Love You to Death (7 page)

I
was still sleeping when Ben buzzed the next morning. Either he had ESP or he had another round of questions. Why he had to come at seven in the morning was a question
I’d
ask
him.
Probably to catch me off guard.

I buzzed him in and had just enough time to brush my teeth before he knocked. As I headed to the door, I glanced at myself in the hall mirror. Once again he was getting the real me. My pink velour sweats and a freshly scrubbed face.

His eyes went straight to my Winnie the Pooh slippers, a gift from my dad.

“The floors are cold,” I said, giving Winnie’s ears a little shake.

He didn’t smile. In fact, he looked downright…grim. “I need to talk to you.”

My smile faded. “I need to talk to you, too,” I said fast. “And me first, okay?” Because if he was about to arrest me, the news about Mary-Kate just might keep those big silver bracelets off my wrists. “It’s about Mary-Kate Darling. I think you’d be very interested to know that she left after the first hour of registering for gifts at Crate and Barrel the night Ted was murdered. The clerk who was helping her said she came back a half hour later. The timing checks, Ben. She could have slipped out and killed Ted.”

He took off his coat and held on to it. “It’s looking more and more likely that
you
slipped out and killed Ted, Abby. Would you like to know why?”

“I really wouldn’t,” I said. “Would
you
like to know why?”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “Yes, I would.”

“Because this is such a colossal waste of your time. I didn’t kill Ted. I didn’t even think of it. Not for a second.”

“Well, then,” he said, “maybe you can explain this
coincidence—
two of your former boyfriends, recent former boyfriends, were the victims of attempted murder.”

He might as well have punched me hard in the stomach. “What? What are you talking about?”

“Ted Puck was murdered the day his engagement announcement hit the paper, Abby. An announcement that you yourself admitted to seeing. And now two other exes—who broke up with you—reported attempts made on their lives just days after ending your relationship. If you do not have an ironclad alibi, Abby, for both dates, I will be back with an arrest warrant. Just because you adidn’t use your brother-in-law’s gun doesn’t mean you didn’t get your hands on another one.”

I had to sit down. This was crazy.

I took a deep breath. “Which former boyfriends?” I asked.

He sat down across from me and f lipped a page in his ever-present notebook. “Riley Witherspoon and Tom Greer.”

“You’re telling me that someone tried to kill Riley and Tom? That’s what you’re telling me?”

“That’s what I’m telling you,” he said.

“So someone is going around trying to kill my ex-boyfriends,” I said. “Am I on Mars?
Am
I on
Punk’d?
Is this one very long joke? A bad long joke?”

“Oh, it’s no joke, Abby.”

“I didn’t kill anyone! Or try to kill anyone!”

He stared at me. “So clear yourself. By telling me where you were over a year ago, on December 22 at 7:15 p.m.”

“December 22?” I repeated. “I have no idea.”

“I’d find out if I were you,” he said. “Do you have your calendar or appointment book? The twenty-second was a Saturday.”

“Oh wait, I remember—that was the day after the holiday party at work. Tom e-mailed me like five minutes before the party to tell me he wasn’t coming after all, that he’d met someone else. That day.” I rolled my eyes. I’d spent almost three hundred dollars on a little red dress for a party I probably would have blown off, only to
be
blown off. “The twenty-second, the day after the holiday party, was Opal’s engagement party. I remember because Opal originally wanted to have her party on the twenty-first, but she actually changed the date for me. Tom was supposed to come with me to Opal’s.”

“So you were at Opal’s engagement party the night of the twenty-second?” he said, jotting something down. “What time to what time?”

“I got there at five-thirty to help set up,” I said. “I didn’t leave until after midnight.”

“Who did you spend most of your time with at the party?” he asked. “I’ll need witnesses to verify that you were there at various times.”

“Opal can. Olivia, too. My stepmother. I talked to a guy for a while, a friend of Jackson’s. He’d just been dumped, too, so we commiserated for a long time, actually. Honestly, I forget his name, but you can ask Jackson.”

“I will,” he said.

“So what exactly happened to Tom?” I asked.

“You might want to put on some coffee before we get gory at seven in the morning,” he told me.

I gnawed my lip. “Gory? How gory?”

“How’s that coffee coming?” he asked.

