Lemon Tart (17 page)

“Well, chocolate has calming properties,” Breanna said.

“Oh, that’s right, it does,” she said, bending the book open to
the right page, an easy thing to do since the journal had been so well used
over the years. She began pulling ingredients out of the cupboard. Then she
remembered the e-mail from Riggs and Barker. She felt her
determination, which had been slowing down, speed back up again.

“Will you do the brownies?” she asked Breanna as she crossed to
the counter where she’d deposited the papers she’d brought in from the car. She
found the e-mail and scanned it, reorienting herself with the
information. Then she sat at the computer, did a Google search for Riggs and
Barker, found the home page, and within seconds of the idea forming in her
mind, she had the contact information for the Boston office. She copied the
e-mail address for the human resources person, a woman by the name of
Marianne Humphry, and pasted it into a new e-mail message.

“What are you doing?” Breanna asked from the kitchen, twenty
feet away from the computer station. She was measuring out the salt.

“E-mailing the Boston office of Riggs and Barker,” Sadie
said as if it were obvious. “I wonder if they can give me any more information.”
She knew what she was doing wasn’t exactly right, but she didn’t know what else
to do. It took her a few minutes to figure out the best lie to tell, though she
preferred to think of it as investigative work.

Ms. Humphry,

I’m contacting you in regards to a mortgage
I’m processing. Anne Lemmon is attempting to buy a home and claims she worked
for your company a couple of years ago and was recently rehired. In light of
the new federal bankruptcy laws, and because of the volatile market, we are
attempting to determine whether her employment with your company is secure,
where she worked before coming to your office, and under what conditions her
employment with you was terminated. Any information you can give us would be
helpful. The cosigner for the mortgage is one Ronald Bradley, who also works
for your company. I need to verify his employment status as well. Thank you for
your assistance.

“Mom!”

Sadie jumped and looked over her shoulder where Breanna was
reading her message. “I just need a little information,” she explained.

“By lying about her buying a house?” Breanna said. “Can’t you
get in trouble for that?”

Sadie shrugged, and then changed the Sadie Hoffmiller in her
signature line to S. Hoffmiller. “I’m just covering my bases,” she said. “I
like to think that’s why the information came to me in the first place—a
kind of fated happenstance that will lead me to find justice for Anne and find
Trevor before it’s too late.”

Breanna shook her head and returned to the kitchen. “You’d kill
me if I ever did something like that. Remember the time you dragged me to the
principal’s office because you found out I’d spent some of the money I was
supposed to donate to the fund-raiser on buying a pop?”

“That was different,” Sadie said, hitting send. “You have to
understand why the rules are made in the first place before you can break them.”

“I’ll keep that in mind the next time I’m tempted to break the law,” Breanna said,
shooting her mother a look that showed she wasn’t impressed. “You’re going to
get in trouble,” she added.

Sadie shrugged and let out a sigh as the message disappeared
from her outbox. The sun was setting, and true to the sunsets of northern
Colorado, the sky was lit up in a hundred shades of pink and orange, filling
the house with colored light. It seemed strange that such beauty should be cast
when a day such as this was coming to an end.

“So what if I do get in trouble?” she said. “Can it matter that
much in the grand scheme of things? Anne was murdered, Trevor was kidnapped,
Ron’s been lying to me the whole time we’ve been together—what’s
a little mixed up e-mail in relation to all that?”

Homemade Alfredo Sauce

1 cup heavy cream*

1 cup butter

1 cup Parmesan cheese, shredded (Shawn likes more
cheese)

Salt and pepper, to taste

Combine all ingredients in small saucepan
(not Teflon-coated) and simmer on low until melted and mixed, stirring
continually (about 20 minutes). Whisk until smooth before serving over pasta.
Can be refrigerated and used again if reheated on low heat. (Remember to whisk
again!)

Makes 4 servings.

*Half-and-half or evaporated milk
can be used for some or all of cream to reduce fat but the consistency won’t be
as rich or as thick.

