by Renee George
“So,” Nadine said, once Freda left to put in our order, “Larry said that there was no sign of foul play at the victim’s apartment.” I liked that we’d had our girl time and now we were moving on to business.
“Is that so?” I asked.
“And,” Reggie added, “I didn’t find any defensive wounds or anything to suggest that there was some kind of fight or altercation. I don’t have any blood work or tox screens back yet. Without the lab reports, I can’t be sure of anything, but it looks like a fairly clear-cut case of suicide.”
“Did you know Abby had a cat?” I asked them.
“I found some hairs on her,” Reggie said. “So, I guess, yes. But I hadn’t really thought about it.”
Nadine frowned. “Larry didn’t say anything about a cat.”
“I don’t know how they could’ve missed Audrey. There’s a litter box in the living room, and her picture is all over the place, including a ginormous painting over her bed.”
Nadine eyed me suspiciously. “How in the world do you know all this?”
I shrugged sheepishly.
“Lily,” Reggie gasped. “You did not break and enter into a crime scene.”
I gave them both a pointed look. “According to Larry, there was no crime. He didn’t even put up any crime scene tape. Besides, it’s not breaking and entering if you have the key.”
Reggie scooted forward in her seat. “Where did you get a key?”
“Pearl Dixon. She and Opal used to take care of Abby’s plants and cat when she was away.”
Nadine stared at me. “Are your Lily-senses tingling?”
A little on the money, but okay. “The kitty litter was clean. There was a load of clothes in the washer and the dryer. And the cat’s food dish was empty.”
Reggie furrowed her brow. “Someone who loved their cat wouldn’t leave them without food.”
“Right?” I said. “If I’m going to take my life, I’m going to make sure my cat doesn’t starve to death before someone finds my body.”
“But she was found four hours after she died,” Reggie said.
“But she couldn’t have known how long it would take someone to discover her.”
Nadine scoffed. “And if I was going to off myself, I wouldn’t waste time doing the damn laundry.”
“Exactly,” I snapped.
“But that’s all circumstantial.” Nadine took a sip of her ice water. “There’s still nothing to suggest foul play.”
“Nadine’s not wrong.”
“But it’s suspicious, right?” I asked.
“Oh, totally,” they both agreed.
I lowered my voice. “She had been having an affair with a married doctor. It ended her marriage.”
Nadine tapped the table. “I know her ex, Dale Rogers. I arrested him on a DUI a year ago.”
“Do you know the doctor she was having the affair with?” Reggie asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t.”
“I’ll ask Margot. She knows all the hospital gossip,” Reggie said. Margot Reynolds was Reggie’s office manager at her practice. “If anyone knew about the affair, she will have heard about it. I’ll ask her tomorrow.”
Nadine nodded. “And I’ll see if Bobby will let me take another look at the apartment.”
“You think he will?”
She shrugged. “He might.” She gestured at Reggie. “Especially if you were to tell him your exam showed something suspicious…”
“I can’t falsify an autopsy.”
“But you could fudge a little in a phone call, right?” I asked.
She shook her head. “It’s lying, not dessert.”
Nadine grinned. “But you’ll do it?”
Reggie chuckled. “I will…fudge. But I’m going to be vague as hell. If he tries to pin me down, I won’t go as far as outright lying.”
I nodded. “That’s fair.”
“Am I going to find your fingerprints all over the apartment?” Nadine asked me.
“Pearl and I wore gloves, and the only thing we took from the apartment was the cat and its necessities, food and litter box.”
“Okay.”
I asked a question that had been bothering me. “How did the police find her so quickly?”
“There was a noise pollution call,” Nadine said. "Apparently, Abby had been playing music loudly. It's assumed that a neighbor called in the tip."
“Did anyone ever complain about Abby playing loud music before?” I asked.
"I'll find out," Nadine said.
Reggie fidgeted with her purse. “When do you go back to work?”
Nadine tugged at the ends of her hair. “Tomorrow is officially my first day back.”
