The Readaholics and the Falcon Fiasco (20 page)

“Okay.” I accepted that for the moment, sensing that it would only alienate her if I pushed. “Troy Sr., then?”

Putting her hands on her hips, she faced me. “Why are you doing this, Amy-Faye? Why are you trying to make it look like someone in my family killed Ivy Donner? If she was blackmailing the people on that list, she deserved what she got.”

I jerked back as if she’d hit me. Where had that come from? “Ivy wasn’t a blackmailer. Clay could have told his clients Ivy had copied the page, warned them that she might make it public.”

“I didn’t mean that. Of course she didn’t deserve to die.” Brooke’s voice was hoarse, and I suspected she was fighting tears. “Didn’t the article this morning say Clay probably killed her?”

“Not in so many words, but I think the police consider him a solid suspect.”

“Well, then. There’s nothing left to investigate. The police—and you—should burn that list, forget it ever existed.”

“Someone tried that.”

She gave a tiny gasp, but then silence stretched between us. Dust motes floated in a sunbeam from the room’s one small window set high on the wall. A rhythmic
skritching
sound puzzled me for a moment, but then I decided a mouse was enjoying the dog food before it was dished out to the shelter’s canine residents.

“Brooke, what’s wrong?”

She sniffed and headed out the door. “Nothing.”

We transferred the bags in silence for twenty minutes, and then she fetched a broom to sweep up litter and dog food dust where the bags had been stacked. I didn’t like seeing her like this—silent, withdrawn, and obviously worried about something—but I didn’t know how to help. Music from an oldies station drifted in to cover the silence, and the splat of water on concrete told me the other volunteer was hosing down the dog runs.

When Brooke emptied the dustpan into a trash can, I said awkwardly, “I should be going. Al will think I drove off a cliff.”

Brooke had been giving me her classic profile for the past twenty minutes, but now she faced me. The hollows under her cheeks seemed more pronounced than usual. “Let it go, Amy-Faye. Can you do that? For me? The police have their killer. Does the rest of it really matter?”

I studied her face, troubled. Brooke was my best friend. Ivy was dead and nothing was going to change that. In all probability, Clay Shumer had killed her. Did the details, the whys and
wherefores, really matter? Not more than my friendship with Brooke, I decided.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

Relief lightened her face and she hugged me. “Okay.”

I left, not sure anything was really okay.

I
was abstracted on my way back to the office, thinking about the names on the ledger page and about how little each of us knows about our neighbors, and even our friends and family. Undercurrents roiled beneath smiling surfaces meant to convince others that everything was moving along smoothly, that there were no submerged logs or boulders in the stream of daily existence. The encounter with Brooke had me wondering exactly what was going on in her marriage. It wasn’t my business, but I loved her and I was worried. In all honesty, I had to point a finger at myself. I mean, how many people realized how torn up I was about Doug getting married?
Bad example.
How many people knew I worried about growing my business so I could meet my mortgage every month and keep Al and me employed? Who knew I felt guilty about not making it to church more often and the fact that I didn’t keep in touch better with my sister Natalie? We all had issues that we covered up or disguised almost as a matter of course; others—like
whoever killed Ivy—were more proactive and deliberate about their cover-ups.

My thoughts distracted me, and I was halfway from the van to my office door when I noticed someone lurking at the end of the walkway where it emptied into the garden. There was something vaguely threatening about the figure backlit by the sun, something stiff and tense. It was early afternoon on a sunny day, but the walkway was shadowed by the house, and there were only a couple of small windows—bathrooms—in the brick façade. For a moment, I felt isolated, and a remnant of the fear I’d felt when I found the “mind your own beeswax” threat prickled through me. I stopped. The figure took a step toward me. I half turned, prepared to make a dash for the safety of the street, when a voice stopped me.

“Wait! Amy-Faye, it’s me. Fee. Fiona Shumer.”

I paused and she came toward me. She stopped a few feet away, clutching her purse tightly to her chest with both arms, and we studied each other. She looked like a different woman from the sleek blond yoga goddess who had taunted me yesterday. Red eyes testified to copious weeping, binge drinking, a sleepless night, or all of the above. Her hair and skin looked dull and her shoulders drooped. She’d apparently dressed all by guess, or in the total dark.

“Fee, are you okay?” I asked, taking a step toward her.

“You’ve got to help me,” she said, her eyes pleading with me. The hands clutching her purse shook.

