Throw a Monkey Wrench (an Emma Cassidy Mystery Book 1) (12 page)

Emma shifted from one foot to the other. “I
just went to the photo printing store. Anyone could have done it.”

“No, not anyone. You made it happen, and
I’m so grateful. This makes up for the horrible morning I’ve had.”

“I’m sure you’ll be able to find an honest
cleaner.”

“It’s not just my domestic problems.”
Jordan kneaded her temples as she frowned. “Tony’s lawyer called. Apparently
Howard White is suing Tony’s estate over some failed business deal.”

Emma just managed to stop her mouth from
gaping open. “I didn’t know Tony and Howard were in business together.”

“Neither did I. Apparently the deal was
supposed to have happened a while ago, but Tony never mentioned it to me. He
never talked about his business with me.” Jordan tiredly rubbed her temples.
“From what I know, Tony never liked Howard. He was always saying what an
arrogant snob he was.”

And the dislike had been mutual. What had
Madison overheard her dad yelling about Tony dying?
Good riddance
. How
much money had Howard lost over this failed business deal? The Whites had deep
pockets, but no one liked losing out.

“That was one of the reasons Tony wanted to
build this house,” Jordan continued. She walked up to one of the portraits and
gently laid her fingers over Tony’s cheek. “He used to live over in Wineglass
Bay not far from the Whites. I think he tried to be friendly, but they snubbed
him, and I suppose the other neighbors took their cue from the Whites. That’s
why Tony chose this bit of land. To get away from all those people.”

And not just that. Tony had chosen to build
his big new house on this spot because it was directly opposite the people who
had snubbed him in Wineglass Bay. This was his way of thumbing his nose at
them.

“I might not have any neighbors nearby,”
Jordan continued as she gazed out at the spectacular view of the lake. “But I
love it here.”

“So you’re keeping the house? You won’t
find it too big for just one person?”

“Oh, I couldn’t get rid of it. No, I’m
staying on. I might get a couple of dogs to keep me company.”

“That’s a good idea.” Emma couldn’t forget
about the thug she’d spied in the orchards opposite the house. “Some Dobermans
or Alsatians, maybe.”

Jordan wrinkled her nose. “I was thinking
of those cute little pugs.”

Pugs? They wouldn’t be any deterrent to a
determined intruder. But she didn’t want to alarm Jordan. At least a couple of
pugs would raise the alarm if someone tried to break in.

“I have a great band lined up for the
funeral reception,” she said instead. “I think you’ll like the Morrisons.”

“Thank you.” Jordan walked over to Emma and
hugged her. “It’s such a relief knowing I can count on you.”

Surprised and touched by the hug, Emma
patted her on the back. Beneath the soft fabric, Jordan felt fragile. The past
few days had taken its toll on her.

Emma went through the preparations one more
time with Jordan. The church service was due to take place at Tuesday one
o’clock. Tony had left instructions for his body to be cremated in private, so
after the service everyone who wished to would make their way back here to the
house. Emma wouldn’t be able to attend the service, as she’d be here seeing
that everything was ready for the guests.

“I’m sort of dreading the funeral, but at
the same time I’ll be relieved to have it done,” Jordan confessed. “Is that bad
of me?”

“Not at all. When my mom passed away I felt
the same. It seemed like time had stopped ticking and I couldn’t even breathe
until we were able to give my mom a proper farewell.”

Jordan nodded, her eyes welling up. “I’m so
glad you’re here.”

There was nothing left to do until
tomorrow. Jordan walked Emma to the door. As Emma stepped out onto the porch,
she spotted Mateo across the lawn bending over a garden bed, and something
clicked inside her brain.

“You mentioned your former housekeeper
earlier,” she said to Jordan. “You said her name is Luisa. Is she by any chance
your gardener’s wife?”

“Yes. I’m sorry, didn’t I make that clear?
Luisa worked here up until a couple of months ago when she had some sort of
accident.”

“I heard about it. A hit and run. Luisa was
thrown clear off her bicycle.”

Jordan pressed her fingers to her mouth.
“Yes. So horrible. It happened a few miles from here, after the turn off to
Buena Vista Road. I visited her in hospital and sent her flowers. I hope she
gets better soon.”

Jordan looked so worried that Emma didn’t
have the heart to tell her the truth about Luisa Crespo’s medical condition.

