Eternally 21: A Mrs. Frugalicious Shopping Mystery (22 page)

Twenty-Six

Frank insisted he toss
a jacket over my shoulders to hide the handcuffs in case any, or likely all, of our neighbors happened to be glancing out of their windows as I was led out of the house toward the waiting police cruiser.

Detective McClarkey insisted I was under arrest for suspected hit-and-run with the assurance my charges would be upped to murder if Tara, who was currently in a coma at South Metro Hospital, didn’t wake up. There were additional charges to be faced if Andy’s injuries turned out to be more substantial than the bruises, broken ribs, and concussion he’d sustained.

Before I allowed myself to think about what was coming next, I closed my eyes and prayed for both of them. Tara, my former co-primary suspect and co-ringleader of a conspiracy that couldn’t possibly exist, and Andy, who would never have sanctioned that they both be run down with my car just to put the last nail in my proverbial guilt coffin.

Griff was right all along. Those two being behind this made no sense at all.

“I’m innocent,” I said for the umpteenth time. I couldn’t say the same for my car, which was being impounded due to the suspicious scratches and dents on the front bumper. “The security guard will vouch that I was where I said I was.”

“Even if she does, you still had time to drive to the north parking lot, hit Tara and Andy, re-park, and zoom back to the bench by Chico’s by 4:43.”

“But I didn’t,” I said. “There have to be security cameras in the mall that prove where I was?”

“I’m sure that will factor into the case. So will your vehicle.”

Good thing I hadn’t had anything to eat or I’d have thrown up. “Frank, someone had to have taken your keys when you thought you lost them at the studio and used them—”

“Don’t say another word until you get a lawyer,” Frank said as Detective McClarkey placed a hand on the back of my still shower-damp head and guided me into the back of the police car.

The last thing I heard before the car door slammed shut was Frank wondering out loud, “How can this be happening?”

I wondered the same thing as I, Maddie Michaels, AKA Mrs. Frank Michaels, AKA Mrs. Frugalicious, was hauled off to jail.

I was booked, fingerprinted, searched, and tossed into a jail cell complete with rough hewn, less than fresh blankets and stained, ticking-striped vinyl mattresses. For company, I had three dubious cell
mates—one of whom was passed out, and two whose occupations were abundantly clear given the ratio of short skirt to sky-high heels.

They eyed me up and down.

“Rough night already, huh?” one of them asked.

“You could say that.”

“Ours hardly even got started,” her buddy said. “Whatcha in for?”

“Hit and run, for starters,” I said. “But basically, you name it.”

“I told ya she had crazy hair and a crazier look in her eye,” the first one said.

They scooted closer to each other and farther away from me.

If only I could be away from myself instead of both figuratively and literally trapped, trying not to imagine what it was going to be like looking at bars for the rest of my life. How would Frank’s career survive? How would the kids fare with a mother rotting in jail until some blessed organization for the falsely convicted or documentary filmmaker finally got my conviction overturned? Would I still have a few good years left?

I could only pray seventy was the new forty by the time I was re-
leased.

I’d been counting down the minutes until Monday when the tests would come back clean on the chocolates and the Bye Bye Fat. Until the moment Detective McClarkey would have to admit he was looking at the wrong person and turn his attentions to the only logical suspects: Andy Oliver and Tara Hu.

Tara and Andy, who were now both in the hospital.

My mall-wide conspiracy theory that everyone was helping the two of them cover up Laila’s murder couldn’t have seemed more absurd. Andy would never, ever have arranged a stunt so elaborate as stealing my car to mow down his girlfriend just to frame me. Again.

But, someone had tried to frame me.

The same someone who had poisoned Laila had set me up to take the fall for it, and then, just to make sure the case was watertight, plugged all the holes in the circumstantial evidence with a plan far more elaborate than anything they could script on TV. Whoever it was knew Tara’s Saturday routine and knew Griff would be out of town. Then he or she impersonated Griff well enough to get me to come flying down to the mall and keep me there long enough to take my car from my parking spot, drive to the other lot, get up to the top level, and around the corner in time to clip Tara and Andy. Not to mention re-park the car before I realized I’d been duped. So they also knew where I always parked and had access to my car keys.

