“Maybe the hit man didn’t know that it wasn’t counterfeit,” Gilley said.
Shepherd sighed and rubbed his eyes again. He seemed utterly exhausted. “Maybe,” he conceded. “Santana’s digging into Purdy’s financials to see if he can trace the money or find any hints of a connection to organized crime.”
“I don’t know whether to hope for a connection or not,” I said. “On the one hand, it would be a relief to know there wasn’t some crazed serial killer type roaming the streets, looking for victims, and on the other hand, it’d be yet another Mafia hit entering our lives in a terrible way.”
“How is this entering your lives?” Shepherd asked, and he was giving me that look like I’d better not even think about getting involved in an amateur sleuth kind of way.
“Well, Gilley and I did discover Purdy’s body,” I said quickly, while Gilley avoided making eye contact with Shepherd.
“Uh-huh,” he said, clearly still suspicious. Wagging his finger at us, he added, “Do not get involved in this, you two.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Gilley said.
“The thought never entered our minds,” I said.
Shepherd continued to stare at us like he knew we were big fat fibbers. Which, hello . . . we were! But no way was I going to confirm that.
Shepherd finally let up and tried to stifle a huge yawn. “Man, I am beat.”
I stood up and took his hand. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get you to bed.”
“I’m staying over?” he asked as he got to his feet, and there was the sweetest bit of hopefulness in his voice.
“Of course you’re staying over,” I said, wrapping my arm around his waist and guiding us toward the door. “I’m not about to let you drive home in the state you’re in.”
“What state am I in?”
“Tired and suspicious.”
Shepherd grinned down at me. “It’s like you know me.”
Chapter 10
The next day, I spent the whole day in the city with my sons. Monday morning, however, I went straight to Chez Kitty. I wanted to pick up where Gilley and I had left off on Saturday night.
Letting myself in, I called out to him, but he wasn’t anywhere in the house. And neither was Spooks. There was, however, a note on the table that said that he and the pup had gone for a walk, and that I should make myself comfortable with some coffee and have the slice of quiche Florentine he’d set aside for me.
I smiled as I unwrapped the plate. Gilley was always taking care of me, and as much as I was heartbroken that he and Michel seemed to be headed for a split, I was grateful that Gilley wouldn’t be leaving me anytime soon.
After polishing off the quiche and the coffee, I straightened up the living room, tossing Spooks’s various squeaky toys into the toy basket, doing a bit of light vacuuming and dusting, and before I knew it, I’d also organized Gilley’s spice rack.
“Where the devil could he be?” I muttered to myself when I glanced up at the time. I’d been at Chez Kitty for well over an hour.
As if on cue, the front door opened and in came Gilley and Spooks, but leaning on Gilley and hobbling forward was none other than Tiffany—Sunny’s babysitter.
“Oh, my goodness!” I said in alarm when I saw that the poor girl was sticking her right foot out in front of her in an effort not to have it touch the floor. “What happened?”
“She rolled her ankle,” Gilley said, guiding Tiffany to a nearby chair.
The young woman’s face was contorted in pain, and I hurried to pull the ottoman over so that she could lift her foot onto it. She winced and hissed out a breath as she very carefully placed it onto the cushion.
After hurrying to the freezer, I pulled out a cold compress and came back to the chair to see Gilley very gently putting another pillow underneath Tiffany’s ankle to give it more support.
Kneeling down, I said to Tiffany, “This is going to hurt, sweetie, but we have to try and slow down the swelling.”
A tear leaked down Tiffany’s lovely face, and she nodded. Then she hissed a few breaths through her teeth as I slowly, slowly lowered the compress onto her ankle. “Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod!” she cried as the coldness spread across her injured foot. Gilley held her hand and rubbed her fingers.
“I know it hurts,” he said. “Try to hang in there for a few more seconds, and it’ll get easier.”
She nodded as more tears slid from her eyes. I wondered if she hadn’t broken the ankle.
