They must have mellowed since high school. I couldn’t imagine them hanging out together then, the student council president and the kid who was always in trouble. They’d both been popular, though, in their own ways. Maybe fighting had been as much a social activity for Randy as being president of various organizations had been for Oliver.
Randy and Oliver turned right. Honey got up and headed for the front door. She turned right, also.
At four, I turned the sign in the front door from OPEN to COME BACK TOMORROW and locked the front door to allow customers to leave, but no new ones could come in. Just before four thirty, the last group of regulars called out their good-byes and let themselves out. I double-locked the door.
Tom and I finished tidying. In the office, I logged on to the computer. Despite Dep’s roving around on the keyboard, I put in an order for sugar and flour. Tom came into the office, gave Dep a hug, set her down, said his good-byes, and went out to the lot in back where he always parked.
Tom wanted me to steer clear of Randy, but there were other ways of learning about him. I phoned Lois. “How are you?” I asked.
“Fine. How else would I be?”
“Concussed.”
She made a rude noise. “You saw me this morning. How much more did you think I could have deteriorated this afternoon?
“Not a whole lot.”
She laughed.
“Want to come to my place for supper? It won’t be as luxurious as what you served me last night.”
“That doesn’t matter. I’d love to.”
“I have to shop, first.” I told her to come at six thirty.
As always, Dep transformed the walk home into an exercise of pouncing on imaginary prey, and then after we arrived home, she settled in the sunroom, where she could watch for anything exciting that might come into the backyard, like more leaves.
I went out to the driveway beside the house. Alec had planned to build a garage so that potential thieves couldn’t keep track of when we weren’t home. We’d had two cars then, and both of us had driven to work most of the time. I hadn’t built the garage, but now I usually walked to work, and my car seldom left its parking spot except in rainy weather or when I needed groceries.
I loved the car. Alec had talked me into buying a sports car like the ones he always owned. Its power was wasted on me. I had no intention of bombing around town at speeds that might feel comfortable to a police officer. However, cars had always fascinated me, and if I could have afforded and maintained them I would have owned an entire stable of antique and vintage cars. I liked imagining my neighborhood when the homes were new and some residents still traveled by horse and carriage while others terrified their friends with noisy Tin Lizzies that could attain dizzying speeds approaching all of forty-five miles per hour. The speed limit in our neighborhood was now a comparatively sedate thirty-five.
When Matthias Treetor owned Taste of Fallingbrook, I had shopped there whenever I wanted special delicacies, but after Matthias died, the gourmet grocery was closed for about a year, and I’d started shopping at a supermarket on the outskirts of Fallingbrook. And then Alec had been killed, and I’d had no reason to return to Taste of Fallingbrook and no one with whom to share the surprising sorts of treats that I’d found in the shop when Matthias owned it.
It was time for me to stop avoiding everything that reminded me of losing Alec. Taste of Fallingbrook was closer than the supermarket, and might be the perfect place to quickly purchase ingredients for a dinner worthy of my foodie friend, Lois.
I parked in the lot behind the small grocery. There was only one other vehicle in the lot, a dented SUV that might have been black but looked beige under its coat of dust. The SUV was parked in front of a green door with NO ADMITTANCE hand-painted on it in white. Matthias had let customers use that door to go to and from the parking lot. I walked around to the street side of the store.
The awning stretching across the front of Taste of Fallingbrook had faded from hunter green to uneven shades of kelly green, and there was a long tear near one end of it.
I walked into the grocery. And almost walked out.
Chapter 13
Taste of Fallingbrook just wasn’t the same as when Matthias owned it.
For one thing, it smelled wrong. Not bad, exactly, but not like a squeaky-clean supermarket, and not like I remembered Taste of Fallingbrook from five years ago—a mingling of spices, baked goods, and fresh lemons. About the strongest aroma I could single out was coming from plastic bags at the checkout.
For another thing, Frederick Aggleton, the man who had bought Taste of Fallingbrook from Georgia about a year after Matthias died, was scowling as if I’d spoiled a wonderful day. Matthias had always smiled and welcomed me.
