Pawsitively Swindled
Page 9
Amber shot a look at Kim who very enthusiastically nodded. Blowing out a sigh, Amber sagged. “Okay, I’ll go with you.”
“Yeah?” Bianca asked, sitting up straighter.
“Yeah,” Amber said.
“Also!” Kim said. “We want to buy you waffles.”
Bianca sniffed. “I am kind of hungry.” But then she looked down at herself, suddenly realizing she was dressed in silk pajamas. “Oh my God! I can’t go out in public like this! I’ve been wearing these things for nearly two days.” She tentatively lifted an arm and gave the underside a sniff. Her head reeled back. “Oh my God.”
After a brief discussion, they agreed to go back to Bianca’s so she could clean herself up, and then they’d backtrack to Calluna’s Corner.
Bianca lived only a few minutes away in an apartment nestled in a sprawling two-story dark gray complex. The accents were all a striking black, and the apartment front doors were bright spots of color—red, orange, bright blue. Tall trees ringed the property, and the porches on the lower floor had poles and porch roofs overtaken by ivy.
Amber and Kim followed the pajama-clad Bianca up a short flight of stairs and toward an orange door with a “17” made of black metal hung below the peephole.
“This is me,” Bianca said, unnecessarily, given that she’d just slipped her key into the lock. Amber would have expected someone like Bianca to live in a mini mansion on a few acres of land, complete with maid and butler. Not in a two-bedroom apartment.
Amber and Kim followed her inside, and when Bianca flipped on the entryway light, Amber took in the sparsely decorated living room. There was a two-seater couch in the middle of the living room, and across from it, an open laptop sat on a large box. There were moving boxes stacked all over the place. Amber wasn’t sure if Bianca was in the process of moving out, or if she’d only just moved in.
“Sorry about all this,” Bianca said, holding fast to one of her elbows as she surveyed her box-laden living room. “I’ve only been here a couple weeks. My husband Peter and I split up.”
With that, she quickly walked out of the room and down a short hallway. Moments later, a door snicked shut, followed by the sound of a shower turning on.
“She’s making it very hard to for me to hate her!” Kim grumbled.
Amber nodded in agreement.
For the next few minutes, Kim and Amber waited awkwardly in Bianca’s living room, not saying much of anything. Amber assumed Kim was feeling as profoundly uncomfortable as she was.
The awkward silence continued after Bianca had changed, after they’d gotten back into the car, and had driven the short distance to Calluna’s Corner.
Kim finally broke once Amber parked. Amber was impressed Kim had kept quiet for as long as she had. “Does your husband know what happened to your father?” she blurted.
Bianca heaved a weary sigh from the back seat. “I suppose everyone knows at this point. But I haven’t heard from him, if that’s what you mean. You and Amber are the only people who have really tried to see how I’m doing.”
Kim sagged in her seat and then quickly turned to face Bianca in the back. “That’s awful. I’m really sorry all this is happening to you.”
Amber caught a faint ghost of a smile flit across Bianca’s striking features. Then it was gone again. “Are you still buying me waffles, or …”
“Yes, definitely!” Kim said.
The décor of Calluna’s Corner was like a homey diner from the 1980s—the color palate was all pastel: soft yellow bench seats, sea green tabletops, and foam-pink bar stools lining the bar. The walls were covered in flower-heavy wallpaper.
There were ten or so diners inside and nearly every head turned to watch the trio of women as they stood at the front of the diner while they waited to be seated. Could the patrons somehow sense that they had Edgehill interlopers in their midst, or were they all too aware of who Bianca’s father was and what he’d been accused of doing?
The waitress did a slight double-take when she approached Amber and her group, but plastered on a friendly face and led them to a booth that had windows on the right side and the dining counter lined with pink bar stools on the left.
Once they had all ordered, and the waitress had wandered off to tend to someone else, Amber turned toward Bianca, who sat beside her and said, “Do you have any idea what we can expect at the arraignment?”
