll even want us to recreate the moment.”
“If you want drama,” Mason said, “Molly was in the group that found the body at CeeCee Collins’s house. We were just talking about what we think happened.”
It was pretty clear Jaimee couldn’t care less, and I was already gathering my things. Mason saw what I was doing and tried to get me to stay, but a moment later Brooklyn came in the room, dressed in loose-fitting white pants and a kimono-style top.
“I’m going to get your meds, Dad. Then we can do some tai chi.” She glanced in my direction. “It helps him sleep.” I offered to help. “Thanks,” she said halfheartedly, “but we have a whole ritual.” Her eyes went toward the hall leading to the door, and her message came through loud and clear. I was the odd man out.
Mason pulled himself off the sofa and rode the scooter along with me to the door. He winced a few times. “The pain gets worse at night.” He looked back to the ruckus going on in the den and turned to face me. “It seems to be important for my daughter to handle things. She hasn’t said anything to me, but I think she was looking for a reason to leave San Diego. You know how they say you never retire from being a mother? Well, the same is true for being a father, at least for me.”
How could I possibly find fault with that? We went outside, finally getting some privacy, and he gave me a good night kiss that promised things to come.
CHAPTER 14
I dreamed about yarn again. No surprise. This time I was crocheting. I couldn’t remember the details, just that it felt like a fever dream. The yarn was full of bumps and thorns, and the stitches kept coming out wrong. At one point I think I picked up the ball of yarn, threw it in the air, and hit it with a bat, sending it sailing off into space, but it kept coming back, and each time the ball of yarn was bigger. I was relieved to wake up, though I was twisted in the sheet. I fell out of bed trying to untwist myself.
I rushed through my morning chores, already thinking about what I had to take care of at the bookstore. I certainly wanted to call Kelsey Willis and confirm everything about her daughter’s shower. I remembered I’d given her a card and then she’d given me one in return. I hadn’t paid attention to it at the time because I didn’t really expect her to book her daughter’s shower at the bookstore. I’d never been so happy to be wrong. If it went well, we were sure to get other business. I definitely wanted to stay on top of it.
I searched the house and couldn’t find it. I was just about to see if one of the dogs had carried it off somewhere when it came back to me—it was still at CeeCee’s. I had managed to get the cops to give me the purse I’d left in the dining room, but I’d forgotten all about the tote.
It was probably still sitting on the floor in CeeCee’s dining room. I thought about calling CeeCee, but it seemed easiest to just swing by. I handed out treats to the animal crowd at my feet and rushed out the door. The air smelled cold and damp but also incredibly sweet from the orange blossoms on the row of trees in the yard.
I would have liked to linger and relish how green the yard was and the way the sun sparkled in the dewdrops hanging from the leaves, but I needed to get my tote bag and get on to the bookstore.
I parked in front of CeeCee’s and was glad to see there were no cop cars or news vans. I rang the intercom, and Rosa answered. I asked if CeeCee was there.
“No,” Rosa said curtly. I thought she was going to shut off the intercom.
“Wait,” I said quickly. “I left something the other day, and I wanted to pick it up.”
Rosa seemed to hesitate, but I really wanted to get the bag with the card. We went back and forth a few times, and she finally buzzed the gate open. As soon as I got inside, I couldn’t help it—my eye went right to the garage and the stairway. A piece of yellow tape still hung from the railing, and I gathered it had been released by the cops.
When I’d walked through it before, I had always just taken in the yard as a whole. I’d noticed there was a small forest of trees, but my perception of the rest of it was just green with no details. Now I saw that it had been landscaped to make the outside world seem almost nonexistent. There were trees arranged along the sides of the lot, and the space between them was filled with bushes. Flowers had been added to give bursts of color. When I’d walked around the outside of the property with Babs, I’d noticed there was a wall of green created solely out of bushes and ivy that was separate from what I was seeing. So much more attractive than seeing the fence that surrounded the property.
Rosa had the door open, and the two Yorkies ran outside, barking. She corralled them, and we all went inside. I’d never been there when CeeCee wasn’t home before, and it seemed very quiet. I had said to Mason that I wanted to talk to the housekeeper, and it seemed like I was going to get my moment. I figured she knew all the inside information, what skeletons were in the closet and where the bodies were buried, to borrow a couple of figures of speech. Not that it would be easy to pry it out of her. My impression of Rosa was that she was rather stoic, but then if you wanted to keep your job as a celebrity’s housekeeper, it was better not to be too chatty.
“Where did you leave the tote bag?” she said, standing so that I couldn’t move beyond the entrance hall. I pointed toward the dining room, and she stepped aside to let me walk in. She seemed a little nervous, and I sensed she wanted me out of there as fast as possible.
“It must be different having Tony living here. More work for you. I suppose he wanted you to get the guest quarters cleaned up.”