“If this turns into something, do you think Larry Shobe will give you the case?” I hoped he would. Nadine had more experience and smarts than Shobe.
She shrugged. “I guess we’re going to find out.”
“Here you go, ladies,” Freda said. She expertly balanced a tray with all our food on her left forearm and served with her right hand. She set each plate down where it belonged without a hitch or wobble.
I took a big bite of the burger because I was practically starving.
Nadine laughed. “You got a little something on your chin.”
I hooked the saucy juices with my finger and licked it. “I was saving it for later.”
“Uh huh.” She tore the meat off a wing and poked it between her lips. I watched with great interest as she basically inhaled the chicken.
“Those must be pretty tasty,” Reggie observed. She forked some lettuce and grilled chicken.
“Uh huh.” Nadine grunted her affirmative while devouring a second wing.
“What’s going on with you?” Reggie asked Nadine.
With her mouth full, Nadine said, “Herrrfe myerdasd garermsish.”
I heard a snort of laughter from the kitchen. It made me smile. I’d missed Buzz’s ease and humor. It was nice to see him back to form. Same with Nadine.
Nadine swallowed. “It’s amazing what a month of sun and fun will do for your disposition.”
“And appetite, apparently,” I said.
“Speaking of social media,” Nadine said, abruptly changing the subject. “Have you checked out Abigail Rogers’ personal page for any public posts that might hint at her state of mind?”
“That’s a good idea,” Reggie said.
“Yeah, you should be a detective or something.” I took out my phone and pulled up my social media app. Nadine and Reggie had talked me into joining, but I’d only made connections with the two of them.
“I can’t believe you don’t have more than two friends,” Nadine scoffed.
“I have plenty of friends,” I told her.
I searched the “people” tab for Abby Rogers. There were several of them, but only one had a Moonrise, Missouri, location. I clicked on Abby’s profile. I honestly didn’t think I would find anything illuminating, but I hoped Nadine was right, and it would give me some sense of her life.
I found several public postings by her, but they were mostly cat memes and some photos of her own cat. I searched through her pictures for anything interesting. There was one picture of a bouquet of white roses and a heart charm bracelet. The card said, “Thinking of you. XXOO.” And she had commented, “Feeling loved,” in the caption.
“Do you think that’s the married doctor or someone else?” Reggie asked.
I set the phone down on the table so they could both see the pictures.
“No telling,” Nadine replied. “Keep going, Lily.”
“Oh,” Reggie exclaimed when I swiped to the next photo. “There’s a picture of the hospital’s fundraiser from May.” She pointed to a group photo that included Abby along with four men and two other women. I recognized one of the men as the doctor from the nursing home.
“Do you know who she’s with?”
“The balding guy there is a Doctor Emmett Mansfield. The guy with the sandy-blond hair is Doctor Stewart Smith. The you
nger guy with the dark hair is Rod Simpson, a critical care nurse, the other one with graying hair and the expensive suit is the hospital administrator, Bradly Pfieffer. He asked me out once when I first moved here.” She smiled at the memory. “He was a boring date, but it made me feel good to know I was still desirable after the divorce.”
Reggie’s ex had been a real piece of crap. He’d made her feel like all the problems in their marriage were her fault.
She continued. “I don’t recognize the blonde woman. But the brunette in the red dress is Sheryl Smith. Stewart’s wife. She’s a doctor, too. An orthopedic surgeon.” Reggie nodded. “She’s probably the surgeon who took care of Opal’s hip.”
“Smith is married?” I asked.
“Yes," Reggie said. "But he wouldn’t have an affair.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I can’t be a hundred percent sure, but his wife is pretty terrific. I can’t see him throwing away his marriage to her for an affair."
Nadine leaned forward and tapped his face. "But who knows what motivates some men or women to cheat. Maybe she's too awesome.”
Reggie nodded. "Maybe."
“What about Mansfield?” I asked.
“He’s married, but I’ve never met his wife. I’m not sure about him.” Reggie waved at the screen. “Keep going. Maybe we’ll see someone else I know.”