Whoever it was seemed brilliant enough to succeed at getting me locked away forever.

The question was who?

And why?

The bigger question was, could I do anything about it?

I didn’t bother to look up like the rest of the inmates did when the main door clinked open and a new offender was led toward the holding cell area across the way.

“Can you put her in here and move the murderer over there?” one of the hookers asked. “This chick is creeping me out.”

“I told you, I’m innocent,” I mumbled.

“Right,” the hookers said in unison.

“Keep it down ladies,” our jailer said.

“We should probably find out if the new one’s worse than what we got anyway,” the second hooker said.

“At least she doesn’t have that weird look in her eye.”

“Or the jacked-up hair.”

“Whatcha in here for, hon?”

“Shoplifting,” the woman said.

Shoplifting? I looked up and into the face of a woman who fit my general description—early forties, medium height, sporting a blond-
ish chin-length bob, dressed in designer jeans and ballet flats—but was a good ten pounds (but not more, considering I hadn’t eaten all weekend) thinner. The very woman I’d stood beside in Bath & Body Works at the exact moment the police claimed I was in my car trying to mow down Tara for accusing me of the crime I now knew neither of us committed.

The Shoplifter.

She smiled. “But I didn’t do it.”

The hookers enjoyed a hearty guffaw.

“How about I be traded over there to her cell?” I asked.

“Good by us,” Hooker Number One said. “I’m kinda scared of both of them.”

“Right.” The jailer shook her head and escorted the Shoplifter to the empty cell across the way, then in what felt like the first stroke of luck I’d had in days, turned to me. “You want in over there, too?”

“Please,” I said.

After an encouraging clink and clank of cell doors and allowing a few minutes for the Shoplifter to arrange herself into an approximation of comfortable, I launched into the first of what I hoped would be no more jailhouse confessions. “I’m in a little trouble,” I whispered. “Actually a lot of trouble, but the thing is, I’m totally innocent and I really need your help.”

“I’ll only be here a few minutes,” the Shoplifter said with a serene smile. “My husband’s arranging to get me out now.”

“Great,” I said, wondering what my husband was doing. “But were you by any chance at the South Highlands Valley Mall today?”

“I’m there almost every day,” she said through a perma-smile that had me starting to question her sanity.

“Today?”

“For a few minutes,” she said.

“Were you in Bath & Body Works?”

“They have a scent called Warm Vanilla Sugar I adore. In fact, sometimes I just stand there by the candles and sniff,” she said.

“I’m a fan of Caribbean Escape myself.” The thought of it had my perfume headache coming back with a tropical vengeance. “Didn’t I see you in there today?”

Her eyes grew wide. “No.”

“I could have sworn we were standing right next to each other by the antibacterial soaps.”

“Wasn’t me,” she said, the smile having given way to something more akin to panic.

“I looked different because I wearing jeans and a baseball cap but—”

“Nope,” she said.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “Because you look exactly like the woman I saw in there, and if it was you—”

“Couldn’t be me. I don’t steal.”

“I’m not accusing you of anything,” I said, realizing the security officer I’d met up with had to have been on her way to detain the Shoplifter, whose name I still didn’t know. “I really need your help. The police believe I was involved in an incident in the parking garage, but I was in Bath & Body Works at the time. I just need someone who recognized me there so I can prove I wasn’t doing anything wrong somewhere else.”

“I hear you there. Nothing worse than being falsely accused.”

The woman was definitely a wacko, but at least we’d connected enough for her to look me over with what I hoped was recognition.

She stared at me for what felt like hours, shut her eyes, and then opened them again. “Nope,” she finally said. “Never seen you before in my life.”

I sat upright for the rest of the evening without moving, talking, or allowing myself, even for a moment, to play armchair detective or detective gone rogue.

I must have dozed eventually, because I awoke with a start to the rattle of the keys in the cell door. “Michaels?”

“Me?”

“You’re Maddie Michaels, right?”

