Magnolias, Moonlight, and Murder

by Sara Rosett

  We meandered down to the gravel parking area and I couldn’t help but look at the tree in the moonlight.

  “Kind of creepy, isn’t it?” Nadia said.

  The air was completely still and the only sound was the loud crunch of gravel under our feet. “Yeah, it is,” I said, thinking that a man may have died a horrible death here. The floodlight only lit part of the tree. Above, against the blackness of the sky, I could see more twisting branches.

  Maybe it was the darkness, but the place disturbed me. I didn’t want to linger. “Come on,” I said, “we don’t want to be late for our manicures.”

  Melissa’s was a little place in a strip mall that only did manicures. I parked and blinked at the light pouring out of the windows. After the darkness of the inn, the light was almost dazzling.

  We walked inside and a woman with a nose ring and a shaggy haircut waved to us and said, “Yeah! Our last appointments of the day.” She sorted us out along a line of manicurists. Nadia and Abby were seated at side-by-side stations and fell into talking about their classes. I ended up at the far end of the row. The woman who’d welcomed us sat down across from me. “I’m Melissa,” she said as she shifted bottles of nail polish, then picked up my hands and examined my nails.

  “Are you always this busy?” I asked. There were about ten manicure stations and each one was filled with a customer on one side and a manicurist on the other.

  Melissa kept her head bent over my hands as she clipped my nails. “Yes, especially in the evening.”

  “Ellie? Is that you?”

  I leaned forward and looked down the row of stations. Colleen waved, flashing a French manicure. I smiled back since Melissa had placed my hands in a tray to soak. Colleen pointed to a woman on the other side of me and drew a frown from her manicurist, who was waiting to finish her nail polish. “That’s my mom. I told her you had some questions you wanted to ask her.”

  I turned and smiled at the woman. I could see the resemblance in the shape of her face. And she had the same frizzy hair, but hers was cut even shorter and made a halo around her face. “Hi. I’m Ellie. I’d shake hands, but I don’t think that would be a good idea,” I said.

  “No, probably not. I’m Rosalee.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  I turned toward her, yanking my hands out of the solution. “Too hot?” Melissa asked.

  “Ah, no. Sorry.” I plunged my hands back in. “Rosalee?”

  “Yes. Is something wrong?”

  “No. Not at all. It’s just that I’ve been looking for a person named Rosalee.”

  “Well, Colleen told me you were helping Nita and had some questions about Coleman, but she didn’t say you were looking for me.”

  “Honestly, I don’t know if you’re the Rosalee I’m looking for or not. I didn’t know that was your name. Colleen said I should talk to her mom. She never mentioned your name.”

  “Well, why did my name surprise you?”

  Melissa pulled my hands out of the solution, patted them dry, and rubbed lotion on with deep massaging strokes. It felt great and normally I would have thoroughly enjoyed being pampered, but I was so focused on Rosalee that I barely noticed. “I’m helping Nita Lockworth in her Find Jodi campaign.” I stopped myself. “Well, I was. Now I’m more of an interested bystander, but since you’re here and I’m here, we might as well talk and maybe we can figure out if you’re the Rosalee from Jodi’s notebook.” I described the notebook and how I’d helped Nita match the notes to stories. “She’d written Nash’s name in a list of possible story ideas. There was also a list of names that didn’t match anything else she’d written. Rosalee was one of the names. Did she ever contact you, ask you any questions?”

  “No, I never heard from her.”

  “Oh.” Maybe I was completely wrong and Jodi wasn’t planning to write a story about Nash.

  “I suppose she could have called when the power was out and I might have missed it,” Rosalee said as she put her hands in front of a small fan to dry the polish. “My husband—my second husband, not Colleen’s father—and I run a camp for kids in Maryland. We’re less than an hour away from the nation’s capital and we’re never really sure we’re going to have power. Amazing, isn’t it? We do have several generators, but it takes a while to get them all working. Colleen said you wanted to know about Coleman. I suppose you’ve heard the rumors about him and Nash.”

