Trouble In Spades (22 page)

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Authors: Heather Webber

BOOK: Trouble In Spades
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Flash shuffled over to me, cleared his throat. "I, um, wasn't being honest last night."
My jaw dropped. "What? When?"
"I said I was following someone and lost them . . . I didn't lose them."
"You didn't?" This could be the break we were looking for. "Who was it?"
He blinked sheepishly. His fuzzy salt and pepper eyebrows waggled. "You."

Twenty-one

"Me!?"
He shrugged. "I saw you out by Donatelli's gazebo, and thought you might need some help looking for your dog. By the time I caught up to you, you were at Mr. Weatherbee's."
"Why didn't you tell me this last night?"
"Didn't want you to think I was a stalker! But after another burglary happened last night, I didn't want you to think I had anything to do with that either."
I wasn't sure what to believe. Before I could ask more questions, Mr. Cabrera grabbed my arm and shooed Flash off. "Mr. Ca—"
He interrupted. "I've got you on the schedule for Saturday, Miz Quinn. That okay with you?"
Inwardly, I groaned. The last thing I wanted to do was be part of the neighborhood watch. I couldn't even keep tabs on Riley.
"Everyone's taking part," Mr. Cabrera added.
I caved under his pointed stare. "Oh, all right. Who am I paired with?"
He smiled. "Ursula."
"Brickhouse? What? Why? She doesn't even live in this neighborhood."
"We're shacking up," he said, grinning so broadly I thought his dentures were going to come loose. "On a trial basis."
Oh dear God.
I opened the door to see him out, and Maria came up the steps, grinning broadly.
"Bonjour!"
she cried.
I sniffed the air, wondering if I should have been calling the local taverns looking for her.
"Where have you been?" I asked.
She sighed, slipped off her heels and sank onto the sofa. "At the spa." She held up her hand. "Look at my manicure! Isn't it fabulous?"
I should have known. Even
Oprah
couldn't compete with paraffin.
"Where's Gracie?" I asked.
She scrunched her nose. "Maria?"
"Oh, stop with the worrying. She's fine. The vet wanted to keep her overnight." She looked down at the floor.
"Maria . . ."
She looked up at me. "Oh, all right. I talked him into keeping her for the night. It's only sixty dollars, Nina, and I really need to get some sleep."
My sixty dollars, at that. I wanted to yell at her, but I couldn't. Reluctantly I admitted—only to myself—that I might have done the same thing if I'd been there. "Well, did he say what was wrong with her?"
She was studying her pedicure. "Hmm? Oh, she's going blind and has bladder problems." Where on earth did Kit get this dog?
"Oh yeah, and something about poison."
I shook my head, thinking I didn't hear her right.
When she didn't say anything else, I waved a hand in front of her face. "Poison?"
Her nose wrinkled again. "Yeah?"
I sighed, went to the phone to call the vet.
I couldn't be mad at Maria even if I wanted to. Not when I knew what I knew. My stomach twisted. How long did Nate have? We needed to find him. Silently, I begged him to call me again.
I looked up the vet's number, then remembered that the office was closed. Before I could decide whether to have him paged, my phone rang.
Startled, I jumped back. It rang a second time. I ducked my head and looked at the caller ID. My mother. I didn't pick it up. Two rings more and it stopped.
A second later Maria yelled into the kitchen, "Your cell phone's buzzing. I'll get it."
"No!" I darted into the living room. It had to be my mother. Maria had my backpack open and my cell phone in her hand.
I lunged for the phone. "Don't answer it!"
"Why?" Then she looked at the caller ID screen. "Oh." She dropped the phone back onto my backpack and stared inside as though something had caught her eye.
Oh no! The copies I had made of those pictures were in there. Wrapped in an envelope, yes, but still in there. I lunged again, but it was too late.
"What's this," Maria asked, pulling out the PCF gala guest list.
Thank God it wasn't the pictures. I wouldn't know where to begin an explanation.
She flipped through the pages, her eyebrows furrowing. "Where'd you get this?"
Oh jeez. "I . . . um—"
"This is the guest list Verona Frye needs . . ."
I grabbed onto an idea for dear life. "
That's
the guest list?"
"Yeah. Where'd you get it?"
"Nate left it at my office." Close enough.