When Tiffany seemed a fraction less uncomfortable, I said, “What would you like for us to do, Tiffany? Is there someone we can call? Or should we take you to urgent care immediately?”
“I smashed my phone,” she said, her voice hitching on the words.
Gilley produced the phone out of his pocket. The screen was smashed and dark. “I can’t get it to turn on,” he said. “And she can’t remember her parents’ numbers.”
“They’re just in my phone, you know?” she said. “I never have to think when I call them.”
“How about where your dad works?” I tried. “If you can think of the company, maybe we could call his office and ask for him.”
“He’s at home today,” she said miserably, and I knew that it was useless to push her for details. Her mind was clouded with pain, and she might even be in a bit of shock.
“Okay,” I said gently, rubbing her arm. “Should we take you straight to urgent care, then? Or would you like us to drive you home and your parents can take you?”
“H-h-home,” she sputtered, wiping the tears from her face, but more tears simply followed. The poor love was so distressed. Waving to her foot, she cried, “I can’t believe I did that! I’m supposed to run the New York City Marathon this year!”
Tiffany stared at her ankle as if it’d betrayed her, and I couldn’t tell if the tears were from pain or from disappointment that she’d be missing the race. Perhaps they were from both.
“Maybe it’s not so bad,” I said, even though her ankle was clearly swollen and turning a frightening shade of blue.
I glanced at Gilley, and he was staring at her injured foot like he was afraid some alien creature might burst out and attack him.
“We’ll let you sit for a bit, and then we’ll help you to the car,” I told her. “Gil?”
He tore his eyes away from Tiffany’s foot and looked at me with wide, almost panicked eyes. “Yeah?”
“I believe I’ve got a set of crutches in the garage from when Matt had that calf strain last year. They’ll be short for Tiffany, but at least they’ll allow her to maneuver under her own power.”
“Uh-huh?” he said, not understanding what I was getting at.
“Why don’t you go see if you can find them while I make room for Tiffany in my car.”
“Yeah, okay,” he said, and then he bolted for the door.
“Spooks,” I said to the pup, who’d lain down right next to Tiffany’s chair to stare up at her with worried eyes. He sat up when he heard his name. “Stay,” I said, pointing to him.
He replied with a soft snort and placed his head on Tiffany’s thigh.
I nodded to him. “Good boy.” Then I squeezed Tiffany’s shoulder and said, “We’ll be right back.”
She didn’t respond or even acknowledge that I’d spoken. Instead, she stared into space and petted Spooks’s head.
I left the pair of them and headed out to move the seats in my car so that we could ease Tiffany in without forcing her to put any weight on her foot.
Fifteen minutes later the four of us were on our way, headed northeast, and before too long we were turning into a subdivision off of Hither Lane.
“It’s that one on the left,” Tiffany said, pointing to a lovely French country home with neatly tended gardens and a circular drive.
I turned into the drive and pulled as close to the front door as the pavement allowed. “Gil,” I said, unbuckling my seat belt, “I’ll ring the bell while you help Tiffany out, okay?”
“Got it,” he said.
After hurrying out of the car and up the steps, I rang the bell, and the door was opened right away by a woman with white-blond hair, big blue eyes, and a round face, who was just about my height.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m Catherine. I’m a friend of Sunny D’Angelo, and we met your daughter the other night, when she was babysitting Finley.”
The woman eyed me with confusion until she noticed what was happening behind me. She gasped as I was quick to explain. “My friend Gilley found Tiffany hobbling along after she rolled her ankle. We drove her home because she’d smashed her phone when she fell.”
“Oh, my goodness!” Tiffany’s mother exclaimed. “Charles! Charles! Come quick!”
I stepped aside just before Tiffany’s mom rushed past me down the steps, and stayed to the side as a tall, broad presence emerged from the hallway and approached the front door.
Tiffany’s dad was a surprise. He was African American, with a beard and a belly, but he stood at least six feet five. Possibly taller, as he literally had to duck his head to come outside. “What’s happened?” he asked.
