“Exactly what I thought,” I said. “So what now?” I certainly didn’t know how to pursue a financially motivated crime with four silent investors involved. All I knew how to do was root around, uncovering the secrets people tried so hard to keep buried.
“I’ll turn over the information to Lane and the team. If it’s Wellborn—or one of the other nine—they’ll be able to figure—”
She stopped, catching her words before she released them and had to try to pull them back. Because we both knew that we couldn’t count on Sheriff Lane to figure things out. Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. It was up to us.
“There’s something bugging me,” I said to her. I didn’t know if it was worth mentioning, but I didn’t want to keep anything back—just in case. “You remember Dixie?”
“The Marilyn Monroe look-alike? Of course. I don’t think I could forget her if I tried. She’s a one of a kind.”
“That she is.”
“What about her?” she asked, but I could tell she was still circling around the potential suspects who invested with Max Litman.
“She used to date Max back when they were both younger. And when I ran into her, she told me she got a job as a receptionist. What she didn’t say was that the job was with Max’s business rival.”
Emmaline didn’t react. I knew her well; she was thinking about what I’d said, pulling in her background knowledge, and formulating her ideas on the subject. “Ivy,” she finally said, “how did she happen to be at the hangar that morning? The morning you found Max?”
I wondered the same thing at the time, and now I relayed the conversation I’d had with her. “Half the town showed up. Cell phones.”
“Dead body found in a car in a hangar on the outskirts of town, she hears about it from someone—but who knows who?—and she hightails it out there. Why?”
That was a very good question. Although she knew Max when she was younger, she made it clear that there had been nothing between them for decades. That very well could be true, however one thing I’d learned during my own three-plus decades was that people told you what they wanted you to know, and they omitted what they didn’t. Why had she come to the hangar? “She knew it was Max in there,” I said, putting a different spin on something she’d said. “She didn’t ask me who was dead, she asked me for confirmation. She told me that people were saying it was Max. What people? How would anyone have known that?”
I also remembered how Sheriff Lane had gazed out into the growing crowd of looky-loos. He’d thought the killer might still be there. What if she’d been standing right beside me the whole time?
A shudder tickled my skin. I’d just spent the better part of an hour with her today and certainly hadn’t gotten any sense of her as a murderer. Still, I knew better than to discount her; anybody was capable of doing anything.
“Looking at it objectively—and excluding Billy,” Emmaline said, “we now have eleven potential suspects: the ten investors and Dixie.”
“Twelve if we count Vanessa.” Which we definitely should. “That’s a whole lot more than we had a few hours ago.”
Emmaline had been carrying a heavy load, beginning with the circumstantial evidence potentially connecting Billy to Max’s murder and then the blow of not only being taken off the investigation, but the lack of control that came along with that removal. Still, having twelve people to focus on, other than Billy, had to give her a modicum of hope, didn’t it? It even felt overwhelming. How were we supposed to get to one killer from twelve suspects?
Emmaline echoed my feelings with the audibly shaky breath she blew out. We didn’t know the identity of nine of the investors, and motives for Dixie or Vanessa were both giant unknowns. And if I was being honest with myself, none of them took Billy off the hot seat.
Chapter 15
After my conversation with Emmaline, I needed a change.
I needed a distraction.
I needed ice cream.
Since the moment I’d seen Laura’s husband on a daddy date with their daughter, I’d wanted to call my father. I hadn’t seen him since Em had asked me to be her eyes and ears within the Art Car Show and Ball. The event itself was still days away. In the meantime I was thinking about what to do next with the information in my head. I didn’t know how to figure out who the investors in Max’s condo scheme were, so I couldn’t do anything there. I didn’t like that Dixie had not told me where she’d worked, but that didn’t mean the omission was deliberate or calculated. She may not have seen a connection between Max and her employer. I had to remind myself that not everything had a sinister intention behind it.
But pursuing information about Vanessa was a different story. What, exactly, was a spiritual advisor, and in what capacity had she advised Max? Learning more about her was doable. Of the three possible doors I could walk through, digging into Vanessa’s background was the logical choice.