  “Yes. Do you think they could be true? That he could be involved in any way?”

  Rosalee snorted. “Absurd.”

  I’d glanced at Melissa, who was using some evil-looking instruments on my cuticles—painless, I should add. I looked back at Rosalee. “Really?”

  “Yes,” Rosalee said. “I don’t know how much Colleen has told you about her grandparents, but it was not a good situation for a child and I tried to keep her out of it as much as possible.”

  “Not good? In what way?”

  “Ava was an alcoholic,” Rosalee said matter-of-factly.

  “I’ve never heard that.”

  “Well, you can believe me or not, but it was true.”

  I said, “I thought she was sickly.”

  Rosalee gave a sharp laugh. “Right. That’s what Coleman said to cover for her. The technical term for it is enabler. His son, my first husband, Durwood.” She shook her head. “Exactly like his father. I didn’t realize how bad it was. When Durwood and I first married we lived in Seattle and rarely saw his family. The few times we visited were short stays, just a couple of days, and Ava was able to hide her drinking then. I certainly wasn’t aware of it. A few years later, after we had Colleen, we went for a longer visit and Ava had deteriorated by then. Of course, I had no idea she was that bad until I saw her screaming at Colleen.”

  “Everyone else I’ve talked to has mentioned she was sick, but no one’s said anything about drinking,” I said, amazed and still not totally convinced.

  “Because Coleman hid it. He did everything he could to keep it a secret. Durwood did, too. Once I realized the extent of the problem, I wanted to get her help, but no. That was impossible. Then people would know.” Rosalee rolled her eyes. “So idiotic, to live like that, in denial. Of course, by the time Durwood’s job brought us here, I knew and kept Colleen away from them. Eventually, Durwood and I divorced—too toxic. I made sure Colleen was protected from the lies and cover-ups.”

  “What color?” Melissa asked.

  “Oh. I’d like a French manicure.”

  Melissa sighed. “French manicure. Always a French manicure. Nobody wants color anymore.”

  Rosalee shouldered her purse and picked up her keys with two fingers, careful not to mar her new polish.

  “Wait, before you leave, tell me more about Coleman,” I said.

  “There’s nothing to tell. He’s meek as a lamb. He ran around his whole life cleaning up Ava’s messes.”

  “Would you say he was prejudiced?”

  “Of course. He never made any bones about that, but would he kill someone? No. Maybe that’s why Jodi didn’t get in touch with me. Maybe she found out how ridiculous that idea was.”

  We walked outside twenty minutes later and I scanned the parking lot. “Didn’t I park right beside you?” I asked Nadia.

  “Yeah.” She clicked her key chain. Her minivan beeped and her doors unlocked. “Right here—” Nadia broke off.

  “My car’s gone,” I said, staring at the empty parking space.

  “And you probably should contact Detective Waraday with the sheriff’s office,” I told the police officer who was taking my statement. “There was an incident at our house this morning…threats and a break-in.”

  Officer Kinsawa did a double take, then said doubtfully, “Yes, ma’am. If you’ll wait here for a moment, I can have an officer take you home.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to do that,” Nadia said. “We can take her home.”

  Once we’d established that I wasn’t just crazy and my car really had been stolen, I’d called Mitch, the police, and my
insurance company. We were still in the parking lot of Melissa’s, but it was now closed.

  The officer came back and said, “We’ve had a call about an abandoned car on fire, a Jeep Cherokee. It’s not too far from here.”

  I rode with Nadia and Abby, hoping that by some strange coincidence it was someone else’s Jeep Cherokee on fire. We followed the police car to a deserted parking lot in the older section of town near the base. The fire was out by the time we arrived, but a fire truck was still parked near the burned-out carcass of a car. “Do you think that was my car?” I asked, leaning forward. I recognized the basic shape, but I couldn’t quite match the metal shell to the car in my memory.

  “I can’t tell,” Abby said. “It might as well be a big piece of charcoal.”

  We all got out of the car and followed Officer Kinsawa. “Don’t get too close,” he warned as we walked through the film of water covering the parking lot. The smell of burnt fabric and hot plastic filled the air.

