by Harper Lin
I was in the backroom five minutes before closing, rearranging items on the shelves, when I heard the jingle of the bell over the door. I walked out into the café, a little annoyed that I’d have to make someone a drink when everything was already clean and put away. At the same time, I recognized that was my fault for cleaning up early. A smile spread across my face when I saw Matty, still looking handsome in his work clothes.
“Hey!” I said cheerily.
“Hey yourself!” he replied. “You about ready to get something to eat?”
“Yeah, I just have to lock up.” I glanced at the clock on the wall. There were still a couple of minutes left before the official closing time. To most people, that would be inconsequential, but I had spent so long working beside my grandparents and being told that you have to be open when you say you’re going to be open, I wasn’t sure if I would physically be able to turn the key in the lock before precisely closing time. I hesitated. “Well, in two minutes.”
Matty looked at the clock and laughed. “Ghosts of your grandparents keeping you from closing shop thirty seconds early?”
I shrugged with a smile. Even after spending most of the last fifteen years apart, he knew me too well. We stood and watched the clock tick down until the minute hand was precisely lined up with the twelve, then I walked over to the door and turned the lock.
I smiled at Matty. “Okay, now we can go.”
He gestured at me. “Might want to take that apron off. Otherwise they might try to put you to work at dinner.”
I rolled my eyes at his bad joke as I walked to the backroom and took off my apron. I grabbed my purse and headed for the door, turning lights out as I went. Matty followed me out and waited as I locked up.
“So what’s for dinner?” I asked.
“I was thinking the little Mexican place down on the beach?” he suggested.
“Sounds good to me,” I replied. “I could go for a margarita about now.”
“No tequila shots?” Matty joked.
“I didn’t say no tequila,” I teased back. “I just said I wanted a margarita. We can work our way up to straight tequila.”
Matty laughed as we walked down the sidewalk toward the beach. It was a warm night, with just the slightest breeze blowing out to the ocean. The sun was sinking below the horizon behind us as we approached the water.
“You want to sit outside?” Matty asked when we arrived at the restaurant with its deck that stretched out over the water.
“Definitely.” The full moon would be rising momentarily, and there were few things I loved more than watching the moon reflected over the water.
Matty gave our request to the hostess, and she escorted us out onto the deck. Something about that evening must have made all the businesses on the beach slow, because we were the only ones out there, and the inside of the restaurant was sparsely populated. I tried to remember if there was a concert or something in a nearby town that was luring everyone away, but nothing came to mind. Matty pulled my chair out for me then went around to his side of the table as the waitress appeared, chips and salsa in hand, to take our drink orders.
“Margarita on the rocks, please,” I told her.
Matty hesitated for a moment, giving me a look that I knew meant he was toying with the idea of jumping straight to tequila, but he ordered a beer instead. We studied our menus as the waitress disappeared to get our drinks.
“I don’t know what I want,” Matty muttered. “I want everything!”
“Hungry much?” I asked with a laugh.
“I haven’t eaten since lunch.” He groaned. “I’m starving!”
“Eat some chips!” I said, shoving the bowl across the table toward him.
Matty grabbed two and shoved them in his mouth.
“Charming,” I said.
“I told you I’m hungry,” Matty said around the chips.
I laughed at his obviously unnecessary crudeness. It was juvenile humor, but sometimes it’s fun to be juvenile. The waitress reappeared with our drinks. That was one thing I liked about that place—they actually made your drinks and brought them out to you quickly. I couldn’t stand it when you ordered a drink and for some reason it took twenty minutes to get to your table. I gave the waitress our orders then sipped our drinks as she left.
“So,” I said, figuring we needed to get down to business. “I went and talked to Cell Phone Guy—his name is Chris Tompson—and Mrs. Collins today—”
Matty cut me off, reaching across the table. “Please, Franny, can we not talk about my dad just yet? Let’s just sit and enjoy each other’s company for a while, okay? We can talk about anything else.”
I smiled. Matty and I hadn’t just sat and talked in ages, certainly not since I’d been back in town.
“Sure,” I said. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the moon starting to peek up over the water. It sounded like a perfect way to spend the evening.
Chapter 11
We lingered a while over dinner. I never did switch to tequila, but I did have more than one margarita. The moon was stunning over the water. It was large and full and made the night unusually bright. Matty and I chatted about our lives since high school and how we ended up back in Cape Bay.
Matty had gone away to college too, but he moved back right afterward because he didn’t want to leave his dad all alone. He’d had a couple girlfriends, one of them pretty serious. She had wanted to get married, but Matty wasn’t ready, and they broke up.
I filled him in on what had happened with my ex-fiancé. He’d heard about it, of course, because once my mother told one person that her daughter’s engagement was off, the whole town knew—that was the way the rumor mill worked in a small town. I gave him the unexaggerated version of the story, though, not the one that had been built up through retellings by people who weren’t there and didn’t actually know. The woman he’d left me for wasn’t a model, I didn’t catch them in bed together, I didn’t throw all his belongings out the window. I told him the boring but true version—he left me, and my heart was broken.
