Sweet Hearts (9 page)

She let them go early, still
feeling pretty energetic herself and well into the final touches on one of the
larger wedding cakes. She enjoyed the quiet for awhile, lost in the
concentration required for old fashioned piping work.

Jen walked into the kitchen, the
first time all day she’d not dodged being alone with Sam.

“I know, need to get home to get
ready for that exciting date?” Sam teased.

“Well, it would be nice. The shop
has been pretty quiet for the last hour.”

“So you and Kelly both have
someone . . . interesting?”

“She’ll tell you about it, Sam. I
know she will. It’s a guy she met at the nursing home last night.”

“Oh god, don’t tell me he’s
ancient.”

Jen relaxed and laughed out loud.
“He works there as an orderly. About our age, good looking.” She put her hands
up. “Okay, that’s all I’m saying. Kel can tell you the rest.”

“Ah, so there
is
more.”

“Sam, don’t make me—”

Sam aimed the pastry bag toward
her, like she planned to get off a good, gooey shot. “I won’t. Thanks for
telling me at least that much.” She lowered the bag and turned back toward the
cake. “And, yes, go on home. Turn out the front lights and lock the door,
okay?”

Jen stepped over and gave her a
light kiss on the cheek. “You’re a great boss, and Kel’s lucky to have you for
a mom.”

Sam watched her saunter back to
the sales room with a jaunty little lift in her step. These girls. Pretty cute.

She finished the wedding cake and
managed to slide it from the worktable to a rolling cart and get it to the
fridge. The thing weighed over sixty pounds and she really should have insisted
that at least one of her workers stay long enough to help with the task, but
she managed to move it without a crash.

Her phone rang as she was closing
down the shop, sticking the money and credit card receipts into a bag to take
home.

“Hey darlin’. How’s it going?”

“Pretty routine around here. How
about your day?”

“Well, that’s what I was calling
about. I promised you dinner at home tonight but we’ve gotten a bunch of extra
calls. I’ve got all the deputies out on traffic watch. Storm has moved in and
the northern part of the county is getting socked. I hope you can get settled
in before much longer.”

She assured him that she would go
straight home and stay there.

“My place or yours?” he asked.

A rush of lusty thoughts and
pictures popped into her head and she almost blurted out that she wanted
him—now.

He was talking on, though, about
how it would be a late night and maybe she shouldn’t chance the drive all the
way out to his place. He would be busy. She ought to go on to her own house.
Disappointment welled up as she said goodbye.
What’s with that
, she
thought as she stuffed the phone into her pocket. They’d never been clingy with
each other. Fatigue? Hormones?

Now she
knew
something
weird was going on.

Outside, clouds still blanketed
the town, heavy with the promise of snow, the air chill with undelivered
moisture. However, as yet the actual storm had not reached her house.

The envelope with the private
investigator’s notes waited on Sam’s kitchen table, but she gave herself time
to take off her sugar-coated bakery clothes, have a quick shower, heat a frozen
low-cal dinner and eat it before turning her attention to the stash of
information.

The first two pages were
evidently the investigator’s worksheet, the information he’d taken from the
family, and a copy of the same police report she’d seen in Beau’s file. She set
them aside.

From that point on, the pages
contained dates, times and results of interviews, all in Bram Fenton’s vaguely
familiar neat printing. Sam had helped Beau with the investigation of the PI’s
death a few months ago. She pushed back the memory of those circumstances and
read on.

Fenton had started with the same
set of friends Sam knew about, the list of people Marla said she had spoken
with. But the investigator dug a bit further, going to the supermarket
employees, a man who regularly sat on the street corner by the store, and
Tito’s co-workers at Bellworth. Sam scanned the early pages; none of the market
employees remembered seeing Tito that afternoon, and the man who regularly
begged spare change from caring souls was one of those who lived in his own
minute, foggy world. If you weren’t pausing to drop some cash into the can he
held out to you, you were not of interest to him. Fenton reported that he’d
gone back a week after first questioning the man, to find that he no longer
resided at that intersection.

