“Hey,” the woman said, as a greeting.
“What’s Dani doing?” Jaymie asked.
“She’s on the last step of breaking a foal to halter.” The woman glanced over at Jaymie and perhaps felt her puzzlement. “Horses don’t naturally take to a halter and bridle, so it’s best to start early, get them used to it long before they’re ready for a saddle. This one’s a new colt, Chester, and he looks good, so we want to train him up right and early. Emma Spangler,” she finished, putting out her hand. “And you are…?”
“Jaymie Leighton.”
The other woman nodded. “I’ve heard of you. Dani said she ran into you at the feed store the day before Kathy was killed.”
Jaymie nodded. “That’s what I want to talk to Dani about.”
“This has been real hard on her.” She slanted a serious glance over at Jaymie. “You’re not going to upset her, are you?”
“I’m hoping, as Kathy’s friend, she can tell me about anything that was bothering Kathy lately, so I don’t know,” Jaymie said, honestly.
“Okay. I appreciate the truth.”
They watched for a while. Dani was so wholly engaged in her task, she didn’t even notice Jaymie until she finally relaxed and walked the foal, a pretty reddish brown animal, to the ring gate.
“That was beautiful,” Emma said.
Dani came over, kissed Emma soundly and smiled broadly. “Isn’t he perfection?” She petted the colt’s white-blazed nose. “We’ve got ourselves a winner.”
Jaymie felt the shock of the intimacy of that kiss, but didn’t want to show it. Dani Brougham was gay. It didn’t matter a jot, but what shocked her most was that Kathy must have known that, and yet Dani was her best friend. She hadn’t thought Kathy would be tolerant, much less accepting, of the couple. It saddened her that she hadn’t known that Kathy in adulthood, the one who was clearly a good and loyal friend.
Dani was watching her when she looked back up.
She knows I’m shocked, Jaymie thought, but not why. It was not the kind of thing she could explain, so she just moved on. “You were Kathy’s best friend,” she said. “I wanted to say how sorry I am about her death.”
Dani nodded, her expression stoic. “I understand you found her.”
“It was terrible,” Jaymie said. “Can we go somewhere and talk?”
Dani nodded.
“I’ll take Chester,” Emma said gently, touching Dani’s shoulder. “You two go on up to the house. There’s coffee made and some carrot cake I just finished frosting.”
Dani led the way to the back door and down into a rec room. She said she had to wash the ring dust off her, but told Jaymie to go ahead and have a seat while she headed upstairs.
The rec room was big, maybe twenty-five feet long, and cool. There was a fireplace in the corner, and there were comfortable couches and chairs in a seating area at one end. The walls were adorned with ribbons, framed photos and a shelf that held trophies dating all the way from the 1980s to earlier this same year. Most had Dani’s name on them, but some had Emma’s. There was a framed newspaper clipping with a photo of a grinning youngster in pigtails holding up a ribbon. Under it, it said, “Danielle Brougham, age twelve, and her half-Arabian, Leon, bring home a first in the Michigan Youth Equitation Trials.”
Passion: Dani had found hers early, but Jaymie was a late bloomer in every sense of the word, and was just now discovering an ardor for vintage kitchenware and old recipes. It was a sad, sad thing that Kathy, who had shown an early enthusiasm for health care and helping others, had not been able to follow through. Perhaps if she had lived, she still might have.
Jaymie sat on the sofa and thought about what she wanted to discuss with Dani. She wanted to know what Dani thought of the relationships in Kathy’s life, with her husband, sister and the grandfather of her nephew. And what about Matt Laskan? Did Dani know if there was anyone else who would want Kathy dead? But the woman was going to have questions about her own motives, and Jaymie had to be prepared for that.
Finally Dani came down the stairs with two mugs and some carrot cake on a plain wood tray. “I didn’t know how you take your coffee, so I brought sugar and milk.”
“Great.” Jaymie fixed her coffee, and sat back, eyeing the generous hunks of carrot cake on a platter.
“Take a piece,” Dani said, grabbing a sizable chunk and a napkin for herself.