Bianca shrugged. Her phone lay on the green tabletop and she tapped her finger on the face of it twice. The screen lit up, showing a background picture of her and her father, both of them with their heads thrown back as they laughed. Sighing, she said, “Even though it’s something the public can attend, I think we’ll have to watch it in a separate room on a TV. We have to make the trek to the jail pretty early.”
Good thing Amber hardly slept anymore, so she’d have little problem getting up.
“Do you have someone who can maybe stay with you tonight?” Kim asked.
Bianca crossed her arms on the table and looked up. “What, you worried I’ll go after Daniels again if I’m left to my own devices?”
“Yes,” Amber said bluntly.
Bianca huffed a humorless laugh. “You’ll be happy to hear that the shower sobered me up a little and the shame is starting to crash in hard, so my plans to be a vigilante are waning rather significantly by the second.” She chewed on her bottom lip for a second. “Thanks again for, you know, saving me from doing something really stupid.”
Kim fidgeted in her booth seat. Amber knew Kim well enough to know she was warring with the urge to ask Bianca every personal question swirling in her head and the knowledge that she should keep her mouth shut and not prod the woman. Awkward situations made Kim either deathly silent or unable to stop talking. Amber hoped that Kim could hold out until the waffles arrived, because at least then her mouth would be occupied. “Why did you and your husband split up?”
Amber mentally thunked herself on the forehead. Kim shot her a pained look as if to say, “I tried not to ask. I really did.”
“You don’t have—” Amber started, but Bianca cut her off.
“No, it’s okay,” Bianca said. “When we got married, we both were in agreement that we didn’t want children. But the longer we were together, the more his opinions on that changed. For me, I … the abilities you and my father have are genetic. It’s known to skip a generation, like it did with me. It’s possible that even with two parents without abilities, our child would have them. I thought Peter was on the same page as me when it came to having kids, so I never had the ‘my parents are kind of weird and because of it, our kid might be able to fly’ discussion or whatever.”
Kim’s gaze snapped to Amber. She leaned forward so far, she was practically lying flat on the table. “So you can fly?”
Amber groaned. “No!”
Kim sat back in her seat and huffed, clearly disappointed.
Amber said to Bianca, “And it’s not like it’s something you can get a test for to find out what the likelihood is that your child will inherit it.”
Bianca nodded. “Exactly.”
Kim eyed them both. “Would it really be so bad if your kid could do … magic?” She very dramatically mouthed the last word.
“It’s hard to constantly have to keep it a secret,” Amber said.
“And unless you’re living in a hybrid town, it’s best to hide it,” Bianca added. “And hybrid towns are a whole other thing. I wouldn’t want to raise a kid there.”
“So … you’re just never going to tell your husband why you don’t want kids?” Kim asked.
Bianca sighed. “I haven’t decided. I’m scared of how he’ll react.”
“Maybe you need to give him a chance to decide for himself,” Kim said. “Maybe he’d be cool with it either way. But as it is now, you’re both miserable and he’s in the dark. Personally, if my husband was like, ‘Yo, babe, I can turn people you don’t like into toads,’ I’d be like, ‘Sign me up right now.’”
Bianca snorted.
Amber was halfway through her sugar-infused dinner when someone appeared beside the table. She expected to see their waitress, but instead she found a blonde woman with bright blue eyes and an even brighter smile. Her long, so-blonde-it-was-nearly-white hair was tied back in a French braid that flopped over one shoulder. All her attention was focused on Bianca.
“Hello, Ms. Pace,” she said, her voice light and professional. “How are you faring in the wake of your father’s arrest?”
Bianca’s hardened exterior had softened around Amber and Kim over the last hour or so, but with this woman here, Bianca instantly walled herself up again. Amber could almost see the bricks being laid one by one in rapid succession to keep this woman from seeing anything Bianca didn’t want her to. Her nose hiked up in the air and she arched one perfect eyebrow. “This isn’t the time or place, Molly.”
Without waiting for an invitation, Molly slid into the booth next to Kim, who squeaked and scooted over, shielding her food as she went.
