Eternally 21: A Mrs. Frugalicious Shopping Mystery (13 page)

“I’ll buy them for you if you want,” the lady said.

“Five is more than enough.” I handed her the coupon and the pizzas. “You take them. They’re free after the triple coupons are applied.”

“Really?” she asked. “My kids will be thrilled.”

“Enjoy,” I said as the bag boy returned with my deodorant and finished loading my groceries into the reusable bags I received ten cents each for using.

“Thanks,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” I said as the register continued to not deduct from the rest of my total the way I’d anticipated. “Aren’t the eggs a dollar off?”

“That ended yesterday,” the checker said.

“Oh,” I said, sure I’d checked and double-checked the expiration date on the egg deal, but more sure I didn’t want to attract any more attention to myself than I already was. “Okay.”
23

“The Berry Madness promotion starts at midnight, so I’m giving you the forty cents off per basket on that.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“This really is amazing,” the woman behind me said. “I’m going to have to start clipping coupons too.”
24

“I have to admit, it is kind of a thrill to save like this,” I said, not saying how absolutely sick it felt to realize I’d miscalculated by over—

“$109.11,” the checker said.

Gulp.

“Are you kidding?” Trent asked, spotting the groceries even before he popped the trunk to throw in his football gear.

I’d been asking myself the same question since I’d tossed my $60-over-budget groceries into the trunk and pushed countless yellow lights to get home in a record fifteen minutes. The other question, where Frank was, remained unanswered. “Any word from your dad?”

“Not yet,” FJ said.

“Then we better get a move on.” I hopped out of the car and headed for the trunk. “The sooner we get this put away, the sooner we’re out of here.”

“We don’t have time,” Trent said.

“There are perishables that have to be put away.”

“We won’t get to play if we’re not there by warm-up.”

“We’ll be okay if we hurry,” FJ said. He set down his equipment and grabbed two gallons of milk.

“Maybe if the food hadn’t fallen out everywhere,” Trent grumbled, stuffing a box of cereal back into a shopping bag.

“From racing to get back here as fast as I could,” I said, picking up a stray peach and two shopping bags. “So grumble at your father when you see him, not me.”

Personally, I planned to read him the riot act. Since I handled practically everything related to hearth and home, there was no excuse for him to space off the simplest, most infrequent of kid duties. By doing so, he’d disrupted my shop, causing me (at least in part) to lose my all-important concentration and sixty bucks.

I was also starting to worry. Why wasn’t he answering his phone?

“You want these in the kitchen?” FJ asked, distracting me from the maudlin car crash to heart attack what-if list starting to run through my head.

“Basement,” I led the way to the door, down the stairs, and flipped on the lights to my converted bedroom.

“You know,” Trent set down his bags, “this whole bargain room thing is just weird.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Cuz, like, we’re rich.”

“We’re not rich,” I said.

“What would you call it?” Trent asked.

“Comfortably blessed,” I said, despite how uncomfortable it felt to go way over my grocery budget.

“Then we don’t need to have a food bank in the basement.”

“Have you noticed the sheer quantity you and your brother consume every day?”

“True that,” FJ said, “But we do have a lot of stuff already. Did you need to go grocery shopping today?”

“It was a triple coupon day.”

“Gotcha,” FJ said, shooting Trent a
told you so
look.

“It’s still weird to have a room full of ketchup and mustard and stuff,” Trent said.

“I gotta admit,” FJ said, “that is kinda true.”

“A penny saved can be way more than a penny earned when you do it right,” I said. “And I donate the stuff we don’t use.”

“Whatever,” Trent said. “You don’t expect us to put it all away right now, do you?”

“Just pull out the frozen and cold stuff and go get the rest of the bags,” I said. “I’ll put away the rest later.”

The boys took off for upstairs.

I was loading Eggo waffles and the pizzas I’d salvaged from the transaction into the spare freezer in the guest room when Trent came down with three more grocery bags. He had my cell phone, which I must have inadvertently left on the seat of my car, propped between his shoulder and his ear.