  I heard a firefighter speaking behind me saying, “Doused with gasoline and set on fire. It was the upholstery that did most of the burning.”

  I looked at the remnants of the military identification sticker that expired in a month at the top of the windshield, then circled to the back and saw the yellow ribbon bumper sticker. “It’s mine,” I said with a sinking sensation.

  Abby patted my shoulder and said, “Oh, Ellie, I’m so sorry.”

  “You know, there was one problem with that vow I made not to be involved in figuring out what happened to Jodi.”

  “What’s that?” Abby asked.

  “The person who’s doing this doesn’t know about it.”

  “Come on, honey,” Nadia said, steering me back to her minivan. “Let’s get you home.”

  “Mitch, what are we going to do?” I rubbed my hand over my face and paced around the kitchen again. He caught me and stopped my pacing. “We’re going to be very careful and hope Waraday wraps this up soon.”

  “Right. We have to hope for that,” I said, but I knew what I had to do. I didn’t bother to say it aloud, because I knew Mitch would disagree and I was too tired to argue. Jodi had been missing for months and who knew how much longer it would be before there was a resolution to the case? I had to go back over those notes and look through the boxes from Nita. It didn’t matter if Mitch wanted me to stay out of it. It didn’t matter if I tried to stay out of it. We were in the middle of it and we weren’t getting out until Jodi was found. And, obviously, I wasn’t very good at leaving things alone anyway.

  “Watch me, Mom! Watch me!”

  I looked up from my stack of papers. Once Livvy was sure she had my attention, she clambered up a rope grid and onto the platform of the play equipment designed to resemble a ship.

  “Good job, sweetie,” I called out, and went back to sorting papers after a quick check to make sure Nathan was still engaged in his favorite activity, piling sand on his toes. It was another spectacular autumn day, so nice that we had to spend at least part of it outside. The insurance company had arranged for a loaner car for us while our claim was processed, and even though I missed the Jeep, I had to admit the new minivan was nice.

  “Just act like it’s a normal day and try not to worry. That’s the best thing for the kids,” Mitch had said before he left for work that morning. He was right. There was nothing more normal than a picnic on a nice day and it got us out of the house for a while. I’d been flinching at each noise, so I’d loaded the stroller and a blanket in the new minivan along with the last box of Jodi’s papers. I’d figured once we’d eaten our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and fed the crusts to the ducks, I’d be able to finish sorting out the papers while the kids played on the playground.

  “Watch me, Mom! Watch me!” Livvy shouted again, this time from the top of the slide.

  I suppressed a sigh. My plan wasn’t working out quite like I’d hoped. “Okay, go ahead.” I had to work on these papers. I wouldn’t have time tomorrow since it was my last day to work with Scott and I had to finish his storage room. “Oh, look. Here comes another girl. I bet she’s your age. Why don’t you see if she wants to go down the slide with you?”

  I finished sorting the receipts by date, then pulled the last pile into my lap to look through them. Most of them seemed normal enough. Jodi bought groceries, filled her car up with gas, went out to eat, and bought several gift cards. I switched to her credit card statements and frowned. There was a charge for Beach Vacation Rentals in Destin, Florida, during the week after Christmas. I scanned through the rest of the statements and found a charge at a gas station in Pensacola. I reviewed the rest of the statements again, but didn’t see any more charges in Florida.

  I gazed across the playground, automatically checking on Livvy as she and her new friend scampered under the monkey bars. Nathan had moved on to the panel of knobs attached to disks. He stood, wavering slightly, as he carefully gripped each knob and twisted.

  Surely, someone investigating Jodi’s disappearance had checked out these charges. I couldn’t imagine it would have gone unnoticed, especially since Peter Yannis lived in Florida.

  I pulled out my phone. Nita answered on the second ring. “Ellie, it’s lovely to hear from you. How are you?”

  “Fine, fine. I’m looking through the last of Jodi’s receipts and charges. There’s two charges in Florida.”

