Steps to the Altar (32 page)

“But I don’t want you to stop being my stepmom,” he said in a low voice.

I squeezed his muscled biceps. “Oh, Sam, that’s one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me. I don’t want to stop being your stepmom either, but if it comes to that, remember, you and I will always be friends.”

“Really?”

I nodded, wishing I could erase the sad look off his face. Wishing I could freeze my own heart into not hurting so much. In that moment, I hated Del with all my being for bringing this pain into my life, into Sam’s life. And I hated Gabe for allowing it to happen.

His face did not look entirely convinced. “I hope you’re not mad at me for telling my mom. She said she talked to you.”

“Not at all. Your mom’s a very special woman. You treasure her, okay?”

“Okay. I guess I’ll see you at the wedding Saturday.”

“You bet.”

I went downstairs and tried to forget about Gabe and Del and the whole mess my life was in while I drank my café mocha and read today’s
Tribune.
Two hours finally passed and I was back at Mission Floral. The owner had come in a few minutes ahead of me.

“She’s in back,” another young girl told me. This one looked to be about fourteen and had a bright green streak down the side of her black hair.

I made my way to the back of the store, where a woman in her early fifties was working on a huge funeral wreath of white gladioli and gold mums. A radio in the background played our local oldies station. Herman’s Hermits was singing about Mrs. Brown’s lovely daughter. The woman turned to face me. Her platinum-streaked black hair was pulled up in a messy topknot. A white stick dangled from her unpainted mouth. She pulled out a red Tootsie Roll Pop and said, “Can I help you?”

“I hope so. I’m Benni Harper. I talked to your daughter this morning.”

She held out a dirt-stained hand. “Janet Nicholson. I own this place. She said something about you wanting to know something about one of our customers.”

I quickly explained my story. She listened, moving the sucker from one side of her mouth to the other. When I’d finished, she took it completely out of her mouth and shook it slightly from side to side.

“I’m sorry, but our records are confidential. There’s obviously some reason why this person wants to remain anonymous and I should honor that.”

“But this is very important—”

“So’s my reputation. If it gets out that we give out information about our customers, think of how that would make us look.”

“But—”

“Sorry.” She turned back to the white-and-gold funeral wreath.

Back outside, I kicked the ground in frustration. How else was I going to find out who was sending those flowers? The thought that Maple’s actual address was as close as Mission Floral’s records in physical distance but out of my actual reach made me want to bite through a steel bit.

An idea came to me as I was unlocking my truck’s door and I headed back downtown. If anyone could help me, she could.

Amanda Landry’s law office was located above the Ross Discount Department store downtown. Inside its expensively decorated Kentucky-colonial-home-style waiting room, I begged her receptionist for a minute of her time.

“Two minutes tops,” I said. “My name is Benni Harper. I’m an old friend.”

“She’s with a client,” the receptionist said in a cool, professional voice. She was a woman in her late sixties who had the look and manner of someone born drinking from a silver baby bottle. Amanda had just hired her, which was why I introduced myself. She’d get to know me eventually, as this wasn’t the first time I’d cajoled Amanda into letting me use her investigator’s prodigious Internet capabilities.

“Would you care to wait?” She pointed to the cordovan leather sofa.

“Absolutely,” I said, sitting down. “Thank you.” Etta James sang a sad, he’s-left-me song in the background.

Fifteen minutes later when I was well into an article in
Southern Living
on plantation house restoration, Amanda walked into the reception area.

“Benni, girl! What a surprise!” Her voiced boomed across the compact reception area. “Have you met Sara?”

“Sort of.” I held out my hand. “Nice to meet you.”

“How do you do,” the woman said in a quiet, elegant voice. Her handshake was firm, but her skin soft as a newborn kitten’s.

“I just love her,” Amanda said, giving the woman an enthusiastic one-armed hug. “Has only worked here a month and already knows me like a book.”

“Do you have a few minutes for Ms. Harper?” Sara asked, her delicate face a pale pink from embarrassment.

“Oh, shoot, Sara,” Amanda said, gesturing at me to follow her. “I always have time for my favorite cowgirl. Benni’s an old friend.”

“I’ll remember,” Sara said, smiling graciously at me.

