“I . . . yes. Thank you, Brent.”
A pair of uniformed officers were coming toward us. Brent didn’t say anything else until he reached for the door of his office. “You’ll be okay, Em,” he said softly.
I couldn’t answer except to nod.
The office had barely changed. Two battered oak desks were covered by stacks of papers and file folders. There were computers on the desks and two more on a table.
One thing was different, though. A picture of Alec, smiling in sunlight, hung on the wall.
Tears warmed the backs of my eyelids.
Brent shut the door. No one else was in the office. “I could tell that the photo of you behind the deceased and that bush was created by merging one photo with another.”
Turning my face so he couldn’t see the emotions that the photo of Alec had caused, I nodded. “Did Detective Clobar know?”
“I suspect he had an inkling.”
“Then why . . . ?”
“Probably to gauge your reaction.”
“Strange.”
“Detectives can do things that seem strange to others.”
I let out a shaky laugh. “You sure can.”
“Plus, we, especially Rex, weren’t sure how Landsdowner knew about the stack of donuts. If it was real, the picture of you with those donuts could have been a convenient answer to that question.”
“Too convenient,” I said dryly.
“Yes. Luckily, we don’t stop searching after the first convenient answer occurs to us, and I don’t think Rex was about to stop there, either.” Brent pulled a couple of newspapers toward the side of the desk we were on. “Show me the other two doctored images?”
He stared for a long time at the one that Landsdowner had taken in Deputy Donut. “Hmmm. I don’t remember exactly where your espresso machine is. I’ll have to come over and take a look.”
“Anytime.” I had more or less tamped down the grief that had surged through me when we entered Alec’s old office. Touched because the Fallingbrook Police Department detectives displayed Alec’s photo in their office, though, I still had to fight tears.
Together, Brent and I looked at the picture in the paper of me with the stack of donuts near our table at the Fourth of July picnic. We agreed that it was the original of the one that Landsdowner had pasted behind the backs of Nicholas and Taylor when they were watching the fireworks. I described where our table had been.
I didn’t have to tell Brent about the image of the police station replacing the original background of that photo. He noticed it himself. Then he also discovered the photo that showed the identical image of the police station where it belonged. “Mr. Landsdowner is going to have to answer a few questions,” he said. “Did you see him at the fireworks before you noticed the flaming fuse sticking out of a stack of donuts?”
“No, but like most of the crowd, I was looking up. And Nicholas and Taylor must have been watching the sky when someone slunk behind them and planted that stack of donuts. The fireworks were so noisy that they probably didn’t hear the person, either.”
“Also, whenever we’re in a crowd, we’re not as aware of people around us doing unusual things as we would be if we were alone or almost alone.”
“And people at fireworks can’t help making those appreciative ohs and ahs.”
He laughed. “It can be noisy.” He thanked me for my help. “I’ll walk back to Deputy Donut with you now, if it’s okay, to see the location of your espresso machine in relation to where you were standing in that one photo.” Instead of leading me back past where we’d met with Rex, Brent took me out of the police station the way I remembered, past the open area where Misty, Hooligan, and other cops were sitting at desks. They seemed to be discussing something serious, so I merely waved. In return, I received a smile from Hooligan and a questioning look from Misty.
The late-afternoon heat outside was welcome after I’d nearly developed hypothermia inside the building.
Brent asked me to show him where the Deputy Donut table had been on Thursday, where I’d been, and where Landsdowner had snapped the photo of me with the stack of donuts. I led him up the east side of the village square and stopped about where I’d stood.
Brent asked, “Do you mind if I take your picture?”
“As long as you don’t put it in the paper. I’ve gotten enough notoriety this year, and it’s only July.”
Grinning, he took out his phone and snapped a couple of shots from where Landsdowner had been. The police station was behind Brent, not behind me.
