by Becky Durfee
“Hey, Jenny.”
“Hi, Greg.” An awkward silence ensued. Jenny realized she’d made the phone call, so it was up to her to initiate the conversation. However, she wasn’t sure what to say. “Um…I was hoping we could talk. Is now a good time?”
“Sure.” She could tell he was repositioning himself on the other end of the line.
“I’ve been doing some thinking,” Jenny said, the butterflies in her stomach threatening to jump out of her body. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to get back together.”
Shit, she thought. I said ‘I don’t think.’ She wasn’t supposed to use such wishy-washy terms.
“And why do you say that?”
“Because you deserve better,” Jenny replied.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean you deserve someone who is going to be crazy about you. Somebody who wants to be with you. Unfortunately, that person isn’t me.”
“But I told you,” Greg argued, “I’m willing to change. I can become the person you want to be with.”
Jenny covered her face with her hands. “I don’t think you can.”
Dammit. She did it again.
“How can you say that when you haven’t even given me a chance?”
“Because I know how I feel. I think…no, I know I have too much resentment built up for me to ever go back to loving you again.”
“You say that now,” he posed, “but you may change your mind about that. I know I haven’t treated you right, but things will be different in the future. Eventually, your resentment will subside once you see how much better our relationship is.”
“You underestimate my resentment,” Jenny declared. “Besides, you say that you’ll be different in the future; I’ll have you know that the person I am now is very different than the person you met and agreed to marry. You may not like who I am now.”
“You’ve already told me that. And I’ve already told you that I’m okay with you being a psychic.”
“It’s not just about me being a psychic. It’s about me mattering. It’s about me expressing my opinion and having it be valued. It’s about me being heard, which honestly isn’t even happening right now.”
“I’m hearing you,” Greg said. “I’m hearing you loud and clear. I’m just disagreeing with you.”
“And I suppose you think you’re right and I’m wrong.”
“In this case that’s true.”
Jenny rolled her eyes.
Greg continued. “I’m telling you, Jenny. I’ve changed.”
“Okay,” Jenny began, trying to remain calm. “Let me see if I understand this. We’re having a disagreement. We each have our own opinion of how the future should look. And you’re telling me that we should be doing things your way because you are positive you’re right.”
“That’s correct,” Greg confirmed.
“So then how is it different? My biggest complaint in the marriage was that you never respected my opinion and you always insisted on doing things your way. You’re sitting her telling me you’ve changed, but you’re acting the same way you always have.”
“You’re not being fair,” Greg replied. “You’re not even giving me the chance to show you how much I’ve changed.”
“If you really have changed,” Jenny posed, “you’d be willing to let me go if that’s what makes me happy. But apparently this isn’t about me being happy. It’s about you being happy.” She swallowed as she absorbed her own words. “Just as it’s always been.”
“It’s about us being happy. Together. As a couple. Just like you vowed it would be.”
Jenny scratched her head. “Just so you know, laying a guilt trip on me does not make you more attractive to me.”
“I’m not laying a guilt trip on you. I’m just speaking the truth.”
Jenny didn’t respond. As far as she was concerned, there were no words.
“I’d like to spend Christmas with you,” Greg continued.
“I’m not sure I’ll be back in Georgia by then,” Jenny replied, regretting those words as soon as they came out of her mouth. That made it sound like she would otherwise be interested.
“You’re still away?”
“Yes,” Jenny replied. “I’m working on a case. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone. It could be a long time.” Jenny hoped that sounded like an unappealing quality in a wife.
“Well, then we can celebrate when you get back. I got you a present.”
Great. Guilt and bribery in the same conversation. “I really don’t think that’s a good idea.” Jenny cursed under her breath; she was bad at being definitive. “I don’t want you to give me a present.”
“Well, I’m giving it to you anyway. And you don’t have to give me anything in return. This is just me showing you how much I value you.”
