Bait & Switch (Mayfield Cozy Mystery Book 1) (7 page)

CHAPTER 9

With Clarice leading the boys on round two against dirt, I settled at the newly cleaned kitchen table and spread out. My laptop, Skip’s laptop, a notebook, my phone and a few ideas.

I listened to my mother’s tangential voicemail message — the usual chatty gossip, this time with wedding flavor. Who wore what, said what and was offended by whom and/or by their placement at the reception, ad nauseam. No need to return the call, as Clarice had predicted.

I checked my watch. Dad’s afternoon nap time. I’d visited two days before the wedding, had taken Skip along in the hope that Dad would make the connection with what I’d been telling him for the past few months, that I was getting married. Dad had been alert enough to play a decent game of chess with Skip, but when we left he called me Doreen — his sister’s name — and after some fumbling came up with ‘young man’ for Skip.

I’d waited until Dad was settled in the care facility to accept Skip’s proposal. I needed to know he was taken care of before I could think about committing myself to someone else. I sighed, my stomach in knots. At least Dad wasn’t aware enough to understand, and be troubled by, my current predicament.

I dialed the nursing home’s Alzheimer’s unit desk, and Arleta, my favorite nurse, answered. “How is he today?”

“Tired and a little out of sorts. Still managed to complain about his chocolate pudding at lunch, though.”

I smiled. Dad swears he can tell the difference between Jell-O brand instant pudding and “that cheap knock-off stuff y’all are skimping on.” But he gets confused on the way back from the cafeteria and more often than not is found sitting in someone else’s room thinking it’s his. Good thing his fellow residents seem to enjoy the company.

“Honey, don’t you worry,” Arleta continued. “Alzheimer’s patients don’t have a real good handle on time. He won’t realize you’re gone for a while. He’ll just be glad to see you next time you visit. How’s Cozumel?”

“Warm.” I cringed, hoping it was enough of an answer.

“’Course it is, honey.” Arleta laughed the deep-throated gurgle I love. “That’s what those bikinis are for. You just keep on having a fabulous time.”

“Give Dad a hug for me.”

“You know he won’t tolerate that, but I’ll tell him you called.”

oOo

Eight boys and the package of Oreos they decimated in under thirty seconds indicated the kitchen table was not the best location to commandeer as my office. I pulled my laptop to safety just in time, barely dodging a shower of sticky crumbs as the boys pried the cookie layers apart and shouted with their mouths full.

Their awe of Clarice had worn off, and they were clamoring over each other to impress her with tales of the strangest things they’d found in their various tenures on the farm — a cast iron bathtub with a sapling growing up through the drain hole, old tractor tires, horseshoes, a rusty revolver. I sat there, hugging the warm laptop to my chest and grinning. There is no better noise than that made by happy, free-range boys.

Clarice shooed them out the door and dropped into a chair across from me. “So?”

“Passwords.” I shook my head. “Not the usual suspects — birth date, mother’s maiden name—”

“Which one?” Clarice snorted.

At my scowl, she sniffed. “Uncalled for. Sorry. Did you try your info? He might have switched to the numbers of the most important person in his life.”

“What, 36 - 24 - 36?”

I don’t catch Clarice off-guard often, but it’s worth it when I do. She hooted then dissolved into bouncing jiggles and pushed her glasses up on her nose. “Are you?” she managed.

“Not for the past decade or so. There is something about spending most of my time on a rolling office chair that develops an affinity — my bottom with the width of the seat.”

“You got that right, girl.” Clarice smacked her own hip which overhung the side of her current chair. “You have the rest of Skip’s luggage in the Tahoe? Let’s go through it. He was so forgetful, he had to have written down the passwords somewhere.”

So much for our new tidiness. We dumped the contents of Skip’s suitcases on the floor in my bedroom. The man had packed enough changes of clothes to last a month. His scent — bay rum aftershave and shoe polish — flooded over me. I sank cross-legged into the middle of the pile and picked up a pair of white athletic socks balled together. I hadn’t even had a chance to do his laundry yet, and he was gone.