We had long since finished eating and were nursing our third round of drinks when our conversation about our personal lives wound down.
Matty sighed. “I guess we should go ahead and talk about my dad.” He gestured at the inside of the restaurant, where only a few customers were left and the waitstaff was wiping down tables. “They’re going to want us out of here pretty soon.”
I was enjoying my time with Matty so much, I had almost forgotten what had brought us out to dinner that night. I pulled my notebook out of my bag and flipped through the pages I’d filled at the café, refreshing my memory about my conversations.
“You took notes?” Matty asked wryly.
I glanced up, the very picture of seriousness. “Yes, yes, I did.” I looked back down at my notes.
Matty chuckled and took a drink of his beer.
Satisfied I knew the points I wanted to cover, I flipped my notebook closed again. “Do you know anything about your dad shopping for a new cell phone?”
“No. Why?” Matty said slowly.
I gave him a brief rundown of my conversations with Chris the Cell Phone Guy and Mrs. Collins. That both of them mentioned Mr. Cardosi was looking for a new cell phone made me think there might actually be something to it. Matty listened thoughtfully.
After a long pause, he spoke. “The weekend before he died, he mentioned that he was going to Plymouth so he could go to one of those big box stores—I can’t remember which one. I didn’t understand what he needed to do out there, but I guess if he wanted a cell phone and didn’t want to go to the cell phone shop—and you know he wouldn’t go back there after he got into an argument with that guy—I guess he might have been going to get a cell phone.” Matty looked thoughtful. “I wonder why he didn’t tell me.”
I shrugged, then something occurred to me. “If the thing Mrs. Collins said about your dad dating someone was true, maybe he was worried how you’d feel about it.”
Matty pla
yed with his beer bottle. He sighed. “I just—Mom died so long ago. I would have been happy for him if he’d told me he found someone.”
“You know how parents are. My mom talked about her ‘friend’ John for years, and every time I’d ask, she denied that there was anything between them. But the way she smiled when she talked about him said otherwise. They just want to protect us.”
“I guess you’re right,” Matty said quietly. He shook his head. “I just wish I’d known.”
We sat for a few minutes, both lost in our thoughts about our parents.
Finally Matty glanced up and gestured inside the restaurant with his beer bottle. “We should probably get going.”
The other customers were gone, and the servers were hovering just inside, looking at us every once in a while as though they didn’t want to pressure us too much even if they were ready to go home.
“Yeah, I guess we should.”
Matty caught our waitress’s eye, and she brought over the check. I reached for my purse, but before I could get my wallet out, Matty had slid his credit card into the folder and passed it back to the waitress.
“What was that?” I asked indignantly.
“Me paying for our dinner?” Matty answered.
“I can pay for myself. And if anyone’s going to be paying for anyone, I should be paying for you because I’m the one who suggested dinner.”
Matty shrugged. “Too late.”
I looked at him through narrowed eyes. “Well, I’m paying next time.”
He shrugged again, this time with a twinkle in his eye. “We’ll see.”
I had a feeling I’d have to fight to pay.
“You know, it’s only fair that I pay,” Matty said. “You’ve treated me at the café twice in the past two days.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“It just is.” I didn’t really have a reason except that I ran the café and could give out free food and drinks to anyone at any time, but Matty was going out of his way to pay for my dinner.
Matty didn’t bother arguing with me anymore. He just signed the check when the waitress brought it back. We left quickly so the staff could finish cleaning up and go home.
“Where’s your car?” I asked as we started up the street toward the café. Matty’s house was on the other side of town. It was a quick drive but far enough that I knew he wouldn’t have walked to the café.
“I actually parked at my dad’s house,” he said. “I didn’t see any reason to pay for parking when his place is just around the corner.”
“Well, good,” I replied cheerily. “I’ll have company on my walk home.”
Matty scoffed. “You think I’d let you walk home alone at this time of night?”
I looked at him, surprised by both what he said and how forcefully he said it. “You think I can’t take care of myself? I lived in New York for twelve years! I think I can handle sleepy Cape Bay. It’s not like this is a dangerous place!” Matty didn’t say anything, and I realized what I had just said. “Oh… um, I mean, usually, um—”I couldn’t believe how badly I’d stuck my foot in my mouth.
“It’s okay,” he offered. “I would have felt the same way before. I do have manners, you know.” He chuckled softly.
“Thanks.” I sighed, relieved that my gaffe hadn’t upset Matty too much. “And sorry. I should have thought before I said that.”
“It’s okay.” He rubbed the back of my shoulder. “Really.”
We walked on in silence, enjoying each other’s company and the peace of the night. After a few minutes, we turned onto our street—well, my street and Matty’s old street.
“What are you going to do with your dad’s house?” I asked.
