“I’m sorry, I have to go.” Zoey reappeared in the foyer, car keys in hand. “Gotta help Max with something at the gym.”
“Oh, sure. I’ll get out of your way then. Would you mind if I maybe—?”
She snagged her purse off the entry table. “Just take the books, Miss Sutton. I gotta leave.”
Zoey waited long enough for me to grab a single box, tossing in a few extra wedding books on top and nearly shoving me out the door.
“Thank you for speaking with me.” I fumbled with the heavy load as I stood in the yard and watched her open her car door.
Zoey shut herself inside, then rolled down her window. “Good luck,” she said. “I may have disliked my stepsister on a regular basis, but she was my family. I do hope you or the police find her true killer.”
“Me too, Zoey.” I put the box of books in my backseat, a little pleased with the information I could now share with Sylvie and Frannie. And knowing my next step would be talking to the mysterious Professor Carson Fielding.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Your grandma’s here.”
I looked up from my desk at Enchanted Events the next day to find a frazzled Alice, holding the doorframe with one hand and a fortifying energy drink with the other.
“Tell her I’ll be right out.”
“Feel free to hurry.” Alice took a pull from her can as if wishing it were something stronger. “She just talked one bride into a prenup and another into what she called a ‘level five background check’ because her fiancé reminded Mrs. Sutton of a man she knew in Greece who sold olive oil and explosives.”
“On my way.”
After calling the college and being told Carson Fielding was working from home today, Sylvie and I decided we’d pay him a visit. My grandmother had insisted upon meeting me at Enchanted Events, which clearly was not in the best interests of our altar-bound brides.
I walked into the main area and gently pulled Sylvie away from a thirtysomething woman making her venue selection.
“We’ll talk later, dear,” Sylvie said to the woman as she waved goodbye.
“Don’t harass the clients.”
“I’m not. I just noticed she had a few silver fillings and wondered if she knew those could be used as communication devices.”
“Okay, let’s go.” I opened the door and walked outside to my car, grateful she was following.
“Your car’s a mess.” Sylvie opened the passenger door and found it filled with binders, bags, and fabric samples. “Let me drive. I’ll get us there faster.”
“Just throw it all in the back.”
“Can’t,” she said. “There’s a big box back here. What is all this?” Her face sobered as she watched me over the hood of the car. “Hey, you’re not packing up to make a quick getaway, are you?”
“No, I stopped by Zoey’s last night. Turns out Sasha was a wedding book collector, so Zoey gave me some of her stash.”
“Very generous, given your perilous connection. Anything revealing in there?”
“I don’t think so.”
But Sylvie didn’t take my word for it. She dug through the box as if it held the answer to all my problems. “An etiquette guide—she should’ve read that one a little closer. A how-to on vow writing, one on reception trends, and . . . what is this?” She held up a smaller red book I hadn’t had time to peruse. “Wait a minute.”
I dodged a fly and shut my door impatiently. “Let’s get going, Sylvie.”
“Hold on.” She walked to my side with her treasure. “Shug, do you see this?” She flipped open the cover—revealing a mini iPad.
“Well, that’s an interesting development.” The iPad’s protective cover looked just like a novel, and I hadn’t even noticed it.
“Want me to take a look at it for you?”
“Should we? I mean, it’s private.”
“Yes,” said Sylvie, “we definitely should.”
“Or we could take it back to Zoey. Or to the police.”
“You and your conscience. Give Frannie and me a crack at it first.”
“No. I need to think about this.” It seemed wrong. Yet so did going to prison. Maybe I needed to explore every possibility of information.
“If you’re not going to let me snoop on the iPad, then you definitely have to let me drive.”
That sounded even riskier.
* * *
“Sylvie, can we change the radio station? Maybe some music?”
“My car, my tunes,” my grandmother said.
“It’s nothing but clicks and static.”
“It’s coded.” She pushed a button on some gizmo she had clipped to her dash, ending the racket. “But excuse me for checking on a hot situation in Istanbul. By all means, let me turn on some George Strait for you and ignore all matters of global security.”