Clarice gripped my shoulder. “Hold it together. Check the pockets.”

The room looked like a fickle teenaged girl’s with clothes strewn everywhere by the time we’d examined every garment — and found nothing except ticket stubs from the symphony Skip and I had attended a couple weeks ago.

Clarice started prying the cushioned insoles out of Skip’s shoes. I pulled his shaving kit onto my lap and unloaded the toiletries. The usual — deodorant, shaving cream, razor, toothpaste, mouthwash, a trial-size bottle of Tylenol which I verified was really just filled with pills. The only oddity was an elaborate nail care kit in a zippered leather case. A couple pairs of snub-nosed scissors, different sizes of clippers, tweezers, a knife-tipped wedge thingy, and several items that looked like dental tools all held in their designated spaces by little elastic bands. I’ve had plenty of manicures, and they were nowhere near this complicated. I doubted the set would have made it through airport security if we’d flown commercial. I held the case up for Clarice to see, and frowned as one side of the case flexed but the other didn’t.

I had the tools out in an instant and ran my fingers over the seams on the stiff side. I hooked an elastic loop with my thumb and yanked. A Velcro ripping sound, and the case’s lining came away. A booklet slipped out, its edges thumbed with wear.

I’d seen Skip with this little brown journal once. We’d been at a restaurant, and I’d gone to the ladies’ room. When I had returned to the table, he’d been jotting notes in it. He’d palmed it and slid it into his shirt pocket when I walked up. He’d suggested we go for a stroll on the bay front which made me happy, and I hadn’t thought any more about it.

Skip was the king of notes — Post-its all over his desk and on the mirror in his bathroom, slips of paper magnet-pinned to his fridge, clipped to the visor in his car. One of his endearing quirks.

All those memory triggers did their job, because I got flowers from him on every possible commemorative date associated with our friendship first, then our romance, and as thank-yous for every new orphanage or charity I signed up for the foundation to support. He loved to celebrate, and he wrote notes to make sure that happened.

Clarice knelt beside me and breathed over my shoulder. I flipped a page, then another and another, faster and faster. Columns of Skip’s scratchy writing, but disjointed letters and numbers, nothing meaningful.

The word ‘shark’ jumped out, and I scrabbled back a few pages to find it again.

M Shark    070812    5.55m    103112    IND

Upon closer examination, there were a few recognizable words among the lists. ‘Shark’ made several appearances, along with ‘Fat’, ‘Nose’ and ‘Ocho’. In fact, there was a ‘Fat A’ and a ‘Fat H’. Nicknames. And some of them matched up with the names Matt had mentioned.

Not good. So very not good.

I glanced up at Clarice. Her penciled brows were drawn together in a worried line.

“I’m in trouble,” I whispered.

She just nodded. Then she pushed herself to her feet. “We have to get you set up, wired in. Tackle this professionally. You need a space.”

“I know the place. Upstairs — in the attic. Can you help me haul a table?”

“There’s an elevator,” Clarice said. “The boys showed me.”

“Do you trust it?” I frowned.

“Nope.”

I hoped Dill wouldn’t mind, but I wanted all signs of my nosing into Skip’s — and now my — mess out of sight of the FBI should Matt keep his promise to return. We found a decent, only semi-wobbly table, an upholstered armchair that hadn’t leaked too much stuffing, and a lamp with a working light bulb and arranged them within cord’s reach of the only electrical outlet. I tacked blankets over the windows in lieu of curtains. I didn’t want anyone outside to see me burning the midnight oil.

“You’re going to freeze your tushie off,” Clarice announced, hugging herself and rubbing her arms even though she’d developed a sweat sheen from all our stair climbing.

“It’ll keep me from falling asleep.” But I think I saw my breath puff in short spurts as I spoke.

“Coffee.” Clarice turned toward the door. Her steps were slow, not her usual indefatigable marching cadence. And I remembered she’d hardly slept, if at all, the night before.

“Go to bed,” I said. “No point in staying up with me.”

