Fanatically in Trouble
Page 25
“I’ve given you good intel.” Why was it I could hold my own with a grumpy detective, but I could barely defend myself to my own mother? “I called last night as soon as I could.” Reese had been gone by the time Sylvie and Frannie showed up at her cabin. I knew the two had probably found a way to gain entry and search the place themselves. So far it looked just as they’d described. Which wasn’t a big help. “It’s not my fault Reese got away. And it still doesn’t mean she murdered America.” Though it looked bad. As Jaz would say—totes bad.
“We found her place like this last night.” Matt lifted a hand to encompass the mess that was Reese’s cabin. “Most of her clothes are gone, suitcase and makeup gone. You’ve been in here before, Paisley. Does anything look off?”
“I don’t notice anything yet.” But I’d barely had time to look around, and my first and only visit with Reese in her cabin had been very brief.
Matt gestured toward the hall. “Drawers in the bedroom still open like she was in a hurry.”
“Which she was,” Ballantine snapped, “because Paisley tipped her off.”
A half-full teacup sat in the sink. Beside it on the counter rested a sleeve of opened saltine crackers and a paper plate holding three dried pieces of cheddar. Crumbs circled the plate like a warning in the sand.
“Don’t touch anything!” Ballantine hollered as I walked back to Reese’s bedroom.
Drawers hung angled and open from a small dresser. A pair of heels lay atop a red evening gown at the foot of the bed. I leaned down and peered at the shoe label. Jimmy Choo. “Probably her outfit for tonight’s cruise,” I said as the two men joined me. “Apparently she knew this outfit was no longer required.”
Ballantine picked up the shimmery dress with a gloved hand. “Definitely won’t need fancy clothes in prison.”
I pivoted a slow circle, cataloging the rest of the room and filing away details. There wasn’t much to see. A queen bed, properly made with crisp tucks and pillows layered in acceptable symmetry. A thin-spined romance novel sat at an angle on the bedside table next to an old digital clock that flashed the wrong time. “I noticed her rental car’s still here.”
“She probably called a cab or an Uber,” Matt said. “We’re working on that.”
“And you’re sure Reese hasn’t contacted Jaz since the movie?” Ballantine asked for the second time.
“Jaz said she hasn’t heard from her.” My eyes narrowed as I studied the room again. Was I missing something here?
“What are you thinking?” Matt asked quietly as he joined me near the bed.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “It’s hard to argue with the facts. We have an AWOL Reese and a clear motive for her to kill America and implicate Jaz.” I’d relayed every word of my conversation with Sharky Cooper, so Officer Matt and Detective Ballantine knew Reese had been struggling under the pressure of America’s blackmail. I couldn’t imagine the constant fear Reese lived in, knowing America or Sharky could reveal her affair with Apollo at any moment. She had so much to gain with America’s death. I hate that she’d bolted, as it only made matters worse.
“Detective, out here!”
Ballantine and Matt took off in the direction of the voice from outside, and I used the opportunity to inspect Reese’s bathroom. A dry towel hung from a hook, and a pair of black flip-flops lay on the floor beside the cast iron tub. Her makeup was gone, save for a tube of drugstore mascara, but her hairspray and lotion remained, along with a pick and an electric toothbrush. If I was in a rush, would I have grabbed that toothbrush? I didn’t know.
A dog barked outside, and I heard an officer praise her for a job well done.
My heels clicked on the tile floor as I walked out of the cabin and into the sunshine. Gravel crunched beneath my steps as I neared Matt and the detective. Uniformed and plain-clothed cops swarmed the yard like bumblebees, and a handful of them circled Ballantine.
“Find something?” I asked.
“I’ll say.” The creases between Ballantine’s brows deepened as he held up a familiar red and white bag from Bugle Boy Bagels. “Dog found it buried under the rosebush. And what do we have here?” The bag crunched as he dug in. Out came his gloved hand, holding a familiar gold necklace.
Matt released a gusty breath. “It’s America’s necklace.”
I watched the light bounce off the dangling letter A. “You mean Reese’s.”
