by Kathi Daley
“I thought so.”
She frowned. “How exactly did you get this information again?”
I described my visit to the deputy and my crying jag in more detail.
Jemma laughed. “Wow, I guess I should have realized you’d come in handy. You did say you were a PI before coming here.”
I nodded. “I went into the business to help my dad and to keep an eye on him and make sure he didn’t overdo it. It’s not like being a PI was my dream, but I learned a lot in the three years I worked with my father, who was a darn good detective.” I glanced at the file I’d sent Jemma. “So, what should we do with this information?”
“I’m not sure. It’s not like we can contact the sheriff’s office and call them out on the information they clearly have but aren’t making public. I think I’m going to call Parker to see if she can come over. Josie will be home soon, so maybe between the four of us, we can come up with a strategy.”
Jemma called Parker, who assured her she could be here in an hour. Jemma suggested that I go get the dogs and bring them over, and we’d open a bottle of wine and have a bite to eat while we had our strategy session. It seemed like a good idea to me since I really didn’t feel like cooking, so I went back to my cottage, grabbed the dogs, and then returned to Jemma and Josie’s for the third meal in as many days.
Once I arrived back at the large cottage, I followed Jemma out onto the deck and took a chair. “It’s a gorgeous afternoon,” I said.
“It really is,” Jemma agreed. “I love this time of the year when the whole world seems to be decorated in brilliant colors. Of course, I also love it when the weather turns cold, the tourists go home, and it’s just us out here on the bay.”
“I know you work from home, but I guess you all must work fewer hours in the winter.”
“A lot less,” she confirmed. “And we make the most of it. Josie and I like to get out whenever we can and go biking or hiking. Sometimes when Booker is off, we’ll borrow a boat and head out for a day on the water. We aren’t super formal with invites around here, but anytime we’re heading out, you’re always invited.”
“Thank you. I’ll keep that in mind. I’ve been busy getting the cottage cleaned, but once I finish settling in, I should have some free time.” I looked in the direction of Booker’s cottage. “Did I hear that Tegan and Booker are out of town?”
She nodded. “Until next Sunday. Tegan took a week off, and they headed down to San Diego to do some scuba diving.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“Josie and Parker will both be here soon. I’m going to grab us a snack.” Jemma got up and headed into the cottage. She came out with a bottle of wine as well as a plate with fruit, bread, spread, and cheese. “Did you see Parker’s article in the newspaper today?” Jemma asked, handing me a printed copy of the newspaper.
“Actually, I looked it up online.”
“She was pretty upset when she realized that her editor hacked it down to represent the idea that Cammy committed suicide even though that isn’t what she wrote. When I spoke to her earlier, she indicated that Harrison must have gotten to her editor. Parker is not the sort to take kindly to censoring. In fact, she’s pretty livid, so you might want to be prepared for that.”
“Thanks for the warning, but I get why she might be angry. I was a journalist before I was a PI. If someone would have hacked up an article I wrote without my permission, especially if it changed the subtext, I would have been furious.”
Basically, the article just said that Cammy Collins had been found dead at the foot of Bramblewood Bluff and that while the official investigation was still underway, it appeared as if she jumped, and the preliminary cause of death was suicide. Short, to the point, and apparently, a complete and total lie.
Josie showed up shortly after Jemma opened the wine. She changed her clothes while Jemma poured her a glass, and then we caught her up on the developments that had taken place that afternoon. I remembered that Josie was going to talk to Cammy’s manager and wondered if she had. “Were you ever able to find out if Cammy had planned to close early?” I asked.
“She hadn’t,” Josie answered. “I spoke to the store manager, who said that Cammy was supposed to work until after eight. She was supposed to close and lock up at eight and then clean up and close out the cash drawer. I guess that usually takes fifteen to thirty minutes to accomplish once the last customer leaves. If she turned the sign at seven-thirty, she should have been out of there by eight o’clock, but according to the store manager, Cammy didn’t set the alarm until eight-forty.”
I frowned. “So she turned the sign at seven-thirty and then hung around until eight-forty?”
“That’s how it looks. No one knows why.”
“Did any of Cammy’s friends know what she might have been doing?”
“Not as far as I know. Hillary said that Cammy didn’t show up at the party until around nine. She couldn’t remember the exact time.”
“What about Harper? Did Tegan have a chance to talk to her before she headed out of town?” I wondered.
“She did. Harper had no idea why Cammy texted her of all people. She said she hadn’t seen her in months and that they certainly weren’t close. It seemed odd to her that if Cammy was going to reach out in her final moments that she wouldn’t have reached out to one of her besties.”
“I agree. That does seem odd.”
“This whole thing has been odd from day one.”
I then looked at Jemma. “Were you ever able to track down the unregistered cell?”
“No. It seems to be untraceable, so it’s unlikely we’ll ever know who Cammy had been communicating with that night.”
“It sounds like she didn’t lock up until eight-forty, and we know she went to the party for a while before whatever happened to her happened, so it’s likely she was at the party when she sent the first text to the unregistered cell,” I pointed out. “Perhaps even both texts to this number were sent while she was with friends. Hillary didn’t remember Cammy texting anyone, but she said there were a lot of people around and a lot of distractions. Maybe someone else was with Cammy when she sent the texts.”