“What do you want?” Bianca asked. “You here to tell me all the ways my dad is guilty, too? You were at that dinner party; I can’t imagine you missing it. What, you saw my dad drunkenly stumbling around the chief’s house, screaming his head off about how he hated Jameson?” She addressed Amber and Kim in turn as she said, “Molly works at The Marbleglen Herald, where she gets paid to ruin the lives and good times of as many people as possible.”
“I was there, yes,” Molly said, barreling past the slight. “But so was everyone else—well, those who have a place of power in town, anyway. I guess the committee for the Floral Frenzy doesn’t count.”
Bianca pursed her lips so hard, they turned white.
“Who else was there?” Amber asked, hoping to defuse some of the tension.
Molly turned her attention to Amber and gave her a quick once-over. There was something very thorough about it, as if Molly were a robot and her eyes had just performed a quick electric scan of her, run a diagnostic in her wire-filled brain, and then deemed Amber worthy of speaking to. “Well the chief for one, obviously. Then there were the full-time officers, Mayor Sable, business owners, Simon’s makeshift safety committee, most of the reporters from the Herald, the town council. But it was more or less a PR stunt, to be honest. My editor gives me photography assignments sometimes; he said I needed to get as many photos as possible of all the important people of Marbleglen getting along. The town council is really worried that the crime spree is going to disrupt tourism this year for the festival. Simon’s safety meetings weren’t helping the cause, so they came up with this dinner idea to show that the town was working hard to ‘band together in this difficult time.’ Unity! A sense of community!”
“And you didn’t think that was a good idea?” Amber asked, unable to ignore the sarcasm in Molly’s tone.
“Of course she didn’t,” Bianca said, punctuating her words with a bitter laugh. “Molly thrives on chaos. A story about the Marbleglen Bandit—with Molly’s byline—was in the Herald the morning after it happened. She bundled it with a discussion about Chloe Deidrick’s kidnapping. By the evening, the story ran on a few local news channels; they used pull quotes from Molly’s article. It was only a ten-minute piece, but it was more or less ‘small towns aren’t as safe as they used to be’ and they mentioned the Floral Frenzy Festival by name. And since I’m the one who heads the festival, you better believe I was well aware of the fallout when a handful of vendors pulled out from attending and a few comments popped up on the festival’s social media page saying they don’t feel safe bringing their kids here until the crime spree ends. It was a single night of attacks, yet Molly called it a spree.”
“The chief of police was murdered a month later, Bianca,” Molly said.
“I’m well aware of that,” Bianca snapped. “But the supposed spree and the murder aren’t even related. You made a bad situation sound even worse than it already was and now people seem to think Marbleglen is a hotbed of criminal activity. But this is your M.O., isn’t it, Molly? Take something relatively small and blow it out of proportion as long as it moves a ton of papers? I guess I should have known back then that you were just hitting your stride.”
“You can’t still be mad at me about that,” Molly said. “It was high school!”
“I’m not the only one still ticked,” Bianca said, then addressed Amber and Kim. “Little Miss Molly Hargrove here wrote an article that was originally about the low attendance of high school dances, but then turned it into a story about how several of the seniors were going to 18-and-up clubs in the city and engaging in ‘risky behavior.’ All we were doing was dancing in a place that didn’t require we keep exactly six inches apart.”
Molly’s face crunched up. “That’s not even what the article was about! It was about the school administration being out of touch with the student body and how they needed to adapt to the interests of modern students.”
Bianca rolled her eyes. “Call it what you want, but it caused a crackdown that was so widespread, that within six months—because parents lost their minds about Marbleglen High becoming a cesspool of sin—we had even more rules. And school uniforms. Molly became a social pariah practically overnight.”
“Exactly!” Molly said. “So you should feel pity for me, if anything.”
“You might have gotten pity if you didn’t get worse after that. You called it a crime spree, Molly. It wasn’t a spree. It was a group of senior kids pulling a bunch of nonsense in town as a prank. They do something like this every year; everyone knows that. It just got really out of hand this time. Write a story about the chaos of today’s youth, not about a crime spree that doesn’t exist. All you did was scare off much-needed vendors. Vendors we really can’t afford to lose when we’re running our festival at the same time as the horrible show-stealing Here and Meow.” Then she winced. “No offense, ladies.”
