Top of the Hour

by Anina Collins

  “There is no Chambersburg Road in Waynesboro. The closest Chambersburg Road I know of is in Fayetteville, over ten miles away. Back when my daughter was in high school, she and her girlfriends used to use it to get rid of boys they didn’t want to date or if they got in trouble outside of Waynesboro and needed to lie to the police. You know, typical teenage stuff.”

  Alex still looked confused even after she explained that where we needed to go didn’t exist, so I stepped in. “I’m looking for a woman I met in Baltimore one night—a woman named Jessica. She gave me that address after a fight at a club, and I just wanted to thank her because she was nice enough to give me some money to get a cab after someone stole my purse. All I know is her first name is Jessica. Could she be one of your daughter’s old friends?”

  The woman thought for a moment and nodded. “I think I do remember a girl named Jessica hanging around my house. A pretty girl with big eyes and long blond hair. That was about fifteen years ago, though. Her last name was Borden.”

  “Do you know where she lives?”

  “I don’t know, but my daughter might. She lives above the bakery if you want to go talk to her.”

  I jumped at the chance to speak to someone who may know something about Jessica outside of Sunset Ridge and grabbed Alex’s arm to pull him toward where the woman walked to the back door.

  “You wanted a break? Something tells me we might get one now,” I whispered as we walked to the stairway at the back of the bakery.

  The old woman held the door open for us and said, “My daughter’s name is Christine Jeffers. Her apartment is the one to the right at the top of the stairs. Be careful because they’re steep.”

  She walked away before I could thank her, and as Alex and I looked through the door at a staircase that seemed to be almost perfectly vertical, I nervously asked, “You have a gun with you, don’t you?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Why are you asking?”

  I stared up at the stairs we were about to climb and then looked at him. “I don’t know. I think I saw this in a movie once. It didn’t end well.”

  He nudged me into the stairwell and closed the door behind us. “Too late now. Time to go meet Ms. Jeffers and see what she has to say about Jessica. Don’t worry, though. I’ve got your back.”

  Chapter Ten

  The door to Christine Jeffers’ apartment had a dent in it like someone had tried to shove their foot through it sometime recently. I pointed to it and said to Alex, “Why do I get the feeling this place has seen its share of all kinds of action?”

  Whispering to me as he rapped his knuckles on the door, he said, “Makes me wonder what we’re going to see when this door opens.”

  A woman answered our knocking and to no one’s surprise, she looked like someone had tried to shove their foot through her recently too. Rough was the only word that popped into my mind the second she appeared in front of us.

  “Yeah? What do you want?”

  So much for niceties.

  Alex displayed his badge and asked, “Are you Christine Jeffers?”

  For a moment, the woman didn’t answer. I had a feeling she’d seen her fair share of cops in her lifetime by the way she jutted her right hip out aggressively and snapped, “Yeah. Who’s asking?”

  “I’m Officer Montero and this is Poppy McGuire. We’d like to ask you some questions about a woman you knew when you were a teenager. Her name was Jessica Borden.”

  Christine Jeffers squinted her eyes at us and shook her head. “So that’s all you want?”

  I quickly answered, pretty sure any more coming from Alex might spook her. “Yeah. That’s all. Can we come in?”

  She hesitated for a few more moments until Alex finally said, “I’m not interested in whatever illegal things you’re up to. We just want information on Jessica Borden. That’s it.”

  Pointing at me, she warned him, “I have a witness you said that. My lawyer will be able to get whatever you charge me with thrown out if you decide to change your mind.”

  “I know. I give you my word. We only want to know about Jessica.”

  Even after all that, I still wasn’t sure she’d talk to us until she actually opened the door wide and waved us in. We walked into her apartment and the sweet smell of baked goods reached my nose first, followed by the sour smell of old cigarettes and finally another sweet scent I hadn’t smelled since high school.

