Armed (27 page)

“I think that’s a good idea. We could all use some sleep. Tomorrow is going to be a big day.”

The next night I backed my car out of my garage at six-thirty. Stars filled the night sky where only hours before it had been brilliantly lit by the sun. The air was as crisp as an apple plucked off a tree. I should know. I’ve plucked my share of apples off of other people’s trees, surprisingly only getting caught once.

I headed for the turnpike anxious to meet my best friend, Mary-Beth Ramsey. Twenty minutes later I snagged a prime parking space just vacated by a woman with a minivan packed to capacity with packages and children.

I stood in front of the Herbal Garden Restaurant and looked out over the flow of last-minute Christmas shoppers.

“See anything interesting?”

I turned and hugged Mary-Beth. Almost five months had passed since we last saw each other. We had a lot of catching up to do. A young hostess arrived at our table with a basket of freshly baked bread and a cup of soft butter laced with honey. I grabbed a slice still warm from the oven and heaped a large dollop of the softened butter on top.

“You look like hell. What’s going on?” Mary-Beth never minced words.

“A lot’s been happening. I’ll fill you in over dinner.”

A cheery waitress recited the evening’s specials and we decided on the Cheddar Chicken. Then I told Mary-Beth all.

She reached across the table and patted my hand. “Well, no wonder you look so bad. Diamond smuggling and murder in Indian Cove. Wow.”

Our steaming entrees arrived: grilled chicken with a mustard sauce atop a bed of buttered noodles covered with bubbling cheddar cheese. How it managed to be on a health food menu I hadn’t a clue.

“In all this, I did manage to make a few new friends.”

Mary-Beth took a bite of her chicken. “Besides the detective, and I want up-to-the-minute bulletins on your progress with him, who else have you met?”

“Mrs. Haddock.”

“The woman who saw someone in front of Mrs. Scott’s?”

“Yes.”

“Alex, you look funny. What’s wrong?” Mary-Beth asked.

I put my fork down and wiped my chin. “I never thought about it until now, but Mrs. Haddock saw the person in front of the house a long time ago.”

“So?”

“If what Mr. Absher said is correct, and if Sandy only heard Mrs. Scott and Emmanuelle arguing a few days before Mrs. Scott’s death, then why would Emmanuelle have been out in front of Mrs. Scott’s house over six months ago?”

“Maybe the old woman got it wrong. Maybe she meant six weeks, not months,” Mary-Beth offered.

“Even six weeks doesn’t fit.”

“How about this, Mrs. Scott didn’t suspect Emmanuelle until recently, but Emmanuelle suspected that Mrs. Scott suspected her much sooner?”

I replayed that confusing sentence in my head and pondered this new scenario for a moment. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

Mary-Beth pointed her fork at me. “Why would she single Mrs. Scott out and stalk her?”

“Hey, Mary-Beth! It was your idea.”

Mary-Beth put the fork down and leaned on the table. “I’m just playing devil’s advocate.”

“I don’t think it was Emmanuelle out in front of Mrs. Scott’s.”

“Then who?” Mary-Beth asked.

“I don’t know. But you know what? I’m tired of talking about murder. I want gossip! Tell me who you’ve seen and what they’re up to.”

Mary-Beth Ramsey’s family had moved into my neighborhood when we were ten and we instantly hit it off. For nine years, our telephone rang every night with the words I loved to hear—Guess what I heard?

Shorter and rounder than me, she wore her dark hair in an updated Dorothy Hamill look. She still had a handful of freckles sprinkled around her nose and perfectly round doe eyes with thick lashes. The gold balls at her ears where the same earrings she had been wearing forever.

“Well? Give! What do you know?” I leaned forward on the table, all ears.

Mary-Beth wiped a bit of sauce from the side of her mouth and smiled, clearly delighting in drawing out the suspense. “It just so happens I did hear something recently.”

My eyes sparkled, eager for something other than the goings-on at the factory.

“Remember that dorky girl, Cathy Lyon?” I shook my head. “Sure you do. The one we always teased.” Mary-Beth rolled her eyes.

“Oh, yeah. Whatever happened to her? I figured she’d probably become a nun.”