She returned a few minutes later with a steaming carafe and a plate of apple slices spread with peanut butter. “I’m setting my alarm for 5:00 a.m. I’ll come check on you then. And girl—” she sandwiched my face between her palms, “you get ‘em. Whoever’s done this to Skip — you get ‘em. I can’t believe he’d be involved willingly. Maybe they had some kind of power over him, extortion or blackmail. Get them where it hurts.”

I nodded, my cheeks still squashed between her hands. “That’s what I intend to do.”

CHAPTER 10

I wasted an hour trying to piece together passwords from the jumble of letters and numbers in Skip’s notebook. Then I went back to Clarice’s advice and made a list of my information — birthday, address, phone number, my name in different configurations. No luck. I played with combinations of Skip’s and my initials.

Dates were so important to him, so I veered into that track — the day we met, the day he asked me to head his foundation, our first date — which was supposed to have been dinner at a venerable Italian restaurant but ended up as a progressive meal of burritos and cotton candy on a pier because a political protest clogged the street where the famed cafe was — the day he proposed, our wedding date.

Then I tried the date he first told me he loved me, written out to get the right number of characters — August17.

Bingo.

I pushed back in the chair and sat blinking as Skip’s private folders stacked up on the screen.

A few were clearly labeled as Turbo-Tidy Clean files — tax records, expenses, purchase orders. The rest, hundreds of files, were named with codes that were starting to look familiar. I picked one at random and clicked it open — and gulped at the astronomical sums that bounced back and forth across the debit and credit columns. I checked others, and others, and others — while the details were different, the concept was the same. A mind-boggling amount of money had been shuffled. Turbo-Tidy Clean’s net income was chump change compared to these numbers. The company was being used as a front.

Skip’s claim of hopelessness at balancing his checkbook — that had to have been a ruse, feigned. There was no getting around it — a patent lie.

My body dwindled into slow motion as the realization sank in — my vision blurred, I forgot to breathe, the exact way Skip had looked across the desk during my interview when he flushed a little as though he was embarrassed to tell me he wasn’t good with numbers — the scene rolled sluggishly across my mental screen.

He’d said that he much preferred the marketing and operational aspects of his business, that all he really cared about was growing the foundation to help kids who were facing the same difficulties he’d had in life. I’d fallen in love with his goals right then, even though it’d taken longer to fall in love with the man himself. But I’d always assumed that was my fault since I wasn’t looking for love or a husband when I interviewed for the job. The thought hadn’t even crossed my stubbornly practical mind.

Time was wasting. I jerked my attention back to the task at hand. I’d save the grieving for later. Not to mention a severe tongue-lashing for being so gullible.

These internal accounts had to be linked — the system was too complicated to allow for manual entries in all the different ledgers. I’m not a forensic accountant, but it was obvious there had to be a master entry sheet somewhere.

I found it just as Clarice padded into the room in a voluminous purple robe, bearing fresh coffee, a bowl of hard boiled eggs and a salt shaker. I greeted her with a huge grin. Except the dismal breakfast deserved some comment. “Doughnuts? Bacon? Hollandaise sauce?”

“You got in, then?” Clarice’s bloodshot eyes widened behind her glasses.

“I need a few more hours. Now for the fun part. I need to do this fast — there might not be much time before someone notices. Help?” I stood and offered her the chair.

Clarice sank into it. “Tell me what to do.”

I set my laptop in front of her and brought up the foundation’s list of supported charities. Then I sat on the floor with my back against the wall and balanced Skip’s laptop on my knees. “Open all the orphanage accounts. You know how Skip makes a monthly deposit to the foundation from the business? I’m about to make that funnel a whole lot bigger, but the funds can’t stay in any one place very long. I’m going to set up streams to filter it through several charities per continent.”

“Speak English,” Clarice muttered.

“Read me bank account numbers. Start with southeast Asia.”

