Taken In (8 page)

Tori lifted her wrist to the light and noted the late hour. “First, we get a good night’s sleep. Then, starting first thing tomorrow morning, we start turning over rocks—big rocks, little rocks, and everything in between. The key to Dixie’s freedom is out there somewhere and it’s up to the six of us to find it. Fast.”

“You have to eat, Victoria.” Rose halted her French toast–laden fork inches from her mouth. “You have to keep up your strength.”

She knew Rose was right, knew Dixie was counting on her and everyone else assembled around the table to find the truth, but it was hard. They were in a strange city, far from home, with a mammoth-sized problem to solve and little to no idea of where exactly to start.

“The folks at XYZ Studios were most accommodatin’ when I called this mornin’ to tell ’em we’d be stayin’ on a few days.” Margaret Louise chased her ham and cheese omelet around her plate with her fork, smiling triumphantly as she delivered it to her mouth. “In fact, would you believe Melly actually called back herself and said they’d pick up the tab for the hotel for the rest of the week?”

Beatrice looked up from her tea. “They will?”

“Seems that little thing was so taken by our friendship that she wants to make it easier for us to help Dixie.” Margaret Louise laid down her fork, pointed at Tori’s largely uneaten breakfast, then swapped plates at the nod of agreement she sought. “Course they might want to send that sweet camera fella with us when we actually get to springin’ Dixie.”

She bit her lip to keep from correcting Margaret Louise’s use of the word
when
. Semantics weren’t necessary at this stage of the game. Especially when the insertion of
if
could have damaging effects on morale.

“Are they picking up the tab for this meal?” Rose pointed her fork around the same breakfast restaurant they’d spied through the branches of a potted plant forty-eight hours earlier. “Because I
do
have to eat once we get back home to Sweet Briar.”

Debbie waved away the elderly woman’s concern. “This is Colby’s treat.”

Beatrice and Rose sighed in unison then joined in the chorus of appreciation that spread around the table with as much enthusiasm as they could muster in light of Dixie’s plight.

“Oh, oh . . . there he is!” Margaret Louise pushed Tori’s plate off to the side and pointed at the tall, dark-haired waiter they’d been hoping to see since arriving nearly thirty minutes earlier. “Should I call him over?”

At Tori’s nod, Margaret Louise’s hand shot into the air. “Woo-hoo, young man, over here . . .”

Leona dropped her head into her hands in embarrassment as the waiter glanced in their direction, then hurried over. “Yes, ma’am? Would you like me to call your server?”

“No. You’re the one we’ve been waitin’ to see.”

His brows rose. “Oh?”

Margaret Louise guided his attention toward Tori. “Go ahead, Victoria, ask him.”

Sensing the waiter’s confusion, Tori lifted her purse from the floor beside her chair and retrieved the printout of John’s face that Margaret Louise had managed to score from the computer in the hotel lobby. Holding it out, she looked from the waiter to the picture and back again. “Do you remember this man? You waited on him at that table over there”—she pointed with her free hand to the table where Dixie had been smiling so beautifully just two days earlier—“with a friend of ours.”

Instantly, the waiter’s hands were splayed waist-high. “I don’t want any trouble. I’m just a waiter, trying to work off my student loans.”

“Please. I’m not looking for trouble—for you or for me. I just want to know if you remember him and whether you’ve seen him in here before. That’s it.” She heard the earnestness in her voice, saw the way it affected the waiter, who relaxed his shoulders and overall stance enough to warrant a second and more prolonged look at the picture in her hand.

“Uh, yeah. I sort of remember him. My female co-workers were all gushing about the way he looked at his breakfast companion.”

Tori set the picture to the side of Margaret Louise’s empty plate and dug into her purse a second time. This time, when she produced a picture of Dixie, the waiter simply nodded. “Yeah, that’s her.”

“Ever see him before?”

Again he looked at the picture of John, the shake of his head coming fairly quickly. “Can’t say that I have. Why? Is he in trouble for something?”

The tip of Beatrice’s chin began to tremble as she leaned to her left to look at Dixie’s snapshot. “No. But
she
is.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. She was a nice lady. Very friendly and happy.” Then stepping back from the table, he hooked his thumb in the direction of an impatient diner one section over. “I gotta go. Good luck with your friend.”

And then he was gone, his relatively few answers useless in the grand scheme of things.

“What are we going to do?” Debbie asked. “We know nothing more than we did when we sat down.”

