Keep Calm and Candy On

by Wendy Meadows

  I turn out of town into my neighborhood when a grey sedan comes whispering down the street from the highway. I barely have time to look toward it when I see David Graham at the wheel. My heart stands still when I see a woman in the passenger seat.

  She wears her long blonde hair swept up behind her head in a tasteful twist. Her immaculate makeup makes her look young and flawless. Sparkling diamond earrings swing from her earlobes, and a teardrop necklace accentuates her throat above a plunging neckline. No woman dresses like that unless she’s on her way out on a date—a very special date.

  Cold sweat breaks out under my arms. He did NOT take another woman out on a date. Is that who he’s texting? Our fiasco last night rears its ugly head before my eyes. When have I ever looked that good going out with him? Never. That’s when.

  My eyes remain glued to the car as it purrs into town. He parks in front of the Happy-Go-Lucky Café. That’s the only establishment open at this hour. I glide toward the car. I can’t take my eyes off it, even though it horrifies me out of my wits.

  In a few seconds, David gets out. He opens the passenger door, and his beautiful companion gets out. He offers her his arm, the rat! He escorts her inside.

  Like some sort of phantom haunting the living, I find myself moving toward the café. I open the door and stop by the register. David and his paramour sit opposite each other in a corner booth, away from noise and distraction. His eyes rivet to her face, and his hand covers her on the tabletop.

  I stare at the two of them with my mouth open. How did this happen? How did it happen to me? Everything was going so good between us. How could I not see this coming? You know what they say. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

  Just then, Stacy bustles over. “Good evening, Margaret. Dining alone tonight?”

  I jerk around to stare at her for a moment. I couldn’t get my voice to work for all the gold in California. All at once, I can’t stand it any longer. I charge out of the café, and I don’t stop running until I lock myself in my bedroom where no one will find me.

  8

  Don’t ask me how I get through work the next day. I plaster a smile on my face and exchange pleasantries with the customers, but underneath, I’m burning up. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going. I don’t know whether to be furious or heartbroken.

  On the one hand, I grieve the loss of everything David and I built over the last six months. I’ve never been happier in my life, and I have him to thank for most of it. He made me feel smart and beautiful and…well, worthy.

  Then again, I’m glad to be rid of him. If that’s the way he wants to play it, good riddance. I don’t need a man who is going to play me for a fool. I’m better off finding out now what he’s really made of so I don’t have to waste my precious time on him.

  Screw him. I don’t need him or any other stinking man. I can take care of myself. I can enjoy my time with my friends and neighbors. I can throw myself into my work, and I sure as blazes don’t need him to help me investigate crimes.

  If I want to become a private investigator, I’ll do it. I don’t care what he thinks or how it affects his career. I don’t have to give him a second thought. I’m smart enough and resourceful enough to do it on my own. Even he says so.

  He always said I was better at interviewing people. He said I had a way of disarming them that no police officer could match. My position as a civilian is my greatest strength.

  By lunchtime, I feel like myself again, though I’m still steaming over the whole thing. I can’t wait to get out of the store, which isn’t me at all.

  Zack takes over at two o’clock, and I leave for home. I don’t want to hang around to talk to anybody, even if I am over the whole David thing. I get to Simone’s door when I spot David’s cruiser parked in front of the day care center. Is he in there interviewing Elizabeth? He’s behind the eight ball. He’ll find out everything I found out, only about two days late.

  I gather my resolve to walk past the door when he blows though it on his way outside. He draws up short. “Margaret! Just the person I was looking for.”

  I grit my teeth. “What are you looking for me for?”

  “I want to talk to you about the Mark Sheridan case. Everyone I interview has already talked to you. None of them can understand why I don’t know what you know. I was beginning to wonder myself.”

  I don’t want to get into this right now. I continue walking. There’s a cup of hot cocoa at my house calling my name. “I don’t know. Maybe you should concentrate on the case instead of going out on dates all the time.”

  He stops in mid-stride. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing.” I pick up the pace. “I have the rest of the day off, so I’m going home. I’ll see you around.”

  “Hey! Wait a minute.” He rushes after me. “Slow down. I need to talk to you.”

  “About what?” I ask. “You’re the professional detective here, not me, as you’re so fond of reminding me. Just do your job and solve the case.”

  “What is the matter with you, Margaret?” he gasps. “Why can’t we at least talk about the case? We always compared notes before. I need to know if any of these people told you anything they didn’t tell me.”

  I round on him with my insides balled up in knots. Why does he have to keep hounding me like this? “We’re not working on this case together, David. If they told me something they didn’t tell you, that’s your problem. You run your case, and I’ll run mine.”

  I spin on my heel. I want nothing more than to get away from him. Talking to him hurts too much. I hate to admit it, but I can’t stay mad at him the way I’d like to. When I look at him, I want to cry.

  “Why are you so mad at me?” he asks. “Is it because Mr. Stewart is my prime suspect? Is that what’s bothering you?”

  “Mr. Stewart!” I confront him. “You think Mr. Stewart killed Mark Sheridan?”

  “Don’t you?” he asks. “He’s the only one with access to the dog shampoo, and the dog hair that turned up in Sheridan’s dryer had the same soap residue on it. Who else could it be?”

