Dead Men Don't Get the Munchies

by Miranda Bliss

  Kegan was a little late, and the brunch crowd was gone. I knew that before the dinner hour, things would be quiet at the restaurant, so while I waited for him, I took the opportunity to finish up some paperwork. When he still hadn’t shown up, I went out to the bar for an iced tea. Monsieur Lavoie was sitting at a table near the window. I waved to him before I went over to the bar where Jim was working. I was tempted to ask him about Fi and the girls. Since there were smudges of sleeplessness under Jim’s eyes, and his cheeks were pale, I played like a detective and figured things out for myself. Rather than bring up what I knew was a touchy subject and remind him of his misery, I made sure my smile was sunny.

  “What’s up? It feels like we haven’t talked in days.”

  “That’s because we haven’t.” Jim had a rag in one hand, and he wiped down the bar, even though it didn’t look like it needed it. “You’ve been busy.”

  I added sweetener to my tea and sipped it. “No busier than usual.”

  “But busy, nonetheless. Busy detecting.”

  As I may have mentioned before, the subject of my sleuthing had been a sore spot in our relationship. That’s why I’d been aboveboard about every phase of this investigation. (Well, except for the part about going to Brad’s home. Discretion, as they say, is the better part of valor, and I figured it was smart to keep the details of that little adventure to myself. There was no use making Jim a part of our little conspiracy. If the question came up—like from Tyler—I knew Jim would lie to protect me. Since I couldn’t ask him to do that, it was better to say nothing at all.)

  I took another sip of tea. “I’ve been detecting, all right. But I haven’t found out a thing.”

  “Still, you keep trying.”

  “I have to. If Tyler thinks Eve had anything to do with Brad’s murder—”

  “I understand that.” Jim reached across the bar and squeezed my hand. Since he’d just been cleaning the bar, his hand was damp and cold. “It’s just that…” He pulled his hand away and turned around, and I saw his shoulders rise and fall. I guess I know Jim well enough to know what that meant. He was making up his mind about something, something important. When he turned back to me, his shoulders were rock steady, his chin was firm. He looked me in the eye. Have I mentioned that his are the most incredible shade of hazel? Caught in their tractor beam, I looked deep into his eyes.

  “Have I ever told you that you are…” Jim’s voice was hesitant, but only for a second. He looked past me and over my shoulder and whatever he saw there, it seemed to give him encouragement. When he looked at me again, his voice was as unwavering as his gaze. “You are light and sunshine,” he said. “Flowers in the spring. A soft breeze and a…a warm fire.”

  This was, to say the least, a remarkably romantic thing to hear from a man who was always warm and wonderful but who had never been known to be the hearts-and-flowers type. I was flattered. And bewildered. My natural reaction was a spontaneous, “Huh?”

  Jim was not deterred. He went right on. “You’re the stars in my night sky,” he said and he grabbed both my hands and held them in his. “You’re the warm splash of sunlight in a garden. You’re—”

  “Sorry I’m late! The cherry blossoms are blooming, and traffic is a bear!”

  I had been so busy listening to Jim sound like a greeting card, I hadn’t heard the front door of Bellywasher’s open and close. Kegan called his greeting from the door and closed in on us.

  “Hey, what are you guys up to?” he asked.

  “Nothing now.” Jim grumbled below his breath. This was as much not like him as poetry, and it caught me so off guard, when he turned away, I naturally got defensive.

  “Kegan and I have an appointment,” I said.

  “Of course you do.” Jim walked into the kitchen, and I sat back, as confused now as I had been when he was spouting what sounded like country song lyrics.

  Kegan plunked down on the barstool next to mine. “You two fighting?”

  “I didn’t think so.” My answer was knee-jerk. Then I remembered the poetry. “Not fighting,” I said. I was sure of it. I think. “Just…” I shrugged.

  Apparently that was enough of an explanation for Kegan. He jumped off the stool. “Ready to go?” he asked.

  I was, and I followed him to the door.

  I was ready to talk to Gillian Gleeson and ready to get this investigation off dead center.