“Did she have any medical insurance?” Emma
asked.

“I don’t know. Tony always handled the
staff. He liked being in control, and well, he thought I was too soft on them.”
She made a rueful moue. “I guess he’s right, seeing I’m having so many problems
with housekeepers at the moment. Maybe Luisa will come back to work when she’s
recovered.”

“Maybe,” Emma echoed, her gaze still on
Mateo. The man must have heard their voices, but he didn’t look up from his
task, his face set in its usual sullen folds.

As Emma drove away, she couldn’t stop
thinking about Mateo. He was a gardener, and surely a lush garden like Jordan’s
required slug pellets to keep the pests at bay. Mateo had been working at the
housewarming party, so he could have crushed up the slug pellets and
contaminated the pistachio ice cream. He had means and opportunity. And motive?
Maybe he was angry with Tony Barnet for not caring about Luisa, simply
dismissing her when she was too ill to work.

Emma heaved a sigh. As surly and unpleasant
as Mateo was, she didn’t like thinking of him as someone who would deliberately
poison a whole crowd of innocent people. If he was the culprit and the police
arrested him, what would happen to his wife and son?

Gravel crunched
beneath the tires as Emma brought her car to a halt off the side of the road.
As she climbed out, she wondered why she was so intrigued by Luisa Crespo’s hit
and run accident. It had nothing to do with her, yet when she’d left Jordan’s
house, she couldn’t help herself watching out for the turn off to Buena Vista
Road and then scanning the side of the road for signs of the accident site.
She’d pulled over because some swerving skid marks on the road had caught her
eye.

She walked to the spot where the skid marks
ran off the blacktop and examined the gravel-strewn shoulder of the road.
Several bits of broken orange plastic and a couple of bent spokes off a bicycle
wheel told her she’d found the right location. The police must have combed the
area for clues, but it wouldn’t hurt to check for herself.

There were no houses or gas stations
nearby, which accounted for the lack of witnesses. Fields and orchards
stretched on both sides of the road. Tamarisk thickets and ox-eye daisies
flourished on the road shoulder, watered by the run off. Leaning over a clump
of tamarisk shrubs, she peered through the foliage, looking for anything
unusual.

The sun warmed the top of her head. Insects
chirped in the grass nearby. She was so engrossed in her search that it took
her a while to register the sound of an approaching car. The engine suddenly
revved, and she glanced over her shoulder in time to see a black vehicle
gunning straight for her. Her heart stopped in disbelief. With barely seconds
to react, she threw herself to one side, gasping as her chest hit the dirt and
forced the air from her lungs.

The tires of the vehicle spun past her,
spitting out clouds of dust. Then the car roared away, vanishing as quickly as
it had appeared. Emma laid stock still on the ground, not daring to move until
the dust had settled and quiet descended once more. Gingerly she hauled herself
to her feet and glared after the vehicle. By now it was little more than a
black dot in the distance. She wasn’t sure if it was an SUV or a pickup truck.
She wasn’t even sure if it was black, dark blue, or dark green. It had all
happened so quickly. It could have been an accident, but what if she’d been
deliberately targeted? What if she was getting too close to the real killer?

A bright blue car passed by, then screeched
to a halt before slowly backing up. Emma, her heart still pounding, looked over
to see Madison peering at her with some concern.

“Emma, I thought it was you. Are you okay?”

“Um, yeah.” She flicked at her dusty jeans
and crumpled white top. “Just had a close encounter with some jerk driving too
fast. You didn’t happen to see it, did you?”

“No, sorry. Must have been one of those
college jocks. They’ve been causing some trouble lately.”

A college jock? Maybe, but somehow she
didn’t believe that. The near miss had felt far more menacing than a bored boy driving
too carelessly.

Madison was still eyeing her with a worried
expression. “You look shaken up. Come back to my place and have some lunch.”

She
was
feeling a little frazzled,
Emma realized. Her hands were shaking, and her insides were all knotted. It hit
her that, in the process of investigating a hit-and-run, she’d almost met the
same fate.

“Thanks.” She smiled at Madison. “Don’t
mind if I do.”

She followed Madison to the Whites’
mansion, which was only a ten-minute drive away. Madison’s parents were out,
and for that Emma breathed a sigh of relief, as she wasn’t feeling up to
dealing with the tension that always seemed to appear between Cynthia and
Howard.

