by Tracey Drew
“Has she gone out for the morning?”
The guy’s face puckered into a frown. “Friend of hers, are you?”
Was I? Although I’d begun to like her in the short time that I’d known her, now I wasn’t sure. But for all intents and purposes…
“Yes. I’m Tessa Wakefield—”
“Harry’s granddaughter?” His bushy white eyebrows—a stark contrast to his leathery, tanned skin—shot upward. “Why didn’t you say so? I barely recognize you, girl. Your grandpa and me go way back. Dougie’s my name. You tell him we miss him down the pub, and I’ll shout him a beer next time he drops in.”
“I will. Do you know where Isabel’s gone?”
“Oh, aye. Not much happens down this end of the street, so a spot of drama sure gets the old ticker pumping.”
“Drama?”
At my confused expression, Dougie chuckled. “Isabel slipped in her backyard last night, poor dear. What she was doing out there that late, I couldn’t tell ya, but she sprained her ankle right good. Next door thataway”—he tipped his head toward the house on the other side of Isabel’s—“drove her down to get it checked out at the hospital.”
“And it’s not broken?”
“Not even a fracture. Just a bad sprain, as I said. Got herself a moon boot and crutches, no less. She stayed at her sister’s place in the city last night since they kept her waiting at the emergency department for hours. Sister’s gonna drive her home later this morning, according to a text message Isabel sent me earlier. Along with a request for someone to water her tomato plants.” He tutted. “Someone being me, of course, since she won’t be pottering around in her garden anytime soon.”
“Oh dear,” I interrupted before Dougie could steamroll right over any attempt I might make to get more than one or two words out. “What time did she wake you up last night?” Kind of an odd question, but I hoped he wouldn’t notice.
“I wasn’t asleep.” Dougie sounded insulted. “I’m not one of these old folks who’re in bed by eight. I was watching telly when her car pulled in at about quarter past nine.”
That sounded about right. She’d been one of the first wave of people to leave Unraveled last night.
He scratched a spot under his pink helmet in contemplation. “Saw her lights go on inside and not too long after, the outdoor ones went on as well. Nothing too unusual about that; the woman does love her tomatoes—and cats, as you might’ve noticed.”
“I noticed.”
“Then I wandered into the kitchen to make myself a cuppa, and I smelled smoke. Being a good neighbor, I checked out the window, but she was just burning something in the barbecue pit that her ex built shortly before he ran off with his tennis coach.”
Judging by the gleam in Dougie’s eye, he was dying to spill the details of that particular scandal.
“And that’s when she sprained her ankle?” I asked.
“Sure was. Saw her do it too. Not that I routinely spy on my neighbors’ nighttime adventures.”
“Of course you don’t,” I murmured.
He tutted. “She tripped over one of the cherry tomato plants on the patio. Went down real hard and yelped like a kicked dog. I rushed over to help.”
“She’s lucky to have such a good neighbor.” Inspiration struck. “Have you watered Isabel’s tomatoes yet?”
“I was about to before I head into town.”
“Why don’t I save you the trouble? I’ll pop out the back and give them a quick drink since I’m here and you’re all ready to hit the road.”
He beamed at me, the good Girl Scout. “Marvelous. I’ll tell her you stopped by.”
Uh-oh. I didn’t want to give Isabel a heads-up that I’d been snooping. Hoping my innocent expression was firmly in place, I made a casual flicking away gesture. “No need. I’ll come back later to see if there’s anything I can help with.” I added my best Dionne Warwick smile. “That’s what friends are for.”
Dougie tipped me a salute and coasted down his driveway, streamers fluttering majestically as he pedaled away.
I retraced my steps from Isabel’s front door and followed the path along the side of her house. More creepy lawn ornaments judged me as I tried to peer in the windows, though tightly closed drapes thwarted me at each one.