“Your daughter rolled her ankle on her run. We brought her home because she smashed her phone when she fell and couldn’t remember your phone numbers.”
Charles barely acknowledged that I’d spoken, and he hurried down the steps to join his wife while Gilley helped to prop up Tiffany, who was now out of the car.
Bending at the waist, Charles simply picked his daughter up in his arms like a rag doll and carried her up the steps and inside with ease. Gilley stayed by the car, next to Spooks, who was sticking his head out the window, and I waited for Tiffany’s mother to pass me on the stairs before I made my exit, but she paused on the landing and said, “Thank you! Thank you so much for bringing her home.”
“We almost took her to urgent care,” I admitted. “But deferred to Tiffany about where she wanted to go.”
“No, she definitely should’ve come home. Charles is an orthopedic surgeon.”
My brow lifted in surprise at how fortunate that was for Tiffany. “Oh, good,” I said. “Who better than her dad to immediately assess her injuries?”
Tiffany’s mom stuck out her hand. “I’m Brenda.”
“Catherine Cooper,” I said, shaking her hand.
“Would you like to come in for a minute? I’m sure Charles would like to thank you for helping our baby girl home.”
By now, Gilley had sidled up next to me, and, tapping his chest, he said, “Gilley Gillespie.”
Brenda nodded and shook his hand. “Brenda Blum.”
“We don’t want to be a bother,” I said.
“You’re not,” Brenda insisted. “Please, come in for a moment, won’t you?”
I smiled and nodded, and we followed Brenda inside.
Charles had taken Tiffany to the kitchen, and she was sitting on the island, with her father kneeling down to inspect her foot as he eased her running shoe off.
Poor Tiffany cried out as the shoe came loose, and Charles looked pained as he glanced at his daughter. “Sorry, baby. I have to get a look at your foot, okay?”
She nodded, and I noticed the tears were sliding down her cheeks again. Tiffany held her breath, and we did, too, as Charles slipped off her sock. I winced when I saw how purple her whole foot was.
“Can-can I still run the marathon?” Tiffany whimpered.
Charles looked up at her again, his face sympathetic but firm. “No,” he said. “Tiffy, you’re going to be sidelined for the next two to three months, depending on any damage to the tendons. I’ll take an X-ray at the hospital, but it looks like you’ve got broken second and third metatarsals.”
Tiffany burst into tears, and Charles stood to hug his daughter.
I laid a hand on Brenda’s arm. “Brenda, thank you so much for asking us in, but I really think it’s best if we leave you to tend to your daughter.”
She nodded, tears welling up in her own eyes. “You’re right. I’ll walk you out.”
We turned and headed out the way we’d come, but at the front door Brenda said softly, “This is just one more terrible thing to happen this week.”
That was when I remembered that Sunny had told me that Yelena had recommended Tiffany to her for babysitting, and that Yelena had been friends with Tiffany’s parents. “Oh, Brenda, of course,” I said. “I nearly forgot that you were friends with Yelena Galanis, correct?”
Brenda blinked in surprise and said, “Yes. We knew her well. It was such a shock to find out that she’d been murdered. I’m still reeling from the news.”
“I totally understand,” I said. “And you have my deepest sympathies.”
“Did you know her too?” Brenda asked.
“No,” I said, declining to mention that we’d been at the show the night of the murder. “We’d never met, unfortunately.”
Brenda nodded, and then she opened her mouth to say something, seemed to think better of it, but then whispered, “Yelena was Tiffany’s birth mother.”
Next to me, I heard Gilley gasp, and I knew I’d sucked in my own breath in surprise.
“She was?” Gilley said.
Brenda put a finger to her lips. “Tiffany doesn’t know. We’d planned on telling her this year, because she’s known Yelena her whole life. It was part of the arrangement of the adoption, actually. Yelena promised never to tell Tiffany the truth. She said she’d leave it up to us to decide if that was appropriate, and while Tiffany was in Europe this summer, Charles and I made up our minds to tell her. Yelena was supposed to come over for dinner tonight so that we could all tell her together.”