Jenny found his comment to be horribly ironic; despite her request not to do so, he insisted on giving her a present to show how much he valued her opinion. Sensing a natural closing point in the conversation, however, she was willing to let it slide so she could get off the phone quickly. No sense in prolonging an unproductive conversation.
“We’ll talk about it later,” Jenny said. “Right now I have to get back to work on the case.” That was a lie.
“Think about what I’ve said, Jenny. If you take the time to really think about it, I’m sure you’ll see things my way.”
She rubbed her eyes. “I want you to think about what I’ve said, too, Greg. And I’m sure—if you really think about it—you’ll still see things your way.”
Elijah came home less cheerful than Jenny had expected. “What’s wrong?” she posed as soon as he walked in the door.
Before answering, Elijah set down his bag and kicked off his shoes. “I did a little more poking around this afternoon,” he replied. “And I found a very interesting little tidbit.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that?”
“It seems nine months before Lena’s murder, Phillip’s neighbor reported a stolen gun—the same caliber as the one used to kill Lena.”
Jenny felt her blood turn to ice. “And you think maybe Phillip stole it?”
“It’s very possible.” Elijah plopped himself down in a chair. “And that would mean Phillip had the car, he had the weapon, he had the knowledge of her whereabouts, and his paranoid schizophrenia provides the motive. I imagine it would have spooked him quite a bit to see a person being dropped off in front of his house. If regular, ordinary restaurant patrons can be evil FBI agents in his head, you can imagine what he thought about a stranger arriving at his house in the middle of the night. He must have been positive she was after him somehow.”
Jenny sat down on the end of the couch closest to Elijah, sharing in the sadness of the latest discovery. She bowed her head and looked at him out of the corner of her eye as she posed, “This isn’t how you wanted this to turn out, is it?”
He shook his head without an immediate response. Rubbing his hand over the back of his neck he declared, “I always take great satisfaction in putting monsters behind bars. They’re usually sick bastards who get off on watching someone else’s pain and suffering, or vengeful assholes who have no regard for human life. But this…” He looked over at Jenny. “This is different. This is a mentally ill kid. If he did this—and it’s looking more and more like he did—there will be very little satisfaction in putting him away. It will just make a sad case even sadder.”
“Well, is there a chance he can go to a hospital instead of jail? Could he be found criminally insane?”
Elijah shrugged his shoulders. “It’s possible, I guess.”
Searching for something to cheer Elijah up, Jenny recalled something from her vision. “But the way I remember it, the passenger did the shooting. There were two people. Even if Phillip did this, I don’t think he acted alone.”
He leaned back in his chair, looking up at the ceiling, interlacing his fingers over his stomach. He didn’t reply, so Jenny continued.
“Do you think L
arry Goldberg was his partner in crime?” Jenny personally didn’t, but she wanted to get Elijah out of his funk.
“I’m not sure. I don’t have enough evidence to tie Larry to the crime at this point.”
If I could just touch Larry, then I’d know, Jenny thought. Even if that wouldn’t provide evidence that would stand up in a court of law, it would offer a definitive answer, at least in her mind. Perhaps she’d need to sneak in a contact when she went to the store the next day whether Elijah liked it or not.
Snapping back into the moment, Jenny noted that Elijah’s funk was fully intact. In a tone that implied she didn’t notice his depressed mood, she added, “If Larry wasn’t his accomplice, who do you think it would be?”
He never took his eyes off the ceiling. “I have no idea.”
Jenny pursed her lips as a thought she didn’t like crossed her mind. If Elijah had slipped into this mood with any kind of regularity during his marriage, she understood why his wife would have wanted to leave. As good of a father as he was, if he came home from work and sulked like this, he would have been a very difficult person to live with. Like a vacuum, he sucked the positivity right out of a room.