“Well, think again.” Mary-Beth leaned across the table. “She got married. And you’ll never guess to who, or is it whom—I never can get that right.” Mary-Beth didn’t wait for me to render an answer on her grammatical dilemma. “Mike McGill.”

“Mike McGill, Mike McGill? You mean the hunk? The best athlete in the whole class? That Mike McGill?”

“None other.”

“Wait a minute. I thought he married that Jane girl two years behind us.”

“He did. Had a great big wedding out at the country club in Westport. Then they went to Hawaii and she stepped on a sand shark and had to have about thirty stitches in her foot. Stuck in the room and being sweet she insisted Mike go out and enjoy himself. You know, surf, soak up the sun, sightsee. She should have been a little more specific in what she meant by enjoying himself because he sure did.”

“With Cathy Lyon?”

“No! She comes later.”

“Sorry.”

“With the young girl that handed out towels at the pool. But she started getting a little pushy, wanting a commitment and all, and him being a married man, a
newly
married man, it just wasn’t possible. So he started hanging out down on the beach and met a local girl who arranged glass bottom boat excursions.

“Seems they went out on a little tour of their own. Right out in the coral reef, with the boat’s floodlights on. Doing it right there in the bottom of the boat with all those glass panels so the fish could see. Unfortunately, some night divers saw too. Their first dive and, well,” Mary-Beth held up both hands in front of her, “let’s just say they saw a little more than the brochure advertised. When Mike and his little sea nymph brought in the boat, the owner fired her on the spot.”

“So where does Cathy Lyon come in?”

“Mike and Jane settle into marital bliss. He’s some hot shot corporate lawyer and Jane fills her days with the country club and various classes at the community college, one of which is a pottery class.”

A cheesecake-bearing waitress interrupted Mary-Beth mid-story. As soon as the young woman left, Mary-Beth continued.

“So, one day Jane leaves class early with her latest creation. No one knows why she left early, probably some sort of premonition. She drives home and sees Mike’s Lexus in the drive thrilled to have him home early for once. She walks in with a big smile on her face all the while thinking about some pretty lace number she never got to wear on her honeymoon. She walks in calling his name. It’s a very big house, from what I hear, so I guess Mike and Cathy never heard her.”

“Poor Jane!”

“Poor Mike. Had to get ten stitches after Jane flung her glazed fruit bowl at him. Dear, sweet Cathy grabbed a bath towel and drove home with nothing else on. A very cold day with icy roads. A ten-car pileup stopped traffic for hours.”

I choked on a piece of cherry topping and Mary-Beth had to jump up and hit me on the back.

“Are you okay?” she asked back in her seat.

I laughed so hard I used my napkin to wipe the tears from my eyes, which, yes, once again looked like a raccoon.

“How do you manage to hear all this stuff? I never hear anything good.”

“I don’t know. People just tell me things.” Mary-Beth smiled sweetly and popped the last piece of cheesecake into her mouth.

*****

An hour later, back in Indian Cove, Sam and Millie joined me for an evening of joyriding.

“Tell me again why we’re doing this,” Sam yawned from the back seat.

“Because I just had dinner with Mary-Beth and she said something that got me thinking.” I turned left at an intersection. “She bookmarks Web pages throughout the year with stuff she might want to buy for Christmas. So maybe Mrs. Scott bookmarked stuff on her computer. It might tell us something.”

Sam stifled another yawn while she hugged her jacket tight around her. “You need us because?”

I looked sternly into the rearview mirror. “Because, thanks to our escapades the other night, the three of us make quite the little felonious threesome,” I turned to glare at Millie, who had pulled on sweat pants but still had her red flannel pajama top on, “and I’m afraid to be in there alone at night.”

“You need to work on your phobias, Alex.”

“Hey, watch it or next time I’ll bring a chicken along,” I said to my sister, who had a life-long fear of chickens. “Cluck cluck cluck.”

“Well, we better find something cuz you ruined my plans. My
Good Housekeeping
arrived today. Damn.”

“I just started a new book when you called. I snuck out so I wouldn’t wake my mom and gram. I haven’t done that since…well, I’m not sure I ever snuck out,” Millie said.

“You never snuck out?” Sam asked with awe.

I looked at Sam again in the rearview mirror again. “When did you ever sneak out?”