But first, ice cream.
A surprise visit to the city planner’s office and a midday sit-down with my dad was exactly what I needed. It was also what he needed, although hell would freeze over before he admitted it. Owen Culpepper always gave 100% to his job; since my mother had died, however, he’d thrown himself into his work even deeper than before. He woke up early, often heading to the office before it was light outside. He’d come home late, well after the dinner hour, well after the time when he might run into neighbors out watering their lawns or walking their dogs. He avoided people these days, and since I’d bought my own house and moved out, he came home to no one. There was nothing I could do about those things, but I could drag him out in the middle of the day.
The Santa Sofia city offices were in a nondescript flat-roofed building on the west side of town. There were no tourists here; no souvenir shops where you could buy trinkets printed with SANTA SOFIA, CALIFORNIA or LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE IN SANTA SOFIA; no crab shacks on the beach. This was where the cogs of our town turned. My dad was one of those cogs.
There were a few annexes, but the city manager’s office was in the main building. So many in similar jobs had short tenures, but my dad had been moved up through the ranks over the years, landing the top job ten years ago. He was half politician and have administrator, balancing the needs and fickleness of an ever-changing city council. He’d managed to have longevity in his job, something that was almost unheard of. He was smart and politically savvy, and knew how to function within the system, something that had served him well.
Because my dad had worked for the city for his entire career in one capacity or another, I’d been around this place hundreds of times. Even after my time in college and years spent in Austin, the clerks and assistants still knew me. The office manager, Sally O’Brien, had worked with my father for as long as I could remember. She had a good ten years on him and had always looked it, but after losing my mom, he’d caught up with her. His hair had turned to salt and pepper right before our eyes. He had melted away from his loss of appetite. Eventually he started to bounce back. We owed part of his recovery to Sally. She’d anticipated his needs, stayed by his side, and helped to ease him through the worst of it by providing normalcy to his days. She kept my dad’s office running, even when he had been unable to. There was a lot to be said for loyalty.
She had her head down as she shuffled through a stack of papers, but glanced up as I approached. I lifted my hand in a quick wave and smiled. It took her a beat before recognition set in, but when it did, she was out of her seat in a split second, her papers forgotten. She rushed around her desk, sweeping me into a hearty embrace. “Ivy, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes! I’ve been wondering when we’d see you around here again.”
She was a robust woman, several inches shorter than me—and strong as a horse. She’d had enough strength to carry my dad through his grief, and she’d done her share of helping Billy and me, too. From organizing meals to be delivered to checking in on each of us on a daily basis, she had been a rock for us all. I’d always be grateful to her for that.
I filled her in
on my photography and the bread shop, and she gave me an update on her husband, children, and grandchildren, and I promised I wouldn’t be such a stranger. After another hug, I headed down the corridor to the city manager’s office, stopping at the threshold. My dad sat in his black ergonomic chair. It was a luxury he’d refused to indulge in, but finally, after years of an aching back, we indulged in it for him. It was the best Father’s Day we’d given him since Billy and I were knee-high to a grasshopper. As little kids, every Father’s Day was a treasure, but as adults, finding something that made a person’s daily life better was immensely gratifying. And that chair had done the trick.
He had his back turned to me as he riffled through the contents in a filing cabinet drawer. I watched as he walked his fingers over the tabs until he settled on two folders. He reached his hand down, but muttered under his breath as it came up empty a second later. Whatever folder was supposed to be there was not. My dad was a stickler for organization. In that one way, he and my mother were polar opposites. She was the creative type, always leaving a trail of whatever she was working on in her wake. He, on the other hand, had a different philosophy. There is a place for everything and everything had a place. Billy and I had both ended up somewhere in the middle. Neither of us obsessed how orderly—or not—our space was, but neither did we feel comfortable in a house full of scattered stuff. A missing folder would annoy me, but I wouldn’t lose sleep over it. That same missing folder would drive my father crazy.