“This isn’t Dunkin’ Donuts.”

He glanced up at me and smiled. That smile was his ticket out of jail. Too bad mine didn’t have that effect on him.

I got up and headed into the kitchen, glad for the reprieve. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what had happened to Riley. Or Tom. Gory didn’t sound good. It sounded as if they were eaten by grizzlies. Not that either was a hiker. Or camper.

Five minutes later I brought two steaming mugs of coffee into the living room. “First, can you tell
me
something, Detective? Why the crack-of-dawn visit?”

He took his mug and sipped it. “I wanted to catch you before work. It’s easier to talk in the home versus the workplace.”

I wrapped my hands around the hot mug. “So I’m ready for the gory details.”

“Someone pushed Tom Greer in front of a speeding truck at 6:00 p.m. last December 22. He was waiting at a crowded intersection when he was shoved. Many broken bones.”

That did sound gory. And painful. “Could it have been an accident?” I asked. “Tom was sort of accident prone. During our brief relationship he managed to break his nose by walking into a plate-glass window.”

“Mr. Greer doesn’t think so. He distinctly remembers being pushed. Hard. There was a huge crowd waiting to cross—it was right before Christmas, and he said he’d never seen so many people bustling with gifts—but he also said he knows the difference between jostling and being pushed.”

“I didn’t push Tom in front of a truck. And I have the alibi to prove it. At six that night I was already at Opal’s. You can ask her and a whole bunch of other people who were there. Including the catering team. That’s airtight, Ben.”

“We’ll see,” he said. “Where were you one year ago on February 28 at 7:15 p.m.?”

“I need to look it up. I don’t know offhand.” I headed into my bedroom and grabbed my old day planner from my desk drawer. Good thing I didn’t need this year’s date book, because I couldn’t find it. “On the night of February 28 I was at my stepmother’s birthday party. It started at six-thirty.” I wondered if I would be invited to this year’s party.

“Riley was attacked by a pit bull that was let loose in his house,” Ben said. “Two days after breaking up with you.”

I take back the truck being gory.
This
was gory. “A pit bull! Is Riley all right?”

“He has a large hole in his leg,” Ben said. “But otherwise he’s fine.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “This is insane. Two of my exes were attacked right after breaking up with me. What the hell is going on?”

“You tell me.”

“‘What the hell is going on?’ means I don’t know,” I pointed out.

“Abby, if you come clean now—”

I bolted upright. “It wasn’t me! I had nothing to do with any of this!”

“So it’s all a coincidence,” Ben said, those eyes intense on mine. “Ted being killed after his engagement announcement hits the papers. Tom being pushed in front of a speeding truck. Riley being mauled by a pit bull. Days after breaking up with you.”

I had to admit it didn’t sound like a coincidence.

“According to Riley,” Ben said, flipping a page in his notebook, “you told him he was the lowest of the low, the slimebucketiest of the slimebuckets.”

Huh. I did say that. “He dumped me the day the
Maine Life
issue came out naming him one of the best CPAs in Portland. He used me to get listed. It’s the only reason he went out with me in the first place. Every word he said, every kiss, every everything, was a big fat lie. He
is
the lowest of the low. He is the slimebucketiest.”

“Sounds like motive to me,” Ben said, jotting something down in his notebook.

“Wait a minute! That’s not a motive. It’s an explanation!”

Ben nodded. “Yes, that explains why you let a pit bull loose in his home.”

“I didn’t!”

“Riley said you were
very
upset when he broke up with you.”

“I
was
upset. Because he used me and all but said so.”
I’m just not feeling it, Abby,
he’d said. Mysteriously the very day I couldn’t delete him from the Best CPA in Portland listing.

“Tom also said you were very angry with him when he broke up with you. In fact, I have a copy of the e-mail reply you sent to him.” He unfolded a piece of paper from his notebook. “‘Tom, I hope you and your new girlfriend both choke on a piece of moldy fruitcake.’”

Huh. I’d said that, too. “Okay, that was a little immature,” I conceded. “But I was upset. He broke up with me five minutes before my company Christmas party. By e-mail!”

“And so you stalked him the next day and saw your opportunity for revenge. You pushed him in front of that truck.”

“No, I didn’t,” I said. “I have an airtight alibi for both nights.”