“Let’s get this sent off for prints.” Ballantine’s jaw set and his face looked grim. “I want Reese Riggins found, and I want to hear what she has to say.” He held up the necklace. “But I think this tells us all we need to know.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
I’d dreaded this day since we’d finalized the fan fest details.
The Electric Femmes reunion concert.
There were t-shirts, posters, and obnoxious tchotchkes like commemorative glassware with the happier, cartoony versions of Jaz, Trina, and me. (Though I was proud to see the artist had given me a voluminous bust and the waist of a ’40s pinup girl.)
While the hours of the fest had been long, the days had flown, and somehow here we were. I’d thought of all excuses to get out of the concert, such as breaking the least necessary bone and somehow contracting typhoid. Due to my hectic schedule, I’d failed on both options. So now here we were, five hours before showtime, rehearsing. Our riverboat, the Falling Star, could hold over three hundred people, had acoustics little better than a tin can, and swayed with all the gusto of a drunk pirate. My Enchanted Events crew were all onboard, rushing around like mad weevils to make tonight a beautiful venue and a memorable wrap-up of the festival.
“Stop, stop.” Jaz planted her hands on her hips as the band wound down for the tenth time just during this song. “Trina, you’re singing sharp. Watch that bridge, will you?”
“I’m about to throw you off a bridge,” Trina said. “My pitch is near perfect. Stop drowning me out.”
If there was any silver lining in losing your singing voice to surgery, it was this moment now. I just stood at the mic and moved my lips to the words. Nobody could blame anything on me.
“Paisley.” Jaz rounded on me. “You need more facial expressions. This isn’t a wake.”
I stand corrected.
“If you find that bridge,” I whispered to Trina, “I’ll help you push.”
“I heard that!” Jaz rolled her hand, an impatient signal for the band to begin. Again.
Motion from the doorway caught my eye, and soon Henry appeared. He hovered near the entrance and jerked his arrogant chin, a clear sign he needed me. Or that he’d developed a crick in his neck from peeking in every five minutes to watch his beloved.
I excused myself with an apology I didn’t mean, descended the stage, and took happy steps away from the band and toward my partner. “What’s up?”
“I’m sick.”
“With your love for Jaz. I know. She knows. We all know.”
The boat lurched, and he leaned against the doorframe. “No, I mean really sick.”
His face did look a bit green. “Oh.”
“A few of us got fish baskets at the marina for lunch.” He bit his bottom lip with a grimace. “It hasn’t ended well.”
There was still so much to do, and I was tied up in rehearsals for at least two more hours. “Who else?”
“Layla. I’ve already sent her home with a barf bag and an Uber.”
“And Alice?”
“Holding her own, but sweating like a quarterback in two-a-days.”
My silver lining had just slipped from the seams and fallen to the bottom of Beaver Lake. “Okay. We can handle this.”
“It’s mostly just setup, cleaning, and manual labor,” Henry said. “The design work is done, and the lighting crew is en route.”
“Cool,” I said, feeling anything but. “I can handle this.”
“Paisley, you need help. I’ve taken the liberty of calling in reinforcements.”
“Who?”
“I was li
mited on who I could get on such short notice.”
I didn’t like where this was headed. “Tell me you didn’t call—”
“Hey, sweet potatoes,” came an all-too-familiar call. “Who wants to hear about the time I stole a speedboat and nearly decapitated an Ecuadorian president?!”
I glanced out the door where two ladies walked the deck toward us. “Is Frannie wearing a bathing suit?”
Henry passed me a bottle. “Take my anti-nausea meds. You might need them more.”
As Henry walked away, I had to rub my eyes at the vision forming before me. Was I seeing this correctly? Was that my mom behind Sylvie and Frannie?
“Hello, shug.” Sylvie, wearing yellow rubber gloves that went to her elbows and shorts with pockets stuffed with dust rags, kissed my cheek.
“We came to help,” Mom said.
“How . . .nice,” I said, wondering at my mom’s clothing choice of linen pants and a silk blouse. “You might need some grubby clothes.”