I tried sunny politeness. “Good afternoon!”
The response was gloomy. “’Noon.”
I would have thought a grocer might want to be neat and clean. Aggleton’s salt-and-pepper hair looked greasy, like it hadn’t been washed recently. He wore gray polyester trousers and a rumpled plaid shirt. His shoes were scuffed. His apron had probably originally been hunter green like the awning, but now it was faded and stained, and threads were escaping from the embroidered Taste of Fallingbrook logo. Didn’t he care how he presented himself, or his store?
As far as I could tell, I was the only customer, which I found disconcerting at five forty-five on a Wednesday evening.
I picked up a basket and headed toward the back. I was hoping to find freshly prepared shish kebabs that I could quickly marinate and barbecue, like the ones that Matthias used to sell. And if Taste of Fallingbrook also carried a selection of salads—Matthias and his employees had made theirs—the only other stop I’d have to make would be at Cookies and Bakies for dessert.
There were no shish kebabs.
The “steaks” looked like gristle marbled with fat. I picked up a package of two boneless, skinless chicken breasts. Remembering Lois feeding Brent the night before, I put a second package in my basket. Maybe Misty would show up. Or Samantha.
The deli counter was nearly empty. Except for a few containers of limp-looking coleslaw, there were no salads. Fortunately, I found some crisp romaine and a tin of anchovies.
I took my purchases to the cash register.
Barely speaking, Aggleton ran them past the bar code reader. “New in town?” he finally asked me.
“No.”
“Haven’t seen you in here before.”
“No.” Now I was the nearly silent one.
“You should come in more often.”
“Yes.”
“Not enough people know about this store.”
“Oh?”
“I got a bum deal when I bought it. From the mother of the previous owner. He was dead.”
I made a noise sort of like Brent’s noncommittal grunts.
“His mother said this place had lots of customers. Even had financial records to prove it, but they musta been whadya call it. Forged. No one comes in here.” He pounded on a box with a see-through top. “Look at these donuts. Hard as rocks. People coulda bought ’em fresh, but they go to that fancy-schmancy place that caters to cops while my donuts go stale. It’s not like I don’t sell coffee, too.” He waved toward a carafe containing a murky dark brown liquid that smelled like it had been sitting undisturbed on its hot plate for about a week. “They pay twice as much for coffee and donuts as they’d pay here.”
And our coffee and donuts have to be worth ten times as much. I didn’t say it.
His hand hovered over the cash register. “You’ll come back and shop here again, won’t you?” The request was plaintive. “I have a store full of really good things. Tell your friends.”
“Okay.”
“I can’t keep running this place at a loss, you know. No one could.”
“Is it that bad?”
He pinched his thumb and forefinger together and shoved them almost into my face. “I’m this close to bankruptcy. And I got a wife and kid to feed.”
>
I backed away. “That’s sad.” Maybe “mad” would describe his mood better. His face was red and he was breathing heavily.
“It’s a crime, is what it is.”
So is homicide. Wondering if his anger at Georgia had boiled over into a murderous rage, I paid for my purchases, put them into colorful cloth bags that Georgia had made for me, and went outside. A scrap of torn awning flapped in the breeze.
I hadn’t been sincere when I promised to shop at Taste of Fallingbrook again, but maybe I needed to reconsider. Learning more about this angry man could be useful.
Leave it to the police, Emily. I could almost hear Alec saying it, with Brent, Misty, and Tom backing him up.
However, I had very good reasons for wanting to keep my ears and eyes open for clues about Georgia’s killer.
Alec had not solved Georgia’s son’s murder. No one would say that I was duty bound to carry on my late husband’s work, but I wasn’t sure I could help trying.
And perhaps more important, a murderer was very likely in or around Fallingbrook, and none of us were safe until he was caught.
