Brad’s eyes seemed to age a little as he thought. “Yeah, it’s hard. It is that, but it’s great, too. Yeah, I see people when they’re at their worst or, you know, their most messed up, but there’s other times when I get to see people at their strongest. And, well, I like getting to help people. I like taking somebody’s worst moment and doing something—anything—to help them. Makes me feel better. I can’t stop the world from being crazy, but I can make living in it a little better for some.” He shrugged and stole another chip. “I figure it’s better than nothin’.”
Brad was a good man. A genuinely good man who wanted to do good things, not just think about doing good things. I felt like I was looking at a unicorn.
And that unicorn was standing in a very messy kitchen…
I gulped down the last of my sandwich, then got up and got back to work. I stacked dirty bowls, pans, plates and glasses in the sink, washed some by hand and put others in the industrial sized washing machine. Brad rolled up his sleeves and helped. The silence between us was comfortable and companionable. Being with him was like sitting in a favorite chair with a favorite afghan, a cup of cocoa and an amazing book on a cold winter evening. It felt right.
“So how are things going with you and Dan?” Brad asked. The question jolted me out of my happy place.
“In what way?” I asked.
“In the way that a man still in love with his ex-wife wants to get back together with her.”
Wow… Brad was not shy about getting right to the core of his question. It left my head reeling.
“Brad, Dan’s not in love with me.”
Brad gave a disbelieving snort-laugh. Then he looked at me. His smile fell. “Oh! You really believe that.”
“It’s the truth,” I said.
“Honey, a lot of things are the truth, but thinking Dan isn’t still in love with you is delusional.”
“What makes you think he’s still in love with me?”
“He’s in town, all the way down from Chicago.”
“He’s got family here.”
“Word is that his business isn’t going well. He came to visit family while his business is struggling?”
I hesitated. Brad had a point. I wasn’t sure there was anything in life more important to Dan than his company. “He’s been calling trying to get my help on some business matters but I haven’t been willing to talk to him. He came down to hire me in person for a consultation.” I didn’t know if that was the only reason he’d come to town, but it made sense.
“And he needed to hire you because there weren’t any other specialists in the whole of Chicago who could help him?”
I puzzled over what Brad had said as I handed him a pan I’d just washed. He rinsed it and put it in the drain. Brad was right. There were consultants in Chicago who could help Dan turn things around. He hadn’t scrimped on what he was willing to pay me for our short consultation, so I didn’t think that coming to me was purely a matter of pinching pennies. In addition to that, coming down to Camden Falls to get my advice actually took him away from the daily operations of his company. That couldn’t be a good thing, not while it was struggling.
Could it be that Dan cared more about me than he did his company?
The whole world shifted on its axis, suddenly becoming something slightly different than it had been a moment before. If you’d asked me while I was married if Dan cared more about me than the company, I would have answered with a definite yes. But after we split up, he’d unequivocally proven to me that I meant next to nothing to him.
The things I knew about him, the company, and me simply weren’t adding up. I no longer knew what to believe. But that was okay. In the end, it really didn’t matter how Dan felt about me because I was done with him. Whether he wanted me back or didn’t want me back, nothing changed for me. We were done.
“I’m not sure why Dan is in town, I just know that it doesn’t really matter. Not really. Dan and me, there’s only a past. There’s no future. None. Someday he’ll just become that guy I was married to once upon a time.” It caused an ache in my heart to say that, but I had to trust that it was true.
Brad had asked me an uncomfortable question. Not to be mean, but he had. It was time for me to do the same. “How do you feel about me and Joel?” I handed him over another pan to rinse.
“What about you and Joel?”
He wasn’t going to make this easy for me.
“Well, he, uh, likes me.”
“Do you like him?”
Big pregnant pause. I knew the answer. I just felt weird admitting it to Brad. I really, really liked Brad, and I didn’t want to do or say anything to jeopardize what was developing between us. But that didn’t change the feelings I was developing for Joel.
Brad hip bumped me. “Do you?” he asked again.
I started my answer with a simple nod but eventually worked up the courage to say it as well. “I do like him. I, uh, like you, too. I like you both.”
My heart beat unevenly in my chest as I wondered if Brad would walk out and be done with me. Instead, he kissed the top of my head.
“I like you, too, Berry.”
I waited for him to say something more, something about Joel, but it never came. Eventually I relaxed, and then I teased. I gave Brad a hip pump and then smiled at him as I handed him a large mixing bowl.
Inside I reached a new level of security with Brad. He wasn’t the magic genie who was going to disappear in a puff of smoke. He was here, in my life, and it looked like he was prepared to stay a while.
My mind drifted to other things—to being almost run over by a car, to narrowing my list of suspects, a list that still included Samantha’s name. I wondered if Brad would still be in my life if I discovered that Samantha was indeed Hank’s killer.
“Brad, you said that the poison used to kill Hank was identified as an anticoagulant.”
“Mmhm.”
“Where does a person find an anticoagulant to kill someone with?”
“Mmm. I’m sure there’s more ways to get it than this, but the two sources that come to my mind are medicine and rat poison.”