Leona sipped her tea then set the cup back on its saucer. “While I can’t begin to understand what it was about Dixie that possessed John to change his usual tactics, the fact remains that he did have a routine. One that, according to Dixie’s original understanding, hasn’t changed since I first saw him all those years ago.”

“In Paris, right?”

Somehow, someway, Tori managed to divert Leona’s stare from Beatrice back to the table at large. “What are you talking about, Leona?”

With all the drama of a leading lady, Leona lifted her napkin from her lap and folded it carefully beside her plate, the tangible weight of everyone’s attention bringing a small smirk to the corners of her collagen-enhanced lips. “If you actually listened to me yesterday, you’ll remember that it was at a bookstore café where I first saw John.”

Tori leaned forward. “Go on.”

“The same bookstore café where I continued to see him each day for the next several days . . .”

“You’re wasting our time, Leona,” Rose admonished. “Who cares where you saw John in
Paris
? We’re in New York. Worried about
Dixie
.”

She let Leona’s words filter through her head, the meaning behind them becoming crystal clear. “Wait. I get it. John started his con in the same place all the time—a place where the personnel knew him and were content staying mum about his antics.”

Leona curtailed her glare at Rose long enough to nod at Tori.

“And if I remember correctly, John’s original plan for meeting Dixie was at a—”

“Bookstore café!” Margaret Louise finished, wide-eyed. Then, turning to her sister, she smiled. “I’m not sure why you sat such a long time with your mouth open waitin’ for a chicken to fly in, but at least it finally did.”

The glare moved on to Margaret Louise. “Excuse me?”

“Why didn’t you say somethin’ sooner?”

“Would anyone have listened if I did?” Leona stepped into her well-worn martyr attire just long enough to send a few guilt-ridden eyes to the floor. “But don’t worry, I’m used to it.”

“Does anyone remember where that bookstore was?” Debbie asked, looking up once again. “Maybe that was his comfort spot here in New York.”

When no one answered, Leona’s smirk returned. “West Fifty-eighth Street.”

“Do you think maybe someone there will be able to point us in the direction of the person who really did this?” Beatrice asked as Debbie signaled for the check. “The one who planted the torn scarf on Dixie?”

“We can hope.” Tori folded the picture of John into fourths and returned it, along with Dixie’s, back to her purse. “If nothing else, maybe we can start to figure out who some of John’s other cons were.”

Rose glanced at her watch then slowly back at Tori, the worry she held for Dixie aging her all the more. “There’s something I don’t understand about all of this.”

“What’s that, Rose?”

“You said that scarf was in Dixie’s purse, right?”

At Tori’s nod, Rose continued, the confusion in her voice doing double time across her weathered face. “Dixie was back from the hair salon before you returned with news of John’s death.”

She tried to follow Rose’s train of thought, but it was hard. Her focus wasn’t inside the Waldorf Astoria any longer. “I’m sorry, Rose, but I’m not following what you’re saying . . .”

“I know Dixie was at the hair salon. I saw her hair before and after, and there’s no question she had it done.” Rose waited to continue until after the waitress assigned to their table had picked up Debbie’s credit card and disappeared through the swinging doors at the back of the restaurant. “Then once you came back and told her, she never left her room until she was removed from it by that detective.”

Since everything at that moment was simply a verification of facts they already knew, she nodded along with everyone else.

“Don’t you see?” Rose uttered, clearly frustrated with Tori’s lack of response. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“What don’t make sense, Rose?” Margaret Louise prompted.

“If that scarf was torn during the act of murder, how did it end up in Dixie’s purse when she wasn’t anywhere near that man’s apartment?”

Tori stared at Rose as the woman’s question finally took hold. There was no plausible answer anywhere in sight. A quick glance at each of their friends yielded the same dumb-struck look she felt etched across her own face.

“I missed that.” Beatrice turned to Tori and waited.

But like Beatrice, the timing of the scarf’s placement inside Dixie’s purse hadn’t dawned on her, either.

Margaret Louise nudged her chin in Leona’s direction then placed her hands on the table and lowered her normally boisterous voice the best she could. “My daddy used to have a sayin’ that summed up situations like this in short order.”

“What was that?” Tori asked.

“You ’member, Twin?”

Leona looked past her sister just long enough to bat her eyelashes at a handsome doorman in the hotel’s famed lobby, her mouth curving upward in a seductive smile as he puffed out his well-built chest in response. “Daddy used to say all sorts of things.”

“He’d say, ‘If your cat had kittens in the doghouse, would that make ’em puppies?’” Margaret Louise shared. “That fits here, don’t it?”

