“You did a great job speaking yesterday,” I said.
She exhaled audibly, blowing out through her mouth as if she could expel the anxiety coursing through her body. “Maybe.”
“No, really. It was a beautiful memorial.”
Fernanda nodded her agreement. “She is right. It was from the heart.”
I hadn’t realized that she’d come the day before. It was nice that she’d been a support for Rachel and Tate. “I thought I saw you with Gretchen,” I said, glancing around. There was still no sign of her.
Rachel looked at me, her darkly rimmed eyes wide. “You know Gretchen?”
I patted my hair and smiled. “Saw her Friday for the first time.”
“Looks nice,” she said, though it didn’t sound like her heart was in the compliment.
“Thanks.” I acted as nonchalant as I could. “How did you find her? She’s a treasure.”
“I got a . . . mmm, what do you call them . . . a cold call?”
“You mean the salon called?”
“Yeah. No, Gretchen did because she was a new stylist trying to get clients.”
That was interesting. Cold calling was an annoying marketing practice, but I’d never had a call from a hairdresser. “Sounds like it worked. You go to her, and your mom did, too, right?”
Rachel’s lips twisted and her eyes instantly turned glassy. “I don’t want to talk about it. Okay?”
“Sure, sure. I’m sorry, Rachel. Is there anything I can do for you?” I looked at Tate. “For you both?”
Rachel shook her head, tucking a wayward strand of her hair behind her ear. “I have my family. We’re fine.” She added, “Thanks,” almost as an afterthought.
“I know you do. Candy Coffey is there for you, too. Just don’t be afraid to reach out if you need anything, okay?”
She gave a slight nod. I looked at Tate, noting how completely opposite he looked from his sister. His half sister. “You, too, Tate.”
“Okay,” he said. He looked past me, his eyes lighting up as they landed on someone. “Ruby!” he hollered, waving his arms overhead. He looked up at Rachel. “I’m going to go with Ruby and her dad.”
Rachel turned paler. I wanted to grab her elbow and lead her to a chair where she could put her head between her legs. She looked seconds away from passing out, wobbling on her feet. “Okay,” she managed. Her fluttery gaze followed Tate as he ran across the blacktop, dodging people.
“Are you okay?” I asked her.
Her nostrils flared and she exhaled through her nose. Her voice dropped to a pained whisper, her attention still focused somewhere behind me. “I don’t know,” she said.
I turned to see what she was looking at. My own breath caught in my throat. Tate’s friend Ruby was none other than Guillermo’s daughter. Which made Ruby, not just a friend, but Tate’s half sister.
And from the expression on Rachel’s face, she knew the truth.
* * *
“Rachel.” Gretchen appeared beside me, her belly arriving first, followed by the rest of her. She snapped her fingers in front of Rachel’s face. “Hey. Come on.”
Rachel blinked, coming back to herself, and focused on Gretchen. “Sorry. I’m fine.”
“I don’t think you are, sweetie. Come on. Let’s sit down.”
I followed as Gretchen led Rachel to a bench along one of the school’s exterior walls. Gretchen had a crossbody bag on and reached inside, retrieving an unopened bottle of water from it. She sat down next to Rachel, unscrewed the top, and handed it to her. “What’s going on?” she asked.
Rachel closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the wall, her breathing ragged. “I can’t . . . I don’t know what to do. She shouldn’t be gone.”
She could only be talking about her mother. It didn’t matter how many enemies Nessa had made during her political career; she was still Rachel’s mother and the girl needed her. Gretchen, for her part, was true to her word. She was doing everything she could to help Rachel.
Gretchen slid her arm around Rachel’s shoulder. “It’s going to be okay,” she said. “I promise you, it will.”
Rachel squeezed her eyes tighter, fighting the tears that were sneaking out. “Okay,” she managed.
For the first time, Gretchen looked at me, her eyes widening with recognition. “Ivy. Sorry. I—”
I held up my hand, stopping her. “No, it’s fine, really. I just want to help, if I can.”
Rachel slumped against Gretchen, laying her head on the older woman’s shoulder.