“I suppose we can ask around,” Jemma said.
“If she was as moody as everyone said, she might have just gone off by herself,” Josie pointed out.
“Was Cammy moody often?” I asked.
“Not that I could tell,” Josie answered. “I asked Hillary, and she said that Cammy had gone through some dark moods when she first broke up with Brody, but she also said that Cammy seemed to be over things and had been in a really good mood leading up to the night of her death. She wasn’t sure what might have happened that night.”
The whole thing seemed pretty odd, and I was willing to bet there was something going on rather than suicide.
Parker called and indicated that something had come up, and she was going to be late, so Josie, Jemma, and I decided that the most important thing we could do at this point was to get a look at the security tapes from the market on the night Cammy died. Tegan had been the one who’d talked to the store owner to gain the information about the time Cammy locked up as compared to the time she’d set the alarm, but Tegan wasn’t here, so Josie offered to distract Chip while Jemma and I snuck into the manager’s office. I took the dogs back to my cottage, and then the three of us headed into town.
Once we arrived at the store, Josie began flirting with Chip while Jemma and I headed to the office. Once we were inside the office, Jemma booted up the computer while I kept a lookout. The security tapes were filed in a folder that we found on the desktop. Finding the recording corresponding to the date Cammy died was easy. Apparently, the store manager wasn’t big on security codes or passwords.
“Okay, I have it,” Jemma said.
I took a final look out the door to confirm that Josie was still flirting with Chip, who appeared to be completely oblivious to the fact that anything was going on. It also helped that the store was otherwise empty just as it h
ad been the first time I’d been here.
“Here you are coming in,” Jemma said, pointing at the screen.
It was odd to watch myself head up and down the aisles picking up the items I’d need, making choices, and putting some items in the basket while returning others to the shelf. Jemma fast-forwarded the tape since I’d shopped for about thirty minutes. When she got to the part where I was checking out, she slowed it a bit. You couldn’t hear what we were saying, but Cammy was smiling and animated, just as I remembered. There was no way she’d had suicide on her mind. I watched as I paid for my purchases and left. A few minutes later, Brody walked in. Cammy’s smile faded as he headed to the counter where she was still standing. We continued to watch as the two chatted. Brody’s back was to the camera, so it was impossible to see his face, but Cammy was clearly upset. After about fifteen minutes, Brody left. Cammy walked over to the front door, locked it, and turned the open sign to closed, and then headed down the hallway. It looked like she went into the manager’s office. There were no cameras in the manager’s office, so there was no way to know what she was doing while she was inside. She stayed in the office for at least thirty minutes, maybe longer, before she came out and began emptying the cash drawer and cleaning up in preparation for closing. She once again entered the manager’s office for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, then came out with her jacket, and left through the back door leading out to the alley.
“We’d better go before someone comes in,” I whispered.
Jemma nodded and logged off. We’d taken a lot longer than we’d planned. Chip’s back was to us as we snuck out of the office. We headed toward the ladies’ room and then made a grand exit from the ladies’ room, which is where we’d told Chip we were heading in the first place. He appeared startled when we came out as if Josie had mesmerized him to the point that he’d completely forgotten we were even there. We thanked him for allowing us to use the facilities, said our goodbyes, and left.
“So, did you find out anything?” Josie asked once we were back in the car and heading out to the peninsula.
“It’s hard to know if anything we saw was important. We saw Brody come in and we could see the transformation in Cammy as she went from smiling and happy to extremely unhappy as she talked to Brody,” Jemma added. “There was no audio, so we don’t know what they were talking about, but just as Ainsley had said, as soon as Brody left, Cammy locked up.”
“And then what?” Josie asked.
“And then she went into the manager’s office and stayed there for a long time,” Jemma added. “There’s no camera in the office, so we don’t know what she was doing. She set the alarm and left the building around eight-forty just as the manager had told Tegan.”
Josie looked at her phone. “Parker texted. She’s on her way out to our place. She said she has news.”
By the time we arrived back at Jemma and Josie’s cottage, Parker had arrived and was sitting on the back deck, waiting for us. She, of course, was anxious to hear what we’d found out, and we were interested to hear what she’d learned, so in the interest of expediency, Jemma condensed what we knew, explaining about the information gained both from the coroner’s report and the video from the store.
“That all fits,” Parker said. “If I had to guess, based on the number of favors Harrison is calling in to keep a lid on this, Brody killed Cammy or knows who killed her, and has a vested interest in keeping the whole thing off the books. You said you took photos of the coroner’s report. Did it list the time of death?”
“Between eleven and one-thirty,” I answered.
“If this information is correct, then the text sent to Harper at two-fifteen might have been sent from Cammy’s phone, but it wasn’t sent by Cammy,” Parker pointed out.
We’d all agreed that the text had most likely been sent by the killer in an attempt to cover their tracks. Cammy’s phone had never shown up, but if Cammy had drowned, then her phone was most likely lying on the bottom of the sea.