Around the back, I found a neatly mown lawn, inoffensive shrubs and flowerbeds, an old-fashioned rotary washing line, a wooden picnic table, and a patio area complete with brick barbecue as Dougie had described. I hurried over to the barbeque, my first stop, noting the upended broken planter on the patio. What Isabel had been doing out there became apparent when I spotted the mess of ash underneath the metal grill. She’d been torching something. From a couple of scraps, singed but not completely burned, I brilliantly deduced that something was photographs.
Quite a few of them, judging by the amount of ash.
After last night’s class, I could make an educated guess as to who the star of the now destroyed photos was, but guesses weren’t evidence.
From my vantage point on the raised patio, I rescanned Isabel’s backyard in case I’d missed anything on first inspection. Nope. Just a nice suburban yard, in a nice suburban street, belonging to a nice suburban woman who liked gardening and cats and…
An object in a bushy pink rhododendron by the boundary fence caught my eye.
I crossed the lawn and plucked a singed but still intact photograph from the plant’s leaves. The photo was a selfie of Isabel and Lucas on Cape Discovery Beach. Lucas stared directly into the camera lens, flashing a toothpaste-commercial smile. Tucked under his arm, Isabel clung to him, gazing up at his face with an expression that could only be described as adoring.
Desperately adoring.
Head over heels in lust, or maybe even love, adoring.
Isabel had flat-out lied about her relationship with Lucas, and by the sound of things, it hadn’t been a match made in heaven. Hell hath no fury, indeed. But it was also unlikely Isabel had left the threatening note at my door last night. Unlikely, but not impossible.
After staring at the photo a moment longer, I tucked it into the front pocket of my shirt, very much aware of the folded note and the leprechaun pin in my shorts pocket. A veritable smorgasbord of hidden secrets: that was me.
Hearing a scuff behind me, I jerked around in an ungainly hop. And came face to face with an arms-folded, suit-molded-to-muscles-wearing, thoroughly ticked-off-looking detective.
Twelve
The one thing Detective Mana didn’t look was surprised to see me. I decided to brazen it out.
“Good morning, Eric,” I called out, adding a cheery little wave in case he’d missed the perkiness of my tone.
He didn’t wave back. His block-like arms remained folded, his gaze unreadable behind his wraparound sunglasses. But I didn’t need to see his dried-concrete-colored eyes to know they weren’t crinkled with good humor.
“Why are you here?” His voice was grit and crushed gravel.
“Being neighborly and watering Isabel’s tomatoes. See?” I picked up a nearby watering can, which, thank goodness, made a sloshing sound when I lifted it. I proceeded to demonstrate my competent irrigation technique. “Why are you here? Top secret official police business?”
His only response was a muscle flexing on one side of his carved-from-granite jaw.
I held the watering can above another tomato plant. Not having inherited a green thumb from either Harry or my dad, I hoped I didn’t drown the poor thing. “Isabel isn’t home at the moment.”
He cocked his head. “Really? Do you know where she is?”
Opting to play nice, I smiled a helpful citizen smile. “Yes, Detective. She’s on her way back from her sister’s place in Napier.”
The detective’s eyebrows arrowed down. “Does she know you’re trespassing on her property?”
Okay, forget about nice then. The best defense is a good offense—a polite offense, anyway. After all, I didn’t want to get arrested. “Isabel’s a long-standing member of my gran
dmother’s knitting group. And also, ah, my friend.”
Which didn’t clarify whether I had her express permission to be there. But then something occurred to me, and thanks to a sometimes filter malfunction in my brain, I blurted it out: “What are you doing in her backyard? Don’t you need a warrant or something?”
Eric pushed his shades onto his head and strode over to the patio. His long legs ate up the distance so rapidly that I didn’t have time to brace myself for the full impact of his way-too-close presence. He stopped less than a foot from me and grabbed hold of my wrist.
As I let out a shocked yelp, the watering can dropped from my hand, and water splattered the bottom of his suit pants.
He released my wrist so quickly I thought I’d imagined the warmth of his fingers on my skin. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. You were drowning the tomato.”
Sucked that he was right. A pool of water spread out from the base of the planter. Drowning by misadventure, or perhaps drowning by the distraction of a woman susceptible to a man in a well-tailored suit. Whichever.