Wire transfers had been foreign territory for me too when I’d started working for Skip’s foundation, but now it was routine. With a few clicks and an e-mail to Anna, our bank service representative who seemed to work 24/7, the floodgates opened. I needed her expert guidance because I couldn’t afford any glitches. Her contacts would speed up the process. She sent back an enthusiastic response when I told her we were making special donations early for Christmas.

I crossed an ethical line, a big one that would probably send me to jail. The foundation was no longer squeaky clean, but if I was going to abscond with my husband’s dirty money I might as well pass it along to worthy organizations where I knew it would be used for good. This money had gotten him kidnapped, for reasons I didn’t understand. Shaking it up just might get me some answers.

I directed the money laundering accounts into Turbo-Tidy Clean’s main business account and then into the foundation and then into charities all over the world. I deposited money into the accounts of almost all our usual recipients in a series of transactions small enough to be under the radar. But I couldn’t leave the mysterious funds there and implicate innocent people.

Once the money laundering accounts were empty, I went back to the charity accounts where I had access and set up reroutes from one to another several times over, making sure the funds zipped in and out of different countries so the trails would be harder to trace. As the confirmations started streaming in, I composed an e-mail notifying the affected charities of a little confusion with our accounts, telling them not to worry if they saw a few fluctuations but to enjoy their Christmas gift. I also asked them to cash out the deposits as soon as their local banks allowed. I was using banks I’d used many times in the past, so I was hopeful the funds would be available soon.

Wired funds can be seized. Suitcases full of the local currencies would be a whole lot harder to retrieve. Speed was of the essence.

I became aware of a dull thudding. It sounded like an off-balance washing machine knocking about in the bowels of the old mansion. I squinted up at Clarice. “What is that?”

She bolted upright, her ears pricked. “We have company.”

I gasped. “Not now. Matt cannot see this. Doesn’t the man sleep?” I flapped a hand frantically. “Stall.”

Clarice charged out of the room, her robe billowing behind her. The whole floor shook as she rumbled down the stairs, and I frantically selected the email addresses of my orphanages and hit the send button. I tapped out a separate message for a few pivotal charities and sent that one off with a silent prayer.

I shut everything down, unplugged the wi-fi hot spot device, coiled the cords and piled all the equipment on the table. Then I yanked a blanket off the window and draped it over the evidence. Not exactly subtle. I could only hope Matt wasn’t carrying a search warrant.

I scooped up the empty carafes and dishes — they’d be a dead giveaway that we’d recently been spending time in this dusty old attic. Plus we’d left footprints all over the floor. The best I could do was close the door and tiptoe down the stairs.

At the first floor landing, I realized I needed a reasonable explanation for my delayed appearance. I ducked into the bathroom, ripped off my clothes and stood in the tub. I spun the handles and bit back a scream as freezing water blasted over me. I tugged the brittle shower curtain around, too late to prevent a good-sized puddle on the floor.

The bathroom had last been remodeled in the 1950s with Pepto-Bismol pink fixtures and flowered tiles. Apparently shower stalls were not yet in vogue then — or the room wasn’t plumbed for one. I pulled the handheld nozzle from its overhead clamp and rested it on my shoulder. The curtain clung to my wet calves, but the water was slowly warming and starting to feel good. How long had it been since I was clean?

No one was banging on the bathroom door yet, so I lingered with the bar of soap and trial-size shampoo Clarice had left on the tub ledge. Clutching a tattered, formerly-pink towel around myself, I scooted down the hall to my bedroom and discovered that I hadn’t moved my own luggage upstairs yet. I snatched Skip’s robe off the floor and pulled it on, cinching the belt tight.

If Clarice was dealing with our visitor in her robe, I might as well appear in similar garb. Not that I had a lot of choice. But maybe Matt would get the hint that it was far too early for a polite social call. I rolled up the sleeves and donned a pair of Skip’s socks for good measure.

I crept down the last flight of stairs and steeled myself for the lies I would have to tell Matt. Then I pushed open the swinging door into the kitchen.