“I’m not sure,” Tori said honestly. “How does that tie into the torn scarf?”

Acutely aware of the supposition she held, Margaret Louise leaned forward, gesturing for Rose, Debbie, Beatrice, Leona, and Tori to follow suit. When they did, she got to the bottom of what she was trying to say. “Just because that torn scarf had somethin’ to do with the crime scene don’t mean it had to be planted
after
John was pushed.”

When no one responded, Margaret Louise continued, the pride she felt over her theory making her large brown eyes sparkle with excitement. “What I’m sayin’ is maybe that scarf was planted in Dixie’s purse
before
the actual killin’. By someone who knew exactly what they were goin’ to do and how they were goin’ to get away with doin’ it.”

“But the tear points between the piece found in John’s apartment and the piece found in Dixie’s purse have to match,” Debbie challenged, “or they couldn’t use it as evidence against Dixie.”

“I agree. But that don’t mean that scarf wasn’t torn that way long before John was pushed.”

“But—”

Margaret Louise quieted Debbie’s argument with a gentle hand on her shoulder. “It wouldn’t be hard to put one torn piece in Dixie’s purse and drop the second piece in John’s apartment. Why, now that I think ’bout it, I’m pretty sure they did somethin’ like that on
FBI Manhunt
’bout two seasons ago. Only they used part of a diary instead of a scarf on that episode.”

A chill skittered down Tori’s spine as the enormity of what Margaret Louise was trying to say finally hit her with a one-two punch . . .

John’s murder was not only premeditated, but so, too, was Dixie’s setup as the prime suspect.

It took only a glance at each of her friends to know Dixie’s predicament was taking its toll. Rose’s footfalls were slower, her shoulders more slumped. The hearty laughter that was synonymous with Margaret Louise was infrequent. Debbie, who wore cheerfulness like a favorite sweatshirt, kept her eyes on the ground. Beatrice’s camera and Bobblehead Kenny remained in the nanny’s purse, despite the many landmarks they passed en route to West Fifty-eighth Street.

But it was Leona, perhaps, who showed the greatest wear and tear from the former librarian’s official murder charge the previous afternoon. In fact, for the first time since Tori had met Leona, the sixty-something was void of all makeup.

No false eyelashes.

No artfully applied rouge.

No outfit-matching lipstick.

And not so much as a hint of hairspray across a single, solitary strand of her salon-softened gray hair . . .

Tori wrapped her arm around Leona as they reached Columbus Circle, the utter silence of the group enough to make her want to pull her hair out by the roots. “You’re looking a little pale this morning, Leona. Would you like to borrow some of my blush?” She slipped her free hand inside her shoulder-mounted purse and felt around. “Ever since that lecture you gave me last fall about color, I’ve been pretty good about keeping some makeup on me at all times.”

Leona stopped walking and stared up at Tori. “How can you be thinking about makeup at a time like this?”

She felt her mouth drop open, but no words came out. Instead, she snapped her fingers in Margaret Louise’s direction, summoning her cohort in crime for a much-needed second pair of eyes.

“What is it, Victoria? Is somethin’ wrong?”

“Who is this masked marvel?” she asked, pointing at Leona.

Instantly, Margaret Louise’s hand was on Tori’s forehead, checking for a temperature that wasn’t there. “Victoria? Are you havin’ a spell of some sort?”

“She’s just being insensitive and hypocritical, that’s all.” Leona pulled Paris close in her arms, planting a kiss between the bunny’s long ears as she did. “Can you imagine Victoria critiquing
my
looks?” Then, lowering the rabbit to her bosom, Leona narrowed her eyes squarely at Tori. “If you will recall, we were supposed to be back in Sweet Briar today—the tenth day of my cycle.”

“Your cycle?” Tori echoed in shock. “You still get—”

“She’s talkin’ ’bout her beauty cycle, Victoria.” Margaret Louise laughed her first real laugh of the day. “Every ten days, my sister allows her face to breathe. Today is the tenth day.”

“Is this a new thing?”

“Not unless fifty years constitutes new in your book, dear,” Leona mumbled.

Tori looked from Margaret Louise to Leona and back. “I’ve never seen her without makeup. Ever.”

“That’s because you don’t see her on the tenth day.”

“She doesn’t work on the tenth day?”

“Nope.”

“She doesn’t date on the tenth day?”

“Nope.” Margaret Louise grinned. “But flirtin’ over the phone is okay, ain’t it, Twin?”