  Turning back to look at Alex, I saw he smelled it too. “Nothing like a joint to start out your day,” I said with a chuckle. “We better not stay too long or I’m going to leave here with a contact high. I never was very good with pot.”

  A look of surprise crossed his face. “You never cease to amaze me, Poppy. Is that where you got your nickname?”

  I rolled my eyes and grimaced. I couldn’t count how many times someone had asked me that question. “No. Just focus on the case, will you?”

  Christine Jeffers sat down on her couch cross-legged and lit a cigarette. “So what do you want to know about good old Jessica?”

  As Alex asked her how she knew her, I took a good look at Christine. To be friends with Jessica, she had to be around the same age, but she looked far older than around thirty. Perhaps it was her short, jet black hair next to her pale skin that made her look older. I’d always found black hair and green eyes to be a striking combination on a woman, but on Christine it just looked stark. In addition to that, her skin looked like it hung off her body. Maybe it was from a recent loss of weight or sickness, but the effect in combination with the starkness above her neck made her look considerably older than Jessica.

  “I last saw her a few years ago right before she got married to some bigwig guy who I thought was crazy old for her. He was in his forties, for God’s sake!”

  “Yes, that’s her,” Alex said. “Can you tell us anything else about her?”

  Christine hemmed and hawed about not knowing much, but I had the sense it was the person asking her that had suddenly made her memory go bad. I gave her another minute to answer him while I looked around her apartment at the worn brown rug on the floor and the beige walls that had yellowed over time from her smoking before I stepped in and asked her a question myself.

  “When we spoke to your mother downstairs, she said you knew Jessica when you two were in high school. What was she like back then?”

  Alex raised his eyebrows and shot me a look of surprise before taking a single step back away from Christine. We’d worked together long enough for me to know when he wasn’t getting anywhere questioning someone and I needed to step in. He, in turn, trusted me to ask the right questions so we could find out what we needed. We worked well together, and even though he never failed to give me that look of shock when I took over, I knew he was okay with it.

  “She always wanted more. It was like she thought she came from some fancy family and deserved only the best. Jessica didn’t come from some silver spoon life, so I don’t know why she thought she was all that.”

  “Was she popular?” I asked, relatively sure I already knew the answer.

  “Oh yeah,” Christine said with a chuckle. “She was popular alright. Teases always are, you know?”

  I looked over at Alex to see him taking notes on what Christine was saying. Had he just written tease in his notes? I stifled the urge to lean over and sneak a look and continued asking my questions.

  “So she had lots of boyfriends? Or did she just have a steady one?” I asked, guessing Jessica had a line of guys a mile long who wanted to date her.

  Christine screwed her face into a scowl and took a drag off her cigarette. “I don’t know if I’d say she had lots of boyfriends. Jessica had goals, if you know what I mean. She wanted things from the guys she dated.”

  Not sure what she meant by goals, I shook my head. “No, I’m not following.”

  She rubbed her thumb across her fingertips on her forefinger and middle finger. “Money. She refused to date poor guys, which around here is a pretty hard thing to do. There aren’t a ton of ric
h guys in Waynesboro.”

  “Was she successful in finding a rich guy?”

  Shrugging, Christine said, “Sometimes. It never lasted with her, though. She was always on the lookout for her next guy. It was a thing with her. We weren’t really close because she was like that with friends too. If you couldn’t give her stuff, she wanted nothing to do with you.”

  “Do you remember if she was with anyone when you graduated from high school?” I asked, hoping to hear she had been serious with someone who maybe she never stopped seeing, even after she married Lee Reynolds.

  Unfortunately, Christine didn’t remember things that way.

  “No, she was wild and free and took off when we left school,” she said with a grin. “No one wanted to be tied down once we could do whatever we wanted.”

  “Do you know where she went?”

  “Nah. I just know she left like most everyone else after they gave us those diplomas. I would have left too if it wasn’t for my mother and that damn bakery of hers. So I’ve been stuck here ever since. What did good old Jessica do to get you two looking for her?”

