Murder Has a Sweet Tooth (20 page)

Glynis stuck out her lower lip. “That’s not what we were there for,” she told Beth.

Beth’s glare was monumental. “Oh, yeah? Then what were we there for?”

Celia hopped back up on her feet. “It was supposed to just be fun. Maybe you forgot that.”

“Maybe you”—Beth pointed a finger at Celia’s nose—“maybe you forgot that feelings can’t be turned off and on like the switch on the side of your cappuccino maker. You can’t recognize that you have feelings for somebody, then just walk away. Vickie knew that. Vickie was honest and trusting.”

“Yeah.” Celia sneered. “And look where it got her.”

“At least she took a chance,” Beth sniffed and said. “At least she wasn’t afraid, not like you two.”

“Afraid?” It was Glynis’s turn to be outraged. “If Vickie had listened to us in the first place—”

“But she didn’t listen. She couldn’t listen,” Beth insisted. “She was too busy listening to her heart!”

“Oh, please!” Celia managed to turn the phrase into three syllables. “You must be reading too many corny greeting cards.”

Beth threw back her shoulders. “And you must be completely out of your mind. But then, you’ve always been a little ditzy.”

“Oh, yeah?” Celia screamed. It wasn’t a great come-back, but it must have been good enough because Beth echoed it with her own, “Oh, yeah.”

And I knew I had to do something—fast—before an ugly situation got even worse.

“Ladies!” I stepped between Beth and Celia. It got them to back off, but it didn’t do a thing to soften the glares they shot in each other’s direction. I kept my voice soft and even. Like I tried so hard to do when dealing with Fi’s kids. “This isn’t what I intended to happen,” I said, as truthful as can be. “I don’t want to see you guys fight. I’m just looking to find out what really happened to Vickie.”

“Vickie was stupid.” Celia dropped back down on the cedar bench.

“Vickie forgot that there were rules.” Glynis took a seat beside her.

That left Beth, and I turned to her. I wasn’t sure why she was defending Vickie when the other women weren’t, but right about then, I didn’t care. I needed answers. I looked her in the eye. “I think there’s a lot for us to talk about. How about if you sit down, too?”

She did. But she made sure she kept her distance from the other two women.

Back in control—but who knew for how long?—I started again. “Look, there doesn’t seem to be any point in lying to you any longer—”

“Yeah.” Glynis glowered. “Now that we know you’re a private investigator.”

“That’s not why.” I hunkered down, the better to look each of the women in the eye. At the same time, I put my left hand on Celia’s arm (she was farthest in that direction) and my right on Beth’s. “I want you to know the truth because I think . . . well, I like to think of you as my friends. Even though you did con me into making that flan for you. And I can understand if you don’t feel very friendly toward me any longer. After all, I did lie to you. But that’s the whole point of friendship, isn’t it? We can have differences, and we can talk them out. Right?”

One by one, they nodded their begrudging agreement.

“Then here’s what you have to know.” I cleared my throat and, because I wasn’t in the kind of shape that allowed me to sit in a catcher’s squat for any length of time and still be able to walk, I stood and tried not to wince when my thigh muscles screamed in protest. “Alex Bannerman, the guy who’s accused of killing Vickie . . . Alex is a friend of mine. I’m looking into Vickie’s murder because I’m trying to clear Alex’s name.”

Celia’s protest was immediate. “We can’t help you.”

“You can.” I couldn’t afford to single any of them out, so I took in all three women with a wave of one arm. “You can tell me what you’re up to on Tuesday nights.”

“But if we do—”

Celia and Glynis both shushed Beth with a look.

“If you don’t, Alex is going to end up in prison for a crime he didn’t commit,” I reminded them.

Glynis looked up at the ceiling. “The cops say he did it.”

Celia looked down at the floor. “The papers say the evidence is indisputable.”

Beth wiped a finger under nose. “The TV news says there’s no doubt.”

“And none of them are right.” I kept the desperation from my voice. Barely. “Alex is a nice guy. A really nice guy. He’s fun, and he’s funny. He makes really great cookies, only he calls them biscuits. He’s remodeling the house where I’m going to live.”

“And let me guess . . . that isn’t here in McLean, is it?” The pointed question came from Celia along with a look that matched.

“It isn’t,” I admitted. “The part about me being one of your new neighbors was a lie, too. I needed to get to know you so I could find out more about Vickie. I didn’t think you’d give me the time of day, not if you didn’t think I was one of you.”

Glynis sighed.

Celia picked at one leg of her tailored pants.

Beth cried softly.

I thought she’d be the first to cave, but, surprisingly, the surrender came from Celia. “Look . . .” She shifted her position on the bench. “This isn’t something we want anyone to find out about. The guys—”

“They think we go to cooking class every Tuesday night,” Glynis added.

“Which is why you check Sonny’s schedule to see what he’s making in his classes. Then you do exactly what I did, right? You check out the ready-made foods at the grocery stores, find something similar, buy it, and make it look homemade by heating it in a fancy porcelain pan or scooping it out of its little plastic container and serving it on crystal.”

“Guilty.” Glynis tried for a smile that didn’t exactly make it all the way to her eyes. “We’ve been doing it for just about a year now.”

“And on Tuesdays, when your husbands think you’re going to cooking class, you’ve been going to bars, and I don’t get it. Unless . . .” OK, call me slow. A lightbulb went off in my head and suddenly the whole thing made sense. It was a sick and twisted sense, but it was sense nonetheless. “You’re all doing exactly what Vickie was doing. You go out on Tuesday nights to meet guys.”

