Dangerous Alterations (24 page)

“What is that look about, dear?”

She shifted in her seat. “Look? What look?”

Leona made a face. “Don’t be coy, dear. I’m a master at the ploy.”

She laughed. “A master, huh?”

“What else is bothering you?”

Should she tell? Admit to having some reservations where Milo was concerned?

No. Not yet. Not until things with Kelly were more clear. To say anything sooner would only invite questions Tori didn’t know how to answer.

She searched for something else to say, something to explain away the worry she knew Leona had detected. “I’m worried about Lynn. Her life is so sad.”

“Who on earth is—oh, yes, Rose’s friend from the hospital.”

Tori rushed to offer further clarification. “The woman married to Jeff’s stepcousin.”

“Doesn’t her husband have that cliché mistress we saw sashaying around the funeral home?”

“One and the same,” she confirmed.

“Perhaps Lynn might do well to solicit tips from Kelly.”

Indeed.

“She can’t leave him the way you and I did. Because, if she does, she won’t be able to treat her cancer.”

Something resembling anger flashed in Leona’s eyes. “What can we do to help? Offer to string him up by his various parts?”

“Actually, a stoning went through my head,” Tori admitted.

Leona shook her head. “Too good for him. He needs to suffer more.”

“While that notion is more than a little appealing, I think our efforts would be better served helping Lynn. I just don’t know how.”

“Perhaps a bunny would help?”

She smiled. “Maybe. But let’s give it a little more thought, okay?”

Leona nodded, then reached across the table and patted Tori’s arm. “Can I tell you something?”

“Of course.”

“I made a choice all those years ago to never put my heart on the line the way I did with Emmett ever again. Looking back, I wonder sometimes if I made a mistake.”

She covered Leona’s hand with her own and waited, the woman’s naked honesty catching her by surprise.

“Not because I didn’t get married, mind you. But because I never had the chance to be a mother.”

Her mouth gaped open. Who was this woman sitting across the table—this woman who avoided children like the plague and doused herself in antibacterial sanitizer every time she came in contact with her great-nieces and -nephews?

“Close your mouth, dear, it’s a most unflattering pose,” Leona reprimanded.

She closed her mouth.

“And don’t stare, it’s rude.”

She averted her gaze to the nearly empty cookie plate in the center of the table only to look back at Leona seconds later. Wide-eyed.

Leona rolled her eyes skyward. “Oh trust me, I have no bizarre longing for stretch marks and photographs of me posing with a stomach the size of Texas, because I don’t. But …” Leona’s voice trailed off as she wriggled her hand out from under Tori’s. “I do believe my interrupted beauty sleep has caused me to babble.”

Wrapping her hands around both of their glasses, Leona stood and carried them to the sink. “There are fresh sheets on your bed and fresh towels on the chest in the corner of your room.”

Tori stood, too, the rapid change in conversation leaving her more than a little confused. But if she’d learned one thing about Leona Elkin over the past two years, it was the woman’s tendency to retreat behind a prickly shell when pushed.

Whatever it was Leona had been ready to say would have to wait for another day.

Leona looked back over her shoulder as she reached the doorway leading to the bedroom hallway. “Oh, and dear? If you tell anyone about my pajamas, I will tell them you snore like a lumberjack.”

The morning was a blur as insurance adjusters, carpet cleaners, and various volunteers went about the business of getting the library’s main room open once again. Even the children’s room began to show progress as Debbie and Melissa moved in, noting what needed to be done and then dispatching their expertly assembled army of moms to make it happen.

By midday, the notion of opening the next day was looking more likely than not and Tori was beyond pleased. Still, though, she found herself looking at the wall clock or her cell phone again and again, anxious for her meeting with Fred Granderson.

She’d checked a half dozen times to make sure Margaret Louise was, in fact, coming and that the woman still had the photograph Lulu had identified. It wasn’t that she couldn’t relay everything Lulu had said about the woman without the picture, because she could. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that two witnesses and a photograph were better than one and nothing.

