A Hard Day’s Fright (16 page)

“I’ve spent a lot of time working through the whole Lucy thing,” I said as if it were the only thing on my mind. “I’m pretty sure Darren did it.”

Ariel grunted and rolled her eyes.

Ella shook her head. “Absolutely not!” She pressed her lips together. “Lucy and Darren were friends.”

“And she had something on him.” I told them about how Darren had been stealing tests and answers. Since they were both in such foul moods, they didn’t ask how I’d discovered this. Even after hearing this news, Ella dismissed my theory out of hand. “And you said Darren and Lucy had been dating, though I’m really not so sure about that, either. If they were, though…” The way she wrapped her tongue around that
if
pretty much said that my information about them dating wasn’t only wrong, it was impossible. “That would indicate that they had feelings for each other.”

Or not.

I didn’t elaborate because really, there was no way I could tell them about how Lucy blackmailed Darren into being her boyfriend. Not without confessing about this Gift of mine. And not without betraying Lucy’s confidence. I told myself I was doing it for the first reason. I knew it was really for the second. I couldn’t see the point of adding major embarrassment to everything else Lucy had already suffered.

“All the more reason he would have been pissed if she was going to turn him in,” I told Ella. I’d like to think I was telling Ariel, too, but she was so busy shaking her head like I was an idiot, I decided it was better to ignore her. “Lucy had that appointment with the principal. You told me about that. And yes, she might have made it to discuss that grade she got in her summer school class, but Darren didn’t know that. If he thought she was going to rat on him—”

“That’s just bullshit.”

At the comment from Ariel, Ella gasped, and her shoulders shot back. She held her temper. But just barely. I have a feeling the only way she was able to do it was to pretend Ariel didn’t exist. “You’re forgetting,” she said to me through gritted teeth, “that Darren was with the other kids that night.”

I hadn’t forgotten this; I’d just chosen to ignore it because then I could pin the crime on Darren. After only one meeting with him, I knew I didn’t like him so I’d be thrilled if he was guilty. Leave it to Ella to introduce the logic that shot my case to hell. Even when she was deep in the drama zone with Ariel.

I sighed and fed a pile of papers into the shredder near my chair.

Ella tapped and organized. “I think it was Chuck Zuggart, the guy from the biker bar.”

“Because you saw him talking to Lucy once about a thousand years ago?” Ariel barked out a laugh. “If you were a real detective like me, Mom…If you were paying attention and keeping notes like I do…” She reached over to what I thought was the empty chair beside her, and came up with her cell and a legal pad. She set her phone on the table and brandished the pad. “There’s absolutely no other connection between Lucy and Chuck Zuggart. And there’s never going to be. Not that either of you are going to find, anyway. That’s because Patrick Monroe did it.”

I wasn’t sure she was right, but I didn’t know she was wrong, either, so as much as I would have liked to meet Ariel’s show of attitude with a little of my own, I didn’t. Besides, she sounded awfully sure of herself, and I wondered if her version of an investigation had turned up something mine had not. I plucked the legal pad out of her hands.

“I’m organized and efficient, see.” Ariel leaned over and tapped the pad with one finger, and I saw she was right. She’d made columns that listed suspects, motives, alibis. There was nothing new or surprising on her list, but it was pretty darned impressive, anyway. “I’ve even done a spreadsheet on the computer,” she added as if she knew what I was thinking and had to get in this one last dig. “You know, who was where when and what they know and say they know. And I’ve even been through Mom’s old scrapbook over and over again. You know, the one about Lucy.”

This was news, and I looked Ella’s way. “You have a scrapbook about Lucy?”

She brushed off the information. “There’s nothing important in it. Just the old articles from the newspaper, and the one that appeared on the twenty-fifth anniversary of her disappearance. There’s nothing in any of those articles that we don’t already know, right, honey?”

Her attempt at smoothing things over with Ariel was met with icy teenaged contempt.

“Your theory about Darren Andrews  .  .  .” When she looked at me, Ariel dispensed with the contempt. But she wasn’t above a little one-upmanship. “Pepper, you’re way off base. It was Patrick Monroe. It had to be. He’s still in town, you know. He’s working on a video of ‘Girl at Dawn,’ and they’re filming it here since this is where he wrote the poem. If I could just get him alone, I know I could make him talk.”

