by Jen Carter
Toby opened the door and motioned for me to go inside. I turned and pretended that I didn’t see him.
“Hey, Holly,” I said into the phone.
“Where are you?” she hissed.
“I’m just dropping some stuff off at Shane and Toby’s. The stuff that they left at Vendemmia.”
“You’re there?”
“Uh-huh.” I tried to sound natural.
“You’ve got to get out of there. If you think something happened with them, get out of there. Now.”
“Uh-huh.” She was right—I needed to get out of there. I should have fallen down and pretend-hurt myself when I had the chance. But what now? My mind was racing, grasping for anything I could say to heed her words. Stella’s boys were sick and I need to run home to babysit? That wouldn’t fly—there was a ton of other people who could be called to do that in Otto Viti. Holly was stranded with a broken-down car and I needed to pick her up? No, there were other people in the area who could do that, too. What else?
I couldn’t think of a single feasible excuse.
“Uh-huh,” I said again.
Toby laid his hand on my shoulder and urged me toward the front door. I halfway relented but veered myself into a curve toward the wall rather than the doorway.
“What?” Holly said. “Stop uh-huh-ing. Go!”
“Um, yeah, I think I have that file on my computer,” I said stupidly. “Do you need me to email it to you right now?”
“Yes, yes, I need it emailed, sure,” Holly said. She caught on fast. “Right now. Now!”
“Okay, give me a couple minutes, and I’ll go straight home to send it to you.”
Holly was now yelling through the phone, definitely loud enough for Toby to hear. “Jill, now! I need it right now—you can’t wait a couple minutes! Go now!”
I pulled the phone from my ear and made a face.
“Okay. I’ll call you in a couple minutes.”
“No, stay on the phone with me,” Holly said. “I want—”
But I never found out what Holly wanted because Toby swept me into the apartment by my shoulders and grabbed my phone. He turned it off and pocketed it.
“I think that’s enough of that,” he said. He closed the door behind him and locked it.
I gave a little chuckle. Just keep pretending nothing’s wrong, I told myself. I shook my head and rolled my eyes. “That sister of mine. So dramatic. Last time she was down here, we made wine tasting coupons on my computer, and apparently she wants to hand them out tomorrow.” I pointed toward the door behind me. “If I don’t get them to her right away, she won’t be able to get them printed before Stella locks her out of the winery offices. You know what a control freak Stella is.” Now I was rambling. “Holly’s always coming up with crazy marketing ideas, and Stella just wants to go home to her family. You know my wacky family. There’s always something.”
I wasn’t sure that excuse made any sense. I just needed to get out of there.
“I better just go. Thanks for shutting my sister up. I tend to let her prattle on and on.” I held my hand out for my phone.
Toby shook his head.
He was shaking his head? Seriously? How much longer could I pretend he wasn’t acting so strange? Oh, I hoped that Holly had called Fitts and that he was still in Carlsbad. Either I had to get out of there, or I had to stall and hope that Fitts would magically show up. Toby was blocking the door, so getting out didn’t seem like an immediate possibility.
“Oh, you’re right. I’m being rude,” I said. “Are Angelia and Shane in the back? I ought to say hi to them before I go.”
“They’re not actually home,” Toby said. He dropped the Vendemmia bag in the entryway and pointed to the couch. “Sit.”
TWENTY-NINE
The front door was locked. Toby had my phone. No one else was there.
I shuffled slowly to the couch, my eyes darting about the room to assess my surroundings. There was a screen door leading to a patio behind the couch. Was that locked, too? Could I get around the couch to the door fast enough without Toby reaching me if I needed to?
I sat down. Toby sat in the armchair to my left. His face was hard. Could he really be the same kid I used to play soccer with in the backyard when he was ten? The same kid whose cast I drew Superman and Batman logos on when he broke his arm skateboarding in fifth grade?
I barely recognized him.
If I needed to, maybe I could throw all the magazines on the coffee table in his face and make a run for it.
Please let Fitts still be in the area. Please let Fitts still be in the area.
I went into teacher mode. Much in the same way I’d approach a kid whose grades had dropped dramatically, I said, “Toby, what’s going on? What happened?”
“What do you know?”
“About?”
“I know you’ve been snooping around, trying to find out what happened to Marlo. What do you know?”
I looked straight into Toby’s eyes. There was no emotion there. He was all business.
“I know that Janelle didn’t have anything to do with it. Neither did Alex or the sisters who run Snapdragon.”
“And?”
Dare I continue? Was honesty really the best policy?
“And I know that the shirt you wore that night was found on Vendemmia’s roof. It was splashed with red wine and had colored powder on it.”
He nodded slightly. “So you think I pushed her.”
“No. I’m not an investigator. I have no idea what happened, and if you tell me that you didn’t push her, I’ll believe you.” I paused, hesitating, stalling. Maybe I could get him talking—hopefully until Fitts got there, if he did get there. “Are you worried that someone will jump to that conclusion?”