“And to answer your question,” he continued, moving his expensive-looking leather shoes away from the puddle, “I knew you were back here somewhere and wanted to know why.”
My facial features must have rearranged themselves into a caricature of skepticism because faint lines of amusement feathered from the corners of his lips. “I’m not psychic; if that’s what you’re thinking.”
He looked over his shoulder, in the direction of the driveway.
I followed his gaze to Isabel’s buttercup yellow car, and the black cat grooming its hindquarters on top of it.
Pearl.
“Is that her name?” Eric said.
I hadn’t realized I’d spoken out loud. Slanting a glance at him, I noted the faint lines around his mouth had expanded into what could almost be mistaken for a smile.
“She’s very diligent in her grooming,” I said.
Ignoring us, Pearl continued to give one hundred percent of her attention to her nether regions.
“Cleanliness is next to godliness,” I muttered.
“Cats think they are gods, don’t they?”
When I stared at him—somewhat in disbelief that this big, grim-looking detective actually had a sense of humor—he gestured over his shoulder. “There’s another one sitting under the mailbox out front. That’s the one I saw first. I assume it’s the other cat mentioned in the official statement you made last week?”
“Yes. That’d be Kit. He and Pearl are siblings. They go everywhere together.”
Why I felt compelled to explain their relationship to a man—not just any man, but a high-ranking police officer who had the authority to cuff me and frog-march me to his police car—I had no idea.
My only dealings with the police—other than Harry, of course—had been a speeding ticket and chatting with some user-friendly officers at a high school careers event. Neither interaction had left me tongue-tied one moment, babbling the next, or feeling like I’d eaten undercooked chicken and was playing food-poisoning Russian Roulette. Would I or wouldn’t I start throwing up in the next ten minutes…
“Everywhere together, while following you? Like a close protection team?”
“Yeah. Something like that.” Add inexplicably defensive to the tongue-tied or babbling. “The cats were my grandmother’s, and since she passed away last year, they’ve kept me under surveillance.”
“They’re afraid you’ll disappear out of their world too, and then there’ll be no one to watch them back.” Something dark and a little bit lonely flickered in his eyes. He returned the shades to his face and shoved his fists into the pockets of his suit pants. “Tell me why you’re really here, Tessa.”
Both the photograph and the threatening note felt like acid, burning holes in my pockets. I wasn’t ready to admit the surveillance I was under was not of the cute feline kind. What I wanted was for the investigation to direct its piercing gaze on a suspect other than my brother. I dragged out the photograph of Lucas and Isabel and offered it to him.
Eric examined the photo, holding it carefully by one singed corner, blank expression firmly in place. His head shifted for a moment as he scanned the barbecue area, then the insect-like gaze of his reflective shades swept back to me. “You found this where?”
Fifty Shades of Cop had returned to his tone, making my stomach give a nervous hiccup. “Caught in the rhododendron. It must’ve blown out of the fire when she burned the others.”
“Did you see Ms. Burton burning these items?”
I shook my head. “Her neighbor told me. He was watching when she tripped and hurt herself.”
At the twitch of his eyebrow, I caved and repeated everything Dougie had told me. After listening without interrupting until I ran out of steam, he withdrew a plastic bag from his jacket pocket and slipped the photo inside.
Eric sidestepped around me and crossed the patio to take a closer look at the remains of Isabel’s late-night cook-up. Like a helpless insect drawn to his charismatic light, I trailed after him. We stood, side by side, peering down at the ashy remains.
“What do you make of this ritualistic burning of photographs?”
I gave him a startled side-eyed blink. The detective sergeant was asking for my opinion? Heat crept up my throat, warming my vocal cords and, weirdly, making me want to purr like a stroked kitten.
“Oh.” I focused on the evenly stacked bricks while gathering my flailing thoughts. “I think Isabel had very strong feelings for Lucas. Feelings that weren’t reciprocated in the way she wanted.”
“Strong enough feelings for her to kill him if he rejected her?”
