She looked at him steadily. “Yes, because that’s what happened. Look, Zachary… you’re going to have unanswered questions in any case, right? There are always going to be a few things that just don’t fit. That’s what happens when we try to reconstruct every detail of a person’s life. People are variable creatures, and we can never predict everything. If you look at any death, trying to pull apart every single detail, you can convince yourself that there was foul play, or a conspiracy, or something malevolent. Just because you’re looking for it. There will always be clues that don’t fit anywhere because they’re not really clues. They’re just random bits of information. It’s never going to fit like a lock and key. Real life isn’t Murder She Wrote.”
Zachary listened to her as he poured some munchie mix out of a box into a bowl and placed it on the coffee table between them. They each had a cold can of beer, but Kenzie hadn’t yet touched hers. He shook his head.
“Why don’t you want me to continue with the case?”
“Me? I don’t care. You can waste your time if that’s what you want to do. I thought you wanted my advice as to what to do next.” She sat back, moving a couple of inches farther from him and keeping her back straight instead of relaxing into the couch. “And that’s my advice. Wrap it up and tell them you’re done.”
“Is Dr. Wiltshire upset that I’m reviewing the case? Is that what this is about?”
“Dr. Wiltshire couldn’t care less if you’re looking over his report. It’s not like he has anything to hide. He’s always very conscientious in his investigations and reports.”
“And you just think I should give up and let it go.”
She gave a little shrug. “Yes.”
He wasn’t sure she was telling him the full truth, but he wasn’t going to get it out of her with direct questioning. Maybe they’d get around to it from another direction. Zachary picked a pretzel out of the mix and popped it into his mouth.
“So how was your doctor appointment the other day?”
Her eyes widened a little bit. “My doctor…? How did you know about that?”
“You mentioned it to me when we set up lunch. You said you had a medical appointment to get to in the afternoon. I just wondered how it went.”
“It isn’t any of your business, is it?” She bristled at his intrusion. “That’s private.”
“Okay…” Zachary held up his hands defensively. “I didn’t mean to overstep my bounds. I’m sorry. It’s just that with my wife’s history—my ex-wife’s history—I get worried. Things can come out of the blue… serious things.”
Kenzie popped the top of her beer and took a little sip, looking at him. “What happened between the two of you?”
He shifted uncomfortably, not so happy with having personal questions thrown back his way. He tried to avoid it.
“You know how it is between married couples.”
“I know something happened that left the two of you pretty bitter.”
Zachary nodded.
“Mario Bowman, he said that the two of you were lovebirds, very close, like you had the best relationship in the world. Then everything fell apart. He wouldn’t give me any details. Or maybe he didn’t know them. Either way, he protected your privacy. I just can’t help wondering… what it was that left the two of you both so hurt and bitter.”
Zachary swallowed. “It’s private,” he said. “It’s not just my privacy… it’s more about Bridget’s. She’s the one… with the most to lose.”
As if on cue, Zachary’s phone started to ring. They both looked down at the display on the coffee table between them and saw her name. Bridget.
“How did she know we were talking about her?” Kenzie said in a stage whisper. She covered her mouth, giggling, while Zachary picked up the phone. He didn’t laugh. If Bridget was calling him, it was serious. Despite his efforts to move on, he wanted to be there for Bridget if she needed him. He answered the call.
“Bridget? What is it?”
“You just shut up,” she snapped. “I didn’t call to hear your excuses.”
Zachary closed his mouth. He looked over at Kenzie, who could obviously hear Bridget’s strident voice, in spite of his attempt to turn down the volume of the call.
“You’ve been following me!” Bridget accused. “What a low-down, creepy thing to do!” He tried to respond, but she cut him off mercilessly. “I told you not to talk. You stop stalking me, or I’m going to take out a restraining order! I’ll get your butt thrown in jail! This is the most despicable thing—if I see your car near me again, I don’t care what your excuse is, I am going to have you slammed in jail so fast you won’t know what happened. Understand?”
Zachary didn’t say anything.
Bridget’s voice had risen to a screech. “I said, do you understand?”
“Am I allowed to talk now?”
“Don’t get smart with me, you jerk! You stay the hell away from me, you understand? I don’t want to see your car in my rear-view mirror! I don’t want to see you at any of the restaurants we went to together. I don’t want to see or hear about you anywhere I go! You got it?”
Zachary tried to answer, but she hung up. He pulled the phone away from his ear and looked at the screen to confirm that she had terminated the call.
Zachary looked back at Kenzie, his face hot. “You still don’t think she hates me?”
She shifted uncomfortably. “No, I don’t, but… what’s up with that? Have you been following her?”
“You’re the one who suggested It’s a Wrap,” Zachary reminded her.
“And you’re the one who didn’t object and say that you didn’t want to run into your ex there. You didn’t answer my question. Are you following her?”
“It’s a small world. We still have friends in common. We both still live in town. We’re going to run into each other.”
She stared at him, waiting for a straight answer. Zachary struggled to come up with something she would understand.
“That’s not how it is.”