“I don’t know yet,” Matty said. “It’s paid for. I could sell it and put the money into my own place. Or I could take a cue from you and sell my place and move into his. It’d be nice to not have a mortgage.”
“Hey! Then there’d be two young people on the street!”
Matty laughed. “That is true.” We were walking up to his dad’s house. “You want to come in and see if we can find anything about that cell phone? There wasn’t one in his personal effects that they returned to me, so the old one or the new one’s got to be inside somewhere, right?”
“Unless…” My newly discovered investigator’s mind went off.
“Unless whoever killed him took it,” Matty finished. “Either way, we should find out.”
I agreed, and we headed into Mr. Cardosi’s house to hunt for his cell phone or some evidence of it. Matty unlocked the door and flipped on the light. We stood in the foyer, taking in the space.
“Where do we start?” I asked after a minute.
“Anywhere we didn’t already look.” Matty looked around. “I’ll start with the bedroom. Do you want to come with me or look somewhere else?”
I glanced around the entrance. “I’ll start out here.”
“All righty,” Matty said and headed into Mr. Cardosi’s bedroom.
A few jackets hung on hooks by the door, and a couple of shopping bags were on the floor beneath them. Wanting to start small, I stuck my hand in one of the jacket pockets and immediately closed it around a solid plastic rectangle. Not believing it could be that easy, I pulled my hand out slowly and turned the rectangle over. Sure enough, it was a brand-new smartphone. Not high-end but definitely a touch screen and definitely no antenna.
“Matty?” I called.
“Just a second, I’m just going through his nightstand.”
“I found it.”
There was a pause. “What?”
“I found it.”
Another pause. Matty appeared in the bedroom door, an incredulous look on his face. “You found it? Already? What, was it in the first place you looked?”
I nodded, grinning. “Sure was!”
Matty took the two steps over to me with his hand out. I handed him the phone. He looked at it slowly.
“What do you know?” he said quietly. “He did buy one.”
I wondered if it bothered him that his dad had bought a phone, supposedly so that he could text the woman he was dating, without breathing a word of it to Matty. He pushed the home button. Nothing happened. He pushed the power button. Nothing. He pushed it again, holding it down for several seconds. I saw his eyebrows go up, and he turned it around for me to see the screen light up.
“He always kept the old one off too,” he said. “Said he wanted to make sure it was charged up in case he needed it in an emergency. I told him he could just charge it each night, but he thought that was ridiculous. ‘Batteries should last longer than that!’” Matty slipped into his impression of his dad again, even shaking his fist for good measure. He chuckled softly as he thought about his dad.
I moved closer so we could look at the screen together. “Has he been texting anyone?” Since that was why he bought the phone, it seemed like the most obvious place to start.
Matty opened the text messaging app. It was empty.
“Call log?” I suggested.
Matty fumbled around briefly, trying to figure out how to see the call history. It was a different model phone from his, and it wasn’t the most intuitive design. My phone was different too, so I wasn’t any help. Finally he found it. All the calls were to one number. Matty read it out loud.
“Do you know whose number that is?” I asked.
“Nope.”
“Let’s call it!” I suggested.
He looked at the time on the phone then looked at me. “It’s almost midnight.”
“So that’s a no?” I tried to look as serious as possible even though I obviously knew it was way too late to call.
Matty looked at me skeptically then laughed after he realized I was joking. I clearly wasn’t doing a good job of looking serious.
“We’ll call tomorrow,” he said.
“Oh-kay,” I said dramatically. I had gotten relatively little sleep the night before and was getting a little slap-happy.
Matty chuckled again. “I think you might need to get home and get to bed.”
“Yeah, probably,” I admitted.
Matty started to put the phone away.
“No, wait!” I put my hand on his arm to stop him. My investigator brain had kicked in again. I reached for my purse, which I had dropped on the floor when we came in. “I want to copy that number and the call times down.”
I pulled out my notebook and wrote it all down as Matty held the phone patiently, rubbing his finger on the screen every few seconds to keep it from going to sleep. There were only a few calls, so it didn’t take long to get it all.
“Okay, thanks,” I said, slapping the notebook closed and stuffing it back in my bag.
“Can I take you home now?” Matty asked.
“It’s just two doors down. I think I’ll be okay.”
Matty just looked at me.
“Okay!” I said, giving in. “Are you trying to make me feel helpless or something today?”
“I’m trying to be a gentleman,” Matty replied, shepherding me out the door and locking it behind us.
“Well, I can’t really argue with that, can I?” I was used to being independent, but it’s not as if he was patting my head and telling me a pretty girl like me shouldn’t be worrying her little head about something as big and complicated as a coffee shop. I just wasn’t used to someone—a man especially—being so considerate. My ex-fiancé certainly hadn’t been.
We cut across the neighbor’s lawn on the way to my house on the other side. I unlocked my door then turned to look at Matty.
“Well, thanks for dinner,” I said.
“It was my pleasure,” Matty replied.
“You want to get together tomorrow and try to call that number?”