“Me, too.”
∗ ∗ ∗
“I’m on the right here,” Estelle said when I turned on E Street, pointing at the house with the oatmeal aluminum siding as if I’d never seen her little rambler before.
Slowing, I looked at the basil green craftsman style house with the cream trim across the way. “That’s new.” It had been a few years since I’d spent any time in Estelle’s neighborhood, but I remembered the house being a lighter color.
She leaned over, looking past me. “Turned out nice, didn’t it? Bob’s been working on the place ever since he moved in last year.”
“Bob?”
“Bob Hallahan.”
I pulled into Estelle’s driveway and turned to face her. “When you said you saw Darlene’s car across the street, did you mean that it was in front of Bob’s house?”
“Yep, and right opposite my driveway. I almost hit it when I was backing out to go to the hospital.” Estelle rolled her eyes. “She still blames me for taking down that old ramshackle fence of hers. I never would have heard the end of it if I’d hit her car.”
Since Darlene had given me the distinct impression that she wouldn’t be making a trip into town yesterday, I couldn’t help but be curious about why she visited her ex-husband’s best friend. Perhaps she knew about something in Marty’s will that concerned Bob. Something that Marty had wanted Bob to have?
But wouldn’t that something have remained with Marty at his house, not his ex-wife’s?
“Hopefully, the next time she visits she won’t park in your way,” I said.
“Yes, she should follow the lead of the lady friend Bob’s been seeing and park closer to his mailbox.”
I hadn’t realized that Bob had a lady friend. Maybe this was a mutual friend he shared with Darlene and that was what had prompted her visit last night. “Who’s he seeing these days?”
“I only caught a glimpse of her last Tuesday evening when I was taking out the garbage. Seemed quite lovely. Chinese, I think.”
“Black shoulder-length hair?”
She nodded. “Looked a little young for him if you ask me, but what do I know about these things anymore?”
Since her description fit Victoria McCutcheon, I wondered the same thing.
“Besides, as long as his visitors don’t park in my way, who he spends his time with is none of my business.” Estelle gathered up her yarn and her purse. “Well, thanks for the ride. For the cupcakes for Jordan, too.”
“Those were from Duke.”
“Right.” She grinned. “That bugger has never given away free food in his life.”
Duke had given it to me on sort of a need-to-know basis.
She opened the car door. “You’re a nice girl, Charmaine. I’m going to tell your granny so the next time I see her.”
I wasn’t so nice. I’d used the near-death of a little kid to squeeze information out of his grandmother.
Since Estelle was struggling to get out of the bucket seat, I came around to the passenger side and offered her my hand.
She locked palms with me. “Yep, a nice girl.”
Who was feeling guiltier by the second.
“Now, what you need to do,” Estelle said as I pulled her to her feet, “is find a nice boy.” She winked at me. “Get back on the horse and all that good stuff.”
“Yes, ma’am.” And I knew exactly which horse I wanted to ride later. Yep, there would be no pillow talk about poison tonight.
After Estelle’s door closed behind her I looked at the house across the street, where both Mrs. McCutcheons appeared to have made recent visits.
Strange. Especially since one of them had deceived me about her intention to come into town.
If the subject just happened to come up later, maybe my nice boy wouldn’t mind offering an opinion about it over a beer.
“He’s not that nice,” I reminded myself. Better make it a home-cooked meal with a big slice of chocolate cake for dessert.
∗ ∗ ∗
“About damn time,” my great-uncle grumbled when I grabbed my apron off a hook in the kitchen. “Did you do rounds while you were at the hospital?”
“No. I was just visiting a friend.” Duke wasn’t the inquisitive one I needed to worry about in the cafe, so I slipped my apron on knowing that I’d said enough to satisfy his curiosity.
Unfortunately, the same wasn’t true for Lucille, Gossip Central’s ringleader, who was pushing through the kitchen door. “Would that friend’s name be Dr. Cardinale?”
Shit! Someone had blabbed—someone who had seen me with Kyle.
I stared at her, my mind racing for a way to contain the damage without full disclosure. Phyllis Bozeman didn’t need the rest of Port Merritt to know that I had thought she could have poisoned her former boyfriend, and neither did I.
“Of course not. Why would I take cupcakes decorated with monkeys and elephants to a doctor?” I headed for the worktable to get this conversation away from the ears of the waitress who was picking up her order at the window.
“Hell, I don’t know,” Lucille said, hot on my heels. “Maybe the dude’s into monkeys.”
I cocked my head at her as I pulled a large stainless steel bowl out from under the worktable. “Please. Whoever you’ve been talking to has it all wrong.”
“Funny you should say that because that’s exactly what I told Millie when she came here for her lunch break and wanted to know how long the two of you had been going out.”
Great.
Her eyes fixed on me, Lucille leaned over the table like a snake poised to strike. “So, the two of you had a lunch date.”
“It wasn’t a date.”
She smiled conspiratorially. “Uh-huh.”
“It was more like a business meeting.” At least that’s what I had intended.
“From what Millie said about the way he was looking at you, it’s more like he wanted to get down to business,” she said, chortling at her own joke.
“Hardly.”
