The Readaholics and the Falcon Fiasco (14 page)

He checked the time. “How did it get to be five thirty already? Let’s get an adult beverage and sit on the porch.”

Beers in hand, we settled on the swing on the front porch and I told him about my week, not mentioning the threatening note. He listened carefully, like he always did, and patted my knee once or twice. “I was sorry to hear about Ivy,” he said. “A bit flighty, but I always liked her.” After a pause, he added, “So you’re planning Doug Elvaston’s wedding?”

He kept his voice casual, but I wasn’t fooled. I was not going to get drawn into another discussion of Doug. Deliberately focusing on a small beetle crawling along the porch railing, I said, “Yep. It was nice of him and Madison to throw some business my way.”

I felt his gaze on my profile but refused to meet his eyes. After a moment, he made a comment about a church function he and Mom had been to, and I relaxed. We chatted for half an hour and then moved inside to set the table and summon Mom for dinner. I left a bit before seven, feeling much better than when I arrived.

*   *   *

As I approached my house in the gathering dusk, though, my uneasiness returned. I sat in the van after I parked it, staring at the house.
This is stupid.
Someone had left a note taped to my door. It wasn’t like they’d been inside. I got out of the van, slammed the door, and marched up my front
steps. No ugly note on the door. I yanked off the piece of tape that had secured the earlier threat. Taking a deep breath, I put the key in the lock, pushed the door wide, and flicked on the lights. Nothing moved. The house looked just as it had when I left. My purse was on the kitchen counter where I’d set it, and my expandable folder was on the floor where I’d knocked it after reading the note. I knelt to pick up the receipts that had spilled from it. The fridge compressor kicked on and I started. Feeling faintly foolish for getting so worked up, I scooped up the rest of the receipts and stuffed them willy-nilly into the folder. I’d sort them tomorrow.

Crossing to the sink to wash my hands, I heard a click and the faint sigh that told me the front door had been opened.
Oh my God
. I jerked open the nearest drawer and scrabbled for a knife. My fingers closed around a handle.

I
whirled and brandished my weapon. “Stop right there or I’ll—”

“Take on all three of us with a spatula?” Maud asked. Lola’s and Kerry’s heads poked from behind her. Something brushed against my ankle and I squeaked and dropped the spatula.

“Mew?” Misty looked up at me, hurt by my reaction.

I scooped to pick her up and cradle her against my cheek. “I thought you guys were . . . Well, I was afraid . . .” Dang. That stupid note on my door had upset me more than I’d realized. I’d completely forgotten the Readaholics were coming over to discuss our next steps, or even whether we should continue looking into Ivy’s death. I was glad I’d been armed only with a kitchen utensil. What if I’d had a gun handy and shot one of my friends by accident?

“Spatulas are the latest advance in nonlethal home-protection devices.” I tried to sound like an
infomercial as I retrieved the “weapon” and tossed it in the sink.

“‘I’ve got a spatula and I’m not afraid to use it,’” Maud quipped, going along with my relief-induced silliness.

The other two stared at me with concern. “You did say eight, didn’t you?” Lola asked.

“I brought donuts,” Kerry added, waving a bakery bag. “On sale at City Market when I stopped in for a deli chicken. Are you okay? You look a little pale.”

“I’m fine,” I said, setting Misty down to explore and helping myself to a donut. “I just lost track of time.”

Apparently Brooke had, too, because she wasn’t here. Taking care to lock the front door, I led the women into the sunroom. Misty trotted after us, tail held high.

“Brooke called to say she couldn’t make it,” Lola said, seating herself. “Something about her mother-in-law.”

It stung that Brooke hadn’t called me. She must still be upset about the way I’d left today, or maybe she believed, like Troy did, that I was involved in this investigation for the wrong reasons. I pushed my hurt aside and filled my friends in on what had happened the past couple of days.

“So,” Maud summed up, no-nonsense gaze fixed on me, “you discover that Ivy’s house has been ransacked and find the coded ledger page, which you—for some damn fool reason—turn over to the police. Within hours—
hours
—someone booby-traps your picnic with a beehive and leaves
you a threatening note. Too cutesy by half, but still threatening. I mean, ‘fatal’ isn’t something to mess with.” She tucked her chin and looked at us meaningfully.

“What?” Kerry said with some asperity. “You’re saying the police are involved? Just because Amy-Faye gave them the ledger page and two days later a beehive turned up at her event? Puh-leeze.”

“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Maud stated.

“No, you believe everything is a conspiracy,” Kerry shot back.

“I don’t think the beehive was a coincidence,” Lola said slowly, “but I don’t think there has to be a connection between Amy-Faye going to the police and the bees. What about that reporter?”

