Flour in the Attic

by Winnie Archer

  The man at the door laughed. From where Miguel and I hid, I could see his body visibly relax. His shoulders dropped and he shifted the weight from both of his legs to one, looking more at ease. “You do. She’s a feisty mama, too, just like you.”

  “Your use of the endearment ‘mama’ is quite telling,” Mrs. Branford said. “I’d be willing to bet that she raised you. You’re closer to her than one might normally be to their grandmother.”

  “Who are you, lady?” the man at the door, Brent, asked with a bit of reverence in his voice.

  “As Johnny said, I was his teacher. English, but I’m sure you figured that out.”

  “I bet you’re one hell of a poker player,” Brent said. “An observer of human nature.”

  “I can hold my own,” she said modestly. I could picture her in my mind’s eye looking a trifle sheepish at the compliment, blooms of pink coloring her cheeks. I’d said it before, and I’d say it again: The woman had missed her calling. More than one. She could have run therapy groups, and, truly, she should have been on the stage.

  Brent held the door handle, turning to go back the way he’d come. “Make sure the door’s locked next time,” he said, speaking, I was sure, not to Mrs. Branford, but to the men in the room. A command, not a request.

  It was Johnny who responded. “Will do. Sorry about that.”

  “Don’t let it happen again,” Brent said. He nodded to the room—or maybe just to Mrs. Branford—closed the door, and headed back up the stairs, leaving Miguel and me in awe of Penelope Branford. “She’s good,” I whispered, my esteem for her clear in my voice.

  “She certainly is,” Miguel agreed.

  We crept back up the steps, listening at the door until we were sure the coast was clear, and left Mrs. Branford to her poker game. We sat at a table, knowing we’d get a full report when she finally finished playing, both poker and the detective game she was smack in the middle of. I crossed my jean-clad legs, my chunky-heeled black loafer dangling from my foot. I figured we were in for a little bit of a wait.

  Miguel flagged down a twenty-something cocktail waitress wearing belted high-waisted jean shorts that crept up her booty and a crop top that just barely revealed her bellybutton piercing. She sauntered over and took our drink order, then sashayed away again as my phone jingled from my purse. I dug it out, noting that the number displayed on the screen wasn’t familiar, but was local. I’d scarcely said hello when David Ruiz, clearly agitated, interrupted. “You’re still trying to figure out what happened to my wife, right?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “I found something.” His voice cracked with emotion. “I-I can’t believe—Christ, she didn’t tell me.”

  I uncrossed my legs and sat up straighter. “Tell you what, David?”

  “I can’t—I don’t know—Where are you?” he finally said. “I’ll come meet you.”

  “I’m at The Library,” I said, hearing in real time how misleading that sounded. I gave him the address. “It’s a bar on the east side of town.”

  “I’m on my way,” he said, and after we hung up, I wondered what he’d found and why he felt it was so urgent to share it with me.

  * * *

  David arrived at The Library in less than twenty minutes. He had to have been halfway out the door when he called. He came in, spotted me right away, then did a double take when he saw Miguel sitting with me. His expression clouded for a split second, but then it cleared and he headed our way. Miguel rose, holding his hand out to David. They shook, and Miguel placed his left hand on David’s shoulder, giving it a bolstering squeeze.

  He was looking worse for wear, which, given the state he’d been in when Miguel and I had visited him at his house, was saying something. The salt-and-pepper stubble on his face was scruffy and uneven, emphasizing the dark circles under his eyes and the ashen tone of his skin. It had only been a few days since the discovery of Marisol’s body, but he looked as if he’d lost ten pounds, which was weight he couldn’t afford to be without. His cheeks and eyes were sunken, and his clothes hung loose on his body. Any thought I’d entertained about him being behind his wife’s death dissipated slightly. This was clearly a grieving man.

  David refused the drink Miguel offered to buy for him. He pulled out one of the two empty chairs at our table and sank onto it, his body slouching against the hard back. He folded one arm over his chest, propping the opposite elbow on it and pressing his fingertips against his forehead. He looked like he was barely holding it together, so I cut to the chase. “What did you find, David?”

