A rustle from above made me jerk my head up, and I almost fell off the ladder. Grabbing at the floor to steady myself, I saw that it was only a wren, busy making its spring nest atop the cupboard in the tree house. It eyed me warily and then flew out the structure’s one window.
“I’m only going to be a minute,” I called after it. “Then you can come back and finish your nest.” I stood gingerly, my head not quite brushing the roof. The tree house was smaller than I remembered, probably only nine feet square. The floor creaked under my feet and I tested each board before putting a foot down as I crossed to the cupboard. I was curious to see if anything remained in it. Back in the day, Ivy had kept nail polishes up here, her journal, cigarettes, love notes from her various boyfriends, and a couple of books and magazines—including a Playgirl or two—that she hadn’t wanted her parents to find. I suspected now that they’d known all along what was out here. The door stuck, but I jerked hard on the knob and it popped open. Nothing. Well, nothing more than a spill of burnt orange nail polish, as glossy and slick as ceramic. I ran a finger over it.
Crossing my arms over my chest, I moved to the window, an open square cut in the wall. Careful not to lean against it—I could see from the way the wood bowed out around it that the wall wasn’t sound anymore—I peered out at the evergreens and just-budding aspens, wondering why I’d come here. The place was filled with happy memories—I didn’t remember ever fighting with Ivy here—and it made me melancholy. Even though Ivy probably hadn’t been here in a decade, it still made me sad to think that she’d never climb up here again to sneak a cigarette or ogle the smirking men displayed in a Playgirl spread. It’s possible a tear or two slid down my face as I said a prayer for Ivy and left, glancing over my shoulder once or twice until the trees hid the hideaway from view.
* * *
My next stop was city hall, a three-story, square stone building erected in the 1930s as part of FDR’s Depression-era construction plan. Intricate stonework prettified the façade, but the interior was a characterless warren of long halls lined by offices. Even recently applied cream paint—the sharp odor still lingering—couldn’t make the structure seem welcoming. Kerry’s office was here, as were the offices for other city employees, including the chief financial officer. Ivy had worked there for coming up on seven years and had enjoyed it. The administrative assistant who had taken over Ivy’s duties had called Eventful! late yesterday to tell me she was now responsible for overseeing my work on the offsite I’d been going to talk to Ivy about the day she died.
Kirsten Wiggins was in her midtwenties, at a guess, with a lanky build and a long, narrow face made longer and narrower by straight brown hair that fell past her shoulders.
“Clay’s going ahead with the offsite,” she told me, leading me down a hall lined with offices on both sides of the second floor to a small conference room. “Even after . . . Well, the business of running the city doesn’t grind to a halt when one of the small cogs goes ‘poof,’ does it?”
She sounded like she was quoting someone, probably Clay Shumer, the city’s CFO, whom Ivy had worked for. I wasn’t sure if I was more offended by the idea of Ivy reduced to a “small cog” or the dismissal of her death with a casual “poof.”
I bit down hard on my lip to keep from blurting something impolitic and then said, “Ivy didn’t get a chance to give me the details on the offsite. You’re only talking about one day, right? July twelfth? I’ll need to know how many people you’re expecting, what kind of a budget I’m working with, whether you need me to hire a facilitator, and whether you’ve already got a venue reserved or if you need me to find something.”
We settled into the comfy padded chairs at the oval conference table and spent a good hour hashing through the details for the offsite. Kirsten was surprisingly efficient and I thought sadly that she would take over Ivy’s duties and slide into her job, and after a week or two no one would notice that Ivy was gone.
“My caffeine-low light is on,” Kirsten said, pushing away from the table. “Want some coffee before we finish up?”
“Sure.” I rarely said no to coffee. In the hallway, we passed a restroom and I told Kirsten I needed to duck inside. She pointed out the break room, two doors up on the left, and said she’d meet me there. The bathroom smelled heavily of an aerosol “freshening” scent that made me cough. Holding my breath, I peed quickly, barely flicked water on my hands, and pushed out of the two-stall restroom. I was halfway down the corridor before I realized I’d turned the wrong way. The name CLAY SHUMER engraved on a brass strip beside a barely open office door made me recognize my error. I turned. As I did, an angry voice issued from inside the office.
“. . . not my fault! I think she copied . . . my . . . assistant, for God’s sake. How do you expect—”
Another voice rumbled over Clay Shumer’s defensive words. I couldn’t make out what the new speaker was saying. The timbre of his voice sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
Realizing I was eavesdropping on what might be sensitive city business, I was turning away when one of the men in the office pushed the door closed. The wooden smack made me jump, and I hurried down the hall to find the room Kirsten had pointed out, feeling like I’d been sneaking around where I had no business, even though all I’d done was get turned around. I took a deep breath before walking into the break room, where I found Kirsten watching coffee drip into a carafe.
“No one in this frigging office ever makes a new pot when they empty the old one,” she fumed. “And they must all think their moms work here, or the cleaning fairy, because they never bother to clean up after themselves, either.”