She stared for a moment at the
dark kitchen window. There would be no point in going back to the market now.
Odds were that their employee turnover was tremendous and no one from ten years
ago would still be around. Any who remained would almost certainly not remember
one particular August afternoon. She laid those pages aside and got up to make
herself a cup of cinnamon tea.

Settling into her favorite corner
of the sofa, she set the tea cup on the end table and resumed with Fenton’s
reports. With the assumptions taken from the police report—the questions Marla
and Tricia didn’t want to ask—the PI had quizzed Tito’s friends specifically
about whether he’d had a woman on the side. Sam read the notes carefully, but
it seemed that none of his local friends could or would verify that.

Beside two of the notations,
Fenton had penned a small asterisk but there was no footnote corresponding to
them. Sam could only guess that it was a bit of private code for himself, maybe
to indicate that a particular interviewee had more to say, or perhaps he
suspected those witnesses of fudging the truth a little. It might be worth
following up.

The next page indicated that
Fenton had traveled to Albuquerque and talked with Tito’s supervisor at
Bellworth, along with a few co-workers. It was a huge company, and Sam surmised
that the investigator would only have taken the time to talk with those who
worked personally alongside the missing man. She wished she had phone numbers
for them. A few calls might ascertain whether those folks still worked for the
company. She took a sip of her tea and pondered whether it would be worth her
time to personally look them up. The idea of taking a day or more out of her
crazy schedule to go there made her feel tired.

Then she thought of Marla and
Jolie. The grandmother clearly wasn’t holding up well. Having her son come back
to reconnect with his daughter was vitally important to her, and it seemed that
Sam’s involvement in the case was the thread she was hanging onto.

Sam turned back to the pages,
hoping for something firm, some clue that could quickly resolve this whole
puzzle, but she didn’t spot a thing.

A noise at the kitchen door
caught her attention.

“Greetings, mama mia,” came
Kelly’s voice.

Sam heard the door close a little
too firmly and something thudded to the floor.

“Kel? You okay?”

“Oh yeah. Me doing wonderful.”

Sam stretched to see around the
corner into the kitchen. Her daughter was bent forward at the waist, picking up
her huge hobo bag from the floor, obviously the cause of the crash. When Kelly
raised up she tilted to the left; luckily the wall was right there.

“Had a few drinks after work?”
Sam asked.

“Oh, Mom, we had the greatest
time!” She came into the living room and flopped into an armchair. “Riki and I
met up with Ryan and Tanner at this new little bistro. They make the
best
pasta with melted tomatoes.”

Too many questions flew into
Sam’s head. Ryan? Tanner? Melted tomatoes?

“Ryan is just . . .” her voice
drifted and her gaze floated toward the ceiling.

Sam noticed that Kelly’s
oversized T-top had slid off one shoulder.

“Ryan is the orderly from—”

“Yeah.” The word stretched out
into a long sigh.

“And Tanner? Riki’s date?”

“More than a date,” Kelly said,
leaning forward with a confidential air. “Those two are
hot
together!”

She’s thirty-four, Sam
reminded herself. You can’t preach.
She smiled a little wanly.

“So anyway, we had this
fabulous
dinner, some wine . . . ended up at Ryan’s for music and more wine . . .” She
scratched at her scalp and her brown curls wiggled. “I guess maybe a little too
much.” Her vision seemed to focus a little more sharply. “Whatcha got there?”

Sam held up the pages from
Fenton’s report and gave Kelly the quick, uncomplicated version of the story.

“I was just thinking I might have
time to call a couple of these Bellworth people tonight. Fenton didn’t give
phone numbers in this report, though, and I hate to go through directory
assistance with no more than a name. They make it difficult.”

“So, look ‘em up online,” Kelly
said, rising a little unsteadily. A fuzzy smile crossed her face. “I think I’ll
take a shower.”

Online. Why didn’t Sam ever think
of the obvious? She took the notes to her little desk in the corner and found a
white pages service where she could browse the names. Within five minutes she
had numbers for two of the people from Fenton’s file.