  “Mr. Stewart did not kill Mark Sheridan,” I declare. “I don’t care what you say. It isn’t true. Jesus, David, you know Mr. Stewart as well as I do, if not better. You know he couldn’t hurt a flea.”

  “If you’re so convinced of that, why don’t you share your information with me?” he returns. “Let’s put our heads together and come up with some other option.”

  I clench my jaw so hard my teeth chatter. “You put your head together with someone else. I’m finished.”

  I start walking again, too upset to see straight. He hesitates a moment. Then he runs after me. “For the love of God, Margaret, will you please tell me what I did to make you so mad?”

  “You lied to me, okay?” I roar. “You bald-faced lied to me. How the Christ am I supposed to trust you ever again? You’re a two-faced, lying sneak, David Graham, and life is too freakin’ short to put up with that crap. Have a nice life and leave me the heck alone.”

  He tries again to follow me. “When did I lie to you? What did I say? Please tell me, Margaret. Please, can’t we just talk about this?”

  “You lied to me yesterday when you said you had to work on the case instead of going out with me when you were really going out with some blonde from God knows where. I saw you, David. I saw you driving her to the Happy-Go-Lucky in your car, and I saw you holding hands with her in the back booth in the café, so don’t give me that line of BS about ‘what did I do’. You’re a lying, sneaking cheat. I should have known you were too good to be true. You sweet-talked your way into my life, and now you can sweet-talk your way right out of it. You lied about those texts you got during dinner, too. You lied from beginning to end, and I’m done with it.”

  As mad as I am, I can’t walk away. I stay put to watch the fallout of my explosion. He reels in shock. He gapes at me and staggers back. He collides into a parked car and slumps against it. He stares into space, utterly aghast.r />
  I observe his features gone blank and empty. I’ve never seen him like this, but I can’t regret hitting him as hard as I did. I want him hurting the way I’m hurting. I want him devastated and destroyed. Maybe then he’ll understand what he did to me.

  He blinks in a stupor for a few minutes. Now that I got that load off my chest, my anger cools. Now I just hurt.

  “I’m sorry,” he mutters. “I should have told you the truth from the beginning. I just didn’t know how to broach the subject. I thought I could think it over for a few more days before I had to face you with it. I guess I have no choice but to tell you now, even if it doesn’t make any difference.”

  I don’t say anything. I’m way past that now. I don’t care what he says. I trusted him, and he shattered that trust in an instant. I don’t know if I can ever trust him again.

  He shoots me a quick glance. “I told you before that my wife died of cancer. It progressed really fast. She went through a few months of chemo before she died, but the tumor was growing too fast. I was still on probation with the police department. I was on shift one day and she went into the oncology clinic for her chemo appointment. When I got off work, she still wasn’t home. I got worried, so I called down to the oncology clinic. They told me she went into the seizure in the middle of her treatment. They called the ambulance, and they referred me to the emergency department at Peterborough Hospital.”

  Now that he’s talking, I can’t even stay mad at him. I listen in stunned silence. So whatever’s been going on with him has something to do with his past.

  He still won’t look at me. He locks his gaze on something in the distance. He doesn’t even know I’m there. “When I called the hospital, they told me she was dead. I went numb. I don’t even really remember the next few weeks. I went to work and I went home. I stumbled through the motions, just trying to survive.”

  I look over my shoulder. I want to go home. I don’t want to listen to this.

  His head swings up, and he looks at me for the first time. His eyes sparkle with their old fiery life. “What I didn’t know at the time was that she went into that seizure because she was pregnant. None of the doctors knew. She didn’t even know because she was still having periods right up until the day she died. We thought the nausea was just a symptom of the cancer. She never really showed. Her weight fluctuated. We never knew. She was seven and a half months pregnant when she died.”

  My eyes sting staring at him. Holy Mother of God! I’m not hearing this.

  “They rushed her into the operating theater to get her heart stabilized, but it was too late. She went into cardiac arrest, and her body did some sort of adrenaline response. She started having contractions, and she delivered the baby six weeks premature. The baby got taken to the NICU. Apparently, the emergency personnel hadn’t transferred my wife’s records up to the surgical ward yet, so they put Jane Doe on the baby’s name card. I’m told they had a big paperwork mix-up at the hospital. The papers got crossed up and shuffled and lost. No one told me about the baby. My wife’s paperwork never got connected to the baby. She remained a Jane Doe for seven weeks until she was ready to be released from the hospital. That’s when they called in Social Services, and the baby got adopted out to another family.”

  I swallow hard. “Are you telling me you only just found out about this?”

  He stands up and faces me. He draws a long breath. “You have to believe me, Margaret. The last few days have been one continuous muddle for me. That woman you saw me with is the baby’s adoptive mother. The girl is fifteen now, and she wanted to find out about her birth mother. That blonde you mentioned—her name is Pauline Dunroy, and she has spent the last nine months tracking me down. That’s why I’ve been so confused and distant lately. The texts I got during dinner were from her. I couldn’t think straight. I didn’t know what to think. The first thing they did when they found out the girl’s father was still alive was a DNA test. The girl really is mine. Now she wants to meet me. I’m sorry if this hurts you, but I have to do it. I have to have a relationship with this girl. She’s the only family I have.”