Unsure of what else she could say to lighten the mood, Jenny remained quiet. It was indeed looking more and more like Phillip Grandby was the perpetrator, or at least an accomplice. But if Larry didn’t help him, who did? And who pulled the trigger? It appears Phillip owned the gray car, so wouldn’t he have been driving? That only seemed logical. But who could have been working with him?
Jenny decided that at this point she was only spinning her wheels. She’d need to go to the store where Larry and Phillip worked so she could get a feel for their involvement. Until then, she’d be dealing only with guesswork.
Chapter 17
As Jenny approached the store’s parking lot, she could hear Lena begin to mumble softly between her ears. A peculiar blend of excitement and disappointment surged through her body; somehow she had hoped she’d find Larry and Phillip to be innocent. However, the truth needed to be told, no matter how disheartening it was.
She seemed to be narrowing in on that truth.
Jenny saw Pam standing on the sidewalk by the entrance. “Well that was easy,” Jenny remarked to herself, addressing her own concern that Pam might be difficult to find in a crowded pre-holiday parking lot. She found a parking spot near the back and walked over to where Pam was standing. “Been waiting long?”
“Nah, just a few minutes,” Pam said. “But here’s a shocker…I had to go to the bathroom, so I have already been in there. Both Larry and Phillip are working today. Is Lena saying anything to you?”
With a nod Jenny replied, “Yeah, she’s definitely trying to tell me something. I guess we should go in and see if we can figure out which one she’s upset about.”
“If not both,” Pam surmised.
That would have made Jenny even sadder; Larry also seemed like a decent man. Stifling a sigh she said, “If not both.”
Pam remained chipper as she grabbed a shopping cart. “I’ve brought a list,” she said, waving a paper in the air. “That will make us look less suspicious as we wander around in there. Not only that, but it’s stuff I really need. I’m killing two birds with one stone.”
Jenny forced a smile. Somehow she couldn’t share in the joy of the moment.
The two ladies walked into the store, Jenny’s head full of chatter. “When I was in here before,” Pam went on, “Larry was circulating around the front of the store and Phillip was stocking cans in the soup aisle. Larry could be anywhere by now, but I bet Phillip is still in the soup aisle. He had a lot of cans to stock, and he wasn’t working very fast. It’s a good thing he works for his friend—if he worked for anyone else, I bet he would have been fired by now moving at that pace.”
Between the rumblings in her own head and the constant clatter permeating from Pam, Jenny was having a hard time focusing on anything. She felt almost as if she was having an out-of-body experience at a time when she desperately wanted to be attentive and alert. With a shake of her head she tried to restore some semblance of control, although she wasn’t sure how successful that attempt was.
Pam’s seemingly never-ending babble continued. “We can go ahead and skip the produce section; I don’t have anything perishable on my list. We’re too far from home for that. I can stop on my way home and pick up anything…”
“Is that Larry?” Jenny interrupted, gesturing to a man in a shirt and tie walking quickly toward a register.
Pam looked over her shoulder, not very subtly, and said, “Yup. That’s him.”
Jenny watched him with only her eyes, noting his friendly smile for the customer as he turned a key on the register and punched in some numbers. He patted the back of the young cashier that had clearly made a mistake, promptly leaving so he could address his next issue. Jenny hardly felt like she was looking at a murderer, and Lena’s lack of escalation backed up that theory.
Leaning in closer and speaking in a loud whisper, Pam asked, “Is Lena telling you anything?”
“Nothing that seems to indicate Larry is our guy. She’s been saying something since I got here, and that hasn’t changed.”
“Maybe you’ll have better luck with Phillip.”
Despite her reluctance to equate Phillip’s guilt with luck, Jenny posed, “So…do you want to go buy some soup?”
“It’s on my list,” Pam said, pointing to the piece of paper in her hand.
The two women rounded the corner of the soup aisle, and sure enough there stood Phillip at the other end, placing cans one at a time on the shelves. When he glanced over toward Jenny and Pam, his posture immediately stiffened and he looked painfully like a deer in headlights.