  I was ready to clear Eve’s name, because maybe once I’d done that…

  Just before I walked out the door, I glanced back toward the kitchen. I saw Jim looking out the window toward me.

  I waved. He didn’t wave back. I stepped out into the sunny Virginia afternoon with one thought on my mind: maybe once I had this case cleared up, I could get my life back on an even keel.

  Right where it belonged.

  Thirteen

  WHEN GILLIAN GLEESON TOLD ME TO STOP BY, SHE failed to mention that she lived smack in the middle of Virginia horse country and in an elegant home as big as my apartment building. Did I say home? The place was an antebellum plantation mansion, pure and simple, from the white pillars along the front porch (or was it called a portico on a house like that?) to the acres of rolling, beautifully tended land around it. When I rang the bell, I expected a uniformed and gloved butler to answer the door.

  But nobody did.

  Kegan and I waited for what seemed a polite amount of time. Then I rang again.

  When we got the same response, Kegan’s shoulders drooped. Poor kid. He was so excited about investigating. He was learning the hard way that a lot of a private investigator’s time is spent just watching. And waiting.

  “She’s not home.” His words echoed exactly the same, disheartening thing I was thinking. “So what do real detectives do when something like this happens, Annie? Do we break in?”

  I guess my wide-eyed look of horror told him that, well-intentioned or not, his question was out of the question. That’s why he stammered, “Well…I just…I mean, we came all the way out here. And it’s important for us to talk to Gillian. I mean, she is…she is a suspect, right?”

  “We don’t know that. We don’t know anything about her. We won’t. Not until we have a chance to talk to her.” I’d brought my cell phone with me and had Gillian’s number programmed in. (Another lesson for Kegan: a detective is always prepared, especially a detective who, in her real life, as a bank teller/restaurant business manager plans for every contingency, envisions every possibility, and looks—a dozen or more times—before she ever even thinks about leaping.) I called Gillian. And got no answer.

  This time, it was my shoulders that drooped.

  Thinking about the best way to handle things, I looked around. There was a window to the left of the front door, and I pressed my nose to the glass. I was peering into a study, and I saw a huge mahogany desk, walls of bookcases, and a plush carpet. What I didn’t see were any signs of life. Baffled, I drummed my fingers against the sill.

  “We could come back another time.”

  Kegan’s words were reasonable, but I wasn’t ready to throw in the towel. I was anxious to talk to Gillian and not so anxious to spend the gas money to get out to the country again. I was also curious. Why would Gillian invite me to her home, then not be there to talk to me?

  Unless she had something to hide.

  My imagination—and my suspicions—fueled by the thought, I decided right then and there that I wasn’t going to give up.

  “Come on,” I told Kegan, and I headed around to the back of the house.

  Of course, being a sensible person, this sounded like a sensible plan to me. On the off chance that Gillian was somewhere where she’d heard neither the doorbell or her phone, I’d look around in the hopes of finding her. But being sensible, I had no concept of how big grand old plantation homes can be. By the time we were nearing the place where we could head to the right and come up behind the house, we were threading our way through magnolia trees covered with flowers and a maze of rhododendrons that looked as
if they’d be bursting with spectacular blooms in just a few more weeks, and I was out of breath.

  I’d like to think that’s why I gasped when I finally rounded the corner and nearly slammed into a tall woman wearing dirty jeans and a ratty sweatshirt.

  She was uncommonly pretty, with big eyes, long lashes, and cheekbones that would have made a supermodel envious. Yeah, I recognized her, all right. Even though in that picture that hung in Brad’s office, her eyes weren’t swollen, her face wasn’t drawn, and there wasn’t a gray pallor to her skin.

  Gillian Gleeson jumped back and pressed a hand to her heart.

  And me? Sensible person that I am, I apologized as quickly as I could. “I’m so sorry to have startled you. When you didn’t answer your doorbell…”

  Gillian stared blankly for a moment, then the light dawned. She pulled out the earbuds attached to her iPod and gave me a weak, embarrassed smile. “I do apologize,” she said. I’ve lived in Virginia all my life, and I’m used to what Yankees call our accent. But Gillian’s was different. Her vowels were long and drawn out, her enunciation was perfect. Every word dripped culture. Oh yeah, and old money. “It seems as if I lost track of the time. You’re the one who called. About…about Brad.”