I kept scrolling, but most of Abby’s posts were private, which meant casual viewers like myself couldn’t see them. However, I found one paragraph she’d written on New Year’s Day that said, “I resolve to value myself enough to recognize when I’m being undervalued by others.” There were a bunch of thumbs-up under the post, and one heart face from Michael Lowell.
I clicked on his name and pulled up his page. He was listed as single, and like Abby, he kept most of his posts private, not public. His profile picture was, I assumed, of himself in the back of a boat on some lake, tugging on a bent fishing pole. He was a thin man with short blond hair and a pleasant face.
“Gosh, Lils. You have a bunch of notifications. Don’t you ever open your social media?”
“Yes,” I lied. I looked at the righthand bottom corner of the app and felt an overwhelming urge to close it out and throw my phone across the diner. It appeared I had three hundred and seventy billion notifications, probably since this was the first time I’d opened up the darn thing in a hundred months. I exaggerate, but you get the picture.
My heart skipped a beat when I saw a request to connect with Theresa Avery-Simmons from two months ago. I clicked yes and hoped that this hadn’t been an olive branch that I’d accidentally ignored.
Stupid app.
I had several other connection requests from CeCe Crawford, Reggie’s daughter, and four of the volunteers—Jared, Donna, Mike, and Sherry—along with Ryan Petry, Robyn Patterson, the paramedic who saved me from carbon monoxide poisoning, and Lacy Evans. That notification from Lacy was only a day old. Now, that was interesting. She’d found my personal page after seeing me at the nursing home.
I gave my pals a look of dismay. “Any of these people could call or text me just as easy. Why do they want to be my friend on the internet?”
“Because you’re interesting,” Reggie said.
“I work really hard to be anything but interesting. Interesting is overrated.”
I accepted all of the requests, not because I wanted all these connections, but because I was afraid that they would see I had looked at their requests and ignored them. After I finished the last one, I noticed posts and stuff showing up on my page unbidden from all of them. Someone had a birthday, someone else was complaining about politics, another was posting vacation pictures, someone’s aunt died, another lost their pet of eighteen years, and there was a great temptation to click the thumbs-up on each of them.
Instead, I closed out the app and pushed my phone away.
Nadine grabbed it.
“What are you doing?” I tried to take it from her, but she held it out of reach.
“I’m just adding one more friend.” She typed in Michael Lowell’s name and clicked the request button.
“He doesn’t know me from hayseed. He’s not going to accept.”
Nadine’s eyebrows raised as she handed me back my phone. “He already did. Now we can see if Lowell is a suspect or a potential witness.”
“Is there room at this table for one more?”
“Sure, Pearl.” Reggie scooted toward the window side of the bench seat. “You’re more than welcome.”
“How’d you get into town?” I asked when she sat down. Pearl had changed her hair color to a vibrant indigo, giving a whole new meaning to blue-haired old lady.
She flattened her lips and gave me a meaningful stare, before replying, “A friend drove me.” She emphasized “friend.”
“Oh.” Bob Tolliver. “Is your, uhm, friend coming in?”
“I told my, uhm, friend that I would be getting a ride home with you,” Pearl said with a lot of sarcasm for a seventy-something-year-old. “So, I sent my, uhm, friend away.”
“Is friend code for booty call?” Nadine asked, punctuating the words with a ravaged chicken wing bone.
I widened my eyes at the daggers Pearl shot in my direction. “Big mouth.”
I shook my head. “I haven’t said a word.”
Reggie coughed.
“Oh my gosh!” Nadine clapped. “I’m right?”
“Why don’t we spend a little less time investigating my personal business and spend a little more time figuring out who killed Abby?”
“I’m sorry, Pearl,” Nadine said. “My bad.”
I felt the familiar vibration of a lie. Nadine wasn’t sorry at all.
Freda came over to the table. “What can I get you, Pearl?”
“Me, nothing. But these three will take the check.”
“We will? Are we leaving?”
“Abby’s mother is going to be visiting Opal in about half an hour. She’d like you to be there. Something about how you always know when someone is lying or telling the truth.”