“You have an alibi, Abby. And going to parties isn’t airtight. Your every moment can’t possibly be accounted for.”

“So why isn’t Mary-Kate Darling a suspect?” I asked. “Her every moment in Crate and Barrel is officially not accounted for. In fact, thirty moments in prime time are unaccounted for!”

“You’re forgetting that Mary-Kate Darling isn’t a suspect,” he said.

“She
could
be.”

He stood up and put on his coat. “You should know, Abby, that you’re no longer a person of interest in the murder investigation. You’re our prime suspect.”

I stood, too, but my legs trembled and I collapsed onto my scratchy kilim rug. Ben rushed over and helped me up, those dark eyes working, obviously trying to figure out if I was acting.

“I didn’t kill Ted and I didn’t
try
to kill Riley or Tom!” I said. “I couldn’t hurt a fly!”

Silence. And then, “There’s a gap between middle school and college,” he said. “Didn’t you have any boyfriends in high school? I probably know them.”

I shook my head. “Nope. I didn’t date in high school.”

He eyed me. “You didn’t even go to the prom?”

The prom. When I realized that Ben was never going to notice me, let alone magically ask me to the junior prom, especially because his family moved out of state that spring, I said yes to Petey Strummer, who’d been asking me out, much like Roger, for a year. I guess I was his Ben Orr.

“I did go the junior prom. With Petey Strummer.”

“Petey Strummer! Really.” Was he trying not to laugh?

“Yeah, really,” I said. “What’s wrong with Petey Strummer?” Besides everything.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nice guy. A little spatially challenged, if my memory serves me right.”

Petey Strummer was famous for bumping into walls. Water fountains. Open lockers. I once asked him why he didn’t notice the two cheerleaders blocking the middle of the hallway, as usual, and he said, “I was thinking about you. And how to change a trigonometric graph.”

“Well, your memory isn’t so great,” I pointed out. Reaching. “You don’t remember me.”

How could you not remember someone who spent an entire year staring at your profile in English 11? Spanish 3? The cafeteria? The hallways? I bumped into a few open lockers myself while stealing glimpses of Ben Orr in the hallways.

“Touché,” he said.

“I didn’t kill Ted,” I whispered.
So let’s go back to the start. Ted isn’t dead. I’m not a suspect. You were standing in the doorway of my cubicle because you disagreed that Island, a hot new restaurant, has the best lobster in Portland. You want to take me to your best lobster. You do remember me. You not only remember me, but you also had a secret crush on me. Ah, if only we’d known, you say. We could be celebrating our tenth anniversary as Best Couple in Maine.

“Abby?” Ben asked. “You looked like you were a million miles away.”

Like Mars.

“Penny for your thoughts, as they say.”

I smiled. “A penny? I’d think a prime suspect’s thoughts are worth a lot more than that.”

“Touché again,” he said. “Dollar for your thoughts?”

I sat down again and so did he. “I was just thinking about high school.” I was about to ask him if he’d had a crush on anyone when I realized that he wasn’t flirting with me. He was
investigating!

I felt my cheeks burn. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

“Do I need a lawyer?” I asked.

“That’s up to you,” he said, standing again. “You’re not under arrest. I’ll be in touch,” he added.

Just when I thought an imaginary boyfriend—as Ben Orr had been for two years of my teenage life—was the way to go in love, he had to go and destroy that by thinking I could kill someone. And
try
to kill two others.

That left Petey Strummer as the only guy who’d never caused me a moment’s grief.

Coincidence. There
were
coincidences. Take Mark Twain. Born on the day Halley’s comet made its appearance. Died on the day the comet made another appearance.

I racked my brain to figure out the connection between Mary-Kate Darling and Riley and Tom. That she killed Ted I could understand; perhaps she did catch him cheating on her, or maybe he ended their engagement. But the Riley and Tom factor threw a major monkey wrench into my theory.

It
was
possible that the Tom and Riley incidents were coincidental. Maybe someone simply bumped Tom, as he’d originally thought, on that crowded intersection. And maybe a pit bull just happened to make its way into Riley’s house. It was sort of possible. Theirs could have been random incidents. But Ted’s murder was no random incident. And that left Mary-Kate still viable as a suspect.