She looked down at her slacks. “These are my grubby clothes.”
“Well. Thanks for coming, Mom. I really appreciate it.” Translation: I’m shocked and worried this was a foretold sign of the end times.
“Just tell us what to do.” Mom glanced about the boat. “I can scrub toilets or swab decks. Whatever you need, Paisley.”
Who was this woman? “We, um . . . we still have some lanterns to hang and about a hundred flower arrangements to display. Then all the chairs need to be set up.”
Mom gave my arm a squeeze. “Lead the way.”
I wanted to tell them no, to turn down their help and declare we could handle it ourselves. But I couldn’t.
“Thank you,” I finally said. “Sylvie and Frannie, Alice can show you where you’re needed. Mom, I’ll get you started on the flowers.”
I led my mother back into the large area we were using for the concert. Not everyone would fit in the space, but there would be televisions all over the boat broadcasting the show live.
A guitarist on stage took a full-volumed solo while Jaz and Trina moved to the music and waited for their cue.
“Do you miss it?” my mom asked as I walked her to a wall of boxes.
“Sometimes,” I admitted, wondering if she was inquiring to be polite or truly cared about my response. “These are the flowers we need strategically placed all over the boat.” I handed her a piece of paper. “This details the flowers and their assigned locations.”
She gave my printout a cursory glance. “So have you given any more thought to our job offer?”
There it was. The real reason she’d stopped by. “I told you my answer was no.”
“It was a rather hasty answer.”
“That’s often how certainty works.”
“Think of the life our company could offer you, Paisley. You’d have a consistent income, a company car, and access to the who’s who of celebrities and corporate icons.”
“That sounds perfectly dreadful. Each table gets the small arrangement of three roses.” I handed mom a box, the glass vases clanking in protest. “Center of the tables on the deck. Unless you also have a problem with that?”
She lifted her regal chin, like the American aristocrat she was. “What I have a problem with is you settling.”
If she’d dropped all the vases, gathered the shards, and dragged the pointy edges through my heart, it couldn’t have hurt less. It wasn’t that her low opinion of Sugar Creek was the great offense, though that certainly stung. It was that my contentment wasn’t enough. That who and what I loved—what made me happy didn’t make her happy. “I don’t have time to argue today. You offered to help, and I assumed it was sincere.”
“It is.”
“Then do it without pushing play on the life coach session.”
“Paisley—”
“For your information, Mom, I have a million things to do on top of the fact that I have to get on stage one more time even though I can’t sing anymore.” I had to practically yell to be heard over the music. “Tonight is the last time I pretend I’m something I’m not. I won’t do it again—not for Jaz’s fans and not for you. If you’re truly here to work, then please set out the flowers, then find Alice for your next instructions. If you change your mind at any time and find all of this beneath you, then I’ll understand if you choose to leave.”
Too furious to cry, and no time to tend to it anyhow, I stormed away.
Maybe I needed to go to the marina and order myself a fish basket.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
It was nearly showtime.
I’d played at the same venues that had featured Elvis, the Beatles, Adele, Taylor Swift. Give me the name of a music icon, and the Electric Femmes had rocked any arena they’d appeared. But I’d never been as nervous as I was tonight. Standing on that stage during rehearsals, I’d felt so exposed, so vulnerable. I felt like everyone in the crowd would be able to see what a fraud I was and how much I’d failed the pop music world.
Beau had told me to keep reminding myself of what I had—my business, my family, my friends. Him. But with half an hour ’til we climbed that stage in outfits picked by Jaz, I couldn’t seem to recall what the Enchanted Events storefront looked like. What was my grandmother’s name? Did I have a boyfriend or at least a filled-up punch card to Dixie Dairy? Right now, all I could drum up was a memory of my first-prize ribbon in the first-grade Twinkie eating contest. My confidence was sinking like one of Beau’s homemade fishing lures.
I held my gaping top together at the chest, trying to cover more skin. “Jaz, why is it I look like I’m leaving here to join the WWE, but you look like a sexy wood nymph late to her Vogue shoot?”