Wow… One source designed to heal and the other one designed to kill. If rat poison provided a dose of anticoagulant that was meant to kill, that would make it the easier source. I imagined a person would have to dose Hank with a lot of medicine to get the same effect.
“I think we must be on the right track for catching Hank’s killer,” Brad said. “I got a call last night from an unlisted number. They said to stop investigating.”
That was new! “Was it a man or a woman?”
“Couldn’t tell. They were using a voice distorter. They kept the call short.”
“Did they threaten?”
“They just said to stop ‘or else.’”
That was pretty vague. Stop or else I’ll buy you a hot fudge sundae? Stop or else I’ll mow your lawn for you?
“Were you able to trace it or anything like that?”
“Naw, but I did tell Detective Gregson. I reassured him that I wasn’t doing any investigating and that I thought it was a prank call and not worth following up on.”
“And Gregson believed that?”
Brad shrugged. “Eh. He grunted and walked away. I left it at that.”
“Detective Gregson, um, visited me here yesterday.”
“Yeah, how’d that go?”
“Terrifying. Infuriating, and then… weird,” I admitted.
“Weird, how?”
“He got super mad at me, grabbed me by the arm and started marching me out of the kitchen. I thought he was going to take me into the station again.” I felt Brad stiffen. He apparently didn’t like the description of Gregson manhandling me. My arm was still sore where he’d grabbed me. “He was raving mad, saying stuff… he called me Maggie.”
Brad stopped rinsing the pot he had in his hands and fully turned to face me.
“Maggie?”
I stopped washing and turned to face him as well. “Yeah.
He didn’t even know he’d done it. Then when I asked him about it, he just let my arm go and left.”
Brad’s jaw clenched and unclenched. “I don’t know the whole story. Just rumors. Maggie was his wife.”
Was… I remembered the faded band of skin on his finger where a wedding ring had recently been removed. “What happened?”
“Word is that she was murdered a couple of years ago.” A jolt shot through me at hearing what had become of her. “He got called in on a dumpster murder of a Jane Doe prostitute. She’d been there a few days, and it took him several minutes to realize it was his wife.”
I felt sick. I couldn’t imagine.
Brad continued. “Things got messy after that. Rumor is that Gregson went vigilante, but no one could prove it. That was up in Louisville. They reassigned him down here after that.”
“Put him out of the way, some place quiet,” I surmised.
“Yep.”
“Did he remarry?” I asked. There had to be an explanation for that missing wedding ring.
“Not that I know of. He still wears his wedding ring from when he was married to Maggie.”
I shook my head. “Not anymore. He’s taken it off.” I felt awkward asking this, but I did anyway. “Why was she prostituting herself?”
“That’s the thing. She wasn’t. Well, I guess she could have been. Who knows where she drew the line? She was an investigative reporter, and she’d gone undercover to expose a sex trafficking ring.”
I turned back to the sink and sank into my own thoughts. “And they killed her…” Why had he called me Maggie? Maybe I looked like her or reminded him of her. Gregson knew I’d been investigating some of Camden Falls’ recent murders. Maybe he was afraid I’d end up like Maggie. And maybe that made him mad. He sure did hate me.
He’d taken every opportunity to show me just how much.
Brad was talking again, and it took me doing a bit of mental gymnastics to catch up. “Pete’s our guy,” he said. Pete had been Hank’s business partner. “Follow the money, Berry. It’ll never steer you wrong.”
But I thought about how jealous and possessive I’d felt when Hannah had insinuated that she’d like for Brad to become her baby daddy. Then I thought about Samantha and Hank. Hank had told Hannah yes, that he’d father her child, but maybe that was one yes that Samantha couldn’t accept.
Love and hate were interesting bedfellows, but they were bedfellows that knew each other well. Unfortunately, that kept Samantha’s name at the top of my suspect list, written in great big block letters.
22
Dinner went well. I made steak with the option of a blue cheese crumble along with herb roasted new potatoes and sautéed zucchini. The new potatoes turned out too crunchy and the zucchini turned out too oily and mushy, but I nailed the steak. I listed the dinner on the Oops Board but priced it with only a slight discount.
For dessert, I found an ice cream maker stuck in the back behind a mixer and a food processor. So, going out on a limb, I made peach and bourbon ice cream with candied pecans given some heat with a pinch of cayenne pepper. I burned the pecans and thought that the ice cream was going to turn out like a sweet, creamy alcoholic soup, but it turned out amazing. I served it at full price with some sea salt sprinkled on top.
By the time eight-thirty rolled around, the dinner crowd thinned to a couple of customers and they had already been served. I made a few extra steaks and cut them into strips and gave Sam instructions on how to throw together a steak salad, if needed. There was still a little bit of ice cream left, and there was some chocolate chip cookie dough in the walk-in cooler that could be baked in a jiffy. I knew that he and the café would be fine without me. After all, he’d worked there a lot longer than I had!
I then headed out to Zoey’s. I knocked on her door, and instead of being greeted by the blurry-eyed sleep monster who had faced Brad and me earlier that day, Zoey answered looking as fresh and rejuvenated as a morning person greeting the sun. As for me, I was already counting down the minutes to when I’d be able to go to bed.