  “That’s right, Annie Capshaw.” I stuck out my hand, and while I was at it, I introduced Kegan.

  Gillian pulled off her gardening gloves and shook both our hands. “I get so wrapped up when I’m out here gardening. I just love puttering in the soil, and after all that’s happened…” Her voice drifted along with her gaze, and I looked around, too. The garden was bright with yellow and white daffodils and hyacinths in shades of pink and purple that made the air sweet and heavy. It was a perfectly manicured space, with the flower beds laid out precisely amid a labyrinth of stone paths and gurgling fountains.

  No big surprise, the orderliness appealed to me. But it was the sheer beauty of the garden that caused me to gasp, “It’s gorgeous.” I wasn’t trying to ingratiate myself to Gillian. For all I knew, she was a murderer. But heck, I couldn’t help but be impressed. “I live in an apartment and don’t have a garden to work in, but if I did…” Another look around, and I was convinced. “I’d sure want it to look like this.”

  I could tell she was proud of her work, because her eyes gleamed, even if her smile wasn’t convincing. “It takes a great deal of time and hard work,” she explained. “Of course, now that it’s the only thing I have to do…” Her eyes filled with tears, and she turned away.

  Kegan and I exchanged puzzled looks, but the instant it looked like he might say something to try to soothe the awkward moment, I sushed him, one finger to my lips. Little did he know he’d just stepped into another lesson in the fine art of detecting: sometimes it’s best not to speak, because sometimes, in those quiet moments, a suspect starts talking.

  Lucky for us, that’s exactly what happened.

  Gillian tossed her gloves down on a nearby bench and invited us inside for a drink. She led us through French doors and into a spacious sunroom furnished with white wicker furniture. “I’ve been so distracted lately,” she said on the end of a sigh. “But then, I’m sure you understand. When you called, you told me that you knew Brad.”

  “Yes. He was in my cooking class.” All right, so it wasn’t exactly my cooking class. It was easier to say it was than to try explain that I was really just Jim’s sometime assistant who was really the business manager who was really a bank teller who was really—

  I snapped myself out of it before I got too carried away. “Maybe Brad mentioned the class? It’s at Bellywasher’s, a restaurant in Alexandria.”

  “Cooking class!” I guess Gillian felt about cooking the way I feel about cooking; a single tear glided down her cheek. There was a box of tissues on the coffee table between the couch where Kegan and I sat down and the chair she took for herself. She plucked out a tissue and dabbed her eyes. When she laughed, her voice was watery. “Did he confess?” she asked, and when I gave her a blank look, she shook her head. “No, I didn’t think so. That was just like Brad. If you knew him at all, you must realize that. He didn’t have the slightest interest in learning how to cook.”

  That explained a lot. At least a lot about Brad’s attitude in class. Rather than point that out, I made myself comfortable against the lavish blue and yellow floral cushions. Since I didn’t know where the conversation was headed, I toed the line between saying too much and hoping to draw Gillian into saying more. I tucked my hand down between the cushion I was sitting on and the one next to it. Just so Gillian couldn’t see that my fingers were crossed. “Brad tried his best,” I said.

  She nodded. “Of course. He always did. And he was learning to cook for me, you know. Because he knew I would appreciate the effort he was making. That was so like him.”

  “You knew him well.” This was far more politically correct than pointing out that if she thought Brad was trying his best as he groused and grumbled his way through class, she must not have known him well at all. I tried for the sisterly WOW approach I knew would make any Brad victim spill her guts. “I’m sorry. The whole thing with Brad…that must have been very difficult for you.”

  “Yes, of course.” She sniffled in a genteel sort of way. “It was such a shock.”

  “So you never met any of the other women?”

  The look Gillian turned on me was nothing less than icy.

