Chapter 23
H
EART BATTERING MY
ribcage, I whipped off my oven mitts, grabbed a carving knife, and raced out of the kitchen toward the café. The waitress at the Word had warned me to pay more attention to security. Had looters broken in? I paused at the end of the passageway, where the busboy trays hid from the diners’ view. Katie and Bailey joined me, each armed. I signaled for them to become still, and I peeked around the edge of the partition. The overhead lights in the café were dim. The lights on the patio gleamed a warm, tawny yellow. I didn’t see movement. I glanced in the other direction, toward the breezeway. The flower vase and preset glasses on a table for two were tipped over. The window beyond the table was intact. Store interior lights were on at Beaders of Paradise. I eyed the second floor of Fisherman’s Village. Lights were on in Surf and Sea, as well. There were a few cars in the parking lot, and a nicely dressed couple was exiting a Mercedes.
Feeling braver because of the normalcy of the activity outside, I said, “Stay here,” then I stepped from my hiding place. “Who’s out there?”
A blur of orange raced at me. Tigger. He yowled at the top of his lungs, then dashed under a table.
“Kitty?”
Another meow.
“It’s okay,” I said to Katie and Bailey. “It’s Tigger.” No wayward teens. No burglar with a firearm.
I set the knife in the busboy tray and hurried to capture the cat. He eluded me numerous times, darting beneath tables and circling the legs of chairs. I almost had him when my head snagged on a tablecloth. As I backed out on hands and knees, the cloth and the entire setting came with me. More glass hit the floor. “Dagnabbit,” I said loudly.
Bailey and Katie laughed.
“Don’t,” I warned.
After two more attempts, I nailed Tigger as he scurried down the hall, heading for the bookshop. “Gotcha, you little scamp.” I held him high, his face meeting mine, my thumbs wedged beneath his forearms. “Did you think I’d forgotten you?” His plaintive eyes widened.
Yes
. He was right. I had. I was a terrible mother. Angst coursed through me. I tucked him close to my chest and nuzzled my chin into his fur. “I’m sorry. I’ve been so preoccupied. Forgive me.” I took him into the stockroom and checked his food. Empty. More guilt. More apologies. When he was settled and I felt sure he knew I hadn’t abandoned him, I cleaned up the mess our game of chase had made, and I returned to the kitchen.
“Back to Manga Girl,” Bailey said as if we hadn’t been so rudely interrupted.
I washed my hands. “Hey, guys. Maybe we shouldn’t be obsessing like this.” I meant what I said. My stomach was in knots. My heart, though calmer, hadn’t returned to a moderate beat. I almost felt as if talking about murder was drumming up bad karma. Had Tigger picked up on it? “We aren’t professionals. Crystal Cove has a solid police force with a savvy chief.”
“You’re wrong,” Bailey argued. “We should be talking and theorizing.” Using a Belgian accent à la Hercule Poirot, she added, “It keeps our little grey cells working. And lest you forget, this is our town. We want it to be a safe haven. And we need to exonerate my mother. Right?” She thumped the counter.
Her fervor reignited mine. “Right.” So what if my insides were roiling? I had an obligation. “Back to Manga Girl.”
Bailey rapped the counter a second time. “Good. Now, what if she is serving a dual purpose? What if she is arranging Sam’s loan as well as having an affair with him?”
I thought of the ticket Mitzi had snatched from Sam’s pocket earlier. She’d demanded to know if he was going away with
her.
Had she meant Manga Girl? I couldn’t picture the bank teller throwing over her cute Asian boyfriend for a weathered man like Sam, but love, as Sam had reminded me at the memorial, could be blind.
Katie cleared her throat and fussed with her apron. “Um, Jenna, based on something you said while we were line dancing, I’ve been doing some digging on Sam.” She held up her latex-covered hands as if under arrest. “Okay, I admit it. I’m a glutton for gossip. I wanted to know more about him, especially after Mitzi’s meltdown at the grocery store last Thursday. You said that she adored Sam too much. I wanted to know why. I mean, he’s not that special to look at. His nose is too thick, his forehead too high.”
“He’s got nice eyes,” Bailey said.
“They’re narrow and beady.”
“Crinkly,” Bailey countered.
I said, “I think he’s sort of handsome in an aging-television-detective kind of way, and he seems engaged in the lives of those he loves.”
“However, he hasn’t been very supportive of Mitzi at the Grill Fests,” Bailey countered.
“Today he was.”
“Not really,” Bailey said. “He left early again.”
“Why did Mitzi marry him?” Katie asked. “She has oodles of money. She doesn’t need him for financial reasons.”
“Maybe he’s good in the sack,” Bailey said.
I laughed. “Maybe he’s hypersexual, and that’s why he’s having affairs.”
“Pfft.” Katie waved us off. “If I were going to have an affair with a married man, I’d want him to be super hot.”
“Super hot doesn’t always mean good in bed,” Bailey said.
“Keller isn’t super hot,” I noted. “He’s charming, don’t get me wrong—”
“I wouldn’t have an affair with him,” Katie said.
“You wouldn’t?” Bailey and I chimed together.
“To be specific, you have an
affair
if one of the partners is married. Otherwise, it’s called a relationship.
That
”—Katie held up a finger—“I would have with Keller. He’s so . . .” She wriggled with enthusiasm. “But I’m straying.” Using a teaspoon, she tested the soup, then tossed the teaspoon into a discard cup. “Mm, good. Anyway, I was chatting up one of Mitzi’s best friends, the gal who runs The Enchanted Garden, and I got the inside scoop.”
I knew the garden center, with its decorative arbors, eclectic garden art, and rows of perennial plants. It was a mini-wonderland. I had my eye on a wrought-iron, dragonfly-shaped wind chime.