Chapter 17

Breanna
didn’t say anything but she was stirring the brownies at a contemplative speed.
“You haven’t even told the police about Ron. You’re so dead set on getting this
solved but you don’t give the information to those who can do something about
it.”

Sadie hated that her daughter was right. She let out a breath.
“Okay, I’ll call Detective Cunningham,” she said. “I’m just not sure what to
tell him.”

“The truth, for starters,” Breanna said, glopping the dark
brown batter into the 9x13 pan and obscuring the word Hoffmiller that had been etched into the glass; Sadie
had taken a workshop at the high school with a friend last year and
had put her name on all her glass dishes.

Sadie almost smiled at the role reversal between her daughter
and herself, but it wasn’t that funny. “This will sound horrible,” she said,
coming over to help scrape the remaining batter from the bowl. “But it seems
like I should get something for giving them the information—doesn’t
it?”

“You should be rewarded for doing the right thing?” Breanna
goaded her. “Wow, you’ve left all ethics in the dust today, Mom.”

“Not like that,” Sadie said. “But Detective Madsen seems
determined to connect me to this—he even set me up specifically
to get me in trouble. No one has called to tell me what they’ve found, and they
only have one cop protecting Anne’s house even though there could be some
madman out there. And here I have this bombshell information that I technically
shouldn’t have anyway. Who’s to say telling them won’t get me in more
trouble—assuming they even believe me. It just seems there
ought to be some kind of benefit in my helping them, that’s all.”

“Maybe the benefit will be catching Anne’s killer and finding
Trevor.”

Dang, Breanna was good at this. Sadie felt sufficiently guilty.
“Okay,” she sighed, taking the scraped-out bowl and putting it in the
sink. “I’ll call him.”

Breanna nodded sharply, a satisfied smile on her face. “Good,”
she said. After sliding the brownies into the oven she washed her hands. “In
the meantime, I think we ought to look for Anne on findpeople.com.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a web site that helps you find information about specific
people. You enter whatever information you know and it helps track them down.”

“But I know where Anne is,” Sadie said, saddened to think of
her neighbor in the morgue. Even though Sadie now doubted the friendship they’d
had, she was still sad Anne was dead. She also couldn’t help but think that if
Anne had told her the truth, she’d still be alive today.

“Yeah, but you can find out other stuff like old addresses and
police records. It’s really amazing.”

Sadie turned to look at her daughter. “You sound like you know
this firsthand.”

Breanna’s cheeks went pink and she opened the freezer, taking
her time to give an answer. “I may have used it,” she said casually.

“May have?” Sadie repeated, laughing at her daughter’s
embarrassment.

Breanna took out the pineapple sherbet, a staple in their home,
and put it on the counter. “Well, there’s this . . . guy.”

Sadie’s eyebrows rose. Breanna wasn’t one to pursue the
opposite sex, at least not at this point in her life. She dated a little, but
her real focus had always been her career. She’d take an afternoon with a
Siberian lynx over most men any day of the week.

“You were looking for some guy online?” Sadie said, forgetting
about the promised call to Detective Cunningham. “And you didn’t tell me?”

Breanna’s cheeks got brighter and she finally met her mom’s
eyes. “It’s no big deal,” she said.

“Who is he?” Sadie asked. “Why did you have to look for him
online?”

Breanna sat down at the kitchen table with the sherbet and some
bowls. “Calm down, Mother.” She only called Sadie “Mother” when she was trying
to rein her in. “Remember that first internship I did at the San Francisco Zoo
right after high school?”

“Of course,” Sadie said, nodding. It had been a great way for
Breanna to get hands-on experience before choosing her major. She’d
roomed with five other girls doing the same thing. Sadie had been scared to
death letting her baby girl go so far away at the age of 18, but it was
impossible to say no. Since then, Breanna had spent every summer at a different
zoo around the country. After she graduated, she hoped to return to the Brevard
Zoo in Melbourne, Florida—it had been her favorite. She was
especially fond of big cats such as tigers, jaguars, and lions.