Jenny glanced away, pretending she was looking at an item on a shelf. “Did you see that?” she whispered through closed teeth.
“I sure did,” Pam replied as she pulled a box of stuffing from the shelf and busied herself reading the label.
“I wonder what that was about,” Jenny noted, trying to act naturally.
Pam pointed to the side of the box, showing it to Jenny, whispering, “I don’t know. Look at him again and see if he’s still looking at us.”
Jenny shifted her eyes toward Phillip, who was indeed fixated on the two women. She slowly turned her attention to another box, removing it from the shelf. “He’s staring at us.”
Pam, whose back was toward Phillip, remarked, “Well, if you make eye contact with him again, smile at him. Show him we’re friendly.”
“Okay,” Jenny said, putting the box into her cart. “Let’s get a little closer.”
Jenny and Pam moved nonchalantly down the aisle until Pam stopped about mid-way down, directing her attention to a product on the shelf. “Ooh, this looks good. Have you ever tried this?” Pam asked loudly enough for Phillip to hear.
“No, I haven’t, but it does look good,” Jenny remarked with equal volume. She glanced up at Phillip, who was still staring. She did as Pam advised and smiled at him, only for Phillip to look more panic-stricken in return.
“I think we’re freaking him out,” Jenny noted. “Maybe we should leave this aisle.”
“Have you gotten anything from Lena?”
Jenny had been so freaked out by her own situation she’d become oblivious to Lena’s voice. She shook her head and whispered, “Nothing noteworthy. She’s still the same.”
“Alright. Maybe we can come back here before we leave,” Pam suggested. She turned the cart around and headed out of the aisle the direction they came.
As they moved toward the front of the store, Jenny got a clear shot of Larry buzzing around the registers. Fully aware of Elijah’s concerns but choosing to ignore them, Jenny said to Pam, “I’ll be right back.” She marched with purpose over to Larry, splaying a big smile and posing, “Are you the store manager?”
Considering most of his time was spent dealing with complaints, he seemed pleasantly surprised that someone was addressing him with
a smile. “That’s me. Larry Goldberg. What can I do for you today?”
“Well, I just wanted to tell you what a wonderful job you and your crew are doing. I’m from out of state, and I am very impressed with how clean the store is, how friendly the staff seems to be, and how well organized everything is.”
“Well that’s great to hear,” Larry replied with a grin. “I’m glad you like it.”
“What’s not to like?” Jenny posed, gesturing to the store around her. “It looks fabulous. But listen, I don’t want to keep you; I know it’s a busy time of year for you. I just wanted to share my thoughts.”
“Well thank you,” Larry replied. “I really appreciate it.”
Jenny extended her hand, and Larry shook it.
After bidding Larry goodbye, Jenny rejoined Pam at the shopping cart which had been rolled into the next aisle. “What was that about?” Pam posed.
“I just wanted to see if Larry was involved,” Jenny confessed. “And now I know.”
“So was he?” Pam asked.
Before Jenny could answer, she looked up to notice that Phillip had also moved over to the next aisle and was staring at them. “Oh my God,” Jenny whispered. “There he is again.”
Pam didn’t turn to see for herself; she simply whispered, “Smile at him, remember? Be friendly.”
Heeding her advice, Jenny smiled graciously at Phillip, who once again looked terrified by the attention. “I have to admit he’s starting to scare me,” Jenny announced. Before she even finished her sentence, Phillip began walking toward them, his eyes fixated on Jenny.
Jenny’s feet felt as if they were glued to the floor. She wanted to run, but she seemed unable to move. Every nerve in her body tingled, and for a moment she couldn’t even manage to breathe.
Phillip walked right up to the ladies, still looking intently at Jenny. He opened his mouth, but no words came out. He closed his mouth again and suddenly turned back around, walking away as he muttered under his breath.
Jenny finally exhaled, relaxing her shoulders and hanging her head.