Katie continued. “This gal knows Mitzi real well. The two are in a garden club together. Mitzi buys all her potted herbs from her. She was a fount of information. She revealed that, prior to moving to Crystal Cove, Sam managed a few businesses in San Francisco. They all failed. Sam lost a job at a big firm because of those mistakes, but money guys land on their feet, she said, and Sam was no exception. Another company hired him in a matter of months, the kind of firm that dismantles other companies.”
“Like that guy in
Pretty Woman
.” Bailey snapped her fingers. “Richard Gere. I saw the movie multiple times.”
“Didn’t that come out when we were, like, seven?” I said.
“So? I belonged to a Richard Gere fan club. I saw all his movies.”
“He did some edgy films,” I said.
“My mother didn’t know. Talk about Mr. Gorgeous. I would definitely have an affair with him. I don’t care how old he is.”
Katie clicked her fingers. “Yoo-hoo. Back to Sam. That’s how he met Mitzi. One of her father’s businesses, a lumber company, did well from the dismantling. Mitzi was running the place at the time.”
I gaped. “Mitzi was a corporate woman? But she’s got a thriving home business.”
“Like the three of us, she had a previous career,” Katie said. “When her father passed away, she inherited a gazillion bucks, so she gave up the corporate lifestyle to marry Sam, who, my garden lady friend confided, Mitzi claims is her soul mate.”
“Why did they move to Crystal Cove?” I asked.
“I’ll bet Sam instigated it,” Bailey said. “He probably had to escape a bad reputation in the city.”
“Nope.” Katie wagged her head. “Mitzi made the determination. She wanted fresh air and no more corporate offices. She thought Sam would thrive as a financial consultant in a smaller community. As resourceful as she is, she knew she could build a business here.”
Bailey sniggered. “I’ll bet she wanted to wrangle him out of the city so he wouldn’t have a bevy of gorgeous women from which to choose.”
“We have lots of beautiful women in Crystal Cove,” I said.
“Of course,” Bailey conceded. “Just not as many.”
As we continued preparing dinner, a string of what-if questions cued up like line dancers in my mind. Walk, walk, walk,
clap
. What if Sam resented Mitzi’s bossy ways?
Clap
. What if he had hoped to revive his career in San Francisco, but because of her immense wealth, she held sway?
Clap
. What if he were having affairs to retaliate?
Clap
. Sam had gone to the bank and signed some kind of official papers. Why? Something wasn’t adding up. What was I missing?
Katie said, “Bailey, ladle up three bowls of soup. Jenna, open the bottle of chardonnay, and pour us each a glass.”
As Bailey and I obeyed, Bailey said, “What’s going on in that brain of yours?”
I shared my muddled thoughts.
Bailey said, “Maybe Sam wanted to purchase Mum’s the Word to prove to his wife he could run a business all by himself. Maybe he was under-stimulated in itty-bitty Crystal Cove. That could be why he is having affairs, too.”
“If, indeed, he’s having affairs,” I argued. “Which brings us back to motive. We know what Mitzi would have gained from Natalie’s death: the demise of a rival not only in the Grill Fest competition but also in the bedroom. What would Sam have gained?”
“Easier access to Natalie’s daughters, so he could purchase the Word,” Bailey said.
“What if he and Natalie weren’t having an affair?” I cut off the protective seal from the wine bottle, set the automatic corkscrew over the top, and levered out the cork. “What if Natalie had evidence of Sam having other affairs and threatened to tell Mitzi?
Loose Lips Might Sink Ships
, as the old war posters claimed. Her death assured her silence.”
“Jenna, it’s time to remove the basket of chicken from the hot oil,” Katie ordered. “Put on an oven mitt and carefully lift it out. Drain it over the vat to the right. Then arrange the lettuce on plates and top with all the other fixings.”
As I followed orders—without fear, I might add—I recalled that day on The Pier when Natalie had argued with Lola. Natalie had flirted with Sam. She had toyed with her hair and talked to him sweetly. And he had flirted in return. But then Natalie had turned icy cold. She had been a study in fluctuating emotions. “Here’s another option: What if Natalie was in love with Sam, but he didn’t reciprocate that love? What if she was pressing him to end his marriage?”
Bailey bobbed her head. “He worried that, if Mitzi found out, he would lose his meal ticket.”
“Except she’s not his meal ticket.” I transferred the drained basket of chicken to the cutting board. “He has his own income.”
“The question is, how much? You heard Mitzi and Sam at the grocery store. Mitzi gives him a food allowance.”
“You don’t know that. They could simply have a budget for each month. He does the home shopping; she does the purchasing for her business.”
Bailey set bowls of soup on serving dishes. “They live in that fabulous house near your dad’s. Sam drives a Mercedes. He wears expensive suits. Do you think he can afford all that on a business manager’s salary? He makes, what, five percent per client? It’s not like he’s business manager to the stars.”
“He has a couple of very wealthy clients, and Mitzi said he invests.”
“Didn’t she also confide that he is invariably out of cash?”
“Jenna, I’ll handle the chicken,” Katie said. “You arrange the salads.” With bare fingers, Katie removed the chicken from the basket. She set it on a cutting board and, using a super-huge blade, sliced the meat into long narrow strips.
I winced. If I’d touched the hot chicken they way she was, I would have been shrieking. Could I ever become as comfortable as she was in a kitchen?
“What kind of financial manager loses all his cash?” Bailey asked.
“The kind that messes up.” I assembled three salads with avocado, crumbled blue cheese, diced hardboiled egg, and bacon on top of the lettuce, and proudly presented them to Katie.
Acting unimpressed—a chef rarely compliments, Katie said—she topped the salads with sliced chicken and then drizzled each with homemade Caesar dressing. She handed me finished plates. “Take the salads to the dining room. I’ll be right there.”
