50% Off Murder (Good Buy Girls) (17 page)

“Indeed,” Maggie said. “Now here’s where it gets interesting—”

“Wait, one more question,” Claire interrupted again. “Why are you all gussied up today? Don’t you have to be at Dr. Franklin’s in an hour?”

Maggie blew out a breath. This was the downside to close friends: They knew you too well.

“I am just wearing this outfit so that I don’t have to weed it from my closet,” she said.

“The one-year rule?” Claire asked.

“Yes, exactly.”

“But you wore that two months ago when we all went into Richmond because we had that Groupon to eat one hundred dollars’ worth of food for only fifty at Chez Nous, that snazzy French restaurant,” Claire said.

“Oh, I forgot,” Maggie said. She felt her face grow warm, and she was annoyed that Claire was going to figure her out if she didn’t get her distracted and quickly. “Now, do you want to hear what Joanne had to say or not?”

“Yes, I do,” Claire said. “Sorry. I think being stuck in here is making my brain go sideways.”

“Okay, Joanne was in tears, because of the hormone shots,” Maggie said, and Claire nodded. “But she told us that John Templeton had approached Michael’s young entrepreneur’s group about investment opportunities and,
in fact, Michael used Templeton’s company to buy those two apartment buildings that he and Joanne own.”

“No!” Claire said. “But this means there could be other investors who have much more reason to kill John than I did.”

“Exactly,” Maggie said. “I talked to Max last night and, in light of the new information, he thinks he can get the judge to set your bail at a more reasonable sum. You may be out in time for the two-for-one breakfast at the House of Bacon on Saturday.”

Claire sagged against the bars. Silent tears coursed down her cheeks. Maggie patted her hands where they rested on the bars.

“Hey, this is good news,” she said. “Come on, chin up.”

Claire reached under her glasses and wiped her eyes. She snuffled a bit and then turned to blow her nose on a piece of toilet paper, a roll of which sat on the shelf by the severe metal bowl in the corner.

“There is one thing that will help you to get out faster,” Maggie said.

“What’s that?”

“You have to tell Sam what you told me, about what you saw that night that you fled Baltimore.”

“I can’t.” Claire shook her head.

“I don’t think you’re going to have much choice,” Maggie said. “They’re going to keep investigating, and if they link the body you saw being hauled out by Templeton with your flight from the city, it’s going to look very bad. Claire, you have to tell them. You have to tell them what you saw, and you have to tell them what John Templeton was holding over you.”

“John knew about my past. He knew, and he was going to tell. I would have been ruined,” Claire cried.

“What happened in your past?” Maggie asked. “I can’t help you unless you tell me.”

Claire turned away as if she couldn’t face Maggie. Her voice was so low, Maggie had to strain to hear her.

“I was involved in a robbery, and someone got shot.”

A sucking sound echoed around the sterile chamber, and it was a moment before Maggie realized it was her, gasping in shock. Of all the things she had expected Claire to say, this was not it.

Claire turned back to Maggie. “When I was sixteen, I got involved with a gang of bad girls. It was pure reckless stupidity, but they decided to rob a convenience store, and I went along with it to fit in. I was the only one with access to a car, and I knew how to drive, so I was the driver.”

As Claire paused to catch her breath, Maggie could see her reliving the horror of that long-ago day. The painful memory weighed heavily upon her, and Maggie could swear that Claire shrank as she uttered each word.

“No one was supposed to get hurt, but the girls I was with, well, one of them was wild. When the clerk refused to empty his drawer, she went crazy. I could see her screaming at him
and yelling, so I knew something had gone wrong. I left the car and went in to get the others. I figured our bluff had been called, and we needed to get out of there.”

Claire was silent so long, Maggie asked, “And then what happened?”

“The wild girl, Rita, she leaned over the counter and shot the clerk in the leg. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t even know she had a gun. Turned out it was her brother’s, and it was loaded. The rest of them ran, but I stayed and called nine-one-one.”

Silent tears slipped down Claire’s face, and Maggie reached through the bars to grab her hands. They were cold to the touch, and she wished she could get into the cell to hug her friend.

“You stayed,” Maggie said, not at all surprised that her friend had done the right thing.

“Well, if I hadn’t rushed in there, demanding that they all leave, she probably wouldn’t have shot him. I felt like it was my fault.”

“It wasn’t,” Maggie said. “Yes, the robbery was a stupid thing to do, no question. I mean really, what were you thinking?”

Claire cleared her throat. “I just wanted them to like me. I was sixteen, remember.”

“Oh, yeah, sorry.” Maggie shook her head. “I got off track there. What happened next?”

“The ambulance came, and it turned out that it was just a flesh wound. The clerk testified that I tried to get the others to leave and that I stayed with him after he was shot. But still, the other girls’ lawyer pointed out that I was a part of the robbery; I was the driver, so I had to do some time. I was
sent to juvie for three months, and because I cooperated, my records were sealed.”

“And John knew this?” Maggie asked.

“Apparently he had me investigated when we first started dating,” she said.

“But your records were sealed,” Maggie said.

“Not tightly enough,” Claire said.

“He threatened to go public with it, didn’t he?”

“Can you imagine, a librarian with a record? It would have ruined me,” Claire said. “I knew I couldn’t trust him not to keep using my past against me, so I called in a silent witness report about what I saw that night and I ran.”