My sister stuck out her jaw. “You don’t know everything about me. I may have done it once or twice.”

I laughed. “Yeah right. Okay. We’re here. Millie, you don’t have to be a lookout. If security comes by, they’ll recognize my car and we should be okay.”

Five minutes later I had the computer turned on. I peered into the screen, the glow illuminating my face. “I don’t know what caused her to look for diamonds in the first place, but she’s got a lot of Web sites flagged about diamond smuggling.”

“Do any of them mention Emmanuelle?” Sam asked, her eyes closed and her arms folded across her chest.

“Look at this. She’s got online phone directories marked for a bunch of cities in northern California, I think. That’s kind of odd.”

Sam groaned. “Maybe they do a lot of diamond smuggling in northern California.”

Millie grabbed a chair and pulled it up next to the computer. I eyed her pajama top enviously. It sported a red and black Scottish plaid style. I started to ask where she got it when I remembered I needed to make a stop at Victoria’s Secret. I wondered if they had anything in red and black plaid.

I turned my attention back to the computer screen. “And look here,” I said in much too cheery a voice for so late in the evening. “Here’s a junior college’s Web site in some town called Santa Rosa. What the heck?”

“Maybe she had a reunion coming up and wanted to locate some classmates?” Millie speculated. “You said she came from California, right?”

“Yeah. Diamond smuggling and school sites and just a bunch of work related stuff. Jeez.” I powered down the computer as the faint crunch of tires on snow echoed through the lobby. The computer turned off and plunged us into darkness.

The three of us hit the floor and, with the help of the faint light coming from the reception area, crawled down the hall as a set of taillights exited the parking lot.

“Probably just the guard,” Sam said.

“Probably,” I echoed back.

The following morning, working on the job of finding a replacement for Mrs. Scott, I left Sam and Millie to the task of gearing up for the ad agency staffing. Millie already contacted several people with copy-writing experience and a few with art degrees. She had deftly arranged for all of them to come in after Christmas, juggling times and days and coordinating it all with my schedule. Appointments filled the first three weeks of January. Samantha had also lined up another large job through a lead she received from a friend of a friend. It felt good to be busy again. Meme was right. Everything goes in cycles. Up and down.

I leaned back in the chair, glad to give my fingers a rest from the keyboard. Outside my office window the sky looked like the color of cement. Large flakes of snow, the size of the granola clusters I’d had for breakfast, fell silently to the ground. I reached down and picked up the newspaper and checked the front page, and then the next and the next. I wanted to see if Emmanuelle had been ensconced behind a door reinforced with metal bars—hopefully with Jerry in the next cell—but found nothing. I mentally kicked myself for never having gotten around to questioning him, but the few times I tried, he deftly avoided me.

“Alex? It’s Detective Van der Burg,” Millie announced over the phone.

“Well, hello,” I gushed a second later, hoping he couldn’t hear the excitement in my voice. “I’m dying to know what’s going on. There’s nothing in the paper.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, but we still haven’t made an arrest.”

I sat up. “What do you mean? How can that be? Isn’t Emmanuelle halfway to Sing Sing by now?”

“Unfortunately we don’t have anything on her. We searched her apartment while we had her at the station and found nothing. No bloody rag, no reference to diamonds, nothing. We’re checking into her bank accounts but I don’t think we’ll get much there either.”

“What does she say?” I asked, not able to keep the skepticism out of my voice.

“Demanded to have a lawyer present, everything you see on TV. Once she calmed down, she managed to clear up a few things.”

“Such as?”

“She verified she’d been terminated from her previous position because of suspicion of embezzlement. She didn’t admit it; just said she had been terminated. Blamed the incident as a set-up by a colleague but swears nothing like that happened at Poupée—at least not to her knowledge.”

“Is she still at the station?”

“No, we let her go.”

“What!”

“Alex, we have nothing on her. She may be an alleged embezzler but that’s not against the law. Personally I think she had nothing to do with it other than a bad choice in a romantic partner. We found nothing at her apartment, or anywhere else for that matter, to link her to the murder or diamonds.”

I heard the weariness in John’s voice and tried to keep my words calm. “Well, did she say why she and Mrs. Scott fought?”