At Leona’s knowing nod, Tori stepped closer to Margaret Louise. “What about sewing circle meetings back home? Are you going to tell me they’ve never fallen on the tenth day in this beauty cycle?”

“Those are the meetin’s she don’t come to.”

She thought back over the last two years, to the meetings Leona had missed for one reason or another. “Wait. You mean those times when Paris has needed a good night’s sleep . . . or she’s had to go over the inventory at the antique shop . . . or her nails were wet? Those were actually these—these makeup-free days?”

“Silly, ain’t it? But it’s like my daddy always said, ‘You can’t tell much ’bout a chicken potpie ’til you cut through the crust.’”

Rose joined the circle from whatever location she’d been listening from. “So what you’re telling us, Margaret Louise, is that Leona is human like the rest of us? Or as human as she can be underneath all that meanness?”

“Meanness?
Meanness
?” Leona hissed. “I say something to Victoria about her raccoon eyes at a meeting, and I am nearly stoned. I refer to Beatrice as Mary Poppins and I’m vilified. If I don’t gush over everything that comes out of my sister’s kitchen, I’m accused of being jealous. I call you”—she pointed at Rose—“an old goat after you’ve humiliated me in front of everyone, and I’m admonished for being cruel. Yet Victoria invites everyone to mock my tried-and-true beauty ritual and that’s okay? Sounds like your standard for meanness, you old goat, is rather one-sided.”

Feeling suddenly one foot tall, Victoria held up her hands in surrender. “Leona, I wasn’t questioning you to be mean. I was worried about you. I’ve never seen you without makeup in all the time I’ve known you. You lecture me on this same matter all the time. So it stands to reason I’d be concerned and then, as Margaret Louise explained the truth, curious, too.”

Leona opened her mouth to respond but closed it as Debbie’s index finger brought their focus back to the original task that had them traveling the streets of Manhattan by foot in the first place. “Look! There it is!”

Sure enough, less than four storefronts away, was McCormick’s Books & Café, the original destination for Dixie and John’s first meeting. And like clockwork, the apprehension that had plagued each one of them prior to the brief distraction offered by Leona’s makeup-less face returned. In spades.

Only this time, instead of the silent manifestations that had accompanied their walk to that point, the worry took an audible form.

“Victoria, what happens if this turns out to be a dead end?” Rose said, her voice trembling. “I don’t know if Dixie can stay in that horrid jail cell much longer.”

Debbie pulled her gaze up long enough to nod along with Rose’s assessment.

Beatrice’s lower lip quivered. “All I wanted to do in that courthouse this morning was hug her, but there wasn’t any time. They just snapped those bloody handcuffs on her and carted her off like a common criminal.”

“If I’ve learned anything in the past two years helpin’ Victoria, it’s that there’s always a trail of breadcrumbs to the truth,” Margaret Louise said. “You just gotta keep the crows from gettin’ to ’em first.”

Leona began walking, her purposeful stride inviting all to follow. “Men like John are predictable when they’ve found a script that works. We’ll find something here, I’m sure.”

“But if he switched his and Dixie’s meetin’ to the Waldorf at the last minute, don’t that make you think he was lookin’ for a new script?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” Paris’s ears perked above the line of Leona’s swinging arm. “But my gut says we start here.”

Two minutes later they were in McCormick’s, the smell of books eliciting a momentary sigh of contentment from both Tori and Rose.

“Welcome to McCormick’s, ladies! My name is Charles. If there’s anything—and I do mean
anything—
I can do to make your visit to paradise better, let me know . . .” The twenty-something popped his spiky, red-haired head out from behind a giant poster-sized book placard and clapped his slender hands together. “Oh! Oh! I know you! I know
all
of you!”

Then, with a series of hops not unlike the ones Paris utilized to make her way from carrot treat to carrot treat, Charles stopped just inches from where they stood. “Now give me a minute, okay? I can do this . . . Oh! Oh!” The young man flapped his hands up and down. “You”—he pointed at Margaret Louise—“you’re the one who likes to cook!”

Looking left then right, he lowered his voice to a high-pitched whisper. “I have to tell you,
moonshine
in sweet potato pie is genius, pure genius!”

Margaret Louise beamed as he moved on to Debbie. “While your color scheme of blue and white is delightful for your pastry bags and teacups, have you ever considered adding a touch of pink? Perhaps as a contrasting color? You could make your sales receipts pink. Or maybe the doilies I imagine you must put on each plate.”

“I
do
use doilies . . .” Debbie mused as she slipped into thought.

