by Meg Muldoon
Sam’s eyes flickered with anger. He shot a glare back at Anson.
“I’ll see you in my office first, Officer Donnally,” he said.
“But lieutenant, who’s going to man the front desk if—”
“Now, Donnally,” Sam said, not suffering the fool whatsoever.
Anson let out a loud sigh, and got up out of the chair. He ambled back through the metal doors into the station.
He reminded me of a bully getting sent down to the principal’s office.
Sam shook his head.
“Damn if that fool isn’t going to get us all in trouble one of these days,” Sam mumbled.
“You could say fool again, all right,” I said, agreeing.
I reached down and picked up the paper bag of sandwiches, handing it to him.
“Here,” I said. “Try and get some lunch in when you can, all right? Don’t go skinny on me.”
I patted his abs and smiled.
I myself had lost my appetite. Nervous butterflies were fluttering around in my stomach where hunger had once been.
I supposed that happened when the man you were madly in love with told you that he felt that way about you too.
“I’ll call you later,” he said. “Don’t take too much BS from Kobritz.”
He kissed the top of my head.
“I love you, Freddie,” he whispered.
Fat goose bumps broke out across my skin when he said the words.
He made movements to leave the nook. But just before he did, he leaned down, whispering something in my ear.
“You know, people at the front desk always know a lot,” he said. “Not Donnally of course. But most people in those jobs, in most firms, do.”
He backed away, and then headed toward the main part of the building.
I listened to the sound of his boots on the shiny station floor.
It was amazing the way three little words could change a whole day.
Chapter 26
The Mindy Monahan story wasn’t mine anymore.
But it wasn’t a story to me anyway.
It was a lot more than that.
I walked into the CPA firm, still a little dazed from the conversation I’d just had with Sam. I made a spectacle in the small office as I tried to shut my mangled umbrella, which had been a victim of the violent winds outside. But I didn’t feel as embarrassed as I might usually have about something like that.
It was pouring outside. Great, big bubbles popped in puddles as the rain pelted down on the earth. A driving wind had started up and had caught me completely by surprise in the parking lot, hence the broken umbrella.
I finally got the wet heap of metal and fabric down to a manageable size, and then approached the front desk. Luckily, the small waiting room was empty, and nobody but the receptionist had taken notice of my clumsy entrance.
I cleared my throat. She looked up at me with an enquiring expression.
The woman, who I’d talked to briefly on the phone the day before when I was trying to locate Mindy’s husband, couldn’t have been much older than 21. She was dressed in a low-cut black blouse that hugged her waist, showing off her curvy figure. She had full lips and large blue eyes, and her reddish black hair went far past her shoulders.
She smacked her gum loudly, giving me a judgmental once-over.
I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up on end when I saw her.
I knew there was something here that I needed to find out.
“Welcome to Monahan, Hanson, & Parr. I’m Kayla. Who do you have an appointment with today?”
I shook my head.
“No one, actually,” I said. “I’m here to see you.”
She furrowed her brow.
“Huh?” she said.
I leaned forward, looking around to make sure no one could hear.
“My name’s Freddie Wolf. I spoke to you yesterday about Phil Monahan?”
“Mr. Monahan has called in sick today,” she said, without missing a beat. “But I can take a mess—”
“No, you see, I’m a friend of his wife, Mindy Monahan? I was hoping you could spare the time to…”
I stopped speaking as I noticed the young woman’s eyes bulge when I said Mindy’s name.
“Look, I don’t know what you think you know, but it’s not true.”
“What’s not true?” I shot back.
“Whatever she might have said about me.”
I was about to say something, but stopped, realizing I didn’t know what she meant.
“I’m not a homewrecker,” she said in a voice barely above a whisper. “He wouldn’t have come to me if something wasn’t wrong at home already. So if Mindy sent you here to scare me or to shame me, then you better just turn around and leave. It takes two to tango. And I ain’t even the one who started that dance.”
That sounded like something she’d picked up from a bad romantic comedy.
She flipped her hair back defensively, as if emphasizing the point. Meanwhile, I was left trying to scrape my jaw up off the floor.
I’d come here because of what Sam had told me, thinking that most likely, I’d get nothing useful out of Phil’s secretary. But the young woman had spilled it. Almost as if she’d been waiting to flaunt the affair.
“You’re… you’re saying that you and Phil Monahan…?”
She narrowed her eyes at me, which was an answer unto itself.
She had just as much as admitted it, but I still couldn’t quite believe it.
She’d been having an affair with a married man. And suddenly, the things Phil had slurred the night before – about how he hadn’t meant for it to happen – became clear.
He’d been stepping out on Mindy with a 20-year-old. And judging from the way Mindy had talked about him that night during the dog poop stakeout, it seemed obvious that his wife had found out.
Poor Mindy, I thought, watching the secretary smack her gum some more.
She was a victim of the biggest cliché in the book.