  Alex stepped forward and interrupted me just as I was about to give Christine a vague answer to her question. “Thank you, Ms. Jeffers. One more question. Have you seen Jessica since high school?”

  “Yeah, a couple times. She used to come back every so often to see her parents. I’d see her in town. They lived in a house over on Charles Street. I saw her once last year when her mother died and she came to clean out the house and sell it within a week of her death.”

  I thanked Christine and followed Alex down the steep stairs back into the bakery, curious to know what he thought of her answers. Rather than talking to me, he walked directly to her mother behind the counter and instead of asking her any questions ordered a powdered sugar doughnut to go for himself and one of those apple cinnamon tarts for me. When we finally stepped out onto the sidewalk to head back to the bank, I couldn’t help myself. A cop ordering a doughnut? It was too good not to tease him.

  Taking my pastry, I chuckled. “A doughnut, Alex? You don’t think that’s a bit stereotypical, you being a cop and all?”

  He said nothing but rolled his eyes as we made our way up the street to the Third National Bank. But when we got there, he continued on to the car instead of going in.

  “We aren’t going to speak to the bank manager?” I asked, confused since he hadn’t said a word to me since leaving Christine Jeffers’ apartment.

  Finishing his doughnut, he tossed the napkin the elderly woman had given him in a trash can and shook his head. “Not yet. I want to find out more about that house over on Charles Street. The bank manager won’t be there for another thirty minutes or so anyway, so I thought we’d take a drive to the county courthouse. I don’t think it’s far from here.”

  I opened the door to the car and looked across the roof at him. “You could tell your partner this. Maybe if you weren’t scarfing down that doughnut you could have mentioned your plans.”

  He smiled and got into the car. Turning over the engine, he laughed. “I didn’t know if you were impaired from our time at her apartment. By the way, if that’s not how you got the nickname Poppy, how did you get it?”

  A little powdered sugar sat above his lip, so I reached over and wiped it off before explaining the origin of my nickname. “I got it from not being able to pronounce words correctly when I was a little girl. When I couldn’t say a word right, I would just say poppy. So my father began calling me Poppy, and it stuck.”

  Alex stopped the car at the parking lot exit and turned to look at me. “That’s adorable. Much better than the idea of you being a pothead in high school.”

  “I’d say so. While I definitely had some wild times as a teenager, I wouldn’t say I was a pothead. Now Derek, I could tell you stories that would make your hair curl. That boy was wild!”

  Without saying a word, I saw Alex didn’t want to know any more about his police chief’s past, so I didn’t go any further with my tales of Derek. We drove the ten minutes it took to get to the county courthouse saying little as I enjoyed my delicious pastry, but I thought about what we’d learned. Until we knew the details about the sale of Jessica’s childhood home, all we’d found out about her from Christine Jeffers was she was a gold digger, even as a young girl, and didn’t spend much time in Waynesboro once she didn’t have to.

  The county records clerk added to that information, though, so by the time we were once again in the car driving back toward Waynesboro we did have information to discuss. Although it wasn’t his usual way, Alex seemed downright excited by what we’d learned.

  “I had a feeling that was where the thirty grand had come from, but I find it most interesting that Jessica used her maiden name to sell that house and take the proceeds.”

  I’d noted that immediately when the clerk had told him what name she’d used for the transaction. “Was she trying to keep that money away from her husband?”

  “I have no idea about that, but I think we can fairly say Jessica Borden Reynolds is a liar,” he said as we turned onto Main Street once again. “She lied on her marriage certificate and then used her maiden name on the sale of the house. This makes me wonder what else she told us that was a lie.”

  “Add to that the eye drops and what Donny told us about how some people think that’s a way to kill someone and she’s looking pretty guilty of a bunch of things,” I said as we parked the car in the Third National Bank parking lot.

  Alex opened his door and nodded. “Let’s see what the bank manager can tell us about those smaller deposits.”