“Of course. Let’s go into my office—”

“No!” She looked over her shoulder, as if expecting to see a werewolf sneak around the corner and come after us.

“Okay,” I said in a calm voice. “Not my office. When did you last eat?”

She waved an impatient hand. “I don’t know. Last night? Yesterday lunch? Before . . .”

Before the police picked up Clay for interrogation? No wonder she looked so bad. “You need food. You’re eating for two, remember? You’ll feel better with a little soup in you. Let’s go to the Divine Herb.”

Her dull gaze sharpened and she looked down at herself. “I can’t. Not looking like this.”

I thought. “Okay. You wait here, or better yet, in the garden.” I pointed. “I’ll get some lunch to go and then we can talk.”

She nodded but didn’t move. When I made a little shooing motion with my hands, she turned and walked like a zombie toward the garden outside my office. I watched her shamble away, then trotted toward the café. In about five minutes, I was back in the garden, two take-out containers of minestrone soup cradled against my chest and a couple of cookies in a bag dangling from my hand. Fee sat on the stone bench under the apple tree not yet in bloom, and I sat beside her. Silently, I handed over one of the soup containers, several cracker packets, and a spoon. We ate in silence.

With nourishment, Fee seemed to recover herself a little. Squeezing the empty take-out bowl between her hands, she exhaled heavily and said, “I have screwed things up beyond
comprehension. I mean, look at us.” She waved a hand between us. “I don’t even like you, and I know you don’t like me, and yet I’m here looking for help.”

I didn’t bother to contradict her about the liking thing. It was true.

When I didn’t respond, she huffed a broken laugh and went on. “You’re the only one who can help me straighten out this mess. Lord knows I can’t go to the police. They’ve arrested Clay, and it’s my fault.”

I stiffened. Was she confessing to Ivy’s murder?

She must have felt my reaction, because she looked at me, startled. “
That’s
not my fault, although if she’d been standing in front of me when I found out she was sleeping with my husband, I might have strangled her. No, it’s my fault the police think Clay did it. I should start at the beginning.

“A couple of months ago, I started to think Clay was fooling around on me. The wife is always the last to know, right? I should have picked up on the clues earlier, but I was too dumb . . . or too complacent. I mean, I’m not exactly a dog.” She seemed to realize she wasn’t looking her best and self-consciously smoothed her hair. “Well, not in the normal course of things, anyway.”

“You’re beautiful, Fee.”

A grateful smile slipped out, but then she turned waspish. “Don’t patronize me, please. Anyway, I hired a private investigator—a man from Grand Junction because I didn’t want anyone in Heaven knowing that Clay was cheating on me—and it didn’t take him more than two days to get photos of Clay and Ivy Donner. Screwing.” Rage flushed
her face and her fingers picked at the soup bowl, tearing away bits of foam that drifted like stiff snow to the grass. When she had herself under control again, she went on. “I stewed over it all day, waiting for him to get home from the office. We ate dinner like usual and opened a bottle of wine, and I waited for bedtime. When Clay went upstairs, he saw the photos. I had taped them up all over our bedroom. You should have seen his face. He literally turned green. I lost it then, asked him if they’d done it in our bed, asked him how long it had been going on, told him I would never, ever forgive him. Finally, I told him I was pregnant. I got the test results the same day the PI gave me his report.” She smiled bitterly. “Clay was stunned by all of it. He asked me over and over again if I was sure, until I gave him the lab report. He started crying then.”

I sat motionless, overwhelmed by her misery and by the evidence of the damage Ivy had done. The fact that I didn’t much like Fee didn’t keep me from feeling sorry for her. “That’s awful,” I murmured.

“‘Awful’ doesn’t begin to describe it. We talked and shouted at each other all night. I’ll spare you the gory details. In the end, we agreed that we would try again—for the baby. He said he’d break up with Ivy, that he’d manage it so he wasn’t working with her anymore. I was hoping he’d fire her, but he got her promoted. We were making it day to day, until Ivy died.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When she died, Clay lost it. Broke down. Said
he’d killed her. He meant he’d driven her to suicide by breaking up with her. I saw then what I’d never let myself understand. It wasn’t just about the sex—he loved her. I . . . I wanted to punish him. When it seemed as if she had killed herself, well, his guilt was punishment enough. When it began to look like the police were investigating her death as a homicide, he was actually
happy
. It meant she hadn’t poisoned herself over him. I couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t get off so easy. So I sent the police a picture. Of Ivy and Clay.” She gave me a sidelong look.