He flicked his fingers over the files again, finally landing on the one he wanted. “How’d you get there?” he muttered to it, as if it had up and moved itself to a different spot in the drawer. As he turned to place it on his desk, I cleared my throat to announce my presence and stepped into the room. “Hey, Dad.”
“Ivy! This is a surprise,” he said. He got up, rounded his desk, and wrapped me up in a hug that lasted a beat longer than normal. Sometimes it felt as if I was his lifeline. My mom’s absence hit us all in different ways and at different times. The truth was that we were all each other’s lifeline.
“I’m here to steal you away for ice cream,” I said.
He ran his hand through his hair. Billy had gotten dark brown waves, while I’d inherited my mother’s spiraled ginger curls. But my dad’s hair had turned to gray, all color wiped clean away, never to return. I’d gotten used to the change in hair color, but I hadn’t adjusted to the changes in his face—from the gauntness of his cheeks to the downturn of his mouth, always a little melancholy now, to the new set of lines between his eyes from so many hours sitting, pondering, asking why. Why was it Anna who had died? Why had she been taken from him?
He shook his head. “I don’t know, Ivy. I’m backed up.”
I’d known he wouldn’t just drop everything to take a midday excursion at my first request, but I’d come prepared for a fight and I would not take no for an answer. “The work will be here when you get back.”
“It never goes away,” he agreed.
“You deserve a break now and then.”
“I had a long break,” he said. “Months, in fact.”
He was talking about the time after my mom died. “That doesn’t count, Dad. You don’t have to make up every hour you were gone. Your job isn’t like that.”
“I’m not trying to make up the time, but I have things that have to get done. I have a budget report that is due in a few days and a meeting with one of the council members later today,” he said.
I knew his schedule was busy, and I’d been lucky to find him in his office rather than running around here and there, politicking, but even the head honcho was entitled to an afternoon break. “Dad, it’s just ice cream. I’ll have you back in less than an hour.” And then I took him by the hand, dragged him out the door of his office, down the hall, and out of the building.
He’d continued to resist at first, but soon we were back in town and sitting at a cute little bistro table at our favorite old-fashioned ice-cream parlor. I had a hearty scoop of strawberry in a cup and my dad had a double-scoop hot fudge sundae. Eating the ice cream was easy. Making small talk, not so much. It didn’t take long before we came around face-to-face with the elephant in the room. “So those are some possible leads,” I said after filling him in, making my voice as hopeful as possible.
We were silent for a minute; then he looked into my eyes. “You being careful, Ivy?”
I met his gaze and saw his fear blazing from behind them. It wasn’t just fear for my personal safety. It was fear that I wouldn’t succeed. Wouldn’t manage to find the truth and free Billy from the accusations and the outcome of being charged with Max Litman’s murder. “Always, Dad. Nothing’s going to happen to me. Nothing’s going to happen to Billy.” I took his hand. “We’ll be okay.”
He squeezed my fingers. “I hope so, Ivy. God, how I hope so.”
It hadn’t been the uplifting trip to the ice-cream parlor I’d hoped for, but we were together and that was what we both needed. We just hadn’t known it.
An hour after I’d picked him up, I dropped him back at the city building; then I went home. Home to my old historic house on Maple Street. Home to Agatha. Home to think.
Chapter 16
Back at home, I set Agatha free from her crate and opened the French doors that led from the parlor to the backyard. With a cup of rose-and-lavender-infused hot tea, a hunk of the sourdough bread I’d made, a floral-covered notebook, and my laptop, I settled in at the patio table. Agatha ran around in circles, foraged in the flower beds, and eventually wore herself out, stretching out in a sliver of sunlight on the grass. While she basked in the sun, I opened my notebook and recorded everything I knew about Max Litman, so far. Done with that, I opened my laptop, opened my browser, and began my search for spiritual leadership in Santa Sofia.