I felt as if I was intruding on a personal moment between them. I mouthed to Gretchen that I was going. As I circled the blacktop, checking out the different Spring Fling games going on, anxiety bloomed inside me. Something nagged at me. The fact that Tate had run off with his father, who he presumably didn’t actually know was his father? That had to be it.
Except . . .
I looked back over my shoulder at Gretchen and Rachel, the older blonde comforting the younger one. There was something about the two of them together. And then something Rachel said came back to me. She’d told me she had her family to take care of her . . . and here was Gretchen.
As if I’d turned on a radio show in my head, little snippets and phrases came back to me:
Ali, the hairdresser next to Gretchen’s station, had said that Nessa Renchrik was terrible to Gretchen. She’d started to say something. That Gretchen, of all people—
I’d assumed she’d been referring to Gretchen as Nessa’s hairdresser. But what if it was something else?
There are no secrets in a hair salon.
Something Candy said popped into my head next. I tried to remember exactly what she’d said: My daughter and I both will be there for Rachel. For Nessa’s children. Poor girls. Poor Tate.
Who had she meant when she’d said “poor girls”? Her daughter and Rachel? Or could it have been Rachel and—
I yanked my phone from my back pocket, pulled up a search engine, and typed in Soho Salon. The website popped up and I scrolled through it looking for the names of the stylists.
My breath hitched. There it was. Gretchen Arnold.
Oh. My. God.
I dialed Candy. She picked up on the third ring. “Hey, Ivy.”
My blood pumped and pounded in my temples. I felt like I was so close to something. No time for small talk. “Hey. Listen. Quick question.”
“Okay.”
“This might be out of left field,” I warned.
“Okay,” she said again, drawing out the latter part of the word.
I inhaled, bracing myself for both the question and the answer. “Is Gretchen, the hairdresser Nessa went to . . . is she . . . ?”
The line went silent for a long moment. Finally, she said, “What?”
I looked over at Gretchen and Rachel again. Rachel was sitting up and they faced each other. Gretchen held Rachel’s hands and looked like she was giving the girl a pep talk. Suddenly I saw the resemblance. The blond hair, of course. Their height. Their build. Beneath her pregnancy, Gretchen was slight. Just like Rachel. They had the same slightly upturned nose. If Rachel chopped off her hair, she’d look like a pixie, just as Gretchen did.
There was suddenly no doubt in my mind. They were sisters. “Did Nessa have a child—a girl—when she was younger? Before she married Cliff?”
“Yes,” Candy said.
“Gretchen Arnold.”
Candy sighed heavily. “She never admitted it to me, but the minute I saw them together, I knew.”
A long-lost daughter, even if she was pregnant, had a pretty good motive to kill the mother who’d given her up.
Chapter 22
My head swam with the new information about Gretchen being Nessa’s daughter. A daughter she’d given up. Gretchen had said she’d grown up in Kalamazoo. I’d been so wrapped up in Gretchen’s story about doing Nessa’s hair that it hadn’t registered where Kalamazoo actually was. I Googled it, nodding when I got the result. Of course. Michigan, which was where
Candy said Nessa had moved from.
I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to see Emmaline—Sheriff Davis, aka Mrs. Billy Culpepper—standing there, her black skin sun kissed, the long, beaded braids of her hair pulled back into a hair clip, my brother standing next to her with a goofy grin on his face. I screeched and started to laugh. “Em! God, I’ve miss you!”
“What about me?” Billy asked.
“You and your husband,” I said with a grin.
“I like the sound of that,” Em said. “My husband. His wife.”
Billy grinned. “Me, too.”
I flung my arms around Em, reaching out to yank my brother into the embrace. “You guys. It’s so good to see you.”
Em extricated herself from my arms and stepped back. “I contacted a friend at ICE,” she said, jumping right into the case just like I knew she would.
“And?” I held my breath. This point felt crucial.
Em nodded. “You were right. Nessa Renchrik had a friend there, too. She called in a favor. She wanted them both gone.”
My heart dropped to the pit of my stomach. “Damn.”
“Yeah.”
The woman truly was evil.