“Oh, you can deny it all you want, but she’s not the only one who’s noticed how he looks at you.”
“Probably because he has a bit of a crush on my mother, and with the right makeup,” and bad lighting, “he sees a little of Marietta in me.”
Lucille smirked. “Doll, when he’s looking at you I really don’t think he sees your mother.”
Since I was the one with the bad hair and the extra thirty pounds, I didn’t take Lucille’s opinion as a positive.
“Order up!” Duke barked in our direction.
“Yeah, yeah, hold your donkeys.” Lucille pointed an index finger at me. “Don’t go anywhere. I want details about this lunch.”
“Trust me, the details are going to be very boring.”
“Uh-huh. I may not be able to tell that you’re lying, but I know you’re holding out on me.”
“I’m not holding out on you.” Much. “And I have nothing else to say on the subject.”
Lucille frowned. “You and Steve are hanging around one another too much,” she muttered, squeaking away. “He gave me the same no comment answer ten minutes ago.”
“What?!” I followed her through the kitchen door and locked gazes with the detective sipping a cup of coffee at the counter.
I pasted a smile on my face as I slipped onto the barstool next to him. “Hey.”
“Hey, yourself.” His tone was cool, his eyes assessing.
“I’m surprised to see you here this late in the afternoon. Did you get a sudden craving for bad coffee?”
“I was looking for you.”
“Yeah? Looks like you found me.”
He glanced down at my white apron. “What’s with the apron? Duke putting you to work?”
“It’s payback for a couple of lunches I had earlier this week.”
A humorless smile pulled at the corners of his lips. “Payback can be a bitch, can’t it? Especially when it comes to lunches.”
I had a sinking feeling that it was going to be, and soon. “I know you
were chatting with Lucille earlier, so would you like to hear why I had lunch with Kyle Cardinale?”
“Only if you’d like to tell me.”
Not especially.
As if on cue Lucille ambled over to refill Steve’s cup. “Get you anything else, hon?”
“No thanks,” he said, his gaze fixed on me.
I waited for her to leave, but instead she lingered with a sudden compulsion to refill the sugar dispensers at the counter.
“Come with me.” I picked up Steve’s coffee cup and led him into the kitchen to find some privacy.
Duke frowned as we passed. “This ain’t a meeting room, you know.”
“We won’t be long. I just need to talk to Steve for a minute in private.”
“And I need cake,” Duke said, calling after me. “Is that going to happen anytime soon?”
“Yes!” Sheesh, I could only handle one minor crisis at a time.
Setting down Steve’s coffee on the worktable, I pulled out a wooden stool for him to sit on. “Okay, I can explain.”
He shrugged a shoulder. “You don’t have to.”
“But I don’t want you to have the wrong idea.”
“Then what’s the right idea?”
“You know how we were talking about Phyllis Bozeman slipping something poisonous into the salsa she bought for Marty McCutcheon?”
“I know how you were talking about it.”
“I figured Kyle would be a good person to ask about what symptoms he might see in a poisoning victim.”
“Uh-huh.”
Steve could read micro-expressions almost as well as I could, so I knew I’d best not stray far from the truth. “And when I contacted him he suggested that we talk over lunch.”
“Yeah, and?”
“And that’s it. He pretty much confirmed what he’d told me before about Marty’s cause of death, and then I…” I hesitated telling him anything about going to the hospital since that hadn’t been my finest hour.
Steve’s eyes narrowed. “What’d you do?”
“I sort of ran into Phyllis.”
“I bet you did.”
“The good news is that I’m sure that she didn’t poison Marty.”
Steve exhaled. “Please tell me that you’re going to leave the woman alone now.”
I nodded.
“Anything else that you’d like to tell me?”
“Just this.” I leaned over and kissed him. “Oh, and I told Rox about us.”
“About time.”
“She’s pissed that I didn’t say anything sooner.”
He shook his head. “Why do you women make everything so complicated?”
“Some things are complicated,” I said with more volume than I’d intended. “Relationships for example. They can get complicated fast.”
“You’ve been friends forever. I’m sure you’ll smooth it over with her.”
I wasn’t referring to my relationship with Rox. “Right.”
“When are you getting out of here?”
“In a couple of hours. Why?”
“I thought I should make good on that date I owe you.”
“Yeah, because if you don’t, payback’s a bitch.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“It so happens that I bought something sexy that you haven’t seen yet.”
Steve rose to his feet, a glint of carnal interest in his eyes. “Pick you up at seven? We could go into Port Townsend to some place along the waterfront if you want.”
Ordinarily, I’d jump at the opportunity, but I had no desire to dine at another Port Townsend waterfront restaurant this weekend. “How about if I come over and make dinner? I can probably finagle some cake out of Duke for dessert.”
“Yum.” Steve pressed his lips to mine, gently at first, then he deepened the kiss.
“Mmmm, yum,” I said when we came up for air.
“Hey, what do you think you’re doing back there? Break it up!” Duke pointed at me with his spatula. “You, get busy baking. And you,” he said glaring at Steve. “Out!”
Lucille burst through the kitchen door. “What? What’d I miss?”
“This.” I linked my arms around Steve’s neck to pull him to me and kissed him long and hard.