  He exhaled loudly, straightened up, and stuck his hand into the pocket of the lightweight windbreaker he had on over a worn Jupiter Farms T-shirt. When he withdrew it, he held an envelope that had been folded in half once, then again. He placed it in the center of the table.

  “What is it?” I asked staring at it as if it might be a bomb. A bombshell was more like it, from the way he was acting.

  He laid his hands flat on the hard surface of the table, his breathing heavy and labored. “It’s a letter Mari wrote.”

  He wasn’t being overly forthcoming, so I kept prodding. “A letter she wrote to you?”

  At this, he shrugged. “Not to me. I think it’s to—” He stopped. Regrouped. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. You tell me.”

  I nodded toward it. “May I?”

  He lifted his hand in a permission-granting gesture. “That’s why I brought it. To see if you could make sense of it, because I sure as hell can’t.”

  I restrained myself from speculating as I unfolded the envelope and pressed it flat, taking a moment to note any markings. It was wrinkled and looked as if it had been handled a lot, but there was no writing of any sort on it. The paper inside was equally worn, looking as if it had been folded and unfolded over and over and over again. I placed it on the table between Miguel and me so we could read it together.

  I know what you did. What you’re doing, I should say, and I’m disgusted. But I don’t know what to do. What do I do?! Do I tell? We’ve been grieving for my father. You know how much I miss him. How lost I am. And you do this? We’ve known each other since . . . since forever. I should have been able to trust you. I can’t get my head around the idea that you betrayed me like this. My father . . . oh God, my father. And my kids . . . what do I tell them?

  Several things hit me at once. The first was that it seemed so clear that the letter was written to Johnny. He’d betrayed her with his gambling and debt, which had led to their divorce. She referenced her father’s death here, though, so this letter was recent. Which led to the second thing, namely that Johnny had betrayed her again somehow, and not only her, but her father and children.

  I wondered at the value of Marisol’s house and if that had anything to do with what happened to her, but Johnny had no stake in the house. I couldn’t get two and two to add up to four in this case.

  I remembered the change in the will. Marisol had made David the beneficiary, but had put in stipulations that prevented him from actually benefiting from it financially, and prevented her kids from taking legal possession for at least ten years. Could she have done that to protect the house that had belonged to her father? Maybe she feared that if her kids inherited it, Johnny would somehow end up with it.

  “David, who would have inherited your house if Marisol hadn’t changed her will?” I asked.

  He sat with his elbows propped on the table, his head in his hands. “Johnny. It all would have gone to Johnny.”

  I gulped. “Not to the kids?”

  He shook his head. “That’s why she wanted to change it. If something happened to her, she wanted it to go to the kids, but she wanted to protect it, too. To give them time to accept things before they decided what to do with it.”

  If Johnny didn’t know about the change in the will, whether or not he was in serious debt, his motive for murdering Marisol just grew exponentially.

  I put that aside for the time being, coming b
ack to the details of the note. “It’s definitely her writing?”

  “Oh yeah. One hundred percent. She does—did—this combination of printing and cursive. She usually wrote neater than this, but it’s definitely hers.”

  With that verified, I moved on. “Do you think this is a draft?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A draft, meaning that she wrote this, but then rewrote it and maybe sent it or gave it to someone?” Whenever I wrote a letter, which, granted, wasn’t often, I started with a salutation. This wasn’t a happy letter, so maybe Marisol didn’t want to begin that way, but still. There was no closure to it, either. It felt more like an excerpt than an entire letter. “It doesn’t feel complete, does it?”

  Miguel had nodded along as I’d tried to explain what I meant. “I see what you mean. It’s missing the opening and the closing.”

  David stared at us. “Does that matter?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “If this is it, the only thing she wrote, and it stayed in her possession, then it’s more like she was venting or capturing her own emotions, right? Kind of like a journal, only without the book. Whoever she was writing it to never saw it. But if this was, say, a practice version, and she rewrote it or sent something similar, then that’s different. She’s calling someone out for a betrayal. That could be a motive.”