“We’re here, we’re here,” Margaret Louise bellowed as she walked through the propped open front door, a wide-eyed Lulu in tow. “Melissa got home just as the youngins were gettin’ off the bus. I handed Molly Sue off to her mamma and got in the car. Next thing I knew, Lulu was clamorin’ to come. Figured it couldn’t hurt since she’s the one who saw everything.”

Tori opened her mouth to speak but clamped it shut as the woman continued. “Woo-wee ya’ll did a great job in here today. Almost can’t tell anything happened, can you, Lulu?”

Lulu nodded but said nothing.

“Why, if it weren’t for the door bein’ wide open and the yellow tape ’round the outer wall of your office, I’d think this whole business was nothin’ more than a dream.”

“If only that were the case,” Tori mumbled, her gaze locked on an eerily quiet Lulu. “You okay, sweetie?”

Lulu looked up at Tori, swallowed, then averted her focus back to the floor.

“Lulu?” Tori bent at the waist and nudged the little girl’s chin upward with her finger. “What’s wrong? Are you feeling sick?”

“What happens if I’m wrong?” Lulu finally blurted. “I don’t want to get that lady mad at me.”

Tori’s heart sank. “Do you think you’re wrong?”

The child’s shoulders rose and fell. “I don’t know.”

She looked up at Margaret Louise only to see a second, more pronounced shrug. “So you’re not sure if you saw her in my office?”

Lulu shook her head. “I saw her.”

“Then you’re not sure if she was holding a tool like your daddy’s in her hand?”

Again, the child shook her head. “I saw that, too.”

She straightened up and guided Lulu into her arms, relief coursing through her body as she did. “Then you’re not wrong. You simply tell the fire chief what you told your Mee-Maw and me at the bakery last night. That’s all.”

“Same thing I told you, ain’t it, Silly Bug?”

Lulu nibbled back a grin. “Yes, Mee-Maw.”

Lifting her nose into the air, Margaret Louise inhaled. “The smell ain’t so bad, either. What’d you use?”

It was Tori’s turn to shrug. “The carpet guys came in with a deodorizer for the carpet and another for the air and, voila.”

“Hold on to their name, will you? Now that there’s another grandbaby on the way, the stomach flu is goin’ to be a monthlong event in Melissa and Jake’s house.” Despite the words, Margaret Louise couldn’t be happier. One more grandbaby simply meant one more child to love.

Heavy footsteps behind them made them all turn, the backlight from the sun making it nearly impossible to see. She bobbed her head left, then right, squinting against the blinding afternoon rays.

A burly body stepped left, successfully blocking the sun from her eyes. She dropped her hand to her side and blinked once, twice.

Fred Granderson.

“Things look good around here, Victoria.” Fred stepped farther into the room then gestured over his shoulder as a second figure strode into the room. “Chief Dallas is here, too.”

Her stomach churned.

“Makes sense,” Margaret Louise mumbled next to Tori’s ear.

And it did. She just couldn’t shake the near Pavlovian response the Sweet Briar police chief had instilled in her soul.

Had Tiffany Ann Gilbert not shown up dead in the library parking lot shortly after Tori moved to Sweet Briar, she’d probably regard the man like everyone else in town. But the town sweetheart had, and so Tori didn’t.

Still, she tried, even forging a tenuous connection with the police chief over a homemade chocolate mousse pie following the death of Rose’s next-door neighbor. And, for a while, things were okay, bordering on friendly, even. But all of that was undone when she was later questioned in the death of a local mom tied to Melissa and Beatrice, and then again in a smaller way on Friday night in regards to Jeff.

She gulped.

The chief tipped his hat. “Miss Sinclair.”

“Chief.”

Fred looked from the chief to Victoria and back again before rocking back on his heels and releasing a low whistle. “Hmmm …” He looked to Margaret Louise for help. “I hear you ladies have found a possible suspect in the fire?”

Margaret Louise pointed at Lulu. “This one is sharp as they come. Nothin’ gets by my Lulu.”

Fred softened his pose and smiled at Lulu. “So you saw something you think can help us?”

Tori felt Lulu’s hand inside hers, forcing her to refocus, to put her issues with Chief Dallas aside. She squeezed the little girl’s hand three times. “You know what you saw, Lulu. That’s all you have to tell Chief Granderson. Anything that does or doesn’t come from it will be up to him, not you.”