I’d gone along thinking the political donor or the husband or the lover was the guilty party. Or even the long-lost daughter. But now my thoughts rearranged. I looked across the blacktop and caught another glimpse of Rachel. She knew about Ruby. She’d loved Carmen. What if those two things had converged and caused an unstoppable tsunami inside the seventeen-year-old girl?
I pulled my phone from my pocket, pulled up the Twitter app, and searched, finding the profile I was looking for. I scrolled through the tweets, my thumb pressing down to stop the feed when I found what I was looking for: You’re a liar. You’ve ruined my life.
No one was tagged, but I had no doubt who it was written to.
My eyes turned glassy as I turned to Em. “I think I might know what happened to Nessa.”
* * *
It didn’t take long for me to find Rachel again in the Spring Fling crowd. I stood in front of her and took her hands in mine. “Rachel,” I said, my voice soft and coaxing. “I know about Gretchen.”
She stared at me, looking more like a walking skeleton than the seventeen-year-old girl she was. Her voice was scarcely more than a whisper. “How?”
“I just . . . put it together.
“Did your mom know you knew?”
The color drained from Rachel’s face. “Gretchen didn’t do this.”
I hadn’t been sure till that moment, but now I was. I spoke softly, taking her hand in mine. “I know. You spent the night at Ronnie Coffey’s house the night before your mom died, is that right?”
She nodded, swiping at the tears tumbling down her face with the back of her hand. “My mom picked up dinner for me and Tate. Ronnie ate with us; then we went to her house.”
“And Tate stayed home alone?”
“With Fernanda,” she said.
“How did you find out about Ruby?”
She swallowed. Sniffed. “I drove Tate to her house . . . once.... Then I . . . I found her phone.”
She didn’t have to say any more. I knew. She’d taken one look at Ruby and seen the truth. A truth she’d verified with Nessa’s missing second phone.
Someone called Rachel’s name. We both turned to see Cliff hurrying over to us. I turned, standing next to Rachel. I wanted to give her as much support as I could, and I didn’t know how Cliff would take the truth.
“What’s wrong?” he demanded. “What’s going on?”
Rachel looked up at him and started sobbing. “I’m sorry, Daddy.”
Cliff suddenly looked scared . . . and as weary as his daughter. He swallowed. Stared at her. “Sorry about what, baby?”
It was as if his words sounded a silent alarm around the blacktop. Emmaline and Billy came up behind me. Gretchen appeared and stood off to the side behind Cliff. Tate was next to her. Olaya and Mrs. Branford, who had her arm draped through Miguel’s, came up to the group and stood on the other side of Cliff.
“You can tell us what happened,” I said to Rachel.
The poor girl looked at Gretchen and Tate, then at her father again. “I-I can’t.”
Cliff put his hands on his daughter’s shoulders, his gaze boring into hers. “What’s going on? Tell us what?”
Rachel covered her face with her hands. At some point, she’d run out of tears, but it didn’t look like that would happen anytime soon.
I saw Captain York in the distance at the same time he spotted me. I could see his face register the people I was with and his face twisted with anger. Seconds later, he stormed up to me, glaring at me, then at Gretchen and Rachel and Tate and Cliff. “What the hell is going on here?” he demanded, but his words breaking off abruptly when he saw Emmaline. “Oh. Sheriff. Didn’t see you there.”
“Captain,” Em said. Even dressed in civilian clothes and fresh off a Costa Rican vacation, she exuded authority. Commanded respect. She held up her hand, one finger pointed, ordering him to be silent.
Rachel, poor girl, seemed completely oblivious about anything happening around her. She looked up at her father, speaking only to him. “I’m sorry, Daddy,” she said again.
Cliff was trying to stay calm, but his face had turned red and his hands trembled, revealing the emotions he was trying to bury for the sake of his daughter. “For what, baby? What are you sorry for?”
Rachel didn’t answer his question directly. She was lost in her own head. She could only say what was in her heart. What she had to get out of her. “She took everything from me. From Tate.”
Cliff’s voice turned hoarse. “What do you mean? What did she take?”
I expected indignation from Rachel. Or some other visceral reaction. Instead, she was like a zombie. The tears still streamed, but the hysteria had receded. In its place was a vacant stare. “Carmen knew.”