“Offense taken,” Amber and Kim said in unison.
“Jinx!” Kim said, grinning.
“Anyway,” Bianca said, a flush creeping up her neck and into her face, “I repeat: What do you want?”
Molly leaned forward a fraction, and the three of them mirrored her. “I don’t think your father is guilty.”
Bianca’s head reared back as if Molly had struck her.
“Why?” Amber asked.
“I feel like I know him pretty well. He and I had been working on a story together just before he was arrested.”
“About what?” Kim blurted.
Bianca crossed her arms. “Bull. He’s never even mentioned this to me.”
“He didn’t want you to know,” Molly said. “Ask him about it. His arraignment is tomorrow, isn’t it? If he can’t make bail, you can visit him and ask. If he does, he’ll be home soon enough. I hope y’all have a boatload of cash, though. I hear the arraignment judge is especially hard on cop killers.” When Bianca only stared at her, Molly said, “What could I possibly gain from lying to you about this?”
“I don’t know,” Bianca said. “But you’re a snake. You always have a reason for slithering out of whatever dark hole you live in.”
Kim gasped.
Amber felt an urge to apologize to Molly on Bianca’s behalf, but Molly didn’t look the least bit fazed. Maybe Molly was just used to people talking to her like this.
“There are two stories here,” Molly said, undeterred, her hands crossed primly in front of her. “There’s the story you’ll hear most. The story where Simon Ricinus clearly hated Chief Jameson. Simon, upset about the years of rumored police corruption, is sent over the edge after a crime spree sweeps through the safest town in Oregon. The department doesn’t seem to be lifting a finger to help the victims, so a fed-up Simon rallies the troops and creates a comm
ittee that’s hell-bent on undermining the chief of police. Then in a fit of rage—helped along by opportunity—Simon takes matters into his own hands and ends the Chief Jameson Problem with a bullet to the chest. Bam!” Molly said, slapping a hand down on the table and making everyone jump. “He snapped. It’s the quiet ones you have to be leery of, right?”
“That’s not what happened,” Bianca said indignantly.
Molly shrugged. “Something happened that night that caused Chief Jameson to become enraged—I mean he was screaming at everyone to get out of his house. Daniels and Sable were trying to calm him down—I think even Simon tried—but Jameson wasn’t listening to anyone. Eventually Mayor Sable asked everyone to leave. By the time I left, there were ten people there—probably less. One of those remaining people is who actually killed Jameson, and then that person pinned it on Simon.”
“Why though?” Kim asked. “Why are you so sure it wasn’t Simon?”
But instead of answering Kim, Molly focused on Bianca. “If you’ve lived in Marbleglen for long enough, you know the police here are … shifty.”
“Understatement,” Bianca said. “Daniels has a reputation for pulling people over for bogus speeding tickets—usually scared teenagers who haven’t had their licenses for very long—and letting them go if they slip him cash. There’s rumors about stuff disappearing out of evidence.”
“Ugh,” Amber said.
“I got an anonymous tip from a guy about a month ago,” Molly said. “He did something to disguise his voice; I had no way of guessing who he was. He said that he had proof the Marbleglen police department was up to something illegal. He gave me a couple leads to run down. I eventually figured out it was Simon who had called me.”
Bianca still looked unconvinced.
“Talk to him,” Molly said. “Once he confirms everything I’ve said, we’ll talk again. My guess is, he’s not getting out on bail. So you’ll have to make the trip out to the prison again to have your chat. Maybe Simon will do okay in prison, though, since he’s rumored to have killed a cop. Maybe it’ll give him street cred.” She glanced around the mostly deserted diner. “I’ve probably said too much. I’m already on Chief Daniels’s naughty list and that guy has eyes and ears everywhere.” She fished a business card out of her pocket and slid it across the table to Bianca. “Call me when you talk to your dad, okay?” She stood, snatched a blueberry off Bianca’s plate, popped it in her mouth, and strode out.