  What color David had left drained from his face. “You’re saying that if she sent this—well, not this, but a copy of this—that whoever the recipient was might have killed her over it?”

  We sat in silence. I knew David thought, like I did, that Marisol had written the letter to Johnny.

  A flurry of voices intermixed with a dog’s bark—a bark I instantly recognized as Agatha’s—came from the back hallway of the bar. Mrs. Branford appeared, holding the dog’s leash loosely in her hand. Agatha trotted alongside her. Next to her was a man I didn’t recognize, and next to him was Johnny.

  The man next to Mrs. Branford stopped, turned to her, and said something that made her smile and laugh. “I will, indeed,” she said.

  “Good,” the man said, and then he wandered off, passing us by without a glance, leaving The Library for the dark of the night outside.

  Mrs. Branford scanned the room, her gaze alighting on our little table. Her sly grin told me everything I needed to know—at least for the moment: She had had a successful poker game. She headed over to us, Johnny still in tow, a wad of cash visible in her hand. Recognition crossed his face, but it was only when he registered David that he stopped. The smile he’d worn vanished. Clearly he and his ex-wife’s husband did not have a convivial relationship.

  I sensed his desire to turn tail and scurry away. Before he could do that, I jumped up and hurried toward them. “Mrs. Branford! And Mr. Morales! What a surprise to see you both here.” I spun, gesturing to the table I’d just left. Miguel was just where I’d left him, but David was gone. My gaze darted to the table. No letter, either. I stumbled on my words, trying to hide my surprise. “We—we’re out having a—a drink.” I turned back to them. “Care to join us?”

  Johnny forced a tight smile. “Was that David Ruiz?”

  “Yes. Right, of course you know him.”

  “No, not really,” Johnny corrected. “I mean, we’re not soc—We don’t—He married my ex-wife, that’s it.”

  I moved back toward the table, hoping he’d simply follow me. He did. I scooped up Agatha as Miguel stood to help Mrs. Branford into the chair vacated by David. Johnny, however, stayed standing. “He’s broken up about Marisol,” I said to explain David’s presence . . . and then disappearance.

  Johnny didn’t respond, so I kept going. “He, uh, found part of a letter she wrote.”

  Johnny’s eyes narrowed, tension lines crinkling on either side of his eyes. “What kind of letter?”

  I weighed my words carefully, not wanting to spook him, but wanting to read his reaction. “Something about a betrayal. There weren’t any details.”

  Johnny was visibly uncomfortable. His nostrils flared and he folded his arms over his chest like a barrier. “Who was it to?”

  I stroked Agatha’s flat little head, pretending to focus on her rather than Johnny. I was fishing, following the most likely lead I had at the moment, which was that Johnny’s gambling troubles had caught up with him, and that somehow, it had led to a betrayal. What it had to do with Marisol’s father, I didn’t know yet. One thing at a time. “It didn’t have a name. I thought that maybe it was about your affair, though,” I said, surreptitiously watching him.

  “My what—?”

  “Your affair. I mean, you said you made a mistake and that’s why you and Marisol got divorced. Maybe it was an old letter when she was working through dealing with the end of her marriage.”

  I knew that couldn’t be possible, given the reference to her father’s death, but Johnny didn’t know that. He also hadn’t had an affair, but he’d been so ambiguous about his so-called mistake that it was an obvious assumption on my part. He didn’t know Sergio had told us the truth.

  He jumped at the explanation, visibly relieved. “That must be it. She always did hang on to old letters and journals. Rough for David to find it.”

  “The whole thing’s been rough on him,” Miguel said.

  “Quite understandably,” Mrs. Branford said, piping up for the first time since she’d sat down. “Having the funeral tomorrow will help everyone. A chance to say goodbye gives closure, cliché as it might sound.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll go,” Johnny said.

  My head snapped to look at him. “Why wouldn’t you?”

