by Kylie Logan
Dinah took another bite of sandwich, chewed, and swallowed. “I usually sit with Stella Glowacki.”
Stella had called in sick that day. She was a quiet brainiac like Dinah. Jazz was happy they’d found each other.
“Is that a problem?” Dinah wanted to know.
“You mean sitting with Stella? Or sitting alone when Stella’s not here?”
It didn’t seem to matter. Either way, if it was a problem, Dinah was ready to apologize for it.
Jazz didn’t give her the chance. “I was just wondering…” She glanced back at the lunch line, all but nonexistent now that the first rush was over. “What’s on the menu today?”
Dinah didn’t have to think about it. One look at the menu board and Dinah had the list memorized. She was that kind of kid. “Chicken salad. Ham sandwiches.” She glanced at hers. “Veggie burgers.”
“Then a veggie burger it is.” Jazz popped out of her seat. “Do you mind if I come back here and sit with you to eat it?”
Jazz had the feeling Dinah was still considering the question by the time she returned to the table with her lunch tray.
She saw Dinah slap her book closed. “How’s the book?”
“Sense and Sensibility? Dreamy. Everybody knows that.”
“Sure.” Jazz loaded her veggie burger with ketchup. “I just wondered what you thought.”
Sometime while Jazz was up at the lunch counter, Dinah had finished her sandwich. She carefully folded the paper it had been wrapped in—in half, in quarters, in eighths—and set it aside before she popped the lid on her raspberry yogurt.
Jazz bit into the burger and chewed, then set it next to the broccoli salad that came with it.
“Sorry I made you wait the other day,” she said to Dinah, and when all she got was a blank look, she added, “You know, when Grace came to pick you up and I was talking to Grace in the car.”
“Oh, that. It’s okay. Really. I’m never exactly in a hurry to get in the car with Grace, anyway.”
It was, in fact, a telling point about Grace and Dinah’s relationship, but Jazz pretended Dinah was going for funny and smiled. “I get it. Grace can be—”
“She’s not exactly spoiled.” Dinah came to Grace’s defense the way a sister is supposed to. “Our parents treat us the same. Grace is just…” She searched for the word. “Entitled.”
Trying not to look too eager, Jazz took another bite of burger while she thanked her lucky stars for the perfect opening. “Do you think that’s why she didn’t get along with Florie Allen?”
Though she hadn’t touched her yogurt, Dinah put the lid back on and pushed back her chair. “I don’t want to be late for my next class.”
“The bell isn’t going to ring for twenty-two minutes yet.” As if to prove it, Jazz showed the girl the time on her phone. While they were on campus, the girls of St. Catherine’s weren’t allowed to carry their cell phones. Eileen’s school, Eileen’s rules, and as far as Jazz could see, this particular one was golden.
They sat side by side in silence.
“I’ve got a date tomorrow,” Jazz said, then wondered what in the world had made her tell the girl. She gave Dinah a sidelong look and saw that clearly, Dinah thought dating was an activity exclusively for the cool girls in school, not for old people like Jazz.
“I’m a little nervous,” Jazz admitted. “You know?”
Dinah puckered. “I don’t date.”
“You will. When you’re ready.”
“Why aren’t you ready?”
“You mean, why am I nervous?”
Now that she was trapped in this new conversation, Dinah opened the yogurt again and spooned up a mouthful. She nodded.
“He’s cute,” Jazz told her. “And he’s really nice. And we used to go out. I mean, a while ago, and we broke up and now—”
“Why?” Dinah wasn’t being nosy, she just needed to understand. Dinah needed to understand everything.
“Why did we break up?” Jazz was about to take another bite, and she set down her burger and thought about it. There was no use listing all the ugly details—Nick’s drunken mom, Nick’s mule-headed dedication to his baseball team, Nick’s job with its crazy hours and off-the-charts stress. There was no use hanging out her own shortcomings on the line for the world to see, either—her commitment to spending every Sunday with the dog-training team, her afternoons and evenings working with Manny, walking Manny, playing with Manny. It wasn’t fair to tell a kid like Dinah that relationships, even the good ones, are far more complicated than they look from the outside. Then again, maybe a kid like Dinah—maybe especially a kid like Dinah—already knew that. Maybe that’s why she told her, “I guess Nick and I forgot that we were supposed to be the most important thing in each other’s lives.”