For a split second, Cliff’s gaze shot to Tate. “What did Carmen know?” he asked Rachel, focusing back on her.
Rachel grabbed the front of the navy T-shirt she wore, pulled it up to her face, and wiped her nose. “She knew about Sylvia. About Ruby.” She took a step closer to Tate, as if she could protect him from what she was about to say. Her voice dropped to an imploring whisper and myriad emotions passed over her face in a matter of seconds. She didn’t want to say it out loud. She didn’t want to give wings to her mother’s indiscretions because of how it would change Tate’s life. At the same time, she seemed to understand that it didn’t matter. She couldn’t keep it inside. “She knew about Tate. About what Mom did.”
I expanded on what Rachel was saying in my head. Carmen and Sylvia were friends. Sylvia knew the truth about who Tate’s father was. Of course she did. Guillermo had fallen in love with Sylvia. She was the reason the dalliance between Guillermo and Nessa had ended.
She’d told Carmen.
Cliff opened his mouth to respond but froze for a beat, then closed it again. His face took on a hangdog expression as he looked at Tate, then Rachel. It was clear he knew the truth.
“She had them taken,” Rachel said. “She took Carmen from us.”
“Do you know why, Rachel?” I asked. “Why did she have them taken now, so many years after—’
I broke off, not needing to say after Tate was born.
Her head wobbled as she nodded. “I-it’s my f-fault. She h-heard me talking to Carmen after I saw R-Ruby.”
Em’s discovery that Nessa had a contact at Immigration and Customs Enforcement supported what Rachel was saying. If Nessa had overheard Rachel telling Carmen what she suspected, Nessa would have tried to stop anyone from knowing the truth. The best way to do that was to get rid of Carmen and Sylvia.
Cliff pulled Rachel into a hug, but she pushed herself away. She looked at Gretchen, then turned her red-rimmed eyes back to her father. “She took our sister.”
Instantly, the color drained from Cliff’s face. “What?”
Gretchen moved next
to Rachel, grabbed one of her hands, and held tight. “It’s okay, Rachel. It’s going to be okay.”
But Rachel shook her head so hard I thought her brain might start rattling inside her skull. She was at the breaking point.
I swallowed and steeled my nerves. Rachel was a child, after all. “How did you find out Gretchen was your sister?” I asked softly.
Cliff drew in a sharp breath. Tate’s eyes had turned glassy. He looked from Rachel to Gretchen, his lips quivering. The little guy was only around ten years old. His world was falling apart.
Gretchen answered instead of Rachel. “I told her. My dad brought me here to see Vanessa—sorry, I can’t call her my mother—when I was little. I knew who she was, and I knew she didn’t want me. But when I found out she had other kids? My siblings? I wanted to meet them. To be in their lives. For them to be in mine.”
Hence the cold call from Gretchen to Rachel. She’d orchestrated their first meeting. “Did you want to see Nessa again?” I asked her.
Gretchen shrugged, but her hand went to her belly. I thought I knew what she was thinking. She was having a child and wanted to know that her child wouldn’t be anything like Nessa. “I wanted to ask her why.”
For a second, I questioned what I thought I knew. What I thought happened to Nessa Renchrik. “Did you?”
She shook her head. “It was like this huge white elephant in the room. I think she knew who I was, but I couldn’t bring myself to actually tell her and she never said anything.”
“But she kept coming to you—”
She shrugged. “Like a moth to a flame, I think.”
Gretchen had been abandoned by her mother. That certainly gave her a motive to have killed Nessa, but deep down I knew that wasn’t what had happened. I turned to Rachel again. “Did you meet your mother at the district office that day?”
Slowly, Rachel nodded.
“No!” Cliff’s whole body shook. “You were at Ronnie’s—”
“I left early.” She looked only at Cliff, explaining only to him. Imploring him to understand. “I called Mom and told her I knew the truth. She told me to come see her in the boardroom. I confronted her. I yelled at her. ‘How could you abandon your own daughter? How could you keep Tate from his father? How could you send Carmen away? And Sylvia . . . ?’ ”
Death Gone A-Rye Page 20