She ripped a paper towel from a dispenser and began a furious assault on the coffee spills and grounds on the Formica counter. A shelf sat above it, lined with mugs I assumed belonged to people who worked here, some whimsical, some plain. I made a silent bet with myself that the plain gray mug with “I’ll try to be nicer if you try to be smarter” written on it was Kirsten’s. A refrigerator hummed from the end of the counter, with a microwave beside it. Two large cans of coffee sat beside a small stainless-steel sink, one regular and one decaf, and a container of nondairy creamer and a bowl of sugar were pushed against the tile backsplash. Beside them was a white ceramic canister decorated with ivy vines.
My eyes fixed on it. “Pretty,” I said, sure I knew whose canister it was.
Kirsten followed my gaze. “Yeah, that’s Ivy’s special tea. Was. Lipton’s wasn’t good enough for her.” I thought I heard a hint of snideness in her voice, but then she said, “Although I will say she was the only other one in this office who bothered to clean up after herself. The only one who wasn’t raised by wolves.” She said this last in a loud voice, apparently in response to a suited man who had come in while we were talking, slopped coffee into his mug, and not bothered to wipe up the drips from the still-brewing machine. They sizzled on the burner, sending up an acrid odor.
“Lighten up, Kris,” he said, slouching out. “That’s why we have a janitorial service.”
“Kirsten.”
The byplay was enough to make me glad, once again, that I owned my own business. I’d worked in the English Department office for two years while I was at the University of Colorado, and the pettiness and gossip and complaints about lunch items going missing from the communal fridge had driven me batty. I felt sympathetic toward Kirsten, although I sensed she was the kind of woman who made things harder for herself. My eyes returned to the canister, completely accessible on the counter. Anyone could have doctored its contents. Should I share my suspicions with the police so they could test the tea in the canister? They would undoubtedly pooh-pooh my theory. I had to do something, though, before one of Ivy’s coworkers brewed a cup of tea using her special blend and got sick . . . or worse.
“It’s really sad about Ivy, isn’t it?” Kirsten said, reaching for a pair of mugs on the shelf. “Scary, even. Makes you wonder if you r
eally know someone at all. I mean, I would never have thought she would off herself. Never. Don’t get me wrong, she wasn’t Miss Sweetness and Light, always perky and happy and everything, but I never got the feeling she was that unhappy, unhappy enough to kill herself, even though it was pretty clear her little office romance had come to its inevitable end.” She slanted me a sly look while pouring coffee into a Save the Manatees mug and the gray one I’d pegged as hers. “You were her friend, right, so you must have known?”
“I’m not sure I know what you’re getting at,” I said, accepting the mug with the partially scraped-off manatee and blowing on the coffee. My fingers tightened around the warm ceramic; I was afraid I did know what she was getting at.
Kirsten’s raised brows accused me of being disingenuous. “Really? Well, everyone here knew. I mean, you can’t screw around with the boss and expect people not to notice. They thought they were being so discreet—”
Unlike Kirsten, who was filling me in on office gossip in the break room with its open door.
“—but people notice when you stay late to ‘work’ together, and go to conventions in Indianapolis, and call in sick on the same days. Leaving each other little gifts, too—I mean, that’s just rubbing it in. Did they think we were all stupid? Everyone knows that’s why she got that promotion.”
Ah. Kirsten felt slighted, which explained her nastiness.
“Maybe she got promoted because she worked hard, was good at her job, and had been here longer than some other people,” I suggested, knowing as the words left my mouth that I should have kept silent.
Kirsten’s eyes widened. “I never expected to get that promotion; I only interviewed for the practice,” she said, confirming my suspicions. “I was only saying that—”
I didn’t want to hear any more gossip about Ivy. There wasn’t a woman over fifteen who hadn’t been stupid about a man at one time or another—witness the fifteen years total I’d spent hung up on a man who was marrying another woman in two weeks—and I wasn’t going to pass judgment on her or listen to this envious twentysomething coworker do so. “Look, I’ve got another appointment to get to. I think I’ve got enough to get started with. I can call you if I have questions, right?”
“Uh, sure,” Kirsten said, taken aback.
Setting my half-full mug in the sink, I used a paper towel to pick up the ivied canister—I read enough crime fiction to know all about fingerprints. Maybe I should adopt “What would Kinsey Millhone do?” as my new mantra and have it made into one of those rubber bracelets: WWKMD. I tucked the canister into my purse.
“I think Ivy’s brother would like to have this,” I said, not making it a question. Before Kirsten could object, I made “great to be working with you” noises and said good-bye. My heels clicked on the stairs as I descended, and my mind whirled with memories of Ivy, excited about getting hired into the CFO’s office, excited about working on an accounting degree she never quite finished, excited about a budding romance that had started two years ago.
She’d been coy about not naming her partner, calling him “Loverboy,” and although I’d suspected his identity, I hadn’t challenged her on it. She hadn’t wanted him to leave his wife initially; indeed, after her short-lived marriage she’d sworn she’d never marry again and preferred to date married men because they didn’t want “permanent.” Within the last six months, though, I’d gotten the feeling she was unhappy with the status quo. If Kirsten was right and Ivy and Loverboy had broken up, had she initiated the breakup or had he? Thinking back to her remarks on Monday evening, I suspected the latter.