“I appreciate your sacrifice.” I was having doubts about her so-called retirement.
Before setting out for Fielding’s, we’d stopped by the rent house to pick up my mail, including a royalty check from my old label so small it didn’t deserve a stamp. While Sylvie was wandering the house in search of bugs, I’d hidden Sasha’s iPad beneath my bed. I had no desire for Sylvie to find it if she discreetly let herself into the house later. Which she would.
My grandmother pulled a hard left onto Pope Street, and my head knocked into the passenger window.
“Easy there, Earnhardt.” In most people’s cars, the overhead handles were for looks. In Sylvie’s car, they were sheer necessity. Riding in my grandmother’s sports car was like strapping yourself to a rocket. All you could do was hold on—and pray that when you crashed you’d get to keep a limb or two.
Sylvie speared me with a quick glower. “If I’m to be in charge of the getaway car on this mission, then let me do it.”
“This isn’t a getaway car. We’re not robbing a bank. This should be a nice, calm interaction with Fielding, so I don’t want to see screeching tires or bullets.”
“That’s cute how you think fun always equates with legal.” Her air quotes were an insult to civility.
“Talking to the professor could be a complete fool’s errand,” I said. “So he lied about knowing Sasha. So she took some art classes that she never qualified for. How is this relevant to the murder?”
“Everything’s relevant. Didn’t Raven tell you to look into this guy?” Sylvie took her hand off the gearshift and placed it on my leg. “When it comes to protecting my granddaughter from the slammer, I’m gonna leave no stone unturned. Something about this doesn’t smell right, and I’ve smelled a lot of rotten fish in my day. Especially that one time Frannie and I got dumped into a sewage ditch in the Ukraine. I burped green bubbles for a month.”
We exited a neighborhood of cheery craftsman homes, newly built to look as if they’d been there since girls wore poodle skirts and boys rolled cigs in their sleeves. The road then emptied out into a less desirable part of town.
“Are you sure you gave me the right address?” Sylvia asked
I glanced at the address Frannie had texted me. “According to Frannie, this is it.”
“Our girl’s rarely wrong.” Sylvie made another turn, nearly taking the car up on two wheels.
Johnston Street sported so many identical duplexes, it looked as if someone had created one, then done a copy-and-paste all the way down the street. The neighborhood had seen better days and was frequently highlighted in police reports.
Sylvie slowed the car to a respectable speed, but as we neared 310 Johnston, she just kept cruising.
“What are you doing?” I pointed toward her side of the road. “That was the house.”
“You never go right to the perp’s hideout. You have to do a little surveillance.” She slowed the car even more. “Check out the perimeter, scan the area for any danger—like snipers and Chihuahuas.”
“Sylvie, a professor and librarian live here. Probably the most hostile thing they might do is throw a textbook at us. Now circle back to the house. I don�
�t have all day.”
My grandmother made quick work of her extended tour and finally guided the car into the bumpy driveway. Just as Anna Grace Fielding walked a green bicycle out of her small garage.
“This is going to be awkward.” I unbuckled my seatbelt. “Asking her husband about Sasha right in front of her.”
“You want me to distract her?” Sylvie asked. “Maybe knock her out with one of my jujitsu moves? She won’t remember a thing.”
I opened the car door, grateful for terra firma. “No, that won’t be necessary. And if you have any explosives on your person, please leave them in the car.”
I heard her grumbling as she threw a few items back in the car. “Apparently kissing Beau Hudson makes you extra crabby.”
“Paisley Sutton at my house? Pinch me, I’m dreaming!” Anna Grace Fielding popped her kickstand and rushed to us. “Oh my goodness! I cannot believe the Paisley Sutton of the Electric Femmes is standing in my driveway. Fifteen-year-old me is just dying right now.”
“Hi, Anna Grace.” My cheeks had to be as pink as Sylvie’s roses. “I called the university, and they said your husband was working from home today. I wondered if I might have a quick word with him?”