Jaymie did, and took a bite, closing her eyes in ecstasy. “I have to get this recipe,” she mumbled, enjoying the subtle spice flavor and the chopped pecans. “Yum!”
They finished their cake in silence; then, as Jaymie licked icing off her fingers, Dani said, “I’ll get Emma to give you the recipe.”
“How long have you two been together?”
“Seven years.”
“How’d you meet?”
“Horse show. She was a barrel racer and was looking for a trainer for a new horse she was thinking of buying.”
“How did you meet Kathy?” Jaymie asked.
“I came in to Laskan Cooper to have my accounts done. About five years ago, I guess. When Kathy found out I had horses, she wanted to know all about it, and she came out to ride. She was inexperienced, but she loved horses, you could tell. If she’d had more time, she could have become a good rider. We became friends.”
“I’ve known her almost my whole life,” Jaymie said.
“You’re the last person I would have expected to see here,” Dani said, her voice husky with emotions she was trying to defeat. “You and she didn’t get along, exactly, from what I understand from Kylie.”
“We were the best of friends, once.”
“What happened?”
“What’s sad is, I didn’t know what happened to end our friendship until just a couple of days ago. Apparently someone at our high school thought it would be funny to tell her that I said something unforgivable about her.” Jaymie hung her head, feeling the searing awfulness of the words that must have pierced Kathy to the core. “Something really awful and personal. Someone told her that I said, to a guy she liked, that she smelled like pigs, her family smelled like pigs and their whole house smelled like pigs. It went around the school as some kind of great joke, and the guy never talked to her again.” Jaymie shook her head. “I could never say something like that. Never! But she apparently believed that I said it, without even asking me about it. She never told me why she was angry, so I couldn’t tell her that I didn’t…didn’t say it.” Jaymie shook her head and looked into Dani’s eyes. “Why did she believe I’d say a thing like that?”
“You don’t know?”
Jaymie thought about it, about the occasionally catty remarks she had made, thinking she was being funny, about her nickname for Craig Cooper, the one that had stuck and stung for all those years. “You know, maybe I do know why she believed it. I wasn’t a terrible kid, but I did have my moments.”
“It wasn’t just that. Kathy was touchy sometimes about where she came from. She was probably a little ashamed, especially at that age. Maybe she even worried that it was true.”
“That…that they s-stank? But it wasn’t true,” Jaymie said.
Dani shrugged. “I don’t know; I’m just speculating. I didn’t know her then. So what do you want from me?”
“You knew her better than I did, at least these last years,” Jaymie said, rubbing at a spot of frosting on her thumb. “I want to find out who killed her. I just can’t let go of it. And to do that—to find out who might have wanted to hurt her—I need to know more about her.”
“But I understood there’s been an arrest.”
“A very good friend of mine—someone whose opinion matters to me and who I trust—doesn’t believe Johnny Stanko killed Kathy,” Jaymie said. “And God only knows there were lots of other people who won’t be crying at her funeral. She was a polarizing figure.”
“But I still don’t get it. How can I help?”
“You knew her in a different way than anyone else. You were her best…pretty much her
only friend. Did she confide in you? Was it that kind of friendship?”
The woman hesitated and stared into Jaymie’s eyes, her own full of doubt. “Why should I tell you anything? Why should I believe your motives?”
Jaymie nodded. “Fair enough.” She thought for a long minute. “I’ll tell you what I feel; that’s pretty much all I can do. I can’t shake this…this sense of sadness over the whole thing. All the what-ifs come back to haunt me. What if Kathy had turned to whoever told her such a horrible lie back in high school and said there would be no way I could say such a thing? What if I’d pursued it harder, instead of feeling hurt and withdrawing? I wish she had believed in me and our friendship. Despite everything, I’d have thought she would have given me a chance to tell her the truth. Instead, I just never knew. I can’t think why she didn’t just say something to me.”
“Kids are insecure. I know that better than anyone. Like I said, she probably believed it because she was afraid it was true, and that’s exactly why she couldn’t confront you. Hearing it secondhand was bad enough, but face-to-face would have been so much worse.”