“Oh, Claire,” Maggie said. “You must have been terrified when he showed up here.”

“Pretty much,” Claire said. “I tried so hard to cover my tracks. I even took my stepfather’s name.”

“Your name isn’t Freemont?” Maggie asked.

“It is now,” Claire said. “But it wasn’t then.”

They were silent for a moment. Maggie was trying to process all that she had learned, and Claire seemed to be lost somewhere in the past.

When the door opened at the end of the hall, Maggie glanced up, expecting to see Sam Collins. When she recognized the crotchety deputy making his way toward them, she was surprised to find she felt disappointment instead of relief.

“Time’s up,” he said. “We’re having a shift change.”

Maggie glanced at her watch. She had to get to Dr. Franklin’s anyway.

“Listen, Claire, I know telling me all of this was hard for you, but I’m glad you trusted me,” she said. “It’s going to help you get out of here. I promise.”

“Thanks, Maggie,” Claire said. “And not just for the pep talk.”

Maggie tilted her head. She wasn’t sure she under-stood.

“What I mean is, thanks for not treating me any differently now that you know everything,” Claire said. “You’re a good friend.”

“So are you,” Maggie said. “No matter what happened when you were a teenager, you are a good person, and you did the right thing. Is it all right if I tell Ginger and Joanne?”

Claire nodded. “Yes, I trust you—all of you.”

“Yeah, blah blah,” the old deputy said. “You’re cutting into my break time. Let’s go.”

Maggie reached through the bars to give Claire a half hug. “I’ll be back later today or early tomorrow,” she said. “And I know Max is coming by later. I’ll see if we can get you something to read in there.”

Claire looked like she might weep with relief, “Oh, please! All this time on my hands with no books is killing me.”

Maggie grinned. Claire was such a librarian.

With a wave, she followed the deputy out to the front desk, where she retrieved her purse.

“Bye, Dot,” she said.

“Bye, Maggie. Remember my shoe size is seven and a half.”

“On it,” Maggie said. She swept out the front door, feeling optimistic for the first time in days. They were going to get Claire out of jail, and they were going to prove she was innocent by catching the real killer.

Of course, she had no idea how they were going to do
that; it just seemed more in the realm of possibility than it had yesterday. She hurried down the sidewalk. She had parked farther away, around the corner at the unmetered parking. As she strode toward her car, she heard a set of heels clicking purposefully behind her.

She glanced over her shoulder to see Summer Phillips bearing down on her like a warship with its canons primed. Perhaps it was because she was leading with her bust like the carved wooden figurehead on the bow of a ship. In any event, Maggie wanted to get out of firing range.

She supposed Summer was out for revenge for the ice cream incident, which would not be out of order, but Maggie really didn’t have time for a tussle before work. She was pushing being late as it was.

“Do not try to outrun me, Gerber,” Summer barked.

Which told Maggie, of course, that that was exactly what she should do. She picked up her pace, and she heard Summer pick up hers as well. Darn it. This is when peep-toe pumps were not helpful, not at all. She didn’t want to go faster for fear of a taking a header, but Summer had at least four inches in leg length on her, and the odds were good that she would be able to make up the ground between them pretty quickly. Maggie poured on a burst of speed.

Two men dressed in fluorescent orange vests were surveying the street, trying to determine if they needed to add a streetlight on the corner of Chestnut and Main. They did this every year, as old man Wilcox, who lived in the big house on the corner, attended every town council meeting and complained loudly that he could never cross the street on account of there not being a light.

So every year it was surveyed, and every year they
discovered that Mr. Wilcox was just moving slower and slower and, no, they would not be putting in a light.

This, of course, made old man Wilcox mad, and he would soon be dragging his lawn chair out to the sidewalk to count the number of cars that turned the corner onto Chestnut. He would then make a fancy colored graph showing the peak traffic times and how they correlated with his day’s schedule of trying to cross the street. Then he would attend all of the council meetings until they agreed to have the corner surveyed again. Maggie thought they should just give the old man his light. Really, was it asking so much?

Both of the surveyors stopped what they were doing and took in the sight of Maggie trying to outrun Summer. Maggie could hear Summer wheezing up behind her and suspected she was about to have all of her hair pulled out by the roots.

Abruptly, a blue sedan screeched to a stop right in the middle of Chestnut Street, and the passenger door popped open.

“Jump in, she’s gaining on you!” Ginger ordered.

Maggie jumped into the car, and Ginger zipped away before she had even shut her door. Maggie scrambled around in her seat, slamming the door. She glanced back to see Summer stomping her size twelve high heel on the sidewalk. The two surveyors stared openmouthed as Summer let loose a string of curses that could have bubbled the tarmac.

“How did you know I needed back-up?”

“One of my boys was at the Perk Up getting an iced coffee and saw you leave the jail with Summer hot on your tail, so he called me,” Ginger said. She glanced at Maggie out of the corner of her eye. “He said he wasn’t sure it was you, given that you were all decked out like you were going on a date or something.”

“It’s the one-year rule,” Maggie said.

“But you wore that when we—”

“I know,” she said. “Claire already reminded me. So I
forgot? Sheesh. Why is everyone making such a big deal about it? Do I normally look so terrible?”

“Is that a rhetorical question?” Ginger asked. She smiled as she drove around the corner and parked under a large, shady maple tree. The morning was already heating up, and both ladies rolled down their windows to allow for a cross breeze.