“Well, there was this guy that worked with the interns, his
name was Liam. We didn’t date or anything.” Her cheeks refused to return to
their normal hue.

“You must have done something for you to go to all the trouble
to find him again.”

“Mom!” Breanna said.

Sadie laughed but didn’t say anything, inviting Breanna to
continue by staying silent. “We got along really well—but he
was twenty-four and I was only eighteen. We were just friends, I
swear, but he gave me his number when I finished the program. When I got to CSU
I started seeing Brandon and by the time things were sufficiently fizzled with
him, I’d lost Liam’s number.”

“But he was still in your heart,” Sadie said with a romantic
sigh, playing it up for all she was worth. Who knew when she’d get this chance
again.

“Mo-om,” Breanna said, shaking her head and pushing the
bowl of sherbet she’d dished up across the table. “He was especially fascinated
with bats.”

Sadie grimaced. “Bats?” she repeated, automatically suspicious.
What kind of man had a fascination with bats?

“I know that probably sounds creepy, but it wasn’t. He just
loved bats. They are quite a unique animal, ya know. A mammal that flies with
limited vision and has such a wide variety of species. Their echolocation is
incredible, and did you know you can find bats anywhere, in every region,
because they are so adaptable? In fact—”

“Okay, I’m convinced they’re amazing. So what do bats have to
do with your romantic interest in this guy? Does he have his own Batmobile?”

“Who says I’m interested in him romantically?”

“Uh, your red cheeks, the fact you never mentioned him before,
and of course, your assurance he’s not
a romantic interest. But let’s get back to the story.”

Breanna paused, but she had a light in her eyes that well
communicated how eager she was to discuss this. “So in my Climate Ecology class
we have to do a research paper and I chose to do it on the ecological qualities
of the small tube-nosed bat in relation to the quantitative research
in woodland demographics and the relation to Aves anatomy.”

“Huh?”

“Basically, in what ways are woodland bats like birds.”

“Oh, I can tell you that,” Sadie said, taking a bite of her
sherbet and swallowing quickly. “They fly.”

“Ha-ha,” Breanna replied dryly. “They also fly in flight
patterns, they have similar diets, and certain roosting and hunting
similarities suggest that bats might be the missing link in bird evolution
rather than the more commonly held theory that they evolved from birds.”

“Fascinating,” Sadie said, simulating a yawn. Breanna scowled
and smacked her spoon on Sadie’s bowl. Sadie put another spoonful of sherbet on
her tongue and let it melt.

“So I thought I’d track down Liam to see if he was aware of any
lesser-known research on the subject.”

“And you found him?”

Breanna smiled wide and full, showing her beautiful teeth, the
result of four years in braces. “I did.”

“And did he have this amazing and unique knowledge of resources
you were hoping for?”

“He did.”

“And when do I get to meet him?” Sadie was no fool. There was
something special about this guy.

“Maybe at Thanksgiving. If you’re good.”

Sadie laughed. “I’ll be good,” she said, making an X over her
heart. “I promise. Where does he live now?”

Breanna scowled. “Portland. He’s part of the Oregon Zoo bat
exhibit,” she said. “And before you ask, no, I haven’t seen him yet. It’s only
been a few months and it’s not like we’re dating or anything, we just
e-mail and talk on the phone a lot.”

Sadie smiled, loving the sparkle in her daughter’s eyes.

“Anyway,” Breanna said, “I looked him up on
findpeople.com, and there he was in Portland. I know I could have just
looked him up in the phone book or something, but for $50 you can get a whole
background check, and, well”—she shrugged her shoulders as if still
trying to justify herself—“we had kinda, ya know, hit it off and so just
in case he had a past I thought I ought to find out as much about him as I
could.” She scraped the bowl with the edge of her spoon, capturing the last of
the sherbet, then ate the final bite, smiling with the spoon still halfway in
her mouth. “You can’t be too careful these days.”