“No. It is okay. Mr. Tony didn’t want me to deal with the guest apartment, before or after.” Her voice faltered on after, and I knew she meant after the other day.
“After?” I said with a question in my voice. “Do you mean like clean up after the crime scene?”
“Yes. He said he would take care of it all. He wants the vent replaced right away so there won’t be the chance of another accident.” She paused and seemed to be considering her words.
“I know Miss CeeCee can’t even make a cup of tea for herself, but she is a very kind person. When she found out how long it took me to take the bus to and from here, she gave me a car to use.” I thought she was finished, but then she added, “I worry for her with Mr. Tony. I think maybe she is too kind to him.”
I wanted to ask what she meant and get into whether she had any ideas how Delaney had gotten in, but she made it very clear she was done talking and led me into the dining room. “Please,” she said, gesturing for me to check the room. Of course, the purple tote was on the floor just where I’d left it. Rosa ushered me right back outside and closed the door.
Maybe Tony wasn’t the Prince Charming we all thought he was.
* * *
I waited until it was quiet in the information booth at the bookstore before I took out Kelsey’s
card. You better believe this time I looked to see what it said. It listed her name and title—executive VP—and the company was Willis Industries, Inc. It appeared she’d started a new chapter in her life, too. When I called to go over the choices her daughter had made for the shower, I asked her what Willis Industries, Inc., did.
“I don’t see why you need to know that to put on a shower,” she said with a little edge in her voice.
“No problem. I was just making conversation. As long as you pay for the shower, whatever you do is okay with us.” I punctuated it with a friendly laugh. She didn’t join in. Now it came back to me. She had never had much of a sense of humor, and certainly had none about herself.
Mrs. Shedd overheard my end of the conversation and figured out who I was talking with. “Molly, we don’t want to rile the customers. She didn’t cancel, did she?”
I assured my boss that Kelsey was still on for the shower, and then I moved on to other tasks. I had been gone so much over the past couple of days that I worked straight through until the evening. I stopped by Mason’s on the way home. His other daughter, Thursday, was over, and she answered the door. I had a much better relationship with her than with Brooklyn, but still, when I realized they were all having dinner together, I begged off. There was no way I wasn’t going to feel like an intruder.
I called Dinah when I got home and laid it all out to her.
“And here I thought you two had just the relationship I wanted,” she said when I filled her in.
I mentioned that I had stopped over at CeeCee’s and talked to Rosa. “She didn’t say much, but if you read between the lines, it’s very interesting.”
“Okay, you got me curious. Are you up for company? We can sit and crochet and forget about the problems of the men in our lives. Let’s talk about murder instead,” she said with a cheery laugh.
I’d barely changed into a pair of sweats and a T-shirt when I heard a soft knock at my kitchen door. The menagerie heard it, too, and raced me to the door. The cats were silent, but Felix and Cosmo seemed to be having a contest over who could be the louder watchdog.
I opened the door, and before I could stop their escape, the whole crew ran into the dark yard.
“Sorry, I would have stopped them, but they were too fast for me,” Dinah said, coming inside. She dropped her tote bag on the table.
“The dogs aren’t the problem,” I said, peering out into the darkness past the patio illuminated by the floodlights. “It’s the cats.” The two of them had rushed out to the back of the yard and were already out of sight. My backyard was wide but not too deep, ending in a row of redwood trees with ivy and bushes between. I knew there was a fence behind all the foliage, but it was ancient. It had been there long before we moved in, and I had no idea of its condition and often worried there might be a hole somewhere. Mr. Kitty ran past me and went back into the house, but I could hear rustling in the bushes along the back of the yard. Cat was quite the huntress, and I could only imagine what she was doing in the undergrowth. Or finding, I thought with a shudder. I shined my flashlight along the redwood trees and saw some of the ivy moving.
“I have to get her out of there,” I said, running across the grass. I followed the sound and then plunged into the ground cover. I grabbed her at the base of the fence. I had never really seen it before, since it was virtually covered by the bushes and ivy. Chain-link fence certainly lasted, though it probably had gotten shorter with the thick ivy vines weighing it down.
While I was back there, I shined the flashlight into the foliage. “I’m not sure I like that,” I said when Dinah had joined me. It was almost impossible to see with all the growth, but the flashlight had illuminated a gate in the old fence. The property behind mine was on a cul-de-sac, and I didn’t know the people.
“I don’t think you have to worry about them using it,” Dinah said, giving it a push. It seemed to be rusted in place. “Didn’t you find a similar gate on the fence that runs along the side of your property?” my friend asked. I thought for a moment and realized she was right.
“That gate doesn’t matter anymore. The neighbor next door put up a wood fence on his side that blocks it.” Cat was beginning to squirm at being held, and any moment she would start using her claws to break away, so I quickly carried her across the yard and brought her inside. “You didn’t know that gate was there, and they probably don’t, either,” Dinah said, following me inside.