“Did you tell Brad the plan?” Zoey asked. She was wearing a shapeless orange tunic dress. On me, it would have looked like a dyed potato sack. On her, it was stunning. Her lids were lined with a dark smoky gray that accentuated the size of her eyes and made her look as though she had a secret to tell… that she wasn’t telling. And on her feet were black strappy sandals with a heel that made her several inches taller than me.
I was wearing jeans, a green scoop-necked T and sneakers, but I might as well have been naked. Standing next to Zoey, no one was going to notice me.
“I haven’t told him a thing. Did you set it up with Samantha?” I asked.
“Yeah, she’s expecting us.”
Zoey grabbed her purse, and we headed out. It was a twenty-minute drive to the short rows of townhouses that dotted the edge of town, right in front of the railroad tracks. Samantha was in the second townhouse of the first row that was closest to the road. Her stoop was clean and tidy with a welcome mat, and her door was adorned with a spring twig wreath filled with tiny white and yellow flowers.
I knocked, and the door opened a moment later to reveal a slender, fit woman who I guessed to be in her early twenties. She had straight black hair that was longer in front than it was in back, and the strands that framed her face were dyed a silvery gray that made her pale blue eyes hauntingly beautiful. She was wearing a light blue short-sleeved men’s button-up shirt and black leggings.
“Samantha?” I asked. I was sure it was but didn’t want to assume.
She smiled and everything about her went from hinting at gothic to rainbows and daffodils. The effortless transformation was striking. “Yes, but call me Sam. Come on in.”
We followed her through to her living room. Zoey and I sat on a couch sporting a fitted green tweed cover, and Samantha sat in a wicker rocking chair with one bare foot propped up on the chair with her.
“Brad told me you’d be coming around to see me at some point,” Sam said. “But he said he’d be with you.”
She stared down to where her fingers played with the hem of her shirt. Her shoulders were slumped and there was a distinct lack of joy about her.
“Zoey and I thought it best if we came on our own. We figured sometimes it’s easier to talk to people you don’t know all that well than to people you’ve known all your life.”
She glanced up with her large pale eyes and smiled. It seemed to be a smile given out of politeness rather than happiness.
A thought struck me like a slap to the face. Sam was grieving, actually grieving, and seeing her made me realize what I hadn’t seen in anyone else. She had loved Hank.
“We’re sorry for your loss,” I said, feeling foolish that I hadn’t said it sooner. I fought the urge to get up and leave. To be here now—to question her guilt or innocence in the wake of Hank’s death—felt ridiculously wrong.
Sam bravely gave us another smile, but this time her lip trembled. “Thank you,” she whispered in a voice that did its best not to break.
I glanced at Zoey and rubbed my palms on the thighs of my jeans. Being so close to someone in genuine pain transformed Hank from a deathly puzzle to be solved into a person with a rich life that now had a hole in it where he had once been.
“Were you and Hank planning on getting married?” Zoey asked.
Sam laughed. “We talked about getting married as often as we talked about breaking up.” She sobered and studied the hem of her shirt again. I wondered if it had been Hank’s shirt. It looked like it could have been, but I didn’t want to ask.
“Why didn’t you break up?” I asked with a gentle, soft voice.
Sam’s brows raised as she shook her head. “I don’t know. We… we weren’t ready to commit, but…” She leaned her head back, stared at the ceiling and blinked several times. She seemed to be fighting a flood of emotions trapped behind a dam of her own creation. She cleared her throat when she looked at us again. “We didn’t know how to give each o
ther up.”
“Did you want to give each other up?” I asked with as much gentleness as I could.
“Yeah, I did. I did want to give him up.” A tear escaped down her cheek. She laughed without mirth. “He wanted his life to be his way, and I wanted my life to be my way. Neither of us wanted to compromise. Not being able to give him up made me feel trapped. It made me wonder who else I was missing out on, people who fit my ideas about life better than he did.”
Zoey spoke up. She was direct but not harsh. “What did he want that was different than what you wanted?”
Sam smiled with her lips but her eyes looked heartbroken. Her voice was breathy when she answered. “He wanted a wife.” She cleared her throat again. “He wanted a homemaker, someone to raise his children, someone to make his life… cozy.”
“And what was he going to be doing while you did all that?” I asked.
“He was going to be pursuing his dreams, his businesses, his independent ideals of who he wanted to be.”
Ouch.
“While you lived a life creating the other half of his vision, the part of his vision that he didn’t want to give any time or energy to creating…” I felt sick for her.
Another tear slipped down her cheek as she nodded. Her eyes dropped to where she played with the hem of the shirt again, and her lips pulled downward into a trembling frown.
Sam could have killed him. She could have done it in order to escape the trap her heart was holding her in.
“Did Hank know that you didn’t want to spend your life doing what he wanted from a partner?”
Sam nodded.
“Do you know if he was looking for someone else who wanted to make that life for him?”
Sam shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. I guess he could have.”
“But did he ever say he was or do anything that made you think he was?”
“No.” She looked down again. “I went out on a few dates with someone else. Hank knew about it.”
A Berry Home Catastrophe Page 14