Trina, Jaz, and I sat in an echo-chamber of a room, as a team of folks Jaz had hired for hair and makeup fluttered around us with brushes and aerosols and enough product to fill a Sephora.
Trina lifted the layers of necklaces at her throat, attempting to detangle them and gain some breathing room. “Paisley asked you a question. Your outfit is stunning and accentuates your curves, while ours look like tankinis made for Hell’s Angels.”
Jaz sat in her chair and stared at herself in the mirror. “I have no one.”
“Oh, geez.” We’d gone over this twice already.
“I’m serious, Paisley. Reese was the closest thing I had to a friend, and what does she go and do? Has an affair with my husband, kills America, then sets me up for murder. Clearly, I didn’t keep her busy enough. And for all we know, she’s plotting her way back to Sugar Creek to kill me. She could be a stowaway on this boat.”
“She wasn’t your friend,” Trina said. “She was your employee. And maybe if you’d have treated her right and not hijacked her music, she wouldn’t have jumped on the crazy train, putting us all in danger. Just know if she does come after us tonight, I’m not stepping in front of you, Jaz.” She gave me a measured look. “Paisley . . . you’re a maybe.”
“Thank you.” I tried not to sneeze as a colorfully dressed man named Shiv tickled my nose with a giant makeup brush. “The police are looking for Reese. She can’t get on the boat. Everyone is safe.”
“I trusted her,” Jaz said numbly. “She knew everything about my life, and where did that get me?”
“More fodder for your therapist?” Trina winked at me in the mirror.
But Jaz wasn’t laughing. “Maybe I should’ve noticed she was being blackmailed. I was so busy avoiding America that I never saw she was harassing my assistant. Why didn’t Reese come to me for help?”
“Because she’d had an affair with your husband? Because you’d stolen a hit song that should’ve been hers?” Trina coughed as her hair stylist fumigated her with hair spray. “That girl was in over her head, and I guess when America showed up wearing the necklace from Apollo, Reese just snapped. Face it, Jaz, your assistant was crazy.”
The makeup artist withdrew her brush as Jaz bowed her head, and a sob escaped her plump lips. “Why am I so unlovable?”
Oh, no. Tears.
“Reese betrayed me. My ex-husband couldn’t stay faithful. Tee Pee only cares about using me to advance his career.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “Your little rapping weirdo genuinely cares about you.”
Trina lowered her lids for eyeshadow. “Perhaps you’ve surrounded yourself with so many posers, you can’t tell the difference.”
“Maybe it’s time to treat people how you want to be treated,” I suggested.
“I’m glad you brought that up.” Jaz’s eyes lit, and she leaped from the chair. “I’ve already begun.” She rummaged through a tapestry bag on the floor long enough for the man doing my makeup to apply liner to one of my lids. “For you!” She handed a Tiffany blue box to a befuddled Trina, then to me. “Surprise!”
“What’s this?” Trina regarded the gift like it might detonate in her hands.
“Open it.”
Trina and I wore matching looks of apprehension.
Wary of Jaz’s eager expression, I lifted the lid. Inside on a bed of velvet was a shiny, platinum bangle. I picked it up and traced over the words Electric Femmes on the cold metal.
Jaz pulled up her shirt sleeve, revealing her matching bracelet. “On the underside, I’ve engraved the date we formed the band. I know you probably won’t believe this, but I mean it when I say that day was the most important moment of my life.”
Trina gave a small laugh. “Yeah, because we gave you the step you’d use to walk over us.”
“No, because I met two of the best friends I ever had.” Jaz plucked a tissue from a nearby box and dabbed at her eyes. “Girls, I know I’ve been wrong. I’ve hurt you both, and for that I’m sorry.” She waited a beat, but when neither Trina nor I filled it with gushing acceptance, she continued. “I’d like to say I had a reason to ditch the band the way I did—that I desperately needed the money for a kidney or because I acted under duress. But sadly, the only excuse I have is that I was a selfish, manipulative person who threw away the closest thing to a family I’d ever had.”