From behind her glasses, Dinah’s eyes were steady and far wiser than they should have been. “Isn’t that a no-brainer?”
It was hard to face the truth when it came from a kid with raspberry yogurt on the tip of her nose. With one finger, Jazz pointed it out, and Dinah wiped her face with a napkin.
Jazz picked at the broccoli salad. “I guess the whole point is, we’re all nervous sometimes. About people. About telling the truth. Do you know the truth? Do you know why Grace and Florie didn’t get along?”
Dinah’s eyes were as round as dinner plates. “Grace would kill me dead if I told.”
“She’ll never find out. I swear.”
Though this was clearly a generous offer, Dinah had to think about it. She studied the apple on her tray. “Can I get in trouble if I don’t tell?”
Jazz had no choice but to be perfectly honest. “No.”
“But if I do tell, then you’ll know I did something…” Dinah’s cheeks shot through with color. “… nefarious.”
It was a big word from a little girl, but Jazz didn’t dare smile. “Like what?”
Dinah looked down to where she clutched her hands together on her lap. “Like look through Grace’s diary.”
This time, Jazz did allow herself a smile. “That’s no big deal. Sisters always do stuff like that to each other.”
“Do they? Really?” Dinah’s head came up and relief washed over her expression. “I thought I was the only one. Like a sinner, you know, only worse, because I was a sneak, too.”
“No way!” Jazz made light of it. “I used to do stuff like that all the time. Not that I have any sisters,” she added quickly, because she was close to getting Dinah to open up and she couldn’t afford to let the girl catch her in a lie. “But I have two older brothers. I used to sit outside their bedroom door and listen to them talk to their girlfriends on the phone. If they knew the stuff I heard, they’d go nuts.”
Dinah laughed. “Yeah, if Grace knew this, she’d go nuts, too. Especially since I found out she was…” She dropped her voice and leaned closer to Jazz. “Grace wasn’t exactly being on the up-and-up when she was here at St. Catherine’s.”
Dinah was so serious, so mortified, it could only mean one thing. “She cheated?”
Dinah didn’t dare say the word. “Algebra. Geometry. French. Big time in French. And Florie…” There was so much sound bouncing around the cafeteria, there was no way anyone could overhear, but Dinah looked around anyway, just to be sure. “Florie found out.”
“How?”
Dinah shook her head. “Grace didn’t say. Not in her diary. She only said something about how Florie was a no-good, dirty, rotten…” She swallowed the rest of the sentence along with her mortification. “Well, you can guess the rest.”
Yes, Jazz could.
Especially since out of the corner of her eye, she just so happened to catch sight of Loretta Hardinger and remembered what the cafeteria manager had told her. Florie of the cast-off clothes.
And what Parker Paul had mentioned.
Florie, who needed to pay rent.
Then and now, Florie was desperate for money.
“Dinah, was Florie…” Now Jazz made sure to keep her voice down, too. “Was
Florie blackmailing Grace?”
A single nod spoke volumes. “It started sophomore year and kept up the whole rest of the time they were here at St. Catherine’s.”
Jazz let the truth sink in. No wonder the girls went from friends to enemies in no time flat. No wonder there was still bad blood between them two years after graduation.
“Do you think…” It was a lot to ask the kid. Jazz asked anyway. “Do you think maybe she was still doing it? Do you think Florie still had something on Grace?”
“You mean, do I think my sister had a motive to kill Florie?”
Dinah was so matter-of-fact, it took Jazz’s breath away.
“I didn’t say that,” she protested.