The person sitting at the kitchen table with Clarice couldn’t have been any more different from Matt Jarvis. First of all, it was a woman, and she was gorgeous. Black wavy hair that reached her waist, creamy tan skin, enormous brown eyes fringed with Elizabeth Taylor lashes, perfect makeup and brilliant white teeth as she laughed and chatted. She was also gigantically pregnant. So big, in fact, that I immediately imagined her tipping over frontwards if she tried to stand up.

She flashed a smile my direction.

“Sidonie Gonzales, meet Nora Ingram — Sheldon.” Clarice hung my new last name out there on a hyphen as a second-thought addition. “Sidonie is a sales representative for the Petal Hydration line of skin care products.” Clarice raised her mug and gave me a meaningful one-eyed glare from behind it.

That’s when I noticed the wheeled case parked beside Sidonie’s chair. If there was one thing I hadn’t expected to encounter out here in the boonies, it was a multilevel marketing pitch.

“Also bath salts.” Sidonie stretched to unzip her case, grunting softly. “Lotions, lip balms, sunscreen, body scrubs, you name it. I could give you a fifteen-minute face mask, or we could go whole-hog on the full body treatment.” She beamed at me hopefully. “You’re my first potential customers, and it would be so helpful if you’d let me practice on you.”

I didn’t dare glance back at Clarice. But anything was better than facing the FBI just now. And I was dressed for the occasion. I plopped into the spare chair and sighed. “We don’t have any money.” I didn’t mention that I had just stolen a whole lot of someone else’s money.

“Really?” Sidonie frowned for the tiniest fraction of a second, then dismissed my objection with a finger wave. “Doesn’t matter. I got most of this starter kit free. A promotion the company was running to sign up new representatives. I’ll start with your brows.”

“What’s wrong with my brows?”

Clarice snorted into her coffee.

Sidonie heaved herself to her feet. “Oh, nothing. Well, not much. Just a little — I can fix it.” She moved amazingly fast for her condition. She leaned over me, her belly rubbing uncomfortably against my shoulder, wielding a pair of pointy tweezers.

I scrunched my eyes closed as she tipped my head back and thought maybe she knew what she was talking about. I wouldn’t mind looking more like her.

A few relatively painless plucks later, Sidonie turned and lined up a phalanx of pastel-colored bottles on the table.

I opened my mouth.

“Etherea told me,” Sidonie anticipated my question breezily. “Well, first my husband said he’d seen you in the store. So I made a point of remembering that I’d forgotten something and drove into town to get the details from Etherea myself. It’s not often we get new people here. Hank and I’ve been here less than a year ourselves, but I’m going stir crazy. This place is downright claustrophobic compared to Fort Worth.” She rolled her eyes and gave an exaggerated sigh. “But Hank got a good job offer, so here we are. I’m so excited to have girlfriends. Etherea’s nice, but she’s not — well, you know.” She slapped some cold, creamy stuff on my face with a paintbrush. “Isn’t this fun?”

So the man who’d given me a momentary fright in the store was Hank, Sidonie’s husband. And the cute little girl was theirs. I breathed a sigh of relief that he hadn’t passed on my suspicious reaction to his wife. “When are you due?” I asked.

Sidonie patted her belly. “Any time now. I wish they’d hurry up.”

“Driving over our potholed road ought to do the trick,” Clarice muttered.

I tried to kick her under the table, but my leg wasn’t long enough. “Twins? Where’s the nearest hospital?”

“Longview, but there’s a clinic in Woodland. We’re not counting on making it to either one in time. CeCe came in thirty-five minutes, so I have all the supplies. Etherea said she’d help. She’s only twenty minutes away.”

General store manager, midwife, what else? Seems if a woman chose to live out here, she had to be a jill-of-all-trades. “How far are you from us?”

“Just over.” Sidonie gestured vaguely in the direction opposite town. “We’re next door neighbors. Can’t miss it. I painted the mailbox with reflective yellow paint.”

Clearly, I had missed it the afternoon I arrived in the pouring rain. If I’d seen a neon mailbox, I’d have certainly stopped to check. “You’d better have my phone number, just in case. Not that I would know what to do, but I could hold your hand, heat water, or something.”