“I don’t know,” I said with complete honesty. “Everyone has to learn how to handle rejection, and we all deal with it in our own way. Some more violently than others, granted. You must see that a lot in your line of work.”
He gave a soft grunt that sounded like affirmation. “Far too much, and far too often.” He used a finger to push his shades onto his head again. Eric now; RoboCop Detective had been relegated to riding shotgun. “Let’s say, for argument’s sake, you were involved with a man who you thought was as into you as you were into him. Would you key his home and burn photos of him if he broke off this little dalliance?”
The side-eye I gave him this time wasn’t startled but grudgingly impressed. Detective Mana knew more than I’d suspected. “Dalliance? What are you, eighty?”
He almost cracked a smile. Almost.
“Ed told you about Isabel and the RV, huh?”
“With enthusiasm.”
“Score one for you.”
He made a sound that could have been a chuckle. “Back to my hypothetical question, which I’ll preface by saying, I acknowledge that all women are unique individuals—”
“Yeah, yeah.” Thanks to Jared, I was intimately acquainted with rejection and its sidekick, humiliation. “Would I burn his photos?”
I’d packed up photos of my ex and put them in storage, along with years of accumulated stuff that I had no idea what to do with. Would I burn them, though? No. It was enough that those photos would sit in dusty cardboard boxes until, one day, they’d be faded memories, sorted through along with ticket stubs and old letters and thrown into a recycling bin. I refused to give him free rental space in my brain, even if it was just to fill it with the ashes of photographs taken in happier times.
But—as far as I knew—Isabel hadn’t been in a long-term relationship with Lucas Kerr. From the outside, it appeared to have been a summer fling. In which case…
“Burn, shred, draw devil’s horns on. Yep, more than likely. But keying a guy’s RV? That’s a whole ’nother level. My granddad’s a retired cop; rules and staying on the right side of the law is in my genetics.”
“Really?”
“Really, really. Although, as a pirate once said: ‘Rules are more like guidelines.’ Sometimes I bend them a bit.”
This time I got a proper smile. And, wow, Detective Sergea
nt Eric Mana actually looked human when he smiled. I found myself smiling back until I remembered the point he was trying to make with his hypothetical question. Was a woman in lust/love capable of murdering a man who, for some reason, made her want to vandalize his property in anger? On that, I couldn’t speak from personal experience.
“You’re speculating on whether a woman could be driven to lash out in a fit of passion. But I can’t give you a solid answer because I’ve never felt that intensity of emotion for another person.”
“Never been in love?”
This definitely wasn’t an officer of the law asking, and my pulse fluttered like a panicked bird. I didn’t want to get introspective with this man. He unsettled me in ways I didn’t care to examine. “Of course I have. Just not to the extent that I’d pay a guy a visit in the middle of the night, drug him, then bash him over the head with a wine bottle.”
As soon as the words pattered out of my mouth, I longed to suck them back in. One blessed moment of wishful thinking that Eric hadn’t picked up on my slip, and then—
“How do you know Lucas was drugged? That information wasn’t released to the public.”
I tucked my lips together and imagined staples holding them shut.
He sighed, pinching the spot between his eyebrows as if he had a headache developing. A headache named Tessa Wakefield. “I can make an educated guess as to what little birdie gave you that information.”
“Let’s just say it’s hard to keep secrets in Cape Discovery.” And yet, quite a few of its residents seemed to. “Please don’t blame my granddad. He was only trying to help.”
“Like you’re trying to help clear your brother’s name?”
“I am.” I turned to face him and adopted what I hoped was my sincerest honesty is my middle name expression. “He didn’t do this, Eric. You must know that now.”
Using his first name might be pushing the limits of our acquaintance too far, but he didn’t seem to mind.
He sighed again. “Unofficially, Sean is no longer our prime suspect. We received an anonymous tip-off”—his eyes narrowed into suspicious slits—“another anonymous tip-off, that a woman fitting Isabel’s description was seen at the pop-up store late on the night Lucas was murdered.”