“Tell Coach we’re almost there,” he said.

“Is that your dad?”

Trent nodded.

“And he’s okay?”

Trent nodded again.

My blood pressure spiked. “And he’s at the high school?”

“On his way there,” Trent said.

“Hand me the phone.”

He handed me the bags and my cell in exchange for the two half gallons of ice cream.

“I had to come rushing home because no one could get a hold of you,” I said, heading back into the storage room. “I was starting to really worry. Where have you—”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.

On the off chance he wasn’t referring to what I was sure he was referring to, I managed not to utter a dubious
tell you what?
“Where have you been?” I repeated weakly.

“Maddie, why didn’t you say anything to me about being at the mall last Friday?”

I’d managed to stay out of camera shots. I’d been to the police and given my account. Considering Frank worked for the local news, I knew he’d eventually overhear my name in connection with the Laila DeSimone story, but I didn’t expect it to happen so soon. “I did,” I said, the irritation still in my voice, but the conviction knocked out of my sails. “Remember I mentioned I’d helped a lady who’d collapsed?”

“You didn’t say she’d died.”

“She hadn’t at that point.”

“And you didn’t feel the need to say anything when I told you she’d been murdered?”

“I was going to, but—”

“But what?”

“You were completely stressed out over the TV deal. The last thing I wanted to do was bother you with—”

“With the fact that my wife’s name is being associated with a mall murder?”

“As a Good Samaritan.”

“A Good Samaritan?”

“Who tried to help a woman after she collapsed. Practically in my arms, I might add.”

“Because she was
poisoned
!”

“Frank, even if I’d known at the time, what choice did I have but help her?”

“What will people think when they hear my wife—”

“Helped catch a killer?”

“A what?” Trent, who’d returned from putting away the ice cream, asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Oh God,” Frank said. “This is getting worse by the second.”

“Everything’s fine,” I said to both Frank and Trent as I ducked back into the guest room with a handful of frozen veggies and lowered my voice to a whisper. “In fact, since I was there that morning and saw just about everyone that came in contact with the woman, I think I can help the police catch whoever did it.”

“Don’t get any more tangled up in it,” Frank said.

“Frank, by filling them in on what I know and saw, they can wrap up the investigation faster. You said yourself it’s getting in the way.”

“Not as much as having the Michaels name associated with a murder will.”

His call waiting beeped, obscuring what might have been my reluctant
okay
of agreement.

“That’s gotta be Stasia,” he said. “Finally.”

My stomach lurched. “Stasia?”

“Anastasia.”

“As in Chastain?”

“Yeah, that’s what her friends call her.”

“I see.”
Stasia
was clearly smarter than she looked—at least where connecting the dots that placed me at the mall at the time of Laila’s collapse and presumably sharing the details with my husband were concerned. Should I have been more concerned, not about where my husband was, but who he was with? “I guess I didn’t realize you were on such a friendly basis.”

“Maddie, everyone at the station calls her Stasia.”

“You still haven’t said where you’ve been all afternoon.”

“I’ve been in meetings trying to get everything squared away for the new segment, only to find out Stasia—or Anastasia, or whatever it is you think I should call her—was tied up all afternoon covering another incident at that damn mall.”

“What kind of incident?” I asked, despite what I already knew.

“Some kind of weird break-in.”

“Really?” I asked in the most unassuming tone I could possibly muster. “Do you think it’s related?”

“I think I need to get her out of the mall and onto the set of my show.”

“Which is why I was trying to help the po—”

“The groceries are all inside,” FJ yelled from the top of the stairs.

“Let’s go,” Trent said.

Frank’s call waiting beeped again.

“I’ve gotta go,” Frank said. “I can’t miss this call.”

I hung up with Frank, looked down at my phone, and noticed that in the rush to get the groceries inside, I’d missed a call of my own.