When I was talking to Honey Bellaire earlier that afternoon, I’d wondered if she could have murdered Matthias and Georgia. Honey had been angry at them both, but Frederick Aggleton seemed even angrier. The thought that he could be a murderer did not make me any fonder of the idea of buying food from him, but it shouldn’t hurt to snoop around his store.
Unlike Taste of Fallingbrook, Cookies and Bakies tempted me to linger, inhaling the scents and admiring the colorful cookies and bars. I finally chose lemon cookies shaped like birch leaves and frosted in lemon icing.
At home, I checked the chicken breasts I’d bought. They were fresh. I marinated them in olive oil, garlic, ginger, and the zest and juice of two limes while I washed and cut the romaine. I assembled Caesar salad except for the dressing, Parmesan, anchovies, and the croutons I’d made and stored in the freezer.
The doorbell rang.
Lois looked adorably girlish in a buttoned-up fisherman’s cardigan, tight blue jeans, and espadrilles. Her jaw dropped when she stepped into my cottage. “This is how I imagine redecorating my living room!”
I picked Dep up and cuddled her. “No one says you can’t.” If Lois decorated in the scarlet and royal blue that I’d used, though, she might want to hang something besides that ferocious orange sky above her couch. That painting wouldn’t go with the Victorian reds I’d chosen. Besides, could anyone truly relax in a room dominated by that disturbing painting? However, her tranquil river scene wasn’t very peace inducing, either, considering what must have happened in that valley shortly before she snapped the pictures of it.
Lois admired my dining room and my sleek, modern kitchen, too.
“Yours is perfect,” I told her.
“I’m not doing a thing with it as long as those aqua appliances continue working. Then, when I need replacements, I’ll have them repainted aqua—Randy knows of an auto body shop that repaints things like major appliances and patio furniture. And then maybe I’ll update my kitchen, but it will still have to go with the appliances, even though they’re not Victorian.”
Outside, we sipped Chardonnay while standing over the barbecue. The chicken smelled delicious. Dep twined around our legs.
“Four chicken breasts?” Lois asked. “Who else are you expecting?”
“I never know when Misty or my EMT friend Samantha will show up. And if they don’t, we can have seconds or I’ll have leftovers. Do you like anchovies, or should I leave them off the Caesar salad?”
“I love them. We’ll cut back on salt tomorrow.” Lois’s grin was diabolical.
It was warm enough to eat outside at the table on the flagstone patio underneath my sturdy timber pergola.
We finished most of the bottle of wine while we ate and chatted about everything besides Georgia, Matthias, and violence. Dep stayed near us, even though the tunnel to Lois’s yard was still open and Lois and I refused to give her anchovies. We were willing to compromise our own health with a pinch or two of salt, but we drew the line at possibly harming our favorite kitty.
The sun hadn’t set, but after my house began shading us, the evening cooled rapidly. We went inside to the living room for lemon cookies and liqueurs. “We’ll cut back on alcohol and sugar tomorrow, too,” Lois said.
She hadn’t mentioned Randy all evening. I enjoyed Lois’s company, but I had hoped to learn more about Randy over dinner. As casually as I could, I asked, “Did you look for those digital photo files for Brent?” Maybe she’d already given them to him.
“I forgot!” She pulled a thumb drive out of her pocket. “I unpacked some boxes, and I think this drive might hold my photos from five years ago.”
“Let’s go upstairs and load it on my computer.”
Dep ran past us and then stood at the top of the stairs, meowing down at us. I was certain she’d have led us the rest of the way if she’d known exactly where we were going. I guided Lois into the front bedroom. Dep whisked in ahead of us, jumped onto the couch, sat down, thrust one back leg almost straight up, held on to it with both front paws, and licked it vigorously.
The room served as both an office and a guest bedroom. The couch converted to a double bed, and its matching upholstered chair was comfy for reading. Guests would not be able to hang much in the closet, however. Closets in Victorian houses tended to be small, which didn’t make sense considering the bulk and length of Victorian gowns. I kept my out-of-season clothes in this one. Like most of the other rooms in the house, the walls in my guest room were painted white. Unlike the walls in Lois’s front bedroom, mine were almost totally devoid of art, mostly because I hadn’t gotten around to choosing much.