Reaching out, Charles took Leona’s non-Paris-holding hand in his and squealed. “A fellow skin cycler! I am so—so glad to see someone with my sensibilities! And Oh! Oh! This must be Paris.” He nuzzled his nose against Paris’s. “She is simply precious. Precious, I say!”

Then, with his one hand still holding Leona’s, he nudged his chin in Rose’s direction and smiled approvingly. “Everyone here will tell you I wiped my eyes more than a few times when Victoria, here, was saying how you’ve helped ease the pain of her great-grandmother’s passing. Touching . . . so, so touching.”

He took a moment to wipe his eyes with his free hand then released his hold on Leona and hopped back to the register, winking at Tori as he did. When he reached it, he spun around, clapped his hands in a quick, yet deliberate beat, and ran his finger down the side of an autographed black-and-white photograph framed and hung on a nearby wall. “Beatrice, you
have
to see this.”

Slowly, shyly, Beatrice took a step forward, a squeal erupting from her lips and spreading an even bigger smile across Charles’s. “Oh my gosh! He was
here
? Kenny was here in this store?”

“Five months ago. Can you
believe
it?” He took one last look at the photograph then fixed his glance on the whole of them as a group once again. “I’ve been watching
Taped with Melly and Kenneth
for three years now and never have they had as wonderful a friend segment as they did with all of—”

Charles stopped, lifted his finger in a mental count, then dropped it back down to his side. “Really, ladies, don’t you think Dixie should play hard to get just a little? I realize she’s been without a man for quite some time, but there’s no harm in turning down a date once in a while. Makes her more mysterious that way.”

Leona’s head nodded in approval. “I like the way you think, Charles. Your mother raised you right.”

He snapped his fingers in a quick triangle shape. “You’re darn straight she did!” Then, turning to Tori, he said, “So what did she wear? Something spectacular, I hope?”

“Stripes are never spectacular, Charles. You know that.”

His mouth snapped open. “Tell me you’re kidding. Tell me you did
not
let her leave your hotel room in stripes, Leona.”

“No, they gave them to her there.”

Charles nibbled on the pinky of his right hand then stopped himself when he realized what he was doing. “Call in the search party. You lost me.”

Beatrice tore her focus from the autographed picture of her idol and fixed it instead on Charles, her eyes wide with worry. “Dixie is in . . . jail,” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper for the last word.

“What?”
Charles held his hand to his heart and staggered back a step. “You can’t be serious? What happened?”

“Her bloke was”—Beatrice looked left and right then lowered her voice still further—“
murdered
a few blocks from here the day before our show aired.”

His hand moved to his mouth. “Hold the phone. Are you saying
John Dreyer
was her bloke?”

Tori heard the gasps that mingled with her own. “You knew John?”

“As much as anyone can truly know a snake as he’s slithering along the ground . . .” Charles leaned against the edge of the counter and rolled his eyes with stage-worthy drama. “So all the time Dixie was blushing over her new friend, she was talking about
him
?” At their collective nod, he
tsk
ed loudly. “Men who prey on vulnerable women like that should be taken out into the woods and shot.”

“Or pushed from a three-story balcony,” Leona mused with a hint of boredom.

Charles laughed. “So true.”

Tori took note of the various customers looking at or reading books around the store, her heart pumping loudly in her chest. “Dixie didn’t do it, Charles. But someone has gone to great lengths to make it look as if she did. That’s why she’s sitting in a jail downtown. That’s why we’re here, in your shop, instead of heading back to Sweet Briar like we were supposed to.” She took a deep breath in an effort to head off the emotion she felt building behind her eyes. “We need to know everything you can tell us about John—how you knew him, how he operated, who he preyed on. Basically everything and anything you think might help us prove Dixie’s innocence.”

A rapid blink gave way to a misting in Charles’s eyes as he waved the splayed fingers of his right hand in a fan against his face. “You want
my
help? To rescue Dixie and reunite the Sweet Briar Seven? Oh my gosh, I
can’t
believe this is really happening to me!”

Rose, who’d remained wide-eyed and silent since Charles introduced himself, finally shook her head in disbelief. “You must live a very sheltered life, young man, if you think
we’re
exciting.”

Charles wiggled his fingers at Rose and laughed. “Once we get Dixie back where she belongs, I’ll bake you my world-famous lasagna and you can meet my roommate. He calls himself Double-Oh-Seven for his supposed prowess with the ladies. But between you, me, and the stylist with the exquisite eyes who saw straight through my hair to my very essence yesterday afternoon, he’s really more of a Double-Oh-Dud. At least in my world anyway.”