I knew what she was talking about because of what Hart had told me. I nodded.

“I thought it would embarrass him, being grilled by the police. That’s all I wanted. I didn’t mean for him to get arrested or go on trial! I didn’t know when I sent it about the gambling.” She cut herself off.

“But you do now?”

“Yes. He told me all of it yesterday, after we got home from the police station. He told me he’d been running this side business”—she said it as casually as if he had a paper route—“for almost ten years. He told me that after he broke up with Ivy, he found a page from his ledger, the one he keeps all his transactions in, in the copy machine tray. Someone had made two copies by mistake. It scared the crap out of him. He confronted Ivy at her house. She’d worked with him for so long that she had figured it out, she told him. She’d only kept quiet because she loved him. Now that he’d ditched her, she was going to make him sorry.”

“What did he do?”

“There was nothing he could do. He warned a few of his best clients that there might be an investigation.”

“Troy Widefield?”

After a brief hesitation, Fee nodded. “Among others.”

“Junior or Senior?”

“Senior, I think. I’m not sure. Clay just said ‘Widefield.’ He said he felt like he was living on top of a time bomb, waiting for it to go off. And then Ivy died.”

I studied her face, which had a hint of color in it now. “I don’t understand, Fee—what do you want from me?”

She gave me a look that said I was being dense. “I want you to find out who really killed her, of course. Everyone knows you’ve been asking questions about Ivy’s death, that you never believed she killed herself. When I sent the photo, I didn’t mean for Clay to get in this much trouble. It never crossed my mind that he’d actually be arrested or have to stand trial. I thought he’d just get a taste of humiliation. But because of the bookie stuff and that stupid ledger page Ivy stole, the police think he had a real motive. For obvious reasons, he can’t confess to the betting thing, can’t tell the police one of his clients must have killed Ivy to keep from being exposed, so you’ll have to figure out which one of them did it. Have you found anything out already? Do you have any idea who it might have been?” Fee looked at me hopefully.

I asked slowly, “What makes you so sure it
wasn’t Clay? He had motive and opportunity, and I don’t imagine he’d find it hard to come by a few oleander leaves.”

She swallowed hard. “You didn’t see him when he heard she was dead. He loved her, truly loved her.” Her voice was no more than a whisper. “There’s no way he killed her.”

The admission had cost her a lot, and she suddenly stood. She swayed and I put out a hand to steady her. She shook it off. “Look, I know you don’t like me, Amy-Faye, but you were Ivy’s friend—you must want to know what really happened to her.”

The blatant attempt to manipulate me made me say, “I don’t know if I can.”

Her nostrils flared. “You can’t hate me that much, to refuse to help keep an innocent man out of jail—”

I wasn’t wholly convinced of Clay’s innocence in any context, but I said, “It’s not that, Fee. I sort of told someone I’d drop it. I don’t know—”

“I’ll pay you.”

“I don’t want money.” A squirrel that had approached, hoping the take-out container crumbs were edible, fled up a tree at the sharpness of my tone.

“Then, what?”

I was torn. I’d told Brooke I’d drop it, but I found myself believing Fee when she said Clay didn’t kill Ivy. If not, then the real murderer was walking the streets of Heaven, as pleased as punch that the police had arrested Clay. I could tell the police what Fee had told me, about Clay warning his clients,
including Troy Widefield, but I didn’t think they’d be able to get a search warrant or even question him based on my thirdhand information. Frustration built in me. “I’ll think about it,” I told Fee.

“Thank you.” She paused, as if going to say more, and then walked away.

I looked up at the squirrel, frisking his tail on the branch above me. “You think I should do it, right? Look into it some more?”

He chittered.

“But what about Brooke?”

The squirrel scampered to the crook where the branch met the trunk and scratched his ear briskly. “You’re right. The truth is more important. And we can’t have a murderer running around loose in Heaven.”

“Talking to yourself, boss?” Al’s voice came from the office doorway behind me. I turned to see him lounging against the jamb, arms crossed over his sweater-vested chest. “They say that’s a sign of senility. Or just plain crazy.” He made looping motions beside his ear.

I didn’t think it would improve matters to tell him I’d been talking to the squirrel, so I said I’d been thinking out loud and herded him in front of me into the office, asking for status updates on his events.