White Colander Crime (22 page)

Jaymie returned to her home and parked the van, retrieved her groceries from the back and headed up the flagged walk that bisected her backyard, but saw a figure hunched on the back step. She paused, until the figure looked up. It was Nan Goodenough!

“For heaven's sake, Nan, you must be freezing!” Jaymie said, surging forward again. “How long have you been here? What do you want?”

Her editor stood, hefting a bag under her arm. “I needed to talk to you, but not on the phone. I didn't want to talk until I saw you in person.”

Jaymie eyed the duffel bag uneasily, but unlocked the back door. Hoppy charged out and swiftly retreated to a piddle spot in the corner of the yard. Denver blinked up at the light, then curled back up in his basket and tucked his face under his winter-thick tail, sighing deeply and retreating back into a catnap.

Nan plunked the duffel down on the trestle table and looked Jaymie's kitchen over with interest. She pulled off her ski parka and tossed it aside, rubbing her bare hands together then tucking them under her armpits. “It's freezing out there tonight.”

“I'll make tea,” Jaymie said, still eyeing the duffel. She knew what it was. And she couldn't have been more nervous about it if it had contained a nest of vipers.

“You do love all this stuff, huh?” Nan said, eyeing the vintage tins lined up on the cupboard tops among an antique weight scale, sets of bowls, vintage choppers and other utensils from the last century, and even some from the century before that.

“I do.” She pulled out a chair and indicated it. “So, Nan, let's not beat around the bush. That is Shelby's duffel. Cody told you about it, and you retrieved it. Why? And why did you bring it here? Have you looked in it yet?”

Nan sat down and gave her a withering look. “Of
course
I looked into it. That's why I want you to hide it somewhere the cops can't find it. Bury it if you have to.”

Twenty-one

W
ITH SHAKING HANDS
Jaymie unzipped the duffel bag as Nan looked on. They both had a mug of tea, but Jaymie's stomach was doing flips and there was no way she'd be able to down any before she knew what had Nan in such a panic. The woman wouldn't say, she just wanted Jaymie to find out for herself.

Inside was a jumbled mess of clothes, mostly casual exercise wear along with panties and sports bras. An elastic band was tight around a stack of cards. Jaymie slipped it off and flipped through Walgreens, Walmart, Visa and MasterCard gift cards. There was cash, too, a lot. Jaymie riffled through the bills and estimated there was more than Cody had implied, easily ten thousand dollars or more. Maybe she had added money since he saw the bag. There were also the two so-called “burner” cell phones still in the packaging.

“She was planning to run for some reason,” Jaymie mused.

“That stuff is not what's got me worried,” Nan said. “Look harder.”

She dug farther through the clothes and at the bottom was a small leather-bound journal. Inside was Shelby's name and the date September eleventh. Jaymie looked up.

Nan, her face set in a grim expression, said, “Read.”

So Jaymie sat down and did, skimming through much and reading only occasional entries all the way through. When she was done all she said was, “
Gone Girl
.”

Nan nodded. “She was planning to disappear and make it look like Cody killed her. Why? What did he ever do to her?”

“Besides hitting her?” Jaymie said bluntly, closing the book and slapping it on the table. “I saw that Nan. He
did
hit her. Nothing she said to him could have excused that. But I'm not sure any of this is about him. This was aimed squarely at you and your newspaper and how you had targeted her family. Or at least how she perceived that you had targeted her family.”

“Oh my God. Do you mean that?”

“Just wait.” She thought for a long minute, tapping the leather cover with her fingernail. “So she wrote a malicious journal, saying that Cody was threatening her daily, had hit her repeatedly and was systematically cutting her off from friends. A lot of that can be disproved easily enough. He certainly was not cutting her off from anyone; in fact she kicked him out of her apartment and had complete freedom apart from him. I didn't know her, but the entries feel fake to me, clumsy . . . like she was having too much fun with it.”