Crossing the square, I wanted to thank Brent for making me go into Alec’s old office, but I also didn’t want to talk about it. I barely said a thing all the way to Deputy Donut. Brent was quiet, too, probably mentally reviewing evidence concerning Taylor’s murder. We went in through Deputy Donut’s back entrance, straight into the office.
Dep was sleeping on the newspapers. She blinked, stood, and stretched, clawing little holes in the top newspaper. I picked her up, stroked the soft fur above her upper lip, and told her, “It’s a good thing that Brent has copies of those newspapers in his office and wasn’t counting on having a really good look at the ones you’ve decided are a kitty bed.”
She wriggled. I set her on the floor. She immediately rubbed against the ankles of Brent’s navy blue slacks. He scooped her up and held her close to his jacket as if he wanted to distribute cat hair more evenly over his clothes.
The kitty claws hadn’t punctured all the way through to the paper’s centerfold pictorial essay. I pointed at the first picture. “Here’s where the espresso machine should be.”
Brent set Dep down. “Can you show me where you and Landsdowner were when he took this picture?”
Without too much difficulty, we left my affectionate cat inside the office.
I led Brent to the serving counter. He stayed where Landsdowner had been, and I moved to the other side of the counter. “Here’s where I was. Tom was here, and Jocelyn was behind us. From there, it would have looked like she was between us.”
“And from this angle, the espresso machine would have been behind her?”
“Yes.”
He snapped photos. “What do you know about this Philip Landsdowner?”
“Only his name. And that he began taking pictures that had me in them early on the morning of the Fourth, especially when I seemed to be in conflict with others. It was like he was planning to commit a crime and frame me for it. But how could that be? He didn’t know me. The first time I saw him was right here, that morning. It doesn’t make sense.”
“He could have known of you.”
“Did Alec ever confront or arrest him?”
“We have no record of any Landsdowners.”
“Maybe Landsdowner planned to harm someone with a homemade skyrocket during the fireworks when lots would be going on and very few people would notice an extra explosion. Maybe he didn’t know who he was going to harm or who he might frame for the crime, and the first thing that day, he started snapping pictures of people who could have been angry. It just happened that he caught me frowning at least a couple of times, so when he saw me at the fireworks, he planted the five-year-old’s skyrocket birthday cake near where I was sitting.”
I detected a glimmer of amusement in Brent’s eyes. “You have quite an imagination.”
“You can’t tell me that you detectives don’t brainstorm all sorts of ideas.”
“I can’t?”
I heaved a dramatic sigh. “Unfortunately, I can’t say that Landsdowner was the one who lit that skyrocket cake. I wish I’d been watching Taylor and Nicholas instead of the fireworks. I’d have seen the culprit, whoever he was. Or she was.”
Brent put away his phone and took out his notebook. “Tell me again who you saw in the vicinity that evening who might have had a grudge against Ms. Wishbard.”
“There was Duchess Gabrielle, who was obviously jealous of Taylor. And I saw Felicia, a hairstylist. Using a megaphone at the parade-marshaling grounds
, Taylor claimed Felicia was jealous of Taylor’s hair and wanted to make it as ugly as Felicia’s. Which is as silly a motive as me supposedly being murderously angry at Taylor for refusing to ride in my car and calling it a clown car, and probably smelly, besides.”
Brent asked what Felicia’s hair was like.
I had to laugh. “It’s a lot like mine, actually.”
He glanced at my head. “Definitely not ugly.”
Flustered, I thanked him. “Well, she’s older than Taylor was, and unlike mine, her dark hair is dyed, all one shade of black. She keeps it in place with so much hairspray that it doesn’t quite look like real hair.”
“Maybe it isn’t.”
I spluttered with a sudden and uncontrollable laugh. “Taylor preferred softer waves.”
“Did Taylor criticize any of the other people you saw at the fireworks?”
“No, but I wonder about Ian, who was elected king. As I told you before, Gabrielle said Taylor dumped Ian. But I might not have mentioned that when Taylor was late for the parade and the rest of us were waiting for her, Ian acted nervous and jittery, like he couldn’t stand still.”