“What the hell!” Lucille exclaimed. “I thought…”
I turned to her. “You thought wrong.”
Chapter Eleven
Five hours later, I was leaning against Steve’s white-tiled kitchen counter and sneaking a peek at my cell phone while he loaded his dishwasher.
My phone displayed the same lack of activity as the last ten times I had checked. No missed calls. No texts. No nothing since I’d outed myself to the two gossip queens of Port Merritt.
Weird.
Totally and unpredictably weird, but maybe Steve had been right all along. Aside from Rox, who had the right to be a little ticked at me for holding out on her, maybe nobody especially cared that Steve and I were officially friends with benefits.
Considering how popular a dance partner he had been on Tango Tuesdays at the Senior Center, I found this non-development a little perplexing. But we weren’t cheating on any spouses, neither one of us made enough money to make us gold digger-worthy, and no shotgun wedding was on the docket.
Maybe my big reveal hadn’t been so big after all, and Lucille’s cronies wouldn’t grill me like a cheese panini the next time I stepped into Duke’s.
This was a good thing—a very good thing. But given the bevy of dishy rumors I heard on almost a daily basis, the only way I could see my news stalling on the gossip launch pad was if the hotter rocket of a story about Marty McCutcheon and the inheritance his bride would be coming into was still soaring.
Based on what I’d heard this afternoon, I couldn’t help but wonder about the part Bob Hallahan played in that story.
“You expecting a call?” Steve asked. “You keep looking at your phone.”
“No, I was just…. Never mind.” I slipped my phone into the back pocket of my jeans. “You haven’t heard any rumors about Victoria McCutcheon and Bob Hallahan, have you?”
He shot me a glance. “Haven’t exactly had my ear to the rumor mill grindstone.”
“She was seen at his house this week.”
“Could be for any number of reasons.”
“Uh-huh.” Considering the woman’s husband died a couple of days later, whatever that reason had been, it seemed a little suspect. “She was also referred to as his lady friend.”
“By?”
“Estelle. She lives across the street from Bob.”
Steve smirked. “The same woman who likes to tease your grandmother about the younger man she’s been seeing. Or maybe she referred to me as a young buck. I can’t remember.”
“I’m sure that’s not what she called you. But really, I don’t think Bob Hallahan is feeding Marty McCutcheon’s wife pot roast a couple times a week.”
“She’s been seen there more than once?”
“I guess. Enough for Estelle to make the assumption that there’s a relationship.”
He furrowed his brow. “Don’t know what to say about that. If anything were going on that they wanted to keep quiet, I’d expect them to be more discreet.”
“Yeah.” But Steve and I hadn’t exactly been pillars of discretion each time I joined him in his bed the past month. Then again, I didn’t have a husband to worry about.
“Don’t make too much out of this. You should know by now that witnesses can jump to all sorts of incorrect conclusions about what they think they’ve seen.”
“I know. It’s just curious. Possibly not just to me since Darlene McCutcheon was at Bob’s house yesterday—the same day she asked me to deliver something to Estelle because she didn’t plan on coming into town.”
“Hmmm.”
“Hmmm, what?” I asked.
“Her plans must have changed for some reason.”
“Don’t you think that’s strange though? Both of Marty’s wives visiting the guy who is suppos
ed to be his best friend? And both of them there the week that he died.”
Steve gave his shoulder a little shrug. “Like you said, it’s curious.”
But could it be an indicator of anything significant to this unofficial case?
“Unless you think you need to pursue this with Frankie,” he said as if reading my mind, “and I wouldn’t unless you’ve got some fact to go along with this gossip, I’d recommend that you not share this with anyone else.”
I nodded my agreement, but that didn’t make Bob Hallahan’s sudden popularity with the McCutcheon women seem any less strange.
His lips curled slightly at the corners. “Anything else that we need to talk about?”
I knew I couldn’t talk to him about how it had gone with Rox without him rolling his eyes, and there was absolutely nothing I wanted to add to what I’d already told him about Kyle Cardinale. “Nope.”
“Then I think we should move on to the next phase of our date,” he said, pressing the start button on his dishwasher.
My pulse quickened as if he’d pressed my start button. “Okay, then!” He’d barely touched me for days, so as long as part two of this date included his hands on me I was all for it.
Reaching into his refrigerator, Steve pulled out two beers. He then cocked his head, and I followed him to the living room where an area rug separated a chocolate brown leather sectional from an overstuffed chair left over from his mother.
I sank into the sectional next to him and set the beer bottle he’d offered me on the cherry wood end table to my left to assume a comfortable make-out position. Unfortunately, I may have assumed too much because instead of reaching for me, he reached for his remote control.
“Hey,” he said as his flat screen flickered to life in time for us to watch a baseball fly into the upper deck of Safeco Field. “The Mariners just pulled ahead of the Angels, three-two.”
“Good for them.”
“It’s one of the last games of the year. I thought we could make this a dinner and a movie night, but since it’s early…”
I had no choice but to take the bait. “You want to watch the game.”
“Do you mind?”
I shook my head. “Remember what we talked about earlier though.”
He looked at me with a quizzical expression.
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