  Johnny’s dark eyes turned glassy. “I put myself in David’s shoes. If I was him, I wouldn’t want me there. The ex-husband? Come on.”

  I couldn’t help but glance at Miguel. Luke showing up unexpectedly had put us in a similar situation. Since the encounter at my house, I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Luke, and I still didn’t know why he’d come. I hadn’t had time to give it much thought, and I still didn’t. I pushed the visit to the back of my mind where Luke had resided for so long, refocusing on Johnny Morales.

  “Your children would want you there,” Mrs. Branford was saying.

  If I assumed he hadn’t had anything to do with Marisol’s death, I’d agree with her, but at this point, he was the lead suspect in my mind. If he proved to be Marisol’s killer, how would his kids feel about him having been at the funeral? “See how you feel tomorrow,” I suggested as Agatha grunted contentedly in my arms.

  Johnny looked at me for a beat too long, then abruptly changed the subject. “You still thinking about that yard remodel?”

  “What yard remodel?” Miguel asked.

  Mrs. Branford jumped in, patting Miguel’s hand with her own arthritic one. “A hot tub. A new deck. Ivy has a lot of grand plans.”

  I hemmed and hawed. “I don’t know. I don’t think I want to take out a loan against my mortgage.”

  Johnny wrapped his hands around the top of the chair he stood behind and leaned in. “I get that. I know a guy, though. He isn’t with my bank—”

  Was he with any bank? I wondered.

  “—so there’s no impact on your credit or your mortgage. Easy to borrow, no credit check. Something to think about.”

  Miguel shifted in his seat, clearly not liking the implication of borrowing money from “some guy.” I shot him a look that said I got this, before he could jump in and interrogate Johnny about it.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said with a smile.

  He nodded amiably, the worry over Marisol’s note diffused. “I have to get back to the game. Gotta win some of my money back.” His laugh held an undercurrent of dismay. “Let me know if you want to play again, Mrs. B. I’ll set a place for you.”

  Mrs. Branford wiggled her fingers at him. “I’ll do that, Johnny.”

  “Keep in mind, beginner’s luck only works once,” he added, giving her an indulgent smile.

  Based on the pile of money sitting on the table in front of h
er, her beginner’s luck had taken her a long way. I expected a retort of some kind, but from her devilish grin, I knew this had not been Mrs. Branford’s first poker rodeo.

  The second Johnny was out of sight, Miguel and I both turned to Mrs. Branford. “Did you have a secret life as a card shark?” I asked, looking pointedly at the stack of bills.

  “Bridge and poker are not dissimilar,” she said. “I prefer bridge, but Jimmy always favored poker. I was a quick study.” She tapped the stack of greenbacks in front of her. “I am severely out of practice, I admit, but I did okay against the likes of Johnny Morales and the other men at the table.”

  “I guess you did. Did Johnny say anything about . . . anything?” I asked. He’d been as overt as I thought he would be by mentioning his “connection,” who could loan me money. I didn’t imagine he’d be more forthcoming at the poker table—they had to be discreet, after all—but anything was possible.

  “I did well, so no need for anyone to extend me credit,” she said. “I came away with zilch—in terms of information.”

  That was disappointing, but the night hadn’t been a complete bust. Thanks to David, we’d gotten a better glimpse into Marisol’s state of mind before her death, and thanks to Mrs. Branford, Johnny was on high alert. I was more convinced than ever that we were on the right track.

  Chapter 18

  The next day was completely dedicated to helping Olaya prepare for the funeral, and then to the funeral itself. I started with a walk around the neighborhood, then took Agatha over to my brother’s. He hadn’t known Marisol like I did, which meant he didn’t mind missing the funeral to do a little Agatha-sitting. He lived about five miles from the house we’d grown up in, was a contractor, and usually had enough flexibility to help out our dad—or me—if either of us needed it. I could have crated Agatha, or even taken her to Mrs. Branford’s again, but it was going to be a long day. Plus, Mrs. Branford would be coming to the funeral, so her dog-sitting hours would be limited.