Everything creaked as I rose to my feet. “Yes.”

“Come with me.”

The jangle of her keys in the lock rattled my brain as I tried to prepare for the cold reality of handcuffs, leg shackles, and a trip to the county jail in one of those terrifying vans with the tiny barred windows at the top to await sentencing. “Is my lawyer here?”

The officer shook her head.

“But I—”

“You certainly have some friends in high places.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’ve never seen someone facing charges like yours get the strings pulled and get sprung so fast.”

I’d been sprung? “I was here all night.”

She clicked open the door. “Believe me, should have been a lot longer.”

“Thank you,” I said, unsure how to process what was going on.

“You got someone to thank, but it sure ain’t me.”

Twenty-Seven

Frank wasn’t standing in
the lobby awaiting my release or even perched on the edge of one of the gray plastic chairs avoiding eye contact with any and all, but instead waiting in the car with the engine running. I was certain the only thing preventing him from peeling out of the parking lot before I could close the passenger door was the fact he was parked in front of a police station.

“I’m sorry,” I said in a hoarse croak.

“You’re
sorry
?” he repeated, gunning it toward home the moment the coast was clear of law enforcement personnel. “Is that what you expect me to say to Jim Jarvis and Michael Perkins when they learn their new syndicated financial guru’s wife is a—”

“Frank, I didn’t do anything.”

“I’m not sure how you can say that with a straight face.”

“I can say I’m innocent because I went into Eternally 21 to use a few coupons and the next thing I knew I was tangled up in something much bigger than I could have ever—”

“I told the boys your car broke down on the way home from the gym.” His voice choked with anger. “That I had to run out to come get you. I don’t want them to know that you’ve been …” He waggled his hand in the air as though he couldn’t even describe what had happened.

“You have to believe me.”

Frank didn’t respond.

My worn-out tear ducts overflowed once more with my husband’s silent vote of no confidence. I cried harder with the view of the Front Range in the distance. How many more times would I be able to take in that majestic mountain vista unfettered by bars? Without imagining the life I should rightfully have been living on the outside?

“Have you heard how Tara Hu and Andy Oliver are doing?” I finally managed.

“She’s still in a coma.”

“That’s awful.”

“Doesn’t begin to describe it.”

“This is the most horrible of mistakes.”

Frank pressed roughly on the brake as the yellow light he should have already slowed for turned red. “Who was driving your car, Maddie?”

“All I can think is that someone took your keys at the taping and—”

“And tucked them into the couch cushion in my dressing room?”

“That’s where you found them?”

“They’d slipped out of my pocket,” he said, accelerating a second short of the light changing back to green.

I watched the keys clink back and forth in the ignition. “Frank, your key to my car is missing.”

“I gave it to the police when they impounded the SUV,” he said.

“Right,” I said, turning toward the passenger window. I ached for my old existence, broke or not, as we passed by the commonplace sights of what was so recently my world—the sprinklers running at the odd numbered addresses per the water restriction schedule, the morning joggers lining the green belts, and the predictable shades of beige trim accenting the homes. “I just can’t understand how any of this is happening. I—”

“Save it,” Frank said.

“But—”

“I’ve already heard it all.”

Heard it all? How could he have heard it all when he hadn’t given me a chance to finish a single sentence of explanation? “How could you have?”

“Stasia,” he simply said.

I squeezed my eyes shut with the sound of her nickname on his lips. “Do you have to call her that in front of me?”

“She’s a good friend,” he said with even less hesitation than he’d had about my keys.

I was already more than a few circles into hell. Wasn’t it way past time to get the whole ugly truth out there? “How good?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean—”

“She got you sprung, didn’t she?

“
She
got me sprung?”

“I thought we should leave you where you couldn’t get into any more trouble until the network deal was signed. It was Stasia who insisted we get you out ASAP.” Frank gave a nonchalant wave to the guard at the entrance to our development. “We were up all night pulling strings.”

My husband wanted to leave me rotting in jail while he and his ostensible paramour were
up all night
together? “Why would Stasia do that?”