She used silence as a weapon. Zachary shifted and picked a few M&Ms out of the snack mix. He chewed on his lip.
“I might have… driven past her house a time or two, making sure she was okay. Or I might have seen her car downtown. I miss her.” He shook his head and blinked to prevent tears from forming in his hot, prickling eyes. “I loved her very much. The break-up was such a shock. It was so traumatic.”
“What happened?”
He tried to think of how to tell it without getting cut up over it all over again. The silence gathered around them.
“She was pregnant,” he said finally.
Kenzie nodded slowly. “And you weren’t ready for a baby?”
“I was. I was over the moon about it, but she didn’t want it. We were using birth control. She didn’t want a baby. I wanted a family of my own, but she… she wouldn’t budge.”
“That’s tough,” Kenzie sympathized.
“Yeah. That was the beginning. She said I didn’t have any right to dictate… that I had no rights over the pregnancy… over her… It was her body, her choice…”
“And legally, she’s right.”
“But we were in a relationship. That kind of thing… it’s supposed to be something you decide together. You talk about it. You come to some kind of decision together. It was my baby too.”
Kenzie just nodded. Her dark eyes were intense, drinking him in. Zachary’s heart pounded painfully in his chest as if it were happening all over again.
“She decided it didn’t matter what I wanted. She was going to get an abortion. As soon as possible.”
Kenzie continued to watch him. Zachary popped another pretzel in his mouth, but it was as dry as chalk. He couldn’t even taste it, and it turned to glue in his mouth. With difficulty, he washed it down with a large amount of beer.
“The doctor said that the good news was, she wasn’t pregnant. It was one of those point-one percent of cases where the pregnancy test was wrong. A false positive.”
“The bad news was that she had cancer. An HCG-producing tumor in her ovary. That was what triggered the false positive on the pregnancy test.”
They both sat in silence.
“So that’s it,” Zachary said finally. “There was no pregnancy. No baby. No need for an abortion. Instead, she had to have the ovary removed, and chemotherapy.”
“And a big elephant in the room.”
“Oh, we talked about it,” Zachary said. “We talked about it constantly. How I wasn’t ready to be a father but thought I was. How she was the responsible one, the one who had to make the hard choices. How she would kill a baby to avoid responsibility. How I was trying to make her feel guilty while she was going through chemotherapy and should only be having positive thoughts. I tried to help her through her treatments, but she didn’t even want me in the room. She didn’t want anything to do with me.”
He sat there in silence.
“What a mess,” Kenzie said finally. “I understand what you mean about it being a traumatic break-up.”
Zachary nodded. Sweat dribbled down his back. He tried to wash away the lump in his throat with a few more swallows of beer.
“But you have to move on,” Kenzie said. “You can’t be hanging around her house or following her around. She’s right; that is creepy. You could end up in jail if you keep it up.”
“I know.”
“Then stop it.”
He didn’t tell her that it wasn’t that easy. Not for him. It was so hard for him to maintain a relationship in the first place; letting go of what had been a successful one was more than he could handle.
Chapter Ten
The evening with Kenzie had ended unsatisfactorily. As much as they had tried to move on to more natural topics, neither one could seem to maintain a conversation that didn’t lead either to the Bond case or Zachary’s relationship with Bridget. They turned on a movie on the TV and cuddled on the couch, but in the end, neither could focus on the show, and they didn’t even finish it. Kenzie looked at her watch and announced the need to go home, and Zachary didn’t have the energy to argue with her about it. She tried to brush him off at the door, but he walked her down to her car like a gentleman, patting the top of her trunk.
“Sweet ride.”
She patted the little red sports car. “It’s my one indulgence,” she said with a laugh. She bent closer to give him a quick peck on the cheek, but was turned around and sliding into the vehicle before he could reciprocate.
Without making any plans to get together again, or even so much as a ‘see you later,’ she shut the door and pulled away. Zachary watched the car until it drove out of sight, then made his way up to his apartment.
One of the good things about being a private detective was that on nights he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep, he could work. There was always some surveillance that he could do, following a straying spouse, or else he could stay in and run backgrounds and do other computer work.
He was too restless to sit at the computer, so he donned dark clothing, grabbed his cameras, and headed out. He had a new case, an executive who believed that his wife, a high school principal, was out fooling around when she claimed to be out with her girl friends or working late.
Zachary had her cell phone number, to which he’d previously texted a video file. The video file had a GPS app embedded in it, and provided she was curious enough to see what video an anonymous sender had texted her; he would be able to pinpoint her exact location. He opened the tracker app on his phone and noted the locations of his most recent targets. He noted with satisfaction that the principal now showed up as a virtual pin on the satellite map. A zoom-in suggested she was probably in Rancheros, a rowdy cowboy bar, rather than stuck at her desk grading papers or doing whatever it was principals did.
Once at the bar, he scanned the faces of the patrons, looking for her. He had a good head for faces and didn’t need to pull up her picture on his phone to refresh his memory. The bar was busy, the lighting dim with strobing dance lights, and had some private booths that it wasn’t easy to see into unless a person were right beside them. He worked his way around the dining area and eventually spotted her at a booth, sitting across from a younger woman, a heavily made-up brunette.
