The Way of the Wicked (Hope Street Church Mysteries Book 2) (32 page)

Cooper didn’t even glance at the pages that were so critical to Brooke Hughes. She’d never examined the contents of a single document in her four years as a repairwoman and didn’t plan to start now. Clearing her throat, she stood in the threshold of Brooke’s office and unfolded the rag containing the wedding ring.

“Here’s your ring, ma’am—um, Brooke. No harm done.”

Brooke plucked the ring from the rag, pushed it on her finger, and threw her arms around Cooper. “You’re an angel! I can’t tell you how much this means to me!”

Though surprised by the woman’s quickness, Cooper still managed to press the documents against her thigh so they wouldn’t get crushed by Brooke’s embrace.

“Your copier’s back in order too,” Cooper continued once Brooke had released her. “I made five copies just to test the machine, but you’re good to go if you’d like to run some more.”

Brooke accepted the papers. The joy that had shone from her eyes upon seeing her wedding ring was instantaneously replaced by a mixture of worry and fear. “Thank you,” she said softly.

The phone on her desk began to ring, and Brooke glanced in its direction. Once again, she began to pick nervously at her fingernails.

“I’d better get that.” Her tone was regretful.

Cooper was accustomed to abrupt dismissals by busy and important people, or at least people who viewed themselves as busy and important, so Brooke’s desire to linger was unusual.

“Have a nice day, ma’am,” Cooper said politely. She wished she could think of something more comforting to add but nothing came to mind.

Brooke gave Cooper a bright smile infused with warmth and then wiggled her ring finger. “I hope that one day a good man gives you a ring and a promise and makes you very, very happy. Maybe I’ll see you at church some Sunday. I’ll keep an eye out for you.”

It took a moment for Cooper to move, as a vision of Drew bending down on one knee and offering her a velvet jewelry box had her so captivated that she almost forgot where she was. Finally, she blinked and Drew’s handsome face and pleading eyes evaporated.

“Most folks don’t talk to me when I’m working,” Cooper found herself telling Brooke. “I kind of walk around as if I’m invisible. So it was really nice to have met you today. Thanks.”

“No
one’s invisible,” Brooke replied firmly and smiled again. She then picked up her phone and her smile disappeared in a flash.

Sensing that Brooke needed privacy, Cooper returned to the copier and packed up her tools. Because the only trash receptacle in sight was the overflowing Rubbermaid can under Cindi’s desk, Cooper gathered the paper scraps she’d removed from inside the copier, folded them up in her rag, and headed out to the van. As she walked, she considered how her regular interactions with office workers were brief and impersonal. In general, she preferred it that way. Yet for the first time, she had met someone who had spoken to her openly, as an equal, and it had felt really good. And though part of Cooper felt touched by Brooke Hughes’s attention, the other part of her wished that she could have remained anonymous. That way, she could drive off into the sunshine without fretting over the welfare of someone she barely knew.

After making her way to another area of Capital City’s mammoth campus to deliver the Hewlett-Packard 7410s, Cooper parked the van near the delivery entrance of Building F and turned off the engine. She felt like enjoying a cigarette beneath one of the lot’s large dogwood trees but then remembered that she had smoked her last one that morning.

Cooper got out of the van and leaned against the tree trunk. She propped her leg against the smooth bark, enjoying the sun on her face as she opened a Ziploc bag containing two of her mother’s homemade cookies. She felt an inexplicable urge to say a quick prayer before returning to work. She hadn’t prayed for someone else for a long, long time. In fact, she couldn’t remember praying much at all until Drew had left her, but now she said a nightly prayer asking that she be reunited with him soon.

Maybe I should focus on somebody else for once,
she thought, closing her eyes.

“Lord,” she began hesitantly and then felt words flow more easily from her mouth. “I hope that Brooke’s husband is all that she says he is. I hope he rides up in his white limo and sweeps that nice woman away in a tide of happiness so powerful that whatever is troubling her will be completely washed away. Amen.”

Not bad,
Cooper thought and felt the tension she’d felt in Brooke’s office ebb away. Chewing on one of her mother’s chocolate pinwheel cookies, she got back to work.

2

“I can’t believe my only sister works as a copier repairman!” Ashley complained to their mother, Magnolia “Maggie” Lee, as Maggie finished up her daily baking that Sunday afternoon. “Do you know how weird I feel telling people what my sister does for a living?”