“I’m following up on an
investigation by Mr. Fenton, on behalf of a woman in Taos.” A little devious,
but it wasn’t completely a lie. “There’s an urgent family matter here and we
really need to locate Tito Fresques as quickly as possible. I understand you
worked with him at Bellworth a few years ago?”

The man at the other end of the
line, Harry Cole, came back with about ten seconds of silence before he said,
“Yeah?”

Sam went on to explain that Mr.
Fenton talked to him right after Tito disappeared, and that she wondered if he
might have thought of anything new about the case since then.

“Lady, that was ten years ago. I
ain’t given Tito another thought. He went off for a weekend and never came
back. Didn’t make my job no easier, I’ll tell you. Had to do his work and mine
until they got a replacement.”

“Mr. Cole, do you remember if
there was anyone at the company that Tito was especially close to? A buddy he
hung around with after work or anything?”

Again, a long pause. She could
almost imagine him rubbing his chin while he pondered the question.

“Maybe a woman?” Sam asked.

“I’m tryin to remember. There was
some from the department, went out for a beer on Friday nights sometimes. I
never went along. Like the casinos better myself. There mighta been a woman or
two in that bunch. Lisa Tombo was one, I think.”

It didn’t exactly sound like the
makings of a hot, secret affair. She read off the names of Fenton’s
interviewees and Cole thought a couple of them were in the Friday night group.
Sam thanked him, realizing she’d gotten about all she could from him.

The second call was more
productive. Bill Champion instantly remembered Tito.

“Well, heck yeah. Tito and I
worked side by side for five years. I just couldn’t believe it when he never
showed up for work that Monday morning. I mean, it seemed way out of character,
him not quitting or anything, just not showing up. I talked to your
investigator guy and he asked a bunch of questions, like did Tito have a
girlfriend or something like that. Well, I told him I sure didn’t think so. I
mean, you work with a guy for a long time, they’ll usually hint around, maybe
ask you to cover for ’em now and then, make up a story. Tito never did anything
like that.”

“Harry Cole said that a woman
named Lisa Tombo sometimes went along with the group, out for a beer. Do you
know how I might get in touch with her?”

“Lisa. Yeah . . . she and Tito
ate lunch together a lot. Gosh, I haven’t heard from her in quite awhile. I
don’t remember. She quit Bellworth and moved out of town, I think, shortly
after Tito left. She might have got married. Now, Lisa, she was a looker. If
Tito was going to fool around, she might be the one. Hell, I might have been
interested there too, but she never gave me those kind of vibes, you know,
where a woman kind of lets you know she might want to?”

“Mr. Champion, can you think of
anyone else that Tito might have confided in? Someone he might have told if he
were planning to leave?”

“Gosh, I sure can’t,” he said
after a short pause. “But you know, the human resources person back then was a
lady named Glenda Cooper. I heard that she left Bellworth to start her own
company, some kind of internet thing that she runs from her home. She and Lisa
were pretty tight, as I remember. She might be the person who could tell you
where Lisa is now.”

Since he seemed like the kind of
guy who loved to share information, Sam asked if he knew how she could reach
Glenda Cooper and he very cooperatively looked up her number and she jotted it
down. She immediately dialed it as soon as she got Champion off the phone; the
chatty guy didn’t quite know when to quit. A busy signal buzzed in her ear.
Hmm, who doesn’t have voice mail anymore? The thought crossed her mind that
Champion might have dialed Glenda Cooper himself, in order to be the bearer of
the news, but a quick dial back to him and his phone rang. She hung up before
he could answer. Cooper’s line immediately went to an answering device on the
second try but Sam didn’t leave a message. She realized she was tired.

Sam yawned and gathered Fenton’s
notes into a stack. Okay, so she would try Glenda Cooper again in the morning
and see if she could track down Lisa Tombo. At least she felt like she was
doing something to help Marla.

She poured the unfinished half
cup of tea down the drain, noticing for the first time that a few snowflakes
drifted past the window. She switched off the light and stared out into the
darkness. A scant half-inch of the white stuff coated the landscape and her
vehicles, nothing near the amount of doom-and-gloom called for by the weather
forecasters.