“No, but it would take a total moron not to think of it.” Dinah tucked the apple into her backpack. “Grace doesn’t live at home anymore,” she said, and she pushed back her chair and stood. “So I haven’t had a chance to look at her diary lately. It’s too bad. It sure would be delicious to find out Grace was the killer.” She grabbed her tray to deposit it—of course—exactly where it was supposed to go, and while Jazz was still stunned by how much resentment there was between Dinah and her sister, Dinah grinned.
“Good luck on that date,” she said.
* * *
Blackmail.
For the first few minutes after she heard it, the word pounded through Jazz’s brain.
But then her blood pressure ratcheted down, and her thoughts settled. After she had some time to think about it, she realized it was the natural progression of things.
Florie needed money. That’s why she slept with Parker Paul, then threatened to tell his wife if he didn’t pay up. That’s why she was ready to turn in Grace for cheating. Did that also mean Jazz had been right about Tate Brody all along? When Florie needed an A, did she sleep with her professor?
What else might she have done to get what she wanted?
Back at her desk, long after lunch, Jazz checked the time on her phone. She wasn’t scheduled to meet Sarah until five. She had forty-five minutes. She locked up her office and raced home and got her car. Just a couple minutes later, she was in Ohio City.
Florie’s parents weren’t home.
It wasn’t what she expected—not what she wanted. She had hoped to talk to Renee and Larry Allen a little more, to dig a little deeper, and for a minute, Jazz stood on their front porch and stared at their aluminum screen door and considered her options.
The choice became eminently clear the moment she heard a sound from next door like the keening of a banshee.
The woman there answered the door, her eyes bloodshot and rimmed with gray smudges, her dark hair as tangled as a squirrel’s nest. The baby propped on her hips had tears streaming from his eyes. He hiccupped and spluttered, his gnome face screwed into an expression that said he was only catching his breath. A second later, he crying started again.
“Hi.” Since Jazz wasn’t sure the woman could hear her above the racket, she added a friendly wave. “We met. A couple weeks ago.” She pointed back to the sidewalk where they’d talked the day Jazz met Florie’s parents. “About Florie Allen.”
“Sure, sure. Look…” She bounced the baby. It didn’t help. “Lalo, he’s teething and I haven’t slept in like forever. Maybe we could talk another time?”
“It won’t take long. It’s about the photographs. The ones Florie took of Lalo.”
The kid’s cheeks flamed. He flailed his arms and kicked his chubby legs and screamed his lungs out.
“Yeah, pictures.” The mother backed away from the door.
“I’ll pay you for them,” Jazz blurted out.
For a couple long seconds, the woman eyed Jazz, considering her words and probably wondering if Jazz was some kind of nutcase. Finally, she held up one finger and walked away.
But she didn’t close the door.
The sounds of Lalo’s desperate cries faded, and a second later, the woman was back without the baby and with a pink envelope with white polka dots on it. She opened the door, but she hung on to the envelope.
“How much?” she wanted to know.
Calculating how much cash she had with her, Jazz stalled for time. “How many pictures are there?”
The woman opened the envelope and slid out a stack of eight-by-ten photographs, counting silently, holding them close to her chest.
“Ten,” she told Jazz.
“And I’ve got…” Jazz riffled through her purse for her wallet. She’d been planning to stop for bread and milk and treats for Luther after she had a drink with Sarah, and just before she left the house, she’d grabbed some cash. Thank goodness. “Fifty bucks. Five bucks a photograph. And I don’t even want to keep them. I’ll copy them and get the originals back to you.”
The woman studied her through bleary eyes. “Fifty?”
Jazz handed over the money.
And left the house with the pink envelope full of pictures.
A few minutes later, she slid into the seat opposite Sarah at a table near the window of the café.
Sarah already had a glass of pinot grigio in front of her, and when she took a sip, she eyed Jazz—and the envelope—over the rim. “What’s that?”
“Exactly what I’m dying to find out,” Jazz told her, and slid the photos from the envelope.
Just as Lalo’s mom had told her, there were ten of them, all eight-by-tens, all black-and-white.
When the waitress came over, Jazz ordered a beer and got down to business. “Take a look at this one.” She slid the top photograph to the center of the table. “What do you see?”