Lulu looked at the floor and returned three squeezes of her own. “I saw a lady in Miss Sinclair’s office when I went to the bathroom.”

She saw the exchange of looks between the two men.

“Was she one of Miss Sinclair’s friends?” Chief Dallas asked.

Tori clenched her teeth.

“I didn’t know her.”

Fred marched past them, retrieving the stool from behind the information desk and pulling it into the open room. He patted the seat. “Why don’t you sit, Lulu, and tell us what you remember.”

Lulu climbed onto the stool at Tori’s nod and crossed her dangling sneaker-clad feet at the ankles. “She had a turny thing in her hand and she was over by that table Miss Sinclair has, the one where she keeps her snacks.”

“What kind of a turny thing?” Fred asked as he crouched beside the stool. “Can you describe it?”

Margaret Louise moved in behind her granddaughter. “Describe it just the way you did to Miss Sinclair and me at the bakery.”

Lulu sucked in her lower lip then released it slowly. “She had one of those things my daddy uses when he changes the battery in one of our toys. Only hers had a red handle and my daddy’s has a black handle.”

Fred’s eyes brightened. “Wait right here, I think I have one out in my truck.”

They waited as he disappeared through the front door in search of a visual aid.

Chief Dallas stepped forward. “Can you describe this lady you saw, Lulu?”

Margaret Louise held up her hand. “We can do better than that. We have a—”

Fred jogged into the room with a screwdriver in his left hand and a hammer in his right hand. He held them up in front of Lulu. “Are you talking about one of these?”

Lulu reached out and touched the tool in Fred’s left hand.

Tori saw a second and more telling exchange of looks between the men.

“Did she say anything to you?” Chief Dallas asked.

Lulu nodded. “She asked if I’d like a lollipop.”

Fred shook his head and jammed the tools into his pocket. “Then what?”

“I took the lollipop and went to the bathroom.”

Chief Dallas hushed his voice despite the rapt interest Tori knew was there. “Was she still there when you went back to wherever it was you were going?”

“She’d been in the children’s room with me, readin’ stories with her little sister,” Margaret Louise offered as she, along with Tori, waited for the answer to a question they hadn’t thought to ask her the night before.

Lulu nodded. “I think she dropped something under the table.”

Tori’s mouth went dry as she looked to Fred and Margaret Louise for confirmation of what she was hearing.

“Why do you say that?” Fred prompted.

“Because she was kneeling on the floor and her head was under the table.”

Fred clapped his hands together. “Can you describe this woman to us, Lulu?”

Chief Dallas crossed his arms. “I already asked her that.”

“Can you, Lulu?” Fred asked again.

“I saw her in that lady’s picture last night.”

Fred’s brows furrowed. “What lady?”

“Lynn Calder,” Tori explained. “She’s a friend of Rose Winters.”

“This woman had a picture of the arsonist?”

Plucking the photograph from an inside zippered compartment of her tote bag, Margaret Louise held it out to Fred as Tori spoke. “Margaret Louise and Lulu ran into Lynn at Debbie’s Bakery last night just before I arrived. She was showing a packet of pictures to Margaret Louise when I got there. When they were done, Lulu and I started looking through them together, too. That’s when we came across this one.”

Fred took the picture, made a face, then pried a second photograph from the bottom. He looked at both then handed one back to Tori. “I’m guessing this isn’t the one you want us to see.”

She glanced down quickly, recognized the bell-shaped flowers from Lynn’s packet of pictures, and stuffed it onto a shelf behind the information desk. “Sorry about that.”

Fred waved away her apology and looked at the photo in his hand, handing it to Chief Dallas when he was done. “So what happened? Why is this picture so special?”

Lulu climbed off the stool and walked over to Chief Dallas. Extending her index finger, the little girl pointed at Kelly. “That’s the lady I saw in Miss Sinclair’s office.”

Chief Dallas narrowed his eyes. “Are you sure?”

Lulu nodded.

“Do we have any idea who this woman is?” Fred asked as he took in the photograph once again.

“Her name is Kelly. I don’t know her last name. But—”

“She’s the girlfriend of that out-of-towner who was murdered last week.”