“She thought we’d have a better chance of keeping the bombshell news that Frank Michaels’s wife is wanted for a hit and run and who knows what else quiet by getting you out of that jail cell.”

“And you wanted to leave me there?”

“I want to get the deal done,” Frank said. “Luckily Anastasia wants it as badly as I do.”

“I suppose I owe her a big thank you,” I managed.

“I don’t know of anyone else with the connections to wrangle what should have been an impossible get out of jail free card.”

“So I hear.”

He emitted what could only be called an angry chuckle. “I have to assume that along with being pretty and smart as a whip, that young lady is quite the pillow talker.”

He assumed? “Pillow talker?”

“Her boyfriend is the acting police chief.”

The wind felt knocked out of me, like I’d landed flat on my back. “Stasia’s boyfriend?”

“From what she tells me, he’s her almost fiancé.”

Anastasia was whispering sweet nothings into her almost fiancé, the acting police chief’s ear? “She’s engaged to the police chief?”

“Acting,” Frank said. “Why?”

“It’s just that … ”

“What?”

I fought to get my breath back. “With all the time you’ve spent together and everything else, I’ve been wondering if something’s going on.”

“Between Stasia and me?”

“She’s smart, beautiful, and just your type.”

“The almost fiancée of an acting police chief is hardly my type.” Frank pushed the garage door clicker and steered the car into the driveway. “And the idea that I’d compromise the future of
Frank Finance
by mixing business with pleasure … ”

“I didn’t want to think it,” I said. “It’s just—”

“Ridiculous, Maddie,” Frank said. “Utterly ridiculous.”

Ridiculous
didn’t begin to cover how I felt after Frank handed me a tissue and hairbrush and left me alone to
collect myself
while he went inside to reconfirm with the boys just how hunky-dory everything was.

So hunky-dory, that in the few minutes it took me to pull myself together, get out of the car, and make my way into the house, Frank was already locked in his office trying to find a lawyer
who, in his words,
would make even O.J. Simpson’s attorneys look incompetent.

Thankfully, the boys were too absorbed in some post-apocalyptic Xbox battle to notice me tiptoe past them toward the front hall or I might have enveloped both of them in a teary,
soon we’ll have to touch hands separated by a thick wall of Plexiglas
instead of hugging
, hug.

Until the last two weeks, I’d considered Frank’s obsession with keeping up appearances a quirk to be indulged as part of the marital give and take. Where the boys were concerned, however, I couldn’t agree with his sense of caution more. I didn’t want them to see how bedraggled I looked, much less find out their silly mother had made every mistake in the book, including but not limited to, accusing her husband of the most far-fetched of extramarital affairs. Oh yeah, and getting arrested.

I was about to sneak upstairs for a shower I needed even more than yesterday’s ill-fated scrub down (and possibly one of the last I’d take without the company of my cellblock and an armed guard) when I spotted a green light emanating from my otherwise dark office.

Frank hadn’t mentioned any variation on the word
frugal
but after yesterday’s revelations, it was no stretch to presume he might well have been snooping while I was languishing in the slammer.

I veered into my office and logged onto Mrs. Frugalicious to see the last time anyone had been on the site.

“Hey, Mom,” FJ, from the slightly deeper timbre of his voice, said from behind me just before the admin screen popped up.

“Hey,” I responded with as much nonchalance as I could muster and switched quickly to my personal email account, back turned to avoid any telltale (red) eye contact. “Sorry you boys had to forage for breakfast this morning.”

“No big,” FJ said. “Dad said your car’s all jacked up.”

The last thing I wanted to do was lie, so I was grateful for his word choice. “For sure.”

“So it’s in the shop?”

“Uh-huh,” I said watching my regular email account load.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Not sure yet.”

“What a hassle.”

“Tell me about it.”

He seemed to linger in the doorway. “I bet it couldn’t have helped that you left your purse here.”

“What?” I forgot I was trying to keep my back to him and spun around to FJ, holding my handbag.

“It was in the kitchen,” he said.

“I know,” I said, thinking quickly. “I didn’t expect I’d need it for the gym.”