There was no real fear in the lines, not that Jaymie noticed. It felt like some of the first-time novels, self-published before they were ready, that she had read, by authors who badly needed an editor. She wrote that Cody had the heart of an evil beast, and that “blows from Cody's fist rained down on me like a monsoon,” that he “hurt me so bad I wanted to crawl away into a hole like a frightened little bunny rabbit.” Metaphors and similes were apparently a favorite technique, and she used them copiously.

Jaymie had Austin as a witness to Shelby's writing in the journal, and the smile she had as she wrote the passages. But despite that, it was terribly true that Shelby Fretter's life had ended, as the diary forecasted, violently. That was why Nan wanted Jaymie to hide the duffel bag. She feared the impact of the journal on the police case against Cody.

But Jaymie also knew what Nan didn't; others attested that Shelby had spoken about being afraid of Cody, and that he had hurt her. Also, there were the emails from Shelby to Lynnsey claiming Cody hurt her, which she then contradicted in phone calls. What was going on? Something felt off to Jaymie about those reports, but the police wouldn't see it that way, especially not with the additional testimony of the journal to Cody's physical battering of Shelby. Though she figured it was impossible for him to have killed her if the cell phone supported his timeline, she couldn't be sure of that, and the journal could be viewed as a kind of “dying declaration,” which was sometimes used in evidence at murder trials, from what Jaymie had read. Like a statement from beyond the grave, it spoke to her fear of a certain person, and since she had died in much the same manner as she forecast, it could certainly be used as supporting evidence against Cody.

“Why was she leaving town, Nan? I don't believe it was fear of Cody.”

“It certainly was
not
! I get that he hit her once—I confronted him about that—but he swears to me that was it, and never again. And he
never
did any of the things she concocted in this piece of trash!” Nan said, putting one finger under the edge of the book and flipping it over in contempt.

“Okay, all right,” Jaymie said sternly. “Nan, calm down. Why did you kick him out of the house? He told me that's why he went to stay with Shelby.”

“We were fighting all the time. I told him he needed to get a grip and get a job. I was fed up, and told him to get out. I didn't expect him to take me seriously.”

“Okay. So . . . Shelby seemed to be planning a life on the run. Why? Shouldn't there be some reason why she wanted to leave town and disappear? I feel like the plot to finger Cody was just an added bonus in her mind. And if that's the case, maybe whatever she was running from was the real reason she was murdered.” Jaymie frowned down into her full cup of tea. “Or not. She was looking into the disappearance of Natalie Roth and was somehow involved with Delaney Meadows. Whoever is responsible for Natalie's disappearance, and, I'm afraid, death, may be Shelby's murderer, too.”

“Then who did that?”

“I don't know. I'm looking into it.”

The editor sighed dramatically. “Then just hide this stuff until you figure it out.”

“No!”

Nan jumped at Jaymie's forceful manner.

“I appreciate your worries,” Jaymie said, staring right into the older woman's eyes. “But you asked me to look into this, and I'm doing it. Cody told me about this bag, and I was trying to decide what to do about it, but you retrieved it and brought it here. This puts me in an awkward position, and I'm not willing to go to jail for obstruction of justice.”

“You and the chief are buddies. He's never going to arrest you.”

“Don't bet on it,” Jaymie said. “His lead detective on this case does not like me and thinks we're too close.” She had made her decision and crossed the kitchen, grabbing the cordless phone. “I have to call Chief Ledbetter.”

Nan left in a huff as Jaymie made the call. As bad as it made her feel to be at odds with her editor, she was doing the right thing. She hoped it didn't get Nan in trouble. She called Chief Ledbetter at home and he heard her out, grunted once, and said he was on his way. She wasn't surprised when he showed up with Bernie Jenkins—her friend but also an ambitious officer on the police force—as his driver and note taker.

The chief settled at her kitchen table. She told him that Nan brought her the duffel bag and asked her what to do about it. He opened and laid everything out as Jaymie turned on the overhead light and shooed Hoppy away. Bernie catalogued the items and cash as he examined the bag. He shoved his glasses down on his nose, peered at what appeared to be some hand stitching in the dark lining, and tugged on a loose end. As she watched he unraveled the thread and reached in. And pulled out tickets.