  Thomas Rubens sat behind the welcome desk in the bank lobby with a smile for us as we approached him. He wore a finely made grey three piece suit that fit his rotund body snugly, causing the buttons on his suit vest to tug uncomfortably. As I scanned his person, I wasn’t surprised to see a bare ring finger on his left hand. No wife, even one who didn’t love her husband anymore, would have her husband dress so badly for so much money.

  He stood to greet us and escorted us to his office in the back of the bank. We sat down in front of his desk, and he folded his hands on top of the desk blotter as he asked, “What can I do for you today, Officer Montero?”

  “I’m conducting an investigation that involves one of your customers. I want to know about deposits she made into an account here.”

  “What is the customer’s name?” Mr. Rubens asked as he turned slowly in his desk chair to face his computer.

  “Jessica Borden Reynolds. I believe her account is in her maiden name, however.”

  He turned his head and nodded his recognition of her name. “Oh yes, we know her from a long time ago. She’s been a customer at this branch for years. I do hope she’s okay.”

  Alex didn’t offer the bank manager any information on Jessica, much to the man’s chagrin as he waited a few seconds before turning back to look at his computer. He tapped his fingers on a bunch of keys and her information came up in green on the screen.

  Leaning forward to look at it, Alex said, “I want to know about the deposits she makes each month. What can you tell me about them?”

  Thomas Rubens read what was on the screen and shook his head. “Not much. She makes the deposits in cash. They always come on the tenth of the month, or the day closest if the tenth lands on a Sunday. We’re open on Saturdays, so when the tenth is a Sunday, she’s deposited on a weekend. Other than that, I don’t have any other information.”

  Alex jotted down the word CASH in his notes and looked up at the bank manager. “Nothing else? Are you sure it’s her who deposits the money in person each time?”

  Thomas Rubens closed his laptop and turned his chair so he once again faced us. “I wouldn’t know that from the records. All it says is the money is deposited in cash into her account.”

  Looking frustrated, Alex closed his notebook and put it back into his pocket. I didn’t know why he didn’t ask anything else, so for the first time I spoke up. “What about your tel
lers? Would they know since she’s been a customer here for so long? Surely one of them would know if she’s been in here recently.”

  The bank manager thought about what I’d said for a moment and then asked us to wait as he checked with the two tellers on duty. As he walked out, Alex turned to me and smiled. “You didn’t think I was going to ask that, did you?”

  I narrowed my eyes to slivers and asked, “Were you?”

  “I would have eventually,” he answered in tone I knew meant he hadn’t thought of it.

  Waving his claim off, I sat back in the upholstered office chair. “This is what partners do, right? We complement each other.”

  Just then, Thomas Rubens returned and I saw by the disappointed look on his face that his tellers hadn’t helped us. Taking his seat behind his desk, he said, “Neither teller can say for sure if it was actually Jessica who deposits the money or someone else. All we know is the deposits come in cash each month and are deposited in person right here at this branch. I wish I could help more.”

  “What about cameras?” I asked before Alex could open his mouth to ask another question. “I saw them in the lobby when we walked in.”

  The manager fidgeted in his seat and after a few moments nodded. “Well, they are there…” He stopped for a long pause and then continued. “I think you’d need a court order before I could let you see them, though.”

  Alex shook his hand and smiled. “You’ve been very helpful. Thank you, Mr. Rubens. If we have any more questions, I’ll let you know.”

  The bank manager smiled at me as we left basically empty-handed. We’d already known the amounts of the deposits and when they came in each month. What we needed to know was where she got the two grand each month, something we still were in the dark about.

  As we walked through the bank doors, I grabbed Alex’s sleeve to stop him. “Are you going to get a court order to see the tapes? Do you think you’ll have a difficult time getting one?”

  Alex smiled but shook his head. “Probably not, but my guess is that Mr. Rubens got uncomfortable when you asked about them because they aren’t working.”