“Just a keen intuition,” I said.
“Whatever.” Pearl stood up. “Point is, we have to go.”
“Can we come?” Nadine asked.
“I don’t think there’s room in Lily’s truck for all of us.”
“We can take my sedan,” Reggie said.
“Fine. You two can come,” Pearl agreed.
The frantic patter of nails along the linoleum tile forced me to jump up and put myself between the elderly Pearl and my seventy-five-pound bundle of energy.
Buzz stood in the archway. “Sorry, Lils. She got away from me.”
“She’s fast like that.”
“I call shotgun,” Pearl said. “Deputy Nosy-Parker and Lily can sit in the back with the fur ball.”
Chapter 7
“Oh my lord,” Nadine croaked. She jammed her finger on the window button to no avail. “Damn it, Reggie. Unlock the windows or roll them down.”
“What are you all going on about?” Pearl asked.
The smell must have crept to the front of the sedan, because Reggie groaned and hit all the window buttons at once. I held on to Smooshie’s collar so she wouldn’t get any ideas about escaping her own gas bomb.
“It’s toxic,” Reggie said. “What have you been feeding her?” She drove with one hand on the wheel, the other waving in front of her face, and the strong breeze coming into the windows had started to undo her updo.
“I can’t smell a thing.” Pearl touched her nose and smiled. “Old showgirl accident.”
Smooshie, the smelly offender, wiggled and squirmed across my lap, her tail lethally smacking Nadine across the shoulder. I was holding on, laughing and gagging at the same time. She licked my nose. “Smoosh!”
“Make it stop,” Nadine said. “Please make it stop.”
Smooshie whined. “Uh oh.” I knew that whine. My girl had to go number two, and she was almost at the point of no return. “We better pull over.”
<
br /> “Is someone going to puke?” Pearl asked. “I have a strong stomach except when I see puke.”
“Someone is going to poop!” I said with more urgency.
Reggie pointed ahead. “We’re a block from the nursing home.”
Nadine hung her head out the window. “Pull over the car!”
“All right,” Reggie said. “Just hold your horse, and by horse, I mean dog.”
The car slowed, Smooshie’s whining increased. She tried to circle between Nadine and me. “Hang on, girl. Almost free.” I undid my seat belt, ready to jump out with her when Reggie parked. “Hurry!”
The car stopped and Reggie threw it in park. “Go, go, go!”
I shoved the door open, and Smooshie jumped over my lap onto the sidewalk. I held on to her leash, grabbed my purse and piled out after her, thankful for the handful of dog waste bags I’d thrown in there before I’d left Parker’s today. Her eight-foot-long rope leash gave her enough room to get to the grass without me. She had already circled once then squatted as I closed the car door behind me.
We were close enough to walk to the nursing home. “Go ahead,” I told the ladies. “I’ll meet you all at the manor.”
None of them argued with me.
After Smooshie had finished her important business, I bagged the evidence. “Well, girl, let’s see if we can find a trash can around here.” Smooshie barked and did a half jump, more from relief, I was certain, than finding an appropriate place to dispose of the bag. I wrapped the rope leash around her chest and pulled the end through the extra ring to make it into a harness.
The Moonrise Manor was H shaped, which I learned the hard way by walking the perimeter of the place in search of a dumpster or a covered bin. The first nook of the H was fenced off. The interior was graveled with an outbuilding, a lean-to with a riding mower and a push mower underneath, but no trash cans. Not that it would have done me any good, since I had no plans to hop the six-foot chain-link. I kept going around, occasionally glancing into a window to see a resident watching television or sleeping.
I rounded the corner of the long backside of the building and the second nook opened up into a courtyard-style area. Smooshie’s ears twitched with excitement as we passed through a white picket gate. The temperature was seventy degrees, which to me was perfect, but both the elderly women enjoying the fresh air were wearing sweaters and long pants. I recognized one of the ladies as Jane Davidson. She was sleeping in her wheelchair, her head down.