“That”—I emphasized my point by slapping her legal pad back down on the table—“is a really bad idea.”

I had meant it more as advice than as a pronouncement, but I’d forgotten that when a fifteen-year-old girl is feeling touchy, even the most well-intentioned comment sounds like a decree.

“Oh, you’re going to gang up on me, too?” Ariel pushed back her chair and stomped to the door and back again. “What, you guys are tag teaming me? Is that why you asked Pepper to come over tonight, Mom? So the two of you could—”

“Now, honey…” Ella pulled herself to her feet so she could face her daughter.

I got up, too, the better to look my imposing tallest and to send the message that I was past putting up with their sniping. “All right, you two,” I said, swinging a look from one of them to the other. “Somebody better explain what’s going on. And don’t tell me you live in a dictatorship,” I warned Ariel. “I’m not buying it, and it doesn’t explain anything, anyway.”

Ella folded her arms over her chest.

Ariel balled her hands into fists and held them close to her sides.

There couldn’t have been a worse time for the oven timer to ring.

Ella had put a frozen pizza in when I arrived, and ever the mom, she went to get it out. She set it aside to cool, put napkins and silverware at the places where none of us were sitting anymore, and cut the pizza into slices. She slid pizza onto plates, handed them around, and sat down with hers. It wasn’t until she’d cut it into neat pieces that she set her shoulders, lifted her chin, and said, “Ariel wanted to go out with Gonzalo tonight.”

This was a surprise! I turned to Ariel. “So he’s back, huh?”

Ariel might be plenty pissed at her mother, but she was a teenager, after all. She’d attacked the pizza with gusto, and her mouth was full. “He’s forsaken his plebeian ways,” she said.

“And Tiffany Slater? Has he forsaken her, too?”

Ariel chomped, her mouth clamped shut.

“I told her that I don’t have a problem with her seeing Gonzalo again but—”

“That’s not what you said, Mom.” Ariel swallowed around the protest. “You said he wasn’t good enough—”

“I never did.” There were spots of color in Ella’s cheeks when she looked my way. “You know I’d never say that, Pepper. Not about anyone. I simply pointed out that after Ariel’s irresponsible behavior a couple weeks ago—”

“Oh, am I going to be made to suffer forever just because of one little mistake?” Ariel flopped back in her chair and groaned.

“I explained…” Ella was always reasonable, even when the situation wasn’t. “I
tried
to explain,” she said, “that I don’t have a problem with Ariel seeing Gonzalo again. Once she proves she’s trustworthy.”

“I’m going to have to join a convent before I can prove that to you,” Ariel wailed. “Are there Jewish convents? I’ll have to found the first order of Jewish nuns.”

I didn’t wipe the smile off my face fast enough. Ariel saw it, and her irritation knew no bounds. “You’re just as bad as Mom.” She pointed at me, her voice sharp. “I thought we were colleagues, fellow detectives. But she’s pushing me around and you…you’re laughing at me.”

It wasn’t all that long since I’d been a touchy fifteen-year-old whose irritation knew no bounds myself, and I never have been one to put up with this kind of crap.

“You’re just a kid,” I said. “You don’t—”

“See, that proves it.” She stomped one sneaker-clad foot. “You and Mom, you both think alike. ‘Don’t do this, Ariel.’ ‘Don’t do that.’ But the two of you, you do whatever you want. You investigate, Pepper, and nobody ever said you were a real detective. But you don’t let that stop you. And Mom goes right ahead and does whatever she wants to do, too. Even with that creepy homeless guy who was at the cemetery the other day.”

The color drained from Ella’s face, and her mouth fell open. “Ariel, honey, if this is about Will—”

“You can see that grubby guy and I can’t see Gonzalo?” A single tear splashed down Ariel’s cheek. “That not fair, Mom, and you know it.”

“It’s not fair. It’s not anything. Because I’m not
seeing
him.” Ella wrung her hands. Her breaths came in sharp gasps. “Honey, if you’re having issues because of Will—”

Ariel threw her hands in the air. “I am not having issues. I’m having a life crisis. And if the two of you weren’t so old and out of touch, you’d realize it.”

So much for me acting the peacemaker. Since I’d tried to make things better, they’d only gone from bad to worse. I scrambled for a way to save the situation, and keep these two from going at each other’s throats.