Brent wrote in his notebook. “Who else did you see that night who might have had connections to Taylor?”
“You know Freeze, the ice cream shop just east of the square that I like so much?”
“Everyone likes it.”
“When I went there Thursday morning to see if Taylor was at work, the clerk, Kelsey, hinted that Taylor was often late. But Mama Freeze, the ice cream shop’s owner, gushed about how hard Taylor worked and how gorgeous she was. I wonder if Kelsey was jealous because Mama Freeze seemed to prefer Taylor. But I’d never seen Taylor working there, so I don’t know who was right about Taylor’s work ethic. I saw Mama Freeze at the fireworks, too, but I don’t know of any grudges she might have had against Taylor. One thing for sure—Kelsey didn’t need to be jealous of Taylor’s looks.”
“Women don’t always understand that about themselves.”
He was right, but he was also staring at me too intently. Not eager to discuss women and how they viewed themselves, I changed the subject completely. “Would you like a donut? They were fresh this afternoon.”
He pointed at one in the display case. “What are the ones with the gooey-looking orange icing?”
“Filled with lemon and topped with gooey orange icing.”
“Sounds good.”
“They all are.” I plated one for each of us, drew him an espresso, and made myself a mug of chai. To be sociable, and also to quiet Dep, who had been yowling the entire time since we left her in the office, we took our treats into her playground, set them on the coffee table, and sat beside each other on the couch with Dep between us.
She stretched, sniffed in the direction of my donut, and stalked away. She jumped onto the desk and prodded my phone. Afraid she was about to knock it onto the tile floor, I picked it up. Someone had left a message. I apologized to Brent, checked, put the phone down, and explained, “That was one of those spam recorded messages saying that I supposedly won a contest that I didn’t enter. I was hoping it was my parents.”
“Are they back?”
“No. They’re usually in Fallingbrook long before the Fourth of July. I don’t know where they are.”
Dep raced me to the couch and curled up in the center cushion. The office was, after all, her space. I returned to the end of the couch where I’d been sitting before Dep reminded me to move my phone farther from the edge of the desk.
Concern in his eyes, Brent asked me, “Do your parents still drive back and forth to Florida?”
“Yes, in a humongous RV. They’re good drivers, but they’re in their early seventies.” I had come into their lives, they’d always told me, as a delightful surprise when my mother was forty-one and my father was forty-three.
“Do they share the driving?”
“They share everything, including a very basic old flip phone that they never turn on, conserving the battery for emergencies, they say. I’ve offered to get them new phones and show them how to use them, but they always tell me that the one they have is perfectly fine.”
“When did they last get in touch with you?”
“A couple of months ago.”
Wrinkles appeared between his eyebrows. “That’s a long time.”
I shook my head in mock exasperation. My parents had some peculiar quirks. Being too independent was only one of them. “Not for them. They’d call if they needed my help.” If they could. “They don’t usually contact me until they get back to Fallingbrook in the spring. Or, the past few years, in the summer. They figure I should know that they won’t call me when they’re on their way or about to start out. They always gave me lots of freedom when I was growing up and were fond of telling me they hoped I would never have to act like a parent to them, especially—hint, hint—an overbearing parent. ‘Feel free to let us make our own mistakes, just like we let you make yours,’ they told me frequently.”
He grinned. He didn’t know them well, but he’d met them several times, enough to recognize some of their hippie-flower-child traits and philosophies. “Do they still park their RV at the campground near the falls?”
“They rent their space year-round.”
“Don’t they e-mail you?”
“They’ve managed to avoid using computers at all, ever. And they don’t send letters or postcards when they’re on the road, or right before they leave, either.” I couldn’t help sighing.
“Want me to run out to the campground and look for them?”
That was sweet of him. He really was helpful and supportive. “I’m not that worried. Besides, I can drive there myself.”