Madison led her through to the conservatory
at the rear of the house, where the housekeeper served them chicken Caesar
salad. The meal was delicious, but Emma couldn’t do justice to it as she
ruminated who might want to scare her off. Madison seemed equally preoccupied,
picking listlessly at her salad and sipping nervously on her mineral water.

“Sean wants to cancel the wedding,” Madison
suddenly blurted out after a long silence.

“I see.” Emma set down her fork. She’d been
expecting this, but still it was disheartening to hear.

“But I don’t want to. I know it sounds
crazy, but I can’t give up on our dreams. I just can’t. It’s the only thing
keeping me sane at the moment.” The young woman’s shoulders slumped as she
pushed away her barely eaten salad. “Sean says he can’t afford a wedding now.
He’ll need all his money for his legal bills.”

“He’s right, you know,” Emma murmured.

Madison’s lips trembled. “This is so
awful,” she whispered. “A few days ago we were picking out appetizers, and now
our whole lives are turned upside down, and Sean is—” she gulped convulsively “—facing
a murder charge. I just can’t believe it.”

Moved, Emma reached across the table and
squeezed Madison’s hand. “Sean’s name will be cleared, and maybe he won’t even
have to go to trial, so he won’t have an enormous legal bill, and you two will
still get married. You’ll see. Everything will work out fine.”

Perhaps she shouldn’t be giving the distressed
woman false hope, but what else was she supposed to do? She couldn’t just sit
there and let Madison fall to pieces.

Madison sniffed and nodded, looking
somewhat comforted. “I’m not cancelling the wedding just yet. Oh, I know my
mom’s been calling all her guests and telling them it’s off, but I don’t care.
We’ll just have a smaller wedding with only the friends who really care about
us. Is that possible?”

“Well, yes.” Emma’s mind raced as she went
through all the logistics of downsizing the wedding. “How many guests were you
thinking of?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe only twenty or so?
That won’t be a problem, right?”

“I don’t believe so.” No party too big or
too small, that was A Perfect Party’s motto. “I’ll talk to the venue operator
and the caterers and get back to you.”

Madison nodded absentmindedly. Clearly she
didn’t have much idea of the work involved. But that was precisely why she’d
hired an event planner, and Emma wasn’t going to bombard her with sticky
details.

Resting her chin in one hand, Madison breathed
out a sigh. “Sean and I are meant to be together, I just know it. We’re going
to get married and live happily ever after.”

Ah, young love. After Steven, Emma couldn’t
help a little cynicism of her own, but she wasn’t going to spoil Madison’s
fairytale. Maybe Madison and Sean
were
meant to be together, and this
current disaster would only bring them closer.

“One thing’s for sure.” Madison
straightened, a frown clouding her brow. “I am never going to suffer the same
marriage as my parents. I don’t know why they’re still together when they hate
each other so much.”

“Hate? That’s a strong word.”

“The only reason they tolerate each other
is because they’d both hate the messiness of a divorce. My father would have to
move out of this house because it belongs to my mother, and he’d hate that. And
my mother would suddenly find herself single, and she’d hate that, too.”

A lot of hate, then. Emma kept her silence,
figuring that Madison needed to vent, not advice.

Madison stabbed her fork at a piece of
lettuce. “You know my mom had an affair a while back?” Emma raised startled
eyebrows, and Madison continued, “Yes, hard to believe that my ice queen mother
could have actual blood running in her veins, but it’s true. She had a lover
for about three months, and she kept it a secret from Dad, but I knew all
along. She thought I was too busy with college to notice, but I wasn’t. I knew
when she was sneaking out to meet her lover.”

“Who was it?” Emma couldn’t help asking.

“I don’t know. I never found out. Mom was
careful. She’d only meet the guy when Dad was away for the night. Once, I
followed her, because I couldn’t believe what I suspected was going on. She
drove down to a wharf on the lake, and got onto a boat. It was dark, so I
couldn’t see much, but it was a speedboat, and there was a man in it, and when
she got into the boat, he kissed her. Ugh.” Madison paused to shudder. “They
went off somewhere, and I came home, sick to the stomach.”

“So how did it end?”