“It sounds like you’ve had experience?”
Dani nodded. “I briefly had a girlfriend in high school—not a girlfriend in the sense of Emma, just a friend—but when the others noticed us hanging out together, she was teased so much she turned against me, said she never really liked me, that she only hung around me because she felt sorry for me. She said a lot of other crap, too.” Her expression was impassive, but anger flared in her eyes. “It hurt so bad, I lost a whole year of school. I never spoke to her again. I had to transfer to another school finally, after I tried to commit suicide. It was a long time before I trusted anyone again.”
“I’m so sorry,” Jaymie said, gazing into her eyes, where the hurt still lingered. “Do you ever wonder what that friend feels today, if she’s sorry for what she said?”
The other woman frowned and looked down into her coffee, swirling it around. “You know, I never really thought of it that way. She was a kid too, so afraid of being ostracized. I wish she’d had more guts, but…” She shrugged. “Teenagehood sucks.”
“You’re probably right about why Kathy believed the lie. But I can’t leave it alone; I keep thinking what might have been if she hadn’t died. On the Fourth, before I even found out the truth, I swore to myself that the very next day I was going to corner her and hash it all out.” She met Dani’s gaze. “Why did I wait? Could I have changed anything? I just don’t know. The only thing I can do now is help the police get whoever did that to her and her family.”
“And you don’t think Stanko did it?”
“That’s just it; I don’t know, not for sure. He was a bully in high school, and he gave Craig Cooper a real hard time, but I don’t think he even knew Kathy. He seems like the type, and I wince even saying that, but he has a short temper and a history of violence, and he threatened Kathy at the picnic. She was so gutsy.” Jaymie shook her head and took a long gulp of coffee. “I would have backed down, but she didn’t.”
“Okay. I’ve been wracking my brain the last couple of days trying to think of who might have done it, but when Stanko was arrested I just…” Dani shrugged. “But I hate when people make snap judgments, and if he’s not guilty, I don’t want him to suffer.”
“I have to be completely honest here. I do have another motive for figuring this out. Kathy was killed with my glass bowl.” She hung her head a moment, shivering as the horror of the scene came vividly back to her. She looked up; Dani’s expression was soft with sympathy, but she waited, silent. “I brought that bowl to the picnic, and someone used it to kill her. That makes me really mad,” she said, through her teeth. “But it also makes me a suspect. If Stanko didn’t do it, then we’ll be back at square one. I want to know the truth, and I can’t just leave it up to the cops. This is personal.”
“How can I help?”
“I need to know about her life. Did she say anything lately about anyone she was afraid of? Did she tell you about any fights she’d had? About her and Craig’s relationship? Her and Kylie? Connor’s grandfather, Andy Walker?”
“Whoa, that’s a lot. Give me a minute.” She sat back in her chair and drank down some of her coffee, her gaze unfocused. “Well, she and Craig; something was bothering her about that the other day. I talked to her on the phone on the morning of the Fourth. She wanted Emma and me to come in for a picnic, but one of the horses was colicky, and we had to stick around and walk her. Emma told me to go ahead to Queensville if I wanted, but Matilda is my oldest horse; I didn’t want to let the poor old girl down.” She closed her eyes for a second, then opened them. “Instead, I let Kathy down. What if I could have changed things that day, turned events so it wouldn’t have happened? I guess I feel like you do. I’ll never know.”
Jaymie reached out and touched her knee. “So let’s see that whoever did this to her pays. What else did you talk about that morning?”
“She was upset. I’m not quite sure, but I had a feeling that…that she was afraid for her marriage.”
Jaymie nodded. “I can believe that. I know it won’t go any further than this, so I’ll tell you something I’ve just learned: Craig was cheating on her. I have a witness to him kissing another woman.”
Dani gasped, eyes wide with shock. “Bastard! He was the one thing she was sure of in life, she once told me. What an asshole! Pardon the language.”
“Pardoned,” Jaymie said.