Inside Amanda’s office, she quickly filled me in on Sara. “Just between you and me and the hitching post, she’s a client I represented back in Alabama right before I left. Criminal trial. She was the defendant.”

“What’d she do?” I asked.

“She blew away the asshole of a husband who’d been beating her senseless for thirty-two years. She served her three years and was released completely destitute. Her son, a real chip off the asshole’s block, abandoned her and she had no marketable skills. I sent her the money to come out here and work for me.”

I smiled at Amanda. Rich from her deceased daddy’s ill-gotten gains as the crookedest judge in Alabama, she continued to use her money in ways like this, helping people who needed a hand up.

“You’re a good woman, Miss Mandy,” I said, using her housekeeper’s nickname for her. The blues-singing, very hunky male housekeeper she was still contemplating falling in love with.

She made a scoffing gesture with her hand. “
Pshaw,
as my mama used to say. Sara’s the best thing I ever did for myself next to hiring Leilani.”

“And Eli,” I said, grinning. Eli was her housekeeper.

“We’re not going to go there today,” she said, grinning back at me. “So what can I do you for?”

“I’m in desperate need of Leilani’s services.” Like I’d done so many times in the last few days, I quickly told Maple and Garvey’s story and how far I’d gotten in my investigation.

“What possessed you to attempt this right before Elvia’s wedding?” she asked, leaning back in her chair and laughing.

I shrugged. “It just sort of happened. Obviously, there’s no real hurry except that if these flowers are being sent by Maple herself, well, I’d love to get a chance to talk to her while I can.”

She leaned forward and picked up the phone. “Let me see what Leilani can dig up.” After relaying to her the scanty information I’d discovered, she hung up the phone. “She said to give her about fifteen minutes.”

“She’s amazing,” I said.

“Amen, Sister Benni,” Amanda agreed.

We chatted about Elvia’s wedding and again debated the wisdom of Amanda dating her housekeeper, who we were both sure was interested in her romantically, and though the feeling was definitely mutual on her side, the possibility of losing him as a housekeeper was a real consideration. We still hadn’t debated all points to death by the time Leilani knocked on her door.

Leilani was a former San Celina police detective and investigator for the district attorney’s office. A soft-spoken, satin-skinned Samoan woman with depthless eyes that dared you to lie, she was a whiz at computers as well as, according to city police legend, the toughest female cop the force had ever seen. If there was any way for me to get that address over the Internet, Leilani would know how to do it.

“Hey, Leilani,” Amanda said. “You remember Benni.”

She nodded wordlessly at me. I waved hello.

“Mission Floral doesn’t seem to do anything by computer,” she said. “I’m guessing they still do bookkeeping the old-fashioned way.”

“Darn,” I said. “That means unless I break into their offices and riffle through their files, I’ll never find this woman’s address.”

“Don’t give up so easy,” Amanda said. “Any ideas, Leilani?”

She held out a sheet of paper. “This is the best I could do. I checked the records, and Janet Nicholson has owned Mission Floral since 1978. Before that, it was owned by a Mr. and Mrs. James and Clara Downey, who’d owned it since 1939. Clara Downey died three years ago, but Mr. Downey lives in Templeton. Here’s his address and phone number.”

“Great!” I said, standing up and reaching for the paper. “If the deliveries started before Janet Nicholson owned the shop, he might know something about them. It’s a long shot, but who knows?”

“That’s exactly what I thought,” Leilani said.

“Leilani, again you save the day,” Amanda said, beaming. “Thank you kindly.”

Leilani nodded at both of us and left.

“Thanks, Amanda,” I said, giving her a hug before I left. “See you this Saturday at the Mission.”

“Wouldn’t miss this wedding for all the roux in New Orleans,” she said.

It was now one o’clock, and though I knew I should grab something to eat, I was too excited about the possibility that this Mr. Downey might have Maple Bennett’s—or whatever she called herself now—address.

I sat in my truck and dialed his number on my cell phone. It took a little talking before he agreed to meet me at a cafe in downtown Templeton.