  And suddenly, I began to wonder. Oh, not about Brad. I knew we were talking about the same thing: Brad’s murder. I just questioned whether her take on Brad’s death and mine were the same.

  “Oh.” Was that my voice, small and ill at ease? It must have been, because when I looked toward Kegan for support, I saw that his face was as red as a beet and his hands were clutched together on his lap. I wasn’t the only one getting the message from Gillian. Now if I could only figure out what it meant!

  Certain it was time to stop beating around the bush, I leaned forward. “I’m here because I’m trying to figure out who killed Brad,” I said.

  Relief washed over Gillian’s expression. “And I’m so glad! In my opinion, the police aren’t doing nearly enough. You said something about women. Other women. Do you think one of them might have killed my Brad?”

  OK, call me slow on the uptake. It took that one moment and that one phrase—my Brad—to make me see the light. I sat back, the better to let the icy claw in my stomach uncurl. “You’re sorry Brad’s dead,” I said.

  Gillian’s eyes brimmed with tears. Her voice teetered on the brink of hysteria. “Sorry? Of course I’m sorry. Brad was the love of my life, my soul mate. We were engaged to be married.”

  IT WAS THE MOTHER OF ALL UNCOMFORTABLE moments, but luckily, Gillian didn’t stay around long enough to hear me stammer out an apology that wouldn’t have made any sense unless she realized I had been thinking of her as a suspect. Which, come to think of it, would have been just as embarrassing. She hopped up, mumbled something about splashing cold water on her face, and left Kegan and me to sit there in stunned silence. That’s the way things stayed for a minute or so. Then he hopped out of his chair, too.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go have a look around before she comes back.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?” He’d already started toward the door, and I had no choice but to leap off the couch so that I could clap a hand on his arm and keep him from leaving the room. “We can’t just go snooping through the woman’s house. That would be terrible.”

  “It would be terrible if she wasn’t a suspect.”

  “But we don’t know if she is a suspect. In fact, she might be the only nonsuspect we’ve met. She’s the only one who actually cares that Brad is dead.”

  “And I think that makes her look more suspicious than anyone else.”

  In its own, crazy way, Kegan’s theory actually made sense. Unfortunately, I thought about this for a moment too long. By the time I was willing to admit that he might be right and suggest that instead of ransacking the house, we conduc
t the rest of our interview more carefully, Gillian was back, and Kegan was saying something about finding the bathroom and heading out in the direction where she pointed.

  All of which, of course, left Gillian and me with nothing in common and nothing to talk about.

  Except Brad, of course.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, and it wasn’t a lie. I had never liked Brad but, believe me, I recognized pain when I saw it. Gillian might have questionable taste in fiancés, but that did nothing to ease the hurt. “If there’s anything I can do—”

  “You said you were trying to find out who killed him. That’s the best thing you could do for me. Do you have any suspects?”

  I shrugged. “We thought we did. Nothing’s panned out.”

  “So you want to know more about Brad, about his life. You think that might help you figure out who did this terrible thing to him.”

  “That’s right.” I settled myself back on the couch, glancing at the doorway as I did and hoping that Kegan really was in the bathroom and not wandering around the house playing detective. “What can you tell me?”

  Gillian’s smile was soft at the edges. “I can tell you that a lot of people were jealous of Brad.”

  “You mean—”

  “That what you may have heard about him, none of it is true.”

  “Except that I’ve heard the same sorts of things from a lot of people.”

  Gillian hadn’t sat down when she came in, and now she paced to the far end of the sunroom and back again. “You’re talking about those women. The ones who are trying to trash his reputation.”

  “They say he harassed them.”

  “Like he’d need to!” For a cultured woman, Gillian’s snort was monumental. “Why would a man as handsome and as charming as Brad need to beg a woman for sex? Don’t you see? Those women, they said what they did about him because they were the ones who were after him. When he rejected them…” It was her turn to shrug. Her gesture was much more regal and dismissive than mine. “There are so many jealous people in the world. That explains what happened at the Washington Star, too. Those other reporters weren’t nearly as good as Brad. They weren’t nearly as talented. They made up lies about him.”