"He did?"
"Yeah. When he came by to drop off some papers for your backyard. It must've gotten mixed up somehow."
Liar,
liar, pants on fire.
I nudged her over on the couch, sat down. "I've been carting it around, waiting to give it back to him."
"He probably doesn't know where it is."
Now that she had it, I thought this was a good time to pick her brain. "What are those columns?" I asked. As an event planner, she'd know, right? Nate's weird shorthand and all . . .
"This," she said, pointing to the first column, "is that the invitation was sent." Her French manicure slid to the next column. "This is the RSVP column. An X means no, a Y means yes."
On the page we were looking at, almost all of the RSVP column had some symbol or another in it. "What's the third column for?"
"Double-checking. People who haven't RSVPed are notified . . . usually a telephone reminder."
Now that I looked more closely, I saw that when the middle column was blank, there was a check in the third column. Very confusing.
"Now this is strange," she said.
"What?" She was looking at the bottom of the last page.
"There's about twenty names here that look to have been added on to the master list."
"How do you know?"
"Not alphabetized."
"That's unusual? To add a last-minute guest?"
"Not so much. What's odd is that there's no mark in the RSVP column and no reminder mark either. Wait . . . and there's a circle around the checkmark in the first column."
She was seriously losing me. "English, please?"
"These last twenty invitations were returned unopened." I scanned the names and was surprised to realize I recognized some of them . . . kids from the PCF website. I shared this with Maria, and she smiled. "I know what he did," she said.
"What?"
"He must have invited some of PCF's beneficiaries to the gala, as guests." She looked at me. "He's so sweet." I thought about his phone call and my stomach turned.
"He loves you, you know." I'd promised him I'd tell her.
"I know. I just wish I knew what was going on . . ."
She wasn't the only one. My gaze slid to the guest list. "If these names are PCF beneficiaries, why did all their invitations come back?" I asked.
"Good question," she said. "I'll ask Verona when I call to tell her I have the list."
"No!" Maria looked at me strangely, and I said, "I, um, am going to see her tomorrow. I'll bring the guest list with me. No need to bother her."
Nate was hiding that list from someone, and I wasn't letting it out of my sight until we knew who it was.
"All right." Maria stood. "I'm going to take a long bath. I've had a rough day."
A rough day at the spa. I could just imagine.
She headed up the stairs and I called out to her. "Maria . . ."
"Yeah?"
I needed to fill her in about Nate's car, but oddly enough, she did look like she'd had a rough day. No doubt Nate's disappearance was taking its toll on her, though she put up a good front.
"It can wait till later," I said.
She tipped her head. "You sure?"
"Yep."
"All right."
I moseyed into the kitchen and caught sight of the three glasses on the kitchen counter. Riley had put them into big gallon-size Ziploc bags and written whose was whose on the plastic.
Maybe there was a little bit of detective in him after all. I heard Maria on the stairs. "Oh," she said, coming into the kitchen, a thick bathrobe over her arm. "Gracie."
"What about her?"
"I forgot to tell you that the vet thought she might have gotten into something around the house."
I wondered if Gracie had been sniffing around Riley's room. Who knew what toxic things lurked in there? "He suggested you dog-proof this place."
I looked around. There wasn't really anything for Gracie to get into here. Not only that, but she hadn't been out of our sight, except when she was under the couch—and the only things under there were harmless dust bunnies. I slapped my forehead. Gracie
had been ou
t
of my sight—when she'd escaped last night.
Mr. Weatherbee had found her in his
garden
.
Ugh. "Come on," I said, pulling Maria to her feet.
"Where are we going?" She hung her robe over the back of the stool.
"Mr. Weatherbee's."
"Oh, the gay guy?"
"What?!"
She slipped on a pair of my flip-flops and pulled open the back door. "The older man with dark wavy hair, green eyes, clean shaven? Wears Bruno Magli loafers, Hugo Boss clothes?"
"Mr. Weatherbee is not gay." What was it with my family and thinking everyone was gay? Between Maria and Ana, I was starting to look twice at everyone I knew.