“Look,” I said. “I’m not here to shame you or to make you feel bad about what you’ve done. I don’t care about that. I just want to find my friend. Mindy’s missing, and I think maybe you might know something helpful. Something Phil might have said or—”
“Wait, what?” Kayla said.
The gum nearly dropped from her mouth.
“You’re saying… you’re saying Phil’s wife is missing?”
I lowered my voice.
“Why else do you think cops and reporters have been calling you, Kayla?” I said. “Just to chit-chat about your boss’s whereabouts for the fun of it?”
Her face turned slightly red.
“No, but I thought… I mean, Phil works on a lot of big time accounts. I thought maybe one of his clients had gotten into trouble with the IRS and…”
She trailed off as I shook my head.
“No,” I said.
She placed a hand up to her mouth in disbelief.
“But… but he couldn’t have done anything to her,” she said. “He’s been in California all week at a conference. And besides, Phil wouldn’t have hurt Mindy. She may have been a raging pain in the neck, but the man couldn’t hurt a fly if he tried.”
I felt my teeth grind together when she added insult to injury and called Mindy that.
At any other time, I wouldn’t have let her get away with that.
But I still needed information from her.
“Do you know if Mindy and Phil are on speaking terms?” I asked.
Kayla narrowed her eyes again at me, giving me a look as if I’d just asked the dumbest question ever.
“You’re the one who’s friends with her,” she said, giving me attitude. “You should know.”
I crossed my arms and maintained a steely silence, using a proven technique that always made people uncomfortable. Because when people were uncomfortable, they were prone to say things they wouldn’t normally say.
It only took a few seconds before it worked on Kayla.
She let out a sigh.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “His wife found out somehow about us. Two weeks ago, she moved out of their house and into her grandfather’s house or something… Phil said she inherited it a couple of years ago when he died.”
I furrowed my brow, thinking about it hard for a long moment.
I’d heard that Mindy’s grandfather had passed on from a stroke shortly after I moved to Portland. In fact, now that I thought about it, it was him who had given Mindy that old-fashioned camera of hers in the first place.
And, as I recalled, the elderly man had lived in a house not too far away from downtown in one of the city’s old neighborhoods.
“So if Phil called Mindy’s school for her and told them that she’d come down with laryngitis… would that surprise you?” I asked.
She raised her eyebrows, and I got my answer.
“I highly doubt that happened,” she said. “Not with the way he left things with her. Unless they somehow miraculously made-up. But why would he when he’s clearly done so much better?”
It was obvious that she was talking about herself, and I suddenly became nauseated.
She was all class, this one, I thought sarcastically.
I’d gotten all the information I needed out of her.
“You must feel really good about yourself,” I muttered.
I didn’t stick around to hear her response. I got out of there, wanting to get as far away from her as possible. I stepped outside, not bothering to bring out my broken umbrella.
My mother would have said that women like Kayla always had their come-up-ins.
But sometimes, it was hard to believe that things actually evened out in the end. Kayla would probably end up wrecking several more homes before finding a rich guy to marry her and buy her anything she wanted.
Meanwhile, someone nice and good like Mindy would end up…
I bit my lip, not knowing how to finish the thought. Realizing that anything to do with Mindy’s future was no better than a question mark at this point.
I got to my car. The sick smell of Kayla’s floral perfume seemed to linger, and I cracked the window, trying to get rid of it.
As I turned over the engine, I noticed something on the windshield.
Then I noticed another car in the parking lot.
A black Kia with no plates.Its engine running.
I felt my stomach lurch forward.
I watched as the Kia pulled away abruptly.
When it was gone, I stepped out of the car, pulling the rain-soaked flyer for a carpeting company off the windshield.
Only, there was more to it than free carpeting estimates.
“BACK THE HELL OFF.”
It was written in unbalanced, hurried scrawl that sent brutal shivers running down my spine.
With trembling hands, I pulled out my phone and called Sam.
Chapter 27
“Did this dude say when he’ll be done?” Jimmy said, rolling his head across the passenger’s seat and looking in my direction.
He let out a long breath that spoke volumes about how bored he was.
“He should be out of the meeting any minute now,” I said, gazing out the window at the beige bungalow-style building with a large banner draped across it that said “High Construction, Inc.”
Jimmy sighed again and started fishing around in his bag. A moment later he found what he was looking for and started switching the lens out of his camera.
I leaned my head back against the Hyundai’s head rest and tried to ignore his fidgeting. In fact, I tried to ignore him all together.
But that was easier said than done.
We were sitting outside the office of Taylor High. Taylor, a current school board member who had been at the meeting earlier in the week, was running for re-election against a woman named Amy Kirkland. Most people thought Taylor was going to take the seat with flying colors. He had a solid track record throughout his school board term, and local voters seemed to resonate with his tough stance on school security. And in addition to all of that, he brought a youthfulness and energy that his opponent – a retired dentist – just couldn’t compete with.