“My dad found out. Or maybe my mom wanted
him to find out, because one night she came down to dinner wearing a necklace
that my dad obviously hadn’t bought her because when he saw it he went ballistic,
and the two of them had the mother of all arguments. I might as well not have
been there because they said the most awful things to each other, things I wish
I could forget.” Shivering, Madison took a quick gulp of water. “I tiptoed out
of the dining room, but they didn’t even notice I was gone. I went out and
stayed overnight at a friend’s place. When I got home the next morning, I was
expecting to see smashed plates and packed suitcases, but it was as if it never
happened. My dad went off to golf, and my mom went to the hair salon. She
didn’t see her lover again, and I never saw her wear that necklace again
either, so I suppose she must have given it back to him.”

There was a short pause as Madison stared
off into the distance, reliving that fraught period. An uncomfortable idea had
wedged in Emma’s mind and wouldn’t be dislodged. She knew she had to ask the
question.

“What kind of necklace was it?”

Madison glanced at her in surprise. “A
pearl necklace. Not really my kind of thing, but it was stunning and very
expensive. A real eye catcher. My mom could never have worn it without my dad
noticing, which is why I’m sure she did it on purpose. She wanted to goad him
into a reaction, maybe. Anyway, it seemed to do the trick. He paid her more
attention, but after a while it all seemed to go sour again, and they’ve been
like that ever since.”

By this time, Emma was barely listening to
Madison, her mind too preoccupied by what she had learned. So the ice queen
Cynthia White had had an affair with the brash Tony Barnet, and Tony had given
her a stunning pearl necklace which Cynthia had worn to taunt her husband. Had
Cynthia used Tony? Maybe Tony had genuinely thought they were in love, which
was why he’d given her the pearls. And afterward? Had Cynthia flung the necklace
back at him in scorn? Or maybe Howard, the enraged husband, had delivered the
necklace back to Tony. Maybe Howard had never forgiven Tony for making a
cuckold out of him and had finally taken his revenge, two years after the fact.

A sudden tapping on glass roused her from
her troubled thoughts. Both she and Madison glanced up to see the figure of a
man on the other side of the French doors that led outside.

With a gasp Madison leaped to her feet. “Kyle!”

***

“You shouldn’t be
here.”

Madison’s suppressed voice drifted back
into the conservatory where Emma still sat. Upon seeing the man, Madison had
rushed to the French doors, but instead of inviting him in, she leaned halfway
out of the room, speaking in a low tone that conveyed dismay and uncertainty.

“Oh, come on, sweetie. I had to see you.”
With a cocky smile, the young man traced his fingers down Madison’s bare arm.
“Come for a drive with me.”

“I can’t. I’ve got company.”

The man’s gaze flicked dismissively over
Emma. “I’ll keep you company.”

Emma pressed her lips together. It had
taken all of two seconds for her to recognize the unexpected visitor. He was
the same man she’d seen with Madison in the garden two days ago. And the same
man who’d been threatened by that thug at the Rainbow Casino.

“I think you should leave,” Madison said.
Her hunched shoulders and tight voice indicated that she was trying hard to
appear firm, but the man she’d called Kyle seemed not to take the hint.

“Can’t we talk?” he urged, clasping her
hand and not letting go when she went to free her fingers. “I really need to
see you. You’re the only one I can turn to.”

Emma had had enough. She pushed to her feet
and marched over to the French door.

“Madison, is there a problem?” she asked,
directing her attention to the young woman.

“No one asked you.” The man’s hostile eyes
swept over her, leaving her with the impression that he knew to the dollar how
much she’d spent on her outfit.

She pointedly ignored him. “Madison?”

“Uh, Emma, this is Kyle, a—a friend of
mine.” Madison glanced at Kyle. “Kyle, this is Emma, my wedding planner.” Her
voice seemed to drop on the last two words.

The corner of Kyle’s mouth curled. “Wedding
planner? Jeez, what do you need that for? Haven’t you already cancelled the
whole thing?”

“No, I have not.” With some force Madison
pulled her hand free of his grasp.

“What? Don’t tell me you want to marry a
jailbird? I was there at the workshop when he threatened to kill my father.”

Indignation flushed Madison’s cheeks. “Sean
is innocent!”

“Oh, yeah, yeah.” Perhaps realizing he
wasn’t endearing himself to her, he held up both hands, palms facing. “Hey, you
must be going through hell. And I’m here for you, a shoulder to cry on whenever
you need. Let’s go for a drive and we’ll talk.”