We cut across Mr. Cabrera's and Mrs. Daasch's yards. Her panties were gone from her doorknob. As we passed through Mrs. Walker's yard, all I could imagine was her hiding in a closet while someone was breaking into her house. This guy needed to be caught. "What are we doing?" Maria asked.
"Look around. See if you see anything dug up or half eaten. Bulbs, especially."
Day lilies and daffodils were beautiful—and very deadly to dogs. If Gracie had nibbled on one, she was lucky to be alive.
I wracked my brain, trying to remember what other plants were toxic to pets. There were so many, and I hadn't needed to brush up on it lately.
"And you're trying to tell me this man isn't gay?" Maria said, looking around.
I hated to stereotype, but I had to admit she had a point. The lawn was meticulous, Mr. Weatherbee's garden filled with pastels. From pink canterbury bells to purple sage. And his house? A pretty salmon color with cream and tan trim. "But he's divorced!"
"Did you ever wonder why?" Maria asked with a "duh" look on her face.
"But he gets
Playboy
in the mail," I said weakly, not believing that a juicy tidbit like Mr. Weatherbee being gay could be kept secret in the Mill. The Mill!
Maria kept her gaze on the ground. "Maybe it's a decoy."
"You think?"
She shrugged. "A friend of mine once dated a guy who had an above-average porn collection only to find out he was gay."
"How'd she find out?"
"He wouldn't put out." She sounded seriously miffed by this. "Then a couple years later, she saw him and his boyfriend at the Home and Garden show."
"Oh my God! Derrick? Derrick Brandt?"
Maria's mouth dropped. "How did you know that?!"
Maria had dated Derrick for two months her freshman year of college. I'd never seen her so angry over a breakup . . . and Derrick Brandt—and his partner Sean— owned the nursery where I had an account.
She hmmphed. "Never mind. I don't want to know."
We continued to search the area. Gracie had definitely been here. Signs of trampling were everywhere. The garden would spring back with a little TLC, though.
A broken stem caught my eye. I wandered over to the trellis attached to the back of the house. Morning glory vines were working their way upward. The plant was pretty young, not yet three feet, but it had a fair share of buds, and several closed blooms.
Bending over, I picked up the stem. It hadn't been cut with shears. Looked like small little dog teeth to me. "I found it," I said to Maria.
"What is that?"
"Morning glory. Gracie must've eaten one of the blooms."
"So?"
"It's poisonous to dogs," I said. It explained a lot too, like why Gracie was walking in circles this morning. "It causes hallucinations and an upset stomach."
"That explains the yakking this morning."
"And the ghosts. She should be okay, though." Thank God. I could just imagine explaining all this to Kit.
"Mrs. Quinn?"
Maria and I jumped. Mr. Weatherbee stood on his back deck. "What are you doing back there?"
"Looking for evidence," I said.
Now that I looked a little closer, I can't believe I'd never noticed the way he dressed. I suddenly remembered how he'd held his glass of lemonade too, and how he'd checked for a mark on the bottom of the glass.
I shook my head. I was doing it again. Stereotyping. Straight men did those things too. Lots of them.
All right, all right. Some of them.
"I can assure you," he said, "that I am not the panty thief."
Maria snorted. "I should say not. He's obviously—"
"A very nice man," I put in quickly. "Here," I said to Maria, handing her the morning glory stem, "chew on this for a while."
Maria folded her arms over her chest. "Hmmph."
"I was looking for something our dog might have eaten. She got sick."
"Oh."
"But now that you mention it—why were you out last night?" I asked.
He looked irritated that I even asked. "I told you, I was on thief patrol."
"You weren't scheduled," I countered.
He arched an eyebrow. "Do I have to be?" he said. "To be looking out for my best interests?"
I tipped my head. Looking out for his best interests? What did that mean? I peeked over at Maria. She was admiring her manicure. She'd said something about a decoy earlier. Was it possible Mr. Weatherbee was acting suspicious to make us think he was the panty thief? All so we wouldn't suspect he was gay? Why? Why not just come out?

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