“Gotcha,” he said.

I didn’t dare make eye contact as I walked over to him and collected the bag. “But I sure could use it now. Thanks.”

“No problem,” he said.

More like problems, plural. If my purse had given FJ cause for suspicion, there was little chance Frank hadn’t already rifled through it. I took a deep, silent breath and unzipped the bag, expecting everything to be pulled apart inside. To my surprise, not only did the contents look untouched, but my cell phone was tucked in the side pouch where I’d left it.

Dead.

If nothing else, I’d have proof of the call that had come in from the mall and the outgoing messages and calls I’d made while I was there.

“Dad said you called him from the road.”

“He did?”

“Uh-huh.”

I stepped over to the wall charger and plugged in my cell. “He must have meant the gym phone.”

“Weird,” FJ said.

Weirder were the answers I’d be forced to give if I didn’t get him off my automotive troubles and soon. “Speaking of which, do you happen to know if anyone was using my computer this morning?”

He nodded.

My phone came to life and began to ping and beep message alerts.

“Hold that thought,” I said, trying not to lunge toward the shelf where I’d left it to charge.

Two texts and a missed call appeared on the display. The first, a text, had come in yesterday evening at just about the same time as I was being led out to the police car:

Maddie, it’s Griff. I have some info.

I felt sick for Griff, wherever he was, finally getting back to me, unaware of all that had happened since he’d left Friday morning.

The next text was sent thirty minutes later.

Please call me ASAP.

If only I’d had his number, I would have called him before I’d gone running over to the mall in the first place.

“Is everything okay?” FJ asked.

“Fine.” I forced a smile. “Just some messages I need to deal with.”

I was about to listen to the voice message when Trent joined his brother in the doorway.

“Did she admit it yet?” he asked.

There was no missing the fierce
ixnay
look FJ flashed him.

“Admit what?” I asked, not knowing whether I should be more concerned about what I hadn’t had a chance to listen to, or what I was about to hear from my boys.

Neither said a word.

“FJ?”

He looked down at his size-twelve feet. “I … ”

“FJ … ” Trent interjected. “He—I mean,
we
—we think … ”

“Think what?”

FJ looked up at me. “Where did you take your car in this mor-
ning?”

“The dealership. Why?”

Another subtle yet pointed look passed between the boys.

“Did you have a coupon?” Trent asked.

“A coupon?”

They nodded in unison.

Blood begin to pulse in my ears. “No, actually.”

“That’s a surprise,” FJ said.

“Why’s that?”

“At first we just thought you were going cuckoo,” Trent said. “With all the bargain shopping and stuff.”

FJ looked directly into my eyes. “And then we figured out you’re Mrs. Frugalicious.”

Their pronouncement felt like the governor calling, not to stay my execution but to switch methods of offing me. My heart began to pound at a pace it could never have sustained were it not for all the cardio I’d been doing. My mouth began to run even faster. “I’ve definitely gotten into the coupon clipping and bargain shopping craze, I mean, everyone has, but, me, Mrs. Frugalicious?” I stopped short of a complete denial, copying Frank’s denial instead. “Ridiculous.”

“Please tell us the truth,” Trent said.

“The truth?” That was certainly the question of the hour.

“I saw you messing around on the website the other day,” FJ said. “Answering emails and comments.”

“So we decided to try an experiment,” Trent said.

“An experiment?”

“We’ve been sending you messages,” Trent continued.

“Shopping questions and stuff,” FJ said. “Like,
I clip coupons, but it doesn’t seem to make much of a dent in my grocery bill. Can you help?”

It took all my concentration to maintain what couldn’t possibly be a neutral expression.

“We tried to find out where you were going shopping, but you didn’t take the bait.”

“Our attempts to get discount ski stuff didn’t go so great either.”

“Which was why I went on your computer while you were gone this morning,” FJ said.

“It was you?”

“I was trying to log on to your account to prove it.”

Considering how blindsided I felt, I could only imagine how dumbfounded I looked. “Passwords … My computer is password pro—”