Fourteen

Maddie, It’s Griff Watson.
Sorry I couldn’t get back until now but there was a break-in at the pet store, and I ended up having to track down two MIA iguanas all afternoon. I know we were going to go over that list, but I just clocked out and am off to the gym to try and clear my head. If you still want to talk tomorrow, I work the afternoon shift, so any time after two should be good. Just leave me a message with the time or something. Oh, and thanks for getting me on the guest list. I can’t wait to see Frank’s show.

I redialed Griff twice and got his away
spiel twice, but I couldn’t leave a message of any kind. Not with two extra sets of ears in the car, anyway.

Under normal circumstances, I’d have dropped off the boys, parked in the student lot facing the football field, ambled over to the bleachers to join my husband and (his usual comments about FJ’s blasé attitude notwithstanding) enjoyed the togetherness inherent in watching our sons toss the pigskin with their teammates.

These were not exactly normal circumstances.

When we arrived at the high school, Frank wasn’t even seated in the bleachers but leaning against a post at the entrance to the field with his phone pressed to his ear. He was so engaged in conversation with
Stasia
or whomever it was he was speaking to that he barely waved as his boys blew past to join their team for the last set of backward pedals.

While I couldn’t say I was thrilled about his insistence on employing blond, beautiful, and a bit-too-much-his-type Anastasia as his sidekick, I did understand that he needed the right candidate for an ongoing segment on what could be a national program. Or I understood enough not to worry too much about it, anyway, even if I didn’t like it. Given the adage
no press is bad press
wasn’t exactly true in our case, I also understood why he didn’t want me involved in anything to do with the mall, even as a helpful citizen bystander, until his contract was a done deal.

On the one hand, Frank was right. I’d already drawn more than enough attention to myself. On the other, I’d heard the first forty-eight hours in a murder investigation were crucial to cracking a case. Since the police didn’t even suspect foul play at the time, the hour or so after Laila’s death was announced to be a murder had to be almost as key—an hour I’d spent at the mall overhearing what was being said.

I retrieved my phone from my purse and listened to Griff’s message again:
I work the afternoon shift, so any time after two.

If Frank needed Anastasia on the job yesterday, tomorrow at two might as well be next year. Griff had also said he was off to the gym. Since Xtreme Fitness was across the street from the mall and offered a discount to mall employees, wasn’t there a decent chance he was a member of my gym? If Griff was working out, I could pass along everything I’d heard, he’d forward it on to the police, and I’d be able to wash my hands of the investigation a good twenty-odd hours earlier than he was able to meet.

I looked in the rearview mirror and confirmed the workout bag Chelsea had me keep in the car—“in case of fitness emergencies”—was indeed at the ready.

Worst-case scenario, I’d get in my thirty overdue minutes on the bike, head home, get dinner on the table, spend the evening untangling the Gordian knot that was my suspect spreadsheet, and impart my information via phone call tomorrow afternoon. Best case, Griff would be there amongst a group of young, fit, post-shift warriors. We’d compare notes over barbells until we’d boiled down my spreadsheet, his knowledge of the mall employees, and our joint observations of everything we’d heard and seen since Friday. I felt sure our short list would help make what was an already overdue arrest a mere formality.

I left Frank a text saying I was going to squeeze in some quick cardio while he was watching the boys and pulled out of the lot.

I arrived at Xtreme Fitness ten minutes later, stepped inside, and somehow expected to see Griff. I felt more like a head case than anything else. The Tuesday afternoon crowd was full of unfamiliar faces. I didn’t even recognize the girl swiping membership cards. Other than fulfilling my daily fitness goal, the only thing I’d gained by my brief, delusional foray into thinking I was TV detective clever were the $2-off coupons for Bye Bye Fat I took from a basket on the counter as I headed into the locker room to change.

I dressed, exited into the gym proper, made my way over to the back corner of the cardio area, and settled onto a stationary bike. I set the program to Chelsea’s recommendation and, hoping for a workout vigorous enough to keep my mind from racing faster than my lactic-acid stiff legs, began to pedal up the first of what was sure to feel like a countryside’s worth of virtual hills.