I bit my lip. “I’m so, so sorry,” I said.
Brenda nodded, and her eyes welled again. Glancing over her shoulder, she said, “She’s been training so hard for the past three years to get fast enough to run the marathon, and she was lucky enough this year to get a lottery number. I don’t even know how she’ll be able to deal with the hard stuff now that she can’t run. It’s her coping mechanism, and it was how she got through her senior year, during the lockdowns.”
Gilley and I nodded, and I thought we both sensed that Brenda was confessing all this to a pair of strangers because it was easy to confess such things to people she didn’t know. It was safer to say something personal to two people you’d likely never meet again.
“If we can be of any help to you or to her, would you let us know?” I asked, reaching into my purse to pull out a card. I handed it to Brenda, then squeezed her arm in sympathy and turned to go.
“You’re a life coach?” I heard her say.
“I am,” I said, glancing over my shoulder. “So . . . if you or Tiffany needs someone to talk to, please think of calling me, okay?”
Brenda nodded and offered us a small smile before waving goodbye.
When we were safely back in the car and on our way back home, Gilley said, “That was a twist I didn’t see coming.”
“Right?” I said. “That poor girl, though.”
“Exactly,” Gilley said. “She gets a ticket to the New York City Marathon and rolls her ankle six weeks before the race and will soon learn that her birth mother—whom she’s known her whole life but didn’t know was actually her mom—was murdered three nights ago.”
“I do not envy the Blums,” I said, thinking of Tiffany’s poor parents and the task before them of comforting their daughter through three heartbreaks.
“Do you think they’ll tell her?” Gilley said.
I eyed him in surprise. “Of course. Why wouldn’t they?”
Gilley shrugged. “Would it be more painful for you to think that your birth mother was some stranger out there and was never named, or that she was a woman who’d been murdered the week before the confession could be made and you would’ve gotten the chance to form a whole new relationship with her?”
I frowned. “I see your point.”
“I wonder if Sunny knew,” Gilley said next.
Again, I glanced at him in surprise. “Gosh, I don’t know, Gil. She didn
’t give any hint about it to me, but then, she could’ve been protecting Yelena’s privacy.”
“Sunny and Yelena . . . Their history as friends goes back to college, right?”
I nodded. “That’s my understanding.”
“How old do you think Tiffany is?”
“Twenty. Maybe twenty-one.”
“The timing fits,” Gilley said.
“It does,” I admitted. “Still, what does it matter now?”
Gilley sighed. “I guess it doesn’t.”
“How did you stumble upon Tiffany, anyway?” I asked.
“I took Spooks for a walk all the way to Indian Wells Beach, and he had a great time splashing in the waves. On the way there, we passed Tiffany going in the opposite direction. I waved at her, but I don’t think she remembered me, ’cause she just kept on truckin’.” Gilley laughed. “Anyhoo, when we were about a quarter mile from home, we found Tiffany on the ground, near a big ole pothole. She’d fallen in, rolled her ankle, and couldn’t walk.”
“The poor thing! How long was she like that?”
“She said she was there only a few minutes, and nobody stopped to help her, which is simply unacceptable, but what’re you gonna do?”
“Well, you stopped and helped.”
“I did. She said she was doing a fifteen-mile loop around East Hampton when she took a sip of water and didn’t see the pothole.”
“I don’t know whether I’m more pained hearing that Tiffany fell into the pothole or that she was doing a fifteen-mile run!”
“My thoughts exactly. Runners are weird.”
“Candice is a runner,” I said, referring to my sister’s best friend and business partner, whom Gilley knew well.
“Abby’s Candice?”
I nodded.
“It figures. That woman is subhuman.”
I laughed. Candice was a formidable woman in every respect. I had been a member of her posse once or twice and genuinely respected her, even if I didn’t necessarily want to spend a lot of time with her, because she was pretty intimidating.
“Abby says Candice is running the Vermont One Hundred next year.”
“What’s the Vermont One Hundred?”
Coached in the Act Page 14