“Why?” Maggie momentarily paused in rolling out a ball of cookie dough for her Chinese almond cookies and gave her younger child a perplexed look. “What’s wrong with Cooper’s job with Make It Work!? Your sister is very
talented with her hands. She can fix most anything, just like her daddy.”

Ashley tossed a thick lock of glossy, radiant blonde hair over her shoulder. “It would be one thing if she just did administrative stuff, but she actually gets greasy and wears a uniform with an embroidered name tag! What’s next? Coveralls? Steel-tipped boots?”

Mrs. Lee shrugged. “Someone has to keep those complicated machines workin’ smoothly. Folks seem to really depend on them these days. And someone has to be firm enough to tell those stingy business owners when their machines have reached the end of their road and need to be replaced.” She teared up. “Oh, now you’ve got me thinkin’ about what I’m gonna do when Grammy is called by the angels!”

Ashley rolled a pair of captivating cerulean eyes. “There’s nothing wrong with Grammy, Mama. Don’t get all worked up. Besides, I don’t think the angels are going to be able to handle her. She’s going to be with us forever.”

Maggie brightened. “You’re right, dear. Grammy’s plucky as a hen in springtime. Now”—she wiped her hands on the seat of her pants instead of her apron—“I have to get these cookies ready for the folks at the Alzheimer’s home.” She glanced at her watch. “I want them to have a special treat with their Sunday afternoon tea.”

“Why?” Ashley’s perfect lips screwed into a smirk. “They won’t remember eating them.”

“Ashley Elizabeth!” Mrs. Lee shook her rolling pin at her daughter. “Don’t you say ugly things like that in my
kitchen!”

“Sorry, Mama.” Ashley shot a look at her sister, but Cooper wasn’t paying attention. She had a mug of hot coffee in her right hand and was lost in the pages of the Sunday paper.

“Back to Cooper,” Ashley persisted. “How is she ever going to meet a new man when her job is so macho?” She put her manicured hands on her narrow hips. “It’s been six months since he left, ya know. It’s time for her to start living again. She’s pretty in that all-natural kind of way and has a body most girls would kill for, but she just hides out, living in her garage like a nun. Someone will have to drag her out of there or she’s going to turn into an old maid.”

“Help me bag up these pinwheels while you’re carryin’ on, Ashley.”

Ashley obediently stuffed two cookies each into plastic bags decorated with gold stickers reading
Magnolia’s Marvels.
As she tied them using gold ribbon, she occasionally glanced over at Cooper, who was still engrossed in the
Richmond Times-Dispatch
and had refused to respond to any of her sister’s comments. Ashley, who was unaccustomed to being ignored, suddenly claimed the edge of Cooper’s chair.

“I’ve got it!” she exclaimed as Cooper turned a mismatched but fiery gaze upon her sister. “Coop? You should start coming to church with me! There are tons of nice single men at church. And they’re your age too.” Watching her sister warily, Cooper reached out and folded the newspaper so that when her father got home from his weekly shopping trip to Wal-Mart, his paper would look pristine. She pushed back from the worn and scrubbed farm table in her parents’ kitchen, refilled her coffee cup, and helped herself to a cookie.

“Not gonna happen, Ashley,” Cooper said firmly. “Besides, I have plans of my own.” She hadn’t told anyone that she was thinking about attending Brooke’s church the following Sunday. Wanting to reread the flyer on Hope Street alone, Cooper walked out the back door, down a short path, and entered the small greenhouse her father had built for her after the field hockey accident.

She inhaled the scents of her private refuge—a wheelbarrow filled with rich soil, two aisles packed with seed trays bearing the first hints of green, a stack of terra-cotta planters, her bottles of pungent fertilizers, and a tidy pile of gardening books on edible plants that Cooper had picked up from library and yard sales.

“This place is as peaceful as any church,” she said to the air, delighting in the humidity and the dappled spring sunlight glinting off the glass roof. Moving about the cozy space, she touched the plants flanking the center aisle and brushed specks of dirt from the leaves of a seedling. “Grow well, my friend. You’re going to help fill hungry bellies come summertime.”

Cooper spent the next few minutes flipping through a seed catalogue. She soon became so intent on deciding which tomato seeds to order that she didn’t hear Ashley enter her sanctuary.