“She told me that she took his phone by accident one morning a few days before the Fourth. She saw text messages on there that weren’t right, and I think she saw a photo that upset her. She wouldn’t tell me everything, but she was devastated about it.”
“I wonder if that was what was going on at the Emporium on the second. She had a phone in her hand and was looking at it, and she said something like “What the heck?” and she was upset. Maybe that’s why she lashed out at Ella about running over Connor’s toes.”
“Oh, and that’s another thing. She e-mailed me that she was planning on going over to Ella’s place and apologizing for biting her head off. She said…” Dani frowned and stared down into her cup. “What did she say? Something I meant to ask her about. Oh yeah. She said that she wanted to help Ella. Ella Douglas is that woman in a wheelchair, right?”
“Yeah. She has a degenerative disease or something, and she’s having a lot of trouble right now. Kathy wanted to be a nurse. Maybe she was thinking of going back into it?”
“I don’t know,” Dani said, slowly. “I think she wanted to help her, specifically to make up for snapping at her in the store. I’m not sure, but that’s the only thing I can think of.”
“Ella Douglas was a girl we knew in high school. Back then she was a bit of a bully,” Jaymie said.
“Kathy did say that, but then said something about Ella being in trouble, and that she wanted to reach out to her.”
“That’s nice,” Jaymie mused. She was silent for a moment, letting the coolness of Dani’s rec room wash through her. “Everything I hear makes me wish I had not put off making it up with her somehow. You were her best friend; you must know about her plan to adopt her nephew and move to Toledo?”
Dani nodded, her expression troubled. “Connor meant the world to Kathy; he was everything to her. She and Kylie had a rocky relationship after Kylie’s fiancé died. I tried to tell her to let Kylie recover on her own terms, but Kathy was so worried about what Kylie’s depression was doing to Connor.”
“But Kylie was getting better, I’ve heard?”
“That’s real recent. Kathy was worried about a relapse. You have to understand, at one point Kylie was suicidal. Kathy didn’t trust her recovery.”
“Kathy also thought that Andy Walker was trying to alienate Connor from her.”
Dani’s gaze sharpened. “You knew about that?”
“I overheard her talking…actually, yelling it at Craig while they had an argument on the Fourth. Did Andy do something specific to make
her think he was trying to turn Connor against her?”
“I’m not sure. My impression, if you want the truth, is that Connor was getting good at manipulating them both in that way kids have, to get what he wanted. When he was with Kathy, he’d say he wanted Grandpa, but Kylie said when he was with Grandpa Andy, he said he wanted Aunt Kathy.”
“How did the plan to get custody of Connor and move away from Queensville come about?”
“Kathy figured if she could prove to the judge that Kylie wasn’t stable, she’d get temporary custody of Connor. Then if she could get him to Toledo, she hoped Kylie would give up and forget about it.”
“That’s not likely. Kylie really seems to love her kid.”
“Exactly what I told Kathy,” Dani said, slapping her thigh. “But she wouldn’t listen to me.”
“Well, it does seem that she was giving up on the idea, from what I saw and heard on the Fourth. She was sitting with Kylie and Andy later in the day, and it looked like she had made up her mind to stop trying to get custody of Connor.” She was not about to share the info she had from the lawyer, that Kathy had already prepared to abandon the custody suit, for some unnamed reason. There was so much confusion around her intentions that Jaymie just didn’t quite understand.
Jaymie thought back to the conversation she had overheard between Kathy and Craig, when Kathy had been complaining about Andy Walker; it had almost seemed like Kathy was testing her husband, trying to push him to some definite statement. She had said something like “If Connor is going with us,” but he had hushed her up. “I don’t know what changed her mind from earlier that day, when she still appeared intent on getting custody.”
“That I couldn’t tell you.”
The door to the rec room opened and Emma Spangler bopped in, dropped a kiss on Dani’s forehead and smiled over at Jaymie, perching on the arm of the chair Dani was sitting in, her arm looped casually over Dani’s shoulders. Despite her casual demeanor, there was an aura of tension in the set of her shoulders.
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