Not a single one of them jumped up and told me I was wrong. They didn’t have to. I knew from the color in Glynis’s cheeks and the paleness of Celia’s and the way Beth twitched her nose . . . I knew I was right.

“Well, what do you expect?” Celia harrumphed the explanation. “You don’t really think it’s easy to be perfect, do you?”

It was my turn to be speechless. Which was why Glynis had a chance to interject, “Life in the ’burbs isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. We’ve got to be perfect wives.”

“And perfect mothers,” Beth added.

Celia joined the bandwagon. “We’ve got to have perfect clothes and perfect wardrobes and perfect manners.”

“Perfect meals, perfect taste, perfect children.” Glynis looked perfectly miserable about the whole thing. “It’s impossible.”

“Who can blame us for wanting to step out now and again?” Celia asked.

I didn’t get it. But I wasn’t about to argue. “So every Tuesday . . . ?”

“Every Tuesday, we each head out to have a little fun.” Celia glanced at her two friends. “The rules have always been the same. We’re never supposed to go to the same bar twice.”

“And we’re always supposed to say we’re going to cooking class,” Glynis added.

“We’re not supposed to talk about what happens while we’re out,” Celia said.

“Not even to each other.”

I grumbled under my breath. “But then, that means—”

“That we really don’t know who Vickie was seeing or what she was up to,” Glynis finished my sentence for me.

“She did say she’d met someone.” Beth’s voice was so low, we all leaned forward to hear her. “Someone special.”

“She told you that?” Celia wasn’t as surprised as she was obviously pissed that she’d been left out of the loop.

Beth shrugged. “She mentioned it. That’s all. She never gave me the details. She just said . . . you know. She just said he was special.”

I swallowed hard. “Do you think she was talking about Alex?”

Beth answered with another shrug.

It was my turn to drop down on the bench. “Then none of this helps us much, does it? Vickie was probably talking about Alex. We know they saw each other every week at Swallows, so we know she ignored the rule about going to the same bar twice. But that doesn’t mean he killed her,” I added, just so they didn’t get the wrong impression. “Alex didn’t know she was married. And he really liked Vickie. And—”

I listened to my own words and realized I was right back where I started from. “I’m sorry I lied,” I said, and I meant it. “Maybe we could have gotten this whole thing straightened out right from the beginning if I’d just told you the truth from day one. But I wanted to get to know all of you and . . .” I didn’t dare say what I was thinking. I hardly dared admit it to myself.

I wanted these women’s lives. I liked pretending I was a suburban wife and mother who had all the material comforts a restaurant manager could only dream of. Celia, Glynis, and Beth were living my dream life. Or at least what I’d always thought my dream life was.

Finding out that even the most perfect lives weren’t all that perfect was a hard dose to swallow.

For all of us.

“Look,” I said, “I know there’s no reason you should listen to my advice, but I do have some experience when it comes to this kind of thing. That lie about you going to cooking classes on Tuesday nights is going to come back to bite you. You know that, don’t you? You really should come clean with your husbands.” I thought about Jim, about the kind of honest, authentic relationship we had with each other. It was something I wanted to last forever. It was hard for me to get my brain around the idea of couples who didn’t have—or didn’t want—that kind of intimacy. I guess I was talking to myself as much as to the other women when I said, “Isn’t being open and honest with each other what marriage is all about?”

Celia rolled her eyes. “You’re not really married, are you?” she asked before she got up and headed out the door.

Glynis followed her.

Beth dragged behind. I got the feeling there was more she wanted to say, but when I gave her the opportunity by asking, “Is something bothering you?” she just hurried outside.

And me? Well, I should have been thinking about my case, but let’s face it, though I’d satisfied my curiosity about what the women did on Tuesday nights, I really hadn’t learned much that was going to help me find Vickie’s killer, had I?

Maybe that was why I didn’t want to think about it. Maybe it was just too depressing to realize that I was no closer to clearing Alex’s name than I had been before we walked inside the sauna.

Or maybe I was just too preoccupied with everything Celia, Glynis, and Beth had revealed. And everything they didn’t need to say: all that stuff about marriage and how maybe reality could never live up to my fantasies. Maybe my pie-in-the-sky version of how things were going to be for Jim and me would never actually mesh, not in real life.

Maybe I should have learned that from my marriage to Peter.

I sat there for a few minutes, deep in thought, before I shook myself back to reality.

“Snap out of it, Annie,” I reminded myself and headed for the door. “You’re not Celia, Glynis, Beth, or Vickie. And Jim isn’t a thing like any of their husbands. He’s certainly nothing like Peter. Jim and I will always be honest with each other. We’ll always be open—”

As fate would have it, that was the exact moment I pushed on the door. Only the door never moved.

“Open,” I said again, and gave it another push.

But the door didn’t budge.

To say I was surprised was an understatement, and, thinking about it, I stepped back and considered my options. That was just about the same time I heard the heat in the sauna click on.

SO WHO CAN BLAME ME? I STOOD THERE FOR A FEW
dumbstruck moments, the panic closing in while the heat rose, not little by little, the way I imagine it’s supposed to in a sauna, but by leaps and bounds. What had Celia said? The sauna was acting up? Oh, yeah. Big time. Even little ol’ unmechanical me knew that. Even before I shook off the surprise and fear that kept me rooted to the spot, there was a thin stream of perspiration on my forehead and another one on my upper lip.