I hadn’t been sure how difficult it would be to find information on Vanessa, but it turns out it wasn’t hard at all. Googling “spiritual advisors” led me to a series of psychics and mediums, several professional counselors, and a life coach. A life coach who was named Vanessa Rose. Clicking over to her website and seeing her photograph confirmed that it was, indeed, the same woman. When Mrs. Branford and I had met her at Max Litman’s house, she hadn’t struck me as overtly metaphysical—or, truth be told, spiritual, at all. But the picture painted a different story. It had been taken with an exposure that created the effect of light streaming from behind her like an aura.
Turns out Vanessa was a Certified Life Coach and Spiritual Advisor with services that ran the gamut. She could help a person build loving relationships that work; cope with “hot buttons” like managing anger, frustration, and stress; deal with grief; develop self-awareness, self-worth, and self-esteem; and more. And she could also tap into a person’s psyche with her “third eye.”
Vanessa Rose was a one-stop therapist without the advanced degree to support her expertise. And with the added perk of angel readings. Knowing all of this made me want to go see her again so I could dig deeper into her relationship with Max. Without the benefit of a uniform and badge, however, I couldn’t compel her to talk to me. A cold call might scare her off, and then where would I be? Keeping this in mind, it didn’t take long to formulate the easiest and most logical plan: I was going to contact her about her services. After all, who couldn’t use a life coach?
I made the call, half expecting to get a recording, but she answered on the third ring. I introduced myself using my middle name, Anna, which was my mother’s name, and Cullison, the made-up surname I’d given to Johnny Wellborn. “I’ve never done this before,” I said tentatively. True statement.
“I hear that all the time. We’ll do a complimentary meet and greet first. I’ll come over, we’ll talk, and determine what your needs and goals are.”
Life coach/spiritual advisor/angel readers must not be in high demand in Santa Sofia, because she had availability the following morning. We made the appointment, but as I hung up, a case of nerves struck me. How far would I have to go with my ru
se to get information from her about her relationship with Max?
The doorbell rang, making the opportunity to dwell on what I’d say to Vanessa short-lived. Agatha had been asleep, but the moment I stood, she popped up, following me inside. I pressed the pads of my fingers to the door, stood on my toes, and peaked through the peephole to see Miguel’s distorted face. I opened the door to him, a surprised smile on my face, grabbed hold of his shirt, and pulled him in. He laughed, but only until my lips landed on his with a God, it’s good to see you kiss.
Had it not been for Agatha, the kiss would have gone on and on, but the second she’d laid eyes on Miguel, she tilted her head back, looking for all the world like she was going to howl, but instead she sucked in a wheezy breath and let forth a lusty barrage of barks. It was hard to sustain a kiss with the cacophony of her yelps and the clickety-click of her nails against the hardwood floor. She raced down the hall before doubling back to repeat her greeting. She sniffed his shoes, circled around him, and lightly nipped the hem of his pants, then started the barking frenzy again. Finally, she stopped when he bent to scratch her head. “One of these days you’ll love me, Agatha.” He glanced up at me with a charmingly crooked grin. “So will you.”
I think I already did, but I wasn’t ready to confess that. That would mean truly putting my heart on the line with him, and I wasn’t ready to take that leap quite yet. Instead I smiled coyly. “You think so?”
He stood, then gave me that smoldering look he was so good at. “I know so.”
I folded my arms and did my best to look stern, but my flirty voice gave me away. “You’re a confident one, aren’t you, Mr. Baptista?”
He kicked the door closed behind him and wrapped his arms around me. “Confident and patient,” he said. And then he pulled me close and kissed me again.
I melted in his arms. This was the feeling I’d missed since we’d parted ways so long ago. This was the feeling I’d missed even after marrying Luke. This was the feeling I hoped I’d have with Miguel for the rest of my life. But it wasn’t going to last any longer at the moment because, dammit, Agatha was at it again, sounding for all the world as if she might hack up a lung. I pulled away from him, throwing a disappointed look at my pug. “Agatha, stop!”
The Walking Bread Page 11