I crested the second hill and looked up to grab my water bottle when my eyes met those of the stocky guy I’d noted in the weight room but dismissed from the back as too short and spiky-haired to be Griff.

He started across the room toward me.

Without the uniform, thick-soled shoes, and Mountie hat covering the reddish spiky hair atop his head, Griff looked different—younger and cuter, but definitely a good three inches shorter.

“Maddie?” He stopped beside my bike.

At least the sudden heat rising in my cheeks was attributable to exercise.

“I didn’t realize you worked out here,” he said.

I’d planned to respond with
great minds think alike
or, at the very least,
I didn’t know you worked out here either
were I to actually run into him. Instead, my surprise at having successfully tracked him down got the better of my ability to be calm, cool, and calculated, or at least sound like it. “I got your message, and I was going to leave a message back, but I didn’t want to wait until tomorrow afternoon to talk, because after I saw your note this morning, I hung around the mall thinking one of us should hear the scuttlebutt and gauge reactions, and as you might imagine, there was a lot out there. So when you said you were going to the gym, I wondered if it was this gym because I heard mall employees get a discount, and since I belong here too and my trainer has me doing cardio workouts, I thought I’d kill two birds in the hopes I might run into you and we’d have a chance to—”

“Talk?” he asked.

“Yes,” I huffed, now thoroughly out of breath.

In a moment that felt as smoothly scripted as any scene on
Criminal Minds
, he stepped over to the stationary bike beside me, took a seat, and shook his head. “It has been quite a day.”

“I’ll say.” I dropped the resistance three levels so I could actually breathe and talk at the same time. “Did you finally track down those iguanas?”

His expression of consternation revealed the dimples I wouldn’t have missed had he been looking at and not away from me when I walked by him the first time. “Would you believe in the dressing room of the bathing suit store, hiding in a pile of bikinis?”

“Crazy.”

“Indeed.”

“Have the police figured out who set all the critters free in the first place?”

“They have their ideas … ” Griff’s voice trailed off as he fiddled with the incline on his bike controls.

“The Piggledys mentioned the animal rights people,” I said. “They think maybe they could be behind both incidents.”

“Their theory makes some sense,” he said. “But even if the protesters did have something to do with letting the animals loose, they didn’t have a thing to do with Laila’s murder.”

“Why’s that?” I asked, feeling ever so slightly like a bona fide investigator. “I’m told she wasn’t exactly sympathetic to their cause.”

“They might not have appreciated Laila crossing their picket lines, but they’re far too peace-loving to ever kill her to make their point,” he said. “Besides, they’re all rabid vegans. They wouldn’t set foot in the food court, much less support the place by buying something from there to poison Laila.”

“So the poison
was
administered in her food?”

“That’s the working theory, or so I’m told. The police are just waiting for confirmation from the tests on the wrappers and such.”

“Interesting.” If, in fact, the murderer had poisoned her food, Richard the regional manager and his wife, Claudia, frontrunners in my mind, fell to the back of the line; neither had been on the premises that morning, nor had access to what she’d been eating. “Especially given everything I heard around the mall today.”

“I take it you were there for a while?”

“Long enough for Andy Oliver to suggest I buy a listening device that allows me to hear things up to twenty-five feet away.”

“That kid’s nothing if not ingenious.”

“Exactly.” I started up another hill. “He also told me he considers Laila’s death justifiable homicide, and he’s taking wagers as to who killed her.”

Griff shook his head. “He’s actually taking bets on this?”

“Which is why I can’t help but wonder if he was somehow involved,” I said. “I mean, his girlfriend
is
the new Eternally 21 store manager.”

“True.” Even though Griff wasn’t pedaling hard, sweat rivulets began to form at his temples. “But neither of them killed her.”

My heart, already pumping, began to race in anticipation of Griff’s ironclad reasons why both Andy and Tara, who I really did like from the get-go, could be marked off the list. “Because?”