Toby’s eyes narrowed. “I didn’t mean for anything to happen,” he said. “That night, I saw Marlo walking down the street and leaving Janelle on a bench. I knew she was going to do something bad—she was always looking for ways to hurt people. But then your friends showed up, and then you showed up, so I couldn’t do anything about it. Then I came up with the idea to pretend Shane had texted me so I could get away from you and follow her. She was always causing trouble, and I just wanted to stop her.”
“So Shane didn’t text you? You just decided to follow her?” I had heard him fine but wanted to keep him talking.
“She had opened the doors to your barn. And when I walked in after her, she was messing around with that long pole thing you use to mix the wine. I asked what she was doing, and she just laughed. She said, I’ll show that girl who’s boss. My daughter won. She’s the one marrying Shane.” Toby looked intently at me. “She was talking about you, Jill. She wanted to show you who was boss.”
I wanted to say, so what? But instead, I just nodded.
“So I tried to grab that tool thing from her, and she hit me with it. I got mad and yanked it away really hard. She fell down, but then she got up like she was fine and started digging through a big shopping bag. She kept saying she was going to prove she was in charge. I tried to get the bag from her, and it ripped apart. All kinds of stuff scattered everywhere. She picked up a container of these weird powdery balls, climbed up the side of the vat, and sat there with her legs hanging into the wine. I tried to get her to come down, but she was just crazy. She started throwing the balls in the wine, and then she threw some at me. I grabbed her arms and tried to pull her off the side, but she flailed around and ended up slipping into the wine. She screamed and yelled, and I just got madder and madder.”
I nodded, not wanting to interrupt, ignoring the urge to ask what happened next.
“I tried to help her out, but she stood there in the wine, hurling insults about my family and about you. She said my parents moved away because they couldn’t stand me and Shane. She said Angelia thought I was socially inept and would never find a girlfriend. She said you were fat and ugly. I couldn’t take it, so I told her to find her own way out of the wine vat. And I left.”
Wow. Those w
ere very childish insults, and I was surprised they upset Toby so much. I wondered if he had some underlying, pent-up feeling that made him snap during Marlo’s rant.
“So she was standing there yelling at you when you left?” I asked.
He nodded. “Jill, she was such an awful lady. So is Angelia—that whole group of them is awful. I can’t believe my brother is marrying her and dragging my family into all their drama.”
That wasn’t what Alex said. Alex thought there was good in Angelia. Who knew her better—Toby or Alex?
“The detective said there were signs of struggle. A chunk of missing hair, a broken finger—” I couldn’t finish the sentence. Toby looked away and shrugged. He wasn’t telling me the whole story. I wasn’t going to push him, though. That seemed unwise since I was locked in his house and without my phone. “You have to tell the detective what happened. You didn’t drown her. You tried to stop her in the first place. You have to explain all this.” I stood up and held my hand out to him. “C’mon, where’s my phone? We’ve got to call Fitts right now.”
Toby grabbed my forearm and pulled me down onto the couch. He was much stronger than I ever would have imagined. Whoa.
“No,” he said firmly. “That’s not what’s going to happen. That’s not how all this is going to work out.”
My heart started to beat faster again.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You tried to stop her from doing something wrong. She probably passed out from the carbon dioxide, and that was it.”
“Yeah, but after that night, I panicked. I spread rumors. I hid the evidence on the roof. I even tried faking more evidence by splattering more shirts to make it look like a bunch of people had been messing around with wine if my shirt was ever found.”
“Okay, but all that’s understandable. You’re twenty-one years old. You’d never been in a situation like this before, and it was scary. Who wouldn’t panic? You just need to come clean. I doubt any of this is serious enough to cause you real trouble.”
Was I right about that? Probably not. But what else could I say?
I stood up again, this time knowing that Toby would grab my forearm again. When he did, I used Jules’ self-defense escape. I turned my wrist so that my thumb lined up with his thumb and forefinger, and I pulled hard. My arm came free, and, letting out a blood-curdling scream, I raced for the front door. I managed to get my fingers on the deadbolt lock and twist it before I felt myself torn from the door and trapped in a bear hug with my arms folded against my chest.
“Why are you doing this?” I said, squirming against Toby’s grip. I tried to remember what Jules told us to do if we were ever in a situation like this. His grip was too tight, and I couldn’t think. “You’re not making this any better. I’m your friend, Toby. I want to help you.”
“It’s too late. You know too much.”
God Fitts, get here!
I stopped struggling. “Okay, Toby. You win. I can’t get away from you. You’re like a foot taller than me and a lot stronger, so how is this going to go? What do you want me to do?”
He tightened his grip and dragged me back toward the couch.
This was ridiculous.
“Really, kid? Stop dragging me. I already told you I’ll play your game. Let me go.”
“I don’t trust you. You just tried to run away.”
“I didn’t know how serious you were. I get it now. This is all very serious.”
He let go and pushed me halfway across the room into the armchair. I didn’t attempt to resist. Then he reached into a coffee table drawer and pulled out a length of rope.
My eyes grew as he tied me to the chair.
“Toby, are you serious? What is wrong with you?”
He didn’t respond.
“Do you really keep rope in your coffee table?”
“No,” he said. “I put it there when I saw you examining shirts on your car hood.”