That thought popped into my head as I reached the small lobby and spotted Clay Shumer—“Loverboy,” if Kirsten was to be believed—shaking hands with another man I recognized. Troy Widefield Sr., Brooke’s father-in-law, looked even sterner than usual as he gripped Clay’s hand. Clay, generally full of the kind of shallow charm and bonhomie I associated with movie depictions of con men and gigolos, looked slightly green as his head bobbed in response to whatever Mr. Widefield was saying. His caramel-colored mullet—dyed, I knew, because Sheena at Sheena’s Hair Jungle had a big mouth—stayed stiffly in place, even as his head moved, and I suspected industrial-strength hair spray. Mr. Widefield, who had an equally full head of hair, although his was white and undyed, looked fitter and trimmer than the twenty-years-younger Clay. I hoped Clay’s greenish color was a sign of his grief over Ivy’s death. She’d loved him. They’d been together for at least two years. He should have the decency to be sad.
“Gentlemen,” I murmured in greeting as I edged around them to get to the doors. I didn’t feel like talking to either of them.
Mr. Widefield recognized me immediately; he was the kind of guy who could instantly put a face to a name and remember where he met someone. It was a key skill for my business and I was pretty good at it, too, but not in Mr. Widefield’s league. Clay Shumer took a bit longer to place me, nodding when Mr. Widefield said, “Hello, Amy-Faye.” Civilities observed, he gave Clay a sharp look and left.
“Thanks for the opportunity to organize your offsite,” I said to Clay, figuring I should say something politic. It took him a minute to tune in to me, preoccupied as he was by watching Mr. Widefield stride toward the parking lot.
He wiped the frown from his face, replaced it with an insincere smile, and said, “I’m sure you’ll do a great job for us. Ivy Donner recommended you very highly.”
“She was one of my best friends.” My gaze challenged him to make a similar statement, to acknowledge Ivy’s importance to him.
“We’re going to miss her in the office; that’s for sure,” he said.
Wow, what an epitaph. If Ivy’s ghost was around to hear that lukewarm declaration, she must want to slap him. I considered doing it for her. WWKMD? Probably not slap him and risk an assault arrest, I decided reluctantly.
“She was too young to die, too full of life, too—” He ran a hand down his face. For a moment I thought he would say more, but he only nodded, turned his back on me, and started up the stairs. I fancied he was blinking back tears, and I felt better on Ivy’s behalf.
As I made my way to the van, it crossed my mind that he might blame himself for her death. If he had recently broken up with her, and if he believed she’d committed suicide, he might think the two events were connected. Even though I didn’t know Clay Shumer well, and I couldn’t help but despise a man who was cheating on his wife, he shouldn’t have to live with that burden if it wasn’t true. Yet another reason to prove that Ivy hadn’t killed herself.
* * *
I drove straight to the police department. I was going to be late for my appointment with Madison Taylor, but it couldn’t be helped. I wasn’t walking around with Ivy’s tea canister in my purse a moment longer than necessary. I parked and called Al and asked him to apologize to Madison when she arrived and start the meeting without me. Inspecting my teeth in the rearview mirror and slicking on a melon-colored lipstick, I approached the police department. The building was redbrick, separated from the street by the sidewalk, and one block off the downtown square between Mike’s Bikes and A World Apart, the new travel agency. Pink and purple petunias frothed from planters outside the building, all part of Kerry Sanderson’s plan to make all parts of city government seem appealing and approachable, I guessed.
I pulled open the modern glass door, which didn’t go with the building’s façade, and stepped into a cool reception area with a counter, molded plastic chairs, and what might have been the building’s original tile floor. I’d lived in Heaven all my life and never been in here before. My brother and a couple of buddies had gotten arrested as young teens for vandalizing street signs, but my folks had made me and my sisters stay home when they came to spring him. I guess I’d expected something like Andy Griffith’s office in Mayberry, with a jail cell in one corner, but this was more like my doctor’s waiting area. Very disappointing.
I approac
hed the counter, behind which Mabel Appleman, who was in her seventies and had been the police dispatcher since before telephones were invented, I was pretty sure, was reading a Tess Gerritsen book. Mabel occasionally came to Readaholics meetings when we were reading a police procedural. I told her that I needed to see Detective Hart. Mabel squinted at me and fumbled for the glasses tucked into her tightly permed gray curls. With the blue-framed specs perched halfway down her roman nose, she looked me up and down.
“Amy-Faye Johnson, what in tarnation do you want with a police detective? You don’t look scared enough to have been attacked, besides which it’s broad daylight and no one but a total moron like the Yoder boy would try to mug someone while the sun is shining, and it can’t be a domestic abuse matter because you’re still not married, and not likely to be now that the Elvaston boy is in the way of getting hitched to a New Yorker. I don’t see any obvious injuries, so you weren’t the victim of a hit-and-run—”
The Readaholics and the Falcon Fiasco Page 6