“Ariel…” I pivoted her way and kept my expression neutral, so I couldn’t be accused of anything. “I’d love to see that scrapbook of your mom’s.”

“Why, so you can look through it and tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about? I do. I’m a good detective. I’m a better detective than you are, Pepper. I could prove it if I could just get Patrick Monroe alone.”

The tips of Ella’s ears were pink. “Even back in high school, the girls talked about how Mr. Monroe paid too much attention to them, honey. It wouldn’t be a good idea for you to talk to him.”

“You think I can’t take care of myself?” Ariel snapped.

I hadn’t signed up for family drama night; I groaned. “Nobody said that.”

“But it’s what you were thinking.”

“I wasn’t. OK, I was,” I admitted. “And I’m also thinking that I’ve about had it with you, Ariel. Your mom says you can see Gonzalo again when you prove she can trust you, so start acting like a grown-up. That’s the only way you can convince her.”

“Yeah, I’ll act like a grown-up, all right.” She grabbed her legal pad and stormed past me and out the door that led into the front part of the house. “This grown-up is spending the rest of the night in her room.”

The last we heard from her was her footsteps stomping through the upstairs hallway.

“Well…” Wiped out, Ella collapsed back into her chair. “I’m sorry about that, Pepper. You shouldn’t have had to put up with it. Ariel’s made such great strides these last few weeks, I thought she’d understand when I said I wasn’t ready to let her go out again without supervision. I told her she could talk to Gonzalo on the phone. I never thought she’d react like that when I said she couldn’t see him yet.”

“Except I don’t think that’s what she was reacting to, do you?”

Ella reached for the pizza that was getting cold on her plate. She took a bite and chewed.

I knew a dodge when I saw one.

“You’re not really dating Will, are you?”

Luckily, she had a glass of Diet Dr Pepper close at hand. Otherwise, she might have choked on her pizza. “Dating?” Ella coughed and pounded on her chest. “Of course not! Ariel can’t possibly think that’s true.”

“Who knows what a teenaged girl thinks.”

She acknowledged this with a tiny nod.

And I saw an opening. I’d been meaning to talk to Ella about Will since the day of Janice’s funeral, and there just never seemed to be time. “What about him?” I asked her. “You haven’t said a word about that dinner you had with Will at the Academy Tavern. What was he talking about, Ella, when he said that thing about how he hadn’t murdered anyone,
not this time
?”

She set aside her pizza and got busy with the newsletters again. “It wasn’t exactly something I could bring up in casual conversation,” she said and added quickly, “I know, you would have done it. But the way you investigate and the way I investigate—”

“You’re not investigating.” I don’t know why I bothered to even mention it.

“Will is just too fragile. I didn’t have the heart to put him on the spot. I tried to keep things light. I asked about his mom. I asked if he’d seen anyone else from school.”

I fed a stack of papers into the shredder. “You didn’t happen to ask why he disappeared from the rehab center and where he was the day Janice died, did you?”

Even when Ella scowled, she looked like a huggable gnome. “Like I said—”

“Fragile. Yeah.”

The shredder groaned, and I turned it off and took a moment to pull out the strip of paper that had jammed it, then sat back and stared across the table at Ella.

She’s the sensitive type. It didn’t take long to get her attention.

“What?” she asked.

“I was just wondering. About Will. About what Ariel said. What she was thinking. Do you still have feelings for Will?”

“Don’t be silly.” Ella got back to work. “Will was a great kid back in high school and yes…” She thought if she concentrated on the newsletters, I wouldn’t see that her cheeks were flushed, and this time, it had nothing to do with trying to reason with Ariel. “Back then, I did have a crush on him. But as you no doubt noticed, life hasn’t been easy for Will. He’s a kind, sensitive soul. And if things were different, yes, we might still be friends. But really, Pepper, I hope you realize that’s all he could ever be. I’ve got the kids to worry about. And my job. And yes, you, too, since I think of you as one of my girls. I don’t need to complicate my life with a man who has serious problems.”

“And one of those problems could be that he killed Lucy.”

“He feels guilty about Lucy’s death, that’s for sure,” she said. “I’m no psychologist, but I think that’s why he turned to alcohol and drugs in the first place. I think he just couldn’t handle Lucy’s disappearance any other way.”

“Which might explain why Bobby felt so guilty, too.”