“I’m trying to look out for you, Coop,” her sister said as Cooper straightened a group of seed trays on the potting table. Ashley held out her hand and wiggled the mammoth diamond of her engagement ring. The light caught the stone and shimmered along the row of smaller diamonds on her wedding band. “I’d like you to find someone as wonderful as my Lincoln.” She sighed happily. “I know I’m just a bubbly newlywed talking, but the day I became Mrs. Lincoln Love was the happiest of my life. I know you thought you and Drew were going to be like Lincoln and me, but it wasn’t meant to be.” Her long lashes fluttered as she surveyed her sister. “You’re pretty, Cooper. You could catch a man and be happy again. I could help you.”

Cooper crossed her arms and frowned. She felt no jealousy over her sister’s ostentatious jewelry or the endless mentions of her extremely wealthy husband, but she didn’t like what she saw in Ashley’s eyes.

“I don’t want to become one of your charity projects,” Cooper snapped. After all, Cooper viewed Ashley’s charitable works as her sister’s vain desire to appear in
Richmond
magazine and
Virginia Living
as often as possible, dressed in fabulous designer clothes, her arm draped around the mayor, the governor’s wife, or another rich suburban do-gooder.

The trouble was, Ashley always distanced herself from the actual people she was purportedly bent on helping. She would organize teams of builders, electricians, and plumbers to work for days constructing a house for Habitat for Humanity, but she never visited the site or met the family. She would collect thousands of winter coats and Christmas presents for the children of area orphanages, but she’d never meet any of the kids during the delivery of these gifts. Even her hospital volunteerism was conducted from a distance. Ashley would host a dinner and raise funds for needed supplies or medical equipment, but she preferred not to be introduced to one of the patients who had benefited from the monetary donation.

Everything Ashley did was self-serving to some degree, and Cooper didn’t want to be a part of any of her sister’s schemes. Suddenly, Cooper recalled Brooke’s kindness and felt guilty over thinking such nasty thoughts about her sister.

“Look,” Cooper told Ashley more gently and busied her hands tidying her pillar of catalogues. “I appreciate your wanting to help, I do, but I don’t want to go to church to meet men. Isn’t that what bars are for?” she quipped.

Ashley frowned. “Well, then go to church to pray. It doesn’t look good that you’re the only one of us that doesn’t attend worship service.”

“Doesn’t look good to who?” Cooper demanded, getting annoyed again. She knew that Ashley wanted to chair some new committee at the large and powerful church she attended on River Road, a wealthy corridor composed of million-dollar homes and churches the size of college campuses. She was also aware of the fact that Ashley was embarrassed of her family.

Their father, Earl Lee, was in charge of maintenance at one of the area’s private schools and their mother got up at five a.m. to bake cookies, which she sold to several Richmond sandwich shops. Except for Ashley, who resided with her husband in a mansion just off River Road, the Lees lived out in the country, a good twenty minutes from Richmond’s West End subdivisions and endless strip malls. Cooper’s parents were humble people who spent their money modestly but gave generously of their time. Their house was small, outdated, and yet incredibly cozy. Cooper lived in a minuscule studio apartment Mr. Lee had erected over the garage with the idea of moving his mother out of the main house, but Grammy Lee refused to budge.

Cooper shook her head, wondering for the millionth time how her parents could have produced such different children. She could only reason that during the one year, one month, one week, and one day that separated their birthdays, the world must have spun in the opposite direction. Looking at her sister as she turned the pages of a gardening magazine with disinterest, Cooper tried to keep her irritation in check. “No one outside of this house cares what I do, Ashley. Why don’t you tell those snobby ladies at your church that your entire family was lost at sea or mauled by bears? Then you won’t have to obsess over how we make you look.”

For a moment, Ashley turned Cooper’s suggestion over in her mind. Suddenly, she scowled. “I can’t say that! It would be an outright lie and
that’s
not going to get me elected.”

Cooper began filling out the order form in the back of the seed catalogue. “Works for politicians all the time,” she joked.

“Fine, Cooper. Rot away in this greenhouse. Live with your parents until you’re old and gray. Go ahead.” Ashley turned to leave. “But you should go to church, even if it’s to suffer through that awful choir at Mama and Daddy’s church.”