She gasped, as did Bernie.

“Where are they to?” Jaymie asked.

The chief shook his head. “Sorry, part of an ongoing investigation.”

“You wouldn't even
have
this bag if I hadn't called you!”

He grinned and stared at her over his glasses. “I guess it doesn't matter if you know, but don't let it get around. They're bus tickets to Clearwater.”

“Clearwater, Florida? In the US!” Jaymie exclaimed. “Wait . . . something just clicked.” She fetched her purse, dug in it and took out the piece of paper she had stolen from Shelby's desk. She scanned it, then handed it to the chief. “This was in Shelby's desk at the employment agency.” Sheepishly she explained what she was doing there and how she happened to look in Shelby's desk. “I guess Detective Vestry overlooked it. It's pretty cryptic, and at first glance not important. I wasn't even sure what it was, but I get it now. This is from a phone call she made, or online searching; it's a rough schedule of buses to Clearwater, where they stop, and what times of day they run. But why Clearwater? Why not fly to the Bahamas or . . . I don't know.”

“Tougher to book plane tickets out of the country. Easier to trace, too,” Bernie said. “She may have been planning to go somewhere else from there, though.”

The chief nodded.

“But why was she planning her disappearance? That's what I haven't figured out yet,” Jaymie said.

“So this duffel was hidden in her gym locker,” Bernie said. “I'm a member of that same gym.”

That wasn't surprising, since it was the only women's gym in the vicinity. Heidi was a member, too, and both kept trying to get Jaymie to join. But she preferred walking Hoppy as exercise. “Lily Meadows is a member, too,” Jaymie said, remembering what Austin told her. “Apparently she takes the spin class?” She described Lily to Bernie.

“I think I've seen her there, and Shelby, too. It seems to me . . .” Her dark eyes went blank for a moment, and Chief Ledbetter watched her with interest.

“Whenever she gets that look,” he said to Jaymie, “I know she's going to come up with something.” He was a staunch defender of Bernie's bid to make her way to detective someday, and was, in essence, mentoring her.

Bernie nodded. “It took me a minute to make sure I was remembering it right, but I saw Lily and Shelby talking once, and it wasn't friendly. Lily said something to her, something mean, and then threatened her.”

“What did she say?” Jaymie asked.

She thought for a moment. “It was a while ago now. If I remember it right, Lily said something like, ‘I don't know what you and my husband have cooked up, but if you get him in hot water I'll make sure you go down.'”

“And you didn't think to tell us that?” Chief Ledbetter said, an expression of disappointment on his pouchy face.

“We had a suspect under arrest in the murder,” Bernie said, frowning across the table at her boss. “How could an extraneous conversation overheard between the victim and some random tiny little woman who uses two-pound weights in the gym mean anything?” Her cheeks flushed a darker tint and she ducked her head. “Besides, I'd forgotten about it until now. That was almost two months ago.”

“I know for sure Lily Meadows didn't do this,” Jaymie said, and told them about the book club meeting that Friday night. She then told them about meeting Lily earlier that evening, and what the woman said. “I find it interesting that she said she knew Delaney and Shelby were up to something. She's definitely worried about her husband.”

Bernie and the chief exchanged looks, but said nothing. Jaymie knew from experience that they could be looking into any number of things that she would never know about until the end. They left, taking the bag with them. Jaymie had made it clear that the key to the locker was in Cody's possession in the editor's home, so
Nan
didn't do anything wrong, though Jaymie didn't know how he got his girlfriend's gym locker key.

It was late. Jaymie got ready for bed in a fog, all the information she had received jumbled like a trash heap of clues. And like some trash heaps, she had a feeling there was a valuable piece of information there if she could just search through the junk and find it.

But there were so many loose threads.

Why did Travis Fretter lie about being with his Mom the whole time that evening, and where was he when he wasn't with her?

Why did Glenn Brennan lie about being away on a work trip that same evening?

Where was Delaney Meadows scurrying to or away from that night?

Were Natalie Roth's disappearance and probable death tied to Shelby Fretter's murder? What did Shelby know about it?