Realizing I wasn’t there to see her, Anna Grace’s bright face fell. “No, I’m sorry. Carson’s in Bentonville at Crystal Bridges Museum giving a special lecture on an exhibit. He’s supposed to be home in a couple of hours, but he tends to lose all track of time in art museums.”
Crystal Bridges was a state-of-the-art museum, strangely located in a small town like a crowning jewel, a gift to the community from the family who had brought us WalMart.
“I see you’re on your way out.” Sylvie nodded toward the bicycle. “That’s quite a bike you have there. A vintage Ladies Royale. I used one of those in Zimbabwe, back in 2010. They’re surprisingly agile in quicksand.”
Anna Grace laughed. “Carson and I are a one-car family at the moment, but we’re hoping to buy a new vehicle soon. We usually carpool to school, so it hasn’t been too big of a deal, but I do miss my car. You know, if you’re not in a hurry, you ladies should come in and have some tea.”
“No, that’s okay,” I said. “We need to be going and—”
“We’d love to!” Sylvie linked her arm in mine and gave it a tug. “Charming place you have here, dear.”
Anna Grace wheeled her bicycle back into the garage as we followed her. “It’s not much to look at, but the rent’s cheap. We sold our house a year ago. We’re trying to save money for another, and we like to travel. But all of that’s been curtailed in the last few years. My husband hasn’t had a raise at the university in nearly four years. We relied pretty heavily on his art sales, but with the economy as it is, people aren’t exactly lining up to pay big bucks for his work like they used to. But it’s fine.” She opened the door and motioned us in. “It’s just a temporary speed bump. When I graduate in a year, we’ll be a two-income household and can have all those things that we want.”
I’d forgotten to mention to Sylvie that Anna Grace was a fan of some chitchat.
We stepped into the Fieldings’ kitchen, an outdated eat-in with sagging cabinets and countertops the color of depressed pine trees.
“So you said you wanted to talk to my husband?” Anna Grace reached into the refrigerator and procured a water bottle, offering it to me.
I declined with a shake of my head. “Yeah, a bride wants a themed backdrop for a wedding, and it’s just completely out of my range of ability. I was hoping to get some art direction, maybe even see if your husband would be interested in doing some freelance work for Enchanted Events.”
Sylvie gave a barely perceptible nod of approval to my story. “We also had a few questions about Sasha Chandler,” she said.
My eyes went wide, and I smashed her toe with my foot. What was she doing?
“Sasha Chandler?” Anna Grace cracked open her own water. “What more can Carson tell you about her?”
“When I last spoke to Professor Fielding, he acted like he hardly remembered Sasha,” I said. “But she attended three of his classes, including some upper-level courses she would’ve needed his permission to get into.”
Anna Grace took throat-pulsing gulps of water, then daintily wiped her mouth. “Let’s go sit in the living room, shall we?”
I sat on the couch next to Sylvie, who was pulled taut as a violin string, ready to jump on any suspicious information.
Anna Grace rested her sweating bottle on a coaster bearing Jane Austen’s face. “I think you’ll find, Paisley, that people around here don’t relish talking about Sasha Chandler, especially now that there’s a murderer at large. But I can tell you my husband did, in fact, know Sasha.” Shadows fell across eyes devoid of any makeup. “It was quite a dark time in our lives.”
Sylvia scooted closer, the thrill of the hunt evident on her face. “What happened?”
Mrs. Fielding pressed her lips together, her eyes drifting to the floor as if gathering difficult memories. “My husband and Sasha met at one of those faculty-student government events at the beginning of the school year some time ago. I believe Sasha was probably a sophomore. Carson, as you may have noticed, can be incredibly charming. And not that he acts on it, but he has quite the way with the ladies. Really with anyone. He’s just an effusively friendly guy. Sasha walked away from an innocent conversation with Carson and assumed he was interested in her. He hadn’t been at Arkansas A&M long, so he wasn’t going to be dumb enough to date a student. But Sasha seemed smitten, so she took some of his classes.”