Oh, forget all this I’ll-do-it-your-way stuff. He planned this? He knew he was going to tie me up? No.
I screamed. And screamed. And screamed. Until he put some of the rope in my mouth and pulled it tightly around my head.
“You’re making it worse,” he said.
No, you’re making it worse, I wanted to retort.
The rope pressed into the sides of my mouth and against my teeth. It tasted like sweat and dirt. Gross.
“What are you going to do?” I asked through the rope. The words were garbled, but I knew he could still understand.
“I haven’t decided. But I have about ten minutes to figure it out before Shane gets home.”
He finished tying me up and then disappeared into the back of the apartment. Not even two full seconds later, the front door swung open, soundlessly and swiftly.
And there stood Nico with a baseball bat. His dark hair was shaved closer to his head than I remembered from last time, and his easy, lazy smile was gone—but it was him.
Nico?
I had to be dreaming. I was hallucinating. The sweat and dirt-soaked rope in my mouth must have been poisoning me. Nico was in Italy, of course.
But if this was a dream or a hallucination, that was just fine. I’d choose a hallucination of Nico over a reality without him any day.
I nodded the best I could to the hallway leading to the back of the apartment. He’s there, I wanted to say. Back there!
Holding the bat ready to swing, Nico moved stealthily down the hallway.
“Hey!” Toby yelled.
Nico let out a grunt—the kind of grunt I had only ever heard from him while attempting a goal in soccer.
Then there was a thud.
THIRTY
Nico ran back to the living room, bat hanging by his side. He dropped to his knees and began untying me. As soon as the binding was loose enough, I wiggled out of it and threw my arms around him. This couldn’t be a dream—if I could hug him, it couldn’t be a dream. I was shaking and sputtering. Words escaped me. Nico held me tight for a long moment and then pulled me away and brushed my hair back from my face with both hands, looking into my eyes.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I nodded. “What happened?”
Nico’s eyes darted to the hallway. “I hit him with the bat. He’s out cold on the ground. He tied you up?”
I nodded again. “Why are you here? How did you get here?” So many questions swam across my mind. I didn’t know where to begin.
“It was a surprise. I told you that I couldn’t come for another week, and at first that was true. But when everything got straightened out faster than expected, I decided to surprise you. I couldn’t make it for the first day of the festival, but I wanted to be here for the second day at least. Holly and Stella just picked me up from the San Diego airport.”
“Holly and Stella?”
He nodded, grabbing me into a hug again. “They’re out in the car, waiting for the detective.”
In the car. . .the words echoed in my head. My sisters were in the car. The detective. They were waiting for him. So the wreath making was just a cover for going to the airport?
“The bat?” I asked weakly.
“Jason’s. Stella drove to the airport, and he leaves his baseball gear in the back.”
Another voice sounded from the doorway before I could gather the words for another question. “D’Angelo! What the hell happened?” Fitts was striding into the room, his hand on his waistband where, I could only assume, his gun was.
I pointed down the hallway. “It was Toby. He didn’t kill Marlo, but he was there—and he freaked out when I found out. He’s unconscious and—”
“Stay here,” Fitts said, charging to the back of the apartment.
Nico pulled me to my feet, and I shrugged the rest of the way out of the ropes. “We’ve got to go tell Holly and Stella that we’re okay.” I grabbed Nico’s hand and pulled him toward the door.
“That officer just said we had to stay here.”
“Don’t worry about hi
m. If we don’t tell my sisters that we’re okay, we’ll be in more trouble with them than we would be with the detective.”
Outside, I ran toward Stella’s black SUV parked across the street. My sisters saw me running and jumped out. They sprinted toward me, and all three of us nearly fell as we collided in a hug in the middle of the street.
Thank God for my sisters. Thank God for Nico.
Holly whacked me upside the back of my head before letting go.
“What in the world is wrong with you?” she asked. “Why would you ever go into a house with someone you suspected of murder?”
“Holly!” Stella chided. “Give her a chance to explain.” She looked at me. “What happened?”
Before I could answer, another car pulled up to the curb in front of the apartment building, across from Stella’s SUV. Shane and Angelia hopped out and looked at the three of us sisters standing in the middle of the street.
“Jill?” Shane said, a bit of confusion in his voice. “What’s going on?”
“Your dang brother!” Holly said before any answer could formulate in my head. “He—”
But Shane didn’t wait for Holly to finish. He sprinted toward the apartment, leaving Angelia standing on the curb by the passenger door, watching him go.
I was curious about what Holly had planned to say, particularly since she didn’t know what had happened with Toby in the apartment, but when I saw Angelia’s face crumple, my curiosity evaporated.
“Did he do it?” she whispered, stepping toward us.
I met Angelia just steps from the curb. My heart was breaking for her. “No, he didn’t kill your mom, but—”
“Shane suspected that Toby did it,” Angelia interrupted me, suddenly sobbing. “He heard Toby talking on the phone. We think he was talking to that obnoxious reporter. He was saying that you and Shane were conspiring, and I know that was completely untrue—”
I grabbed her into a hug. She didn’t need to finish the thought. She didn’t need to relive any of her fears about Toby—or anything else that brought more pain about her mother.