“There’s no telling who she might have mentioned me to,” I said. “She’s really gung ho about tracking down the story Ivy was supposed to give her. For all I know, she went straight from our meeting to Clay and Fee and Doug to ask them what they were doing at Ivy’s house.”

“I wonder what they were doing,” Kerry mused. “Seems a little strange.”

“Seems a lot strange,” Maud corrected.

“If we knew where Ivy got that ledger page, it would help us sort through it all,” Lola said, stroking Misty, who had settled into a purring ball on her lap.

“You’re sure it wasn’t Ivy’s handwriting?” Kerry asked.

“Pretty sure,” I said.

“Here, why don’t you take a look?” Maud pulled an iPad from her purse, tapped the screen a couple
of times, and held up the screen so Kerry and Lola could view the ledger page.

Lola took the iPad. She peered at it and said, “I don’t recognize it. But then, I don’t know whose writing I would recognize, outside of Mom’s and Axie’s. You never see anyone’s handwriting anymore, do you? I mean, we don’t get letters and such—everything’s digital.” She passed the iPad to Kerry.

Kerry squinted at the screen and then took out a pair of reading glasses. “I hate these things,” she said, slipping them on. “It seems like yesterday I could read the fine print on an aspirin bottle, and now I can’t read anything smaller than a billboard at close range without these cheaters. Getting old sucks. You’ll be here before you know it,” she said, shooting Lola and me a look over the top of the glasses. Satisfied that we were properly cowed by the thought of advancing infirmity, she tilted the iPad to read the screen. “It’s just a bunch of numbers. How—? Oh, I don’t believe it. I know who wrote this.” She looked up, eyes troubled behind the magnifying glasses.

The doorbell rang. We all started. Misty jumped off Lola’s lap and skittered to the door.

“Hold that thought,” I said, following the kitten. I approached the door a bit warily, but then told myself not to be stupid. No one who wanted to deliver a “fatal sting” was going to march up to the door and ring the bell. Nevertheless, I inched the blinds aside on the narrow window beside the door and flicked on the porch light. Brooke stood there.

I swung the door wide. A gust of wind almost banged it out of my hand. A front was coming through.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said, hugging me and dropping a gym bag on the floor. Her mink-colored curls tickled my cheek. “Clarice.” She delivered her mother in-law’s name as if it explained not only her lateness but also the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the cancellation of
Firefly
, one of my all-time favorite shows.

“I thought you weren’t coming,” I said, returning her hug. “I wasn’t sure—”

“Yeah. That. I’m sorry about earlier. I was stupid. Troy was stupider. I know you’re not in this for the attention.”

“It’s not like
I’ve
ever entered a beauty pageant,” I said.

“Ouch.” The former Miss Colorado laughed.

“What’s the bag for?”

“I’m staying. My best friend has been threatened by an unknown nutter—she’s not spending the night alone. I’m your new bodyguard. You’ll find my rates very reasonable: pancakes. I want pancakes for breakfast.”

Acting like it was no big deal, she picked up Misty and headed to the sunroom. I followed, feeling warmed by her concern but sensing a little tension under her insouciant manner.

“Brooke’s here,” I announced.

“Who is it?” Maud asked impatiently.

It took me half a sec to realize she was talking to Kerry.

Kerry licked her lips and said, “It’s Clay Shumer’s handwriting. I see it all the time on financial reports, notes . . . daily.”

We were all silent for a moment, absorbing the implications. Ivy had copied a coded ledger page written by her boss and mailed it to herself. Why?

Brooke looked bewildered. “I’m lost.”

We gabbled at her, filling her in on the happenings of the last two days. She already knew some of it from my visit after getting the threatening note, but she listened as everyone talked at her.

Maud finally ended the recital. “This is a good thing,” she said. We stared at her. “Now that we know who wrote the coded page, we can figure out what book he used and break the code.”

“How do we do that?” Brooke asked.

“Simple,” Maud said. “Someone gets into his office—he has to be keeping the ledger in his office because Ivy couldn’t Xerox a page from a book he kept at home—and makes a list of all his books. Then we try the code against all of them until we find the right one. The book’s got to be there—this kind of code isn’t something he could do from memory.”

We all looked at Kerry, whose mayoral office was in the same building.

“Uh-uh,” she said. “I am the mayor. It may be only a part-time, piddly-ass job that pays less than a Walmart greeter, but I owe this city some dignity and integrity—I cannot be caught rifling through the office of the city’s CFO. I could, however, keep him tied up in a meeting if one of you wants to catalog his books.”

Everyone’s eyes shifted to me.

“Aren’t you planning a waste-of-time-and-city-funds offsite for his office?” Maud asked.