The principal was a blond. Not with bright, shining locks like Bridget’s pre-chemo hair, but a dirty blond with short, messy curls. She was comfortably overweight, with the middle-age spread of many fifty-year-old women. Zachary looked for somewhere he could sit to observe them unobtrusively. He found a booth that hadn’t yet been cleared of its dirty dishes and sat down, pushing them aside and pretending to be intently interested in something on his phone. He didn’t look at the two women. If they glanced at him, they would see nothing but a man occupied with his phone, like any other man who was waiting for his date, or whose wife had abandoned him to go to the bathroom.
“Uh…” a skimpily-clad cowboy waitress hovered over Zachary. “I’m sorry, this table isn’t ready yet, maybe I could…”
“It’s fine,” Zachary said, “just clear it. I’m waiting for a friend, and she wanted somewhere… private. This is perfect. Thanks.”
“But…” She stood there for a minute, then shrugged. “All right. If that’s what you want.”
She cleared away the dishes. “I’ll be back to wipe the table down in two shakes.”
“Thank you. Much appreciated.”
She gave him a nod and a strained smile and took the dishes back toward the kitchen.
Zachary snuck a glance at the ladies at the other table. The younger one was looking his way, and he tried a friendly smile and raised eyebrow. She looked quickly away from him and back at her friend, Principal Montgomery.
Zachary again pretended to be busy with his phone, watching them covertly. He tried to pick up on their vibes. Two coworkers out for an after-work drink? An assignation? Parent-teacher conference?
The dim lights made it difficult to make out more than general features, but a couple of times, dance lights flashed over the ladies’ faces. Zachary frowned, studying the second woman’s features.
She was young. Younger than he had first thought. Certainly, not the parent of a student. Maybe a student teacher or office aide. Or a therapist who came in to work with the students. He had seen baby-faced professionals before.
Teachers who could almost be mistaken for their students.
The girl’s makeup was heavy and had contributed to the impression that she was older. Which was, he assumed, the reason she was wearing it. She was trying to hide the fact that she wasn’t old enough to be in the bar, even if it was just soda in her tall glass.
Rather that pull out his full-size camera, Zachary brought up the low-light photography app on his phone. He braced his elbows on the table to minimize any camera shake, and aimed his camera lens at the two ladies, with their heads close together. He looked around casually, keeping his body language relaxed, so it only looked like he was reading or looking something up on his phone instead of taking a picture. He snapped several stills, and then a short video of the two women. While he had the video running, the younger woman reached across the table and held the principal’s hand.
Bingo!
The waitress returned, wiped down the table, and pulled out her order pad. “What can I getcha? Or are you waiting for your friend?”
“How about two coffees, to start?” he suggested.
Her face relaxed a bit, and she nodded. “Sure. Nothing else? Desserts? Drinks?”
“We might have to get one of those hot fudge brownie deals. I’ll wait and make sure the lady approves first, because I don’t want to eat it alone.”
She flashed him a genuine smile. “That may or may not be a good idea. No self-respecting woman would order such a high-calorie treat. You know, everyone’s on a diet, but if someone happened to order one before she had a chance t
o say no…”
“Ah,” Zachary nodded agreeably, “then why don’t you bring me one, and we’ll see if I can get her to share it?”
She wrote it down on her order form. “Anything else?”
Zachary leaned forward. “This is a sort of unusual question. I don’t usually do things like this…”
“What?” Her eyes narrowed, but she continued to smile pleasantly.
“Don’t turn around too fast, but the two ladies at the table behind you. Are you sure they’re both legal?”
Her smile dimmed. She obeyed his advice and didn’t whirl around to stare. She looked over her shoulder toward the dance floor, scoping the two women out peripherally without being obvious about it.
She swore and looked back at Zachary. “The brunette, right? Doesn’t look a day over seventeen.” She sighed and shook her head. “I don’t know how they let her in without carding her. I’ll have the manager come over and check them out. Thanks for letting me know.”
He nodded. She walked back away. Zachary continued to watch the couple, a knot of anger growing in his stomach. The waitress returned with his coffees and a brownie with two forks and placed them down without a word. It was some time before the manager came over to talk to the two ladies. Zachary had taken several pictures in the interim, as the two became decidedly more cozy.
The manager, dressed in worn blue jeans and a big cowboy hat, leaned over the table to talk to them, his voice too low for Zachary to catch his words. There were exaggerated movements from the two women, feigning shock and amusement at his questions. He was firm, insisting on proof that the younger woman was legal drinking age. Eventually, they both rose, expressing their outrage, and stormed out of the bar. Zachary watched them go, wondering if he should follow them and pursue the matter further. The manager watched to make sure that they left. He noticed that Zachary was watching them too.
“You’re the one who pointed them out to the wait staff?” he asked Zachary.
“Yes. I don’t normally go out of my way to ruin someone’s date, but…”
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