Lois rubbed her toes in the soft nap of the blue and cream rug. “Another gorgeous rug.” It was patterned like an oriental rug, but that was as close as it got to the real thing. Still, it was pretty, and went well with the dark blue couch and chair. Dep toppled over on her side, acted like she’d done it on purpose, jumped down to the floor and then up to the desk. From there, it was only a short hop to the sill of the dormer window. Switching her tail back and forth, she gazed into the branches of the maple tree in the front yard.
I turned on the computer, inserted Lois’s thumb drive, and pulled out the desk chair.
Lois remained standing. “Where will you sit?”
I tugged the upholstered chair to the desk. “Here. I’d give you this chair, but it’s kind of low.”
She glanced down at me as I sank into the chair and peered over the keyboard to the monitor. “For you, too, but thank you. Being able to see the pictures might help.” She sat in the desk chair.
Sure enough, the drive she’d brought contained photo files, hundreds of them. They weren’t organized by date, so we couldn’t zero in on August five years ago. Eventually, we found a folder labeled LAKES AND RIVERS, with a subfolder marked FALLINGBROOK RIVER.
Lois was practically bouncing up and down in that desk chair. “That’s it! I remember now. Maybe we can prove that Randy wasn’t driving that car, that it wasn’t Randy’s car, and that I was remembering it wrong.”
Right, even though the initial “remembering” was only about ten days after she saw the car. . . .
The first photo in the group was very similar to her painting. Down in the left corner, between trees, we could see the dark splotch that Brent had asked about. Could it have been a black car? We enlarged the photo on the screen until it blurred. A few pixels were lighter, possibly a gleam off metal. Or a brighter spot among the shadows.
We clicked on the next picture. It was almost the same.
In the next one, Lois had turned to her right. She’d snapped many pictures from that angle, and then she must have heard the car and turned to her left again.
There it was. A black car was heading toward her, with the sun reflecting off the windshield, dust billowing around it, and a front license plate hidden by tall grasses. I clicked the next picture. It showe
d the dirt track, empty except for the tan-tinged haze of dust settling after the car passed.
Lois inched the desk chair closer to the computer. “Apparently, I remembered correctly about taking only one photo of that car.”
“Does it look like the one Randy was driving back then?”
“Maybe. He was always trading one old thing for another. He often had mismatched fenders and panels, and the section over the driver’s side front wheel looks lighter. It seems to me that it was actually white, like I told Brent last night. But I’m sure Randy wasn’t the only person in Fallingbrook who was driving a patched-up but not repainted car at the time.”
“Probably not. I don’t think I saw Randy after he graduated from Fallingbrook High, so I have no idea what car he was driving five years ago.”
“I do. He came to say good-bye before he left for Wyoming, and I remember telling him that he should have had that fender painted black before he moved to a new community. Just having fun, you know? Not really criticizing.”
“How’d he take it?’
“Fine. We’ve always teased each other. He laughed at me for owning a seven-passenger minivan even though I lived alone.”
“Did he know that you sometimes traded vehicles with Georgia?”
“Sure. He often borrowed my van, and offered to let me drive whatever rattletrap he owned at the time. Ha. I wasn’t about to go around in something held together with wires and duct tape. It would break down in the middle of nowhere, and then where would I be? But he said his cars were always in good mechanical condition and safe to drive. They just wouldn’t win any beauty prizes. He’s a good kid, with a sense of humor. You’ll help me, won’t you, Emily?”
“Help you what?”
“Figure out who the murderer was. You used to work at 911, your husband was a detective, your father-in-law was our police chief, you know Detective Brent, and one of your best friends is a policewoman. You must know something about solving crimes.”
“Not enough.” And Alec, Tom, Brent, and Misty would tell me to stay out of criminal investigations....
Survival of the Fritters Page 10