I wouldn’t have described it quite like that. “Ye-es.”

“So you’ve got a reason to go there.”

“I suppose I could tell him I need to talk to him about it,” I said, warming to the idea. “While I’m there, Kerry could call down and say she needs to see him. That would give me a chance to take a look at his books.”

Kerry nodded. “Easy.”

Easy. Famous last word.

*   *   *

When the others had left, Brooke and I changed into our pajamas and made up the futon in my small second bedroom/office. I made hot cocoa and popped a quartet of freezer cookies into the oven. The scent of melting peanut butter and chocolate filled the kitchen. Brooke busied herself sponging the counter off and moved the canisters to clean behind them. “What’s this?” she asked, holding up a baggie of what looked like potpourri.

It took me a second. “I’ll bet Ivy left that,” I said. “Her tea.”

We stared at it, both of us wondering, I was sure, if the Baggie contained oleander. “I’ll give it to Detective Hart,” I said, taking it from Brooke with two fingers.

The discovery was a little sobering, and we were silent for a few minutes. Brooke picked up the used glasses from the sunroom, wiped down the microwave, and had started alphabetizing the spices
lined up on the back of my stove when I observed, “I’m not expecting Clarice anytime soon.”

“Oh!” She dropped the cumin bottle she was holding, then slotted it between the cilantro and the curry. After a half second, she pulled it out again and defiantly placed it after the paprika. “That woman makes me—” She growled with frustration. “I don’t know what she makes me. Batty. Bananas. Suicidal.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Kidding.”

“Not funny.” I topped the cocoas with whipped cream and handed her a steaming mug. “Is Troy okay with you spending the night here?”

She ran her forefinger around the mug rim and licked off the whipped cream. “We might have had a little . . . spat after his mother left.”

Clutching my mug and a plate with the cookies, and with the whipped cream can tucked under my arm, I led the way into the small den. I set everything down and turned on the gas fireplace. It was chilly tonight, with a cold front expected before morning. The wind was already picking up, rattling loose screens and whipping tree branches so they scraped the roof. Colorado weather was always changeable; if you don’t like the weather, wait twenty minutes, the natives said. Brooke settled into the cozy chair and a half and tucked her bare feet beneath her.

“Tell me,” I said, seating myself in the recliner by the fire. I bit into a cookie.
Um.
Nothing like warm, crumbly cookie.

She sighed, coiling a lock of hair around her finger. “It’s nothing new. Just her usual attempt to manage every detail of our lives. Troy mentioned to his sister that we had an appointment to talk about IVF, and Bev—of course!—told Clarice and Troy Sr., so Clarice hotfooted it over to tell us how unacceptable that was. By the time she left, Troy was wavering and I . . . I just lost it, Amy-Faye.” Misery dragged down Brooke’s lovely mouth. “I told him he wasn’t married to his mother, he was married to
me
, and that he should be more concerned with my happiness,
our
happiness, than with her happiness. I said something about how wives could offer benefits mothers never could—just trying to lighten things up a bit, you know—and he came back with ‘We never have sex for fun anymore—it’s just for trying to conceive.’ Oh, A-Faye, he’s right. I can’t remember the last time we fooled around without timing it around ovulation or thinking that we
had
to do it.”

She drank down half her cocoa and I could tell she half wished it was a bottle of vodka. Getting out of the recliner, I padded over and gave her a big hug. “Brooke. There’s nothing wrong with wanting a baby. And nothing wrong with wanting your husband to put you and your relationship first.” I paused, considering my next words. No one, not even best friends, wants unsolicited advice. “Have you ever thought about seeing someone? You know, a counselor?”

“Troy says we don’t need a third party poking his nose into our marriage.”

“Of course not—you’ve got Clarice.”

Brooke made a sound somewhere between a burp and a laugh. Tears trickled down her face.

“Maybe you could take the advice Troy gave me—get away. Take a long weekend somewhere—Denver, Salt Lake, Vegas. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going. Promise each other you will not make love, no matter what, but take that Victoria’s Secret teddy you got for your last birthday just in case.”

Brooke gasped and then laughed a real laugh. “You are so perfect, Amy-Faye. That’s why I love you. I’ll do it. We’ll do it. I’ll talk Troy into throwing a change of clothes into a bag and driving to the airport. We’ll decide when we get there where we want to go.” She wiped away her tears and hugged me. “Do you have any schnapps? This hot chocolate could use some livening up.”

We finished the cocoa, a quarter bottle of peppermint schnapps, and the whipped cream, taking turns squirting it straight into our mouths, while watching an
Iron Man
marathon on TV. By the time we went to bed, we’d both forgotten the threatening note, which was the reason for the sleepover in the first place.