Griff’s kind hazel eyes burned with intensity. “Because I just know.”

He
just knew
? I could only hope Griff knew better than to run that rationale by Detective McClarkey or he was likely to remain a mall security officer for a long, long time.

We stopped talking for a moment when a nearby door opened and L’Raine, the massage therapist, exited a room behind and to my left. She smiled at me, but eyed Griff, making sure he’d noticed her before sashaying, surgically enhanced cleavage first, across the gym.

“Griff,” I said trying not to be annoyed by his naiveté or the distraction. “I realize they’re your friends, but Andy called her a beyotch without thinking twice
and
said he hoped she’d choke on the French fries they were bringing up to her.”

“That’s how he always talks,” he said. “Doesn’t mean a thing.”

“What about the fact Andy and Tara likely brought Laila the food that killed her?”

“Everyone knew they brought her lunch up to her almost every day. They’re not stupid enough to pour poison right into it,” he said. “Besides, why would Andy give you a listening device knowing everyone would be talking about Laila’s murder if he or his girlfriend poisoned her?”

“I did think of that,” I said, and really Laila had eaten pizza, a burger, fries, a burrito, and some baked goods, all from different vendors. Any one of the workers from any one of those food stands could easily have spiked her lunch and sent Andy and Tara upstairs with her lunch as unknowing couriers of death. Assuming Griff was right. “But Tara could be guilty without Andy knowing anything about it.”

“That girl wouldn’t hurt a fly,” he said.

Another irrefutable bit of proof. “Even if she was about to be let go?”

“To move on to become a manager at another store,” he said.

His insistence on Tara’s and Andy’s innocence had me starting to question my faith in Griff’s judgment, which, I was coming to realize, was based primarily on one encounter in the security office and his commanding presence in uniform. “What about Hailey Rosenberg?”

“Logical,” he said. “But no.”

“I suppose you’re going to tell me it’s because she idolized Laila?”

He looked genuinely surprised. “She did?”

“So much so she set up a mannequin shrine to her.”

“That’s more than a little weird, but it just confirms my theory.”

“That she’s crazy?”

“That she had no good reason to want Laila dead.”

Perhaps Hailey wasn’t the only one a little touched in the head. “What about Shoshanna from Whimsies? She was slinking away from Eternally 21 when I went back there on Friday.”

“She hated Laila all right,” he said, pausing long enough for me to think maybe we were finally getting somewhere, then added “But … ”

“Let me guess. Too religious?”

“Way too religious.”

Could it actually be that none of them were guilty of anything more criminal than a legitimate hatred of Laila DeSimone? If so, was someone or some dubious cluster of someones from one of the other catchall groups responsible for Laila’s demise? “The cleaning crew?”

“I heard that one while I was searching for the iguanas,” he said. “But my buddy works for them and told me anyone who cleans at Eternally 21 gets paid extra.”

My list was rapidly devolving into nothing. “I did hear something about the girl who works at the smoothie place.”

“Katia?”

“Purple hair?” I asked.

“And lots of eye makeup.”

“That’s her.”

“The police were all over the food court this afternoon asking questions, so I’m not sure what point there is in leading them where they’re already looking.” Griff slowed down on his bike. “In fact, they’ve already talked to pretty much everyone you’ve mentioned.”

If the police were already looking into everyone I’d thought of or heard anything about, at least I didn’t have to worry about any further involvement on my part. “And ruled them out?”

“They will.”

“How do you know?” I asked, still hoping for an answer that started with the word
elementary
and was substantiated by fact.

“Despite how challenging she could be, I refuse to believe anyone who works at the South Highlands Valley Mall hated her enough to commit a premeditated murder like that.”

Mr. Holmes, Griff was not. I had to wonder why he had even asked to see my list in the first place if he
just knew
everyone was innocent? To shoot it down like he’d originally shot down any suggestion that Laila’s death was anything more than an accident? I suppressed a sigh and asked what was likely to be the dumbest question of all: “Who do you think did it, then?”