Plus, Taylor had a little something in the looks department. And voters weren’t known to be immune to his sandy blond hair, sharp, rugged jawline, and bright blue eyes.
I would have much rather been out looking for Mindy than talking to a vain school board member. But I had set up this interview with him the day before as part of the school election piece Kobritz had assigned me at the last minute. Jimmy and I had arrived on time, but it appeared that Taylor was still in the middle of some business-related meeting.
I just hoped that the school board member remembered to bring his dog along. Otherwise, Kobritz’s absurd desire to have all candidates pictured alongside their dogs would suffer a serious setback.
As we waited in uncomfortable silence for the meeting to come to an end, my mind wandered. I began to think about what Kayla – that snake in the grass secretary of Phil’s – had said earlier that afternoon.
She’d been so certain that he hadn’t done anything to Mindy. But was she covering up something?
After all, the fact that he was having an affair gave Phil Monahan a pretty strong motive to do away with his wife. Divorce was expensive and messy. And it seemed entirely possible that a weak man like Phil might do everything he could to make it easier on himself.
But while I didn’t like Kayla, there were parts of her story that I did believe. Like the fact that Mindy and her husband hadn’t been on speaking terms. And the fact that Phil wasn’t a violent person. I even believed what Kayla had said about Phil most likely not being the one to call in sick for Mindy.
In fact, I had a hunch that maybe Kayla was telling the truth about all of it, and that Phil was innocent of everything except adultery.
His biggest crime might have only been not appreciating Mindy and the marriage that he had—
“I forgot that you talked to yourself when you’re trying to work out a story,” Jimmy said, breaking through my thoughts.
I felt my cheeks flush.
I hadn’t noticed that I’d been mumbling anything, though I knew I must have been. I did that on occasion. Not so much these days when I was writing straight-forward dog puff pieces. But back in the day, when I actually covered real crime in Portland and had more cause to think stories through, I sometimes started speaking out loud as I tried to figure out how I was going to write a piece.
“Uh, sorry,” I said, kicking myself for saying it.
If anything, it was him who should have been sorry. Not me.
“Don’t be,” he said with a small smile. “It reminds me of the old days.”
The memory of the dream the night before suddenly came back to me in full Technicolor vividness. Such vividness, that I could almost taste the salt on Jimmy’s lips and smell the hops on his breath again right this very moment.
I shuddered at the memory.
Why couldn’t Kobritz have assigned any other of the photographers to this story? Why did it have to be him?
Sitting in the car, waiting with Jimmy Brewer for Taylor High to get done with whatever stupid meeting he was having, was about the worst thing that I could possibly think of doing on a rainy afternoon in the—
“It wasn’t all bad, was it?” he asked.
“What wasn’t?” I said quickly, my insides a jumbled mess of nerves as I wondered whether or not he could tell what I’d been thinking about.
“The old days,” he said. “When we were both so hungry for stories, we’d follow a lead anywhere it went without ever thinking twice about where we were going.”
I felt his stare burn into the side of my face.
“We made a good team back then,” he said. “No matter what happened between us personally, you can say that we worked well together.”
I felt my hands curl up into fists at my side.
“Look Jimmy, I’m not really up for a trip down memory lane
with you,” I said. “All I want is to get this interview over with and to get back to the office.”
He cleared his throat.
“I get that,” he said. “But I’ve been doing some thinking lately, Freddie. You do that when you’re about to become a father. And I’ve been thinking that I never got a chance to really talk to you about what happened between us. And that maybe me getting a job here at The Chronicle was fate in some way, you know? Like somebody’s trying to give me a chance to make it right between us again.”
I was about to open the car door and wait inside when he put a hand on my arm.
“Just hear me out, Red,” he said. “That’s all I ask.”
I met his eyes then.
“Jimmy,” I said, my voice shaking slightly. “Rehashing this might make you feel better. But it’s not going to make me feel any better about it.”
There was a hint of confusion in his eyes. The way a puppy that hasn’t been housebroken yet looks when somebody yells at it for ruining the carpet.
“You don’t even realize how much you hurt me, do you?” I said.
The words came out angry, but I couldn’t completely hide the vulnerability I felt, either.
“You have no idea, do you, Jimmy?”
He stared back at me, still obviously confused.
“I guess not,” he finally said. “I mean, I didn’t. Not until recently. I thought…”
He trailed off, leaving the sentence unfinished.
I shook my head.
“I loved you Jimmy,” I said. “Don’t you understand that? And you treated me like… like…”
The pained words came spilling out of me like candy from a broken piñata. And there was no way to stuff them back in.
“And I thought you loved me, too. But you lied, Jimmy. You lied…”
I felt my eyes fill up with tears and my voice give out.
He didn’t say anything. But I thought I saw something in his expression.
Something like regret.
I almost believed it was real.
But then, as if coming out of a trance, I came to my senses.
I wiped away the useless tears.
It must have been the lack of sleep. Otherwise, I knew I’d never entertain any of this.
