A Grave Search (Bodies of Evidence)
Page 24
“He’s there every day?” She frowned and blinked long false eyelashes. “I never noticed.”
I poured Molly her usual peppermint tea, but the steam rising came from between my ears, not from the small vent at the top of the plastic lid. Pushing Mitch aside, I thrust the cup into Molly’s hand and took her two dollars. I gave her a quarter in change, and she deposited it into the tip jar. Great, I could plan my trip to Hawaii now.
“Thanks, Mitch.” Molly fluttered her eyelashes.
Once Molly was out the door with her tea, I picked up a rag and began energetically wiping down the counter and pastry case.
Merlot’s Café was just one of thousands of independent coffee shops in Seattle. I’d been whipping up java there for nearly two years. It was located on the main floor of an old, five-story brown brick office building on James Street halfway between Yesler and Second in Pioneer Square. The place was owned by a seldom-seen owner named Mervin Lo. Here at Merlot’s we served fair trade, shade grown, organic coffee usually with a smile. The inside was long and narrow with lots of exposed brick, a wide glass pastry case, half a dozen tables and counters with bar stools at the front windows. The walls were lined with framed black-and-white photos from long-ago Seattle when vegetable stands stood where Pike Place sprawls today.
“Amazing that she could walk by every day and not even see him,” I snarled under my breath. “Obviously her dresses are too tight and have cut off circulation to the gray matter beneath her dyed roots.”
“Nothing amazing about it, Jen. Hundreds of people walk down the streets of Seattle every day and I bet most of those don’t give the homeless a second thought.” He stood next to me and nudged my shoulder good-naturedly. “C’mon, even you must’ve had times when you crossed the street to avoid a panhandler or pretended not to hear the guy asking you for spare change.”
“Whatever. Just drop it.”
My gaze cut sideways to the guy across the street. It was starting to rain. My throat constricted. You’d think if you chose to be homeless, you’d at least have the sense to thumb a ride south until you hit the California sun instead of hanging out in Seattle. The burning itch in my palm ramped up a notch and I rubbed my hand against my blue-jean-clad thigh.
Mitch caught me staring across the street and said, “I told you when he started coming round a few weeks ago that if you feed him he’d keep coming back.” He paused. “They’re kind of like cats, and for him...” he nodded across the street “...coffee is like tuna.”
“Shut up!” I slammed my palm on the counter, somewhat for emphasis but also to help relieve the itch. The half dozen customers in Merlot’s looked up from their newspapers and laptops to regard me curiously.
We served the last of the customers in a long line and I picked up a pen in my left hand to offer my itchy palm some solace. I doodled on the thick pad left near the register.
“How come you write with your right hand, but you always doodle with your left?” Mitch asked.
“Guess I’m just talented.” I winked.
I wiped the already clean counter and Mitch went off to make small talk with a petite brunette. After a minute, I began to feel restless.
“It’s slow.” I two-pointed my rag into a nearby sink. “I’m going on my break.”
Mitch wisely kept any snarky comments to himself when I poured a large black coffee in a to-go cup, snagged a bran muffin from the basket containing the day-olds and headed out the door.
As I crossed the street, I observed Mr. Stinky was still getting organized. He finished a smoke and ground it under his toe as I walked over. Placing a twelve-inch square piece of cardboard on the damp sidewalk, he sat down, crisscrossing his legs clad in dirty blue jeans. He had on a denim jacket and leaned his back against the gray concrete slab of the parking garage behind him. In a death grip in his left hand he held the orange Jansport backpack containing all his worldly possessions.
His eyes looked dead ahead at Merlot’s, and he didn’t acknowledge me in any way as I dodged traffic and risked becoming the victim to an angry Prius driver. Once I was right in front of him, I crouched down to eye level. The stench of him brought tears to my eyes. At least I told myself it was the smell.
A curl of steam rose from the vented lid of the hot coffee that I placed on the concrete sidewalk. He took the muffin from my outstretched hand and unzipped his backpack using a small yellow compass dangling from the center pocket zipper pull. He placed the muffin gingerly inside next to the oatmeal bar I gave him yesterday and the cinnamon roll from who knows when. Then he reached deeper to the bottom of the pack and pulled out two things—his usual worn paper coffee cup with “change please” scrawled in black Sharpie and a lost dog flyer. He placed the cup in front of him and handed me the sheet.
I sighed, barely glancing at it.
“Right. Lost black lab. Got it. You’ve given me the same paper every day for a month. You know that you don’t have a dog, right?”
I ran an impatient hand through my hair, tugged out the ponytail then scrunched up my hair and pulled the elastic around it tighter than before.
“Look, you gotta find somewhere else to hang out.” I dug in my pocket for a folded index card. “I’ve made a list of all the shelters and soup kitchens in the area. The one up on Third even has a daytime program. You could, you know, be inside all day. No more sitting in the rain. Wouldn’t that be nice? Plus, they’d feed you so, um, yeah...wouldn’t that be good?”
I held out the card but he continued to look straight ahead. Not at me but through me. For a minute we stayed like that. Him staring. Me holding out the list. I’m sure he could’ve easily done this all day but I had a life. The rain ramped up from mist to drizzle and pasted my hair to my head and made my mascara run but did nothing to wash away his eau de toilette. Finally, with a small exasperated sigh, I tucked the card into his donation cup along with a twenty I couldn’t afford.
I was about to get to my feet then changed my mind and leaned in to snap my fingers in front of his face to try to get his attention. His gray eyes flicked to my face then away.
“I don’t get it.” I threw up my hands in exasperation. “Why the hell do you come here every day if you don’t even want to talk to me?”
He reached out a grubby hand and tapped the lost dog flyer I still held in my left hand.
“The dog? There is no dog!” I crumpled the sheet and tossed it at him angrily. It bounced off his stained jacket and landed in his lap.
“You can’t keep coming here.” My voice hitched. I placed a hand on his shoulder. “Sorry, Dad, but you just can’t.”
Don’t miss GROUNDS TO KILL by Wendy Roberts.
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Copyright © 2013 by Wendy Roberts
Acknowledgments
This book is made possible by the tireless work of my editor, Deborah Nemeth, and the wonderful crew at Carina. I owe them much wine and chocolate!
Thanks, as always, to my agent, Melissa Jeglinski, for her support.
About the Author
Wendy Roberts is an armchair sleuth, fan of all things mysterious but a huge chicken at heart. Her mind is often in a secretive cloak-and-dagger world of intrigue while her physical presence is usually at home feeding feral cats and a demanding guinea pig. Wendy resides in Vancouver, Canada, where she happily writes about murder and is always at work on her next novel.
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ISBN-13: 9781488030635
A Grave Search
Copyright © 2018 by Wendy Roberts
All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario M3B 3K9, Canada.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
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Table of Contents
Back Cover Text
Dedication
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Excerpt from Grounds to Kill by Wendy Roberts
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Wendy Roberts
Carina Press Romance Promise
More Mystery Titles
Writing for Carina
Carina eNewsletter
Copyright