Sarah eyed the picture. Little Lalo was in the foreground, out of focus and off-center. His right ear and right eye, half of his nose and wide-open mouth were there in the frame. The rest of him was lost somewhere beyond the edges of the photograph.
“I thought we were here so I could give you the lowdown on my date with Matt.” Sarah had been squinting at the picture, and when she raised her head, she still looked skeptical. “And you’re here to talk about really bad photography?”
“I do want to hear about your date with Matt,” Jazz told her. “All about it. But…” She tapped a finger just to the left of Lalo’s ear. Farther from the lens, the scene was in focus, even if it was anything but interesting. A park bench. Two people, a man and a woman sitting next to each other, their heads bent together, their shoulders touching.
One by one, Jazz set the other pictures out on the table between them.
Lalo out of focus on a playground swing.
Lalo out of focus in front of a church.
The back of Lalo’s head; the bottoms of Lalo’s feet; Lalo’s fat fist in the air.
“Florie took these pictures,” Jazz said.
Sarah’s expression morphed from skeptical to total disbelief.
“Are you telling me that Florie … our Florie … are you telling me she took these lousy pictures?”
“Exactly.”
The enormity of the news sunk in, and Sarah leaned forward, her elbows on the table.
“Impossible. Florie didn’t take bad pictures.”
“Right.”
“Which means…”
“She wanted to take bad pictures.”
Sarah considered this and arrived at the same place where Jazz found herself. “What does it mean?”
“I’m not sure.” Jazz pulled the pictures closer and added, “Not yet!” because she hated for Sarah to think all talk of Matt had been pushed to the back burner for no good reason. Now all she had to do is find out what the good reason was.
Jazz studied the pictures.
In each and every one of them, as Jazz had noticed from the start, Lalo was an afterthought. In one of the pictures, there were two women in the background, laughing. In another she saw a couple coming out of a church, down the front stairs, their fingers touching against the hand railing between them. In another, there were two men in the center of the picture.
And Lalo?
Parts of Lalo—his
nose, his arms, his chubby body—were always out of frame, out of focus.
“Out of sight, out of mind.” She mumbled the words, and Sarah was apparently thinking the same thing, because she nodded.
“Why pay to rent a kid and then take lousy pictures of him?” Jazz asked Sarah and herself. “Unless—”
The thought was so preposterous, Jazz couldn’t find the words to explain. Before she could consider it and dismiss it as ridiculous, she picked up the photos and tapped them into a neat stack.
Then she went through them again, one by one.
By the time she restacked the photos and dealt them out like cards on the table, her heart beat double time.
“She wasn’t taking pictures of Lalo,” she told Sarah, pointing from picture to picture to picture. “That’s why she didn’t care if he was in focus or not. That’s why she didn’t care what he looked like. And that’s why she kept changing clothes!”
This was a new thought, and because Sarah wasn’t up to date with the information, Jazz filled her in. “Florie had lots of different clothes. But they weren’t really clothes. They were more like costumes. Old raincoats, wigs, even a nun’s habit. They were disguises.”
Sarah might be an artist, and as such, as right-brained as can be, but she could be logical when the occasion called for it. Her eyes lit. “She was trying to blend in.”
“So no one would notice her.” Jazz gripped the edges of the table with both hands, and when her beer arrived, frosty and foamy, she ignored it. “Florie needed the kid as a sort of decoy because it made perfect sense for a woman with a kid to be at a playground or a park or walking down the street as church let out. It made sense for her to be taking pictures of the kid, too. No one would even blink an eye if they saw that. There were other times when she obviously didn’t need the kid, but she still had to make sure she’d blend in. That’s when she’d dress as a homeless person.”
“Or a nun,” Sarah said.
Jazz nodded and glanced at the couples in the center of every picture. “She was watching them.”
Sarah gulped. “Like a stalker.”
“Not stalking. Not exactly.” Jazz studied the photo of the man and the woman on the park bench and wondered who they were. “But she was watching them all, all right. Watching them all. Florie was photographing their secrets.”