“If you need company . . .”
“I’ll be fine. They’ll be fine. They’ve been lengthening their winter stays as they become more and more acclimatized to hot weather. Lately, they’ve been finding July and August up here a little chilly.”
“Would you like me to file a missing persons report?”
I raised my hand above my dozing cat as if I might stop Brent by grabbing his wrist, but instead of letting my hand land on him, I settled it into Dep’s warm fur. “It’s not necessary, really. I’m sure they’re having a grand old time touring routes they’ve never explored before. They don’t like superhighways. Too fast and no scenery, they say. But if I had to drive a rig like that . . .” I shook my head. “No, I wouldn’t drive it on superhighways. I’d abandon it and hitchhike home. Or if I was in Florida and didn’t like the so-called chill of July and August in Wisconsin, I’d stay in Florida. I might inform someone of my decision, though.”
He smiled at my joking, but I could still see concern in his wary expression. “I hope so. Let me know if you want me to do anything, need company going out to check on them, or anything. Meanwhile, thanks for the donut. I’ll go back to the office and show Rex the pictures I took of you on the square and here, with your espresso machine.”
He picked Dep up and rubbed noses with her. “Look after Emily, okay?”
“Meow,” Dep said.
He put her down, slung one arm around my shoulders, gave me a quick squeeze, and let me go before I could reciprocate. “Call if you need me, Em. Anytime.”
“Thanks. For everything.” Like forcing me to think about how Alec’s death affects you, too, and also showing me that I can face his old office . . . I didn’t say it, but I thought Brent understood. I let him out, watched for a second as he headed down the driveway toward Wisconsin Street, and then I snapped Dep’s halter and leash on.
When Dep and I got to Wisconsin Street, Brent was almost at the square, but instead of heading toward the police station, he was standing still and looking our way. I waved. He waved back and stood there as if planning to watch us until we were no longer in sight.
Chapter 16
Dep and I started south. A couple of blocks later, we were about to leave Wisconsin Street and go into our neighborhood. I looked back.
Brent w
as where I’d last seen him, still facing us. I waved again, and Dep and I turned the corner. We were out of Brent’s sight and he was out of ours.
Did he think we weren’t entirely safe? I considered walking faster, but Dep apparently decided it was too nice an evening to do anything more energetic than amble along checking for beetles in the grass next to the sidewalk.
Despite the beautiful weather, I wanted to cocoon inside my house—or in my walled-in backyard—and not go anywhere else. I was hungry and emotionally wrung out.
After Dep and I both had fish for dinner, Misty called. “Was Brent giving you a tour?”
“Have you met Detective call-me-Rex Clobar?”
“Briefly. He seems okay.”
“He wanted to talk to me, at police headquarters. And I agree with you. He does seem okay, but a little scary. Thank you for telling him you were sure I wouldn’t intentionally harm anyone. That seemed to help my case.”
“Was Brent at your interview?”
Did she think that her frequent mentioning of Brent was so subtle that I wouldn’t guess she hadn’t given up trying to throw Brent and me together?
“Yes.” She probably heard my smile and believed it was about Brent and not about her matchmaking pipe dreams.
“That’s good. He would also say that you would never intentionally harm anyone.”
“He did. With me right there.”
“I’m not surprised.” Now she was the one with a smile in her voice, as if she were about to say that Brent’s defense of me made him perfect for me. She didn’t, quite, but she did say, “After Hooligan and I saw Brent with you, Brent was gone for a while. Did he walk you home?”
“Only to Deputy Donut to check on something related to the case.”
“Well, don’t you sound like a wannabe police officer!”
“Show-off. And no, because I don’t wannabe.”
“Show-off donut monger.”
Both laughing, we told each other good night.
I looked down at Dep, who was gazing, wide-eyed, up at me. “Sorry, Dep. Misty isn’t coming over.”
“Meow.”
Jealousy Filled Donuts Page 10