Templeton’s ode to the West was obvious in the painstaking consistency in its main street buildings. Once an authentic cowboy town, it was rapidly becoming lined with upscale bistros and wine stores. Though the Templeton stock auction down the road was still as authentically Western as anyplace in Montana or Wyoming, the town of Templeton itself was succumbing to the Central Coast’s invasion of fringe-wearing, Ralph Lauren–clad stockbrokers and
dot.com
executives who wanted a rural experience without too much manure smell and accompanied by a nice crisp Chardonnay.

Mr. Downey was waiting for me in a back booth at The Lett’s Dine Inn, a small cafe that appeared to still be in the pancakes and chicken fried steak category rather than crepes with lemon zest and steak Diane. I recognized him from his candid description over the phone. “I’ll be the eighty-two-year-old geezer wearing a scraggly mustache, a cue ball head, and a red-checkered hunting jacket.”

“Mr. James Downey?”

“That’s my name last time I checked my driver’s license.” He gestured to the bench seat across from him. “What’ll you have?” He gestured over at the waitress, who yelled out, “Be right there, Jimmy.”

He grinned. “So, you’re looking into the Sullivan murder, eh? Land sakes alive, that was a long time ago. Why’re you interested in that old tragedy?”

Yet again I told the story of my involvement and interest up to and including Janet Nicholson’s refusal to share the information of the flower buyer to me this morning and how Leilani came up with his name. During my explanation, we were interrupted by the waitress, who took our orders—a grilled cheese sandwich and bowl of tomato soup for him, a BLT for me.

“So,” I said. “I was wondering, since you and Mrs. Downey owned the store before they did, maybe you’d remember something about this person and their order.”

“So you think this Maple Sullivan might have been the one sending the flowers?”

“Maybe, maybe not,” I said. “But it’s really the only lead I have to work on.”

The waitress brought our food and for a few minutes we concentrated on ketchup, salt, pepper, and Tabasco sauce. He took a small bite of his grilled cheese, chewed it slowly, then said, “What do you plan on doing with her if you find her?”

That stopped me cold, my sandwich halfway to my mouth. That was something I honestly hadn’t considered. All I’d concentrated on was finding her and talking to her, finding out what really happened if she’d tell me.

“You’re married to San Celina’s police chief, aren’t you?” Mr. Downey asked.

I nodded, not bothering to ask how he knew that.

“So, would you feel obligated to turn her in seeing as she’s still a suspect in her husband’s murder?”

Again, that was something I hadn’t even thought about. So I did for about thirty seconds. “No,” I said firmly. “I just want to talk to her. To be honest, I don’t think she did it.”

He ate a spoonful of soup, looking up at me as he did. “What if she did?”

This was getting much more complicated than I’d anticipated. To be truthful, deep inside I never thought of any of these people as still being alive. It had been more like a puzzle to me, a quest of sorts. If I hadn’t desperately needed something to keep my mind off the possibility of my own marriage disintegrating before my eyes, I’m not sure I’d have pursued it this far.

If she
was
still alive, the fact remained, she was wanted for questioning. What was my duty as a citizen in that regard? Since I hadn’t had any time to contemplate the moral and ethical ramifications of it, I fell back on my standard procedure.

“When I come to that bridge, I guess I’ll just have to trust my instincts,” I said weakly.

He nodded as if he understood. “I reckon you’ll make the right decision, young woman.” He pushed his half-finished lunch aside, reached down next to him, and pulled three stained green ledgers up and placed them on the table. “Me and Clara sold the place in the late seventies just like your friend told you. We’d owned it since 1939. Ran it on a shoestring all through the war. Kept all our own handwritten records in these ledgers until 1978 when we sold it to Janet Nicholson. We had a part-time accountant those last couple of years and he started sending out real bills and recording them in his own system. He’d give us a monthly statement all typed up nice and neat. That’s what went with the business when we sold it to Janet. She didn’t want our old ledgers, said they weren’t of any use to her. Clara and I kept them because they were kind of a record of our life during that time. We used to go through them when she was still with me and remember all the people we’d arranged flowers for.”

He opened the ledger sitting on the table. “The first request for the rose to be sent to Garvey Sullivan’s grave came on May 10, 1952. After that, we’d get a money order once a year for the exact amount a dozen roses would cost plus our standard delivery charge times twelve. Got it regular as clockwork until we sold the place.”