If Cammy hadn’t sent the last text, and if it been sent by the killer, had Harper been chosen as the recipient due to the fact that the killer had Harper’s number and wanted to set up the illusion of suicide, or had Harper’s number been in Cammy’s phone and the killer had just randomly chosen it?
Parker shared the news that both she and her editor were being threatened big time by Harrison Davenport about the consequences of publishing anything they were unable to substantiate one hundred percent. Since the case was still open and no arrests had been made, talking about the case in anything other than the broadest of terms had been made nearly impossible. It was Parker’s opinion that not only was Davenport leaning on the newspaper, but it also seemed that both the sheriff and Deputy Todd were going out of their way to speak with caution to avoid doing anything that might even inadvertently cast suspicion on Brody or the Davenport family.
Of course, we knew all that, so I had to wonder about Parker’s big news.
“I found out that on the day of her death, Cammy stopped off at the bank and withdrew a large amount of money before going into work,” Parker said. “At least it was a large amount for Cammy, given the fact that she had a total of fourteen hundred dollars in her account at the time of the withdrawal and had taken twelve hundred out. I checked with Officer Todd, who admitted that he knew about the withdrawal and confirmed that Cammy didn’t have the cash on her when they found her body, nor did they find it in her car or in her bedroom at home. I guess if she had drowned rather than fallen as the coroner’s report indicates, the money could have ended up in the sea.”
Everyone agreed that given what we knew, that seemed likely.
Josie, Jemma, Parker, and I talked late into the evening. We came up with a bunch of different theories, but no way to prove or disprove any of them. Parker planned to keep following up on leads until she figured this out, and the rest of us agreed to help her to the best of our ability. Between Parker’s nose for news, my experience as a PI, Jemma’s hacker skills, and Josie’s ability to charm anyone she set her mind to, the four of us really did make a pretty awesome team.
Chapter 9
The next few days flew by. I’d run into Jemma and Josie a few times, but they’d been on their way in or out, so we’d only chatted for a few minutes. Tegan and Booker were still in San Diego, and I hadn’t happened to run into Coop. It was quiet on the peninsula, and there didn’t seem to be a lot I could do to solve either my own mystery relating to the woman and children in the photo or the mystery of Cammy’s death, so I focused my energy on getting settled in and into a routine of sorts. The dogs and I ran every morning. I was excited about my opportunity to meet with Archie on Monday but still hoped to run into someone when I took my run up to the back fence line of the estate every day. So far, I hadn’t seen a soul, but the run was gorgeous and just about the right distance, so I continued to take the same path day after day despite my lack of success in gaining any additional information about the house.
After our run, the dogs would nap while I focused on cleaning and painting the cottage. It really was beginning to feel like my own. I’d barely left the peninsula except to run, but today, I needed more paint. At least another gallon. I considered changing my paint-spattered clothes but decided that Hank wouldn’t care how I looked, and it was unlikely I’d run into anyone else I knew, so I ran a brush through my hair and pulled it back into a ponytail before grabbing my purse and heading out the door.
Of course, when I arrived at the hardware store, it wasn’t Hank I found behind the counter but the most gorgeous man I’d ever seen in my life. He was tall, with broad shoulders, long legs, and a flat stomach. He had dark hair, which was cut short and covered with a baseball cap. His eyes were dark and best described as bluish-gray, and he had the longest lashes I’d ever seen. Darn it, I realized as my heart sped up just a bit, that maybe I should have taken the time to change my clothes or at least wash the streak of paint off my cheek.
“Is Hank here?” I asked, trying not to s
tare or act as self-conscious as I felt about my looks.
“He’s on a break. Can I help you with something?”
I held up my empty paint can. “I need another gallon. Actually, two.”
“I can help you with that,” the man said, reaching out for my empty can. He plucked a blue shirt off a peg and put it on over his jersey before opening a can of base paint and adding the color.
“Red Sox fan?” I asked, noticing that the man not only had on a Red Sox jersey but a Red Sox cap as well.
“I am. I went to college in the area and got hooked on the team. Guess once a fan, always a fan.”
“Yeah, I guess. Of course, it isn’t really baseball season.”
The man smiled. “Yes, I guess you’re right about that. I’m on my way to a party. The theme is favorite sports and teams, and I happened to have the cap and jersey, so I decided to keep it simple and wear something I had.”
“Ah,” I smiled. “I guess that makes sense, although if you are on your way to a party, why are you here?”
The man put the can on the shaking machine and turned it on. “I stopped in to chat with Hank on my way to the ferry, he needed to step out for a minute, so I told him I’d cover the counter while he was away.” He paused the machine, opened the can of paint, and held up a sample of the paint he’d just mixed. “Is this is what you’re looking for?”
I nodded, glancing at his shirt, which featured the name Mike embroidered on the front. He mixed the second can of paint, and I said, “Thank you, I really appreciate it. Should I pay you, or do you think Hank would want me to come back later?”
“We’re pretty informal around here, so I’ll just take your name, and you can settle up with Hank the next time you’re in.”
“Okay, great. My name is Ainsley. Ainsley Holloway. Tell Hank I’ll stop by in the next few days to settle up. Or he can just put the paint on Hope Masterson’s account. She’s paying for the paint anyway.”