I put Cat on the floor, and she went off looking for Mr. Kitty. A moment later Felix and Cosmo came to the door and wanted to come in, too. I kept looking through the window toward the back of the yard. It had stirred something in my mind.
“Are you up for an adventure?” I asked, grabbing my keys.
“Are you kidding? I live for our adventures. Where are we going? What’s up?” Dinah said.
“I just want to check out a hunch,” I said. We got into the greenmobile. By now it was late enough that there was no traffic on the back road I took. I drove right past the front of CeeCee’s and kept going around the side of her property until I got to the street at the back of it. I pulled the car to the curb, and we got out.
The temperature had dropped into the low fifties, and there was a bite to the air. The street seemed dark and deserted, but then again, all the houses were on the other side of the street hidden behind high fences and mature foliage. The only light came from some fixtures on the gates.
Our footsteps were absorbed by the asphalt as we walked along the back of CeeCee’s property. The light on the gate across the street illuminated the wall of bushes. There was no sidewalk, just a strip of dirt with ivy covering it, and instead of a concrete curb, there was a raised layer of asphalt. I kept shining my flashlight on the greenery, looking for some kind of opening as we walked the whole length of it.
“I see where you’re headed,” Dinah said. “You think there’s a gate somewhere in the fence, like at your place. Wouldn’t the cops have looked for one?”
“Maybe not. If there is one, I don’t think CeeCee knows about it. If, according to Rosa, she can’t make a cup of tea for herself, I doubt she knows much about her fencing.”
“Speaking of Rosa, what did you find out?” Dinah asked.
“Mostly that she’s a loyal employee who is protective of CeeCee and not a big fan of Tony, though she didn’t offer any details. It seemed a little suspicious to me that he wanted to take care of everything with the guest apartment.”
We had reached the place where CeeCee’s property ended and the neighboring lot began. “I could be wrong about a gate,” I said.
“I hate to bring this up, but you found the gate at your place by looking at the fence. It might be more helpful if we went in.” She stuck her hand in the greenery. “It looks like a wall, but these are bushes.”
“Wait a second. I have an idea.” I trained the flashlight on the strip of ivy growing between the street and the bushes. Then I spotted it. “There’s an indentation in the asphalt curb, like this was a driveway once,” I said, getting excited. I turned toward the wall of green and began to examine it more closely. Dinah was right. The planting only looked like a wall, and I noticed a slender opening. I slipped in and once I was behind the tall bushes saw that despite the fanciness of CeeCee’s place, the fence was just ancient chain-link covered in ivy. The flashlight reflected off two metal poles sticking up out of the ground that clearly belonged to a gate—a rather large gate. “This must have been a back entrance,” I called in a loud whisper to Dinah, who was still outside the green wall. “C’mon,” I beckoned.
“The flashlight looks really weird coming through the bushes,” she said when she joined me. I gave the gate a push, expecting the resistance I’d had with the gate at my place. But this one moved easily, as if it had been used recently. All I had to do was move back the thin vines of ivy that covered it and push it open. I slipped inside, and Dinah was close behind.
; “Where are we?” I said in a soft voice. The large trees with their spreading branches made the area seem even darker. I shined the flashlight around, trying to orient myself. The ground was covered with patches of ivy and some bald spots. Nothing like the beautiful landscaping of the rest of CeeCee’s. My light hit a row of tall bushes, and I heard a soft swishing sound coming from the area to one side. “That’s the pool, which is right behind the house.” My flashlight illuminated a wall and, as I pointed it upward, windows from a second story. “That’s the garage and the upstairs apartment. This must be sort of a no-man’s-land. I wonder if CeeCee even knows it’s here.”
Dinah made a move to go around the end of the bushes into the pool area, but I stopped her. “What if CeeCee looks out her window and sees people skulking around her yard?”
Dinah nodded with recognition. “She’d probably freak out before she had a chance to see it was us.” She glanced down at the dark ground nervously. “Let’s get out of here. Who knows what’s wandering around in this ivy.”
It seemed a like a good idea. All the darkness and the fact that we were walking around right near where a death had recently occurred started to get to me. I grabbed Dinah’s arm and tried to see where the way out was. A disembodied voice made us both jump. “Please get me out of here,” the voice cried out.
“It’s my phone,” I said, trying to get it before it repeated. Instead it slipped through my fingers and fell into the ivy as the voice kept on urging me to answer it.
I managed to fish it out of the ivy without encountering anything creepy and swiped the screen to answer it before the voice could cry out again.
“Molly, are you there?” There was a pause. “Sunshine, say something.”
“I’m here, Mason,” I said in a low voice as I finally got the phone to my ear.
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