  My chin falls on my chest. I can’t hardly believe the story myself, but it doesn’t erase the damage of the last few days. If he’s telling the truth, he’s still not the person I thought he was. Nothing can go back to the way it was before.

  My vision clears, and I find myself looking at him as if for the first time. “Thank you for telling me the truth finally.”

  I turn around and start walking home. He walks in silence at my side, but he might as well be a stranger now. I get all the way to my porch before he stops me. He lays his hand on my arm. That touch sends a jet of electricity into me, but it’s not the excited exhilaration I used to feel. It’s the touch of a stranger who no longer has the right to touch me, not even in an innocent social way like that.

  “I’m sorry, Margaret. I screwed up. I know that now. Can you forgive me?”

  “I can forgive you for screwing up,” I tell him. “I’m not sure we can repair the broken trust, though. I don’t know how to come back from this or even if we can come back from it. You threw the last six months out the window. If there’s ever going to be anything between us again, we’ll have to start from scratch.”

  He closes his eyes and bows his head. “All right. I can accept that. I’ll just have to prove myself to you.”

  “You can start by leaving me alone. Don’t nag me to make up with you. Just give me the space I need to process all this.”

  He nods. “I can do that. I need some space, too, so I can make contact with my daughter.” His face explodes in delirious rapture. “God, you don’t know how good it feels to say those words!”

  I can only imagine, but seeing him so happy only stabs me in the guts. “I understand. I’ll see you around. Congratulations, by the way.”

  I open the door, enter my house, and shut it again with him still standing there. I don’t wait around to see what he’ll do. I go up to my room and shut my door on the world. I lie face down on the pillow, bury my face in the feathers, and burst into tears.

  9

  I wake up at three o’clock the next morning and lie awake in the dark. I stare at the ceiling, but I can’t stop thinking about the case. I ought to be thinking about David, but my mind won’t stay focused on him.

  I’m not mad at him anymore. I know why he did what he did. I know we both need to take some time off. We got really close over the last few months. Now we’re going into a hibernation period. Maybe that’s for the best.

  At least I know he’s not a cheater. When I think back on the events of the last few days, it all makes sense. Even so, he’s a stranger to me now. I don’t feel the same thrill about him. I don’t feel anything. It’s as if the last six months never happened.

  I was never in a romance with him. I never went on dates with him. I never did any of it with him. I’ve been on my own the whole time, and I’m just as strong and capable as if I never dated him at all.

  Does he feel the same way about me? I can’t even think about that. It bears no relevance to my life at all.

  The case occupies all my attention now. I run through what I know. A lot of people seem to have a motive to kill Mark Sheridan, but none of them have a motive to kill him right away. Of all the available suspects, only two had regular contact with dogs: Mr. Stewart and Bea Donohue.

  So that brings us to the soap. Someone had access to professional-grade dog shampoo. They used it on their dog. Then they got their dog’s hair on their clothes. They struggled with Mark injecting the soap into his neck. They transferred the dog’s hair from their own clothes to Mark’s suit. Then they tried to erase the evidence by laundering the suit.

  We have only the official record to show that Mr. Stewart used that soap, but he’s a retailer. The police didn’t check the records of any private individual who might have used the same shampoo on their champion Shih Tzus.

  Mr. Stewart said showmen used Floral Glow, too. David assumed only no one e
lse in West End used professional-grade dog shampoo. Now I know there is one competitive dog person in town: Bea Donohue.

  What about motive? Mr. Stewart didn’t like Mark Sheridan. Everybody knows that, but that doesn’t give him a motive to murder. A man as smart as Mr. Stewart would know he didn’t have to kill Mark to stop the development.

  Bea is another story altogether. Whether the development when ahead or not, the toy store would still be sold. She had to stop that, and the only way to do it was to stop Mark getting the documents notarized.

  When David and I interviewed Bea and Patrick at the toy store, Bea acted all surprised that Patrick agreed to sell the store, but that could have been nothing more than an act. She could have found out somehow. She could have overheard Patrick and Mark talking. She could have heard Mark tell Patrick he had to get the documents notarized.

  She would have been in a hurry. She must have been if she got dog hair on the victim’s clothes. She grabbed whatever she could lay her hands on, and that was the dog shampoo.

  I sit bolt upright in bed. I have to connect her to that shampoo. None of this means anything if I can’t show she used it on her dogs. I swing my legs over the side and slide into my slippers. It’s four o’clock in the morning.

  I pull on my bathrobe and cross the room to retrieve my laptop. I open it up and get on the internet. I search, Floral Glow Dog Shampoo, and come up with a list of suppliers. There’s one in Hartford. Nothing in Peterborough. Dang, I wish I could talk to David right now. I could really use his information about where Mr. Stewart gets his soap.

  I won’t see David anytime soon, though. I lost that one. I guess I have to finally admit to myself that I blew it as much as he did. If I hadn’t told him to leave me alone, we might be able to talk about the case like civil adults.