  “One of her good friends from school moved down there. Jodi visits Tracy at least once a year. Jodi says it helps her recharge.”

  “So it’s been checked out? Waraday knows she went to Florida between Christmas and New Year’s?”

  “Yes, of course. In fact, it was one of the first things they checked on. Because of Peter Yannis.”

  “And they didn’t find anything?”

  “No. Peter lived in Jacksonville and Jodi went to Destin. It’s a shame, really, that Tracy wasn’t there. At least, if she’d been there she might have talked to her and Tracy might know something that would help us out now.”

  “She didn’t see her friend when she went to Florida?”

  “No. Tracy had a business trip. She’d started a job with one of the big hotels there and had a training meeting she had to go to. Jodi went down anyway. She loves the beach, especially the Gulf. It’s so beautiful down there with all that white sand. Anyway, Tracy offered to let her stay at her apartment while she was gone, but Jodi didn’t want to do that. She found a vacation rental and stayed there for a few days.”

  “So she went down there quite a bit?”

  “Oh yes. We used to go there on family vacations when she was little. I could hardly get her to come out of the water. I think she was more excited than Tracy when Tracy moved down there.”

  “So she went to take a break, to get away?”

  “Yes. She sat on the deck and walked on the beach. Best therapy in the world, I think. The water is so relaxing.”

  “Hmm. Okay. I haven’t seen anything else out of the ordinary.”

  “Oh.” Her voice, which had been so lively when she talked about Jodi and their beach vacations, had flattened. “Thank you for looking, Ellie. There has to be something, somewhere. Something that will tell us what happened.”

  “I’m sorry.” I think it was her unfailing politeness coupled with the sheer depression of her tone that nudged me to say, “I can look through everything again. I probably won’t be able to do it until later in the week, but if you don’t mind if I hang on to the boxes until—”

  “Yes, why don’t you do that? Take one more look. You keep the boxes as long as you need.”

  “Okay. I’ll call you in a few days.” I had another call coming in, so I switched to it.

  It was Detective Waraday. He said, “We were able to trace the text message sent to your phone. It was from a disposable phone that was purchased in Macon.”

  The small flare of hope I’d felt at his first words died away. “So there’s no way to know who bought it?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Well
, thanks for letting me know.”

  “You take care, Mrs. Avery.” He emphasized the words and I knew it wasn’t just a casual good-bye.

  “I will.” A shadow flickered over the bench and I realized another mom had arrived at the playground. I piled the paperwork back in the box, careful to keep it in order, then shifted it to the ground to make room on the bench.

  I threw a quick smile in the direction of the person who’d taken a seat at the end of the bench. My smile froze and I quickly shifted to grab the box and stand up while doing a quick scan of the park.

  “It’s okay. No photographers, I promise,” Chelsea O’Mara said. In her posh pantsuit and heels, she looked like she’d been teleported to the playground from a boardroom. “Please don’t go. I know I’m the last person you want to talk to, but we might be able to help each other out.”

  I paused with the box balanced on my knees. “Why?” I glanced around the park’s expanse of grass dotted with magnolias and pines. It really was empty except for Livvy and her friend chattering away, the other mom, and Nathan, who’d moved on to the steering wheel, which he was spinning enthusiastically.

  “I think we should trade information.”

  An Everything In Its Place Tip for an Organized Party

  Party Countdown Checklist (The Big Day)

  Finish preparing food.

  Make or pick up food trays.

  Purchase ice.

  Pick up balloons—helium balloons usually last one day, so don’t pick them up the day before. Mylar balloons last several days.

  Pick up any last-minute items you’ve forgotten.

  Set up drink stations and appetizers.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  “What?” Was she crazy? I was not going to develop any sort of relationship with someone in the press, especially Chelsea. Except for closing the door on her a few days ago, I’d only encountered her once before when she covered a big story I’d gotten involved in when we lived in Vernon, Washington. Despite that brief acquaintance, I knew that the tactics she used to cover a story were about as classy as the tabloid television show she worked for.