“But she couldn’t have gotten in those classes if he hadn’t approved her,” I said.
Anna Grace released a ragged breath and contemplated her wedding ring, twirling it around her finger. “This is where it gets a little tricky,” she said. “And I don’t expect you to understand or agree with this. Money has always been tight for us. We’ve been on our own since we were nineteen. Neither one of us has much family to speak of, and all we’ve known is struggle. Carson’s student loan debts were astronomical. Five years of undergrad, two years of the Masters program and then his PhD? We were drowning in debt. So when Sasha Chandler came along and asked my husband to let her into his class, he said no way. He knew that art had nothing to do with her major, and he didn’t have enough space as it was for all the students he wanted to reach. But then she offered to buy a handful of his paintings—for a large sum of money.” Anna Grace laughed. “Can you believe that? This rich, spoiled college girl offered my broke husband the chance to sell his work in exchange for a seat in his class. And he took her up on it.”
“Why would she do that?” Sylvie asked
“I have no idea,” Anna Grace said. “I guess just to be close to my husband? He’s known for being a dynamic professor, so even if she couldn’t keep up with the art projects, she would’ve enjoyed learning from him. Right now at the museum, there are probably two hundred people listening to his lecture. So, maybe it was unethical to make the exchange, knowing she had a crush on him. But he also knew he was never going to act on it.”
Sylvia and I both looked at each other with matching frowns. “Didn’t someone at the university question that?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Nobody said a word.”
“Anna Grace, are you sure nothing ever developed between your husband and Sasha?” Sylvie asked.
“I assure you, crazy as it sounds, that my husband did not ever so much as touch Sasha Chandler. Here was a girl throwing money at him, so confident in her own female wiles, that she thought she could wear him down. But she couldn’t. The only thing unethical about Carson is that he would sell paintings and take money from a rich girl who thought she might have a chance. It was pocket change to her, but it ended up being close to a thousand dollars for us. We were able to pay off a long overdue medical bill that had been hanging over our heads. He assured me, no matter how many tricks Sasha tried, he was never alone in a room with her, and I believed him. I’d even routine
ly drop by campus just to check.”
“You mentioned Sasha pulling stunts,” Sylvie said. “Like skydiving into his classroom from a fighter jet? What are we talking about here?”
“She’d send him flowers.”
My grandmother’s cheeks blew out in a plume of disapproval. “Amateur stuff.”
Anna Grace turned to me and continued. “She’d have expensive art supplies delivered to him in perfume-scented boxes. Bring him lunch. Tape little notes to his door. She was relentless in her pursuit of him for a good year and a half, and we used that to our advantage. It was a rare, weird opportunity, and, I’m ashamed to say, we ran with it.”
“The transcript says that Sasha dropped out of her third art class with your husband a few weeks before semester’s end. What happened?” I asked.
Anna Grace peeled the label off her water bottle and curled it in her fingers. “One afternoon Carson came back to his office, only to find Sasha dressed in a trench coat and little else, reclined on his desk. She had paid some janitor to let her in. I was with him. He told her in no uncertain terms to get out and that there would never be a future for them. She ran off and never returned to his class.” Her volume dropped, as if someone might overhear. “If the college found out that my husband sold seats to his class, he’d be fired. It’s a blatant ethical violation, and he’d lose his job.” Her hand gripped mine with a strength reserved for lady wrestlers. “I’m asking you, as the idol of my teen years, as the good woman I know you are, and as someone who understands a desperate situation, to please not tell anyone. Nobody can know about this. Even though it was a long time ago, Carson could still get fired. What he did was stupid. We’ve regretted it and have just been waiting for it to come back around and bite us, but it never did. Please understand we were flat broke, and it just seemed to be an answered prayer at the time. One we couldn’t turn down.”
“Where was your husband the morning of the murder?” I asked.
Engaged in Trouble (Enchanted Events Book 1) Page 19
